House War - The Hidden City Part 63

"I left Brockhelm at his command in my sixteenth year; I had turned fifteen two weeks before. I did not, at that time, understand why I was being taken from home; I understood only that I had no choice. The Winter makes us harsh," she added softly, "a harsh people for a bitter clime. My mother and father were silent; I was silent. My brother, younger, was only barely silent, but he understood that any word, any action, on his part would mean the loss-in one day-to my parents of both their children, and he said nothing. We accepted the inevitable."

Rath did not speak. He had no words to offer this woman. No words of comfort, no words of sympathy, no words of admiration. By her simple statement, her flat, uninflected voice denied him even the effort of finding them.

"Were there no Priests in your villages?" he asked at last, for the silence demanded something.

No. We had perhaps three before the Ice Mage came, but none of them G.o.d-born. Had he found the G.o.d-born among the villagers, I believe he would have fled farther North; what the G.o.d-born see, the G.o.ds know, and what the G.o.ds know, the Kings, inevitably, will come to know. He was no fool. He desired power, but he was patient and cautious.

"Cautious in almost all things."

"But not the demons."

"Not the demons, no," she said softly. "Their first love is terror, primal terror; their second love is pain. For those creatures who look as if they stepped out of the rhythm of childhood story, the gratification of their desire is a simple-but b.l.o.o.d.y and messy-affair. But those who are more human in seeming are not without subtlety, and even in captivity, they are powerful."

"Is it not for their power they are summoned?"

"Ah, I forget myself. The past always makes an uncertain country of the present. Yes, it is for their strength or power that they are summoned, but even leashed, they can be compelling, and if they cannot satisfy their desire for fear or pain quickly, they will find another path to it; they think of it as a type of ripening. You are not talent-born," she added softly, "but with both words and weapons forged by men who were, likewise, born without such power, you are dangerous."

He nodded.

"Understand, then, that these creatures can see the darkness of even so slight an evil as thought almost before we can think it."

"They can hear your thoughts?"

"Nothing so concrete. They sense the darker thoughts the way sailors sense the storm. But sailors avoid the storm; the demons thrive on it. If they can find the seed, they will grow it; if the seed does not exist, they will plant it. And they will do so with subtlety, where subtlety is required.

"Where it is not, they will do so with glee and malice." She could not help herself; she rose. Her hand drifted away from the tabletop, and a web of light came with it, invisible, she knew, to Rath's eye.

"Understand that I was young," she said softly, "and away from home for the first time. Understand that I knew, from the moment the tower became my home, that I was never to return. I was not expected to be servant to the Ice Mage; he had those in abundance, although servant is too kind a word."

"They were demons?"

"He was not a fool. Where people would do, he used them. In the early years," she added softly. "In later years, he grew arrogant, certain of himself and his control, and in those years, he dismissed-often fatally-his household.

"To contain one demon is difficult. And the one that he had never released-the one who could sense talent, and find it-was a danger to him. He was, as demons are, arrogant; he was proud of bearing. But he was also almost human in seeming. He wore the clothing of the North as if he was born to it; he spoke the tongue. Where the lesser kin-for they are called, among other things, the kin-seemed almost b.e.s.t.i.a.l in their savagery, he appeared to consider such wildness beneath him.

"And he served for years. Served faithfully, as if unaware, in the end, of the leash. The Ice Mage was no fool," she added again, "but no man can be cautious and completely in control for his entire life."

"It does not seem-from my vantage-that he ever tried."

She laughed; it was a hollow sound, and spoke of age and pain. "He prided himself on his control."

Ararath offered no more.

"He summoned demons often. Testing himself against them, testing his hold over their names, became a matter of bitter pride, and it carried with it the edge of possible failure; I think he thrived on that possibility, while at the same time denying it."

"I remember the first day I saw him summon a demon. He spent hours tracing the necessary containments, and I was forbidden to move from the stool upon which he had placed me. He offered me to the demon," she added, "and I was afraid, then.

"But it was the fear he wanted. He understood that fear was their wine, and that some creatures were less immune to its effect than others."

