The Brush of Black Wings (10 page)

Could a demon hold affection for anyone or
anything? Especially a demon who once tried to annihilate all
humanity? She frowned. Not possible. These creatures weren’t
capable of such feelings, and she shivered at the thought of Acseh
trapped here with such a being—ruthless, soulless, heartless.
Still, the idea refused to be banished, especially when Acseh sat
across from her, seemingly unharmed. Martise stiffened. Looks were
often deceiving.

Acseh rose and left the table, only to return
with two cups of water poured from the same pitcher she’d used to
wet the cloth. “You won’t thirst here or hunger, but sometimes it’s
good to have a reminder.” She raised her cup in toast, and Martise
obliged by mimicking the gesture. “He called you
‘kashaptu.’
Witch.”

Martise sipped her water, surprised at its
fresh, sweet taste. “I’m neither witch nor mage.” Again, a
half-truth based on interpretation. She possessed a Gift; in the
eyes of Conclave, she was a mage, even if she was a failed
one.

“
Nor are you nameless.” Acseh’s
knowing gaze told Martise she’d noticed the exchange of names had
been one-sided.

Martise returned the look. “No, but names have
power. I’ll answer to “witch” even if I’m not one.”

Acseh nodded and toasted a second time. “Fair
enough.” Her dark eyes shone with curiosity. “So there is still
magic in the world.”

Oh, if she only knew. Martise quelled her
chuckle. “Yes, probably more than anyone desires.” She paused. “Who
ruled your country before the
saruum
brought you to this
world?”

Acseh thought for a moment. “An obeth named
Anguis out of Clan Tuleo.”

Martise searched her memory of Conclave
records she’d both read and recorded. Her eyes widened and she
gasped. “You were there when Megiddo and the other
saruui
buidu
ravaged the earth.”

She might well have uttered that information
in Kros sailor slang if Acseh’s perplexed expression was anything
to judge by. “What are you talking about? And what is a
saruum?”

Martise hesitated. Acseh exhibited no fear of
their captor. She called him Megiddo. Just Megiddo. Not Megiddo
Saruum or King Megiddo. His otherness was obvious, but did Acseh
assume him to be something besides a demon? Something still not
human but not nearly so terrifying or lethal as one of the Wraith
Kings? And how could she not know of the devastation they wreaked
on the world? Or was she taken just before it happened?

So many questions with no answers. Yet.
Martise didn’t assume that Acseh’s loyalties lay elsewhere than
with Megiddo. She stepped carefully with her explanation.
“’Saruum’
is Makkadian and means ‘king.’
‘Saruui’
is
more than one king.
‘Saruui Buidu’
means ‘Wraith Kings.’
They were demons and almost destroyed the world a long time ago.
Your time I think.”

Acseh shook her head, her features more
guarded than puzzled now. “I don’t know of any Wraith Kings.
Vigestri was at peace when I was taken. Though we heard rumors of a
strangeness in the north and east where the gray Elders lived.”
Sparks of unease ignited in her eyes. “Megiddo is just a monk. Or
was until he became trapped in the gray world.”

“
A monk?” Martise gaped at her.
Her knowledge of demons and their behavior was far less than
Silhara’s, but she found it hard to reconcile the idea of one,
especially a demon king, claiming false identity as a lowly monk,
and to a harmless human woman no less.

Acseh’s voice echoed the uncertainty in her
eyes. “Yes. One of the Nazim. Do you know of them?” Martise shook
her head. “They’re a holy order devoted to Faltik the One. They act
as guardsmen and protectors to royal households.”

Conclave kept records of aristocratic
geneologies that stretched far back into time. Ancient holy orders
held no importance for them unless they possessed magic, and
Martise had never come across records that mentioned the Nazim or a
deity called Faltik the One. Megiddo probably lied about him being
one of those long-ago monks.

She didn’t argue Acseh’s assertion that
Megiddo was a Nazim. This woman was not an ally, and she had no
wish to make of her an adversary. The demon king was more than she
could handle at the moment as it was. She turned the conversation
to something safer. “How did this cottage come to be
here?”

