She’d sauntered down to the front door in her slippers once it reached late afternoon, to retrieve the news-etchings that were posted through her letter-box every day. Printed news was faster, obviously, but she had to use her powers to read the markings on paper, and it was far more relaxing to let her fingertips do the job.
She got tucked back into bed – one benefit of reading with your fingers was that if it was cold you could just do it under the covers, no need to see what you were doing.
There wasn’t really a vast amount to report. Reconstruction was moving ahead at record-breaking pace, thanks in part to generous contributions from members of the public, whose squabbling over investment opportunities had left plenty of spare cash for the wizard-guilds to scrape off the top. The rate of crime in the city had reached a peak and then plateaued, as it usually did following an Incursion – there’d be a decline over the following four-week period, until it bottomed-out again, pending the next Incursion…
Not that the news actually said any of this directly – but she was easily capable of not just reading between the lines but reading between the realities, understanding the truths underlying opinions. She searched, scraped through the facts for one hint of a hidden history, a faked identity, a link to the infamous Facechanger –
There was the usual rush at the window, and it startled her.
Yet again, she hadn’t noticed as he entered the room. She managed to avoid the obvious reactions like jumping up or spinning on the spot, but he would be able to see through her responses anyway, glean his meagre amount of pleasure from her shock.
“I told you to stop doing that! I’m glad you’re back… I’m… I’m sorry I left? I…”
Her voice failed her and time stretched. A yawning infinity between her words and his response.
It would come eventually, inflected with cold dispassion. She approximated it as:
“Last time you thought it wasn’t him; this time you thought it was. Are you an arch-diviner or not?”
And then she would know it wasn’t Irimar. But it was getting dark. Irimar should have been back by now.
And she would answer, trying to keep her voice measured, but hearing the way it trembled, “Last time it could’ve been a demon.”
And he would grin, grin at that.
– Mortiforn Yune Ismethyl Ismethyl! give me strength give me the power to fight this fight –
Grin like the madman he was. Grin like he wept.
Grin like his… his wife… his wife had… died?
Something was inside her mind, a fogginess. What had he done to her? She could follow the lines back to Zadhal…
Zadhal?
The last twelve hours went rushing through her.
Rosedawn. Duskdown.
That was why he was here.
Something had been done to her – by Rosedawn? Before she died? It didn’t matter; she could deal with that later.
First she had to deal with this.
With excruciating slowness, she rose from the bed.
There was an awful speed to his stillness, a preparedness that informed her he was simply waiting for her to flee. She could outrun sound, could make it across the city in seconds, yet the robed, masked man in her bedroom would catch her within a few steps.
No. There was no life for her on those avenues. Each of those well-lit paths fell swiftly into darkness. She’d have to aim at a destination a hundred, a thousand miles from the city to achieve the kinds of speeds she’d need, and he’d still have her before she passed over Mund’s walls.
Escape would come from blades, not boots; fists, not feet.
Yane would drink his fill here. Blood would flow.
Unless Irimar saved her.
Her opponent was faster than her, but he waited. Let her think it through. Let her see what she could see.
If she put her foot here, so that the toe-ring on her right foot was lined up with the crack in the floorboards, she would live, on average, a tenth of a second longer than she would if she put her foot half an inch closer to the wall; the scales tipped, even on so fine a balance –
If she dived across the foot of the bed for her robe, her knives, she would be there faster than lightning fell from the sky, and she would be felled just as surely as had the lightning-bolt struck her, slain with her own daggers in the hands of her lover’s mortal enemy –
She caught her breath, centred her face on him as though she could see him.
She could see him. The unhappy smile warping the lower half of his face into some abhorrent mockery of a human mouth. Too many teeth. Too much anger and grief in what should’ve been an expression of delight.
‘We’re all one big family,’ Irimar had said. She was fairly certain he hadn’t been thinking of Duskdown when he’d said it, though –
“Did I surprise you, darling?”
She jumped upon hearing Duskdown’s low voice. It wasn’t just that he’d chosen to break the silence that had slowly been growing heavier since she last spoke, years ago, back when she still thought it was Irimar who’d finally arrived home. Back then, when she thought she was going to live out the day.
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No. It was that he so effortlessly elided her prophecies. What he’d actually said wasn’t as close to her vision as she was accustomed, and it made her more nervous than she thought she was going to be, which only compounded itself, again and again, until she felt her confidence and her battle-readiness seeping out of her through numb fingertips.
“What do you want?” That sounded good; her voice came out hard, forceful, even if the base root of her aggression was her fear.
“You know what will happen, don’t you? He will suffer the way I’ve suffered.”
It took her a moment, then: “He doesn’t love me. Not the way you loved her.”
Duskdown was shaking his head softly from side to side. “You’re right, of course,” he said, “but he knew the potential was there. While you lived, there was a chance of love, and, now you’re dead, he will feel the pain of that loss all the more-sharply for the fact that it was never realised. You are his one, true, long-lost love. The memory that impels his actions, the worst failure of his career as a champion: letting you die…”
It chilled her, to hear the way he already spoke of her in the past-tense.
Now I am dead… I am just a memory.
No!
In the moment she threw caution to the winds, bitterness and anger overcoming all the mental barriers that had been preventing her from acting, she knew that she was doomed.
She turned to the window, he was there.
The doorway, there he was.
When she gritted her teeth and went for her robe and knives he merely withdrew across the room, permitting her access.
