Retribution (24 page)

“No, beloved, it is a necessary part of the
explanation,” Dominic said. “The configuration of my mind is a
physical trait like anything else. It is the Aranyi mind, with the
Aranyi gifts and the Aranyi vices.”

Edwige had said much the same thing. She had
distrusted Dominic from the beginning, had told me how his whole
family, all the Aranyi were—

“She was right,” Dominic said. “We’re a bad
bunch. We enjoy cruelty and torture, sexual domination and
sadism—”

“That’s why I love you,” I said. “All your
sterling qualities.”

“No you don’t. If you did, I’d be dead and
you’d be lying here with Reynaldo.”

The pain in Dominic’s voice and the look of
torment on his face stopped me from acting on my first
impulse—taking out my prism and incinerating him. He did have these
desires in him—the communion made it impossible to hide—but he had
learned the cost of giving in to them, and he had never knowingly
directed them at me. It was more difficult for Dominic to talk
openly of such things than to fight twenty battles, and far less
enjoyable. If it made him feel better to blame it all on
inheritance, some sort of family curse…

“That’s what it is, a family curse.” Dominic
broke in on my thoughts. “When the ‘Graven bred for
crypta,
these bad traits became embedded in the Aranyi genome over the
generations as well, the way breeding a wild animal into a domestic
one can change the color of its fur or the shape of its ears. We
inherited the flaws along with the gifts.” He had told me something
of the ‘Graven’s early genetic experiments, but this was the first
time he had spoken so candidly.

“Every line got something odd. Erteguns are
often intersex, many of the Ndokos are sterile, Changs tend to
suffer from organic diseases, and the Singhs—not enough
intelligence amongst the lot of them to make one decent moron.

“Aranyi, we picked up a mutation for a kind
of mental instability. It’s not age-related dementia, and it’s not
an obvious chemical deficiency, a vitamin or nutrient—we’ve
checked, believe me. It’s passed on through the male line and it
doesn’t develop fully in all of us, but it’s always there in latent
form. I was lucky: my mother was alien, so half my genome is
untainted. But I carry all the evil in me, from my father. The
traits that showed in Reynaldo are hidden in me.”

I was forced to analyze the resemblance
between Reynaldo and Dominic’s father more carefully. I had never
met Zoltan—he had died long before I came to Eclipsis—but I had
heard of him, had heard more than I would have liked, from stupid,
well-meaning people who had wanted to sow doubts in my head before
I was married.

Zoltan had been considered promiscuous even
by the lax standards that apply to ‘Graven, the disapproval
stemming not from the number of women but from his callous
treatment of them, his lack of support for the children he
fathered. He had suffered from the Aranyi illness, a mental
imbalance that began early in life and worsened as he aged, until
his last years had been a prolonged agony, for him and for his
family. Thinking of Reynaldo’s cruelty and madness, comparing his
appearance to the man in the portrait, remembering all I had been
told of Dominic’s father, I could no longer doubt the truth of the
relationship that gave Dominic such pain to acknowledge.

“I did see it, Dominic,” I said. “And you’re
right, I couldn’t accept it.” It had begun with my attempts at
reading Reynaldo’s thoughts. The ease with which he penetrated my
mental barriers, the way he always knew what I was doing, the
sickening feeling that I had encountered the warped, destructive,
mental pattern somewhere before—here were the last proofs, if any
were needed, of the validity of Dominic’s argument.

“Reynaldo was Aranyi,” Dominic said, “as much
as I am—more. You sensed it all along, whether you could admit it
to yourself or not. That’s why you kept seeing him in me and me in
him.”

Seeing a similarity between Dominic and
Reynaldo, a man with none of Dominic’s virtues, had been the most
disorienting thing I could have encountered. I had fought against
it, denying it, yet all the time scrutinizing it, testing it,
poking and probing at it like a cat that has seen something run
behind the stove. I could not leave it alone until I caught the
rat.

And the rat I had dragged out at last was
what I called the abomination or the demon, the side of Dominic
that enjoys torture, that derives pleasure from pain, the man who
is not a kind and gentle lover but a rapist. The side of Dominic he
carries within him, but tries not to express.

