Chapter 31
TAAR
“Give me to drink. Pour out blood unto me.”
Is it my own voice which pleads, again and again, or the voice of the virulium inside me, begging to be sated? I do not know; it does not matter now.
All that matters is the urge, eternal and desperate and without hope of an end.
Rivers of blood flow all around me, but though I search, I cannot find them.
My feet move like leaden weights through a landscape of dark shadows and twisted red lowlights.
The stench of iron is in my nostrils. I am parched.
I am famished. I am nothing more than need without end.
My body, such as it is, twists in convulsions of tormented pain, and when these convulsions strike, I cry out to Nornala for mercy.
But the Goddess does not hear me. Surely not even Nornala, in all Her power, can extend Her reach, Her presence, down into this hell.
So I march on, searching still. Torment without end.
But then . . . but then . . .
A shiver of energy pulses through me. It’s the first change I’ve felt in the midst of this endless monotony in what feels like a thousand years.
At first I cannot comprehend it, this ripple of awareness, pulling me, moving through me, splitting me into tiny fractions.
Then, as the feeling intensifies, I manage to yank some sort of awareness together, to focus and realize and be.
“Give me to drink!” roars the voice of she who feasts upon my soul.
Her wrath looms over me, a wave of darkness seeking to claim and hold tight to what belongs to her.
But the energy pulls me faster now, yanking apart what being I possess, hurtling me out from this reality of raw pain, out into the void of the Unformed.
I laugh—I have no voice, no tongue, no physical being with which to make a sound, and yet what there is of me laughs with pure joy—joy I never thought I would know again—as I am carried from hell out and up and away to wherever my rescue waits.
My prayers, such as they were, have been heard!
Blessed Nornala has not forgotten me, has not abandoned me to the virulium and the pain and the demon.
I will ascend to Her glory at last, I will . . .
Wait. What is this?
My laughter turns to screams as my essence becomes constricted, tighter and tighter.
It is crushed, out of the extended awareness of eternity back into a realm of time and matter, back inside a rotten, dead form.
I fight, struggle. The pain is worse even than the torment I just escaped.
I feel the physical weight, the putrid deadness, and I know this is not salvation, but a new form of hell.
My mind begins to awaken. I feel the place where the knife entered me, as though it were newly thrust there.
A scream rips from my throat. My eyes flare wide—dead eyes gazing out upon a living world where I no longer belong.
I roar and flail imprisoning limbs, my head shaking, my mouth slavering, a stream of pleading words struggling to form through inarticulate horror: “Why? Why? Why have you done this to me?”
As the initial pain fades, I fall back, my head lying against hard, stone floor. I stare up into . . . a face. A face which slowly comes into focus before my dead vision. A face I know so well, a face I have longed these twenty-odd years to behold.
“Father?” I gasp.
The word comes out garbled. I do not speak my own language, but a dialect of Ashtari, of hell itself. The word, meant to be rendered with so much love, emerges as a vile slur, spitting poison.
Those dark eyes look down at me from the face of my father.
Of Thalor, luinar of Licorna. His features twist with disgust, but there are tears in his eyes as well.
He grips me by the shoulders, his powerful hands trembling.
“Taar, my son,” he gasps, shaking his head even as tears fall down his cheeks.
“I know it isn’t right. Not yet, not yet.
But we are working on it. We are working to perfect the spell.
We require only enough power and the right channel for that power, and then .
. . eternal life! It is within our grasp! ”
He sounds like a madman, even to my dead ears. Mad and manic and delusional. But his fingers tighten on my shoulders, digging into my dead flesh. “We’ll make it all worth the sacrifice,” he says. “You will see.”
The sacrifice?
I blink—and in the momentary darkness behind my eyelids, I see myself, bound to a stone slab with chaeora ropes. A sacrifice indeed, slain in pursuit of a false god.
A howl of rage bursts from my throat. I thrash, writhe, but find my body is bound yet again, secured, no doubt, against this very waking rage.
No doubt I am not the first dead man to wake in horror at my own existence.
There is still virulium pulsing in my veins, reacting to the dark magic which invades me.
If I could only get free now, I would rip this man to pieces, him and his unrotten skin and his spirit-filled eyes.
This man, who plays games with eternity. This man, who killed my mother.
Thalor yanks back, startled by my fury. Someone else steps into his place, someone else grasps my shoulders and looks deeply into my eyes.
“Welcome back, beloved,” Shanaera says, smiling with her blackened teeth. “I told you we would be together again soon.”
I rip one arm free, grasp hold of her elbow. “What is happening to me?” I growl, my tongue spewing the language of hell. But it is a language Shanaera understands.
She tilts her head to one side, lunatic delight suffusing her rotten features.
