meep
The Words Between - part 21
Kyn's life had taken on a surreal cast that he had only found matched in the most tragic of comedies. When he had been forced to study them in his younger years, he had scorned their seeming artifice, the improbable coincidences that had brought about irony, tragedy, or hilarity; the helpless players within the cast scurrying blindly about to the bidding of the demented playwright, mistaking their circumstances for the edicts of a gods' pleasure or fury rather than a simple, childishly cruel amusement.
With his lack of experience, was it any wonder that he could not see the truth for what it was? That such intricate and artificial plots might actually model real life closer than he could have ever imagined himself? How else could it explain the sudden insane urge he felt to choke himself with laughter, even as his throat closed upon dry sobs? Was this what he had been reduced to; little more than a jester's role, an unwitting pawn in the game between kings, wandering confusedly from scene to scene and never given the keys to understanding, or even the realization of his own pitiable nature?
Jenner looked unsurprised to be here. He looked unsurprised to see Kyn here. In fact, Jenner looked as if everything was finally falling into place - nearly two decades' worth of anticipation setting fire to his eyes, a light which Kyn eventually had to turn away from, shaking. The shaking...he could not stop it. It made him stumble even though he was not moving, his body canting wildly aside though the ground was steady, and he caught at a willow beside him, nearly giving in to the impulse to slide down to the ground, to curl amongst the shallow roots, and hope that everything - Jenner, the world, himself - just went away.
"I thought you were made of stronger stuff, boy." The tones were so soft, so gentle...so close. Kyn's breath shivered in his lungs as he instinctively shoved his back against the solid bole behind him, almost trying to press himself into it as he stared at the man's approaching figure, refusing to meet those terrible eyes, that unnaturally smooth visage. "I thought I had taught you better."
You had taught me everything wrong... came the instinctive, petulant thought, even as Kyn straightened infinitesimally, head bowing in a reflex ingrained by years of training.
"Better," Jenner said grudgingly, one finger - whole and healthy - rising into Kyn's vision as if to tip his chin up. Befor he could do more than flinch, however, the man dropped the hand again, gliding back, his manner distracted, face turned away. "But we shall save comments upon your behavior for another time. First, there is the matter of Sen's upcoming performance."
There was hatred and there was glee in those patrician tones, unsoftened and unmarred by the burr of scar tissue. Kyn was only able to find enough wits while that too-sharp regard was turned to glance up...glance about...and realize with a start at the insubstantiality of the garden. Not to say that the willow felt any less prickly at his back, or that the colors were any less vibrant...but in the same way where he was aware of his physical body even as he seemed to inhabit another world entirely, he could feel the detachedness of his hold upon his own body and the garden's realm. As if something had come between them.
Someone else.
The first shadings of alarm began when his hand twitched without his prompting. He could feel the scrape of rough stone beneath his nails as the fingers curled and clenched. Stone? When had he moved enough to touch stone? Panic filled his lungs, and he instinctively fought to reach out, to bid his body move only as he wished it...
"Think quietly, boy," Jenner remonstrated.
Think quietly...! The incipient laughter was choked back by the firm grip of a hand over his mouth, Master's voice a sudden, sibilant hiss in his ear, "Fool boy! Have you already lost a lifetime's worth of discipline and training? When there are lines upon the ground, when there is no answer, what do you do?"
Be still. Be quiet. No thought preceded the loosening of tense muscles, the shift of weight to accomodate a more patient stance. Kyn simply reacted to the achingly familiar question, and was rewarded by the slow removal of Jenner's hand from his jaw.
"Good," Master's voice whispered in grudging approval, the same hand resting upon his head as it oft had when he was young - not to comfort, but to command attention. "Listen well. My time here is limited, as is my influence, but it will be enough to interfere with Aisner's work. Since you have allowed the girl to survive till now, it is now your duty to see that she does not give him the sacrifice he needs to ensnare Belahb again."
