18. TORMENT
TORMENT
YSIRA
In a strange twilight state that was neither sleep, nor death, nor wakefulness, Ysira understood the depth of her error.
The Lord of Hunger had deigned to meet her face-to-face and told her the closely guarded secrets of her world.
He had fed her assurances of his benevolence, tried to dazzle and intimidate her with his incalculable power and wisdom.
All of it a means to an end. Her cooperation may have proven convenient, but he had never required it.
Once he deduced she would not fall for his manipulations, he had retreated and waited until her guard was down.
Extradimensional fingertips circled Ysira’s passenger like a swirling mist, making her head spin. The demon tightened around her brainstem and curled inward like a kirikil in its shell. With deft precision, Tharanoth followed the path of least resistance to the heart of Ysira’s being.
Helpless as he rifled through her subconscious, she glimpsed her old selves as though from a distance.
Her earliest memories were of home. Her mother’s hands as she braided Ysira’s hair.
Ash on the wind as a Guardsman pulled her from the rubble of an adobe dwelling.
Hugging her threadbare woven blanket, the only familiar thing she brought inside the Citadel’s pale walls.
There she was at twelve, in a line with Saraida and several others.
They pointed at her and whispered, mocking her accent and her shabby clothes.
But Ysira listened to the Knight Instructor with rapt attention, deciding then and there that it was her destiny to be the greatest of them.
She caught a glimpse of Seth, so young she barely recognized him, beside a pale, grey-robed Church novitiate.
Then Ysira was sixteen, flatchested and wiry. She showed a piece of parchment to Saraida—her acceptance to train as a Knight Candidate. Saraida grabbed her hands and congratulated her, and they were both smiling, but when Saraida spoke again, Ysira’s face fell.
“Pity,” said a voice in her head. Tharanoth.
“She was to be groomed for leadership, and you would only ever be her shadow.” Something rustled out of sight, like a many-legged thing scurrying in the desert brush.
“Does it gratify you to know her illustrious family means as little to me as the rest of your kind?” The curiosity in his tone was unsettlingly genuine. “House Semira too.”
Ysira shuddered at the sight of Ged. She was naked beneath him, trailing her hands over his muscles, batting her lashes and murmuring inanities as she’d seen other people do.
Saraida had told her this was the most natural thing in the world, that her body would know what to do, but it didn’t.
Nothing Ysira did seemed to have any effect on Ged, until her gasp of pain when he penetrated her.
She must have been broken. She wanted it to be over, but she’d forgotten how to speak. At least Ged was quick about it.
But . . . she remembered it so differently.
When Ysira was very young, she’d often mistaken wanting to be a man or woman for wanting them.
Ged dominated every room he entered, took whatever he desired, commanded effortless power.
What Ysira felt for him was not attraction so much as a desire to crawl out of her own unsatisfactory skin and inhabit his—to taste what it was like to be someone of consequence.
As he pulled off her clothes and promised her everything she ever wanted, she believed him.
She had been in control. Hadn’t she? But through the god’s dispassionate eyes, she looked like a girl out of her depth, and Ged looked like a man grown.
“We let them do as they please, take whatever worthless things they want, and believe it’s their choice,” said Tharanoth. “They mistake their comfort for power.”
Then Ysira was leaving the Citadel, wiping away angry tears as she turned in her uniform and practice weapons. The training supervisor wore a look of pity that made Ysira want to hit her. Perhaps she should have. Why not? Her life was already ruined.
And then—
She stumbled into a dusty alleyway, eyes glazed with a rainbow shimmer. She was somewhere in the Knots, not far from where her childhood home burned down all those years before. The eclipsed sun hung low in the sky.
There was a sharp pain in her arm, beneath her consecration scar. She couldn’t move. She collapsed in the sand. A circle of lights descended on her from above, and the last thing she remembered was an utter lack of surprise. Of course, this was how her story ended.
Ysira knew what came next. She didn’t want to remember it, let alone experience it again.
She fought it, but Tharanoth swatted away her efforts with casual ease.
What followed came in fragments. More lights.
A white room. Pain. Fear. Tharanoth had no use for most of these memories, shuffling through without fully exhuming any until—
“Here we are.”
The buried memory surfaced in crystalline detail. Ysira might have pretended it was a scene from someone else’s life, if not for the cold bite of shackles on her wrists and the stench of death in the air. She had been there before.
She stood in a cramped, cavernous tunnel in a line of prisoners, all wearing metal collars with blinking lights around their necks.
Individuals in bulky armor stood sentinel behind them and at the exit.
They outnumbered the prisoners four to one.
They moved like nightmarish imitations of people, with eyeless masks and distorted voices.
A lone individual walked down the line, pausing before each prisoner. Ysira watched him, heart thudding as he approached. She looked half-dead—head shaved, skin scraped and mottled with bruises.
Tharanoth focused on the instant the demon entered her body. She sensed his frustration at the fact that she’d closed her eyes, unable to watch as the man cupped an armored hand over her ear and something slithered inside.
The sensation returned to Ysira, catapulting her back into her seventeen-year-old body. First came a stabbing pain. Then her head was too full. The demon convulsed and spread, tendrils of fire shooting along her every nerve.
