The Forgotten (The Lost Words: Volume 3) (61 page)

“Lord Count,” Junner called, tagging behind, “I see this village full of women, with no husbands to take care of them. Perhaps you let Junner buy some for himself. Will do—”

Bart cut him off. “No, Junner, out of the question. These are Eracian women.”

“That means no buying and selling?” Junner asked stupidly, and Bart knew he was being obtuse on purpose. He sometimes wondered if the mercenary had not been swindling him since the first day they met and never stopped for a moment.

Bart shook his head at him, weaving his way through the nervous crowd. He could not help thinking there would be a huge army of Kataji and Namsue pouring over the nearby hills, with him trapped in this sorry hole. He tried to ignore the women and children around him, tried to ignore the oily venom of hatred. Soldiers looked equally hungry to dole out their revenge, and it disturbed him.

Everyone was waiting for him, he noticed. For them, it was a done deal. The only question was whether he would honor Junner’s proposal or not.

He addressed the crowd of prisoners. “Who is your leader?”

Only a few seemed to comprehend Continental. One of the men stirred from his kneeling position in the wet snow.

“Speak.”

“What you do now, Eracian warman? You promised.”

Bart did not come too close. He remained at a safe distance from the nomad. “What tribe are you?”

“We are the Yirman, brothers of the Fox clan.” There was acerbic pride in the prisoner’s tone. He hid his fear well.

“Why did you not flee? You knew we outnumbered you. Why did you take this village and stay?” It was a bad string of questions for an interrogation, he knew. Most soldiers would be asking about the enemy strength, positions, tactics, and other crucial factors. But he wanted to know why. It bothered him.

The Yirman clansman spat. “Stay? This is our village!”

Bart gritted his teeth. “This is Eracian land.”

“You stole from my old fathers!” the man snarled. “You took, fourteen generations back.”

Fourteen generations
, Bart thought sourly. Most books faded after half that long. How could any nation sustain itself on hatred for so long?

He recalled his days at the court, serving Leopold. He could not begin to fathom the torrent of mistakes, the tidal wave of arrogance and ignorance that had bound him to his position as the lowly clerk of the Privy Council. He had focused so much of his effort on understanding the fragile peace with Caytor that he had never bothered to acknowledge the silent, distant threat of the nomads.

Ever since Vergil’s conquest, the Eracians had treated the tribes as subhuman. A defeated race good for bartering trinkets and pelts with. Now, he realized, the war was more complicated. Five dozen starved men might have surrendered, but he harbored no illusions the Kataji in Somar would ever do something like that. If these men would not give up a sorry scrap of land lost five hundred years earlier, then there was no knowing to what length the nomads would go to to avenge all the slights, insults, vendettas, feuds, and stolen territory they had suffered from the Eracians in their past. Which meant they would have to kill every single one of them.

And that meant he could not let these…sixty-four survivors ever again take up arms against his nation.

He looked at the Yirman. Oh, no doubt there. The moment they could, these men would head back to battle. They had surrendered because their death would have served no purpose inside an old monastery. So they bet on the Eracian naïvety to live another day. And fight.

Unless…

“Cut their hands off. Leave one man so he can feed them,” he ordered and walked away.

Among the Yirman, someone translated. Then there was an uproar, the prisoners screaming their defiance at the betrayal, the Eracians cheering the gore fest about to begin, soldiers, women, even children joining the clamor of vengeful release. Bart did not relish seeing an ax chop the wrists off. But he knew he had assured his reputation with the army now. If they had thought their viceroy a silly noble, he had killed that image today.

CHAPTER 45

“S
tand still,” Calemore said.

“My hands are tiring. I can’t feel the blood in them,” Nigella complained.

He put the horsehair brush down. It was his thinnest piece, good enough for drawing the tiniest details.

Nigella was posing in front of him, naked, her arms raised above her head, the back of her left hand touching the inside of the right wrist, fingers curled somewhat languidly. She was looking to the side, as he had instructed her. Her belly arched forward, her rump backward, and her knees were touching. It was not a comfortable posture for a human.

He sighed. If she moved now, she would ruin the painting. Despite his best judgment, he channeled a trickle of magic into her flesh, strengthening her muscles. There was an almost visible tremor of relief on her pale skin.

Calemore lifted the brush and resumed painting. He had fifty-eight colors in tiny jars on the drawing table in front of him, extracts of precious, rare herbs from all over the world, sweet oils with real flecks of metal powder, even soft tar. There was magic in those dyes to keep them fresh. They were extremely valuable. Some kings had less.

His fingers worked slowly, carefully, painting the curve of her breasts, the ribs that gently rippled the skin, the mole she had just underneath the left gland, the soft strip of downy hair down her belly line. It was almost invisible, and most humans would probably miss it, unless they saw Nigella naked in a very good light, which was quite unlikely given how self-aware she was about her appearance.

Her flaws were fun and exciting. They reminded him how complex life was, how difficult Damian had made things with his silly experiments. He had imbued mankind with more than just passions and whims. His father had made them so acutely conscious about everything.

In a strange way, it also reflected on him.

Mingling with humans was a dangerous business. He was far above their petty desires and filthy little sins and dark crimes, and yet, spending time in their company sullied his own thoughts, made him indulge in trifles. Back home, in Naum, people worshipped him blindly, without reservation. There was no one and nothing to fault his choices, his rationale, his decisions. In the Old Land, all manner of doubts and worries seemed to jump into existence all of a sudden.

Nigella was fuddling his mind, he thought.

