Gara shut the door behind him and stood for a moment with the solid wood at his back. The Murasame pressed against his spine, its hilt rising over his shoulder like a living thing that always watched and waited. Her room was next to his. Gods knew what fate had put its twisted hand to that arrangement. He wanted to take the sword off and the weight of the armor and the clothing he had worn for two weeks or more tromping through the snow.
A door down the hall opened, Kall-Su's chambers, he thought, and Schneider walked out. He stood in the hall a moment, as if undecided, then started for the stairs leading down to the main hall. Gara ground his teeth and pushed off from the door, sliding down the hall with all the grace and silence of a lifetime of training. He caught up with Schneider ten steps down.
"What did you say to her?"
The sorcerer jerked his head about, startled at Gara's silent presence at his back. He paused, his perfect face miming bafflement.
"What business is it of yours?" He said airily and something inside Gara snapped.
He made no noise of protest, merely snarled and whipped an elbow out. It caught Schneider across the jaw. His head snapped back, he faltered a step and Gara slammed him backwards into the stairwell wall.
"Godsdamn you. Its my business that I looked after her while you were in hell. Its my business that she's my friend and I respect her and her feelings, which you goddamned well have no sense of burden for." He leaned close, glaring down, his hands on either side of Schneider's head. A trickle of blood seeped from the side of Schneider's lip. He lifted a hand between them to gingerly touch the split. His eyes were hidden by lashes.
"Back off, Gara." A quiet warning.
"I will not."
"Have you lost your sanity?" Again low voiced. The lashes flickered up. There was still something of perplexity in those blue eyes and irritation that did not quite verge on the anger that Gara felt.
"Damn you, stop hurting her."
"Arshes."
"Yes, Arshes! You use her then you discard her, then you use her again when it suits your purposes."
"You don't know what you're talking about, Gara." A little bit of anger seeped into the tone. Good, Gara wanted anger. He wanted something he could sink his teeth into. Schneider tried to shove one of the big man's arms out of his way and Gara, taller and heavier used his weight to slam against him, pressing him back against the wall with a thud.
"Goddamnit, Gara -- do you want a fight? Is that what you want? You're about to get one."
"You are not the god of the world, Schneider. You can't treat people like that and get away with it. You used her to hurt Yoko and then when you changed your mind, she got hurt. Don't you ever think of anyone else besides yourself?"
"Shut up. Get your fucking hands away from me or loose them."
"Make me."
"Damnit ---Gara." Schneider hissed between this teeth, glancing away in frustration. Gara realized in the part of his brain that was not on a rampage to defend Arshes Nei's honor, that Schneider did not want to fight him. That Schneider was going to great lengths not to return the violence that Gara was teetering on the edge of. It was sobering that Gara was the irrational one here and not the other way around. He prided himself on his calm and here he was squandering it. He was the one asking for a fight -- a fight that he could never hope to win. He cursed and stepped back. Didn't say a word, just called on every shadow skill he had and melted down the stairs like a wraith. Schneider probably saw through it, Gara didn't care. He just wanted away, out of the castle and into the cold where the heat that pulsed inside him might cool.
Gara was down the steps, not making a sound and doing a damn good job of blending into the shadows. He'd had such a stricken look on his face, when the anger had passed, that Schneider just stood with his back against the wall staring at the curve in the stair where he'd disappeared. He ran his tongue along the split inside his lip and healed it with an absent thought.
This had started out such a nice day, what with the destination of Kall's city finally reached after too long in the snowy wilderness. It had been just lovely up until the point he had broken the kiss with Yoko and heard the news of Arshes's presence. From there it had gotten rather dismal. He didn't like feeling guilty and Arshes's damned lost little girl eyes had managed to make him feel it. And Yoko, who had been sweet and shy for the last several weeks - albeit chastely sweet and shy -- had turned back into a fearless, condemning termagant over a period of mere minutes. And to top it all off, Gara looses his mind and assaults him. Miserable, miserable day.
"What are you doing? Are you all right?"
Thinking of termagants -- here she came up the stairs, eyeing him with wary suspicion in her brown eyes. He slid down the wall to sit on a step and her frown deepened.
"Gara just up and attacked me. Can you believe it?"
"Gara wouldn't do that." She said with the vaguely scoffing tones of an adult who had just heard an outrageous tale from an overly imaginative youngster.
