Страница 76 из 83
Enosh
Black spots dotted my vision through the haze of pain. I wheezed, but I’d stopped thrashing against the fire long ago, letting the hot metal burn my wrists and ankles as my weight dropped toward the restless tips of endless flames.
When I rose to the highest point of the wheel, the priest standing on the scaffold dug his bloodied hand back into the gaping cleft on my abdomen. He rummaged through my organs with one hand, giving his nods and frowns, then let the quill in his other hand note all the peculiarities of an undying god.
“What a curious creature you are,” he murmured, his robes drenched in sweat from the sweltering heat that radiated back from the ceiling. “A stab to the heart will do as little to you as the removal of your guts, aside from weakening you temporarily. Another turn, please.”
A swell of blood oozed from the hole in my body, veining across the welts and pustules that covered my skin. How long I’d been here, I couldn’t say—I’d stopped counting the days when they’d cleaned powdered bone and spikes from the furrows in the rock.
The high priests had gone through great trouble indeed, amassing enough knowledge to keep me here; reducing a god to a drooling creature with his guts dangling from a crater in his abdomen, while somewhere between hisses and pops, his penis shriveled away once more.
When the fire engulfed me, again and again, I couldn’t think past the dense fog of misery. One turn blurred into the next, and the only thing keeping my mind from descending into hysteria was the memory of Ada’s vow. I needed my little one; I needed to return to my wife. I was growing more and more willing to scream for it, beg for it, to throw myself at the goodness of mortals I knew did not exist.
I emerged from the flames to the creak of hinges. An armed mortal entered my dungeon, his trembling hand wrapped around the pommel of his sword. Sweat glistened on his forehead and his shoulders bobbed with each studded step of his metal-plated boots.
“What is this about?” the man by the wheel said. “High Priest Dekalon ordered that nobody—”
His words died on the sword as it sunk into his ribcage, only for the blade to sever his spine and let him collapse to the ground at an odd angle.
A spark of hope.
Until the wheel shifted, slowly at first, only for my weight to rip me down into the fire once more. Coals seared into my chest to the sound of metallic clanks. The stench of burnt blood ripped a scream from my throat until my voice died at the scorching, scalding heat that flayed my lungs from the inside.
Die.
I wanted to die.
Wanted to die…
Wanted to—
“Ew.” Yarin’s familiar voice wafted through the thick smoke of charred hair as I lifted toward the ceiling once more. “Let me tell you, breathing through the stench alone calls for at least fifty corpses, sixty if you need me to stuff your guts… Oh my, is this truly my brother? Hard to tell with half your face carved down to the skull—” A hiss. “Bastards cut your pecker off. Oh, I do commiserate with you on that particularity.”
I blinked him into sharpness as he climbed over me and lifted the heavy chains to thread them through the spokes. “I… called… for you.”
“Yes, about that.” He brushed a rust stain from his tailored green jacket before he set to work on another chain. “See, I wanted to come to your aid sooner, you have to believe me. In fact, I was at a brothel when thoughts about your torture reached me. I wanted to come immediately. Right after I finished. But then Eilam showed up. Oh, what a mess it was. Uh… do help me with breaking this chain.”
Against the weakness in my limbs, I braced my heel against a spoke and fought the constraints of iron. “Pull harder…”
“That’s what she said, but then Eilam came. And as it so goes with our brother, everyone dropped dead. There I was, my hands on this woman’s hips, about to pull her onto my length…” He ripped through the chain with a spark, then let it clank down along the wheel. “So confusing. What does one do in such a moment? Should I stop? Should I finish? What are the divine rules here? After all…”
His voice faded away.
My mind spiraled on its wobbly axis as I sat up and stared down at my gnarled legs. Their bones had healed into the weave of the spokes, leaving me no choice but to break them once more. Nine pounds of my fist shattered them into a hundred pieces, allowing me to pull first one, then the other, from the constraints of the wheel.
“I dare say I had an onslaught of… morality of some sort,” the God of Whispers continued as he climbed back onto the scaffold. “Such a lovely woman. Anyway, Eilam threatened to follow me to every whorehouse across the realms should I aid you. What a waste of fine women that would be. Oh, you vexed him so, Enosh. The drowning didn’t help our thoroughly dysfunctional family. Oh, you do look rather beaten. Good thing I convinced that archer to kill most of the guards.”
Saliva pooled beneath my tongue as I pushed my liver back where it ought to be for faster healing, only one thing on my mind. “I have… have to go home.”
Back to my wife.
Nothing else mattered.
Not yet.
“Home. Yes, of course. You ought to rest.” Yarin made his descent, his voice like fangs digging into my brain. “In the end, I mentioned balance. There has to be balance, but how, if our brother is being carved up like a pig?”
