INTERLUDE 5B: SOMEONE DIED
“I am the striking shadow. I am the cruelty that causes pain without profit. I am the listener who hears the weeping that follows in the assassin’s wake and smiles. I am Lord Sorrow.”
– from the Yanic Creed
1st Lynara, 995 NE
Perri sat upon the steps of the bank, waiting like a good little girl for Father to return with the loan-statement that would secure their family’s ninth property. Money made money, Father always said, and in two generations the Chavarn name had gone all the way from the Rivertown docks to the glades of Treetown. Perri wasn’t stupid, and she wasn’t actually a particularly good little girl. People always tended to think the best of her, just because she was blind. As though blindness itself just made her innocent… For years she’d known how to play to her strengths and the lack of sight was definitely one of them. She could do a lot with touch and hearing, with common sense, that no one would ever believe possible. She’d stolen dozens of small items, which she hid behind the drawer in her wardrobe, and of course no one would think to blame her; when she’d taken the butler’s pocket-watch she’d gotten one of the maids fired, and she’d not pinched from anyone at home since. Even still, she liked to sit there in the early hours of the morning, cross-legged on the rug before the drawer, playing with her assorted treasures. It wasn’t like the pitch-blackness of the room bothered her, and sometimes she fancied she could almost see; the memory of seeing was still something she could access, but as she grew older it was increasingly dreamlike, surreal. Her world was sounds, now, not light. The watch in particular she’d enjoyed, winding it, listening to its little clickings; her ears were sharp enough to pick them out in the silence of her bedroom even when the watch was hidden, but the cleaning-staff were non the wiser. Unfortunately its mechanism had broken the year before, but she’d kept it, until the day she could get it mended without drawing any attention.
One of the annoying things about being smart was that playing the most effective, long-term game involved taking on those roles, the good little blind girl, sitting demurely on the steps of the biggest bank in the biggest city in the world, just two close-lipped man-servants for company. One of them was close enough to shade her with the parasol he held in his hand, but he still said nothing to her – quite right, too. She very much doubted there was any chance he could hold up his end in a conversation half as well as he could hold up a parasol.
It was into the ninth month today but the sun was still as strong as it had been in Urdara. She could feel it radiating off the marble next to her when she stretched out her hand. She loved the sun but even with her dark complexion it would cause her skin no end of trouble if she sat out in it unprotected, when it was like this. Mund was a dreary place and it got cold in winter, but it was still in a warm part of the world by all accounts, and its summers shocked those who first arrived in the chilly seasons.
She heard the footsteps approaching a little closer than usual behind her –
“Away with yer!” one of her man-servants said brusquely –
Then the man-servant was groaning, collapsing to the steps; the one bearing the parasol aloft swung it aside, and the suddenness with which the sunlight was poured over Perri’s skin made her flinch from the unexpected heat.
Both man-servants were down – she could hear their gasps – what had happened? –
Her hand on the steps felt the warm fluid, and she realised they’d been stabbed. It was blood. On her hands.
“This is the one,” someone grunted. Rough fingers tried to seize her by the back of her neck but she leaned forwards, and they only succeeded in grasping the little sensitive hairs – even still, it was enough to halt her forwards motion –
This is the one.
It wasn’t the necklace she wore they were after. Not the rings and brooches, the bracelet of healing, the Im Hatal shoes that cost as much as most men earned in a month.
They were after her.
They were going to ransom her, and they would kill her when Father screwed up and went to the Magisterium.
First they would take her to a little dingy room in the cellar beneath a supplies-shop in Anvil Row, where she’d be chained, and a talkative rat would be her only company, and she’d think ‘at least you’re a better conversationalist than the man-servants’, and she’d name him Chatty, and –
And even still, it was enough to halt her forwards motion, and –
And the man-servants were dying. No, only one of them, she corrected herself. The one with the deeper voice, she could never remember their names – (ah, that was it, Oppten) – he would die, his heart had been pierced with the third dagger-stroke, but the parasol-holder – (Fenostor, that was the one) – he would survive if she could –
If she could –
And even still, it was enough to halt her forwards motion, and –
What has happened to me?
She could see – of a sort. It was like she was imagining her surroundings, but the imagination was attached to things she couldn’t know about: the colours of the vines on the walls, the lush red flowers; the yellow-white of the sunlight that until now had been nothing more than a dying memory; the people down there in the square going about their business…
Not that they were actually moving. They had been transformed into statues like everyone around her, the pigeons hanging in the sky as though they’d been painted-on… It was all frozen until she finished processing this monolithic instant of time.
