“Do you see anything in there? I’ve looked quite a number of times over the years, but I’ve never seen anything interesting. Water. Stars. Wind. Myself. I’m sure there must have been something to see, else why would it beckon us to stop and take a look.” He looked from one to the other of us. “Do I know you?”
I popped up and spun on my heels, relieved to find a very solid figure standing behind us, not some specter observing us from the pool. “We’ve come here to see. . . .” I looked at the cheerful, clear-eyed old man, scarcely taller than Fiona, and I could not make myself believe he was the monster.
“Don’t say the name if it bothers you. Or say it as you please. I don’t worry about it anymore. And, of course, there’s no one about, so I don’t hear it so often as I once did. Sometimes I come near forgetting it, and that indeed might be a fine thing. Names carry so much baggage.”
A man who can prattle so ingenuously while carrying such a burden of horror, death, and madness . . . the worst kind of monster. Awash in purest loathing, I passed the back of my hand across my eyes. With a full focusing of melydda, I examined him for demon infestation, but I saw only a ragged little man with stringy white hair whose wide brow was crumpling into a frown. He flinched as if he could feel the assault of my seeing.
“Not a friendly guest. Not at all. And you”—he cocked his head at Fiona—“not quite so terrible as your companion. You dislike this business altogether, but you are curious at least. His hand can scarcely keep from his knife. My first visitors in ever so long, and I’m like to end up dead from it.” He sighed. “Can’t say as I mind.”
He clasped his hands behind his back—he was wearing some kind of shapeless gray gown—and strolled around the pool, peering into it as if checking again that there was nothing to be seen there. After a moment, he looked back. “You can come, of course. I’ll show you where everything’s kept, then you can kill me or not as you please.”
He took a few more steps. Neither Fiona nor I had moved. “I’ve been waiting all these years, you see. And no one’s come. I couldn’t leave, for no one would believe me without seeing, so there wasn’t much point in it. But someday, I thought, someday they will send someone. I knew what you would look like. A Warden, I have no doubt. I can smell your melydda, it is so strong in you. Taste it. Myself, I never had so much that anyone could sense it without probing. Quite mediocre always. What glory you must have known, and yet . . . well, that will come, if you are patient before the killing. Come. There’s a fire and spiced wine—I always have them send me wine. Two casks to last me the year. They’ll send anything I ask, but I don’t ask anymore. Just let them send what they’ve always sent. Easier, you know.”
He shook his head and stepped between one pair of the pillars. “Well, come on. Anyone would think you were a pair of these.” He slapped his hand on the pillar, chuckled softly, and disappeared into the temple.
Once the spell of his odd rambling was broken, the two of us moved to follow him. We did not speak. What could be said of such absolute reversal of expectation? Ours and his. He thought we were there to kill him . . . which I had always feared that I would do if I were ever to confront the villain . . . and in truth we were there to hear his story . . . which it seemed was exactly what he wanted.
The steps of the temple were broken, thick green vines poking up through the cracks, but the floor within the ring of pillars was smooth and undamaged from what I could see. A tidy fire crackled in the fire pit, hot—no smoke at all—and a copper pot hung over it. The air was redolent with hot wine and cloves. I stood by the fire and let it heat my damp clothes, but when the old man offered me a cup of his wine, I refused it. “I did not come here to drink with you.”
“No. No, I can see not.” He was staring at the burn scar on my face, where Aleksander’s enemy had branded me with the slave mark of the Derzhi royal house. “You must be an extraordinary man. You have been through the Rites, yet retain your melydda. Would I could persuade you to tell me how you did it.” With a deep sigh, Balthar turned and offered the cup to Fiona. She glanced at me, then took the cup and held it close, letting the fragrant steam wreathe her face. She was so thin that the chill affected her quickly. I had no skill to test the drink for poisons. I hoped she had.
Balthar poked another stick on his fire and twitched his fingers. Instantly the stick burst into hot clean flame, burning away the gloom that was encroaching on the temple. A splash of color caught my eye, bright red and blue from the floor beyond the fire pit. Mosaic. Just as in our own temples. I had never seen evidence of floor mosaics in the other ruins I had visited. Perhaps they had been destroyed with so much else, or perhaps it was only in this kind of structure they would make them. What had they used this place for? Likely not for walking souls.