I inched toward the scaffold. My legs refused to obey; still broken enough, I had to lift and drag them by hand. No matter. Out. Just out. I let myself roll over the edge. My arms paddled the thick air, and I sucked in a sharp breath before—
Crack.
My skull shattered on the rock, and all air burst from my lungs. Blood seasoned my teeth as the dungeon spun around me, and Yarin’s chatter faded into blissful silence. A ringing followed, then the pop of flames, and finally…
“Ah, ten corpses should be appropriate,” Yarin said. “I am not a greedy god, and I can only divide my love and attention between so many.”
As my senses returned and my skull mended, I glanced around my prison. The priest lay beside me on the ground, his eye nothing but a black, oozing socket where the sword must have thrust through his head. The armed man kneeled not far from him, the blade embedded in his own chest.
I jutted my chin toward the lot of dead men and let them rise for my protection. “You may have them once they have ensured my escape.”
Yarin lifted a brow at me. “I said I have no preferences; I didn’t say I have no taste.”
“Suit yourself,” I said, and let them march ahead of me toward freedom.
I crawled over the stone like vermin, up a short set of stairs and through the oaken door, dragging my useless legs behind me. Once I reached the light of day, its brightness stabbed into my head. Bile soured the back of my throat and my stomach cramped before strings of vomit driveled from my lips. It tainted the air with bitterness and saturated the seashells beneath me.
Streaked blood-red at the horizon, the chaotic morning sky matched the color of the flayed skin flapping from my chest. Naked to nearly bone, I rose, blood still dripping from my crotch. Torture had certainly changed over the span of two hundred years, each new instrument an attest to mankind’s depravity.
I sent the corpses to clear the area, some sort of temple grounds surrounded by walls carved from the rock. “High Priest Dekalon?”
“Not here, I’m afraid,” Yarin shouted over the screams of the remaining soldiers as the dead turned temple to tomb, biting through arteries and breaking necks. “Oh, I do understand how eager you are to chain his soul. Bring him to me, and I shall do this for you in exchange for the corpses.”
He would die many gruesome deaths. But not yet. I had other priorities. As promised, my wife was waiting for me. And as promised, I would return to her.
Forever return to my Ada.
Letting armor form around me from the skin of the dead guards and priests, I walked over to a chestnut mare that stood saddled beside a weapon rack. A bucket of water sat by her side, showing me the reflection of something that looked nothing like the man Ada knew, but all the more like a monster.
Ribs exposed and charred black on one side, half of my face peeled down to the bone, my hair a tattered mess of singed strands and new growth. No, I would not let her see me like this. I needed to heal before I could dare hold her, kiss her, sink into her arms.
“How long?” I asked. “How long was I held captive?”
Yarin shrugged and gri
I cut the mare’s throat with a bone knife, only to let her rise moments later, turning her toward the Pale Court. I needed rest. Perhaps I would even find much-needed sleep in my little one’s arms, so I may wake and pretend that this had been nothing but a terrible dream.
“This one,” Yarin said. “The rest… mmm, nothing but brutes with hairy arses. I shall call on you once you are… Wait, where are you going?”
“To my court.” I raised the woman, her soul already shackled to her form. “My wife is waiting for me. Perhaps you should come with me and ease her mind. She has to be terrified.”
“Oh, she was. So overtaken by panic, fragments of her thoughts resonated in my head over the span of towns.” He reached for the confused woman, helped her onto shaky legs, and pulled her into his embrace as he hushed her. “But your wife is not at the Pale Court.” A chuckle. “Not unless you have recently acquired a new servant named Rose and fish cages.”
Your wife is not at the Pale Court.
I froze, rendered utterly dazed and confused by his words. Fish cages? My jawline stiffened as doubt and distrust tore the veil that hid old memories shaped by vile betrayal and set into my core in the shape of a broken heart.
I gulped past a lump of blood and ire. “Where is my wife?”
“How would I know? I have more important things to do than to listen to your wife’s internal ramblings about frayed ropes and what to put in her stew.”
Frayed ropes?
Stew?
Raw and violent, mistrust crackled through every fiber of my being, an emotion I was too familiar with. Why was she not where she ought to be? I had ensured her return to the Pale Court, yet she was not there. Neither could she be held captive if she pondered fish cages and stew. I stumbled back a step, my mind suddenly spi
How…?
Why was she not…?
None of this made sense.
I’ll hide in the back of beyond until my hair’s gray, Ada’s words infiltrated a mind already standing at a crumbling edge, with the black void of madness gaping below. How could I not want to leave you? Any woman in her right mind would. I hate you.