The visions, the wondrous sights, were no less dreamlike for all that her new sixth sense was telling her they were incontrovertible, one hundred percent real.
Faces. She could see people’s faces!
Am I dying? she wondered. Did a knife slip between my shoulder–blades, and now I’m trapped here, in my final moment?
The thought made her shudder, and the shudder made her realise:
I’m not frozen.
And even still, it was enough to halt her forwards motion –
Time reasserted something of its normal flow as she let the thug pull her head back, as she thrust up with her legs to accompany the movement –
There were dozens of witnesses, only beginning to react to this unprovoked attack in broad daylight. She had to restrict herself to the changes of position a blind person could make, motions that could later be attributed to accident, to good fortune, to the gods –
As the thug brought his face down, shifting his weight to hoist her up, her upthrust took him by surprise and the back of her skull connected with his nose. He fell away suddenly.
When the next thug lunged down at the unprotected little blind girl it was an even simpler matter to just skip aside, thrusting out her hands jerkily as if making a nervous attempt to flee, and let his lunge become a painful plunge down the marble steps.
The third had his dripping knife poised to strike but he was beginning to have doubts. This was Mund, after all, and their intelligence on their target was proving to be unreliable…
She knew before he did that he would turn and run, leave his companions in the care of the watch who would soon arrive to apprehend them. She knew his name but it didn’t matter that she had no credible way to give the watchmen this information; one of his former friends was going to sell him out in return for them keeping his neck far from the noose.
The watch would make the deal, then go back on it. Three faces would turn blue for this.
An infinite time later, once the day was done and Father had been quite assured she was feeling fine, she found herself back home in her bedroom. One by one, Perri took out her special objects and she followed the time-lines, glowing as they threaded through the darkness. Some were hidden, occluded by unseen shapes, like stars hidden from view by black clouds – but most of them she could see.
The lives of those she’d stolen from.
It was more than just the maid she’d gotten in trouble.
When she realised her actions had resulted in one poor boy getting his right hand chopped off, she hurled the treasures back into their space behind the drawer and slammed it shut after them, weeping. The servants came, then Father, and it was only as she clung to him and her tears began to dry that she realised what she wanted to do. What she needed to do, with these powers of hers.
She couldn’t give the boy his hand back, but she could do something. Anything, to make up for the way she had lived her life. She’d been a spoilt thief, a pampered, pandered-to idiot, always insisting on thinking of herself as a victim of fate when she was so incredibly lucky…
These things were treasures no longer. They were totems, relics of a Perrinthe who had died. No more. From tonight, she would make her own fate, follow it wherever it led, even if it took her back, back into the darkness.
And she knew even then that it would.
* * *
12th Illost, 998 NE
When Zakimel told everyone to run, Perri was prepared. She and Irimar had discussed the obvious facts of the mission long before they agreed to put the plan into action. The Magisterium was going to attempt to get a large number of champions killed, that much was plain to read. Not all of them, but a fair few. Mistress Henthae wouldn’t stop until the Gathering was under her control, and the way Emrelet Reyd had been moved into position was a clumsy-enough play that even Starsight had asked about it. Zakimel would do his best to ensure a slaughter. Her own vision of the arch-magister was thin, watery, flimsy… she couldn’t grasp him the way Irimar could. But Irimar had seen it all: the way he’d eventually give them away to the powers dwelling in the centre of the city by flying high, something they knew from previous expeditions was an almost sure-fire way of getting yourself hunted down. The way he’d try to break the group’s cohesion, separate them all, while his magisters were under orders to slip away if all should go awry and, chance permitting, return secretly through the Winter Door.
No, this would not be a day for any Magisterium official to display the courage of their convictions, and Irimar knew as much even when he gave them his nervous speech.
Still, when she heard Zakimel’s cry, saw his flight with her own eyes, she couldn’t help but be surprised. It seemed so out-of-character for him, even given his secret motives.
Timesnatcher’s response was to allow it to happen.
