Schneider rode the winds above Sta-Veron, frigid fingers of air tearing at his cloak and hair. The city was a maze of narrow streets and tiny, blocky buildings, the castle a larger block of gray far, far below. There were no clouds out today to obstruct his view of it, even from so high a distance. The sun glinted down, an insubstantial heat against the winds of high.
He ignored it all. His mind was far flung, his senses stretched like spider's silk in a far sensing that over the past days had stretched the width and breadth of a continent. He had begun with a broad sweep and turned up nothing. No hint. No tiny scrape of awareness either of Kall-Su, who he should have been able to discern or the bitingly familiar tang of the Prophet's power. Which meant there were wards. Wards were harder to get past when one's prey had the entirety of a continent to hide in. It was grueling, exhausting work, searching mile by mile of physical world, while underneath he scrutinized the ethereal one as well. He found a hundred essences he knew - out in the world -- a hundred familiar spirits that had touched him at one point or another in time - and none of them where the one he wanted.
Damnit, Kall, help me. He roared into that plane that was below consciousness and above the realm of sleep. Eight days and nothing. This was not Yoko, who was an infant in the ways of magic, or Gara who's presence was weak in the planes where magic dwelt, or even Arshes or was damned powerful but sometimes left herself open in her passion. Kall was damned well better than that. Kall shouldn't have let this happen.
It was driving him crazy. Eight days and he was so irritable and tired from the searching that the servants scurried from his path when they saw him coming. The castle guard went quiet and embarrassed when he was around. Gara and Arshes avoided him. The only person that was unfazed by his mood was Yoko, who paid him not the slightest heed most of the time and babbled incoherent delusions when she did. She hardly spoke to anyone anymore. She sat in her room for the most part, looking out the window or sewing by the fire. Keitlan would sit with her for hours on end. He was grateful for that loyalty. Someone needed to be with her, but he could not bring himself to watch her in her dementia for more than a short while. He missed her wit. He missed her scolding and her forthright opinions. He missed the optimism that she had always upheld, even in the worst situation. Though he might be loath to admit it, he wanted her opinion on what he should do. He wanted her advice because he was at his wits end himself. But mostly he just wanted the calming comfort of her smile and her laughter.
He touched down on the tower roof and stood there, eyes closed, trying to subdue the pounding behind his temples. It was not enough of a physical pain for a healing to banish. It was a strain on his magic that he had kept up almost non-stop for the last week. Not easy work, the delicate operation of finding a needle in a haystack.
Down the narrow tower stair. Past the servant's floor and down to the residential one. He hesitated in the hallway, bereft of objective. He was despondent and disillusioned and torn between the need to seek support and the desire to sulk in solitude. Arshes' room was down the hall, but she might not be there. She had taken to wondering the city in the company of her few remaining men. Gara might be all right to talk strategy with, but he was damned useless when Schneider was looking for a little comfort.
He drifted by Yoko's door. Leaned against the frame and watched her sitting in the windowseat, her knees pulled up to her chest, her eyes far away. She hummed to herself, so far away from him and the rest of the world that she might as well not be here at all. The light graced her profile and the stray strands of reddish hair; her skin so porcelain pale as to be almost a dolls. Her beauty made him ache. He dropped his gaze, rubbing a hand across his eyes.
"Rushie, are you all right?" Soft voice. Limpid eyes watched him when he snapped his gaze up to look at her. There was concern there and confusion.
"No." He admitted. "Are you?"
"Of course. Why wouldn't I be?" she went a little fuzzy eyed thinking about that. Everyone who dared council him told him not to confront her boldly with the truth. To let her reach it on her own. They warned that it might do more damage than good forcing the issue. He could not conceive how.
"What's happened?" she asked. It was more concern than she'd had for anyone outside of her illusional baby for more than a week. He stepped into the room, encouraged by the question.
"Angelo's got Kall and I can't find him. Don't you remember hearing that?"
Angelo's name made her expression go blank and she turned to stare out the window, blocking him out. Blocking everything out again. Schneider drew a ragged breath, overwrought with the search, with the failure that ate at him like a cancer and the frustration of having all the things he loved bruised and destroyed.
"Look at me!" he roared at her. She didn't flinch. He stalked across the room, grasped her sleight shoulders and turned her roughly to face him. Her knees slid off the window seat and she sat there, balanced on the edge, eyes boring into his chest. He grabbed her chin, forcing her face up.
