“I lost count after the first decade,” Cainer admitted.
“You don’t look a day over forty,” Kaibyn commented.
“Nor will I,” the Reaper said softly. “Such was the last Geas that damned bitch threw at me.”
“You want to look older?” the demon asked in a shocked tone.
“I want to
be
older,” Cainer answered. “I want to be allowed to wither and die as the gods intended it.” A muscle jumped in his cheek. “I want to cease to exist.”
“But she won’t allow it,” Evann-Sin said.
“No, she won’t allow it. Along with all the other wicked things she has done to me over the years, I think keeping me alive is the worst.”
“I can’t imagine anything being so bad you want your life to end,” Kaibyn commented. “I loathed every moment I was interred in the Abyss, but I never wanted to die. Now—for all intents and purposes—I am as dead as the rock upon which my ass is resting. Would it be the same for you, Reaper? Would you come back as I did?”
“I can’t die unless someone lops off my head or burns me to a crisp, and I can’t see that happening.”
Kaibyn turned to Evann-Sin. “Could you take his head, warrior?”
“He could try,” the Reaper answered, “but Morrigunia would prevent it.”
“It must be hell for you here,” Evann-Sin said.
Cainer smiled grimly. “It has its moments, but those moments are few and far between, thank the gods.” He shrugged. “For the most part, I am reasonably content. I exercise, I paint, I take very long walks.”
“Paint?” Kaibyn echoed.
“I’ll show you sometime, demon,” the Reaper promised.
“Morrigunia doesn’t visit that often I take it,” Evann-Sin said.
“Only when she wants to taunt me by telling me she’s sending another potential candidate for Reaperhood,” Cainer responded.
“How could you accept…?” Evann-Sin held his hands up. “You know—what you are?”
“What other choice did I have?” came the query. “The first time I Transitioned, I was horrified. It hurts, aye, but it is the knowing that this is going to continue, will happen every three months or so, that is the true dreadfulness of it. You can’t die, you can’t escape. You can simply exist.”
“But the tenerse,” Evann-Sin suggested. “That has to be revolting all its own, knowing you have become addicted to it.”
“Aye, but without it, the situation is a thousand times worse.”
“Something tells me you found that out firsthand,” Kaibyn remarked.
The Reaper’s handsome face turned hard. “Aye, and believe me when I tell you that is something I never care to experience ever again.”
“What happened?” the warrior inquired. His forehead was creased with worry lines.
“It was the last time Morrigunia tried to seduce me,” Cainer said. “She gave me a choice—mate with her or suffer the consequences.” He snorted. “I told her I’d rather mate with a half-dead civet cat rather than take her loathsome body to mine.”
“Ouch,” Kaibyn chuckled.
“She wasn’t pleased with my smart-ass comment,” the Reaper stated. “So to punish me, to show me who was in charge here, she took away all the animals so there would be no food. But even worse, by taking the food out of my reach, she also denied me the Sustenance. I had been very careful to take only a little bit each day from a variety of creatures for I feared killing them and having to do without.”
“Already you were in need of blood,” Kaibyn said.
Cainer nodded. “But as yet, I had not been introduced to the tenerse. I went mad within a week, and by the second week was tearing at my own flesh, biting into my arm to drink the blood. She saw what I was doing and brought her Sisters to help her hold me down.” He smiled slightly. “They are strong women, let me tell you, because I was a raving lunatic by then, and not many men could have restrained me. While her Sisters held me down, she poured the tenerse down my throat. Almost instantly, the madness left in a soft haze of numbness.”
“She had to know what the tenerse would do to you,” Evann-Sin said.
A muscle bunched in the Reaper’s lean jaw. “Oh she knew, all right. She fed me that shit for a week until I was good and hooked.”
“No Sustenance?” Kaibyn asked.
