Balthar screwed up his face. “No. I don’t recall anything like that. Neither one of them. They feared the dreams, feared their desire to live them out. Not the beings in the dream, though. Not afraid of them at all. Pendyrral said they were beautiful.”
Only the outsider was fearful in my dream, the darkness that consumed me when I could not go where I needed to go.
“Gods, it fits.” I leaped to my feet and paced back and forth, my hands pulling at my hair as I reassembled the pieces I had put together in my dreaming. I had seen it so clearly. Pendyrral and Cathor had not understood, because they didn’t know Blaise.
Fiona walked up the steps out of the foggy morning. “What fits?”
“The answers to some of the puzzles. Who the children are. Why we can’t bring ourselves to kill the demons. Why the demons come seeking warmth and life. The meaning of corruption and impurity, and why we’ve been told to be so careful lest the demons find their way into our souls.” My skin was blazing hot—the fever of truth scalding my veins. “We did not create the demons, Fiona. The demons are a part of us.”
“You’re mad!”
“They’re a piece of our own souls, a piece that was torn away by this magic.” I fell to my knees beside the mosaic, the words crowding their way out of me, the ideas structuring and restructuring themselves in my head, the world reshaping itself before my eyes, just as Blaise had reshaped himself. “Look at it. Shapeshifting. They lived it. As much a part of them as cooking and birthing. And portals . . .” Now that I recognized them, the faint rectangle shapes appeared everywhere in the early frames. “. . . they passed through them easily between these two places, one very much like our own home, and this other place where everything is different . . . perhaps like Blaise does his journeying. And then this”—I pointed to the gap just before the story of the dreadful magic. “We need to know what happened here, and perhaps the whole thing might make more sense. But whatever it was, the people were afraid, and the magic was done. Look at them afterward. It’s the first image where not one among them is shifted. There are no portals. The other place is no longer visible. And these monsters that we call demons are separate. It all happened at once.”
“Never,” said Fiona. She backed away from me and shook her head, her thin face losing its rich bronze color. “You will never make me believe I am a demon.”
“You’re not a demon. No. Of course not. But neither are you whole. Nor am I. Nor is Ysanne nor Talar nor any of us. Only the children.” My son. In the midst of upheaval, the foundations of the world quaking beneath my feet, I clung to that one thought—that he was as he was supposed to be. “We have always said that rai-kirah were not evil of themselves, but only hungered for warmth and life. The Scroll of the Rai-kirah claims it is only the possession of a soul that is the evil, and that’s why we send them back instead of killing them all. Don’t you see? They are a part of us as truly as our hands and hearts and desires, and in the dreams, where we can see them, we understand it. In this time a thousand years ago, we were ripped apart”—I tapped the picture of the sorcerers who had worked the enchantment—“and these five were determined we would never go back. Think of the rules we have lived by. Think of our uttermost fears hammered into us from childhood. They didn’t trust us with the reasons, and they destroyed everything so we would never discover what we had been.” Unvoiced was my growing conviction that my dream . . . the warning . . . the Precursor . . . all of it was connected with the gap in the story, the cause of everything.
Balthar had said no word since I’d begun, only listened and stared, rocking himself very slowly. His full lips hung slack, his round cheeks suddenly sagged and wrinkled. His arms were wrapped tightly about his legs, and his chin rested on his knees. One might have thought him shocked into immobility, but the fingers of his left hand hammered on one knee like a woodpecker’s beak on a dead tree. But as I paused to run my eyes over the mosaic yet again, trying to extract more of its secrets, he spoke very softly. “Pendyrral thought that the demon had taken him and was only biding his time until entering his soul. Then the dreams kept coming, and he was mad to go find the place. He said he belonged there with the wraiths, that they were calling him. He killed himself, you know . . . so he wouldn’t go there. He had a wife and five children. Couldn’t bear the thought of going mad or becoming a demon.” The old man shook his head aimlessly, all life, all animation gone out of him. His bright eyes had gone dull, and from his lips there came a soft keening. I did not think there were easy answers for any of us.
