It stopped him like a crossbow bolt. He lowered his head for a moment, breathed deep. Nodded to himself and turned back to the cloaked figure that stood behind him.
“What do you want from me, Takavach?”
“At the moment, I want to help you stay alive. Would that be so terrible?”
His brothers lay dead and cooling in the grass behind him, scant yards from their father’s grave. Marnak’s words floated back through his mind. You start wondering why you made it to the end of the day, why you’re still standing when the field is clogged with other men’s blood and corpses. Why the Dwellers are keeping you alive, what purpose the Sky Home has laid out for you.
Thunder rattled at the chained doors of the world.
Egar’s face twitched as he heard it. Closer now, and out across the steppe the clouds were massing. He felt his own future come and touch him with one cold hand at the neck. The long purpose of the Sky Home was rarely beneficial to those who served as its instruments, heroes least of all. You only had to look at the legends.
He spat in the grass.
Went back to where the cloaked god stood waiting for him. He met the glimmering eyes beneath the hat brim and discovered that in the strange storm blowing through his heart now, there was no longer any room for fear.
“All right,” he said.
CHAPTER 23
Waking up felt like riding one of the huge iron navigation buoys in the channel at Yhelteth port. The taste of rust in his mouth, a cold, black watery rushing around him, and a wavering patch of light on the surface of the dark above. He felt a hot twinge through shoulder and chest, wasn’t surprised to feel it but couldn’t quite recall why. Through the jagged glimmer of approaching consciousness, he thought he saw a dark figure waiting for him.
Don’t you fucking get it, Dad. Mumbling through an oddly aching jaw. It’s all a fucking lie, the whole stinking edifice from the marsh up . . .
And awake.
He lay on smooth, cold stone. Limestone drip of water somewhere in the gloom. A pale light danced on raw vaulting rock overhead. The dark figure stood against a dressed stone wall to his left.
“Why did you do it?”
But the voice came from the right. Ringil blinked and propped himself up on one shaky elbow. Pain lanced up from his jaw and through the right side of his head. Memory crashed in on him. The fight—the dwenda—the damage he’d taken. He peered around, saw little beyond the vague loom of overhanging rock and stalactites.
“Do what?” he asked groggily.
Shadows moved on the stone floor where he lay. It was paving, he noticed, dressed to match the wall on his left. He squinted and made out a cross-legged form seated just beyond the fall of light around him. Whoever it was seemed to be staring down into cupped hands.
“Why did you fight for them?” There was a music to the voice, a deep-toned, melodic vibrancy, for all that the words themselves came quietly across the gloom. The language was Naomic, but tinged with archaisms from old Myrlic and a quaint grammatical ornateness. “They’d execute you on a spike for your choice of bed partner, and call it righteousness; they’d watch it done and toast your agony with tankards and songs, and dedicate it to their idiot gods. They’re brutal, moronic, they have the ethical consciousness of apes and the initiative levels of sheep. But you took the field against the reptiles for them nonetheless. Why?”
Ringil sat up with an effort. Tried to speak, coughed instead. Got it under control, finally, managed a weak shrug.
“Dunno,” he croaked. “Everyone was doing it, I just wanted to be popular.”
Arid laughter, echoing in the cavern. But the question still hung there in the silence that followed, and the figure did not move. An answer was required, a real one.
“Okay.” Ringil took his jaw between thumb and forefinger, flexed it and grimaced. He cleared his throat. “I wouldn’t swear to it after all this time. But looking back, I think it was probably the children. I saw a couple of towns hit by their raiding parties early on. You know, the Scaled Folk tend to eat their prisoners. And for children, well, that’s got to be the ultimate nightmare, right? Being eaten. Chained up watching, knowing it’s going to happen to them next.”
“I see. For children.” The seated form cocked its head. The voice stayed soft and silky, but somewhere it held the underlying tensile strength of Kiriath skinmail. “Children who would in all probability grow to be just as ignorant and brutal and destructive as those that spawned them.”
Ringil pressed fingers to the throbbing side of his head. “Yeah, probably. When you put it like that, does seem kind of stupid. So what about you people? You eat your prisoners at all?”
The figure rose smoothly to its feet. Even in the gloom, Ringil could see the physical power and grace the motion implied. The speaker came forward into the light.
For a moment, Ringil forgot to breathe.
Throbbing pain in his jaw and head, the twinges from the sword-tip slash on his shoulder and chest, a messy, soiled feel to his consciousness and clothes, and behind it all a vague, disconnected sense of fear—still, Ringil felt the spurt of nascent lust in the base of his belly. Grace-of-Heaven Milacar’s words spilled back through his head.
He’s beautiful, Gil. That’s what they say. That he’s beautiful beyond words.
Whatever questionable source had carried that word to Milacar, you couldn’t fault their powers of observation.
The dwenda stood over six feet tall, slender almost to boyishness in hips and limbs but with a sudden breadth and power in chest and shoulders that made his upper body look more like a stylized cuirass than anything living. He—you had to assume it was male from the bulge in the loose black breeches and the flat planes of the chest—stood with the same effortless poise that he’d shown getting up. Long, tapering hands hung pale and slightly crooked, as if they remembered a hawkish past life as talons. The nails each gave up a minute rainbow sheen in the light.
The face that topped it all was everything Shalak’s Aldrain enthusiasts could have wished for—bone white, mobile and intelligent, long-lipped, and just fleshy enough in chin and nose to offset the high, cadaverous cheekbones and broad flat forehead. Long black hair hung straight on either side, met the wide shoulders and spilled back over them like dark water. The eyes—
The eyes were pits of pitch, just the way the legends had it, but even in this low light Ringil saw how they flung back the same faint rainbow glimmer as the dwenda’s nails. He had a sudden flush of absolute certainty that in daylight the whole eyeball would blaze like sunrise over the Trell estuary.
The dwenda inclined slightly over him. It was at one and the same time something like a reverence, something like predatory intent.
“Would you like me to eat you?” it asked.
Ringil felt the squirm in his guts again.
Get a fucking grip, Gil. This is your enemy, you nearly killed him last night—
Tonight, still? Some part of him needed, for some reason, to know.
—you might still be able to manage it.
Instead, he managed an ironic clearing of the throat and a manufactured lightness of tone belying the trip-trip that went up along his arms and down into his groin.
“Maybe later. Right now, I’ve got this motherfucker of a headache.”
“Yes.” The head slightly cocked again. Splinters of light danced across the inky eyes. “I apologize for the pain. The damage is slight, and in this place you will heal much faster than you would in your world. But even here, a physical price has to be paid. And it was the only means I had of ending the fight without killing you.”