“Great idea,” he said softly as she lifted her belongings. “Put your robe back on, and your mask. Gather all the weapons at your disposal, use any of them you wish to on me. Here, I’ll even – haha – turn my back while you change. I can use this scarf for a blindfold, make it a fair fight –”
The moment he’d distracted himself, knotting fabric about his upper face, she fled at two hundred percent speed straight at the open window, rushing headlong into his tensed, outstretched forearm.
The blow took her in the throat and she was slammed down on her back, gasping on the rug.
“Tut tut,” he chided gently; “I told you to put your mask on.”
She already had the robe in place, her hands on her dagger-grips, but she couldn’t use them, couldn’t do anything but choke for breath – was her windpipe crushed? Was this it, over already?
No. As she recovered he reached out with her mask and, almost fondly, settled its straps around her head so that her face was properly covered.
She didn’t need to see, but the tiny slits in the mask hardly helped her suck in her breath.
“That’s the way you looked the day I killed you.” He spoke huskily, almost emotionally. “Not cracked yet, but there’s time. That’s the Lightblind whose corpse he finds.”
She spluttered. “You – you don’t… have to do this, you can –”
“I don’t, and yet I do. You know full-well the curse of the arch-diviner.”
“But,” she coughed, “please –”
“Please do not beg.” The coldness she’d expected was there in his voice. He wasn’t smiling now. “They always beg, and it’s always worse for them after that. No, get to your feet. Chin up, darling. I don’t want to be here any more than you do – come on, let’s get this over with.”
“I th-thought you only went after the bad g-“
“Do not test me. I watched over her, every minute of her life, every minute that I could. It was you, you and your lover that killed her.” His voice softened. “No. I never saw Zadhal, until his plans for her ended. Until you scattered her across the frozen stones. This is on you, Perrinthe. You and him.”
He reached down with a hand as though to take hers, help her to her feet.
Her hands were full of daggers.
The white-bladed knife in her left hand, glittering as though it were dusted with quartz powder, had a chink in the handle; that was how she could tell it apart from the knife in her right hand without using her powers, the blade that would be its identical twin were it not for its pure-black colouration.
They’d felled thirteenth-rank demons. They’d felled greater threats than this hellish caricature of a man standing before her.
She put every ounce of her innocent girlishness into her voice, did her best to sound pathetic: “But I – I didn’t want him to ki-“
When she sprang to her feet mid-word, cutting the air with both daggers, it was his turn to be surprised.
Yes, it was with the blade that this would be decided.
It was the fastest she’d ever moved. Fast enough that every droplet in a waterfall would’ve appeared still. Fast enough to catch the seeds of a thousand dandelions.
Still too slow.
She saw the evasion before it occurred, the faintest shifting of his body-weight.
She tried to change the angle, but he slipped both blows, feinting to one side then the other as he backed away –
She noticed the flat-handed chop he was bringing down at her throat as he pirouetted, managed to twist awkwardly to the right just before it was too late, let the edge of his palm glance off her shoulder –
The power of the strike still spun her like a top, and then they were wheeling about the room: her inside, surrounded by a shell of monochrome ensorcelled iron; him outside, an ever-circling blur of sunset hues and endless attacks.
She tested every trick she’d ever used: sudden variances in angular momentum, reversals of direction, taking the fight across the walls and ceiling –
How do I fight a creature like this? she howled inwardly.
Instincts that had been designed to supply her with not just one answer to her every question but ten were now drawing a terrifying blank.
There is no answer. There is no way through this.
To an observer the fight might’ve been going for all of seven or eight seconds but she was dripping sweat beneath her comfy bed-clothes and robe, worse than when she slew Hierarch Nine. For her it had been minutes of exertion and she felt the slightest onset of exhaustion.
But she saw it in her foe too. He could’ve kicked her in the face when she dipped, aiming slashes at his knees, but he didn’t react quickly enough, he –
He stepped back and brought the heel of his palm down into the forehead of her mask instead, cracking it –
They were fighting on the mirror on the wall at the time, and she had no purchase – the momentum was reversed against her knowledge or will, and she was sent careening off the wall at a breath-stealing speed, bouncing off the floor and cracking one of the bedposts with her back.
Both daggers abandoned her in her moment of need, flying out of her hands with the force of the impact, landing in either corner behind her.
Spine grinding in agony, she nonetheless whipped to her feet again – then sank back to the ground screaming.
She wore a toe-ring, usually kept hidden within her footwear, for times of need.
Her spine told her she had no way to reach it and yet –
He stood over her, holding the little healing-trinket embedded with its three fine, sparkling diamonds. It was a crude thing, really, one activation per diamond. A broken back would probably take all three.
“You were going to try to get this, I believe,” he said.
For a moment she thought he would laugh, then he reached down like last time, merely offering her the ring.
“You’d like to go another round?”
His sad smile was there, even if he wasn’t laughing.
No exhaustion in his voice. She’d been wrong, before. She’d seen only what he’d wanted her to see.
Still…
“He is not coming. Night falls in Zadhal, and still he does not return. He is a fool.”
The certainty, the knowledge, hit her. The trembling hand she’d half-raised to accept the toe-ring dropped, and her vision finally faded.
She couldn’t see it, but she heard him draw a knife from a metal sheath.
No, she couldn’t see it. Back. Back into the darkness she went. She’d known it from the moment she was made archmage. The darkness, the darkness was her destiny.
I’m alone in the darkness again.
She was blind once more, and knew then what she would choose.
She couldn’t even see how Father would take the news of her passing.
“Finish it,” she said bitterly.
Alandrica. Endren. Mother… I follow you now. Will you wait for me, and, and Father, on the oth-