She was just another insect, he knew. She served her purpose, and when he no longer needed her, he would discard her. And yet, he liked coming to her home, liked watching her fret and wonder and ponder and try to outsmart him in her female ways of scheming, liked to see her cook food for him and take delight in his appreciation of it, and he liked the way her body squirmed under his own.

Fucking was a mechanical sport unless you could add fear into it, he realized. But no human could really understand who he was without spending a few decades in his presence. That
was the curse of being forgotten for an entire age, erased from the collective memory of mankind. Your life became history, and then it eroded into legend and rusted into myths, until not even toothless grannies would tell their children bedtime horrors just because they were old and bitter and wanted to impart one last jot of their malevolence on the helpless.

Nigella was beginning to understand. Spending time with him, reading
The Book of Lost Words
, she was gaining an insight into what he stood for, what the future would become once he triumphed. He loved seeing her guess, loved watching her react to her realizations. There was nothing like almost divine truths for torturing human minds. They tried their best to grasp the enormity of it all and always kept failing. Nigella was coming as close as any insect might to understanding the bigger, mightier beast that might so casually trample upon it.

She was learning, fast, hard. She was gaining wisdom that would take the best scholars centuries to figure out. He was almost proud of her, as much pride as there could be for an insect. He was becoming involved, he realized, and he was almost angry with himself.

He put the thin brush aside and picked another, a bigger, coarser one. He dipped it in pink brown and stirred the paste, then began stroking precise layers onto the canvas, drawing her torso.

You spend too much time with humans, and your expectations plummet into the cesspool of mediocrity
. There was that. After so long watching imperfect humans try their best to survive, to outwit fate one more day, he had almost grown used to little victories, small achievements. Nigella’s struggle fascinated him.

Calemore wondered why he bothered. Maybe he was just bored. Total obedience was utterly tedious. He liked being around Nigella, liked it a lot.

He should be focusing on fighting the one living god. The creature had become a menace. Calemore had lost contact with at least three of his hunting parties. He was almost tempted to lead the pursuit himself, but it was too risky. Not yet. He had worked too hard for too long to succumb to impulse.

Still, despite his immortality, he was feeling the urgency of time. There was more faith in the realms. His enemy was growing stronger. There would come a point where they would inevitably clash. With each hour, the uncertainty grew.

Nigella broke the silence. “I need to ask you a question.”

He looked at her. There it was, the slow transformation of her features as she gathered courage. It was so entertaining. Well, he could not really guess what she wanted, but it was something she deemed crucial or dangerous.

Her nipples were creased like brown raisins from the cold. He focused on them and felt base lust wash over him. He preferred her flawed form to marble sculpture beauties any day. A grain of Damian’s evildoing embedded in his own soul, that seed of human drive.

“Just make sure you do not move,” he warned.

She swallowed. “Do you have a wife?”

The brush paused in midstroke. He smiled behind the canvas. “Wife? Why are you asking?”

“No reason,” she replied too hastily.

Calemore resumed painting, delighted. “Tell me.”

“When you leave my home,” she spoke in a soft tone, trying to sound casual, “where do you go? Is there a woman somewhere waiting for you?”

“I am immortal, remember? Human lives are like heartbeats to me.” He dipped the brush in off-white.

Nigella squirmed ever so slightly. She was obviously somewhat embarrassed to be facing him this way, but she had grown
used to his power. “Yes. Still, you could be lonely like anyone else.”

Lonely, such a strange word. Could someone like him be lonely? Was the perfection of his being not enough to sustain him on its own?

Guessing from his presence in the little hut outside Marlheim, probably not, he thought.

“So you think I would take some human girl to be my wife, watch her shrivel like a prune, and then bury her and move on? What could a woman give me? Could she grasp my essence, my importance? What I am and what I stand for?”

She was brave, he had to grant her that. Brave, persistent. Anyone else would shut up at this point, but he could see a fresh idea rolling through her mind. He could see the spark in her eyes behind those spectacles. And for the thousand time, he wondered if she might like having her face fixed.

“But for that woman, it would be a whole life. It would be many years of love and passion and intrigue. She would serve you faithfully, spend her life by your side.”

Calemore grinned dryly. “Trying to understand what is beyond her?”

“Trying to please you, trying to be there for you,” she added weakly.

The White Witch began drawing the finer details of her belly, the slim muscles, the soft plump of birth. “Is that so?”

Nigella was silent this time, waiting for his reply.

“A woman who might partake in my immortality as a witness? Would she not grow bitter that I remain perfect while she grows older and weaker and uglier? What would be of her ambitions then? How can there be love for something that is so much more than a person can ever be?”

Then he remembered Elia and her human lover; he had not understood then, but he understood now.

He put down the brush and walked up to her, watching her closely. Her eyelid flickered, her cheek twitched, she swallowed.

“I have no wife,” he admitted finally. “I have taken human lovers throughout the centuries, so many of them. But they were meaningless toys. That’s all they ever were.”

Lonely? I am not lonely
.

She seemed to ignore everything else, focusing on his marital status. “But would you ever consider a human wife? Not a toy, someone you could share your future with?” she pressed, a brave little mouse snarling at the huge predator in front of it.

“And watch her die one day?” Calemore teased, diverting his frustration at her. Oh, he was feeling aroused, but he had to finish the painting first. So he withdrew behind the easel and resumed his artwork.

“How would that make you feel?”

The White Witch wondered if he could ever entrust his feelings to a human. It was a ludicrous idea. It was sensational madness. Let his feelings be manipulated by a woman and then see decades of his effort, his passion crumble to dust and become worm food one day? That was just petty indulgence, not befitting his status.