Just as Irimar had said to her, Zakimel couldn’t help but get it out of the way early. Too early. He should’ve waited for champions to start falling before splitting the group, should’ve let the panic become terror before he set them loose in Zadhal. That would’ve resulted in a huge amount of deaths. But no, he’d waited only for the first serious opposition, the deathknights. He wasn’t going to risk any arch-magisters’ lives, even of those few he’d brought with him, which she knew represented at best half of their actual force.
No, Zakimel had carried out his own plan and ruined it in so doing, none the wiser. Unless he really meant for this to be some kind of empty gesture, some veiled declaration of war…
Not that he’d ever wanted the mission to succeed, really. The Arrealbord and the Magisterium couldn’t afford to let the truth about Zadhal surface. Irimar had let her know as many of the details as he’d been able to glean, or so he said. There were doubtless more fragments of the whole to be uncovered today.
Now Irimar took her arm politely and slipped away south with her, letting Zakimel rush off into the pale sky, doing nothing to stop him even though Perri had little doubt he’d have been capable of it. He’d drawn only one of his green-glittering daggers with which to cut through the odd deathknight.
“Faster,” he murmured – they were already hundreds of yards from the melee – this speed scared her; it would’ve brought them back to the Winter Door themselves in seconds, if Timesnatcher so chose.
She noted the way his breath didn’t mist on the air when they travelled like this. Were they going too fast for the link?
Why are you talking like that? she thought at him, then heard the alarming lack of echo –
There was no psychic echo, but the future-echoes born of her own power – those she could hear. Lay claim to. Process faster than thought.
Alandrica…!
She looked through the slits in his mask, into his eyes, the eyes of her lover, the eyes of the man she had never truly been able to trust.
He killed my friend?
“What’s going on, Irimar?” she asked him.
She was so fast unsheathing her blades, using them, resheathing them, most people wouldn’t even see her move if she beheaded someone right in front of them – they’d just see the head fall.
Irimar wasn’t most people. To him, she might draw her blades like a swimmer in water, sluggishly, striking weakly…
“If you thought Zakimel was acting strange – my darling… Rosedawn had been breaking some of the waywatchers’ minds.”
“What? That was her?”
He smiled grimly. “You saw it too?”
She shivered. “You thought I didn’t, that’s why you didn’t mention it… I didn’t – I never understand you, Irimar.”
He shook his head. “Not at all. I didn’t say anything to you because I thought it was her. I knew she was…” He bit his lip, then said in a sombre tone: “Listen to me now and listen well. Did you ever look at her? Her past?”
“I saw that you’d meddled with her! I saw –“
“No. Not me.”
It took her only a fraction of a second to realise what he meant, and the way they were moving through the rays of light towards the future, it was a fraction of a fraction. She’d been an arch-diviner long enough to know that she had time to formulate her response.
“So this is part of your Feychilde game,” she said at last.
“Feychilde?” He looked surprised. “No, Feychilde has nothing to do with this –“
“He’s going to help you end Duskdown, though, isn’t he? That’s what you’re… grooming him for?”
She tried her best to keep her disgust from her voice, but she only managed to catch half of it before it spilled out of her mouth.
“Yes and no – that will be his decision, Perri!” He sounded exasperated.
This wasn’t Alandrica’s decision, she thought.
“It’s not that Feychilde is involved with this – it’s Duskdown, it’s always Duskdown!” Irimar hung his head. “Every plan, it all leads to this! To him! Don’t you see it? They became archmages together; he and Rosedawn, they were in love! Their souls were united in her past, wouldn’t you agree? You remember what the lacuna looked like? She was going to destroy the Maginox. I had to –“
“I understand your reasoning,” she cut him off. “And you know I disagree. I’ve told you before, things like this could’ve been Everseer!“
He snorted, which as always made her seethe.
“Alandrica… a manipulator of the higher echelons of the Magisterium? How? How, Irimar?”
He didn’t reply, but their speed slowed significantly.
“Where are we going, Irimar?”
“I… I don’t know.”
“Timesnatcher?”
Perri’s heart leapt into her throat.
I could respond. I could save her –
A million rainbow avenues opened up before her sightless eyes –
Irimar’s polite grip on her forearm tightened suddenly.
She heard the enchantress’s voice for what she knew to be the last time:
“Lightblind?”
Before she could open the link at her end, a process that ought to have been instantaneous, and reverse the psychic channel bearing her message back to the enchantress, Irimar snatched –
– the –
– time –
– away from her in such a surge of exponential speed it brought her previous fright to an apex of terror, leaving her cringing, crying, even as he still bore her away, out of Rosedawn’s range, her ability to link.
