I hate this. This featureless dark. This boredom.
He sat in his corner, with the blankets she had given him wrapped about him, and pondered his existence. He contemplated the word I , as if it were some wondrous and foreign term that had suddenly unfolded to him a world of new possibilities. I denoted an awareness of self that he had not, up to a few hours past, possessed. An animal did not think of nor refer to itself as I in any manner of its instinctual existence. It merely was. I signified something of a higher nature. He was intrigued by the gradual perception of something more to his patterns of thought. Something behind a chasm of --- darkness -- of void without a name, that if he picked at enough would surely come to him. It was just a matter of finding the proper thread to unravel the whole thing. He put the clothes on the girl had brought him. She floated in his memory a face in a sea of faces that held meaning that was just out of his reach. But closer. He wished she might come back again, with her sweet scent and her luminescent eyes. If he saw her again, he might recall a reason for the tracks she left in his mind.
When the door opened and light cast its invasive fingers into the cell, blinding him, it was not her. A man stepped into the room, one other man behind him, holding a lantern. White robes brushed the floor and a red silk scarf hung about his neck. On a chain was a gold emblem. This was not a face that brought memory with it. It was lined about the mouth and eyes, with hair grew sparser with each passing year. The eyes were deep and brown and at first glance not as diverting as the odd green ones of the large man behind him. That man did hold a place in memory. Recent memory concerning mindless flight and final confrontation in a storm drenched alley. He fixed the face of that man in his mind for future reference. There was debt to be paid there and in his new awareness of self, he found a taste for vengeance.
After a moment, though, there was little in the lantern bearer's face but a vigilance to protect the other, so he turned his eyes back to the white robed man. Those brown eyes had not wavered from their gaze at him. The expression did not alter. He stared back, lifting his chin defiantly. His own eyes flashed, transparent in his emotions, hiding nothing of his thoughts. The brown eyes reflected nothing but quiet fortitude and as moments passed, the animal part of him began to sense a subtle, terrible power behind those eyes. An old, old power that in some minuscule part of him, did strike a cord of familiarity. His hackles rose. Carefully, with a rustling of chain, he placed his fingers on the floor, to balance himself should he have to spring up.
The man took note of the slight movement. One side of his lips twitched, as if satisfied. Then he turned without ever making a sound and glided out of the cell. The green eyed guard pulled the door shut behind them, taking the light with him. All but a faint glow that seeped through the small grate on the door and receded as their quiet footsteps echoed down the outside hall.
He shivered. It was a long while before the tenseness left his body.
She knelt before the great shrine in the temple, head bowed, hands clasped in pious adoration of the High God, mouthing the ritual words that asked for guidance and protection against evil. The Prophet had suggested she do so, to ward her soul against temptation by the dark powers. It had seemed a prerequisite to his cooperation -- to his good will, so she meekly agreed. Her mind wondered while she knelt and her gaze took in nothing of the marble floor or the ornamentation of the shrine. The words that came from her lips were habit and nothing more. She could have uttered them in her sleep, having grown up the daughter of a priest.
She finished her prayers and rose, knees stiff from so long kneeling on the hard floor. She had brought more food. It sat on the wooden bench behind her and she retrieved it before signaling to the Basilica guard who was to accompany her downstairs. There were more of them waiting below, to protect her -- or see that she did nothing to violate the security of their impromptu prison. She walked amidst them meekly, counting on their good report of her demeanor to insure that future visits were allowed. That had also been a condition of Angelo's. She gave in to them all, willing to say and do anything to achieve her goal. The capitulation seemed to please him. He had a weakness for the humble.
They opened the cell and let light into the cold darkness. Schneider seemed not surprised by the intrusion. He sat, legs crossed, back against the wall, watching the door. He did not even blink at the onset of light. She hesitated in the doorway, guards behind her, waiting to follow her in. She wished they might stay just outside the door, but that too had been a requirement. She would not be alone with him, ever.
