The Return of Nightfall (6 page)

Brandon added,“Do you know if Byroth had a talent?”

“Many.” The mother gave her husband another glance. He had reason to know the boy better than she did. “But nothing magical. Not that I ever noticed.” She shook her head. “No. No, I’m sorry. Byroth didn’t have . . . a birth gift. Nothing a sorcerer would . . .” She trailed off, her head rocking harder, as if to convince the world of her certainty.

The father babbled, “. . . the placid plow horse, the deadly mosquito, the crystal pond.” He glanced at Nightfall with vacant, hollow eyes. “The bond, the bond.”

The woman waved at Byroth’s bedroom. “I haven’t gone in there since. Haven’t touched anything. The knife’s still there; he just dropped it. You’re welcome to look.”

“Look, look,” Jawar echoed. “But why? That most obvious is hardest to see.”

Liking this case less and less, doubting they could gather enough information to find the sorcerer if, in fact, one was even involved, Nightfall followed Gatiwan and Brandon to the bloody bedroom.

 

The scene yielded no useful clues, at least to Nightfall. The unadorned knife, well used and sharpened many times, might belong to anyone. The bloody footprints could have come from either parent as easily as from the attacker, and the scattered straw revealed nothing but an understandable struggle. The frowns scoring his companions’ faces told Nightfall they found nothing more significant than he had. So, they returned to the healer’s cabin and dismissed its guard, needing to confront the victim one more time.

Byroth seemed stronger to Nightfall this time, a testament to children’s ability to bounce back from the worst of trauma. He handled nearly getting mauled to death better than either of his parents. “I knew you’d come back,” he said.

Brandon sat on the edge of the bed. “Byroth, we’re trying to help you, and your family, too.”

“My father’s gone insane,” Byroth pronounced with the forthrightness only a child would dare.

“Not insane,” Gatiwan corrected. “Just very distraught. We believe it will pass.”

It was essential truth. Uncertain if shock, loss, or magic had unhinged the man, they could only guess whether time would cure him. The natal talents spanned such a gamut, Nightfall could only wonder if such a spell would last for days, weeks, or forever. If the sorcerer had such a power, he had not used it against Byroth. Further consideration brought an answer for that. Driven from his rational mind, Byroth might not react properly to inflicted pain; and the sorcerer might lose his soul. Nightfall shook off the thought, not yet convinced a sorcerer had attacked Byroth.

“But to help them and you,” Brandon continued, “I need the answer to a question I already asked. Don’t be frightened. We’re here to help you and others like you, to keep you safe.”

Byroth looked from man to man. He looked longest at Nightfall. “You want to know if I have a birth gift.”

Brandon nodded. “Because, if you do, you’ll need our protection. Perhaps forever.”

Nightfall wondered just how many people Brandon warded and how he managed to keep them all safe.

Byroth said nothing, gaze still straying between them. Finally, he pursed his lips and nodded. “I . . . can tell . . .” He seemed to be measuring their responses as he spoke each word. “. . . if someone else . . . has . . . a birth gift.”

Brandon and Gatiwan exchanged looks. “You can?” Brandon pressed, laboring not to strangle on his words.

Even Nightfall, the master of role-playing, could not stop his nostrils from flaring. To a sorcerer, it might prove the ultimate talent, the one he would risk everything to get.

“Like,” Byroth continued. “I know you have a talent.” He met Brandon’s gaze. “But he doesn’t.” He gestured at Gatiwan, then turned his attention to Nightfall. “And you’ve got one, too.”

Exposed, Nightfall kept his features a blank mask, ignoring the triumphant smile spreading across Gatiwan’s lips.

“Do you,” Brandon started, then paused to swallow hard. “Do you know what those talents are?”

“No. It just tells me you have them.”

Now, Nightfall would not have given up the mission for anything. He had little choice but to commit himself fully to Byroth’s safety. If a sorcerer got hold of that power, the talented, including himself, had no place to hide. One by one, the spell would expose them, and the sorcerer would feast upon them.

“Thank you,” Brandon said. “I know that was hard, and I’m going to tell you something extremely important, then we will never mention this again.
Do not, under any circumstances, ever tell anyone else that you, or anyone you sense, have a birth gift.
Yours is a powerful talent, and there’s not a sorcerer in any part of the world who wouldn’t give his own . . . favorite body part to have it.”

