Chapter Thirty-nine
“Oh Bel, I remember,” Erlandr said. He wiped tears from his eyes, snot from his nose. He coughed, trying to clear his throat.
“Remember what?” Adence said. “By the Sisters, the way you carry on, it’s as if you’d forgotten about her. I’ve had to hear you moan her name night after night for years now, and yet I mention her name to you just once—once, after all the times you’ve thrown Naea in my face—and you fall to pieces.”
“You don’t understand,” Erlandr said. “That’s not what happened—not completely, anyway.”
“Another trick. You want me to kill you?” Adence said. “Insulting me didn’t work. What is your aim with this one? I saw you kill my wife with my own eyes. Denying it gets you nothing.”
“No, no,” Erlandr said. “It’s all wrong, don’t you see? Why can we remember parts so clearly, and other things not at all? Why do I dream the same dream, night after night, and I know it’s wrong? It doesn’t make sense. Why couldn’t I remember my wife’s name?”
“Guilt,” Adence said flatly. “Your soul is as black as Bel’s, and you don’t want to remember those things.”
“And you?” Erlandr said. “You’re so pure. What do you remember? What don’t you remember? That’s the key.” What they didn’t remember. It was so obvious; how could it have taken him all these years to realize it?
“You think what? That this is someone else’s work? It would take a true master of Khaman sorcery to do that. We would have known him, we must have trusted him, for him to get close enough to do such a thing. And what would he gain by it?”
“There was someone else,” Erlandr said. “Someone who did kill Naea, but not before she had disrupted the enchantment. And then the rent was collapsing, and he had to make sure that we did not hunt him down. The man I saw in the dream—he’s in the city. It must be him!”
“Of course,” Adence said. “A man you happened to see in the street today, whom neither of us remembers, was the one who killed my wife. Not you, the man I remember driving the blade home before my eyes. You see my trouble in believing this?”
“There’s a way to find out,” Erlandr said. “Open the rent again. If it’s him, he will come. He won’t be able to resist. If not, I end the curse and the rent is closed. I’ll die, and you go back to your life with grandchildren, or whatever it is you want to do.”
“And what is the catch?”
“No catch. The plan was to open the rent all along. This changes nothing.”
“How can you be so sure?” Adence asked.
“Because this man, whoever he was, was the one who convinced me to open the rent in the first place.”
“Is that right?” Adence asked. Silver light, reeking of Cemilian sorcery, disappeared into the night air as his cheiron closed.
The garden had been transformed. The mad patterns, like chaos embodied, were more obvious than ever, extraneous plants and limbs trimmed away to leave only the original design of the garden. Erlandr grunted. He had tried a few spells, but none were powerful enough for their landscaping efforts, and so Erlandr had resorted to his belt knife and brute force. He tossed another scrawny rose bush into the pile of clippings in the street and picked at a thorn in his finger, wincing as he drew it out.
Blood, rich and heady, filled the air with its scent. Erlandr’s head swam. He could barely think straight, and the aroma made it even more difficult. He blinked, tried to focus his gaze, and glanced around the garden.
“As good as it will get tonight,” he said. “We don’t have more time. I need to feed soon, or end this, because either way the curse is at its breaking point.”
“A living parakein,” Adence said, wiping sweat from his balding pate. “Mad. Mad, but ingenious. Whose idea was it?”
“You believe me?”
“It’s easier than believing you developed this on your own.”
Erlandr laughed. “I hate to disappoint you, but this, at least, was mine. I had not thought to use it for this, though. It was supposed to be . . . something else. After Tise died, though, and he came along, I could think of nothing else.” That memory, after Adence had reminded him of Tise, was clear enough, although no more than any other memory dimmed with age. It did not have the unnatural clarity of the false memories. Even after all those years, Erlandr could not remember those early days after Tise’s death without a swell of renewed despair. For the second time in his life, death felt welcome.
“I know the feeling,” Adence said. “At time, I have a hard time thinking of anything but Naea. Even after all these years.”
Erlandr shrugged and said, “And thinking of me, too, I suppose?”
“Yes.”
“Even after what I’ve told you?” Erlandr asked.
“It’s a pretty story,” Adence said. “I wish it were true.”
“You do? After all that has passed between us, you wish that someone else had killed your wife?”
“I do,” Adence said. “If you hadn’t killed her, then I wouldn’t have lived the last dozen decades as a coward, watching the man who killed my wife live, day after day. By the blessed Sisters, I wish it were true.”
“Then let’s begin,” Erlandr said. “Get the children out of here.”