But she knew it for a fact – it was too late to save the enchantress now, even for her.
When she managed to twist her arm away from his grip she took a thousandth of a second to note the direction she had to travel, informed more by the position of future-Perri than by the position of the sun or some other such mundane means –
“Perrinthe…”
She ignored him, and thrust herself through the brightest path she could see, letting the winds of time direct her course –
The Winter Door.
Home.
I’m going to go home.
She sensed it the moment he gave up his pursuit – he could’ve caught her, but he knew there was nothing he could do with her now. She’d made up her mind to leave him, and she would do it – unless he stopped her. And there was only one way to do that, really.
He let her go.
She only slowed down at the portal, knowing that to travel through too quickly would risk complete evaporation. Just like the gateways between planes, going through the immaterial journey that was represented in Materium by this vast, blue curtain could be risky at top power. Full speed on the outside would mean she was experiencing vast swathes of time on the inside. Her essence could be lost, dissipated in time and space.
She barely spared a glare for the magisters as she emerged from the crackling, sorcerous portal – she saw a couple of them raise their hands in a half-hearted attempt to stop her, but none of them were fast enough to track her across the sky as she covered the short distance towards home.
She’d only been living with Irimar for a matter of five, almost six months now, but the house they shared was already home to her. She couldn’t go back to Father’s – she couldn’t face him, not anymore, not since finding out what he was really like. He had always been gentle, almost overbearingly-so, whenever he was in her presence. Her powers had, however, revealed to her a man complicit with the power-structures that kept the poor poor and the rich rich. His money was invested in, came from, the lucrative slave trade that took the ill-kept youth off Mund’s streets and promised them a better life, in Rhedal or Shagat or some other far-flung province. The truth was that, once outside the waters and territories of the Mundic Realm, these pitiful street-children with no parents or protectors, no surnames or skills, would be clapped in chains and sold to the highest bidder.
When she’d confronted him over it he merely spoke to her in the tone he always used, like she was still that good little girl, waiting for him on the steps of the bank. He denied everything, acted like she was confused, like she couldn’t possibly come close to understanding the reality of how the world worked.
The truth was that he was the one who didn’t understand the way the world worked. What the slave felt. The cruelty of the master displayed on his face as the whip fell on bare backs and legs. Even she couldn’t understand it, not really. But at least she knew this about herself, recognised her limitations. Perri pretended to the outside world to be a philanthropist with a few private investors, secretly using Lightblind’s bounties to fund her projects. It was her way of giving back, her way of making herself feel good.
She couldn’t tell him, couldn’t give away her identity without cutting ties with Father completely; and she did still love him, for his foolish kindness, the naivety of his trust in the structures that had allowed him to stay wealthy, become wealthier. No, if she exposed herself as a powerful magic-user he would attempt to monetise her abilities, insist on her investing her proceeds from her work as a champion in his own projects, and she would end up saying many things she’d later come to regret. She knew this for a fact, inescapable. Whether she coolly manipulated him or just screamed at him, she would come to regret it.
Because it would mean she would have to act. She would have to oppose him, fully, with all her might as an adult. And she couldn’t do that.
Not when he only had eight years left.
Irimar always chuckled at the way she still worried about what Father thought of her. He said humanity was one big family, that she had bigger concerns now. But the truth was that, in spite of all her incomprehensibly-vast powers, she was still scared of Father. She could never look down those avenues where he was disappointed in her. He’d done everything for her when she was a child, cared for her in a way many men in his position found impossible.
No, it was better this way. She’d asked him for independence, and he’d granted it. She’d made a point out of refusing to take a single servant from Father’s household, and instead hired her own maid, paying the close-lipped, hard-working girl, Savarre, with her own (relatively) clean money.
She lived with Irimar, and things were good, peaceful, between the intense moments of frenzied violence.
Yes, she still loved Father. She would bring him around to her way of thinking, some day… But not tonight. After the argument with her boyfriend – what had it been about again? – she wanted her own bed, the solitude of her thoughts.