“Hers,” Cainer replied. “One teaspoon of that potent brew lasted an entire day, but that could not go on forever. She grew tired of taking care of me and brought the animals back. One last time she tried to make me mate with her and I told her I’d rather eat dirt. I didn’t see her again for almost six months.”
“What of the tenerse?”
“She left me plenty and gave me the recipe to make more,” the Reaper said, pointing inland. “There is wheat growing over there. I plant it and harvest it myself. It is from a type of mold on the wheat that I make the tenerse.”
Kaibyn wrinkled his nose. “What does it taste like—this mold?”
“Bitter,” was the reply. “But you get use to it. Without it, I don’t think I could sleep and the craving for Sustenance is a hundred times worse.”
“I don’t know why I am being forced to do this,” the warrior lamented. “Why can’t I just go after Tamara and…”
“How?” Kaibyn cut him off. “You can’t fly there on your own. How would you get there without the Reaper’s help?”
“When a potential changeling comes to me, I always give him—or her in the case of one remarkable young lady—a choice. They must leave here before they can change, anyway. They take from here the ability to become a Reaper. If they have the courage and the desire to do it, they will. If they don’t, they won’t.”
“What is it they take with them?” Kaibyn inquired.
“A part of the parasite that made me what I am. If they don’t use it, I make them swear to me they will destroy it. They must throw it in the fire and burn it to ash. The world must not be left defenseless with those creatures breeding indiscriminately.”
“Has one of the potential ones who did not use it let it live?”
“No.”
“How do you know?” Evann-Sin asked.
“Because each time one of those things is cast into the fire, the queen senses it and as soon as she feels her offspring dying, she punishes me. I know when one of them meets its death.”
“Punishes you how?” the demon inquired.
“By causing me such savage pain you can not begin to imagine it,” was the reply. “Anytime a Reaper angers his or her parasite that is the payment to be made.”
“And this is what the Mage plans for me,” Evann-Sin said with a shudder.
“It has a few good sides to it, warrior,” the Reaper told him.
“None that I can see.”
“You will be able to read minds.”
“Terrific,” the warrior mumbled.
“You will have the strength of ten men.”
Evann-Sin twirled his index finger in the air.
“You will be able to fly.”
Kaibyn blinked. “As I do?”
Cainer shook his head. “No, in a flying ship.”
“A flying ship,” Evann-Sin snorted. “That I have to see.”
“All right,” the Reaper agreed. He got up and started walking, heading deeper into the lush foliage behind him. “Let’s go see her.”
Kaibyn and Evann-Sin exchanged looks then hurried to catch up with their host. Batting aside huge leaves and pushing past low-hanging vines, they were soon almost on his heels.
“This was the flying ship you came here in?” the warrior inquired, stumbling over a fallen tree trunk.
“Aye,” Cainer replied.
For ten minutes, the trio traveled through the lush foliage. Ahead of them, the sound of waves crashing along the shore brought with it the smell of salt water.
“How she moved it, I don’t know. I landed in a field on the mainland,” Cainer explained. “I was almost out of fuel, putting her down on fumes alone.”
“Fumes?”
The Reaper shook his head. “It would be too hard to explain. Let’s just say that’s an age-old expression for she never ran on fuel as you might know it.”
Kaibyn leaned toward Evann-Sin. “Remember the machines I brought forward from the past? Those ran on what they called gasoline.”
Cainer turned. “Fossil fuel, aye.”
Evann-Sin shook his head. “I don’t want to know what that is.”
“You don’t need to,” the Reaper said. “You just need to know how to fly her.”
“If she has no fuel, how could he?” Kaibyn inquired.
They had come to a tall bluff overlooking the heaving waves of the ocean. Mighty waves crashed against the steep cliffs and white spray leapt high into the air. Beyond the heaving waves was a smaller island.
“There,” Cainer said, pointing.
Evann-Sin narrowed his eyes. What he saw amazed him. “That is your flying ship?”
“It is called a L.R.C.,” the Reaper informed him. “A long-range cruiser.”