Acseh’s gaze shuttered. She wasn’t fooled. “It
came with me. It belonged to our gamekeeper. I was hiding
inside—avoiding the attentions of a suitor at my sister’s
wedding—when Megiddo appeared. If only I’d known there was
something worse waiting for me in the cottage. When this gray—this
prison—pulled Megiddo back, it took everything. Him, me, the
building. It’s all I have as a reminder of my world.” The despair
in her voice was palpable. She plucked at the folds of her dress,
more finely made than anything Martise had ever owned. “I’ve worn
this same dress for a long time.”

Martise opened her mouth to offer sympathy and
screamed instead when Megiddo suddenly appeared next to her. She
almost fell off the bench.

“
Getting acquainted?” he casually
asked, as if he’d just strolled through the door with a wave and a
pitcher of ale to share.

Acseh didn’t flinch, but she did glower. “Stop
it,” she said.

Her heart galloping hard enough to crack her
ribs, Martise gawked as the demon king respectfully bowed his head
at Acseh before turning to her. “My apologies for the
fright.”

Martise shifted as far to the bench’s edge as
she could, ignoring his widening grin. She met his gaze and tried
not to look away from the lightning-riddled eyes with their
steel-colored irises and reflective pupils. “I can’t help you,” she
said. “I
won’t
help you. You have no right to my world, not
after you and your kind tried to destroy it.”

“
Megiddo, what does she mean?”
Acseh’s voice was soft, threaded with a rising fear.

The demon king’s brow knitted and his
shoulders slumped a little. Surely that wasn’t regret Martise just
witnessed? What demon ever experienced such an emotion?

She ceased to wonder when his back stiffened
and his stare turned as icy as his touch. “It’s my world too,” he
said in dead tones. His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean ‘tried to
destroy it?’ We gave up everything to save it.”

Ice water spilled down her spine, and the gut
instinct that she walked a blade’s edge between life and death
dried every drop of saliva in Martise’s mouth. She gripped her cup
until her fingers ached and cleared her throat several times before
she could speak. “What is written tells a different tale. Five
kings, demons all, who led legions of lesser fiends against me,
destroying everything in their path. Entire cities fell to ruin.
People, animals, land—everything laid waste.”

Megiddo reared back. “And yet you are here,
alive and well in a time beyond mine.”

There was no stopping now. If she refused to
say more, he’d force it out of her. “You—the kings—were defeated by
an alliance of kingdoms and your hordes driven back to the
Abyss.”

His eerie eyes gleamed white with lightning
and his upper lip curled into a sneer. “Is that so?” The table
vibrated under his drumming fingers. Dents in the wood marked where
his fingertips tapped. His gaze slid past Martise to an unseen
point beyond her shoulder. “We prevailed,” he said softly. “We
prevailed.”

Martise couldn’t help the fearful squeak that
escaped her lips when that bright gaze landed on her once more. His
voice, brittle and sharp, held the same despair she’d heard in
Acseh’s tones earlier. “For all that we suffered, this is how we’re
remembered?”

Suffered? What had they suffered? The kings
had wrought suffering on an apocalyptic scale. He made no
sense.

“
You aren’t remembered,” she said
shortly. “None now speak of the
Saruui Buidu.
I know of you
from forgotten tomes stolen from an undead necromancer.”

Gooseflesh peppered her skin at his humorless
chuckle. “Fitting, I think, that those who led the dead should now
only be remembered by them.” He glanced at Acseh who’d risen from
the bench and crept along the wall toward the door, her features
drawn with horror. Megiddo’s eyes went as flat a gray as the
landscape outside, and his mouth turned down. “It’s pointless to
flee, Damkiana. You know this.”

Acseh halted but stayed plastered to the wall,
fingers laced so tightly together, her knuckles were bloodless. She
stared at the demon king, new revulsion in her gaze.

Martise’s own revulsion was no less than
Acseh’s despite the sudden doubt creeping into her thoughts. Doubt
in the tome’s accuracy; doubt in recorded memory. Demons were known
to be sophisticated and subtle liars. She had no trouble believing
Megiddo possessed the same skill, yet something in the way he
reacted to her revelation of history’s treatment of the kings made
her wonder.

