“Go,” Cydrich said.
Chapter Fourteen
In his fitful dream, an old man had come to him. A new friend. He had two friends now. Somehow he wanted to tell his new friend things he never dreamed he would share. Secrets. Mother and Father would sure be mad.
His new friend listened and talked with him for a while, promised to make the hurt go away, then patted him on the hand and said he needed to leave for a moment to get rid of Evin.
Gareth tried to get up, tried to stop him, tried to tell him that Evin was their friend too, but the old man told him to sleep and the world snuffed out.
He woke in a different place, suffering more than ever from his burns. He didn’t have any strength. The effort to lift his chest off the floor so that he could look around exhausted him.
The new place was a cellar, much like the one at home but finished in smooth stone and with no rope or other way to climb out. He lay on the floor near a small, barred drain, and he despaired. A trickle of blood and pus oozed from the burned place on his shoulder.
He would probably die here alone and never be found. What else did he deserve? After heaping disaster upon Evin, he could not even be there to do his part. He had promised to be a protector! Suffused with torment from his wounds and fear of what might have happened to Evin, he lay unable to move, his eyes too heavy to stay open.
Consciousness faded in and out like a guttering flame. He was dimly aware of waking again, this time on a bed, still lying on his stomach. Hands manipulated his flesh and probed his wounds, making the pain rise to a maddening torment, then fade to a dull ache.
He heard voices speak of fire and fever and filth in the blood.
He drifted, lost in a red mist that his eyes could not penetrate, until they came to him: The girl in her cage, surrounded by straw men on straw horses who drew bows and shot her again and again while Evin screamed,
She needed you; you were supposed to help
! But the bear held Gareth down, crushing him, dipping her head to tear off putrefying flesh, feeding it to her broken cub. Father drew up behind Evin, his knife rising, as Mother crouched close enough to whisper,
There’s one place they’ll never find him
. He tried to say he was sorry, but the blood welled in his throat and he was drowning again, coughing, spitting.
Gareth woke strangling on his own drool. His wet cheek pressed into the soft bed.
When his breathing settled, he found he didn’t hurt anymore.
Warm sunlight fell on his naked back. He wiggled his toes, rubbing them against the sheet to feel them, and he moved an arm to test it too. He was whole. He had been released. He closed his eyes and took his first restful sleep in many days.
When he woke again, it was night. He found himself in the same bed, lying on his back this time, able to look around. He was in another round, stone room, much larger than the first. It was ringed with wooden tables holding papers and scrolls, tools and pots, and many other things he didn’t recognize. High above, wide windows gave out onto the starry sky.
At one side of the room, a large, wooden door opened and the old man entered.
“Ah, you’re awake.” The man clapped his gloved hands once, soundlessly. “You gave us a lot of trouble, you know! A lot of trouble indeed.”
“Where’s Evin?”
The man stepped closer and put his hand on Gareth’s shoulder. “Can you sit up?”
Gareth slowly sat up and moved his feet off the bed.
“Good. Good. Excellent.” The old man lifted and lowered Gareth’s arm, the one that had been burned, and encouraged Gareth to stretch. “Very good. You are such a fine specimen. It is lucky for both of us that my healer and I were able to save you, you know.”
“The fire put something in my blood, didn’t it?” Gareth was still tired, and his head spun.
“How did you know? Ah, you heard us talking. Yes, you were very sick because of the burns.” The man finished examining Gareth and moved away. “I think you’re almost strong enough for us to begin our work. Maybe one more day.”
“Begin what? No, I don’t care.” He struggled to get up on unsteady legs. “Where is Evin? What have you done with him?”
The man stepped back and held gloved hands up to show them to Gareth. They erupted in flame. Tongues of fire licked out toward Gareth, and he shrank from them.
“Good, good. You remember how it feels, don’t you, boy?” The man’s smiling eyes sparkled with mirth and reflections of the flame. “Don’t want to burn, do you? You’ll do as I say or you’ll die.”
Gareth pushed down the tired, unsteady feelings and stood tall.
Not a baby no more
. “No,” he said quietly. “I won’t do nothing you say till I know Evin’s all right. Take me to him. If you killed him, kill me too, because I won’t do
nothing
for you.”
