CHAPTER 33
C HAPTER 33
T HAT VOICE REACHED straight into Raider like it grabbed his bones. It froze him utterly.
He’d known he might hear it.
He’d known he might see the doubly familiar form that stepped from the catacombs into the dimly lit hallway.
Arrogant. Hawk nosed. Thin lipped. Dark eyed.
That face had loomed over him with a scalpel.
That face had loomed over him in bed.
Because it was the same face worn by two men. Two brothers who had shared a womb, who had been formed of the same flesh but not the same spirit.
Or maybe they had been?
Hassan, too, had been arrogant. Hassan, too, had grasped at what he wanted. Raider recalled it fully now, seeing that face. How he’d tried to evade Hassan’s interest. How little choice he’d had. How Hassan had ruled him, even if softly.
But Hassan had not hurt Raider as Kazir had done. Would he have, if Raider had resisted him?
A minute of difference in their births and it would have been Kahzir who had ruled the Gold. A minute of difference and perhaps Hassan would have broken Raider instead of his brother.
Regardless, it would always have been that face shaping his nightmares. That voice crawling through his mind.
All these thoughts in a moment. A heartbeat.
So much could happen in a heartbeat.
As the past seized Raider, so too did the present. And the present was Seth.
Seth yanked Raider back. Away from the catacomb entrance. Away from Kahzir. Away from the thing that came slinking out around him.
Raider hit the floor as Seth yanked his sword from its scabbard and swung. He cut straight through the neck of the humanoid creature. It looked like a roughly shaped clay figure, neither male nor female, something animate but without real life.
A homunculus.
When Seth’s sword hacked through its neck, the clay head tumbled. It hit the floor. The homunculus stepped on its own head, which stuck to its foot like a lumpy growth. Then the clay body rippled as the homunculus absorbed its own matter, and a head grew at the stump of its neck.
Again, all this in a heartbeat.
And next, in a heartbeat, the homunculus hit Seth in the chest so hard that he was sent flying backwards down the hallway.
Raider lunged for the homunculus, but it leaped clear over him, landing with a puff of clay dust. Raider scrambled up.
Two instincts tore at him. One said, Do not turn your back on Kahzir . But the other said simply, Seth!
So of course he turned his back on Kahzir. Of course he took that first desperate step in Seth’s direction. He even managed to summon the quicksilver, to send it shooting forward, spear-like, to impale the homunculus as it grabbed Seth by the front of his vest.
It was enough to buy Seth a second, to let him wrench free of the clay grip.
It was also enough to let Kahzir get behind him.
Raider jerked at the sharp prick in his neck and the familiar burn in his veins. Maybe, even then, if he had turned instantly on Kahzir with his quicksilver, he might have avoided his fate.
But he would never have chosen that. Instead, he used that last second of his strength to yank the clay creature away from Seth and slam it into the wall with the quicksilver spear—before the world faded.
***
Raider had been here before, more than once, in the murky void between life and death. More than once, he had haunted this space and seen others, wraithlike, passing through.
Always, he had a vague memory of his last moment before coming here.
The scalpel.
The Box.
Kahzir’s face—or Hassan’s?
This time, his last memory was the catacombs. The rough stone walls riddled with black-as-night alcoves where the ancient dead lay crumbling. The twists and turns. The creeping chill. And the fight with Kahzir as he’d clawed his desperate way back to semi-consciousness.
He’d had a weird, doubled feeling of being both inside and outside his body as he’d grabbed the syringe from his sash, flipped its cap, and jabbed it into his vein, shooting Julian’s drug into his bloodstream. He’d wrestled weakly with Kahzir after that. He remembered hitting the ground. He remembered another stinging prick. Then he’d found himself here in the nothingness between life and death. Where he’d been before.
On one of his journeys here, he’d glimpsed the river into the underworld. But Kasha, goddess of mysteries and the arcane, had appeared before him in all her dark splendor. Cloaked in shadows, with a raven upon her shoulder, she had blocked his view. She had told him to go back.
He had begged her not to send him back—begged and begged. He dreamed it sometimes, that moment, when he’d fallen to his knees before her heartless refusal, begging, Please. Don’t. Often, that dream would morph her into Kahzir. Just as cold. Just as cruel. With Raider on his knees.
He had never forgiven Kasha. In that moment, when she had forced him to return to Kahzir, when no other god had intervened, he had hated her. He had hated all the gods. But he had obeyed. He had turned his back to her as she had required.
But he had kept his back to her ever since.
She didn’t appear before him this time.
This time, when Raider glimpsed the river through the murky dark, he knew he could enter it. He would feel the cool embrace of the water. He would float along it among the other dead, to Hasa, where the death goddess would weigh his soul upon her golden scales.
This time, he didn’t want that.