“What else do you know, Balthar?” I said. “There are things . . .” Pendyrral had not dreamed about the darkness or the rider. Something had changed since his day. I had defeated the Lord of Demons . . . the Naghidda . . . the Precursor. My dread would not stay buried. What had written such fear on the faces of the people as the ancient magic was done? What could cause a people to cripple themselves, to destroy their history, to bind their children’s children in a war that would never end? “How do the prophecies fit with this story?” I said.
“Nothing! There is no more of it. No more. It’s all broken. Take your guesses and go away. None of this does any good. What does it matter?” His fingertips were now hammering on his bald head, as if he was trying to make himself remember something . . . or perhaps to forget.
“First I need to know everything you’ve learned of demons. Unless you’ve lied about your knowledge.”
My sharp questioning drew Balthar out of his preoccupation. “I know little of prophecy, but I know more than any person alive about demons, which, if you are correct, leaves a great deal still to be learned. I can teach longer than you can listen, I’ll be bound.” He picked up a stick and threw it onto his hot fire so hard that red coals bounced out of the fire pit.
“Then teach me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I lived for sixteen years with the horror you created. You owe me something.”
Balthar made no answer, but for the rest of the morning instructed me in demon lore. He had been a demon scholar long before his children were born possessed. He spent the first half of his life studying every word written, every rumor, every experience of every Warden that he could gather, and then he had gone out into the world, and gathered the legends of other peoples. The stories of the Derzhi and their battlefield spirits. The tales from Manganar campfires of the warrior spirits that would devour the unwary soul. The legends from Basranni storytellers and Kuvai minstrels. “I wrote it all down,” said the old man, “but I didn’t let anyone read it. I wanted it to be complete, so no one would accuse me of corruption. When I left Ezzaria I burned it. But if I had paper and ink enough, I could write it all again.”
He had come to believe that there were three groups of demons; circles he called them. The demons that the Wardens encountered were almost exclusively from one group. My demon had called them the Gastai, and Balthar had run across the term before. “They are the hunters, the ones who come searching for sustenance. Their violence is in proportion to their hunger.”
I had learned of such behavior in my training, but never of the names.
“Some of these Gastai we encountered many times over. You know the stories. If you fight very often, then likely you’ve met some of them—demons who follow the exact patterns of earlier encounters. Worse every time they come back.”
I nodded. We never gave them names lest it give them power or permanence. But our mentors made sure we were prepared for certain demons who had been encountered multiple times throughout our history.
“Then there are the Rudai. The shapers. A few demons have claimed Rudai connections in their boasting. Some Kuvai legends tell of spirits who shape worlds of stone and wind, and I thought the tales matched with the experiences of several Wardens. Ayolad and Teskor both encountered demons who reshaped the Aife’s weaving to confuse them. They both claimed to have encountered the same demon several times, but their accounts were always brief, and I always wanted to ask them why. But all mention of the shapers was far in the past—Ayolad six hundred years ago, Teskor two hundred. A few others in between. I don’t think we have encountered any Rudai in my lifetime, unless you . . . ?”
I shook my head.
“And the Nevai . . . only a whisper. The proud. The hidden. The innermost circle, the most powerful of them all, farthest from any contact with us. I’ve wondered . . . Tales say the Derzhi god Athos was once an earthly king, big and handsome and golden fair, who could transform himself into any kind of beast. His reign was so magnificent and his subjects loved him so dearly that the lords of the sky—the stars—became jealous. They persuaded him to transform into one of themselves, then worked magic so that he could never return to earth. They thought he would be lost among them, and the people of earth would turn their eyes back to the stars. But his glory grew and captured half of the sky, and the stars were afraid they would lose even the part they still held. So Tyros, the Lord of Night, adopted Athos as his son and anointed him as the ruler to follow him, and so day follows night. The sun participates in the lives of men, but the stars . . . I believe the stars are the Nevai. They watch us, and are jealous of any who intrude upon their power, but they do not touch us. They feed upon the sustenance brought by the Gastai, but crave power more than life.”
He touched a few of the words scribed around the edges of the mosaic. “These words are unknown to me. Neither our own language nor anything like the demon words we know. But look. Here is the word for Nevai, and here Rudai and Gastai. So these ancient ones knew their names. Perhaps these words could tell us more about them”—the old man’s voice shook—“if we wanted to know. Some things . . . some things it’s best not to know.”