No one was in – she’d given Savarre the day off for Zadhal-related reasons. Even with the residual effects of someone’s wizardry still coursing through her veins, she could feel that the cold morning was giving way to a cold afternoon. She went around stoking the fireplaces with emberwood that burnt for hours, so she wouldn’t have to get back up again. She might’ve been relatively nice and warm inside her skin, but that was no reason the house itself had to suffer – she could already see the way the banister’s future had improved just by lighting the first of the hearths… Plus, she’d certainly be cold by the time she next got out from under the covers.
Once she was done she went to the bedroom and undressed, found her warmest bedclothes and burrowed under the quilt, pulling the blankets up to her neck so that only her head upon the pillows was exposed. After a couple of minutes the almost clammy-feeling clothes and covers began to warm up, and the delicious feeling of peace stole over her.
It took conscious effort to follow the lines back, remember she’d just left Zadhal… left her lover, her friends, left them to…
She sat bolt upright.
What am I doing?
Someone had… someone had died… Rosedawn. Alandrica!
Perri went to swing her legs out of bed but before she finished the motion she cut it off, ending up twisting the blankets around herself. What had she been about to do?
It was because of him. Irimar. He had – he had killed –
No, not Irimar. Not the funny, clever young man she’d fallen for.
This was Timesnatcher‘s doing. The cold one. The one who saw it all and said nothing.
Her sense of propriety burned deep within her. She had to return to the fight. She had to.
It was only after the fourteenth failed attempt to get out of bed that Perri’s thoughts fell on the amulet she wore against her breast. She never took it off for fear of a subtle manipulation from a far-off enchanter – not when she bathed, not when she slept…
I’m enchanted, she realised. The thought came through first as though she’d comprehended something marvellous, and she felt the genuine smile of joy play across her lips.
That slowly became a frown.
I’m… enchanted?
She raised her hands to her neck to remove Lovebright’s chain, then rubbed the tight muscles there, and found a knot that sent her into paroxysms of bliss when she pressed it.
Irimar’s turn to do me when he gets home, she thought, feeling smug. It was always nice when it was your turn for the next back-rub.
* * *
She’d sauntered down to the front door in her slippers once it reached late afternoon, to retrieve the news-etchings that were posted through her letter-box every day. Printed news was faster, obviously, but she had to use her powers to read the markings on paper, and it was far more relaxing to let her fingertips do the job.
She got tucked back into bed – one benefit of reading with your fingers was that if it was cold you could just do it under the covers, no need to see what you were doing.
There wasn’t really a vast amount to report. Reconstruction was moving ahead at record-breaking pace, thanks in part to generous contributions from members of the public, whose squabbling over investment opportunities had left plenty of spare cash for the wizard-guilds to scrape off the top. The rate of crime in the city had reached a peak and then plateaued, as it usually did following an Incursion – there’d be a decline over the following four-week period, until it bottomed-out again, pending the next Incursion…
Not that the news actually said any of this directly – but she was easily capable of not just reading between the lines but reading between the realities, understanding the truths underlying opinions. She searched, scraped through the facts for one hint of a hidden history, a faked identity, a link to the infamous Facechanger –
There was the usual rush at the window, and it startled her.
Yet again, she hadn’t noticed as he entered the room. She managed to avoid the obvious reactions like jumping up or spinning on the spot, but he would be able to see through her responses anyway, glean his meagre amount of pleasure from her shock.
“I told you to stop doing that! I’m glad you’re back… I’m… I’m sorry I left? I…”
Her voice failed her and time stretched. A yawning infinity between her words and his response.
It would come eventually, inflected with cold dispassion. She approximated it as:
“Last time you thought it wasn’t him; this time you thought it was. Are you an arch-diviner or not?”
And then she would know it wasn’t Irimar. But it was getting dark. Irimar should have been back by now.
And she would answer, trying to keep her voice measured, but hearing the way it trembled, “Last time it could’ve been a demon.”
And he would grin, grin at that.
– Mortiforn Yune Ismethyl Ismethyl! give me strength give me the power to fight this fight –
Grin like the madman he was. Grin like he wept.
Grin like his… his wife… his wife had… died?
Something was inside her mind, a fogginess. What had he done to her? She could follow the lines back to Zadhal…
Zadhal?
The last twelve hours went rushing through her.
Rosedawn. Duskdown.
That was why he was here.
Something had been done to her – by Rosedawn? Before she died? It didn’t matter; she could deal with that later.
First she had to deal with this.
With excruciating slowness, she rose from the bed.
