“Who are you?” he asked.
“No one,” came the reply, again from a hundred voices.
“Don’t play games with me!” the king yelled. “I won’t stand for it!”
This brought a chorus of dreary, humorless chuckles.
Tithian untied the sleeve of what had been his cassock, then thrust his hand down to touch the hot surface of the Dark Lens. A surge of energy rushed up his arm, but, much to his surprise, the sensation of movement did not return. Apparently, the lens had reached the end of its journey.
“Tell me who you are,” the king threatened. “Or I’ll use the power of the Dark Lens against you.”
“You’ve already done all the harm to us that you can, my brother.”
This time, Tithian recognized the voice. “Bevus?” he gasped.
“I was Bevus once,” said the figure.
As the voice spoke, the brown-eyed eddy began to coalesce into the form of the king’s long-dead younger brother: a youth of about seventeen years, with the beady brown eyes and hawkish nose so typical of the Mericles line. There the resemblance to Tithian ended, however. Where the king’s features had always been gaunt and sharp, with a hard, bitter edge to them, Bevus’s were well proportioned and warm, with a tender quality that bespoke his sheltered upbringing.
In spite of the fiery energy flooding through him, Tithian suddenly felt so cold he began to shiver. “Then I’m dead?” he gasped.
This brought another chorus of funereal chuckles.
“Worse,” answered Bevus, curling his gray lips into a hateful snarl. “You’re alive, and we want to keep you that way!”
He drifted toward the king, and all of the other gray eddies also began to close in.
“Stay back!” Tithian warned.
Bevus’s face flopped down onto his chest, exposing a bloody, jagged wound in the back of his neck. The slit ran from the base of his skull clear through the spine, stopping just short of the adam’s apple. Barely enough skin remained intact to keep the head from falling off his shoulders. It was, as Tithian remembered, the condition in which the young man’s dead body had been discovered.
The king raised a hand to shield his face and looked away, unable to bear the sight. “In the name of our ancestors!” he cursed. “Think of how you look!”
“You shouldn’t have done it,” came the reply.
Tithian returned his gaze to his brother. Bevus and the others had stopped advancing. “You think I did that?” the king gasped, gesturing at the gruesome wound.
“You deny it?” asked Bevus. His words were muffled and difficult to understand, for he had left his head dangling on his chest.
“Yes, I deny it!” Tithian yelled. As he spoke, he felt a terrible, icy lump where his heart should have been. “I’m not the one who did that to you!”
In truth, the king’s recollections of that time were a fog. He had been a young templar in the Royal Bureau of the Arena when he had learned of his parents’ untimely deaths at the hands of a marauding slave tribe. Two of his compatriots had taken him out to console him with drink, and the conversation had turned to his inheritance. He had angrily berated his brother, accusing Bevus of convincing their parents to disinherit his older sibling in his favor.
Tithian and his friends had drunk some more. Barely able to stand, they had filled their waterskins with wine, hired some kanks, and ridden off toward the Mericles estate. That was all the king had ever remembered of that night.
The next dawn, Tithian had awakened in the desert not far from his family lands. At first, he had thought that his friends had led him into the desert and let him vent his wrath until he passed out from drink and exhaustion-then he had discovered that the robes of all three were soaked with blood. The king remembered being seized by a terrible sense of disgust and hatred. He had killed his two sleeping companions and gone to the irrigation pond at the Asticles estate where he washed both himself and his robes. Once everything had dried, he had hiked down to the house and passed the day weeping in the company of Agis and Lord Asticles, who had assumed he was distraught over the death of his parents and warmly offered their condolences.
It had not been until three days later, after he had returned to his duties in the Bureau of the Arena, that he had heard how someone had brutally murdered his brother. Of course, there had been those who whispered that Tithian had murdered his younger brother to recover the Mericles fortune, but Agis and his father had steadfastly maintained that Tithian could not have been responsible, as he had been at their estate, mourning. No more questions had been asked, since the Asticles name was well-known for honesty-and since King Kalak had seen good advantage in having a wealthy noble serve in the ranks of his templars.
Bevus said, “A man always knows who his murderer is-even if the coward hides behind another’s face!”
“It couldn’t have been me. I passed that night at the Asticles mansion,” he said, falling back on his customary alibi.
“You’re choking on your own lies,” Bevus scoffed. “You killed me.”
“Never!”
“An’ I suppose ye never killed me?” growled a tarek’s lifeless voice.
Voice after voice asked the same question. There were nobles who had speculated too openly that Tithian might have been responsible for not only the death of his brother, but of his parents as well. Several voices belonged to templars who had stood in his way as he climbed the ranks of the king’s bureaucracy, and others to slaves who had tried to escape his service. There were even the voices of a few noble ladies and templar priestesses, heartless women who had laughed at a young man’s awkward advances.
Tithian recognized all of the voices, and he remembered killing each and every one of them-not by issuing an order or passing a coin over some bard’s palm, but murdering them himself. Sometimes, if they were weaker than he was, he had strangled them with his own hands. If they were stronger, he had planted a dagger in their backs at unsuspecting moments. For the cautious ones, there had been poison. For the slaves who had thought dying to be easier than serving their master, always some slow and hideous death to prove them wrong.
The king remembered the details of each and every murder right down to what he had been wearing, what the victim had said as he or she fell, even the foul odors that had come from their bodies as they expired. The only exception was the murder of Bevus, which, with the same certainty that he remembered committing all the other murders, he knew he could not have done.
“Do you remember now?” Bevus asked, starting to advance again.
“Stop!” Tithian yelled, opening his body to the fiery energy of the lens. “I didn’t kill you then-but I will now.”
Bevus stopped at Tithian’s side and laid a hand on the king’s wing. “You fool-you can’t kill a dead man. Do you think we would have brought you into the Gray if you could hurt us now?”
“You lured me down here?” Tithian roared.
“We called the lens,” confirmed Kester’s voice. “Ye followed it.”
“Yes, Kester knew you would,” Bevus confirmed. “She said it would be the one thing you valued more than your life.”
A chill finger scraped down Tithian’s leathery wing, drawing a howl of agony. It felt as though Bevus were ripping away a strip of hide, but when the king looked over his shoulder, he saw that was not the case. His brother’s incorporeal finger had penetrated his flesh without tearing it, causing a painful welt that seemed to be the sole injury caused by the digit’s passage.
“And do you know what the best part is? I can keep doing this forever, and you’ll never die!”
Tithian screamed and flailed at his brother’s face. His hands sank right through Bevus’s chin. As spirits, it seemed his captors could not be harmed bodily. But, as the king knew better than anyone, the worst pain was seldom physical-and after the trouble they had caused him by bringing him into the Gray, he had every intention of making them suffer now more than they had in life.