“Go ahead and look at it,” said Balthar. “It’s taken me a very long time to put it back together.”
“We’ve not come to look at ruins,” I said. “Nor to kill you. Only to seek knowledge of rai-kirah.”
The old man continued poking at the fire and rearranging his copper pot. “What would you learn of demons? Surely you’ve not found the scrolls inadequate after so long.” He chuckled as he poured himself a mug of wine. I would have been offended at his sarcasm if I had not borne my own growing disdain for Ezzarian scholarship.
“Two matters,” I said, approaching what I believed the easier one first. “You once studied a demon encounter where the Warden—a man named Pendyrral—claimed the demon was of a different nature than the usual.”
Balthar did not turn, but his hands fell still. “Yes.”
“Someone else . . . I . . . experienced a similar encounter. I need to understand it.”
He turned his moonlike face upward. “And it made you so desperate as to bring you to Balthar the Devil. What did you think after it happened? Did you think yourself corrupt?”
“I don’t believe in corruption.” I was surprised at myself. I had never voiced the sentiment quite so bluntly, even in thought.
Balthar slapped his knee and laughed uproariously. “Of all the things I never expected. You have confounded me right here at the beginning. Have Ezzarian mentors forgotten their discipline? Are our Wardens now permitted to agree or disagree as they choose?”
“I believe in evil—I’ve seen too much to disregard it—just not in corruption that floats in the water or creeps up through cracks in the floor.”
“You believe that I am evil.”
“Yes. I’ve seen . . . I have lived . . . your legacy.”
“How can you keep your sword sheathed, then? If I am evil, then you would do the world a service by removing me.” He spread his arms out wide. “Or is it that I serve some purpose . . . some balance like that which holds us from destroying the rai-kirah?” These words were not spoken casually, but wrought with care and gilded with profound mystery.
The whispers of my dreams tickled my ears, and a frosty breath sighed down my neck. The scene before me wavered for a moment like sheets hung to dry in the wind. “I need to get away from here,” I said, throwing up my hands and retreating to the temple steps where I tried to get a lungful of the heavy air. Suddenly I seemed incapable of sensible conversation. I wasn’t sure what I was doing there. I couldn’t remember the questions we had come to ask.
Fiona took up the challenge and explained the case. “The demon this Warden encountered claimed it was welcomed by its host, an artist who had given up family, friends, and a lucrative contract to decorate a local castle. He preferred to paint pictures of flowers. When questioned, the Searcher verified that the claims of madness were made by the victim’s wife and other acquaintances who saw no value in the man’s pursuits. The wife was a wealthy woman who had borne the man nine children. She had used her father’s influence to get her husband the castle contract. The victim displayed all the signs of demon-possession, save that of deliberate taste for evil—unless one counts abandoning his wife as deliberate evil. The wife certainly did.”
“And what was the nature of the encounter?” Balthar reflected Fiona’s matter-of-fact tone.
She told him of my experience, almost word for word as I had told it to the Mentors Council, though she had not even been in the room. And the other information . . . where had she found it? I stared at her narrow face and wondered if I knew the young woman at all.
“A Nevai . . .” Balthar said to me in wonder. “You’ve drawn out a Nevai. What are you?”
“He said nothing of—”
“He spoke of the Gastai, the ‘brutes’ he called them—yes, yes—and the Rudai—they are called the ‘shapers,’ though of what I don’t know—and he referred to the ‘rest of us,’ which names him a Nevai, one of the inner circle, the most powerful of their kind.”
“How do you know of these things?” said Fiona. “I’ve read no such lore.”
But Balthar’s full attention was on me. “You dream now, do you? Ah, yes, I see it in your face. You dream, but you believe it is not dream. Pendyrral had dreams. He died without learning what they meant.” Balthar’s finger tapped his chin rapidly. “What was the second matter you wished to learn of?”
