Page 51

I awoke in darkness. Pain ripped through my left side with each breath, and I could not inhale completely.

I coughed. Flecks of bright red blood splattered the hand I held up, searing pain the answer to my movement.

Short, controlled breaths were all I could manage.

My right shoulder ached deep in the joint from catching the sword blow, and the gash it had left burned.

Luckily, it wasn’t much more than skin deep.

I don’t know how long I laid there, immobile and aching.

My existence was one breath to the next.

A light flared in the dark, the bright line of a crack in a door and entering candlelight. My head pounded and I struggled to clear my blurred vision.

“Awake. Good,” said a woman’s voice. “Ah. I told them to fix you up. Clearly they didn’t listen.”

A woman’s face glowed in the candlelight, the single source of illumination casting shadows on her wrinkled face.

She used her candle to light several more, bathing the small room in a warm glow.

A contrast to cold, bare stone walls. She bore the same three piercings through her lips that I had seen on the anchorites during my visit to the Temple in Avanis, but no chain bound her mouth.

She crouched beside me and placed a hand on my broken ribs.

“This will hurt,” was all she said.

Roaring, searing pain shot through me. It felt like she was burning my skin, melting through to the bone. I felt my ribs shift under my flesh, pulling at already torn muscles, and both her hand and my skin glowed with a deep blue light, almost black at its edge. I screamed.

As quickly as it began, it was over. The pain ceased, the light faded, and she removed her hand. I took a shuddering breath and felt no resistance, no pain.

“What the hell was that?” I choked.

“Healing. Better now?” she asked.

I nodded, and sat up. My head still rang with pain, my shoulder was stiff and aching, but I could move.

“Let me see your shoulder,” she commanded.

I flinched away from her touch, but she grabbed the injured shoulder and steadied it in her view.

I bit down on the groan I wanted to emit.

She placed her hand over the torn flesh, and the same dim light emanated from it, along with a similar answering pain.

Less intense than repairing my ribs had been.

When she was done, I leaned over and put my head in my hands, trying to regain my breath.

“Here, drink this. All of it.” She set a large glass jug of water on the table beside the cot where I lay. “I’ll return with food.”

She stood to leave, and I asked after her, “Where am I?”

“The Temple of Enos, Lord of Light.” She swept out the door and closed it promptly behind her. I heard the lock click into place.

Tears burned, and my dry throat ached with the threat of crying. Fury bubbled in my empty stomach, roiling like a black, waiting storm.

The curt woman returned some time later, and I ate a bland meal of bread and stale goat’s cheese.

I found a bucket in the corner meant to serve as my toilet, and then collapsed back into my cot.

I felt wrong, sluggish, like I’d drunk too much ale or had been drugged with a heavy dose of magic mushrooms, just without the light, pleasant part of those experiences. I began to drift back into sleep.

Yet just before it consumed me, I saw a face. A young woman’s face, wide blue eyes staring into mine from above, blood dripping from her mouth. One final, rasping, shuddering breath as she died, impaled on an ice blade of my making. I slept fitfully.

∞∞∞

I came to consciousness in the darkness. It was not as complete as what I had woken up in hours ago. I could see details now. A space filled with swirling fog, or black smoke. I couldn’t smell it, couldn’t discern what it was, couldn’t see walls or the ceiling through it.

“You poor thing. Sweet morning lamb.” A deep voice, reverberant and hollow, permeated the darkness.

I froze in the silence that followed.

A swirl of black, of ash and smoke. Thick enough that it should have made me cough, but I did not feel it as I breathed in this void space. I waited, listening, held in stasis by instinctual fear.

“There’s nothing you can do. It has already been done,” the voice murmured.

It struck something primal in me, a deep, remembered terror of what it was to be hunted, of the eternal dance of predator and prey. The tense, quivering, coiled legs of the hare, waiting to spring away as the wolf approached. But where was the wolf?

Something in that voice was wrong. So very wrong.

“Who’s there?” I spoke into the dark.

“You know me,” the deep voice answered. “I was there.”

“You were where?” I said, fighting the shake that crept into my vocal cords.

“With you, when you did it. When you spilled blood.”

I summoned my courage, rose and stepped forward, searching for the candles that had been there, anything to light this darkness. But there was nothing. Only blackness filled with dark, swirling fog.

