Chapter 12 #2
He turned and found a modest cabin. The windowpanes were clouded from age and neglect, and beyond the door was a scene of overturned chairs and undisturbed cobwebs.
His boots came free with a croaky thwack, and he climbed to the safety of the splintered steps.
In the distance, between two clusters of trees, were the doors.
He could barely make them out, but the movement drew him into a soothing trance he had to force himself to break.
Jesstin ransacked the single-room shack, turning over the same chairs and tables already on their sides, as if Elloven might be hiding behind one. He yanked on the uneven floorboards, bloodying his nails, but there was nothing but more swamp beneath them.
She wouldn’t be there, though, would she? The Conductor would reveal her when and only when it was ready.
He’d finally stopped thinking of the creature as she. That felt like progress.
Jesstin paused in the doorframe, exhausted but defiantly resisting the call of defeat. This was not his scene to create or pattern. He could only react to what the Conductor had crafted for him.
He rubbed the sweat and grime from his eyes. When he opened them, a man stood in front of him—or what had once been a man. No, he would not, could not, even say that for the stench of a being skulking in the muck, because no man could ever have done what the beast had done to Elloven.
“Of course it’s you,” Jesstin spat. He shook his head to the side. “It’s too bad you can’t talk. But you can listen. Might as well have ourselves a little conversation while we wait for this bitch to decide what’s next. We’re overdue, I’d say.”
Fabrien glittered like dust. His features were still perceptible enough to imagine the cut of the human he’d once been, but his eyes reflected the dearth of humanity.
“But I can speak, you impudent twit.” The fiend’s voice was inhuman.
It was the sound of the monsters from Jesstin’s boyhood nightmares.
When it grinned, black gaps appeared between his teeth, like mortar.
“You’re just the first who can hear us.”
Jesstin’s hand traveled to his belt out of habit. But even if he hadn’t left his sword at the cloister in the Seventh, it had no power against such disease.
“You seem surprised, Skylark. Or is it Edevane?”
Jesstin couldn’t kill what was already dead, and there weren’t deaths enough for the creature staring at him, smiling at him.
But the Conductor would expect his rage to take the reins, as it so wanted to do, and that was why he held it.
“Thought there was nothing left of you, between Elloven’s justice and the whole. ..” He flapped a hand.
Fabrien spread his arms wide, revealing the faded livery of House Quinlanden. Time, fate, and the loss of half of his flame had tattered it, and it hung off him like loose, rotting flesh. “I’m the same as I ever was, mostly.”
“It eats you up, having no power over her.” Jesstin descended a step. He noted that Fabrien was standing atop the swamp mud, unaffected by its pull. “It eats you up.”
“Don’t I though?”
“That’s done.”
“Because she has her big, brave protector?” Fabrien said the words in a mocking tone, his face a punchable match.
“She took care of you and your mates well enough on her own. Five of you, was it? Against one tiny little woman?”
“Seven years it took her, and she couldn’t even look us in the eye. You have to wonder, don’t you, when someone with her power chooses to endure what she could stop at any time. Seven years. Did she love it? Secretly? Did she crave it?”
Jesstin’s thoughts returned to the scarred brand on Elloven’s thigh, Fabrien’s attempt to erase her identity, and he almost lost the battle.
He clung to his belief that he was not there to rise to whatever challenge the Conductor had laid but to endure it.
“I’ll enjoy killing you, and I won’t make a secret of it. ”
“I’m already dead.” Fabrien laughed. He glanced down at his bare chest. “I could be less dead, however...”
“That flame will never be yours.”
“I’m not here for her flame. You don’t really believe that?”
Jesstin didn’t answer.
“I already have what I want, bastard-born. I got it every night she’d suckle and ration her sleeping draught to escape me. But it’s even better when she fucks you and it’s me she sees and feels. I live under your skin now too.”
Hold. It. Together. Fabrien was part of the game. The Conductor wanted him to lose.
Jesstin grinned through the strain in his cheeks. “Eternity is a long time to listen to your own nonsense.”
Fabrien took a step. It was more of a glide, the way he moved along the surface of the thick brine. “She’s not here, is she? Because it took her.”
Jesstin was momentarily taken aback at the reference. Fabrien either was the Conductor, knew the Conductor, or had been created by the Conductor. The question sat right on the tip of his tongue.
“The Overseer,” Fabrien said. “But you know it as something else, don’t you? It has many identities. It’s everywhere.”
