“You still are, Rik. We are both part of it. There is no escape from duty. Not in times like these. Not ever, really.”
“Look at all these men marching. In a few weeks they may all be dead. In a few weeks they may be walking corpses.”
“That’s the risk a soldier takes, Rik. If war does not get them, plague might. If plague does not get them, hunger might. If hunger does not get them, accident might. If accident does not, old age most certainly will. Everything dies, Rik.”
“Terrarchs don’t.”
“Terrarchs do. We simply live longer than humans, Rik.” He looked at her long and hard, trying to measure her youthful beauty against what he knew of her age.
“Are you really two thousand years old?”
“I am two thousand, one hundred and fifty nine years old, give or take a few years.”
“Why do that?”
“The lengths of months and years on Al’Terra were somewhat different from those of Gaeia. I am converting my age into your years for the purposes of satisfying your somewhat impertinent curiosity.”
He considered this. She had told him that the climate was different on the Terrarch homeworld. He had not imagined such basic things as the length of a year might be different. It opened up whole new vistas of strangeness.
“I talked to a sorcerer in Harven who claimed he would give up years of his life for the opportunity to talk to you.”
“You are doing so. I hope it’s worth it.”
“What is it like?”
“What?”
“Being so old?”
Asea laughed. She seemed genuinely amused but there was a hint of anger in her voice. “You have a lot to learn about tact, Rik.”
“This I know. Are you annoyed?”
“Never apologise for being curious, Rik. At least not to me. The only way to get answers is to ask questions.”
“Are you going to answer mine?”
“Let me think about it. I am not sure there is any easy answer I can give you.”
“Any answer will do. It does not have to be easy.”
“Why this sudden interest in matters of life and death?”
“Kathea is dead. I killed Malkior. There are times, looking at the things in my mind when I know what it’s like to die. The Quan killed many people.”
Asea flashed him warning look. Karim was the wyrm’s mahout. He was her servant, and loyal, but there were some things better not discussed in the presence of anyone save themselves. She raised her hand, and he felt the flow of power as she invoked a ward. He could almost picture the lines of energy weaving around them. His sensitivity to such things had increased recently. External sounds vanished, as the bubble of privacy swirled into being around them.
“This is probably not the best place to discuss this, Rik,” she said. He knew this but the words had forced themselves out anyway. Some compulsion lay on him, some force within his mind.
“I have killed a lot of people,” he said. “I have a lot of strange dreams.”
She cocked her head to one side, concerned. “Go on.”
He tried to approach what was troubling him obliquely, like a hunter moving downwind of a deer. He was not really sure what it was, but he felt its presence as he could sense the presence of an animal in a bush, by the rustling of that which it displaced.
“When I was a soldier it was either me or them. The people I killed I mean. Most of the fights since then have been the same way. I thought about these things, but I never really thought about them, if you know what I mean?”
“No,” she said. He sighed and looked for another approach.
“When I was a kid, the Temple priests told me about heaven and hell. I sort of believed them. As I got older I stopped believing. One priest tells you that you go to hell if you murder someone, but another says it’s all right if you do it in the service of Queen and country. Some men can hold both those thoughts in their mind and believe both. I couldn’t — so one of them had to go.”
“I think I follow you now.”
“In the past few months, it all has become much more complicated. You don’t seem to take the Faith very seriously.”
“It’s hard to do so when you’ve watched it being constructed with your own eyes, Rik.”
“See, you say things like that. If I said them, I could be put to death for it. You say it like it’s just the simple truth.”
“The truth is rarely simple.”
“And then you say things like that. And you have talked to Angels.”
“And your point is?”
“My point is that I don’t know what’s happening anymore, either inside my head or outside it. I still hear voices sometimes, telling me to feed. I can remember what it was like to have the power in me, to be able to work magic so easily that it was like breathing. God help me, there are times when I want that again, more than anything in the world. And there are times I think I will be damned for it. That I am already damned for it.”
“I understand what you mean about wanting to work magic, Rik. I really do. On Al’Terra, it was like that for me, always, even from my earliest youth. I was the most gifted sorcerer at the Mazarian Academy. In my time I created things- towers, airships, spells- that are unthinkable in this world. I was constantly surrounded by magical energy that I could draw on in thousands of different ways. Being here is like being a fish on dry land. I can remember what it was like to have power, Rik, the power to destroy armies, to shatter kingdoms, to quiet earthquakes with words, to build cities by force of will.”
As she spoke her face was transformed, as if the clouds had parted and a ray of sunlight focused on her face. She raised a hand to her cheek and brushed away a strand of her long hair. “I can’t do that anymore, and I never will be able to, and it is like the loss of a limb. Worse, it is like the loss of all my limbs and going blind and deaf at the same time and remembering what it was like to be otherwise.”
“Would you go back? To Al’Terra. If you could?”
“There are times when I think that I would, Rik, even though it would mean my death or worse at the hands of the Princes of Shadow.”
“You knew them, didn’t you? You met them.”
“You are in a morbid mood today.”
“Apparently.”
“And you think this is an appropriate conversation to be having with an Inquisitor within hailing distance?” She sounded more amused than concerned, but there was something shifty and a little trapped about her eyes that worried him.
“Appropriate or not, it’s the one we are having.”
“Yes, I knew them. I went to school with some of them, studied sorcery alongside them.”
He felt like he was standing on the edge of some vast abyss. He had to restrain the urge to reach out and touch her, to satisfy himself that she was real. Today, for the first time in a long time, he saw her as someone who had stepped out of a legend. She had known saints and angels and devils. She had talked to them. And they were just like her. He had never been more aware of the distance that separated them, in time and space and understanding. He was sorry that he had started this conversation, and repelled and fascinated all at once.
“What were they like?”
“They were like you or me, at least to begin with.” He considered that. Scripture said they were incarnate devils, the very personification of evil. Asea’s manner said something quite different.
“What changed them?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did. We walked along the same road for a very long way, and then they chose a different fork in the path.”
“Did they really make a pact with the Shadow, and sell their souls to it for power?”
“There are times when I am not even sure there is a Shadow, Rik. Not in the sense that you have been taught.”
“The priests always used to tell us that was one of the snares the Shadow used to trap our souls.”
“And maybe they are right. Who can tell? I am not one of the Prophets. God does not talk to me. She never did.” He could see that her gaze was turning inward, as it often did, as she retreated from the prospect of answering his questions. He wanted answers desperately, and he pushed on.