Chapter Thirteen
The shadows blanketed Sayeed and he heard, or maybe felt, a rushing sound. When the darkness lifted, it revealed a ruined city shrouded in night. “Ordulin,” Rivalen said.
“The maelstrom,” Sayeed said. “I was here when it was still a city.” “It’s something else now,” Rivalen said.
Shattered, half-collapsed buildings dotted the area, jagged and crooked, like rotten teeth poking from the earth. Swirling shadows darkened the air. The wind blew in fierce gusts. Green lightning split the sky again and again. The ruins smelled like a graveyard, an entire city murdered and left on the face of the world to rot. Chunks of stone and statuary littered broken roads once filled with carriages and wagons and commerce. A hundred years ago, Sayeed had walked Ordulin’s streets under the sun. Now he walked its ruins in darkness, himself ruined.
As they went Sayeed wiped his hands on his trousers, again and again, but whatever stained them would not come off to his satisfaction. He’d killed his own brother. He had no one, nothing for which to live. He had only a single desire, powerful and true, and that was to die. He was a hole. There’d be no filling him ever again.
“It’s dark here,” he observed.
Rivalen, half-merged with the shadows, his golden eyes like stars, said, “Always.”
Thunder rumbled.
“I want to die,” Sayeed blurted. The words sounded limp, dead as they exited his mouth. “You promised me that. I need to die.”
“I know,” Rivalen said, and lightning lit the sky in veins of green. “I can oblige. Come.”
Undead prowled the ruined city: wraiths, specters, living shadows. There were hundreds, thousands perhaps. They broke on Rivalen’s presence like water on stone, flowing around and over him, never approaching too closely. Rivalen said, “Many thousands of years ago I murdered my mother to show the Lady the truth of my faith.”
Sayeed said nothing.
“As she died, she asked for my hand.”
They came to a wide flagged plaza. Building-sized chunks of dark stone littered it here and there, as if they’d rained from the sky. Hovering over the center of the plaza was a void, an emptiness. The sight of it made him dizzy and mildly nauseated. Paper flitted around it, into it, out of it, as if it were chewing on them and spitting them out.
Sayeed could not keep his eyes on the void, not entirely. It seemed to slip away and he never quite saw it squarely. But he saw enough, he felt its emptiness, felt the bitterness that poured from it, the spite. It was a mirror.
In it he saw himself.
“Give me your hand,” Rivalen said.
Sayeed turned, looked into Rivalen’s golden eyes, at his extended hand, the flesh swathed in shifting lines of shadow.
“Give me your hand, Sayeed. You’ll have what you wish. I’d thought to have my brother’s. . aid in this, but you will do better.”
Sayeed extended his hand.
Rivalen took it, his flesh cold and dry, his grip like a vise.
“Come. You must stand before Shar’s eye. She must see you.” Rivalen pulled him along toward the void, the eye, the mouth, the hole. As he drew closer, he realized that the emptiness he’d felt, the pit in the center of his being, the hopeless feeling of loss, of solitude, was a trivial reflection of what he felt emanating from Shar’s eye.
“Wait,” he said, and tried to stop, to pull away from Rivalen. Rivalen’s grip tightened, a vise. “It’s too late for that.”
“No!” Sayeed said and tried frantically to pull away. “No, wait!” Rivalen pulled him along as if Sayeed were a child, the Shadovar’s strength preternatural. Another step, another.
“Stop! Stop!”
Shadows boiled around Rivalen. His golden eyes flashed. “You wanted death, Sayeed! You’ll have it! But first I need you to translate!” “No! No!”
For the first time in a hundred years Sayeed felt something. Shar’s eye put a seed of fear in him, and it soon blossomed into terror. He felt her regard emanating from the hole-the hate, the spite, the hopelessness, the unadulterated contempt for everything and anything. He screamed, his sanity slipping from him. Rivalen drove him to his knees before the eye. The wind rushed around him. The papers orbiting the eye, moving in and out of it, gathering in a cloud before him. Her eye bore down on him like all the weight in the world.
It pinioned him to the earth, tiny before it. He felt himself wither under her regard. He was an insignificant, trivial thing. He’d been such a fool, such a ridiculous fool. The Spellplague had changed him into something other than a man. .
“Feast on her words,” Rivalen said, putting his hands on either side of Sayeed’s head.
But Sayeed had changed himself into something other than human, killed his own brother. Tears fell.
“Your bitterness is sweet to the Lady,” Rivalen said, and his fingers burrowed into Sayeed’s head, squeezing.
Pain lanced through Sayeed’s skull. He felt as if his eyes would pop from his head. His mouth opened wide in a scream that went unuttered, for the pages of the book floating in the air before him flew into his open mouth, one after another, rushing down his throat, filling his mouth, stuffing him.
He gagged, grunted, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t breathe, and through it all he felt Shar watching him, her eyes freighted with contempt.
Rivalen was holding little more than a rag doll in his hands, a hollow man useful now only as a vessel by which to translate the divine language of The Leaves of One Night. Not quite a corpse, not quite alive.
“Light is blinding,” Rivalen said, stating one of Shar’s Thirteen Truths as he forced dark, unholy energy into Sayeed’s limp form. “Only in darkness do we see clearly.”
Sayeed’s body spasmed, charged with baleful energy. Rivalen released him and Sayeed slumped to the ground, an empty penitent with his back to the sky and his eyes to the ground, suspended forever between life and death, able to participate in neither.
Sayeed’s bitterness and hopelessness, the essential core of his being, were the reagents that would transform Shar’s words into something her nightseer could understand.
Impatient for revelation, Rivalen tore Sayeed’s cloak and tunic from his back, ripped his armor from his torso and cast it aside, exposing the bare skin of Sayeed’s back. Small black lines squirmed under his skin, causing it to bubble and warp, the ink of Shar’s malice. The lines twisted and curled, formed themselves into tiny characters, and then into words, and words into promises.
Riven read them eagerly, the holy word of his goddess written in darkness on the skin of a man trapped in perpetual despair. He vacillated between elation and apprehension. The transfigured words of The Leaves of One Night were said to state the moment of Shar’s greatest triumph and the moment of her greatest weakness.
He leaned forward, traced a trembling finger along Sayeed’s back as he read. Shadows poured from Rivalen’s flesh, knowledge from Sayeed’s.
As Rivalen read, he began to understand. And as he began to understand, he began to laugh.
Rain fell. Thunder rumbled. Shadows swirled.
He looked up into Shar’s eye and wept.
“All is meaningless,” he said, intoning Shar’s fourteenth, secret Truth. “And nothing endures.”
He stood, the wind whipping his cloak and hair, and looked over his shoulder to the west.
They’d be coming, and their bitterness would be sweet to the Lady.
“Run to your father, little Cale,” Rivalen said. “Then bring everyone to me.”
Surprised silence greeted Riven’s words. Gerak broke it.
“This is madness. You can’t, Vasen. This is a fight for gods, not men.” “He must,” Riven said, and his one eye bored into Vasen. “You must.” “I’ll do it,” Vasen said without any hesitation. “When?”
“Now,” Riven said.
“I’ll come, too, of course,” said Orsin.