"It's dead, Yoko. The baby is dead. Accept it." He slid his hand down to grasp her wrist and forced it between them, lying her hand upon her flat stomach. "Feel that? There's nothing living there now."
She turned her face away, her eyes growing just a little disturbed. She began humming again. A baby's lullaby. He thrust her away, trembling. What would it take to make her understand? Did he have to show her the grave and the frozen corpse?
Did he? He caught his breath, stunned at the inspiration. Then grasping hold of it like a holy tenant. He caught her arm, pulling her along in his wake, snatching her cloak from the peg behind the door as he forced her from the room. Like a reluctant child she balked, but was nothing against his strength and determination. Down to the main hall and people stopped in their tasks to stare. Yoko was whimpering, her eyes threatening tears. He didn't care. He kicked open the doors, got tired of fighting her outside on the steps, spun her around and in a deft motion wrapped her cloak about her, then swept her up, formed the words of a flight spell in his head and ascended into the sky. He heard the cries of people from below and ignored them. Focused on a southerly destination, one irrevocably etched into his memory. She stopped struggling. Just went limp in his arms, her face buried against his shoulder to shield it from the wind. He put up a buffer between them and the cold.
How many times had he traveled this route? With each trip only to find disaster. This time it would be different. He convinced himself of that. This time something good would come of it. She would be awakened to reality. She would mourn as was proper and return to being Yoko.
Hours and she never stirred. It was almost dark when he reached the terrible little gully where he had found her. He sat her on the ground and she stood, wrapped in her cloak, shifting from foot to foot, either from cold or from disorientation. He cast the whole of the area in a blaring witchlight, looking for the marker Kall's men had left on the little grave. He had not seen it himself, had not returned to this spot since he had first left it, but he had been told him what Kall's men had done. There. A pile of stones over a small mound of earth. He grabbed Yoko by the arm and pulled her over to it.
"Its here, Yoko. Buried in the cold earth. Look."
He hissed a word and the stones and earth erupted, blown away. The dirt spewed aside, creating a hole. Past the frost line and the earth turned rich and dark and the pit grew. Nothing was revealed inside it. His breath came harder. He felt a little disorientation himself. A little bewilderment at this riddle that had presented itself. He called upon a strike of lightning and it struck the earth with enough force to make the ground tremble and send Yoko off her feet. A pit yawned before him. A pit full of broken chunks of rock, of ice and snow, of shattered roots and veins of metal lying below the surface. But no bit of flesh was there.
This was the spot. There was no other. He stalked around the gully desperately looking to see if there might be some other pile of carefully placed rocks that he had overlooked. Some other mound of freshly dug earth. He called lightning to blast a half dozen holes in the earth and none of them revealed what he wanted. Yoko huddled in the midst of his destruction, silent observer. He collapsed on an overturned rock, stunned and only barely beginning to accept the notion that the infant corpse he'd had buried here was gone. That something had taken it. Not animals. The rocks would have been disturbed. What then? He pulled at his hair in frustration. He had come here to restore Yoko to her senses and he was close to loosing his own.
A light touch on his shoulder. "It will be okay, Rushie." She assured him. "When the baby's born, everything will be better. You'll see."
Time passed. Day and night were interchangeable in the Place Without Windows. The light never changed. Always flickering and taunting, turning into shadow and hiding the true details of the place. Sleep was a torture more excruciating than the waking humiliation of captivity. The nightmare's more vivid within the recesses of his mind where they fed off all his subconscious dread. He only half remembered most of them, and they were more devastating for it. Lingering scrapes of horror- pain- guilt - that he could not quite grasp the source of. But it stayed with him during the waking hours nonetheless and he sat in the shadows of his cell trying to dredge up the recollection so he might chase it away once and for all. But it never came.
The Prophet did. The Prophet hammered at him ruthlessly with ever-changing tactics. A mental assault that left him reeling and senseless; a fanatical sermon denouncing him for unclean and tainted, demanding retribution, demanding things Kall refused to give until the sermon turned into punishing pain that he could not block out and then he gave in a little. And bit by bit - as his mental defenses weakened from depravation and torment, and the self-destructive force of his own dreams - he crumbled.
