“You don’t understand, do you?” the ransar asked.
Wenefir replied, “Not entirely, no, but I think I understand you, Pristoleph. After all this time, who but me could?”
“And?”
“And I hope that you will see that no harm was done to you while you were away.”
Pristoleph looked deep into Wenefir’s eyes, and the Cyricist’s knees shook.
“I have your loyalty, still, after all this time?” asked Pristoleph.
“You do,” Wenefir said, and it wasn’t entirely a lie.
“Then do this,” Pristoleph commanded, the fires rising when he squared his broad shoulders. “Send for the wemics, and have them place the Vaasan wizard Kurtsson, Senators Korvan and Aikiko, and the Thayan Marek Rymiit under arrest.”
“Under arrest?” Wenefir asked, stalling. Despite the dangerous heat in the chamber, the priest’s blood ran cold. “On what charge?”
“For Willem Korvan, the charge is murder,” Pristoleph said, and Wenefir almost gasped at the look of grief that came over his old friend. “He murdered the alchemist Surero in clear view of at least one witness. Beware, though, he is no longer human, but some sort of diseased undead.”
“And the others?”
“Treason.”
“But the Thayan-“
“What of him?” Pristoleph asked through clenched teeth. The fire on the top of his head blazed hot yellow and Wenefir had to blink and turn his face away.
“He is not, technically… legally speaking, one of your subjects, Ransar,” Wenefir explained. “He stands on Thayan soil when he is in his enclave, and I surely doubt that he’ll leave there until you” he paused and swallowed once more”forgive me, Ransar… cool down.”
“Thayan soil… ” Pristoleph sneered.
“Perhaps an investigation first,” Wenefir suggested, hoping to stall the ransar in any way possible. “If we have the proper evidence, an appeal can be made to the Thayan authorities. After all, Marek Rymiit is not without superiors of his own.”
“An investigation…” Pristoleph growled. He seemed to be biting his tongue. “Very well. But Willem Korvan is a murderer, and he became a citizen of the city-state of Innarlith when he became a senator. Find him and destroy him.”
Wenefir, caring not the slightest bit for the fate of Willem Korvan, bowed and got out of that room as fast as he could.
55
20 Tarsakh, the Year of Lightning Storms (1374 DR) The Sisterhood of Pastorals, Innarlith
The wall was high, but not impossible to climb. Willem looked up and saw the glow of the broken glass that had been mortared to the top of it, reflecting the wan light of the coming dawn. He dug his fingernailstalons, really, that had grown an inch in one nightinto the space between the smooth rocks. Moving slowly but with purpose, he scaled the wall. When the broken glass tore his trousers and bit into his legs, he didn’t care, and he didn’t bleed.
Willem dropped to the mud between two shrubs and kneeled in the darkness of the wall’s shadow. He moved his head from side to side, and though he didn’t actually draw any air into his lungshe no longer needed to do thathe was sure of the smell of her.
The name came to him once moreHalinabut it faded as quickly as it came, and there was only his quarry, his prey. There was only a goal he didn’t understand.
He crossed the manicured grounds, his chin up, his nose trolling the air for the scent. He found it again, and it was as though a finger formed in the air to point him in the right direction.
He followed the scent to a shorter stone wall, one more ornamental than the high wall that surrounded the place.
Willem didn’t know exactly where he was. He was on the grounds of some kind of building, and there was something about that building, about the ground itself, that repelled him as much as the scent attracted him.
He stepped over the little wall and found himself in a graveyard.
Maybe three dozen stones had been scattered, seemingly at random, on the cut grass. None more than three feet tall, they were simple and carved with names.
Willem sniffed the air again and stepped between the stones.
The sound of a voice drifted from far away, carried on the cool pre-dawn air. Willem looked in the direction he thought the voice had come from, but he saw nothing. Looking into the shadows he felt a sense of impending doom wash over him, so strong he almost fell to his knees.
He shook his head when the scent intruded on himif it even was a scent. It could have been more an impulsea need to find her.
Whatever the mechanism, Willem knew she was close, and he was certain that when he found her, she would make everything all right. She would save him. He didn’t know her name or how they knew each other. He could form no picture of her in his reeling, increasingly dull mind. But he knew her, and he knew she was
There.
Under the ground, buried.
He let a ragged growl tremble unvoiced in his throat, and he fell to his knees in front of a stone. His fingers found the engraving and traced the letters. He blinked but couldn’t see them, and though he wasn’t conscious of being able to read, he knew the letters came together to spell her name.
Halina.
“Who is that there?” a woman called out to him.
He jumped to his feet, his head spinning, and cast about for the source of the voice.
Though so much of what was left of him longed for it to be her, he knew it wasn’t Halina.
“By the Blessed” the woman shrieked.
He saw her step out from behind a tree, just inside the low wall around the cemetery. She clutched at her chest. The light from her lantern lit her face from below, twisting her features into a grotesque mockery of human.
Willem, overwhelmed by the need to kill the woman, moved toward her, his hands poised to rip her head from her shoulders. The woman raised the thing she’d clutched at her neck for and a brilliant white light overwhelmed Willem’s vision.
He couldn’t see any details of the symbol, but he knew what it was. The power of a goddess he was unfit to name rolled over him like a thunderhead rolls across an open plain.
He turned and ran. His legs moved, and his arms bounced at his sides. He couldn’t think. The need to find Halina was gone, the overwhelming necessity to kill Ivar Devorast also fled, and all that was left was the immediate, irrepressible need just to get away.
The woman drove him before her, and he ran all the way to the high wall. He climbed it faster than before, cut himself more deeply, too, but once he was over he ran and ran and ran into the growing light of the awakening city.
By the time he found an abandoned shed behind a ramshackle storefront in which to hide, there was nothing left of Willem Korvan. The man had been erased, and the monster knew only one thing.
Kill.
Kill Ivar Devorast.
56
20 Tarsakh, the Year ofLightning Storms (1374 DR) Berrywilde
Phyrea heard someone call her name. In the dark, still expanse of the country estate, she had heard her name come from nowhere before, had for years spoken with apparitions of violet light, but the voice that came to her that night was different.
She lay in a tub of warm water that she’d scented with lavender oil. The little knife she’d brought from the kitchen lay on the marble tile within easy reach, but she hadn’t cut herself yet. The little girl floated a few inches off the floor in the corner of the room, adding a purple glow to the orange candlelight.
“I like your dress,” Phyrea told the little girl. “It’s pretty.”
The girl grimacedan expression that looked wrong on her baby facebut she didn’t say anything. After a tenday at Berrywilde, they had spoken enough.
They’d told her again and again that Pristoleph meant to destroy them. They told her that her father was still alive but that he’d abandoned her, and the only family she had left was them. They begged her to kill herself, then they demanded that she do it, then they begged some more. They made her cry more than once, and she even put a knife to her throat one night. She looked the old woman in the eyes, then, and the desperation she saw there, the longing, almost made her slit her own throat, but she didn’t. Even days later she didn’t know why she’d spared her own life.