Situated on a small island about a hundred yards off the coast of the Isle of Uaigneas, a large object sat perched, like a black bird of prey waiting to pounce upon its victim. The “beak” of the strange contraption pointed toward the ground as though it was in search of food. Stretched out to either side of the long neck of the object, two huge wings gleamed in the midmorning sun. Droplets of water from the earlier rain sparkled like jewels on the dark skin of the craft.
“By the gods,” Kaibyn whispered. “Look at her!”
“She’s a sweet machine,” Cainer said in a wistful voice. “The best in the fleet, actually.”
“Does she have a name?” the demon asked.
“The
Levant
,” the Reaper replied as though he spoke a lover’s name. “I sit here hours on end remembering what it felt to fly her, to soar into the heavens and wing my way from world to world. She is as fleet as the wind, as powerful as a vortex but as silent as a gentle breeze.”
“The
Levant
,” Kaibyn repeated, his tone filled with awe.
Cainer flexed his hands. “I remember well my hands on the controls.” He looked down at his open palms. “I remember the feel of her instantly obeying my every command.” He looked back at the ship. “I dream of flying that beauty almost as often as I dream of my lady.”
“How did Morrigunia get it here?” Evann-Sin asked.
Cainer shrugged. “My guess is she used magical means to bring it here for I know damned well she couldn’t fly her.”
“That’s how we will be traveling to the Abyss?” Evann-Sin inquired.
“How
you
will be traveling to the Abyss,” Kaibyn corrected. “You know I can’t accompany you, warrior.”
“And you think I can fly it?” the warrior asked, his eyes wide. “You are the one who can fly, demon!”
“But he wouldn’t be able to fly that baby,” Cainer told him. “She was designed especially for me. Her console was built for my body and her controls operate only at my command for I programmed her.”
“But…”
The Reaper held up his hand. “Once you have the fledgling inside you, you will know everything I know because it knows everything I’ve ever learned. My personal history will be as clear to you as it is to me. What I can do, you will be able to do.”
“The f-fledgling?” Evann-Sin questioned, swallowing hard. “You mean the p-parasite?”
“Aye, warrior,” Cainer Cree replied. “You must accept the fledgling as well as partake of a cup of blood. The nestling will bond to the blood as it flows through your body.”
“How does he get that disgusting thing into him?” Kaibyn asked.
“One of you will need to harvest the nasty little bitch from my body, make a small incision on Riel’s back and allow it to enter.”
The warrior turned a pasty green color and looked as though he were inhaling a particularly noxious odor. “I think I’m going to be sick,” he commented.
“But we can’t do that here,” Kaibyn said. “Introducing it to his body, I mean.”
Cainer shook his head. “No, else he’d be trapped here just like me. You will need to take him over to the island, let the fledgling do its job then he’ll be able to fly
The
Levant
to the Abyss.”
Evann-Sin was shaking his head. “Even if I could fly it, I have no idea where the Abyss is!”
“It’s more a state of mind that an actual place,” Kaibyn muttered.
“But it does exist in real time,” Cainer remarked. “Once you have impregnated the warrior with the parasite, come back here and I will gather the information from your memory, give Riel the coordinates so he can program them into the navigational system and…”
“Program? Coordinates? Naviga…” The warrior threw his hands up. “This is far beyond my ability to grasp it, Reaper!”
“It won’t be after you Transition.”
“The Abyss is a vast place,” Kaibyn reminded the Reaper. “How will we go about finding Tamara in that immensity?”
“With what is in your pocket,” Cainer said.
“My pocket?” Evann-Sin questioned then remembered the bloody kerchief that had come unwound from Tamara’s hand. He reached into his pocket and pulled it out.
“What is that?” Kaibyn asked.
“It is his lady’s blood,” Cainer replied, and before the warrior could ask, he told him it had come from her injury on the battlements during the skirmish.