“You have come back to me, just as I always planned.” She leans in close, whispers in my ear, “And we shall kill them together. Your father and Morthiel, both. We shall have vengeance for Licorna and make it new under our rule. But first you must appear to submit. Do you understand? We have need of them still.”
I am shaking, ravening, red foam spilling from my lips. I want to tear my own flesh apart, to escape it, to let my soul fly free once more. But then I think of the hell from which I have just emerged, and terror chokes my rage. I cling to Shanaera, desperate, screaming.
Thalor turns, addressing another party in the room, one I cannot see from where I lie. “Can you do nothing more for him?”
A thin voice responds: “I cannot do more without the princess’s gods-gift.”
No sooner does he speak than a sudden burst of song erupts in my ears.
I don’t know how to understand it. It is like the brilliance of the moon and all the starry host, gathered together in chorus, singing a song which has been sung throughout the ages of existing reality, but which my ears have only just opened up to hear.
The sound is anathema to the un-song which sustains me. I shrink away, horrified.
But beyond Shanaera—beyond the figure of my father, beyond the shadowy forms with faces I do not know and cannot discern—beyond them all, a great, horned beast raises his head suddenly.
His black eyes flare, not with light, but with darkness.
He tosses his head and makes a sound, but the sound is like nothing these ears of mine have ever before heard. It is the sound of un-song itself.
That wheedling, thin voice speaks again: “The princess even now approaches. Her gift is great, greater than I initially supposed. And she has gathered licorneir with her. I must meet her myself and lay claim to that gift.”
Thalor answers in a growl, “You are not ready.”
“Then,” the voice replies, “you must make me ready.”
I cling to Shanaera like a child, my addled mind struggling to make sense of the world around me.
Again I hear that distant song, that burst of light.
Again my body and being recoils. I try to force some awareness into my brain, to take stock of my surroundings.
I lie on a stone floor, my arms and legs bound with chaeora ropes.
The walls of the circular chamber are blocked in, but it feels familiar to me.
Some part of my memory knows there once were tall windows here, looking out on all sides.
My gaze turns to the horned beast standing in the center of the chamber. At last a jolt of true recognition shoots through me like galvanization. Onoril! My father’s licorneir! I know him, I recognize him, the magnificent great beast who is my father’s heart-bound.
Madness rises up in me again, an obscuring dark fog. I scream, wordless terror and panic bursting from inside me like pressure released but never truly eased. Thalor, my father, turns to Shanaera and snarls, “Can you not keep him quiet?”
She wraps her arms more tightly around me, rocking gently and murmuring, “Shhhh, shhhhh.”
Activity moves on the edges of my vision.
They seem to be mounting something on the wall.
Some strange creature, like an ape I think at first, fastened by its wrists to ropes hanging from hooks in the ceiling.
It takes some blinking from my death-filmed eyes before I recognize that it is—or was—a man.
An ancient, withered husk of a man that should not be alive but somehow is.
Magic moves in his veins, bubbling and oozing from every pore and orifice as the profound energy leeches out from him.
It must require a tremendous work of spellcraft to keep that sack of bones and sagging flesh intact, to keep the spirit trapped inside.
Thalor observes as the ancient thing is secured to the wall.
Then, with a last desperate look at me, he turns to Onoril and mounts him.
It is so strange to see—that image I have longed for all these years.
My father on his licorneir, both proud and beautiful and strong.
And yet in this place, they have become the stuff of nightmares.
I see black soulfire licking from the corners of my father’s eyes.
“You will see, Taarthalor,” he says, his voice firm and clear. “I will make it right. Just as I promised your mother. I will make it all right and see Licorna become the greatest power in all Eledria.”
I open my mouth to shout the truth at him. My mother is dead. She died in the first fall of the vardimnar. She and a million souls perished that day, twenty years ago . . .
But I cannot form the words, not even in hell-speak.
Thalor begins to sing. The bond he shares with Onoril is profound, and his voice instantly calls awake the soulfire of his mount.
It flares black and furious across the licorneir’s shoulders, along his arching neck, an intensity of magic beyond anything I have ever witnessed.
In all my years of bonding with Elydark, of riding with other Licornyn and witnessing their bonds, I have never seen anything like this flame.
As my father sings, as he channels the song of his licorneir into a line of power, a ripple goes out from them—like branching lightning, bursting from this chamber out into the sky beyond.
Clawing across the heavens in stark warning of what is to come.
My heart is dead. It no longer beats, torn apart as it is. But I feel it, a heavy stone in my chest, sagging against my ribcage. I know what is coming next. I know what that black lightning foreshadows.
The stones of the floor begin to glow, to melt, to churn. I watch them move, whorl, and then seem to burn away entirely. Onoril, having shifted his footing, stands on the lip of a great pit of howling, ravening darkness.
And so my father and his licorneir unleash hell upon my world once more.