He narrowed his eyes balefully at her and did not dignify her rebuttal with an argument. "I am so not in the mood to be bitched at right now."
"Who said I was going to bitch at you?" He little nose lifted into the air.
"Well it would be just par for the course."
"Well, I don't bitch." She said. He laughed, at which she narrowed her eyes and stomped up a step to glare down at him.
"Not that you don't deserve it for plenty of things. Oodles of things. Tons of things. So many things I can't even think of them all."
"I get the picture." He groused.
"No you don't. I sometimes wonder if you even realize that some of the things you do are just -- wrong? Do you? Do you have the moral capacity separate good from bad."
"Yoko, just go away now. You're the one who wanted time alone to think. Take it."
"Oh, right, avoid the really serious issues."
"I'm not a fucking simpleton. Yes, I feel bad about you not being able to handle Arshes and Arshes not being able to handle you. Okay? Satisfied?"
She jabbed a finger under his nose, apparently not satisfied. "You feel bad about that because it directly effects you. Where's the responsibility of doing something about it?"
"What the hell do you want me to do?" he came to his feet and she stepped down at the sudden readjustment of eye levels. "Damnit, you are driving me crazy. I never used to have this many problems. I never used to give a goddamned what anybody thought. What the hell changed?"
She stared up at him, wide eyed at the fervor in his face. She put one hand reflexively to her stomach, reassuring herself of the life she carried within it. "Maybe you did." She whispered. "But you just don't know it."
She looked down and tried to slip up the stairs past him. He put an arm out to stop her.
"And maybe I haven't."
She stood there, blocked by his arm. Then she lifted her eyes to his and met him glare for glare. There was quiet determination in her eyes fed from deep resources of will. "Let me pass. This conversation is over. Later when you've regathered your composure I will speak with you again."
He took a breath, full of indignation over her tone and her implications that he was the one who was irrational. That he was the one out of line. He opened his mouth, ready to spew forth the first biting thing that came to mind and she cut him off.
"I might have idolized you before, when I was naive and young, but I never loved you as much as I loved the Rushie I grew up with. And that was such a small part of you --the rest was decadent and dark and completely lacking in regard. You have changed, because otherwise I couldn't love you now and know deep down that's its not just the Rushie part -- that it's all of you."
She ducked under his arm and was up the stairs, a slight figure that didn't blend as well as Gara, but was gone just a quickly nonetheless. He stared after her, feeling as if the breath had been knocked out of him.
There was a fine celebratory dinner in the great hall. The cook outdid herself. Kall-Su's commanders and their ladies, Gara's ninja lieutenants, Arshes Nei's knight captain all seemed in great, fine moods. The wine flowed, the minstrel's played. Conversation buzzed about the hall like spring pollen. Of the principle players in attendance, Schneider, Gara, Arshes Nei who looked to have come down under duress only, Yoko and Kall-Su himself, only the Ice Lord was not glaring at the world as if it had done him a grave injustice.
Yoko adjusted the placement of food on her plate despondently, never actually looking up to meet anyone eyes and hardly speaking a word and then not above a whisper. Gara sat as far down the main table as he could get from the rest of them and was equally uncommunicative, an unusual trait for the ninja master. Arshes sat among her men, stone faced and stiff backed, glaring at anyone who dared make a comment to her. And Schneider sat slouched in a chair next to Kall, drinking a great deal of wine, fingers drumming the table top with an agitated, discordant beat. The conversations went on around them. Kall felt vaguely displaced, being on the outside of some dark drama that the rest of them shared. The only player in a game of hearts that was not critically engaged in the battle.
He was not usually one for gossip, but something had definitively changed since Schneider had come complaining at his door that afternoon. Words had been exchanged between unknown - but guessed at -- parties. Gara had gotten into the fray, that was clear from the big man's morose expression. He leaned over to Schneider, swirling the wine in his goblet idly.
"Should I hazard a guess and say that things have deteriorated since we last spoke?"
Schneider slanted an ominous glance his way. His eyes were shadowed pools of darkness beneath the heavy fringe of moonlight pale hair. He didn't answer. One of the serving girls slipped between them to refill both their goblets. Schneider leered up at her -- his old familiar leer -- and ran a hand down her posterior as she bent. The girl gasped, turning red, but not with outrage, more with embarrassed pleasure. The female staff -- the ones that were not sympathetically and firmly planted in Yoko's camp, were aflutter over him. He had, as far as Kall knew, been miraculously abstemious in his treatment of them.