There was an awful speed to his stillness, a preparedness that informed her he was simply waiting for her to flee. She could outrun sound, could make it across the city in seconds, yet the robed, masked man in her bedroom would catch her within a few steps.
No. There was no life for her on those avenues. Each of those well-lit paths fell swiftly into darkness. She’d have to aim at a destination a hundred, a thousand miles from the city to achieve the kinds of speeds she’d need, and he’d still have her before she passed over Mund’s walls.
Escape would come from blades, not boots; fists, not feet.
Yane would drink his fill here. Blood would flow.
Unless Irimar saved her.
Her opponent was faster than her, but he waited. Let her think it through. Let her see what she could see.
If she put her foot here, so that the toe-ring on her right foot was lined up with the crack in the floorboards, she would live, on average, a tenth of a second longer than she would if she put her foot half an inch closer to the wall; the scales tipped, even on so fine a balance –
If she dived across the foot of the bed for her robe, her knives, she would be there faster than lightning fell from the sky, and she would be felled just as surely as had the lightning-bolt struck her, slain with her own daggers in the hands of her lover’s mortal enemy –
She caught her breath, centred her face on him as though she could see him.
She could see him. The unhappy smile warping the lower half of his face into some abhorrent mockery of a human mouth. Too many teeth. Too much anger and grief in what should’ve been an expression of delight.
‘We’re all one big family,’ Irimar had said. She was fairly certain he hadn’t been thinking of Duskdown when he’d said it, though –
“Did I surprise you, darling?”
She jumped upon hearing Duskdown’s low voice. It wasn’t just that he’d chosen to break the silence that had slowly been growing heavier since she last spoke, years ago, back when she still thought it was Irimar who’d finally arrived home. Back then, when she thought she was going to live out the day.
No. It was that he so effortlessly elided her prophecies. What he’d actually said wasn’t as close to her vision as she was accustomed, and it made her more nervous than she thought she was going to be, which only compounded itself, again and again, until she felt her confidence and her battle-readiness seeping out of her through numb fingertips.
“What do you want?” That sounded good; her voice came out hard, forceful, even if the base root of her aggression was her fear.
“You know what will happen, don’t you? He will suffer the way I’ve suffered.”
It took her a moment, then: “He doesn’t love me. Not the way you loved her.”
Duskdown was shaking his head softly from side to side. “You’re right, of course,” he said, “but he knew the potential was there. While you lived, there was a chance of love, and, now you’re dead, he will feel the pain of that loss all the more-sharply for the fact that it was never realised. You are his one, true, long-lost love. The memory that impels his actions, the worst failure of his career as a champion: letting you die…”
It chilled her, to hear the way he already spoke of her in the past-tense.
Now I am dead… I am just a memory.
No!
In the moment she threw caution to the winds, bitterness and anger overcoming all the mental barriers that had been preventing her from acting, she knew that she was doomed.
She turned to the window, he was there.
The doorway, there he was.
When she gritted her teeth and went for her robe and knives he merely withdrew across the room, permitting her access.
“Great idea,” he said softly as she lifted her belongings. “Put your robe back on, and your mask. Gather all the weapons at your disposal, use any of them you wish to on me. Here, I’ll even – haha – turn my back while you change. I can use this scarf for a blindfold, make it a fair fight –”
The moment he’d distracted himself, knotting fabric about his upper face, she fled at two hundred percent speed straight at the open window, rushing headlong into his tensed, outstretched forearm.
The blow took her in the throat and she was slammed down on her back, gasping on the rug.
“Tut tut,” he chided gently; “I told you to put your mask on.”
She already had the robe in place, her hands on her dagger-grips, but she couldn’t use them, couldn’t do anything but choke for breath – was her windpipe crushed? Was this it, over already?
No. As she recovered he reached out with her mask and, almost fondly, settled its straps around her head so that her face was properly covered.
She didn’t need to see, but the tiny slits in the mask hardly helped her suck in her breath.
“That’s the way you looked the day I killed you.” He spoke huskily, almost emotionally. “Not cracked yet, but there’s time. That’s the Lightblind whose corpse he finds.”
She spluttered. “You – you don’t… have to do this, you can –”
“I don’t, and yet I do. You know full-well the curse of the arch-diviner.”
“But,” she coughed, “please –”
“Please do not beg.” The coldness she’d expected was there in his voice. He wasn’t smiling now. “They always beg, and it’s always worse for them after that. No, get to your feet. Chin up, darling. I don’t want to be here any more than you do – come on, let’s get this over with.”
