Restoration (19 page)

“Extraordinary, is it not, such ferocious loyalty? And still undimmed, for his is a noble spirit. Could you do such a thing for anyone? I don't think I could.” The old man sighed. “It is not his fault he has the dullest mind ever woke of a morning.”

Extraordinary, indeed. Someone had cared enough for Nyel to share his captivity for untold years—far more than a thousand, for it was a full thousand years in the past that an Ezzarian prophet had foretold the release of the prisoner of Tyrrad Nor and the catastrophe that it would cause. “Is he a kinsman?”

“He was my
attellé—
the son of a very good friend sent to live with me and learn from me, though not very successfully even then.”

“Your student.”

“Much more than that. What student chooses to lie ill when his master is diseased?”

“More like a son, then.”

And here I believed that I had stumbled close to the heart of the matter, for though Nyel sat very still and made no show of anger, his dark gaze pressed down on me until I was almost suffocated. “No. Not a son. Never that.”

Even Kasparian could not match Nyel as a source for wonder. I had expected to find a being kin to the Lord of Demons, the vile

and murderous rai-kirah I had battled in Aleksander's soul, and what had I found instead? A tired old man—petulant, lonely, wryly humorous, aggrieved. Though I had seen no direct manifestation of it, I did not discount his power. I was utterly fascinated.

“Will you tell me your story, Nyel? I'd like to understand.”

He rubbed his forehead absentmindedly. “And what would that accomplish? You judged me long ago. You think that those who put me here must have done it for good reason, and that a friendly game of warriors and castles will change nothing.”

“I am not afraid to listen.” Wary, but no longer afraid.

He glanced across the room, where the manservant was bringing in a covered dinner service. He rose to his feet and looked down at me. “I need to eat and rest for a while. You can ruminate upon your confounded expectations and decide if you truly mean what you say. If you're still here when the sun rises, perhaps I'll tell you.

I walked in Nyel's garden under a double-sized moon, hung in a canopy of unfamiliar stars. Like a ghost, I left no footprints on the wet grass, nor could I feel the rain-washed air nor smell the honeysuckle. Far in the back of my mind, like the tiny, clear images sighted through a spyglass, were a blind, half-naked boy and a brass bowl. I believed that I had but to reach for them to go back. My true life waited for me there, but here ... what was here?

Danger, certainly. Just as in the days I had walked portals into the realms of human souls, I had journeyed far beyond the boundaries of intellect and experience. But because of the demon inside me, I could no longer trust my Warden's instincts. I felt vulnerable. Exposed. History, legend, and suspicion proclaimed this mysterious man's wickedness, yet I was drawn to him in ways I could not express. He was an answer to questions I had not asked. He was a memory I could not capture, a word poised on my tongue, ready to be spoken.

In my sojourn in Kir‘Vagonoth I had been enchanted, enveloped in a spell of romantic attachment to a beautiful rai-kirah named Vallyne. With confusion and stolen memory, Vallyne and her charming partner Vyx had tried to trick me into yielding my soul to Denas, not understanding that I was ready to do as they wished for my own reasons. But my fascination with Nyel was something far deeper—an attachment developed while my eyes were open and wary, and thus far more worrisome. Denas could not help me. At the time of our joining, Denas had known no more than I of the danger in Tyrrad Nor.

Reviewing every word of my strange discourse with Nyel, examining them for snares and signs of treachery, I walked for hours. I did not watch where I wandered, so that when a shadow blocked the angled moonlight, I was surprised to look up and find myself about to stumble headlong into the wall. The barrier was twice my height. Though built of smooth, solid black stone so finely joined, one could scarcely see the edges of the blocks, it looked as if someone had taken a hammer to it. Chips of stone lay on the ground, and cracks as deep as my second knuckle wandered here and there across the flats. In a few spots the top was ragged, crumbling.