“Oh,” Byroth said, dark eyes growing round as coins. Nightfall could feel his gaze on all of them as they exited. And, though he knew the boy was as much a victim of his natal talent as the rest of them, he could not help feeling like prey.

 

For the first shift, the Magebane assigned Nightfall to stay with the boy, Gatiwan to sleep, while he patrolled the outside. That suited Nightfall well enough. He could not have slept yet, not with Byroth’s revelation hanging over him. The sentry position seemed better suited to him, given his background; but he had no intention of surrendering another of his deep dark secrets. So he accepted the assignment Brandon gave him, pausing only to leave word of his whereabouts with King Edward before settling in with Byroth.

The power of Brandon’s words clearly had a daunting effect on Byroth as well. As the room plunged into a darkness the windowless room only enhanced, he rolled and pitched on his pallet, sleepless.

Hunkered near the door, Nightfall understood the boy’s restlessness. He fiddled with the stone in his pocket, one of Brandon’s spell-breakers. It took the Magebane months to place his natal ability into an inanimate object, during which time he could not use his talent for anything else; and each stone just worked once. Since Brandon had not preplanned this particular hunt, he had made only two since his last outing and had given one to each of his companions. “Are you all right?”

Byroth’s voice floated out of the pitch. “Just scared, I guess. I . . . don’t want . . . to suffer like that again. You understand?”

“I understand.” Nightfall sought movement, a shadow amidst the darkness, a wariness awakened by something he could not quite sense. “I understand. No one wants to suffer.” Preferring quiet, he added, “Try to sleep. You need as much as you can get.”

Byroth stopped talking, but he continued to flop around on the pallet. “Maybe if you sang to me?”

Nightfall rolled his eyes and shook his head, both movements the boy could not discern. His prostitute mother had never softened the night with lullabies, and the bawdy bar songs he knew did not seem appropriate. “I don’t sing.”

“Oh.” Byroth slumped into a new position on the ticking. “Would you mind if I did it, then?”

Nightfall shrugged, still trying to make out objects through the gloom. He wanted it dark enough that any sorcerer who got past Brandon would not notice him, but he would need his own vision well adjusted. “Go ahead, if you think it’ll help.”

“Thanks.” Byroth’s thin, reedy voice floated into the cold, night air. “Hush, my darling, my sweetest babe—”

Nightfall ignored the boy, thinking of his encounter with Byroth’s parents. They had seemed so broken, so utterly devastated by the near-loss of their son; they both clearly loved him fiercely. Nightfall had not lamented his own empty upbringing for many years: the mother who had alternately beaten and cried for him, the men who came and went, the father who could have been any one or none of them.
The bond between man and daughter is sacred; but the son, the son, is his true reflection.
Nightfall was once the true reflection of the men to whom his mother had sold her body, including the one who had battered her to death. Now, he had found a way beyond the poet philosopher’s claim.
How much better have Byroth and his father fared?

It was a question that needed no answer. Nightfall found himself trapped in recollection, the world fading into a dark void around him. His watchfulness withered, replaced by a mental world where word and sound came only from within.
Nothing, nothing on this fair earth is precisely as it seems. The placid plow horse, the deadly mosquito growing on a crystal pond.
In the world of the dreamer, nonsense can become a statement of vivid brilliance.
Nothing is what is seems.

Suddenly, Nightfall understood. He closed his hand over the stone Brandon had given him. His fingers tightened with awkward slowness, seeking the laxity of sleep. He felt his head sagging, heavy as lead; and the welcoming darkness erased the significance from all but his dreamworld thoughts. But those focused him well enough. A wholly mental pursuit, he called on his talent to overcome the heavy inertia magical fatigue forced upon him, driving down his weight to a sliver of normal. Lighter than feathers, his fingers obeyed him. He drew out the stone, which now seemed more like a boulder, and hurled it toward the boy. It cut a glowing scarlet arc through the air.

The singing broke off in a high-pitched squeak, and Nightfall’s senses returned in an overwhelming rush. He scuttled aside, and something sharp jabbed into his thigh instead of his privates. Restoring his mass, he kicked at his attacker, rolling as he moved. His attack also missed, and he dropped to a crouch, realigning, waiting for the other to reveal himself. It all made sense now. He knew who had attacked Byroth, and he also knew why.