“You don’t need to see. We can speak here in the dark like this,” the voice said. Sourceless, directionless. But clearly it could see me.

“Show yourself. Speak to me face to face.”

“Oh, but we are, we are. I’ve seen your face, and I think you’ve seen mine. I was there with you, with them, in death.” The deep voice carried through the fog.

“You were in Rhyanaes?” I asked into the void.

“Yes. I saw you. You didn’t see me?”

“Show me your face and I’ll tell you.”

A low, rumbling laugh. Humorless and empty. “You know me. I saw you know me. I saw you,” it repeated.

“How will I know if I can’t see your face?” I searched the fog, turning and scanning.

The voice resonated from behind me then. “You do not need to see to know. You only need to trust.”

“It’s difficult to trust those who won’t look me in the eye.” I turned in the direction of the voice, but saw only drifting fog.

I heard it from behind me again, closer, just over my shoulder. “That’s why they call it faith, child.”

“Get away from me,” I said, turning and backing up, trying to find the cot behind me. I reached for my power but nothing answered. No Source, no life. Nothing. The stillness of the world around me was horrifying. All dead, all empty.

“Run then, girl. You will not hide from me forever. I saw you. I saw you… I saw you.”

Those final words echoed in my head as I awoke with a gasp on the hard cot. I flung out my awareness, reaching for power, searching for any presence in the pitch black of the room. But I was alone.

I did not sleep again that night.

∞∞∞

Gray light shone through a high window. Heavy iron bars were visible across it, dull and black against the pale sky, to my dismay although not to my surprise.

I was to be a prisoner here, just like Eilith.

Some cog in their political wheel, some chess piece to play when it suited them. The gods damned bastards.

Food and water were brought shortly after dawn by the same terse woman. She removed the bucket and brought it back empty.

“High Priestess Zisorah will see you soon. You are to treat her with respect,” the woman said.

“Oh, the woman who locked me in here? Who’s holding me prisoner? Who sent her minions to gut innocent people in the streets of my city? Respect begets respect. I’ll show it only where it’s due,” I said venomously.

She glared at me from the doorway. “Then you will learn what happens if you do not.”

“What’s your name?” My question seemed to catch her off guard. She hadn’t considered introducing herself to me.

She paused, then said, “Deacon Tessivia. You’ll do wise to listen to my instruction.” And then, in her usual sharp manner, she turned and was gone.

As soon as she left I sent my awareness out after her, out beyond the walls of the room. My head still ached, although it was more of a dull thudding than the pounding roar it had been. Nonetheless, it made focusing my awareness more difficult.

It wasn’t just the headache and exhaustion from the battle the previous day. The same wards I had felt in the Temple before were still at work, even heavier here. My awareness was muffled, muted, as if looking through dirty water. It felt like my ears were plugged but, frustratingly, wouldn’t pop.

I could feel two guards posted outside my door, feel Deacon Tessivia walking away down a long corridor, although she faded from my sensing quickly.

I reached in the other direction, outside the Temple, and found my awareness ended entirely at the stone walls.

The solid and impermeable wards held it back.

I was alone. Helpless, feeble, ineffectual.

A feeling I had never wanted to experience again, had fought and trained and practiced for the last year and a half to never feel again.

I tried to summon my power repeatedly, even just simple spells of force to slam against the door.

They resulted in little more than knocking, barely rattled the heavy door in its hinges.

My frustration warped to anger, then ballooned to fury.

I moved about the cell, squatting, jumping, shadowboxing. I ran through a usual warmup from training, then a long stretch. My whole body ached in response, but I couldn’t sit still.

Hours passed. Most of the day maybe, until I finally heard the clack of heeled shoes approaching down the hall. They stopped in front of my cell door; it creaked open. I sat on the cot and leaned back against the wall.

The High Priestess swept in. She wore a simple, trim gown of gold. Her face was completely enveloped in a mask again, but this one was made of black fabric with visible structured boning. It reminded me of a corset. Like the gold one from our previous meeting, it bowed out over her face.

“Welcome back to the Temple, Halja,” she said. Still pompous, but without the air of graciousness she had used when addressing us all from her throne.

“A pleasure,” I sneered.