When I had been bleeding away my life on a hillside in southern Manganar, my death vision had shown me this very wall breached by a jagged crack that leaked blood, a deadly flow that threatened to consume the world of Kir‘Navarrin in fire. In that same vision, I had seen Vyx insert himself into the breach to seal it. I believed what that image had shown me—not so much that a good-humored rai-kirah had truly become a part of the stone, but that Vyx had somehow sacrificed himself to keep the fortress secure. I ran my fingers over the black stone, trying to sense something of its enchantment, to learn of Vyx's fate or what he might have done to heal the breach. But my ghost hand could feel nothing but the hard surface. “I wish you were here to advise me, rai-kirah,” I said, walking alongside the barrier, dragging my palm along its rough solidity. “This is not at all what I expected.”

I walked along the wall all the way to the juncture where it merged seamlessly with the mountainside; then I walked back again past my starting point to the other end. No tree grew within fifty paces of this dark barrier, and I found no gate or other opening in the black stone. Nowhere did I see any possibility that a man, sorcerer or no, could scale or breach its smooth face.

The hours passed quickly. As the darkness after moonset yielded to dawn gray, I hurried back through the garden toward the castle, where I found a green-cloaked Nyel sitting on the wide steps and watching the watery sun rise over the mountains. He nodded—in satisfaction, I thought—when he caught sight of me. “The grounds are not so large as they seem, are they?” he said, gesturing to his domain. “Do you mind walking awhile longer? I'm a bit stiff from the damp.”

“If you like,” I said. “Did you rest well?”

“Indeed. I find it so annoying to require sleep. When I was young, I could go entire seasons without. There was so much to do—exploring, enjoying games and conversation, building, devising those things humans call magic, contemplating the world... worlds, as we discovered.”

We strolled along the same paths that I had trodden in the night, but I was not watching the scenery this time, only listening and formulating questions. “When you say ‘we' ...”

“We called ourselves Madonai, and we had lived in this world we called Kir‘Navarrin for seven ages—thousands of years to those who count time. I cannot describe the glory of my people—their beauty and intelligence and goodness of heart. To see Kasparian and myself so fallen... to think we are the last... it is a bitter ending.”

I thought he was going to stop with that, for his voice was shaking. But though his steps slowed, they never stopped, and soon he began to speak again. “As I told you, we are not immortal, but we live a very long time compared to humans or your own kind.”

He did not quite spit and curse when he said the word human, as Kasparian had done, but from the beginnings of this story, I felt his loathing for humankind. “As with everything in the natural world, there was a balance to be maintained,” he continued. “And so it was with our long lives. Only rarely did we birth children. No Madonai could parent more than one, and when I came of age, it had been a great many years since the last Madonai child was born. This was a great sorrow to us, as we missed sharing our learning and adventures with children.

“There came a time when my good friend Hyrdon and I came into a great enchantment—a mode of travel that took us to a place that we did not know existed. To a different world, where beings lived who were something similar to ourselves, though weak and fragile and unendingly contentious.” He glanced my way. “They called us gods, Hyrdon and me.”

“You found the human world,” I said.

We had wandered through the garden and onto the wild grass at its edge, but never did we approach the wall. Whenever our path threatened to take us near it, Nyel would alter his direction. “Hyrdon was uncomfortable in this new world and soon returned home, but I explored further and came upon a land so marvelous ... a warm forest land of healthy trees and abundant rain ... of smooth hills, and leaves that took fire with color in the waning season ...”

Ezzaria. He had fallen in love with my homeland. His voice trailed away, and I took up the story for the moment, reciting eagerly as for a well-loved schoolmaster. “You helped the people tend the forest. Taught them how to live in it, how to nurture it and love it as you did. And eventually you met a human woman, fell in love with her, and she bore you a child.”

Nyel laughed, but without mirth. “You learned your lessons well. Yes. That all happened. But I was never jealous of the boy. I was elated. All Madonai rejoiced. When they learned that I had produced a child after only a short time mated, others sought partners among the humans. Men who had produced a Madonai child could also father a half-human child. A Madonai woman who had seen her only babe grown long years before, could have three more if she mated with a human man. And the children were so beautiful and marvelous ... we called them ‘rekkonarre' ...”