"I was not the only witness," she said quietly. "The demon who had found me was present."

"Had he a name?"

Sigurne nodded. "They all have names," she said quietly. "But the names they give are not the names by which they are summoned; I do not think it possible to speak those names in any tongue save their own, and none without power can even attempt it."

"He told you this."

She was surprised. She knew that Ararath referred to the demon, and not to the Ice Mage.

"Yes. He told me."

"And much else."

Her eyes narrowed. "You are perceptive, Ararath. Yes. He told me much. It was a way of gaining my confidence; of gaining, perhaps, my trust-for we were both birds in a cage, and we both obeyed the same master, if for different reasons. I told you: I was young, and given to the thoughts of the young and the isolated. I lived in fear, those early years, and he-trapped, to my mind at the time-far more intimately and more invasively than even I-showed none. Where the Ice Mage was quick to anger-and to kill-the demon was not. And when the demon was sent to kill, when I was sent to witness, he killed cleanly.

"It must have taken a great effort of will on his part, those simple, clean deaths," she added bitterly. "But in all things, where he had choice-and where we were thrown together-he seemed to me somehow better than the Ice Mage. I did not fear him, then, although I had begun my lessons, and the Ice Mage was very clear on the nature of demons." She paused for a moment, remembering. To this place, unlike so many others, she seldom returned; it gave her nothing. Nothing, in the end, but pain.

"I was eventually sent to the villages when the Ice Mage was otherwise occupied. I think it pleased him; I felt I was on parade, and I knew I was hated. If I had dreamed- against all certainty-of returning to my family, these visits on his behalf, as his emissary, were death to even dreams.

"But he did not trust the villagers; he therefore sent the demon who found me as my guard. With us went a dozen men, armed and armored as is our custom, but these men were men I disdained. They served willingly, and even with pride; they were warriors, and they little cared which war they fought, as long as they could fight. But the demon and I-we were different. We had no choice."

Oh, the bitterness of the words, the lie of them. The worst lies one told were always the ones that one told oneself. Time and again she was reminded of this.

But the voice that reminded her was his voice, his velvet voice, the depths of it soothing and warm in a land where ice and stone ruled the heart.

"He told me of the h.e.l.ls," she added quietly, "where the G.o.d we do not name rules. He spoke of the charnel winds, the great abyss, the demesnes ruled by the Dukes-his word-who served their G.o.d. He told me some of their history, much of it bitter, and some of their pride; the beauty of fire, red sky, and flight. And he spoke of the fallen."

"Fallen?"

"I think of them that way. The fallen. The lost. The souls of the d.a.m.ned."

Rath was silent for a moment. It was a long moment, as silences went, and he began-and discarded-several words. He did not pride himself on his great empathy, and his understanding of human nature had never led him to value people overmuch. But something in the voice of Sigurne Mellifas led in different directions than those he had previously willingly followed, and in the face of this particular type of unknown, he felt unequal.

Yet he was not so young that he could, with grace, abandon conversation, and after another long moment, aware of her too-bright gaze, he said, "My understanding of the nature of souls is almost entirely based in my understanding of religion."

A pale brow rose. "And that would be?"

"Very little," he replied, without shame. "But d.a.m.ned is not a word that I have heard used with any frequency."

"What have you heard?"

He shrugged. "Mandaros rules the Halls of the Dead."

"And he sits in judgment?"

"His children are called the judgment-born, so it stands to reason that he is, indeed, the judge. But it has never been entirely clear to me of what. It is said that there are souls that wait in his halls for centuries, and souls that abide no more than a handful of hours; it is said that none can, in the end, remain there, but that they also choose the time of their judgment; he does not force it upon them."

She nodded quietly. "All of this is true."

"Then perhaps I am not so ignorant as I feared."

Her smile was thin, but not cold; it was, however, slight. "I doubt that you are often considered ignorant."

He shrugged. "I was considered ignorant often enough in my youth, the sense of such opinion remains."

"And what, then, in your appalling ignorance, would you claim happens to the souls who wait for judgment?"