The serving girl giggled a little under her breath and leaned over in her filling of Schneider's cup to press her bosom against his arm. A cup slammed onto the table top and wine sloshed over Arshes Nei's untouched dinner plate. Her gaze was fixed on the fire. Yoko's chair scraped up and she made a whispered apology, claiming nausea, and practically ran from the hall.
There was a moment's lull in conversation. People did not quite know where to look. Schneider retrieved his hand from the maid and crossed his arms, glaring at Yoko's empty chair. The girl, sensing the change in mood, hurried back to the kitchen.
"To hell with this." He finally hissed and pushed back from the table so hard his chair toppled backwards when he stood. That most certainly stopped conversation and every eye in the hall followed him as he stalked from it.
Kall sat for a moment, caught in that silence. Then carefully he put his goblet down and rose in a much more mannerly fashion and followed in Schneider's footsteps. Up the stairs. Past the second level where the living quarters were, past the third where his study and library rested, the fourth housed the staff and then there were the steps to the tower. The door was left open and a cold draft whistled down.
Schneider stood on the battlements, looking down over the heights, out over the snowy landscape beyond. The sky was dark and smeared with clouds. Some small bit of powdery snow drifted down from the heavens.
"You'll have to fix this, sooner or later." Kall circled the battlements, running a hand along the rough grain of stone. Hair fluttered about his ears. Snow caught in his lashes. He blinked it out.
"Go the hell away, Kall. No lectures on morality. I've had mine today already."
"Oh. I wasn't aware you took that sort of thing to heart." That was a blatant invitation for strife, but he plunged on anyway. "But, strangely enough, I can see that you have. What will you do?"
Schneider glanced over his shoulder, hair whipping about him like a thing alive. "I had an idea, but you didn't seem to like it."
"I do not believe it was -- well thought out." Kall said diplomatically. "I had almost thought -- from the looks on all of your faces that you had suggested it to them."
Schneider laughed, turned his back on the battlements and held the hair back off his face with one hand. "No. Never got the chance. Gara seems to have a strong opinion on the matter as well."
"Gara -- is protective over those he considers friends."
"I guess I don't qualify."
"You seldom need protection."
Again, a slightly mad laugh. "I wonder how high you'd have to go before the air turned so thin you couldn't breath?"
"I have no idea."
"I've a notion to find out." He shot skywards, cutting through snow and wind like a black sheathed scythe. Kall stared up in dismay at the rapidly diminishing figure. The clouds blotted Schneider's form. The sky rumbled with unease, energies here there for not present swirling high over Sta-Veron. Lightning pierced the dark clouds like the finger of god. He felt the uncontrolled release of mystic energies and cursed. Not over his city. If Schneider were going to throw a fit, let him do it elsewhere.
His feet left the rooftop and he cut through the night sky, heading into the boiling storm. Winds tore at him, but they were nothing to a wizard who had mastered the elements of ice and winter malice. He broke through the clouds, going for the center of power that was still damned high above him. Was Schneider really trying to breach the shell of oxygen that surrounded the world? A bolt of errant lightning struck at him, attracted to his solid presence in the midst of clouds and frozen water. He shielded against it, effortlessly. Tried to find the center of the storm Schneider had provoked and make it null, but it was a wild thing of thunder and lightning and those elements were not so easily controllable for him.
Another bolt struck at him hungrily, its fingers of energy skittering across his shield. The resulting boom of thunder almost deafened him. He put his hands over his ears and called out Schneider's name.
"Stop it, Damnit."
Something slammed his shield with enough insidious force to shatter it and solid force hit him from behind. Arms wrapped around him, pinning his arms, holding him fast against a body that radiated heat against his cold. Fire wizard against Ice. Schneider pressed close and whispered in his ear.
"She said I'd changed. What does that mean? To change would mean something -- some outside force molded me and I won't be manipulated or molded to anyone else's will. Not even hers."
"Stop the storm. You don't know how volatile the weather patterns are here. You'll do the city harm."
"Make me, Kall."