The old man’s face clouded with anger for an instant, but the smile returned to his lips, and if anything, he seemed pleased. He moved farther out of reach. “Oh, you’re a brave one! But your little friend isn’t dead. I know just where
he
is.”
“Where?”
“And if you force me to kill you, I’ll go burn him too.”
“No!”
“Oh yes. I’ll burn him piece by piece. I’ll start with his feet. I’ll make it last for weeks, and each day when I come to him, I’ll tell him who is the cause of his suffering. ‘Gareth chose this for you,’ I’ll say, and he’ll curse your name in a thousand screams before I burn out his tongue.”
The words made Gareth’s skin crawl and burn in a way that had nothing to do with the fire.
He had put Evin in danger.
His fingers grew sharp and pricked at him as he clenched his fists. He wanted to leap at the old man, kill him just like the bear. But if Gareth died in the fire first…if the man did go to Evin… Gareth’s insides turned to cold, dead stone. He didn’t dare try to hurt the man or even sacrifice himself to protect Evin. Worthless and lost, Gareth couldn’t do anything. “Who are you? What do you want?”
“That’s better.” The flames vanished, and the man pointed at the bed. Gareth sat on the edge. “Let’s be civil. My name is Cydrich. You’ve seen enough to know I’m a sorceler. I’m the queen’s demon hunter.”
Gareth hung his head. He didn’t understand
sorceler
, but his parents had warned him often enough about demon hunters. And yet he’d disobeyed them, come out of hiding, and brought on the very fate they gave up so much to prevent. Worse, he’d dragged Evin into it too.
Cydrich sighed. “Oh, well, it does impress most people. But I imagine those aren’t things Rhyd and Magareta ever taught you about.”
What
? “How do you know my parents?”
Cydrich walked to a high-backed chair and sat. He placed a booted foot on his knee and crossed his hands over his lap. “Oh they weren’t your parents, boy. They were my servants. I gave you to them to raise.” He waited then, watching as Gareth tried to understand.
Gareth looked away, staring at nothing.
Servants?
No
. If that was true, nothing was real. All this time.
As long as he could remember, he had wanted to do something, somehow, to make up to his parents for being cursed. To make their fear and disgust go way. To make their lives easier. To see kindness in their eyes when they looked at him.
He hadn’t known the word for it before Evin, but he had wanted to earn their love.
And now… What if the old man was telling the truth? That it was all a lie, everything, from the start? His whole life?
He didn’t want to accept it. He wanted Cydrich to be lying, but he
knew
. He knew. And so he murmured the words that damned his parents: “They told me there was someone else. You’re the important visitor. They were going to g-give me back.”
Cydrich nodded. “I was coming to collect you, Gareth. I created you, and it is time for you to serve your purpose.”
Gareth looked to Cydrich, to plead for an answer, a reason. Everything he knew was a lie, but why? What was it for?
Why had they done this to him?
The sorceler said, “But first I’m afraid you must suffer.”
Chapter Fifteen
“Captain!”
Simone Uliette turned away from her worktable, where she had been wasting her time looking over patent reports—forms the queen’s subjects used to request permission to sell sorceled devices. Functionaries had already been over the forms once to mark out ones that might be too powerful. Her job was to look over them to eliminate any which might pose a threat to the security of Parige or the castle. Eventually Queen Denua would receive the list to reject any which, in her estimation, could possibly bring about some long-term threat to her rule.
Boring, daily, can’t-keep-your-eyes-from-crossing scut work. She was thankful for an interruption. As long as it wasn’t serious.
“What is it, Abel?”
“Well…it’s Cydrich.”
Shit
. That didn’t explain anything, but unfortunately it probably explained everything.
“Can you tell me or do you have to show me?”
“I’ll try to tell. We have a youth downstairs. Cydrich sent him here with news for the queen. Bastard’s half-dead because Cydrich
compelled
him and didn’t tell him he could stop to rest—”
“Shit!”
“So here he is, and he can’t talk to anyone but the queen. He can’t stand, but he won’t stop crawling. We keep dragging him back, but…” Abel shrugged helplessly.
She saw the problem. If they didn’t take him to the queen, he’d die under compulsion. But letting him go to the queen under sorcelrous compulsion would be a serious security risk. They could kill him and be done with it, but either way, nobody but Denua would dare frustrate a sorceler like that. Especially the demon hunter.
