The creatures Lord Sixx had taken with him giggled obscenely as they feasted on the assassin's hot flesh.
From the bed, Lucius moaned. "Release me. I have done what you asked. I am dead. Release me!"
Lord Sixx grinned. He took a staff standing in a corner and stabbed at the gauntlet until he was able to slip one end into the glove and raise the deadly item into the air.
"Please," Lucius begged. "You promised that you would spare my wife and children and that you would release me!"
"Not just yet," Lord Sixx said as his gaze slithered across the undead mage's face. "I still have plans for you."
Eighteen
The nightmare was always the same:
Myrmeen was a child, living at home with her parents in the boarding house she one day would burn to the ground. Her father was trying to perfect a new composition, plucking notes on his lute with passion and skill, while her mother allowed her to help stuff a pillow that she would place inside a beautifully woven slipcover and sell in the market. They lay together on the sky-blue rug that Myrmeen loved so much. All she had to do was roll onto her back and look up to see the painting she treasured, the portrait of her parents, with her sandwiched between them.
I didn't want a sister anyway, she thought. Then we would have to get a new painting.
The notes her father played suddenly changed. The music became discordant and a heavy thumping replaced the light strum of his fingers upon the strings. "I'm dripping," he said in a murky voice. Myrmeen looked up and saw she was an adult dressed in silver armor with a phoenix headdress. The sword that had been forged for her by her second husband was in her hand.
"I'm dripping," he repeated. "I hate that."
This time she saw what he meant. His flesh was leaking from his bones, his eyeballs drooping to his jaw.
"Honey," he said insistently, though his tongue was now curling up in the back of his skull, "can't we do something about this?"
Her father had always wanted her mother to do something when a situation distressed him. Myrmeen was never quite sure what that meant. At the moment, she did not want to find out.
"All right," her mother said, in a voice that made it clear that she no longer was her mother, or, at least, no longer human. Myrmeen heard a thump beside her and refused to look up. Another thump. Then another. Something leathery brushed against her and she felt its texture despite the armor she wore. Myrmeen twisted out of the monster's path, refusing to believe that this was her mother.
The thing reared up to its full height, tall enough to scrape the ceiling with the top of its head. Its body was thin and skeletal, a burnt sienna mass of twisted bones and looping muscle filled with gobs of pure white feathers. Wings with the patterns of spider webs branched out from the small of the creature's back, and its head still contained the gentle features of her mother, marred by insect eyes and pincers that had been driven outward through the cheeks.
"Sweetheart," her mother said as she turned in Myrmeen's direction-the word came out slurred and sounded more like Swuuud-harddd- "Sweetheart, give Daddy your arm to chew on. He's hungry."
"Stay away," Myrmeen said.
"Honey!" her father bellowed. "It's getting worse!"
Myrmeen made the mistake of looking back in her father's direction. He was telling the truth; his dissolution was increasing. Even his bones were becoming soft and oozing. She realized in perverse fascination that his body was not so much melting as it was changing, becoming huge strands that reached out to the ceiling and floor, sticking to the walls, and forming an intricate web whose sinewy strands emitted the odor of rotting fish.
"Get in there, sweetheart," her mother urged. "Get in there and set that terrible knife down first-"
"It's a sword," Myrmeen interrupted.
"It has an edge!" the woman shrieked. "It cuts. It's a knife. You don't want to cut your father to pieces do you? Not like the way you cut our hearts to pieces, not the way you did before. You remember, before, when we told you the other one was dead and you would be our one and only. You smiled. You thought we didn't see you, but we did and it cut our hearts out. So don't do it again. Be a good girl. Get in the stinking web and let us eat your heart!"
The creature advanced on Myrmeen and she woke suddenly, bolting forward in bed. She tried to scream and could only force a high, quiet squeal of terror from her lungs because she had been breathing so hard that she no longer had the air inside her to muster a scream.
Myrmeen squeezed her eyes shut. She was alone, dripping with sweat. The nightmare was just that, a bad dream, nothing to worry about. She knew that she should be used to it by now, but it continued to affect her deeply, cutting furrows into her heart each time it returned to her. The dream was a lie. She had not been happy when she learned that her baby sister had been stillborn, or when she knew that her own daughter was dead.
Of course you were.
She had not smiled, not even a little bit.
Admit it. You were relieved.
No! she screamed in her mind, her hands clamped over her face. She tried to say the word, but no sound came.
Something in the darkness made a scratching noise.
Myrmeen looked up suddenly, her warrior's instincts taking control. The darkness in her chamber would have been absolute if she had not left the door slightly ajar, to make it easier for Krystin in case she decided she did not want to sleep alone.
Myrmeen's eyes adjusted to the semidarkness rapidly and she saw an object the size of a man clinging to the far wall. She could make out very little detail other than that it was alive and moving.
My sword, she thought, and remembered that the weapon had been hung on the bedpost to her right and she was lying near the edge of the bed's left-hand side. She considered bolting for the door, but knew that whatever the creature was that had been waiting for her, it would certainly be upon her before she could reach the knob.
"Want you to… see me." The voice sounded familiar.
Myrmeen heard the striking of flint and saw a tiny flame light near the wall. Suddenly a torch flared to life and in her mind Myrmeen heard the voice of Burke, her first tutor in the art of fighting, who said, Now, while both of its hands are occupied. Go now! What are you waiting for?
Who's to say it has only two hands, Myrmeen thought as she scrambled deeper into the room's shadows and drew the sword from its scabbard, thankful that she had learned to sleep in her leathers. She was smelly and uncomfortable and would remain that way until she bathed, but at least she was prepared to fight. She tried to cry out for Reisz and Ord, but her throat constricted and words would not form, just as the scream had refused to leave her mouth instants before.
"Look… can't scream… touched you while slept… Look!"
Myrmeen felt as if she were back in the world of her nightmares. She looked at the creature on the wall. The torch that had been lighted sat in its holder on the wall, forcing an orange-red blossom of light to caress the gruesome monster's body. Myrmeen had been trying not to look at it directly, afraid that if she gave it what it wanted, it would have no reason to wait before it leapt at her.
"Pretty," the woman-thing sitting on the wall said, indicating its rapidly transforming body with a flourish of a pale hand. The human part of it-its face-was beautiful, with dark, exotic features, long and slightly curly hair, and soft, creamy skin. Its eyes were elongating, becoming large ovals pocketed with myriad chambers, which glowed blood red. The woman-thing's lips pulled back in a sneer to reveal long, curving white fangs, and its jaw began to expand outward from side to side. Traces of a fine silk wrap clung to its body. A pair of sandals and a small pouch lay on the floor. The thing's torso was changing, growing into large, bulbous brownish black sections covered with fine hair. Each of its four human limbs were splitting in two, the flesh falling away to reveal long, thin spider's legs that spread from one another as their sockets moved into place on the body. Small red blotches appeared on the monster's torso, and its face suddenly split as pincers emerged.