Steps forward, that echoed on the stone floor. A smile that wavered on her lips. An offered bribe of food. And his eyes never wavered from her, except once to watch the migration of her guard into the room behind her. They clustered at the open door, clubs in hand.
When she was close to him, she knelt, and placed the pot on the floor between them as she had before. She looked for the old pot and found pieces of it against the far wall, shattered. She would have to clean that up before she left, so there would be no censure from Angelo.
"Hello." She said very quietly, wishing her voice to travel no further than Schneider, but knowing that the guards would catch parts of it, the cell being too small for privacy. "Are you better, today?"
He stared at her, unwavering blue eyes under tendrils of silver hair.
"It's so terribly cold in here. Do you need another blanket? Warmer clothing? I can bring either next I come." She gazed at him hopefully, searching for that spark of recognition.
"I brought dinner. Pork and vegetables with sesame. I know you like that. You shouldn't have broken the pot I brought before. They'll get angry."
She picked at her cuticles nervously, and talked. Just talked. She spoke of the summer before and the summer blossom festival that had taken place on the plains between Meta-Rikan and Judas and been attended by people from every province in the south. She talked about the wedding of Princess Sheela and Prince Haden, and the tragic events preceding it. She told of Gara's appointment of Lord Protector of the eastern mountains and of Arshes Nei's terrible lassitude.
"If she knew you were alive, she would be so very happy. So would Kall. He hides it better, but he misses you too. He won't come back here because -- because of things that were said during the wedding week. That's what Gara says, anyway. I wish he would. He cloisters himself away in the north and won't let anyone close to him -- again gossip from Gara. Gara says even his commanders are wary of him, he's grown so moody."
She sighed, disheartened by the lack of response, glanced behind her to see how impatient the guards were becoming, to gauge how much longer they would let her stay.
"Father is starting to pester me about marriage. He wants grandchildren. He's afraid he'll die and leave me with no one to protect me. I keep telling him I can protect myself. I could join the Holy Swords and none of them ever marry. Gods know I trained enough when I was younger."
"Lady." Her time was up. The guards had had enough of the cold and the boredom of watching over her. She sighed, pushed the dinner pot, which he had not touched closer to him and prepared to rise.
Something flickered in his eyes. One hand lifted, the other following by rote of the chain connecting them and reached towards her.
"Don't." It was strained, as if he were not familiar enough with words to utter it with confidence.
She froze, eyes wide, both hands on the floor in preparation of pushing herself up.
"Rushie?" She whispered. Finally, emotion crossed his face. Confusion, frustration. He shut his eyes and pressed a hand to his face. As sometimes happened with Yoko, emotions and images and feelings of others came to her. She felt the confusion. The dawning of memories. He was remembering her as she had been at fifteen and himself not as Schneider but as Rushie.
Tears formed in her eyes.
"Do you remember?" she whispered. "Please remember."
"Yoko?"
She cried out and hurled herself at him, startled him so badly that he slapped his head against the wall in shock, before he put his hands on her back, at first hesitantly, then with sudden fervent intensity.
The guards closed in, she felt their presence; felt his reaction to their approach in a stiffening of muscles.
"Please." She cried. "Back off. I'm okay." She lifted her head from his chest and looked back at them. "Please."
They hesitated, but came no closer, laid no hands upon either of them. It was enough for the moment.
It came back in jumbled bits and pieces, the life before the death. Faces and places. Arguments and great battles. Lovers . . . .oh there had been a great many of them. 400 hundred years of things; some clear as photographs in his mind, others so distorted as to be unreal. Perhaps they had been. Perhaps he had not been a whole being during the majority of those 400 years. Perhaps Ansasla had been too much in his mind, its purposes his purposes. He recalled the god of destruction very well. It flared in his memory like a stabbing finger of accusation. He pushed that away with effort, trying to focus on other things. He recalled his name, which was in itself a great triumph, and recalled other names he had been called over the years. But, Schneider was the one he called himself. The Dark was an honorific that terrified peoples had added to it during his reign of conquest. He rather liked it.
