The Queen of Death is dethroned. Power is free tonight. Fragments of it drift on the winds, sift through the air, fall on the earth.
It slays the dead.
It casts down the powerful.
Stilcho shivered, his living eye widened and the dead one saw abysses.
He tottered on the edge, reached up hands cold as clay and held to Haught as to his last and only hope.
There is something that shines and I see it, dead man.
It beckons the powerful with an irresistible lust.
And she dares not.
The dust shines and shimmers and falls everywhere and she dares not gather that power up. She seals up the ways. She burns it with fire.
Nisi power. She loathes it and desires it.
I am Nisi, dead man. And I will have that thing. She sits blind and deaf to me what we say she cannot know. That is my power. And it needs one thing.
Things will change, Stilcho. Consider your allegiances. Consider how you fare when she forgets you.
He had a very clear picture then what Haught wanted. He held the image of a shining globe that spun and shimmered. Lust was part of it, in the same way that light was. It was raw power. It was dangerous, dangerous as some spinning blade, as some terrible juggernaut let loose. That shining, spinning thing was a humming regularity that beat like a pulse, that held all the gates of hell and creation in harmony with itself, all beating away with the same thump-thump of a living heart, that was the tiniest imperfection in this spinning. If it were perfect there would be nothing.
The universe exists on a flaw in nothing at all.
A little wobble in the works.
He caught at his chest, feeling an unaccustomed hammering. He felt it as threatening at first, and then he realized that it was a thin, occasional beat in a perfect stillness. It was his own heart giving a little thump of life. And he felt it because for a moment it had been utterly silent.
"You know," Haught said, "you understand it now, what I want." Haught's fine hand touched his face, and a little chill numbed him. "Now forget it, dead man. Just forget it now. Until I need you.... I want to talk to you, Stilcho, Just a moment. Privately."
Stilcho blinked. It was the living eye he saw from now. It was his enemy Haught, a Haught looking uncommonly void of malice, a Haught holding him gently by the shoulder.
"I've wronged you," Haught said. "I know that. You have to understand, Stilcho we were both victims. I was yours; you were their pawn. Now I have a certain power and it's you who are the slave. A sweet difference for me; and a bitter one for you. But-" The hand moved softly and warmth spread from it, like life through clay, so poignant a pain that Stilcho's vision came and went. "It need not be bitter. You so scarcely died, Stilcho. Earth never went over you; fire never touched you. Just a little slip away from the body, a little slip and she caught you in her hands before you could get much beyond the merest threshold of hell, drew you back to your body in the next breath; and this flesh of yours-this is solid, it bleeds if cut however sluggishly; it suffers pain of flesh. And pain of pride; and pain of fear-"
"Don't-"
"And when mistress wants you, it does infallibly what a man's body ought-tell me: does it feel anything?"
Stilcho gave a wrench of his arm. It was no good. The paralysis closed about his throat and stopped the shout; Haught's eyes caught his and held and the arm fell leaden at his side.
"I have the threads that hold you to life," Haught said. "And I will tell you a secret: she has never done as much for you as should be done. She can't, now. But she could have. The power that could have done it is blowing on the wind tonight, is falling like dust, wasted. Do you think that she would have thought twice of you? Do you think that she would have said to herself-Stilcho could benefit by this, Stilcho could have his life back? No. She never thought of you."
Liar, Stilcho thought, fighting the silken voice; but it was hard to doubt the hand that held the threads of his existence. Liar-not that he believed Ischade had ever thought of him; that he did not expect; but he doubted that there had ever been such a chance as Haught claimed.
"But there was," said Haught softly, and something fluttered and rippled through the curtains of his mind. "There was such a chance and there still is one. Tell me, Stilcho-ex-slave speaks to slave now-do you enjoy this condition? You'll trek to hell and back to preserve that little thread of life of yours; you'll whimper and you'll go like a beaten dog because even death won't make you safe from her, and your life won't last a moment if she forgets you the way she's forgetting those others. But what if there were another source of life? What if there were someone to hold you up if she neglected you-do you see the freedom that would give you? For the first time since you died, poor slave, you can choose from moment to moment. You can say-this moment I'm hers; or: for these few I'm his. And if anything should happen to me-that choice will be gone again. Do you understand?"
There was warmth all through him. Warmth and the natural give of his stiffened ribs-it hurt, like cramped muscle. His heart beat at a normal rate and the socket of his eye ached with a stab of pain that was acute and poignant and for a moment giddy with strength.
Haught caught him as it faded and the river-cold came back. Stilcho shivered, a natural shiver; and Haught's face before him was pale, beaded with sweat: "There," Haught gasped, "there, that's what I could do for you if I were stronger."
Stilcho only stared at him, and the living eye wept at the memory and the dead one wept blood. It was a seduction' as wicked as any ever committed in Sanctuary, which was going some: and he knew himself the victim of it. Of drugs and temptations he had sampled in his life, of ghassa and krrf and whatever lotos-dreams the smoke of firoq gave, there was no sensation to equal that moment of painful warmth, and it was going away now.
He needs a focus, Stilcho thought; he had learned his gram-marie in bitter and terrible lessons and knew something of the necessities of black sorcery. He wants a familiar. Nothing so simple as snake or rat, not even one of the birds he wants a man, a living man. 0 gods, he's lying. He knows what I'm thinking. He's in my skull-
Yes, came a soft, soft voice. / am. And you're quite right. But you also taste what my power would be. I'm still apprentice. But to hide a thing is another of my talents. And Mistress doesn't see me. I've learned the edges of her power, I've mapped it like a geography, and I simply walk the low places, the canyons and the chasms of it. She's committed an error great mages make: she's lost her small focus. Her inner eye is set always on the horizons, and those horizons grow wider and wider, so the small, deft stroke can pass her notice; I can sit in a small place and listen to the echoes her power makes. It makes so much noise tonight it has no sense of a thing so small and soft. And I approach mastery. It lacks one thing. No, two. You are one. The thought will remain. I will seal it up now, I will seal it so you needn't fear at all; all that will remain is a knowledge that 1 am not your true enemy. Wake up, "Stilcho-"
Stilcho blinked, startled for a moment as he found himself face to face with Haught. Something was very wrong, that he was this close to Haught and feeling no fear. It was a situation that produced fear of its own. But Haught let him go.
"Are you all right?" Haught asked with brotherly tenderness.
Witchery did not obliterate memory of past injury. It only made things seem, occasionally, quite mad.
And the fire still roared in the front room, where he had no wish to go.