Simone stood. “Let me see him.”
* * *
When they arrived at the palace’s first-floor antechamber, Simone found the problem had already been solved—badly. Queen Denua was already there. A gaunt youth in filthy clothing lay unmoving at her feet.
Simone admonished her queen. “Your Majesty. I see you are still alive.”
“Indeed. The compulsion charm on this man was nothing. You see?” A silver charm on a crude leather strap dangled from Denua’s hands.
Denua wore her own jewelry, ensorceled to provide a shield that would surely protect her from one of Cydrich’s devices. But even so, touching the charm was a risk that made Simone angry. Who would the queen blame if, after behaving so cavalierly, her shield wasn’t enough to protect her from a weapon?
“The mark is Cydrich’s. Turn him over,” Denua said.
Guards complied. When they rolled his body, a filthy arm slapped unchecked against the white marble floor.
“Oh,” Denua said.
Oh, how sad
! Simone could see that beneath the dirt and privation, he was lovely. He bore a striking resemblance to a man she once loved, a soldier who died beside her while fighting an ogre invasion in the North.
Sorcelers were thoughtlessly cruel. Cydrich had intended him to get here alive but obviously had forgotten to allow him to stop anywhere for rest or food on the way.
That pig.
The queen said, “Bring him. We will clean him and tend to his health.”
He isn’t dead
? “Your Majesty! You’ve already risked your person by touching him and the charm. Please let us send him to an infirmary in the city. You shouldn’t have contact with him.”
Denua’s eyebrows knitted. “But I would hear Cydrich’s message. The messenger fainted as I entered the room.”
“There may be no further information. This might be a trick from some other sorceler.”
“I have my shield. I will hear the message. That is all, Captain.”
Chapter Sixteen
Cydrich hung Gareth in his workroom like a naked work of art. Manacles at hands, biceps, and feet held Gareth’s limbs outstretched, securing him to the collection table, a vertically inclined disk of wood with a system of channels to direct the flow of blood.
Cydrich slipped on his viewing mask. He raised a hand before his face, and the mask reacted. Its intricate system of lenses on thin metal arms moved until the proper set slipped into place and Cydrich’s eyes could focus on the tiny courses of spark—life energy—that traced his hand and flowed through his veins. He looked at Gareth, and the lenses moved again. Lines of spark blurred together, shrouding Gareth’s body in a glow of power. A great reservoir of it.
Today’s work would be long and rather tedious, but very delicate and intricate. Cydrich’s hands were steady and sure despite his age, but human fingers were too clumsy to work on the scale necessary to gather much spark at one time. In order to capture every miniscule trace, Cydrich would use a harvester. The device, an ensorceled cabinet with a thicket of delicate tool arms, had been developed long ago in order to capture spark quickly, before the sources died.
He found it interesting to note that Gareth could sweat and breathe rapidly as he hung strapped to the collection table, seeing the implements glinting at the tips of the harvester’s tool arms. He wasn’t crying or begging like most, but his physical fear reactions were otherwise perfectly human.
Cydrich slipped his hands into the gauntlets made of interleaved, spindly metal rods that protruded from the side of the harvester. He moved his fingers, and the jointed arms sprang to life, waving and whirling, making metallic tapping sounds. Gareth screamed as the instruments darted in, dipping into his flesh like toes in soft mud, and spread him open for others to tear and probe and pull.
Blood spray didn’t stick to Cydrich’s mask, leaving him free to lean in close to the wounds. The viewing mask’s lenses slid and rotated into place one after the next as he studied the currents of spark flowing along nerves and exposed blood vessels.
Blood, crackling with its own spark, collected in channels cut into the wooden disk. A long mirror in a thick frame lay beneath, and the blood fell there to gather in a pool, covering the mirror glass, to complete its ensorcelment and attune it.
When he was exhausted from screaming, Gareth whimpered and groaned. Cydrich worked his darting and pulling instruments, urging greater ecstasies of torment and coaxing spark to flow into the other receptacle, a lozenge of amethyst that began to glow with purple light as power filtered in. Working the chittering metal arms quickly, he used some instruments to stretch and separate tissues into long strands, then razored along them with other tools to chase and gather the filaments of power. After harvesting what he could from each part of the body, he laid the tissues back into place, allowing each wound to close and heal as he moved on to the next.