She called him Rushie. He liked that as well, or at least the part of his soul that was newborn and good did. The part of his soul that had been missing for most of his life. From her lips anything would have sounded good. He remembered the smell of her hair. It was the same. As was the feel of her small, slender body pressed against his. A thousand images of Yoko flashed behind his eyes. The girl. The woman. Laughing, furious, determined, jealous -- devastated.
"Yoko." He said the name again, into her hair, as if to reaffirm it.
"Ohgoddessohgoddessohgoddess." She cried.
"Lady Yoko?" One of her guards moved forward, frowning, backed by two of his fellows. "Your time is up."
She shuddered. Schneider drew his brows, indignity that they dared to interrupt at so crucial and miraculous a moment rising within him.
"Leave us, or a curse upon you all." He hissed the warning and their eyes widened uncertainly. They knew him, it seemed, better than he knew himself. They backed away, clustering at the door, whispering among themselves. One of them ran down the hall outside, steps receding into faint echoes. It was enough.
"Where have you been? You were dead. We all thought you were dead."
He barely heard that; a muttered plea against his chest. He thought it was not so good a place, where he had dwelled. A year. Ten years. A hundred years. Time had no meaning where he had been. Pain, and terror and all the sins man might ever conceive did. And he had been cast there, into hell -- not a victim and not a conqueror. The powers that be in that realm were ever so jealous of their dominion and ever so spiteful of those that would not bow down to worship it. They had quite hated him.
"It doesn't matter. Not here."
He ran his hands down the length of her hair, down the curve of her hip and back again, marveling at the feel of her. Half thinking this was some hellish delusion that would be ripped away from him. If it was there were certain demons who would pay. There were spells of his that worked quite nicely in the pits of hell.
Spells. He lifted his wrist and looked at the band beneath the manacles. He vaguely recalled attempting a spell and the unexpected results. He knew the feel of a ward, but this was different. Oddly all encompassing and muffling in its range. Binding wards shackled magic from being summoned, but they did not generally hinder awareness of the patterns and the current of magic. He felt deaf and insulated. The world was usually bursting with the invisible scents and flux of magic, but now he felt nothing more than the dullest of mortal men. It was no small bit disconcerting, to find oneself back in the world of the living, cast in a dank little cell by sniveling churchmen, and he was certain they were that by the righteous superiority in their eyes, and without a shred of magic to set things right.
"Who put these abominations on me?" He asked.
Yoko shifted her head to see what he spoke of. Her eyes widened in dismay. She tried to sit back but the chain connecting his wrists prevented her, so she pressed hands against his chest and leaned back to the limits of his circled arms.
"The Prophet. I didn't know -- I couldn't have stopped it, if I had. I'm sorry."
"You know what they are?"
"Binding wards. Against magic."
"Hummph. I could burn any normal ward to a cinder with hardly an effort. These are decidedly not normal."
"He said -- the Prophet said that they're holy relics. That the power of the High God is imbued within them."
"The High God my ass. Who in hell is this Prophet?"
"This is not the place for blasphemy." She chided. "At least not so loud. We'll both get in trouble."
"Trouble? Trouble?" He lifted his hands over her head so he could jab a finger at her. "Whoever put me here is going to see more trouble than he could possibly imagine. I'm going to reduce this whole place to a pile of smoking stone. I'm going to turn this Prophet into ash."
"And how are you going to do that? With those on?" She lifted a brow at him, pursing her lips smartly. "Are you finished raving?"
He glared at her. No one but Yoko had ever habitually fussed and snapped at him without finding their heads separated from their bodies. "I do not rave."
"You most certainly do. Do you want to hear what happened or not?"
He stared at her. She stared back unflinchingly. There were dried tear streaks on her cheeks. She looked entirely kissable and he hadn't kissed a woman in what seemed a very long time.