My panic on returning to Aranyi, believing
that the man who carried me to my bedroom was not Dominic but
Reynaldo, was further evidence of what I had been denying. This was
what Naomi had urged me to tell Dominic, the morning I regained
consciousness. By avoiding it, I had allowed the confusion in my
mind to continue for a month, culminating in last night’s image of
horror that I must have conjured up, the body and mind of my
husband rendered hideous by the mutilated face of the bandit and
his evil thoughts.

“But you’re not like him,” I said in one
last, forlorn hope of an assault on the walls of reality. “You
don’t think like him any more than you look like him. You’re not—”
I stared at my husband’s unusual face that had gone purposely blank
to contain the upsetting emotions he must discuss. “You’re not a
shithead.” I chose our epithet out of desperation.

“No,” Dominic said. “Just a fuckhead. We were
only half-brothers.” He grinned as he drew the reluctant laugh from
me. “Now listen. You understand what I’m trying to tell you. You’re
just resisting it—understandably.”

“You mean that by recognizing but denying the
similarity between you,” I asked, “I activated it in some way,
forced you to imitate Reynaldo?”

“No, beloved.” Dominic laughed almost
humorously. “What I share with Reynaldo, the gift we both received
from our father, is a penchant for cruelty, a pleasure in giving
pain and, sometimes, in receiving it. I needed no force, merely
opportunity, to make use of such a precious gift.” He used,
sarcastically, the Eclipsian word for a specific talent of
crypta
.

His face changed as he spoke of his “gift,”
for one heart-stopping second mirroring the personality as he
described it. I saw again the mask of the demon-torturer, the man
who had enjoyed inflicting the clever torments he had devised for
the victim in the dungeon. As quickly as I had seen it, his face
reverted to Dominic’s: cold, somewhat cruel in appearance, as I had
noticed in my delirium, but sane and self-possessed and, when
turned on me, softened by a look of love behind the eyes.

“And being in contact with him, when I–
chastised him for his misdeeds—” Dominic spoke dryly, with his
characteristic understatement. “—is a kind of communion, one you
will never know, thank all the gods. It brought out all the vices
in me I work hard to suppress every day.”

Dominic had been affected from the beginning
of my captivity. Terrified at the thought of what I might be
suffering, worried that he might be too late to rescue me, my
husband had formed a communion of pain with the enemy, the man who
shared the Aranyi curse. The mad Dominic had begun emerging, what I
later thought of as the demon, who had used
crypta
to bugger
Reynaldo from a distance, and had threatened him with tortures far
worse than anything actually done to me.

I had seen it without grasping the full
significance. My only concern had been to make sure that Reynaldo
suffered sufficiently. I had not worried about the effect on
Dominic until much later. Now I saw what Dominic and Naomi had
meant about me being the cause. “I encouraged you,” I said. “I
wanted you to torture him. I showed you how to resurrect him. You
might not have done any of it but for me.”

Dominic laughed with genuine amusement.
“That’s right, cherie. If you hadn’t instructed me differently, my
own inclination would have been to invite the shithead to Aranyi
Fortress, give him the freedom of the realm, and a reward of land,
is that it?” His arms pulled me closer. “No, beloved, I enjoyed
what I did, and the fact that he had done things to deserve such
treatment added little to my pleasure.”

“But then why do you say I caused it?” I
asked. “Why do you say I brought about this change in you?”

The answer came to me as I spoke. “He was
dead!” Reynaldo’s body had been crawling with maggots and worms,
the rotting flesh falling from the bones. In Eclipsis’s cold
climate, and in the subterranean chill of the dungeon, it would
take quite a while to produce that level of decay. Last night, when
his Aranyi vices were supposed to have been influencing us,
Reynaldo had been dead, probably for weeks.

I was cold again, the warmth of communion
replaced by fear. Reynaldo could not have been responsible for last
night’s insanity. I had done it, just as Naomi said. I put my arms
around Dominic, understanding more than ever the need for the
protective communion, but wondering if I was helping things now or
making them worse.

“You should have told me,” I said. “Maybe all
this could have been prevented.”