He knew he would have to return to Kahzir. To pain. To horror. But he wanted to—because only by facing all that did he have any chance of getting back to Seth.
And he would choose Seth. Every time. Always.
When Raider turned away from the river to follow the bright line of pain back to his body, he found Kasha where she’d always been. At his back.
The goddess of the arcane mysteries wore her long dark robes, as before. Perched on her shoulder amid her dark hair was her raven. The skin around her eyes was black as though with heavy kohl, but her eyes themselves were icy pale.
For a moment, Raider thought she would once again refuse to let him pass, ever denying him what he wanted.
But Kasha bent down and pressed her lips to his forehead. Then she was gone. And Raider followed that bright line.
***
His whole body seized, bowing up as the current tore through every nerve and organ, jolting him back to life.
The pain was so intense that when Raider collapsed he couldn’t even draw breath to scream. He choked in what air he could.
He couldn’t hear, couldn’t see, couldn’t feel anything but the burning along his nerves and the twitching of his muscles.
Then he could see, and what he saw was Kahzir, just as he had so often seen him. Looming. Blocking the bright arcane light. His face half shadowed, his eyes colder than even Kasha’s could be, his thin lips moving.
Then he could hear, and what heard was that cool, arrogant voice saying, “Good.”
Then he saw, in the shadows, another. In the past, that other had stayed back, present but removed. He might hand Kahzir an instrument, might tend to the equipment.
This time, light reflected on that shadowed figure, catching at the crystalline orb hanging against his dark robes. This time, Fadesh stepped forward into the arcane light beside Kahzir.
Kahzir’s lips twitched in annoyance.
Enough feeling had returned to Raider’s body that he could perceive the collar around his neck and the bindings around his wrists and ankles. He pulled against the straps, but either they were very strong or he was very weak.
“Seth,” he gasped.
Kahzir chuckled. “Fadesh tells me you and Seth are lovers. How ironic that you should love someone I sent your way. It is only right, then, that I should take him away from you again.”
Raider yanked against his bonds. Kahzir’s hand, scarred so long ago by Raider in his first horror at the quicksilver, descended. That hand held his face to the side while Kahzir’s other jabbed the needle into his neck and injected the burning drug into his vein.
“You were always so difficult,” Kahzir sighed. “Always fighting. You won’t be fighting this. I don’t know what you injected yourself with, but it won’t matter. Ten more years I’ve had to refine my craft. I’ve not wasted that time. Oh, all the subjects I had at the Arcanum, working in the surgery. The freedom I had to experiment. My drugs are near perfection. I tell you this now because, soon, you won’t be yourself. You’ll think what I tell you to think. You’ll do what I tell you to do. You belong to me, Shashem. And when I let you enter the river of death, you’ll go in my chains.
“I’ll make use of you soon. When the drug is working fully, when your mind is reconditioned, you will help me secure the Gold, even expand it. You are so much finer than clay. You are my greatest work, far greater than even the Alchemist’s Stone.”
Beside Kahzir, Fadesh scowled and clutched with a golden hand—gold from the Alchemist—at the crystalline orb hanging from his neck. Fine gold chains wrapped around it, making for it a cage and a noose.
“You belittle me, even now. Look what I’ve accomplished! I have the power of the djinn, the power of life . I am your equal, your partner —”
Maybe Raider’s mind was processing slowly. Maybe that was why he didn’t see Kahzir move. But Fadesh didn’t seem to see Kahzir move either. One second, the arcanist was protesting. The next, a red line bloomed across his throat.
Maybe, even then, the power of the Alchemist’s Stone might have saved him. Indeed, the wound began to close. But Kahzir snatched the Stone from where it hung and yanked it away, snapping the golden chains.
His knife—no, a scalpel—flashed at Fadesh again, plunging into his black-robed body. The arcanist cried out in pain and shock. Then he crumpled to the ground.
“No one is my equal,” Kahzir sneered at him. “Not the maker of this thing. Certainly not you. Accomplished?” Kahzir spat on the groaning figure. “You snatched this when the opportunity was there. Now I have snatched it. Is that an accomplishment? No. But it is an asset—and I will use it. Partner? You were a mere instrument, wielded by my hand—and a clumsy instrument at that.”
Apparently satisfied, Kahzir bent to the groaning figure and slashed. There was a choking gurgle—then silence.
Kahzir straightened. His face was still. Emotionless once more. His eyes were cold. He calmly turned a lever at the head of the table.
Raider’s sluggish nerves jolted as the sides of the Box came up. A sound of horror slurred from him as the lid slid shut.
Raider shut his eyes, but he knew, of course, that it wouldn’t help. It wouldn’t change the fact that he could feel this closed-in space even without seeing it. It wouldn’t stop what was coming.
As the Box sent its first heavy shock through Raider’s body, he screamed.