Suchara's eyes burned like the flames of Hell. Her face was an ever-changing landscape of emotion.
Every expression was evil.
Gathrid was the focus. He had shared soul with Tureck Aarant. Together they had conspired to deny her her will. The ties were under strain. Yet, he suspected, he and she could never sever them entirely. Nor could Nieroda separate herself from Bachesta.
The effort, ultimately, underlay all the frenzy and irrationality of her earthly activities. Not lust for power. Not love of destruction. Not even hunger for death. Just a simple desire for freedom. She was engaged in a secret war, the battles of which she sometimes lost and sometimes won.
Suchara's will beat upon him like storm breakers upon a rocky headland, insisting that he slaughter the woman before him.
The harder Suchara pushed, the more stubbornly defiant Gathrid became.
He stared into the eyes of Wistma-Nevenka. She had left the initiative in his hands. She would follow his lead. She would resume fighting if he yielded to Suchara.
Impulse.
He pulled her toward him, kissed her ancient lips.
Suchara and Bachesta gave vent to furies of deific magnitude.
Nieroda glanced at her mistress. Her eyes were merry. She seized Gathrid and kissed him back. She took his hand, faced the demigod walls.
This weak, scarcely genuine gesture of love between foes was arsenic to those connoisseurs of hatred and evil. Love was the one human attribute they could neither comprehend, nor control, nor often bend to their advantage. They loathed and feared it.
In that context, Gathrid reflected, their Games almost made sense. Human love could take ten thousand forms. These devils shattered every sort when allowed to run their course. In their grinding mills the Chosen of the Great Old Ones destroyed what men loved, leaving them only things to hate.
How much hating had he done himself, as the Instrument of Suchara? Too much. Far too much.
And Nieroda? She was, he suspected, herself the thing she hated most.
He reached down inside for memories of the Mindak. Ahlert had not been directly possessed by hatred. His demon had been a warped, obsessive love that had generated hatred wherever it touched.
Anyeck had been possessed of a towering hatred for things-as-they-are.
And Rogala? What of Theis? The dwarf remained a mystery. The puzzle box of eternity. Gathrid now doubted the dwarf was human. Since Ansorge he had suspected that Theis might be the last of the Night People.
He doubted that Rogala would ever be solved.
He whispered, "I think we've found a way to fight back." He laughed. The sound caught in his throat. He remained unsure. A kiss seemed so little in the face of cruel, implacable powers like these.
"What we've found is damnation," Nieroda replied. "Willingly or unwillingly, we're in their web.
They won't let us escape. I've been trying for ages." She despaired, but kept holding his hand. He drew a strange, almost motherly support from her.
"Once more," he whispered. "For their apoplexy."
She did not resist. Strange, he thought as he drew away. Nevenka Nieroda was as old as the hinges of time, yet was as unskilled as he.
As the thunders tramped and darkness marched like iron legions unleashed, he remembered Loida Huthsing. Sometimes it was not hard to hate.
Chapter Nineteen
Endgame Gathrid reassumed physical reality. The Great Old Ones had spit him out like a sour plum. He found himself back in the remains of the Imperial Palace. The blood of Kar-kainen surrounded his soles.
Daubendiek hung loosely in his right hand. Gerdes Mulenex sagged against his left arm. He staggered, went down.
Night had engulfed smoke-shrouded Sartain. It had brought no darkness, no relief for the eye. The great fires burned on.
He did not see a sign of Nieroda. She had not returned. Had he erred? Would she rise somewhere else now, and be lashed into another frenzy of destruction? He hoped not. He hoped she had seen the glimmer of hope, too.
But the Game was rigged. Of course. Even in defeat, the Great Old Ones had their way.
He waited an hour, till he was certain Nieroda would not return to the Mulenex clay. Satisfied, he finally strode from the wreckage of the great hall. The lone weapon he took was the blade he had obtained from Nieroda. He believed it free of any taint of control. The others, Sword and Shield, he left for whomever wanted them.
He did wish there were a way of disposing of them permanently. That was impossible. Even were they dumped into the ocean's deeps, the Great Old Ones would find ways to bring them back to willing hands.
He hefted the Nieroda blade. It was an almost-Daubendiek. It might be of use to the Lady Mead. Or to the Contessa in her struggle to salvage the corpse of An-derle.
Could he bring the two women together? To scavenge a new, happier reality from the ruins of the old?
It seemed a goal worthy of his new life and blade. Perhaps, when faced by a champion as feared and deadly as he, the greedy, power-hungry Mulenexes could be cowed into building a world immune to such as Suchara.
Gathrid did not begin wondering about Theis Rogala till almost two months had passed. He was in Guder-muth, bound for Ventimiglia. Kacalief was not far away. He planned to stop and see what the Mindak had done for Loida and his sister. Curiosity began plaguing him when he passed the place where he and the dwarf had emerged from the caverns.
He strode to the nearest hilltop, slowly surveyed the naked landscape. He saw nothing. But the very fact that the dwarf had not entered his mind for so long seemed suggestive.
Was Suchara toying with him still? Was her agent stalking him with a hungry blade? Had he thought of the dwarf only because her attention had lapsed momentarily?
He finally shrugged, walked on. It did not matter. If the encounter was to come, it would come. He would not evade it. He would be prepared.
He went over the details with Ahlert, Count Cuneo and other wise and captive souls. A Theis so brazen as to bring the traditional dagger would be one surprised and short-lived dwarf.
Only a handful of the strongest minds had survived the passage through the realm of the Great Old Ones. He missed the others. His interior world had been his refuge from loneliness. As they had been for Tureck Aarant so long ago.
Funny. The best friend he had ever had was a man who had been dead a thousand years. A man who had died twice. He missed Tureck dearly.
The missing souls had left him much of their accumulated experience. He had learned to draw upon it as though it were his own. He had the knowledge to become an Ahlert or Eldracher had he the wish.
He felt as old as the time-worn hills of the Savard.
His birthday was approaching. He had overlooked his seventeenth in the chaos of the previous autumn. His eighteenth now approached more swiftly than seemed possible.
He had grown physically as well as mentally. He had confidence in himself. Reassurances would be pleasant, but he no longer needed outside support or direction. He could be his own creature and survive. In a few years he might fit the popular image of a hero.
He had been an introvert all his life. He remained one, but the impact of his adventures had shattered his fear of the world. He felt better about Gathrid of Kacalief. His shift in feelings about himself he saw clearly cast on the inside landscape of himself.
He had become a man.
His changes in attitude toward externals were more elusive and less satisfying. Mainly, he cared less.
The world's agonies no longer pained him. He had little sympathy for its self-torment. It had become an irritation.
Yet his idealism had not vanished. He just seemed unable to apply it in any direct, specific fashion.
Grass and brambles infested Kacalief's remains. Bones still lay heaped in monumental piles round the castle hill.
Rusty weapons and armor could be found everywhere in the weedy fields.
A handful of stubborn, enterprising peasants had begun reclaiming the land. It was blood-enriched earth where plows more often turned on broken swords than stones. The peasants were collecting the iron in hopes of someday selling it.