Path of Revenge

HOW TO KILL AN IMMORTAL?

The question whispers along the cold stone walls. It has a life of its own, this question. Husk imagines the words have found a path through the maze of corridors deep beneath Andratan, a route to freedom, so many times has he whispered them over the last seventy years.

Perhaps they have,
he thinks.
Perhaps they have.
But freedom, however tempting, is not the path he intends to take. A far more dangerous route invites him onward.

Breathe in.

Searing pain as sweet air mixes with the wreckage of blood-fouled lungs. Agony. Torment.
Must stay strong, must not be sidetracked. Concentrate…

Ah, there!

A fleeting mind-touch, anticipated, expected. Someone walks the corridor. Two people. Warders on their regular rounds. They will expect him to be in his cell, not at large in the corridor. Draw a little from them both, just a little from their memories. There, and there. One of the men stumbles and utters a curse. The mind-touch tells Husk this, who has no ears to hear. He has drawn too much—still careless—but the bright power, so necessary, how can it be resisted?
It supplies the strength for thought, for the rational part of his mind to function. For another breath.

Breathe out.

One jailer, new to the task, says something to the other. Husk can feel it, faint currents of air brushing against his open wounds like the promise of healing. He hears the question in the jailer’s mind:
what is that dreadful smell?
Husk knows, but he cannot tell. Husk is ashamed, but he is powerless to alter what he is.

Breathe in.

He suppresses the cough reflex. Coughing would set him back days, would consume too much of his carefully pieced-together strength. So much strength required to stave off the pain, to keep the broken body working; so little left to maintain mind contact with those in his thrall. The captain, the priest and the girl. One cough, one spasm such as those he suffered in the early years, and he could lose contact. He worries especially about the girl, the most recent, the most vulnerable of his acquisitions. Lose her, lose the Stone, lose everything.

Breathe out.

In the few moments of clarity he has been able to fashion during seventy years of suffering, Husk has often thought on the impossibility of the task he has set himself. It is all he focuses on. All that matters. Seventy dreadful years. He should have let go in the beginning, should have fallen into the death that hovered so close, but he did not. He has held his betrayal clenched tightly in his hand for so long now he cannot release it, cannot choose death even if he wanted it.

Breathe in.

A known smell nearby. A rat. Plenty of them down here. They learn to stay away from him. He can draw them to him, kill them with his mind, send his will spiking into their tiny brains. Without the fat, juicy rats he would never have survived. This one scuttles
nervously past him on the other side of the corridor. He can sense it, though his eyeless sockets cannot see it. The rat knows about Husk, oh yes.

Breathe out.

How to kill an immortal?

Again and again he asked the darkness, and after so many long and painful years of silence the darkness delivered him an answer.

Breathe in.