“Illusions are only that,” Jesstin retorted.
“The Overseer architected this place, and it architects your steps even now.” Fabrien’s tongue lashed the bottom of his jagged upper teeth. “It made me thus. It’s your master now too.”
Why had it never occurred to Jesstin that the Conductor might be more than a run-of-the-mill conjurer of deceits?
Suddenly, everything made sense. How it was everywhere.
The omnipotence. The games. Why wouldn’t the author of an eternal prison enjoy engineering its mysteries?
“I don’t fear cheap magicians with superiority obsessions.
It takes here what it couldn’t get in the real world. ”
“How could it, when it is as dead as anything else here? All except you, but it will remedy that soon enough.” Bitterness dripped from Fabrien’s words, a slip of his mask.
He’d specifically called the Conductor dead. Not a god, not an immortal demon, just dead. The flame it wore, then, wasn’t just decoration.
The creature’s supremacy had limitations, and Jesstin would find them.
Whether Fabrien was deceiving him or not, it was all he had.
Jesstin laughed, and he kept on laughing when Fabrien bristled at the sound. “Enjoy the hell Elloven created for you. I have shit to do.”
“If they involve that little whore of a witch you came here for, you might find my methods soothing compared to the Overseer’s.”
It was the glee in the fiend’s eyes that set Jesstin off. He flexed his hands and rolled his knuckles. “Looks like I’m breaking a promise, but I guess it won’t be the first fucking time.” He dropped his talisman into the swamp.
“She’s here,” said the fiend, who looked beyond Jesstin. Then it answered the question Jesstin hadn’t asked. “Our Ellie. Who else?”
Jesstin’s anger was so visceral he lost his upper hand. Within seconds, the fiend had wrapped its hand around Jesstin’s flame and yanked.
But then he gasped with his entire chest as he surged upright, brine and weeds coming with him. He had no memory of the transition between the fiend’s seizure of his flame and mud choking his throat.
The fiend was gone though.
He could have sworn Elloven had been there, just as the fiend had said. He’d been talking to her, and she’d responded, but he must have dreamed it.
But the doors—all three—were right there. Inches from his face. Glowing. Swirling. Beckoning.
He stood, but after only a single step forward—
Jesstin landed in snow up to his ankles.
At least it felt like snow, but what snow was blood red?
Harsh, icy wind lashed him to the bone, and he almost fell again.
The crimson squall consumed his surroundings, though he could just make out the crags of a distant peak, a perfectly rouged match for the homochromous landscape.
The three foreboding doors hovered above the ground, all red-and-white swirls now, like the candies the sweetmeat vendor made only at Wintertide Jubilee.
“Our necromancer is more determined than I gave him credit for.” The Conductor stepped out from behind one of the doors, removing her top hat as she waltzed forward. It. Remember, this is no woman. Whatever it was in life, it’s this now. “But his journey has ended.”
“I know who you are,” Jesstin called. He planted his stance to combat the gale. “What you are.”
“Oh, dear!” The Conductor clutched its chest in mock affront. Its pursed lips were as shiny and red as a porcelain apple. “Whatever will you do with such verity?”
Jesstin had underestimated the Conductor, certainly. While he’d never believed it would offer a fair trade, he’d assumed it had a reputation to uphold. He had no advantage now except his wits, but the creature had spent thousands of years refining its performance. “Does my knowing unnerve you?”
“Little does,” it answered blithely, then dusted snow from its lapels.
“You already knew why I’d come. You knew before I even ended up in your market.”
“For the girl.” Its eyes rolled as it sang its next words. “Always the girl.”
“You know I’m talking about something else.” There seemed some force between them that prevented him from coming closer. “It’s why you helped me. So I’d be too distracted by my concern for her to follow through on my other promise.”
“You’re not imaginative enough for such convolutions. Just the first red-blood to come here and remain a red-blood.” It clucked its tongue. “There have been others. But their blood soon ran purple.”
Nothing it said could be taken as fact, but it seemed an odd thing to lie about. “So you were... curious?”
The Conductor shrugged. “Your confusion is predictable. Yes, I can see you lack Elloven’s implacable inquisitiveness.”
It would only talk in circles. That much was evident. So was the Conductor’s effort to keep him from finding the doors. “You didn’t know I was coming at all.” Jesstin forced a laugh. “I was a genuine surprise. You don’t get many of those anymore, do you?”