“The children,” said Fiona harshly, before I could answer. “The children born like yours were born. Demon children.”
The old man nodded until his whole body was rocking slowly. I would not have been surprised if he had started chewing his knuckles and moaning like Saetha. But he was quite composed when he answered. “I suspected as much. Only logical. ‘The man has sired two of them,’ you say, ‘and if he has learned anything, he must have learned what caused him to commit crimes of such horror that his name will ever be the very name of sin.’ Is that not the reasoning?”
So simple, so quiet was the echo of profound sorrow in his words that I almost missed it.
“For two years I searched for the answer, after my daughter was born and murdered. I read and studied every writing. I read the journals of the Wardens, the journals of the Searchers. Did you know there were at least three more such encounters? And those just in the past hundred years. Before that . . . who knows how many went unreported or were excised from the records? It would have been seen as evidence of corruption. Only in the recent past have we felt it reasonable to keep the written record as complete as possible.”
He was talking faster and faster, then shook his head as if to cool his rising eagerness. “I went back to Pendyrral and begged him to tell me again about his encounter, for I wondered if by some chance my child could have been held by such a demon. Yes, I see you have wondered the same about the children.” He peered at me again, curiously, then went on. “But Pendyrral had already told me everything he could. At last I decided to try to find the woman herself—the victim who carried this kind of demon. But I couldn’t locate her. It had been too long. Instead I found myself at the place where the Searcher and Comforter had taken the woman to link her to Pendyrral and his Aife.”
He looked up and waved his hand at the ghostly columns around us. “One of these ruins. Built by a people so ancient no mention is made of them in any written history. It had been a square building of some kind and was overgrown with weeds and trees. The walls and floors were rubble, the tiles of the roof scattered and crushed so that even the poorest of the local people could not glean anything useful from the place. Scarcely anything left at all save the melydda. So much power, always around these ruins. Why did we never investigate them more thoroughly?”
“They are none of our concern,” said Fiona. “Our business is the war.”
“Ah, yes. The demon war. Protecting the world from the horror of demons. Our noble sacrifice. Our entire purpose for being. Did you never wonder why?” Balthar’s eyes glittered like black gems in the firelight.
“So tell us what you learned,” I said, refusing to be drawn in by his excitement. “What enlightenment was given you?”
Balthar came to where I stood by the steps of the temple looking out upon the fog. “No enlightenment. What I found that day was only a fragment. A beginning. I dropped my knife, you see. I was trying to cut an apple, but my hands were shaking because I was weeping. I had found no answers. I dropped my knife into a pile of rubble, and I had to scrabble through the pile—crumbled bits from an inner wall—to find it. But this is what I found.” From his shirt he pulled a piece of cord that was tied about his neck, and from the cord hung a bit of gray stone about half the size of my palm. On the ancient bit of stone was etched the figure of a man with wings . . . the very same figure that was sketched on the Ezzarian Scroll of Prophecy . . . the very same figure that could be the image of myself as I transformed beyond the portal. I stared at it uncomprehending, teetering on the edge of revelation. An image from Ezzarian lore scribed on the walls of the builders . . .
Balthar did not give me time to sort it out, but dragged me along as relentlessly as the Sajer current. “For two years I searched every ruin from Parnifour to Karesh, and the first thing I discovered was that there was nothing to be found. No drawings of the ones who built the places, no paintings, no writings that anyone could translate. Everything had been destroyed. Everything. Why? Was there a war against these builders? A grudge of such long-standing that every relic of their life had to be obliterated at once?”
The night air had me shivering, though there was no trace of frost in the river valley. Balthar took me by the arm and drew me toward the splashes of blue and red that gleamed in the firelight.
“It was years later that I found this place. After my second child was born a demon and destroyed, I was in the throes of madness and lust for vengeance, and for a long time all I did with what I found was create the horror that you know—my legacy to the world. But as the years passed, I pieced together the true tale. I came to see that what I was and what I had done was small beside the sin of our race, and that the gods had sent us these demon-devoured children as just punishment. Look down,” he said. “Read the history of our people as I have learned it, then tell me which one of us is better than the other.”