“I th-thought you only went after the bad g-“
“Do not test me. I watched over her, every minute of her life, every minute that I could. It was you, you and your lover that killed her.” His voice softened. “No. I never saw Zadhal, until his plans for her ended. Until you scattered her across the frozen stones. This is on you, Perrinthe. You and him.”
He reached down with a hand as though to take hers, help her to her feet.
Her hands were full of daggers.
The white-bladed knife in her left hand, glittering as though it were dusted with quartz powder, had a chink in the handle; that was how she could tell it apart from the knife in her right hand without using her powers, the blade that would be its identical twin were it not for its pure-black colouration.
They’d felled thirteenth-rank demons. They’d felled greater threats than this hellish caricature of a man standing before her.
She put every ounce of her innocent girlishness into her voice, did her best to sound pathetic: “But I – I didn’t want him to ki-“
When she sprang to her feet mid-word, cutting the air with both daggers, it was his turn to be surprised.
Yes, it was with the blade that this would be decided.
It was the fastest she’d ever moved. Fast enough that every droplet in a waterfall would’ve appeared still. Fast enough to catch the seeds of a thousand dandelions.
Still too slow.
She saw the evasion before it occurred, the faintest shifting of his body-weight.
She tried to change the angle, but he slipped both blows, feinting to one side then the other as he backed away –
She noticed the flat-handed chop he was bringing down at her throat as he pirouetted, managed to twist awkwardly to the right just before it was too late, let the edge of his palm glance off her shoulder –
The power of the strike still spun her like a top, and then they were wheeling about the room: her inside, surrounded by a shell of monochrome ensorcelled iron; him outside, an ever-circling blur of sunset hues and endless attacks.
She tested every trick she’d ever used: sudden variances in angular momentum, reversals of direction, taking the fight across the walls and ceiling –
How do I fight a creature like this? she howled inwardly.
Instincts that had been designed to supply her with not just one answer to her every question but ten were now drawing a terrifying blank.
There is no answer. There is no way through this.
To an observer the fight might’ve been going for all of seven or eight seconds but she was dripping sweat beneath her comfy bed-clothes and robe, worse than when she slew Hierarch Nine. For her it had been minutes of exertion and she felt the slightest onset of exhaustion.
But she saw it in her foe too. He could’ve kicked her in the face when she dipped, aiming slashes at his knees, but he didn’t react quickly enough, he –
He stepped back and brought the heel of his palm down into the forehead of her mask instead, cracking it –
They were fighting on the mirror on the wall at the time, and she had no purchase – the momentum was reversed against her knowledge or will, and she was sent careening off the wall at a breath-stealing speed, bouncing off the floor and cracking one of the bedposts with her back.
Both daggers abandoned her in her moment of need, flying out of her hands with the force of the impact, landing in either corner behind her.
Spine grinding in agony, she nonetheless whipped to her feet again – then sank back to the ground screaming.
She wore a toe-ring, usually kept hidden within her footwear, for times of need.
Her spine told her she had no way to reach it and yet –
He stood over her, holding the little healing-trinket embedded with its three fine, sparkling diamonds. It was a crude thing, really, one activation per diamond. A broken back would probably take all three.
“You were going to try to get this, I believe,” he said.
For a moment she thought he would laugh, then he reached down like last time, merely offering her the ring.
“You’d like to go another round?”
His sad smile was there, even if he wasn’t laughing.
No exhaustion in his voice. She’d been wrong, before. She’d seen only what he’d wanted her to see.
Still…
“He is not coming. Night falls in Zadhal, and still he does not return. He is a fool.”
The certainty, the knowledge, hit her. The trembling hand she’d half-raised to accept the toe-ring dropped, and her vision finally faded.
She couldn’t see it, but she heard him draw a knife from a metal sheath.
No, she couldn’t see it. Back. Back into the darkness she went. She’d known it from the moment she was made archmage. The darkness, the darkness was her destiny.
I’m alone in the darkness again.
She was blind once more, and knew then what she would choose.
She couldn’t even see how Father would take the news of her passing.
“Finish it,” she said bitterly.
Alandrica. Endren. Mother… I follow you now. Will you wait for me, and, and Father, on the oth-
Leave a Reply