He tried to deflect the mental intrusion, but it was so hard with his brain clouded by wizardbane. Angelo was hideously good at mind games. It was as violent and intrusive as any physical rape and left Kall as traumatized. It got worse as the Prophet discovered his weaknesses. And the nightmares began to bleed over into consciousness.
He began to think the Prophet was right. They hadn't come to get him, because they weren't looking. Schneider was angry because he'd killed Yoko's baby -- no, no, he hadn't -- Angelo had -- but he'd let her fall into the Prophet's hands. So Schneider left him here to have his mind ripped to shreds -- just like he'd abandoned him to that other darkness that had claimed him. But this was worse because the Prophet did not want to elevate him to power, he wanted to destroy him utterly. And he did it in the name of God. And though Kall-Su had always avoided priests and holy houses with a vengeance, the belief drilled into him as a child by Grandfather still lingered. There were gods -- they just turned their faces from the unworthy. They turned their faces from him because of what he was -- what he had been born of.
Do you think you're worthy to grace the halls of heaven? Grandfather said in the dream -- in reality so long ago.
No. Kall replied, a little, timid answer. He thought it was the one Grandfather expected. He knelt on the hard wood floor of the church, small and dirty because he'd been fighting with one of the boys. He couldn't recall what had started it. Blood ran down from his nose. He'd gotten the worse of the fight, being smaller. Grandfather blamed him. Called him an instigator. Rapped him across the back of the legs with his cane until there were red welts and sat him down to beg the gods for forgiveness.
Tears ran down his face to mix with the blood, but he prayed, clasping his hands together so hard his nails bit into the backs of his hands.
Your mother is to blame for this. Grandfather said acidly. She brought this upon us. Your sins are hers to bear.
He prayed all the more fervently, begging the gods that no blame of his be placed upon Mother. Mother loved him. She was the only one who cared what became of him. She was the only one who protected him against the worst of Grandfather's prosecutions. He wished she'd come now, gracing the church with her gentle presence. Bringing calm and forgiveness in the warm depths of her eyes. Smoothing things over with Grandfather as only she could. She would wipe the blood off his lip. She would hug him and make it better. She would tell him he did not endanger her immortal soul with his mere existence. But what if he did? What if every sin he committed condemned her to a deeper hell?
Please, please God. Forgive me my trespass. Forgive the sins of my flesh. Forgive the sins of my mind.
The god will never turn his face towards the spawn of a demon. The other priest had come to join Grandfather on the podium behind the naive, the both of them looking down at Kall disapprovingly. The only thing that will save her soul, is his death.
He shuddered, curled up against the wall and mouthed the words of the prayer over and over. The taste of salt was on his lips. Tears? Blood? From the fight? He could only barely recall the fight. He huddled in darkness, wondering where the light had gone. Where grandfather was. The church had been replaced by dank darkness and a tiny square cell with a rough stone alter against the far wall. He could not recall how he had gotten there. The words of the priest echoed in his mind. He did not wish to jeopardize Mother's soul. He fervently did not wish to endanger her in any way. But he didn't want to die. But, Grandfather said everything he did was a sin because of what he was. Because of what had spawned him. He didn't know how to stop being what he was.
He sobbed miserably and crawled over to the alter, knelt before it and prayed for forgiveness.
"Why can't you do that for the Master? Then he'll let you eat." The voice came out of the darkness at him. He gasped, choked back a cry and cringed back against the wall. A figure shifted in the shadows by the door. A girl's soft voice. She had been sitting there, watching him. He didn't know her.
He did know her.
He blinked, confused. His vision blurred and his balance did. He clutched at the alter and rested his head against its cold stone surface.
Reality smashed into him like a fist. On his knees before the alter, the words of a prayer on his lips, the fear of a child a clinging mist in his mind. He cried out in dismay at what he was doing -- of what his mind had thrust upon him. He glared at the shadow of the girl for witnessing it. He could not form words to chase her away.
"What will it hurt?" she asked. "Capitulate. Bend knee and give thanks before his god and he'll relent. You'll starve otherwise."
"I'll die first." He murmured, not so certain that was true anymore. From the small huff of air she released, he didn't think she thought so either.
"You'll suffer." She whispered. "Why are a few meaningless words so important? If you don't bend, you'll break."
"Why do you care? Who are you?"