“Children of joy,” I said. Rekkonarre ... rai-kirah ... I wanted him to stop there. To let me savor the revelation, the answer to the puzzle of my people's origin, the bits and pieces of truth that I had seen, now snapped into their proper positions within the mosaic of history. “They could shapeshift,” I said. “These children had power something like that of Madonai.”

“Greater in some ways,” said Nyel as we climbed a narrow track that led from the grassy slope up onto the rocky face of the mountainside behind the castle. “They lived in both worlds easily. Indeed they needed to spend time in both worlds, for their nature was of both. They could have many children of their own, and they aged more slowly than the humans, though much faster than we did. We grieved sorely to think we might see them die.”

We walked faster as he told the story, up the track that grew steeper and narrower as we climbed, the land falling away to one side. “But something else happened. Something terrible. My own people began to die, far, far earlier than should have been their time. Those who stayed too long in the human world grew weaker until they could not breathe, as if something had drawn the heart from them. We tried to find the cause—some disease, we thought. But it was not disease ... not as you think of it. We discovered that those who died soonest were those of our people who had produced many children with their human partners. The more children, the sooner the Madonai parent faded.”

And so it came. The reason for everything.

“I had risen high within our ranks, and I told the others of what I had learned. We had to stop, I said, or we would extinguish our race. No one would listen. No one wished to hear that our joy was killing us.”

We had reached a ledge and could go no farther. A sheer cliff rose behind us, soaring skyward to the rocky peak, and before us was a precipitous drop to the palace ramparts. Nyel was breathing hard. I stood beside him and gazed on the green country in the distance, bathed in waking sunlight. A sheet of water shimmered on a distant plain. Nearer to hand was the walled shelf of green that was Nyel's prison, the precipice beyond the wall, and far below, at the mountain's foot, a ribbon of pale green and brilliant yellow. Gamarand trees—trees with twin yellow trunks that twined about each other like lovers. Denas had told me that the gamarand wood was a holy place to those who lived in Kir‘-Navarrin, that it somehow helped to protect them from the danger imprisoned in Tyrrad Nor.

“I tried to barricade the way to the human world,” said Nyel. “That was my crime. I said we had to leave our mates, abandon our children with their human kin, and destroy the passages between us, before we destroyed ourselves. I begged them to heed me, to let me save them.” He threw a rock into the vast nothing that surrounded us. “Some agreed with me. Most did not. They called me murderer, monster, child-slayer, for we could see that our children needed the life of both worlds to survive. The argument was long and terrible. I lost.”

“And from your prison, you watched your people die.”

The wind I could not feel caught Nyel's green cloak and whipped it about his tall form. “One who is not Madonai cannot comprehend the bond we shared. Through all those years I felt their joys and sorrows, and every time one of them died, a part of me died as well.” He folded his arms tightly across his chest. “By the time of their fearful prophecy, our children's children had forgotten their own history. They called the Madonai ‘gods' or 'myths,‘ and remembered only that the prisoner in the fortress was anathema. Frightened by their seeings, they destroyed themselves, left this land, and closed the way back, not knowing the price they would pay when trapped with their folly in the human world. Is it not a wicked irony?”

But he could not be as innocent as his story claimed. “Yet you invade our dreams and cause upheaval,” I said. “You have used the rai-kirah—the demons—goaded them to torment the world. In your name Tasgeddyr, the Lord of Demons, tried to take power in the human world. Perhaps you want to avenge yourself on the descendants who caused the death of your people. How can I possibly let you go free?”

“How could I wish to destroy our children? Your race—the rekkonarre—is all that is left of my own. Besides, you have done worse to yourselves than I ever could have done. What need have I for vengeance?” Nyel started down the path.

But Ezzarians were not the ones he hated. “It's humans, isn't it?” I called after him. “Not the rai-kirah who are the ‘Madonai' part of us nor the Ezzarians who should properly be joined with them—your children. It's humans you despise.”