"In a minute." He snatched her by the tunic and pulled her against him. Forced a serious and hungry kiss past her parted lips, until desperate for breath she pushed away. He smiled at her lazily, satisfied at the rosy blush on her cheeks and the flustered look in her eyes. He put his arms back around her back and pulled her against him. She settled to a more comfortable position between his legs and asked.
"Do you want to hear what happened?"
"I can think of better things to do?"
She rolled her eyes. "With the guards standing just outside the door?"
"It's been a long time."
"Behave." She wiggled to dislodge his fingers from straying down her behind and between her legs. She had no idea what effect that had on certain parts of his anatomy, but then Yoko had always been ignorant of her own desirability.
"Larz is king now." She started.
"So the old man finally died and his pompous son took his place. Bound to happen sooner or later."
"And he strongly supports the Prophet."
"He always was a prude."
"The Prophet is the man whose power you're in."
He didn't say anything to that, so she continued. "Four nights ago I went to your -- grave. It was the third anniversary of ---since you'd died. There was this terrible storm. It looked like lightning had stuck your gravestone and -- you were gone. Do you know what happened? Did you make it happen?"
He shook his head, totally blank on the whys and wherefores of that phenomenon. He had no memory of attempting to break back into this world, at least not recently. In fact memory of everything he had been doing of late was gone.
"I don't know all the facts, but -- but they say you were mad. That you killed a man in the streets and that when the temple guard tried to bring you in, you used an Exodus spell and slaughtered about a dozen people."
"They put hands on me." He said slowly, dredging up twisted, narrow memory. "I don't recall the spell -- but if they dared to touch me, then they deserved it."
"Rushie." She cried. "That's not true. Some of those men weren't even guards. Some of them had nothing to do with it. The whole city is up in arms."
"And what might you suggest I do about this cry for justice?"
"I don't know. You weren't yourself -- I keep telling them that. Maybe if you apologized and let them know you're back in control."
"Apologize? I'm sorry, have you mistaken me for someone else?"
"Ooohhh, don't you have a shred of sense? You are in trouble here and unless you can get past those wards on your wrists, you're not in a position of power. Sometime a little humbleness goes a long way."
"For you maybe. I don't do humble."
"You do asinine quite well." She snapped.
He grinned down at her, loving the angry spark in her eyes. "You are so beautiful, Yoko."
The anger faded. Her lips trembled, an invitation he could not resist. She kissed him back this time, wrapping her arms about his neck. She tasted of honey and spices, and the soft flicker of her little tongue was ecstasy. Her moan of pleasure the music of enchantment that had not a thing to do with magic.
"Yoko!!"
God. That voice. That damned stern, righteously shocked voice that had her jerking backwards so sharply against the chains that she bruised his wrists. Geo Note filled the doorway, his broad face filled with a few more lines, the brown in his hair fighting a loosing battle against invading gray.
"Father." Yoko scrambled to extricate herself from Schneider's arms. Schneider glared sullenly at the Great Priest.
"You have lousy timing, old man." He muttered and got an offended stare from Geo Note.
"Yoko, what were you doing?" The father demanded.
"I wasn't doing anything." The daughter cried guiltily.
"She was doing quite well before you got here." The defiler of innocent young woman assured them both. Yoko cast him a glare.
Then the guards behind Geo Note moved to let another man into the cell and all Schneider's lazy insolence evaporated into tense, deadly concentration. He recognized the man who had come to his cell earlier this very day. The intense eyed priest who had stared at him silently, gaugingly and left him without a word. That man set his hackles up and triggered alarms that very few men or monsters triggered.
Yoko's Prophet. It could be no one else. The Prophet stepped just past Geo Note and the Great Priest half way inclined his head, as if in respect. Oh, that was a telling stroke. That the former high priest of Meta-Rikan bowed to this new religious zealot, told a great deal about the way things were now. Three years, Yoko had said. Quite a lot of change for a mere three years.