Kall threw his head back in frustration, hitting Schneider on the side of the cheek. "It's not a game. You don't have to prove anything to me. Its yourself that's uncertain. You don't have to go to lengths just to prove you're the same or not. What does it matter?"
"You always try to reason with me, Kall. Why do you bother?"
A finger of lightning formed out of thin air behind them. It struck Schneider in the back and laced through him and into Kall. His vision went white. Every nerve ending in his body screamed in agony. His heart froze up in shock.
And started back up erratically, spurred by Schneider who recovered faster from the strike than he did, if he'd been effected by it at all. He was laughing. "Why do you bother at all, Kall?"
Kall felt vaguely sick from the strike; he forced it away. He'd lost hold of the flight spell and let Schneider support the both of them while he got his wits together. "Because you bothered with me, that's why. Nobody else would."
There it was. The truth of the matter. The debt he could never repay. His life, his self-esteem, everything he was and would never have been if Schneider had not, in his own indubitable way, convinced him he was not the abhorrent, worthless creature every other person in his life had managed to convince him he was.
Silence after that. The clouds boiled around them. Lighting flared. Was diverted away by will alone. Schneider rested his forehead on Kall's shoulder.
"All right." He murmured and the storm seemed to collapse in upon itself. Even the clouds seemed to dissipate. Their feet touched down on the tower roof and he let Kall go, looking tired and world weary, he turned his back. Kall stared, shaken to the core himself.
"Go on, Kall. I'm not going to do anything destructive. Go back to dinner or your books or whatever."
Kall couldn't find any words to reply. There was nothing to do but comply and hope for the best.
The master taught Lily the words to certain hymns that he found pleasurable. She had never sang religious songs before, her former owners having bawdier tastes. But she knew the words of the common songs sang at temple or for religious events. These hymns were different. Unfamiliar to her. He said they were of the ancient world. He said it was all right if she knew those old lyrics for she would never sing them to any other living soul but him. She would serve no other master but him for the rest of her life. In this forbidding, windowless place, where hope died, squashed under the iron shod heel of His religion, she thought he might be right.
She sat on the floor at his feet and strummed her instrument, singing the words he had taught her. Sometimes he did nothing but stare into space, and she was not certain he even heard her. At others he mouthed the words with her, stroking her hair while she played, his eyes lit with the fervor of a passion she did not understand. He never touched her in any other way. Not to beat her - she was far to accommodating for that -- or relieve his physical needs. If he slacked those needs at all, she never saw. The only times he ever seemed excited in that manner -- really excited was when he was punishing some violation of his code - whether real or imagined. Taking out his wraith on some hapless, broken hostage of this monastery they all inhabited. She never watched long enough to see what he did after he'd slacked his thirst for blood and pain. She didn't want to know if he did more. She thought he might have -- when the madness was upon him. She thought sometimes, when he purified himself with prayer and self-inflicted pain, that it was to cleanse himself of the sin of giving in to those baser desires.
Sometimes while she played, he would orate to himself. Talking about the will of the God and his place as the chosen servant. Of his divine right as the Prophet. He spoke of darker things too. Of hatreds and revenge that made her shiver and sometimes miss a chord.
She sat against the wall of his own private room, while he knelt before the stone symbol of divinity where he delivered his prayers to the god. Candles burned on either side of the icon, casting the room in a flickering shadow. She played a particular hymn. One of divine retribution and the reward of the faithful. Her voice was low pitched and the strumming of the lyre was almost a whisper, a mere background noise to the Master's communion with his god. She only half listened to his words, she had learned to tune out what did not directly apply to herself. But some of the things he said caught her attention. He spoke of the future and his own departure. Of that, she had great interest.
"It is almost time." He said. "The day fast approaches when my retribution shall be at hand and I shall leave to do Your work. He was stronger than I ever imagined. I miscalculated the strength of will that a minion of hell could possess. I failed You in that. I could not break the spirit to take the vessel. Not physically. Perhaps there are other ways. I know his weaknesses. I know what he treasures, as if such a creature could hold anything sacred. Take those things away and we shall see --- and if that path fails, then there is always the other. Your will shall be served."
He bowed his head and chanted prayers and Lily shivered. Someone was going to be hurt. Someone was going to suffer the divine retribution of her master and she wished that fate on no living thing. But she missed not a word or a note in her song. He would have noticed that and in the mood he entertained now, she would have sorely regretted it.