Adence nodded and turned. Erlandr immediately forgot the man. The parakein, restored to a semblance of its former state, surrounded him, a coiling in of power and meaning, chaos bound into physical form, madness made manifest. Reality was tense, close to bursting, and the parakein held but a fraction of the power it once had, when Erlandr had shaped it with taul raging in his heart, the full strength of Kajan sorcery at his command.
He traced awa in the air, and the faintest ripples followed his fingers for a half heartbeat. Awa, a child’s cheiron, used to light a candle, to send dust dancing in the air. Awa, all that was left to him. A trickle of power slid through him. The laughter of the children, Adence’s cracked, wavering voice, buzzed at the edge of consciousness.
The air rippled at the edge of his vision, waves on the sea of eternity. Adence was screaming something now, but Erlandr heard him through distant, folded echoes. The parakein was shattering, trees and bushes splitting apart, the ground cracking, revealing deep red earth, the flesh of the world. The garden shattered and released its power, the tension of form and power finding release.
Everything shifted. Erlandr staggered to one side, struggling to keep his footing, but directions no longer had meaning. Up, down, left, right, they were all the same. Fire surrounded him, heat that threatened to burn him to ash, and then he was falling, the skeletal light of awa falling forever into darkness behind him.
The world spun to a stop. Erlandr lay on the ground and vomited once. Blood mixed with bile. Whether it was the parakein or the curse, Erlandr did not know, but the magic had damaged something inside him. Dying. He smiled and wiped bloody spit from his chin.
He pushed himself to his feet. A sinuous line of drooping lilies, pencil-thin black lines running through the white petals, ran past him—once part of the parakein, channeling magic through form, now nothing more than a twisted row of plants that would be dead in a matter of hours.
“That looks familiar,” Adence said behind him.
Erlandr looked over his shoulder and saw the sky. Dull flames whipped through darkness as though stirred by a violent wind, arching over the garden in a low dome. Where the flames touched the city wall, great drops of molten stone fell, but the neatly cropped grass of the garden was untouched by the flames.
Running the toe of his boot along the line of darkness and fire, Erlandr looked back at Adence and said, “Is it good to be back? Do you remember now?”
“I remember nothing new, if that’s what you mean,” Adence said. “And your guest has yet to show up.”
“You didn’t come right away either,” Erlandr said.
“No,” Adence said. “Naea said not to worry, that she would handle it. She was always the more skilled of the two of u
s. So gifted. I never saw her equal. I could feel the rent from the moment it opened, a hole in the heart of the world, and all of reality bleeding out of it into chaos, and I was afraid. I let her go alone because I was afraid, because I wanted to believe her that it would be ok.”
“A hole in the heart of the world,” Erlandr said. “I suppose it is, at that. Do you see it? Racing past us, eaten away by its passage, so quickly that only fire remains? Creation, existence, drawn away into energy, and from energy into nothing. Eaten away, like the sand by the sea, as wave after wave of oblivion crashes over us. It’s incredible.”
“It’s an abyss.”
“But it could be so much more,” Erlandr said. The old thoughts were beginning to return, old dreams. His fear of death, his self-loathing faded, replaced by thoughts that raced. With the rent removed from his heart, the curse was gone. For the first time in decades, Erlandr could think clearly. “A place to reclaim the souls of the dead and return them to life. A world beyond the gods, beyond good and evil, beyond truth. Think of it. Naea back among the living, and your children. Tise. New futures for both of us.”
“Look out there,” Adence shouted, wrinkled eyes wide. “There is nothing. Nothing!” He took a deep breath. “Another word of that madness and I’ll kill you myself, right now.”
“And leave the rent open, to gnaw away at the world until nothing remains, and the last fires die? I don’t think so.”
“You do not know that will happen,” Adence said. “And my skills have grown since then. I will bring it into myself and let that be the end.”
“Your skills have faded, long since drawn past their limits to keep you alive, and now they wane.” Erlandr could feel the truth of his words. Without the rent inside him, without the curse, his own powers had returned, blazing like a dark sun within him, taul awaiting his summons.
“Enough,” Adence said. He traced a cheiron unknown to Erlandr, the air rippling in silver waves with the passage of his hand. “You said you would end this. Do it, or I will.”
Erlandr watched the flames stream past overhead, feeding the appetite of a force more ancient and terrible than imagined gods. He remembered the man he had once been. Weak, idealistic, and then decades of fear and pain. No more.
He spun, tracing taul, feeling Kajan sorcery ripple through him. Power, power that he had not tasted in so long.
“Try.”