“Power-born, skill-born, service-born,” I said. “Valyddar, eiliddar, tenyddar. We have our own circles.”
“Daughters of night . . .” As Balthar lectured me on his years of learning, my eyes did not stray from the images on the broken tiles: the woman/deer, the man with wings, the alien trees that appeared beyond the gateways. By the time the fogbound sun slipped away to leave the world in darkness again, I could re-create those trees in my head and others that were not portrayed on the mosaic. I could touch the baskets given reality by a few brush strokes, and I could imagine what was in them, fruits that grew on no vine in my experience, bread that tasted of grains unknown in the Derzhi Empire, gems that glittered with colors my eyes had never seen. As her child and husband watched from one side of the portal, the woman/deer ran along a road through a flower-filled meadow, and I believed I could describe what lay beyond the next curve. How was it possible? As truly as I knew my own name, I believed that the road she had traveled still existed somewhere, but I was dreadfully afraid of what I was going to have to do to find it.
“I need you to weave for me, Fiona.”
Fiona had sat on the temple steps all day, listening to Balthar’s tales without speaking. After we had shared a meal of cheese and dates, she and Balthar had gone to check the safety of our boat and empty the old man’s nets and traps—I think Fiona wanted to make sure the old man took his catch cleanly—while I spent a long evening of thinking. Now she was back, sitting cross-legged by the fire splitting branches for kindling. Balthar had fallen asleep. I sat leaning against one of the columns.
“Weave? A portal? The old man may be a madman and a villain, but he is not demon-possessed. And I don’t believe a Warden can walk into his own soul, even if he had all his wits—which you most certainly do not.” She ripped the shaggy bark from a hemlock branch. “And, besides, you’re forbidden to step beyond a portal.”
“I am forbidden to engage in demon combat. I have no intention of that.” Even as I listened to myself explain what I wanted, I agreed with Fiona’s judgment. I was mad. What man sets out to follow the road of his worst nightmares?
Soon Fiona was standing over me, shouting. “It’s murder. Worse than murder. I can’t do it.” She stormed across the temple, as if to put the maximum distance between herself and my plan. But she was back in seconds, and dropped to her knees so as to be on a level with me. “What will you prove by it? All you have is this madman’s whimsy to go on. And a dream and a vision of a demon that you met when you were out of your mind with exhaustion and grief.”
“Tell me what else I am to do, Fiona. I am convinced . . . convinced . . . that there is a danger to this world that is worse than the Lord of Demons. The only way we can withstand it is to be united under strong, capable, honorable leaders . . . and that means Aleksander and Blaise must find an accommodation. But before that can happen, I’ve got to find the answer to Blaise’s fate, and I’ve got to find out the nature of the threat, so we’ll know what they’re up against. And the only way I can do those things is to fill in this.” I pointed to the gap in the center of the mosaic. “Where else can I go to find that answer?”
“You can’t believe all this.”
“Tell me another story. If you can think of one, please tell me. This is not what I would choose.”
“What of our own people? The Queen, Talar . . . many others. This is why you are so dangerous. Because you’re not willing to do things properly, listen to those—”
“Ezzarians have done what was needed all these years. I believe that. Our strength and faithfulness have kept the world safe. But it was never meant to be this way. These five did not do this thing from greed or pride or grasping for power beyond what they had been given. Look at the picture. They acted from profound terror. We can’t fault them. But the demons were an unexpected consequence. See their faces. They’re appalled at what they’ve done . . . and so they bound us—their children—to remedy their miscalculation. The problem is that they didn’t trust us with the reasons, and now something has happened along the way. Something has changed. My dream is different from the others. Nothing that they left us predicted the Lord of Demons or the kind of threat he posed to this world. He was called the Precursor. I can’t help but conclude that whatever our ancestors feared is coming to pass anyway, and we don’t know what to do to prevent it. Gods of night, Fiona. We kill our own children because we’re ignorant and afraid. The time has come to look elsewhere for answers. Tell me where.”