He paused. "They return," he said at last.

"Here?"

"I am not aware there are many other places to go. They are judged, and when found wanting, they return. They remember nothing," he added, "of their previous lives."

"Some few remember," she said, correcting him as if she were a schoolmistress, and not a mage. "But in general, your summation is not wrong."

"I have often wondered how any can be found unwanting."

"I, too." Her smile was tired now. "But the G.o.ds have said that there are those whom Mandaros considers cannot learn more, and they are let loose. To where, the G.o.ds either will not, or-in my opinion more likely-cannot, say. They are freed from the circle of the world, and if the G.o.ds no longer walk upon its face, they are of it, and tied to its fate."

"And the demons?" he asked quietly.

"Tied as well, in a different way. And if Mandaros can judge one soul incapable of learning, he can judge another incapable in a different fas.h.i.+on. They are not called d.a.m.ned," she added bitterly, "but rather, those who have chosen. As if, in living each life in ignorance of any others, they can make choices."

"We all make choices," Rath said quietly.

"We make the choices we are given in the context of our lives," she replied, "and our lives, until we return to the Halls, are the only lives we know."

He said nothing. In truth, the matter had concerned him little for the whole of his life until this moment.

"But those who have chosen walk the long road to the h.e.l.ls, there to be kept by the demons and their Lord until the world ends." She looked down at her hands; they lay, now, palms down in her lap. "I do not hate the kin," she added quietly. "Oh, don't look like that. I hate what they do. At one time, I hated them with a ferocity that you cannot imagine I could now feel, and perhaps it is true-for I do not now feel it. I understand that they are what they were made to be; that they love pain and torment because it is to cause pain and torment, in the end, that they exist now. Such desire was probably considered a mercy to their kind when they made their own choice so long ago; what merciful G.o.ds would lay upon any creatures with empathy or pity such a terrible task?

"But having received the desire, they are what they are. And they cannot be easily turned aside. Indeed, if their Lord is aware, they cannot turn aside at all." She fell silent at once. "I say too much," she told him. It was not comforting.

"The Kialli lord told me much. Ah, I forget myself. Kialli is what they call themselves; in their tongue, it means memory. But more than memory. Not all of the kin are Kialli; there are some who are sunk into near b.e.s.t.i.a.lity, and they will not rise from it by any force known to us. There is, truly, a misery in memory-a pain and a viscerality-that make memory a great cruelty, but they cling to it, define themselves by it.

"The demon summoned by the Ice Mage, the demon who spent so much time in conversation with me, was Kialli . He remembered."

"What is there to remember?"

"They did not always serve the Lord of the h.e.l.ls, although they always-as far as I can discern-served their Lord."

"Sigurne-"

"I speak in riddles?" She lifted a hand. "Things are not, now, what they were when the G.o.ds were young. And the G.o.ds were young, and proud. We are-in the eyes of the Kialli-a race that has sunk into dotage, as mortals must. We do not retain the memory of our golden age, our age of power-for it was said that in our youth, we had powers to rival the G.o.ds themselves.

"And I feel that this must be true, although it is hard now to separate the lies from the facts; if we had not known that power, we would surely have perished entirely during the wars that the G.o.ds made while they walked the face of our world."

Rath said nothing; the enormity of what Sigurne had just imparted was slow to settle, and if he professed to ignorance, it was a thin veneer; he disliked to speak from a position of profound lack of knowledge. "What has this to do with my question?"

"Everything," she replied quietly. "For the G.o.ds were persuaded, in time, to leave the world; to separate themselves in almost all ways from its doings. It was not a simple undertaking," she added softly. "And in some ways, it could never be complete; old magic and wild still walk the world, on paths we live in ignorance of.

"For although we are mortal, and fade quickly in the eyes of all others who were born to this place, there is some part of us that is not. It does not wither, and it does not die; it returns, instead, to the Halls of Mandaros. They can see it," she added softly, "the Kialli. I think all immortals can. And what they see in us, dark or bright, is some measure of the path we are tracing in our ignorance, either toward our final freedom or our final imprisonment."