A shadow lunged toward Nightfall, and a knife glinted in the slivers of light leaching through cracks in the construction. Concentrating fully on the weapon, Nightfall sprang for his attacker, Byroth himself. He caught the thin wrist, twisting viciously. The knife thumped to the floor. The boy screamed, pain mixed with frustration. His arms and legs lashed violently, wildly, toward Nightfall. Several blows landed with bruising force, but Nightfall bulled through the pain. He dropped his mass again and hurled himself at Byroth. The instant he felt the boy beneath him, he drove his weight to its heaviest. Air hissed out of Byroth’s mouth, in a crushed and muted screech.

Expertly, Nightfall sorted limbs and parts until he had Byroth fully pinned and one of his own hands free. He flipped a dagger from his wrist sheath and planted it at Byroth’s throat.

“Wh—” the boy started, forcing words around the tremendous burden crushing him to the ground. “What are you going . . . to do to me?” The voice sounded soft, pitiful, the plea of a confused eight-year-old.

Nightfall bit his lip. Even in his most savage days, he had never enjoyed killing. He could afford to choose his victims with care, and he based it upon his own judgment of their worthiness. He had never murdered a child, yet this was no regular child. Byroth was a sorcerer, one who had already shown a cruel streak far beyond his years. The first talent he had stolen, from a seven-year-old friend, had given him the means to detect the gifted from birth. He had callously slaughtered an infant, probably for the ability to heal more quickly or to make the huge leaps he had taken to attack Nightfall. He knew some people who could kill an eight-year-old without compunction, but most could never conceive of such a thing.
Brutal at eight; merciless by twenty.
Nightfall took solace from Jawar’s words:
Nothing on this earth is precisely what it seems. Byroth is no child; he’s truly the demon so many named me.

“What are you going to do with me?” Byroth whispered again.

“I’m going,” Nightfall said coldly, “to finish the job your father began.”

 

By the time Brandon Magebane and Gatiwan arrived, Nightfall had completed the deed. The two men stared at the little body on the floor, the rumpled sheets, the peaceful look on the corpse’s face.

“I couldn’t save him,” Nightfall said, crouched beside Byroth. He let grief touch his voice, not wholly feigned. Though the others would misinterpret what he said, his words were grim truth.

Brandon crouched beside Nightfall. “Don’t blame yourself. The sorcerer got by me, too. I’m not sure how.”

Gatiwan grunted. “Some sort of teleportation spell, I’d warrant.”

Nightfall lowered his head. Lying came easily to him, though not always for so noble a reason. No one but him ever needed to know that Jawar had tried to kill his own son. If the boy’s father could eventually forgive himself, at least he would avoid the condemnation of his wife and neighbors. He had done the right thing, and Nightfall planned to tell him that.

Brandon’s hand dropped to Nightfall’s shoulder. “At least you managed to prevent the ritual. The talent died with Byroth, and he doesn’t have to suffer the limbo of a harnessed soul.”

Nightfall nodded philosophically. The ability to become a sorcerer was as innate as the gifts. That curse had destroyed Byroth’s soul long before Nightfall had dispatched it to whatever afterlife it warranted. In the process, so many innocents had been saved.

Gatiwan sighed heavily. “Let’s go report this death to the authorities.”

Nightfall and Brandon rose together. “I think,” the Magebane said, winking at Nightfall, “at least the king of Alyndar will forgive us.”

Nightfall was less sure. Though Edward’s journey through other kingdoms with a demon for a guide had softened the world’s colors, he still clung to a morality of crisp blacks and whites. To the king of Alyndar, all humans had an essential core of goodness; and their every action made sense in the proper context. At times, Nightfall appreciated his master’s innocence. Any other monarch, knowing his adviser’s identity, would have seen that Nightfall suffered a slow and infinitely painful death for the many crimes attributed to him. In his own inexplicably simple way, King Edward had instead placed the world’s most notorious criminal directly at his side.
Actually, King Rikard did.
Nightfall could not forget that Edward’s shrewd father, and his conniving chancellor, had initiated their relationship.