None of the other prisoners had screamed, but Ysira did. She’d have fallen or tried to run—anything—if the armored man hadn’t shoved her back into line. He squeezed a device in his hand, sending a jolt of electricity through her body. She hardly noticed it. When the agony faded,
there remained the sense that she was no longer alone inside her own skin.
The prisoners were herded to a dusty box of a room. With a bone-shaking boom, a massive metal door shut behind them.
Before long, the demons began to wreak havoc with their minds. The other prisoners shambled around, making inhuman noises,
stumbling into walls. Some forgot to blink, staring at nothing with dry, inflamed eyes. One simply stopped breathing. But most . . . their irises turned dull and yellow. Their teeth fell out. Black forcipules twitched through their gums.
Every child of the Knots had heard stories of the Osuun, whispered late at night to frighten them away from the canyon.
Stories of the gods-forsaken hunters that roamed the ruins of Zal Fel in search of human flesh.
With dawning horror, Ysira began to understand her fate.
Tharanoth dredged up her every memory of the days that followed, hunting for whatever details he found relevant, and it felt like an eternity passed.
It had seemed an eternity then, too, as she fought for her life and waited and waited and waited for the transformation to find her.
When the metal doors opened again, Ysira’s armored captors found her alive and unchanged, crouched in a pile of mutated corpses.
They spoke an unfamiliar language, voices echoing strangely beneath their helmets.
They stopped several feet from Ysira, appearing to argue as she stared at them.
She was so exhausted by then, half-starved and sick to her stomach, that she didn’t have the wherewithal to act when one of them pulled out a short utility knife.
The other shouted something—a warning? It went unheeded. The armored person grabbed Ysira by the wrist, yanked her forward, and sliced off her little finger.
As she screamed, they continued to argue.
They hauled her up and marched her back through the metal doors, through a maze of dusty halls, and Ysira found herself begging for her life.
What life even meant to her now, she didn’t know, but she had finally summoned the presence of mind to realize she did not want to die.
Her captors did not understand a word she said—or maybe they just didn’t care. They arrived at the edge of a chasm, where the labyrinth dropped off into the dark. A horrible stench drifted up from below.
“Please,” Ysira gasped. “Please don’t do this.”
For one wild moment, she thought they might spare her. But instead, the one who’d cut off her finger took out his utility knife. Quick and efficient, he drove the tip beneath Ysira’s consecration scar and dug out a tiny piece of metal.
He slit her throat from ear to ear, and everything went black.
“An error, then,” came Tharanoth’s soft voice.
“My servants meant to infect you with a Category One demon and add you to the . . . security system for our base at Zal Fel. It seems, by mistake, they gave you something else. They removed your tracking device and left you for dead, hoping their stupidity would go unnoticed.”
Ysira could not see him—could not see anything—but she felt his presence like a spider crawling down her spine.
“You hoped you might be special,” he said. “Chosen, even. This must be difficult for you.” There was that curiosity again as he watched his specimen squirm.
“You were an error,” he repeated, “born of careless incompetence and fear of punishment. They were not nearly afraid enough.” He hummed again.
“I’ll have them identified soon enough. I’ll infect them with Category Ones, let them live long enough to endure the transformation, then serve them to their division leaders for dinner.
Perhaps I’ll let you watch. Would you like that? ”
Her revulsion made him chuckle. “Our titles have become a matter of pageantry—each domain a manner of suffering from which we deliver you, given the proper reverence. But it was your own ancestors who chose them. They called me the Lord of Hunger because they knew how I punished defiance. They knew their greatest possible value lay in the meat on their bones and its capacity to feed me.”
He still wasn’t finished with her. He watched her crawl out of the mass grave, along the deepriver, back to Zivora.
He watched her recover at a pace that was no less than miraculous and return to the Citadel heavy with child.
He watched her give birth. He watched her weep as she clutched her newborn son to her breast, overwhelmed by the nightmare that was his existence, the consuming love she felt for him, and the shock of being alive.
Ysira saw her eighteen-year-old self, on the verge of following Ogden out the door.
She paused over Neri’s cradle to stroke his soft black hair one last time.
She said goodbye. It was the most private of memories, and sharing it with Tharanoth made her want to vomit.
But she was no longer made of flesh—only an untethered consciousness drifting in the void. A prisoner inside her own mind.
“So, the boy was conceived before you were infected,” the Lord of Hunger observed. “And carried to term under the influence of rare demonic power. Fascinating.”
Again, he did not seem troubled, merely curious. As though this were but an unexpected outcome of an experiment. He released his grip on her mind, and it was like a fist unclenched from around her very soul.
When Ysira awoke, she was alone once more. Bright lights flared around her. She tried to shield her eyes and found her limbs chained to the hard surface on which she lay. Horror clawed at her insides. The memories, once buried, refused to fade. She remembered it all, and it was too much to bear.
Every emotion she’d buried over the course of the last week .
. . the last decade . . . she was suddenly no match for them.
Her breath came fast and shallow. She was too small, a mote of dust floating high above the world, alone.
With a wrenching scream, she thrashed in her restraints.
She couldn’t breathe she couldn’t breathe she couldn’t fucking breathe—
She twisted onto her side, cramming her face against the stiff white fabric just to have something solid to lean on, and this time, her scream became a sob. Once she’d started, she could not stop.