The quality of Rath's silence changed sharply, as if it were a tangible thing. When it broke, the edges were apparent. "You are saying that all demons can see this?"

"I am, indeed, saying that."

"And this girl-the one of whom I spoke-the one they kept-"

"She must be dark indeed," Sigurne replied quietly. "And close, at last, to her final 'choice.' I deem it too great a risk otherwise."

"A risk?"

"What kind of people can be told of such things-of the darkness of their selves-without blanching? What hopelessness, anger, or despair, must such a person feel, when the truth is made known? We all fear to be less than we desire ourselves to be," she added softly, "and we perceive in ourselves wounds taken, and not as clearly the wounds we give. We lie, and in lying, we trap ourselves.

"But there are those who have come so close to that final edge, they might revel in it. Or they might accept it as a fate they cannot escape. And when they do, such people are profoundly dangerous. They will serve to cause what the kin desire: pain and destruction." She lifted a hand. "I have thought long on this, Ararath; it is both my responsibility and, I admit, my obsession.

"When the G.o.ds chose to leave this world, they bound themselves in such a way as to make return nigh impossible. But they did it for a reason, for they were not yet ready to give over their desire for dominion, their need to wage war against each other.

"We became the most subtle of the battlegrounds over which they might war. We, each of us, drifting one way or the other; toward the h.e.l.ls, where the Lord of the h.e.l.ls waits, or beyond them.

"What do the demons gain? What do they truly gain? Only this: our choice. The blackness. They are cunning and immortal; time is not their concern. It is my belief that they would know the souls they have seen, regardless of how many centuries-and lives-have pa.s.sed.

"And to win their war, they need to be able to persuade us, to nudge us, with each life, toward their open arms."

She lifted the hands that had lain folded in her lap, and set them against the hard rests of her chair. "The danger in summoning is that, and almost solely that: that while they are here, they darken the world they can touch, laying the seeds for a misstep. Could the Lord of the h.e.l.ls do so, I believe he would attempt to rule the world again, so that he might make it a place where only one choice, in the long and bitter end, is possible. It could take a hundred lifetimes," she added softly, "or a thousand; time is not their concern."

She rose, then. "None of the kin are modest. None of the kin would choose to be powerless. But I believe their names lie fallow in the pages of forbidden texts, in old works that have remained beyond the reach of the Magi of the Empire. I believe that some even ceded the names-the full power of the names-to those who might use them. Because if they used them enough, there would be the hope of freedom here. Old names," she added. "And bitter. I have spent my adult life destroying the knowledge of those names, and in some cases, destroying those who held that knowledge. You will never have it," she added, "for you were blessed-or cursed, as you sometimes feel-with a lack of talent that could lead you to them."

"As you were not," he said, without rancor or edge.

"As I was not," she replied, the words serene. "But Ararath, having answered your question, I must now demand answers in return.

"Why did you come, seeking this knowledge? To what use will you put it, if you even considered the use to which it might be put before you came?"

Rath was silent for a moment. Her expression, as he studied it, was now calm; she seemed to be the friendly, wise woman to whom one might come for counsel or solace. Everything about her bearing seemed to imply that she had seen so much the ability to judge others was beyond her, or possibly beneath her.

He wanted to believe it. And, being Rath, he didn't. "Understand," he told her, as he leaned back against hard wood, listening to the wind's howl as if it were harmony to his thoughts, "that I didn't know what you would tell me."

She nodded. "That is not the question I asked, Ararath. You are not a fool. You understood, in the Placid Sea, how important this issue is to me. Now you understand, as well, that it has informed the whole of my life, and that life has been long. Not," she added softly, "thankless, and not without joy. But long. Why did you come?"

He closed his eyes. "I have, in my care, a girl. She is not yet adult; she is not quite child. She is perched on a boundary she can't even see."

"She is not yours."

"She is not my child, no; I have none, nor am I likely to." He lifted a hand to forestall the words he felt must come.

She nodded, allowing him this much.