"So the madman has regained his senses." The Prophet said, the traces of a smile touching his lips. Schneider hated him immediately. "Dear Yoko, you were so correct in assuming your presence would bring him about. Well done, my child."
Yoko trembled, bowing her head as if ashamed, which ignited Schneider's ire.
"She's not your child."
The Prophet arched a brow at him. Geo Note lowered his. "Yoko, come here."
"But, father. . . ."
"Girl, you agreed to certain things you ignore them, first chance you get."
"What things?" Schneider demanded. "What sin has she committed? Could be anything with your lot of pious asses."
"She was not to come into contact with you." The Prophet supplied. "For her own safety."
"Oh, its not her safety that's in question, priest." Schneider tilted his head, a feral smile crossing his lips.
"With you, all godly men are in danger. Your presence in this world has always been an anathema to the holy."
"Get over yourself."
"Your rise from the dead only proves how the dark powers of hell favor you."
Schneider laughed in genuine amusement. "If you only knew how untrue that statement is. Enough of this drivel. I'm tired of this cell and I want these wards OFF."
"The desires of the unholy mean nothing to honest men."
He almost rose in fury at that, but Yoko turned on him and kept him back with a touch of her fingers on his arms and a pleading, frightened look in her eyes. She mouthed the word PLEASE . With a frustrated growl he subsided, fists clenched, wishing to call a spell to strike the lot of those smug faced priests and priestly minions down in their tracks. A tingle of pain went up his arms and he winced, blocking the desire for magic, having no wish to be emasculated before these holy assess.
"Yoko." Geo Note said sternly. She looked at him a moment more, a promise that she would not desert him in her eyes, then rose and marched over to her father. The Prophet smiled down at her and there was in his eyes a proprietary glint. Schneider narrowed his own eyes.
"Perhaps you should take lady Yoko home, Great Priest." The Prophet suggested. "We shall all talk of this later."
Geo Note nodded his agreement and herded Yoko through the guards out of the door. She looked back once before she was swallowed by the shadow outside. Which left Schneider alone with the Prophet and his guard. The big, green eyed one who had been with him before leaned against the door frame.
Schneider rose to his feet, not wanting to kneel in this man's presence. "Do you have any notion of the pain and agony you're inviting by keeping me here?"
"Pain and agony are the torments of the wretched sinners. The pious man endures suffering knowing that it will end with the glory of heaven."
"Oh, God."
The Prophet stepped forward, quick as a cat and backhanded Schneider. If he had not been so surprised by the act, he might have avoided it. "Do not utter the name of our lord, you foul spawn of hell."
Schneider lifted his hands, gingerly touching his face. "My suggestion to you," he said slowly, carefully controlling the tremble of anger in his voice. "Is that you just kill me now. Otherwise, you are going to beg to the devil for mercy because your GOD will be in no position to grant it to you."
The guards shifted, willing to move forward and silence the blasphemy, but the Prophet lifted a hand. He leaned in towards Schneider fearlessly. "And what would you know of god, you motherless abomination?"
There was something in the eyes, something in the inflection of the voice that made Schneider start and blink in sudden recognition. But it faded as quickly as it had come and he stared at the Prophet warily, wondering if there were more to this man than some dusty religious Zion.
The Prophet smiled and pressed his hands together as if in prayer. "But, the High God is benevolent and wishes to forgive when forgiveness is truly desired. Think on your sins, my son and perhaps one day you might find absolution."
Schneider sniffed and lifted his hands. "Whatever. Do the chains have to stay. As you say, I'm not quite mad anymore. Isn't the cell enough?"
"Oh, quite. Sinakha, please remove the manacles. I trust there will be no further outbursts of violence."
Schneider shrugged, then as the Prophet turned to leave him, he whispered. "By the way, she's mine. So whatever little plans you had in mind, you can forget."
The Prophet paused a step, not looking back, then he continued towards the door.