She shook her head. Her hand moved slightly and caught at the faint light. There was a black tattoo there. A slave mark. He stared at it. He hadn't known what she was. He hadn't thought a slave. He couldn't imagine why the Prophet would need to buy a person, when he could take whatever he wanted. She self-consciously moved the hand back into shadow, and shifted as if to rise and flee.
"Who are you?" he repeated, the need to know suddenly overpowering the humiliation and the terror of the dream/reality.
"No one." She whispered and slipped out the door and down the hall. He couldn't find the strength to move or call after her.
"You're avoiding me."
Gara held up a hand and the ninja he was sparring with stepped back, unsheathed sword lowered. They stood in the practice yard, stripped down to nothing more than shirts and trousers and soft boots in the heat of exertion. One didn't notice the cold until one stopped. And even then, with Arshes Nei standing outside the fence, the warmth of embarrassment flooded up to chase away the chill of sweat drenched skin.
Gara wiped a hand across his brow. Nodded once to the ninja that the practice was over and sheathed his practice sword. The ninja walked away and Gara stood in the middle of the muddy field trying to think up a suitable excuse.
"We've all been busy. I've been trying to get back into shape. Almost dying takes a lot out of a man."
She pondered that, tilting her head, resting her hand on the top rail of the fence. "No." She finally said. "You've been avoiding me. Ever since we came back from the mountains."
He looked away and stubbornly insisted. "I've been practicing."
"You're as good as you're going to get, Gara."
He looked up at her sharply at that. "Not good enough."
"Ah. But only because you were thinking more of me than of yourself. Foolish."
"I suppose so." He started walking towards the gate.
"Do you want to spar with me?"
The question stopped him in his tracks. He looked over his shoulder at her. There was nothing but serious inquiry in her eyes.
"All right." Slowly. Carefully.
She walked around the fence to the shed where the practice weapons were kept. Chose a blade and entered the ring. They stood facing each other and she raised her weapon first. He drew his. Not the Murasume. He only fought for real with that.
She struck at him, a quick calculated feint to test the waters. She was adept at the blade -- she ought to be, having studied it for over twice his lifetime. But she was a sorceress before a swordswoman and he was the ninja master. He met the thrust and deflected it, warily, letting her circle him, letting her exert her effort moving around him, while he waited for her next move. Feint to the left. He blocked it. Bam, bam, bam. A series of blows trying to get him off balance. His balance was unshakable.
"How long have you loved me?"
He faltered and she came under his guard, nicked the underside of his arm with the business end of the blade. He transferred the sword the other hand, shaking the sting out of his arm.
"Does it matter?" He felt gawky of a sudden. And lumbering and uncouth. A plain, scar-faced man compared to what she had spent her whole life devoted to. He didn't know why she was tormenting him with it. Curiosity. Some perversity she had picked up from Schneider. She had picked up enough other habits from him.
"Yes." She answered him simply, earnestly, dropping the tip of her blade. "I think it does."
They stood in the mud of the practice field, with drawn weapons held at ready, as if it were still a sparring match. He stared at her. Her ears were at half mast, her skin showing the slight sheen of sweat.
"Since the first day I saw you don armor and ride out to meet battle."
Her eyes widened in surprise. "Why then?"
"Because at first I thought you were one of his toys. A concubine. A plaything with no will of your own and you surprised me. You turned out to be a woman of courage and power -- and compassion."
She laughed outright. "Compassion. You saw that in me back then? I thought it was well hid myself."
He didn't know if she were mocking him or herself. He walked past her towards the gate, finished with the match. She followed.
"Why would you love me, Gara?" she demanded, a desperate note in her voice.
"You already asked me that?"
"I don't understand." She cried. "You say you love me, yet you ask nothing of me. You've never asked anything of me."
"I don't want anything of you." He said putting the blade in its slot, not turning to look at her. She stood behind him silently and when he did turn to look, there was hurt in her eyes. She had taken it the wrong way.
"I didn't mean it like that. I do ---" he faltered. That wasn't right either. He took a breath and said rationally, calmly. "I need your friendship, Arshes. I need that more than anything else. The rest -- anything not given freely is no gift at all."
Philosophy. Ah, he hated himself for attempting it. But she stared for a moment, then nodded, handed him her blade and walked away from him.
It started to rain. Not snow, it was not quite cold enough for that, but a steady, gray drizzle that pitted the snow covering the yard and made the icicles start to drip puddles. A sign, perhaps, that spring thaw was on its way.