“Can you see her?” he demanded again; the fire burned in his voice, dark with threat.
Faron squinted, studying the scrying scale. A moment later the monstrous face turned up to meet the wild blue eyes of its father, and nodded.
Blazing excitement, replaced a moment later with impatience, roared through the seneschal.
“What do you see? Tell me more.”
The mute creature stared at him helplessly.
“What is she doing? Is she alone?”
The creature shook its head.
The fiery excitement soured to blinding fury.
“No? She is not alone? Who is with her? Who?”
The creature shrugged.
The wild storm in the seneschal’s eyes broke, like the wind-whipped waves in the gale.
He plunged both his hands up to the last joints of the fingers into the misshapen creature’s soft skull, twisting them as its fishlike mouth dropped open at the sides in agony, a silent scream bursting in waves of gushing air exiting its quivering lips.
As Faron’s body went rigid with shock, the seneschal closed his eyes and concentrated. Intently he focused his concentration inward, untying the metaphysical bonds by which his immortal demonic nature clung to his corporeal form, seeking the vibrations in Faron’s blood that matched those of his own. He found them easily.
Like threads of spun steel, the tiny tethers of power stretched between his body and his soul. Meticulously he unhooked them one by one and retied each one to the misshapen mass of human flesh writhing in his hands, whose blood burned with his own.
As the fire of his essence slipped into Faron’s body, his own corporeal form cooled, withered and sank into itself, shriveling like a mummified skeleton. It clung to Faron, its ossified fingers still protruding from the child’s head.
Faron’s twisted form, now the vessel, the host of the immortal soul of the demon, straightened and grew substantial, the cartilage hardening into bone. The demon peered out through Faron’s clear blue eyes.
He stared into the blue waves of light reflecting in the scale just below the surface of the glowing green water.
At first he saw nothing but a distant shadow. Then, a movement, and his bearing sharpened.
In the rippling waves of the pool he could make out the watery image of a face, both alien and innately familiar to him. It was a face he had studied at great length a lifetime ago, stared at in portraits, gazed at intently when in close proximity. He knew every line, every angle, though in the clouds of steam it was not exactly as he remembered it.
Perhaps it was the expression that was confusing him. The face he had known was a guarded one, one that rarely smiled, and when it did, that expression was wry. The emerald eyes within the face had burned with contempt, coolly disguised beneath an aspect of disinterest, especially when fixed on him.
Now, though, in whatever blue light through which it passed half a world away, this familiar, unknown face was wreathed in an expression he did not recognize.
There was laughter in her eyes, caught in this moment of time, and some thing more, an expression he could not place, but did not like, whatever it was. Her face was shining in the reflected glow of candleflame, but more—it was generating its own light.
She was talking to someone.
More than one person, it seemed, from the way her head moved, someone whose face was at an equal height to her own to the left, and another who was taller to the right. When she looked in the latter direction, her eyes took on an element of excitement that burned like elemental fire, pure and hot from the heart of the Earth. There was something so inviting, so compelling, about this face that involuntarily he reached into the glowing water and touched the back of her neck, where the golden hair he had dreamed about for more than a thousand years hung in a silken fall. He drew Faron’s gnarled finger through the ripples in an awkward caress.
Half a world away, she froze. A look of revulsion, or perhaps fear, washed the smile from her face, leaving it blank, pale. She glanced over her shoulder, then put her hand to her throat, as if shielding it from a bitter wind, or the maw of a wolf.
His touch had made her recoil.
Again.
Whore, he whispered in his mind. Miserable, rutting whore.
His anger exploded, causing Faron’s body to jerk and quiver with the physical manifestations of rage. With a furious sweep of his squamous hand he slapped the surface of the water, sending the scale spinning out of the pool and into the dank darkness of the catacomb.
He breathed shallowly, trying to regain his focus.
When reason returned, he closed his sky-blue eyes, concentrating on the metaphysical threads that bound him to Faron’s human form, loosing and relying them once more.
As the demonic essence rushed back into the seneschal’s body, the withered mummy swelled with life again, the angry light returning to his dried-out eye sockets. Faron’s body, by contrast, grew supple and twisted again until it collapsed under its own weight.
The seneschal breathed shallowly as he pulled his remaining fingers from the soft skull of his child, stanching the blood that dripped from the holes. Tenderly he gathered Faron, who wept silently, deformed mouth gasping at the edges, into his arms and caressed the wisps of hair, the quivering folds of skin, gently kissing the creature’s head.
“I am sorry, Faron,” he whispered softly. “Forgive me.”
When the creature’s soundless moans resolved into light panting, the seneschal cupped its face in his hand and turned it so that he was staring into its eyes, now cloudy again, though still the same blue as his own.
“I have wondrous news for you, Faron,” he said, stroking its flaccid cheeks with his fingers. “I am going on a long voyage, far across the sea—” He pressed his forefinger to the creature’s fused lips as panic came into its eyes.
“And I am taking you with me.”
The dark staircase that led to the Baron of Argaut’s tower was built, except for the last few steps, of polished gray marble veined in black and white. The stairs, like the passageway itself, were narrow; the noise of footsteps ascending or descending was reduced to soft, ominous clicks instead of the echoing cadence that walking through the other corridors in the Hall of Virtue produced.
At the top of the staircase the last few steps were hewn from blood coral, a stinging calcified sea plant—a living creature when in the sea, it was said—that formed poisonous reefs thousands of miles long near the Fiery Rim, many ocean leagues away. It blended with the marble of the steps, forming a deadly barrier to anyone not immune to the bite of fire, the sting of venom.
The seneschal climbed the last stair and stopped before the black walnut door bound in steel. He knocked deferentially, then opened the door slowly.
A rush of dank wind and consuming darkness greeted him.
He stepped quickly into the chamber and closed the door behind him.
“Good evening, m’lord,” he said.
At first no sound replied except the skittering movements of mice and the flutter of bat wings in the eaves above.
Then, deep within his brain, he heard the voice, words burning his mind like dark fire.
Good evening.
The seneschal cleared his throat, casting his eyes around the black tower room, the darkness impenetrable. “All is progressing well in Argaut. We had another successful day in the Judiciary.”
Very good.
He cleared his throat again. “I will be leaving tonight on an extended voyage. Is there anything m’lord requires before I go?”
The silence swelled around him in the dark. When the voice spoke again, it burned with menace, stinging his ears and the inside of his brain.
An explanation, to begin with.
The seneschal inhaled deeply. “I’ve had some news today that someone who owes me a very great debt, an oath struck on the Island of Serendair before the Great Cataclysm, survived the awakening of the Sleeping Child and is alive.” He let his breath out with the words. “I need to collect on that debt.”