Kyn could not seem to bring his gaze any closer to Jenner than a vague point over the man's left shoulder. As terrible as Master's visage had been in his ravaged body, it seemed even more unnatural to see the embodiment of a painting, an almost mythical figure, instructing him now using all too familiar registers. "I don't understand..." The words escaped without thought, a mere whisper of breath that was detected nevertheless, inciting an impatient sound accompanied by a sharp shake of his head as if he might be roused to greater awareness with the simple gesture.
"It does not matter whether you understand or not, simply that you carry out my instructions to the - "
The forcible shake may not have jogged anything useful, but the words unearthed something bitter inside him. "No!" he interrupted, almost breathless with his temerity, but he was just able to fool himself into thinking this wasn't truly Master, with such a perfect physical guise, and that perhaps all the rules did not apply. "No, I have to understand! It is because - " The hand reached for his mouth again, and without thinking, he deflected it, turned his grip, and captured the palm in a hold that could mercilessly pinch the nerves between the delicate wrist bones with a single, thoughtless twist.
Finally, he met those cold-fire eyes, wide with affront - wide with astonishment. His must have been just as wide...but as the world paused, he did not loosen his grip, and Master remained caught. "You think you do not need me anymore?" the man finally uttered, each syllable like a stone hurled to wound and injure.
How could he ever not need him? Even when Kyn had not heard so much as a word from Master, all his thoughts, all his actions, revolved around this man's desires! "I acted in error before," he husked, surprised to find that the tremble in his voice came from resentment rather than dread, "but only because I lacked information. So, as you have taught me, I would not make the same error again."
Jenner blinked, the ire ebbing, to be replaced with that icy hunger again before he slowly smiled, a raw chuckle dragged reluctantly from his chest. "Very good, Kyn, very good. Very well, you have earned yourself an explanation. But listen closely! There is still a little while yet before the critical moment will be upon us, but there is still much that has to be done, and I will not repeat myself."
The man gave an impatient shake of his hand, and Kyn finally released him, rubbing his own hand as if it alone had betrayed him in its stubborn capture of his former caretaker. Grateful for the steadying presence of the wood at his back, he barely had time to comprehend his unexpected success before the words were coming once again.
"Belahb was summoned to destroy the Mrr'Thaine line. It was tricked, bound, and since then, has remained in service to Aisner. But Sen had always been impatient...sloppy. Not enough to get himself killed - yet, more's the pity - but just enough that when he summoned Belahb, his hold over it was incomplete. In the time between then and now, he had strangled Belahb's source, starved it into submission, perpetually threatening it with the danger of extinction to keep it compliant. He was greedy enough to summon the entity with a lifetime contract, wanting its power forever at his beck and call, but was not thorough enough to curb all its possible actions, to keep himself and what he valued from harm.
"Tonight, he seeks to renew the contract, and to fill in those missing terms which will allow him enough peace to sleep through a night without checking and rechecking his bindings. Tonight, he seeks to make a sacrifice worthy enough to give him the power to wrest that last bit of control..."
Ask, and you shall receive. Kyn could only blindly listen, and hope that he would remember...remember, and have the chance to mull over it all in more detail later, if he survived this evening's events. It was more information than he could process, and yet, it all betrayed nothing of what he truly wanted to know, of what had happened on that night fifteen years ago which led to him as he was now. He wanted to shout over the flood of words, to ask for the real answers, even as he hesitated to interrupt for fear that the man would never start again. Yet, sly impulse, which he seemed unable to shake off in his harried state, prompted him to blurt, "A worthy sacrifice? Of Minnefei? But he disdains his daughter! How could that sacrifice weigh enough to bind a demon?"
Irritation glared at him for a moment before Jenner turned a more considering look upon him. "Does he, now? Are you so sure of that, boy?" he asked, in that testing tone which was only used when he asked a question to which he already knew the answer.
