Carol Berg - Son of Avonar

“Giano has planned all this,” I told him, surprised to find the torrent of words bursting free of Giano’s silencing. “It’s why we were able to free you so easily last night. He let us do it. Just as he let us go at Ferrante’s, and in Yurevan, and again in Montevial. They never wanted to capture you. I was so stupid to think we had outsmarted them again and again. It was always too easy. Did you hear him? When you said you wouldn’t lie down and die for him, he said he never intended that you should. He brought Tomas, knowing well he could never defeat you. Giano wants you to kill them all.”

“Then tell me what I must do!” said the Prince, throwing his knife to the floor, his mouth tight with anger.

I had to follow Dassine’s lead. Instruction could not give the Prince the power he needed. “You must find the answer inside yourself. Dassine believed you could. I believe it. I know you, D’Natheil. You are worthy… so very worthy… of our trust.”

“So the Prince of Fools has become a slave to a woman,” said Giano, stepping forward. Perhaps I only imagined the note of anxiety in his sneering. “Ironic, is it not, that by sending you to this woman, Dassine has robbed you of your only virtue? The Dulcé was right. She is a curse.”

But the Prince was not listening to Giano. He took up his knife again, brushing his fingers along the blade and staring at the burned Zhid who lay moaning in wordless agony. D’Natheil’s stony visage softened to puzzled curiosity as he touched the dying warrior’s mutilated arm.

Giano stiffened and hissed, and without warning he wrapped his arms about me and yanked me to his breast. The dagger that had taken Baglos’s life and that of the highwaymen in During Forest was poised at my heart, and one by one my senses burst into flame, until I believed that the Gate fire must be burning beneath my very skin. But the Prince did not look up, and I refused to cry out. He needed time to see his way.

My captor dragged me toward the wall of fire, the blue-black curtain soaring in vicious exhilaration into the murky heights, and the Zhid began to laugh with such triumphant wickedness that D’Natheil was drawn to look. When the Prince saw what was happening, all softness fled from his face. He leaped up, grabbing his sword, and my heart shriveled. Giano’s fire had grown so fierce that I could not bear it, and I began to sob.

“Let go of the woman,” said the Prince, cold and angry. “I am the one you want.”

“So you are, but I will have you on my terms. We must rid ourselves of this meddlesome female before she saps all your resolve.” And with wicked laughter that rang through the stone chamber, Giano shoved me through the wall of black fire.

I was not dead. Either the Zhid was wrong that the passage of the barrier would destroy me or he didn’t truly want me dead. But the place where I existed had no relationship to any world I knew. Bolts of lightning slashed through purple-gray clouds above a desolation of skeletal trees and naked crags. Though lurid and grotesque, such a view would have been almost comprehensible if it had been the entirety of the landscape. But from the corners of my eyes I glimpsed entirely different scenes: on one side a field of garishly colored flowers that budded and bloomed and withered in moments under a livid sun, and, on the other, a slow-moving river of filth that was a crush of emaciated men and women, clawing and trampling each other so as to drink from a lake of blood. When I turned my head to either hand, the scene would vanish, and only the alien landscape remain. A bitter wind lacerated my skin, leaving bloody tracks, and the tumultuous roar of the Gate fire— now deafening in its volume—was riven with a hideous, howling chorus of despair. Hellish pandemonium. My flesh did not burn like that of the Zhid who had touched the fire. But my being vibrated like a violin string out of tune, and great cracks exploded through my reason so that I could not hold the fragments of myself together. Visions… or memories… yet not memories… nothing of beauty or sweetness… displayed themselves against the mad backdrop: my drunken father vomiting over Tomas’s dying body, Martin laughing as he stripped the skin from a screaming Tennice’s back, and my mother, my lovely, delicate mother, mating in a sweating frenzy with Evard. One after the other, such twisted visions supplanted each memory I treasured, severing every link to love, joy, pride, or accomplishment until only horror was real.

Perhaps this is death, after all. If so, then let it be done with. The dark void proclaimed by Leiran priests, the absolute ending I had always dreaded, would be far better.

Though my mind was chaos, my feet stood on solid ground. I was no longer held captive by the hand that had plunged me into the tumult, but he was close, a solid, malevolent companion to the monstrous apparitions assailing me from every side. He laughed as a pair of green, slavering jaws gaped before me in the darkness, and when I turned away in panic, a river of molten lava blocked my path. Another turn and a hideous beast with two heads and razor-sharp claws the size of my arm loomed over me out of the murk.

Cry out to him all you wish, woman. His nature betrays him. You’ve led him to his doom.

The words meant nothing to me.

“Seri!” Ever so faintly I heard the call through the thunder, but I could pay it no heed. Something was approaching from behind me, something more awful than anything I’d yet seen. It had no name, but I had to run before it showed itself, and the only path open led away from the beckoning voice.

Move, fool! I cried. Ignore the hissing cobra the size of a tree that raises its hood, wrapping you in a gaze so malevolent it could steal your soul away. A rotting cadaver extended its bony fingers, leaving great smudges of unnamable disgust on your arms. Concentrate on the path beneath your feet.

“Seri!” The insistent call came again. But it was only another voice in the cacophony of lamentation, the growls and wails and screams—screams that might be my own for all I knew.

I ran. But chaos has no direction, and my flight brought me only to the place I had been before. The two that battled in that place, swords glinting with the lightnings from the raging storm, were not apparitions. Both were in black, the one with thin lips and pale eyes that reflected nothing, and the other with broad shoulders and blue eyes that flashed with fire and steel. Real blood flowed from their wounds, and I should care. I should speak a name, but I could not bring it to my lips.

Frantic, I backed away from the combatants and fled once more. I ran along a perilous track so narrow I could not put my feet side by side. If I stopped, I would topple into the bottomless nightmare that gaped on either side of me. My throat burned. My blood pounded. The nameless thing was close behind.

“Seri!” The summoning rang out once more, and like a thread pulled from the weft, I was drawn inexorably to the place of battle. The two combatants were bathed in blood and sweat, so that one might think it was the battle for the doom of the world. But I cackled in my madness, for I knew the doom of the world was just behind me, and whatever the result of this duel, it could make no difference.

I had to get away. My path led through mud that sucked at my feet and rain that scalded my face. I could not run in the mud, only slog through it, pushing aside the half-rotted corpses that rose to the surface like flotsam in a morbid sea. My heart pounded with the effort, but soon the mud was up to my knees. The path led into a cave. Beasts of heaven, not a cave! Even the ghastly lightnings were swallowed by that pit. No glimmer, no spark, no dim ray, no pale reflection relieved the nightmare darkness. The hot mud was to my waist, but I could see nothing, and I dared not reach out for the walls lest I find them closing in on me. And the demons, too, were waiting…