He’d made it to his hands and knees by the time she reached him. He raised his head and looked at her, like a battered dog before its mistress, waiting for another blow.
Come on, Trinica, he thought. I know you’re in there. Fight it. Help me. Fight it.
She raised her foot and brought her heel down hard on his left hand. He tried to scream as bone splintered, but all he could manage was a silent wheeze. He snatched his hand back and clutched it to his chest. It had become a clumsy mitten of meat encasing a jumble of broken crockery, burning like it was on fire.
Unable to hold himself up any more, he lost his balance and fell onto his side. The jolt brought tears to his eyes. The pain was more than he’d thought it possible to suffer. He lay there curled up, wishing for the dark of unconsciousness, but there was no respite. He coughed again, and more blood came up.
I’m dying. Oh shit, I’m dying.
He was hauled up by his lapels once more, and held up before her. He wasn’t sure he had the strength to stand on his own, but he shuffled his feet, dragged his ankles, got his boots under him. His head lolled on his neck, and his breath came in rasps; the effort to draw in air was immense. He choked on the blood filling his mouth. Punctured lung? Ruptured spleen? Did it matter any more?
The daemon bared its teeth. ~ How? ~
Trinica’s face swam before him. No, not Trinica. The ghost of her, the nemesis she’d fashioned to torment him. Maybe it was always heading to this, ever since that day he left her standing pregnant in front of the wedding party, and never showed up. Everything since had sprung from that single act of selfishness. Earl Hengar’s death, Retribution Falls, the Mane attack on Sakkan, the destruction of the Azryx city in Samarla, the civil war; all mere sideshows to the main attraction: his elaborate and extended self-punishment for that one moment of youthful idiocy. For the death of his unborn child and what he’d done to the woman who’d carried it.
He’d fought so hard to win her back. He’d dreamed of the chance to atone. But in the end it had been a fool’s chase. There would be no forgiveness for him. There was only the vengeance he deserved, and it was fitting that it should be delivered at her hands.
Finish it, then, he thought, and he waited for the end.
But there was no new blow, and he wasn’t thrown again. Instead he felt a creeping sensation along his scalp, slipping through the bone until it was inside his skull, dirty little fingers grubbing at his brain. Those mismatched eyes bored into his. Horror took him, and he tried to pull away; but she clamped his jaw roughly in one hand, and he couldn’t.
Pictures were forming in his head. Memories, uncovering themselves against his will, scenes from the buried past brought out into the light.
Not that, he begged her silently. Not that.
His thoughts, his desires, his innermost feelings. All his regret and shame, all his triumph and glory. Every secret he’d guarded in a lifetime of secrecy. The daemon was peeling him back in layers, digging into him, dragging him out in pieces to be scrutinised and cast aside. It was reading his mind.
He couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t bear to be seen without illusion, to have his life autopsied before him. The physical pain he’d suffered was nothing compared to this.
He saw childish rebellions at the orphanage. He saw the day he’d first brought Slag on board the Ketty Jay, a mewling kitten, there for luck and for dealing with all those damned rats. He saw himself arguing with Trinica about the wedding and the baby, a young man who didn’t even understand why he was angry. He saw himself charming women and then leaving them, saw himself cutting deals with low-lifes and ripping off the weak. He saw moments of tender camaraderie with his crew.
His life was laid out in his mind, exposed to an alien regard, and it was terrible. In that merciless light, he was no longer special. Everything precious was cheapened and made tawdry. Every failing, stripped of excuses or equivocation, showed up stark and shameful. Viewed coldly, his history seemed wretched, the tale of a cheat and a philanderer, a narcissist and a liar. A man of small importance, always trying to be something greater than he was, doomed to defeat and doomed never to realise it.
No, he thought. No, I was worth something. I was! I lived!
A picture came to his mind then. A picture of himself, a ferrotype on a handbill, WANTED printed in large letters above him. He was young and smiling in it. They’d distributed that handbill all over Vardia after the death of Earl Hengar, back when Duke Grephen and Gallian Thade were trying to frame him, back when the Awakeners were first trying their hand at insurrection.
He’d been enraged when he first saw it, because that portrait they’d taken was only a part of a larger ferrotype, one he hadn’t wished to be reminded of at the time. But now he unfolded it in his memory, and found himself standing in a meadow with mountains behind him, and Trinica there, clinging to his arm and laughing. Laughing at the camera they’d set up on a tripod, laughing with unforced delight, laughing just to laugh. Laughing because she was a young woman in the throes of first love, brimming with a pure, naïve, dreamer’s passion, and she knew nothing of the troubles of the world.
He held on to that picture, forced his thoughts upon it. The daemon was trying to tug him away, to move on to other things, but he wouldn’t let it go. He clutched it tight in his mind, and the picture opened out again until it was no longer a picture but a scene.
Now he stood in the meadow with her, the sun warm on his back and the hiss of the long grass in his ears and clean mountain air in his lungs. He felt as he’d felt then, when he’d lived in a time free of responsibility and commitment, when he was just a cargo pilot who’d fallen for the boss’s daughter. A time when he’d been filled with the heady joy of love without precedent, and he’d felt like an explorer on an uncharted frontier.
In that moment, he’d loved her completely. It filled his mind, crowding out everything else. This place, this time. He never wanted to leave it. He never should have left it. And while he held on to it, nothing else could get in; not the past or the future, and not the cruel eye of the daemon. Nothing could sully this memory. It was untouchable. It was perfect.
And somewhere in the bittersweet bliss of reverie, he became aware that the daemon was no longer pawing at his consciousness. Trinica no longer gripped his jaw, and her face had changed. Instead of the hateful creature that inhabited her body he saw her staring out at him. Those odd-coloured eyes shimmered with sorrow; her stained and smeared lips trembled.
He wanted her to look at him for ever, but she had only seconds. She’d mastered the daemon briefly, but it wouldn’t stay down for long. With her terrified gaze, she implored him.
Ignoring the pain that wracked him, he laid his left forearm on her shoulder to steady himself, his shattered hand dangling uselessly at the end. He leaned in close, so that his bloodied lips brushed her ear, and he could feel the flutter of the pulse at her throat.
‘I love you,’ he said. And he drove the point of his cutlass into her with all the strength in his body.
A soft whimper escaped her as the blade passed through her and thrust out of her back. Her eyes, still fixed on his, tautened with the agony of it. She took in half a breath, and then her eyes rolled up, her head tipped back and her legs gave way.
He caught her with his left arm, clutched her to him and kept her there as she jerked and shuddered. The air warped and bent, distorting their surroundings like a fairground mirror; aethereal screeches filled the hold; a hurricane raged around them. He held on to her with one arm as if she was the only thing that would stop him from being blown away. With his other, he gripped tight the hilt of the cutlass.