Suddenly I knew just how long Reynaldo had
been dead. It had been the day Niall had gone, the day I had
inadvertently entered communion with Dominic as the demon-torturer,
terrifying Magali simply by the look on my face. “He was dead for a
whole month!” My voice quavered like a child’s.

“Yes,” Dominic said. “That day, when he died
for what must have been the hundredth time, I could not bring him
back to life, not to conscious existence. So much of him was dead
despite anything I could do, his gangrenous legs, his—” Dominic cut
short the description I did not wish to hear, or see through his
mind. “He could no longer suffer; torture would have been wasted on
him. What is the Terran expression, like flogging a dead horse.”
Dominic slid his eyes over to my face, to see how I took his
attempt at humor.

He could always make me smile. “Beating,” I
said. “And you’re stalling. So why didn’t you tell me he was
dead?”

“I came upstairs for supper,” Dominic said,
“and saw you and Jana napping so peacefully, and I thought, enough,
let him go.”

“But that night,” I said, “I went in to you,
because I heard crying.”
Dominic transformed
,
Dominic
becoming the abomination, the mixture of himself and Reynaldo that
had almost destroyed us both
. “That night I was prepared to go
down there and kill him. And you wouldn’t let me. You acted as if
he was alive, said you’d take care of it.” My monotone of
reasonableness changed to a rising howl of accusation. “We could
have avoided this whole mess, if you had just told me.”

“I tried,” Dominic said. “Honestly, I tried.
But I couldn’t do it. Your fears were so strong, as real to me as
my own. I thought, if you knew he was dead and this was happening—I
didn’t know how you’d handle it. You’d been so sick, so weak, so
starved.” His voice broke. “Oh gods, Amalie, it hurt me so to see
you like that.”

In our communion I shared Dominic’s memories
of that night, saw the sincerity of his words. He had acted out of
love. Once returned to his true self from the abomination I had
awakened, he had wanted to protect me from any further terrors.
That’s why he had forced my hand, prevented me from going down to
the dungeon that night, or the next morning, to discover that the
person I had thought was controlling him was in fact a corpse.

“But what good did you think would come of
ignoring it?”

Dominic sighed. “You see, Amalie,” he said,
“I didn’t really understand then that you were influenced by his
madness, as I was. I thought what everyone thinks who shirks his
duty. I thought the problem would go away by itself. I thought the
effects would fade eventually, that it would just take a little
time.”

“And why didn’t they?” I asked. “Why did it
get worse once he was dead?”

Dominic had a hard time answering. He lay in
silence, pulling me down to rest in the curve of his arm. “Before
he died, Reynaldo forced communion on you. And since he was Aranyi,
you could not help responding to him, feeling something of the same
communion.” He spoke aloud through clenched teeth, not liking to
contaminate our sanctuary with such filth. “You told me of it, or I
would not speak of it now to embarrass you. He violated your mind.
When we were at Lady Ladakh’s.”

I had confessed this to Dominic that night a
month ago, after he had frightened me half to death. At the time I
had not been sure that he had heard me.

“Yes, my love.” He responded to my thought.
“I heard all that you told me. And all you did not tell me. I began
to see what was going on in my own household, all the ways that
bastard had thought to ruin me and mine.”

Dominic frowned, attempting cool detachment
as he explained the appalling facts. “What he did, what you thought
of as rape, mental rape, is simply forced communion. It takes great
skill against a seminary-trained mind like yours, and he could
never have managed it except for the unusual circumstances. He
could do it to you, because of your receptiveness to Aranyi—to me,
to him.”

“I formed communion with him other times,” I
said. I told Dominic of my abortive attempt to read Reynaldo’s
thoughts, and the time he had raped the girl in my dress, had
discovered my mind in his and threatened to do the same to me.
Worst of all, because it had happened so smoothly, without my even
worrying about what I was doing, I had fused my tiny remnant of
consciousness with Reynaldo’s while I was in the
crypta-death
.

Dominic hugged me so tightly I thought my
lungs would deflate. “You see?” he said. “He disgusted you, yet you
formed communion with him easily. It was the same for me. You
experienced, as if they were your own, his thoughts and feelings—or
the muck he had in place of them. And when you were weak and sick
he forced himself on you, and set you off.”