“
Even were I willing, I cannot
help you open the gate.” She wasn’t the catalyst that had anchored
him to the temple.

Before she could expound on her statement, he
lunged for her, gripped her shoulders and jerked her up from the
bench as he stood. Martise dangled midair, caught in a frigid,
unbreakable grip. Megiddo pushed his face close to hers until they
were nose to nose.

“
Who says I need your willingness,
kashaptu?”
Her stuttered plea for mercy evoked no sympathy
as he shook her hard enough to make her head snap back and forth.
“I will take what you refuse to offer.”

“
Megiddo, stop! Please!” Acseh’s
voice sounded miles away in Martise’s ears as Megiddo threatened to
break loose everything in her skull.

He didn’t release her, but he did stop shaking
her. Martise tried to catch her breath even as her vision swam.
“Not me,” she wheezed. “The sword. The king is the
sword.”

Megiddo dropped her as if she’d suddenly
sprouted spikes from her shoulders. Martise struck the bench’s edge
as she fell. A shockwave of pain rolled across her shoulder blade
and back, and her right arm went numb. She scuttled away from the
king on her haunches and good arm, helped by Acseh who dragged her
back to a corner of the room.

The two women huddled together, staring at
Megiddo once more enrobed in the chimeric shadows with their
tortured faces. He hadn’t changed beyond the robes, but his
presence filled the cottage, swelling to enormous proportions, and
the structure’s wooden frame groaned and popped with the
strain.

“
What do you know of the sword,
kashaptu?”
His voice swallowed stars, a dry well into which
oceans had drained and left their dead rotting in the briny
mud.

Terror robbed Martise of speech. Acseh keened
softly in her ear, a wordless cant composed of every fear and
nightmare that had plagued mankind in the deep hours when darkness
was more than the absence of sunlight.

Megiddo strolled toward them, his pupils
preternaturally large and bottomless, his spectral face merciless.
“Answer me,
kashaptu,”
he commanded. “What do you know of
the sword?”

Acseh’s grip around her midriff threatened to
cut off her air, and Martise inhaled shallow breaths in an effort
to speak. “The king is the sword; the sword is the king. Yours is
buried beneath the temple. I’m not the anchor or the key. The blade
is. You shouldn’t have taken me. I can’t retrieve for you what
isn’t here. The gate is locked to all of us now.”

Her declaration accomplished one of two
things—guaranteed her own execution or bought her a chance at
returning home. If he believed her. Her gut churned, and in this
world with no sun and no heat or cold, terrified sweat beaded her
brow.

His expression didn’t change, but the robes
reacted. Writhing around his body in convulsive gyrations, they
twisted the faces in their depths into new, more warped visages.
Open mouths emitted screams no less horrific from sounding far-off
and faint.

“
You made a mistake, Megiddo
Saruum,” she said softly.

He advanced on them, his demon-white face
blank and distant. Acseh whispered prayers into Martise’s hair.
“Holy mothers, I beg your mercy. Hear this handmaiden. Save us.
Save us.”

Something listened. And answered.

A lonely sigh echoed through the entire
cottage, fluttered Martise’s skirts and sank into her bones.
Megiddo’s eyes rounded. He spun on his heel, surveyed the room,
glanced at her and Acseh and disappeared.

The sense of space in the cottage grew once
more with the demon king’s absence. Acseh and Martise sat together
in the corner, each shivering in the other’s arms.

“
What was that?” Acseh’s voice was
thick with tears.

Martise dared not hope too much but added her
prayers to Acseh’s.
Silhara,
she prayed.
Let it be
Silhara.
“I don’t know,” she said aloud. She escaped the other
woman’s embrace and helped her stand.

Acseh wiped her wet eyes with her sleeve and
swiped at her red-tipped nose. “He isn’t a monk.”

The urge to apologize hovered on Martise’s
lips. Apologize for destroying a merciful ignorance, no matter that
the truth would be revealed at some point. Still, she’d sensed
Acseh’s acceptance, if not affection, for Megiddo. From what
Martise could tell, it had made the woman’s imprisonment with him
bearable. Now there was fear and disgust, and soon hatred. “No,”
she said. “Nothing so simple or human as a monk.”