Kyn held his breath uncertainly, frantically ransacked his memory for all the evidence, wondering what it was he had missed...he could not have misinterpreted the chill that lay between the two. Minnefei herself, for all her arrogance and inward-turned regard, had sensed the wrongness and conspired to have herself sent away to the capitol...
Something fluttered in a remote corner of his mind, a corner which he had been forced to ignore for weeks due to a misbehaving Gift. It tried to prompt him now, and he reflexively winced away...and then paused. He had Seen her death before, in two places, two times. One had already been navigated without coming to pass, due to his interference. But the other one?
"He had been crying," Kyn husked in confusion. "He had slit her wrists to collect the blood, but there were tears upon his face. Why? If he does value her, somehow, why does he do it?"
Jenner snorted, the sound full of derision for the perceived thoughtlesness of the question. "Of course she must have value to him, if she is to be made a sacrifice! Otherwise, it is no sacrifice upon his part at all, is it?"
Sacrifices. Bindings. Everything whirled confusedly in his aching head, and he nearly sobbed in frustration...he already had nearly all the pieces, he could sense it ! But how did they fit! "Why does he need a sacrifice at all? He already has Belahb under his control. Why not force it into complying with new terms?"
"It is not so easy as that, with the arts," the man murmured darkly, his attention straying for a moment before returning, graver than ever. "Such contracts are only binding with willing participants. Belahb had to be tricked into entering the first, and true to its nature, would rather wait through a man's lifetime perpetually shackled by wards just for the slim chance of revenge, rather than gain only an illusory freedom in exchange for its complete slavery. Yet even intent and will is subject to a certain amount of interpretation - remember, Kyn, that in such things, everything lies in interpretations. In this case, considering the timing and the degree of his sacrifice - not just his only progeny, but an entire keep's worth of people - I surmise Aisner wishes to call something of a higher plane than Belahb, either to use it to command the entity into submission through their own heirarchical strictures, or perhaps to banish it altogether and to chain the newly summoned in its place..."
Kyn's mind stuttered, and he gaped at the man. Wait... "...an entire keep's worth of people...?"
Realization of what Jenner had been hinting at must have stolen across his face, for other than a brief flash of annoyance, the man's face had smoothed into imperturbability rather than begin a harangue on his woeful lack of critical analysis, simply waiting for him to come to his own conclusions.
Kyn, the way is barred! We cannot get in!
Kyn, we cannot leave the keep! The great doors have been locked somehow!
The duke was planning on following the payment of his daughter's life with the lives of over a hundred others? Kyn's heart quailed to ponder what might be summoned with such a balance.
"Time is short," Jenner said with a gentleness that might have been concern in anyone else, but which was betrayed by his mad smile as being only the serenity of anticipation. "You need to steal the girl away. Aisner must not be allowed to take her life tonight...and while a handful of other lives here and there will make little difference, he must not be allowed to succeed in taking all other lives within this keep either." A moment's hesitation as he seems to consider a finer point, and then he adds, "Yet even if you prevent those two events, you have simply maintained the status quo."
"But how can I break the drugs' - "
"I will command it."
Kyn swallowed, and remembered that rough scrape of stone across his fingertips, though he had not consciously moved them. This is what I have been reduced to - not even a pawn anymore, but simply a marionette... "Those herbs," he said hollowly. "What you had given me for as long as I can remember."
A slight dip of the head in acknowledgment. "Close enough to what Aisner used, which allowed him to command you as he just did. Close enough to ease you into a state where I, with a much deeper hold, can slip in past his control."
Kyn shuddered, felt a weakness from more than just sick realization leech at his joints, as so many threads of lives and intentions colliding birthed a choking tangle of visions struggling to be realized. "What..." he gasped, covering his face with his hands, fingers digging into his scalp as he struggled to reorder all his hodgepodge wits. As futile as herding clouds with one's own breath. "What are you really trying to do? It is not to save Minnefei's life, or the lives of the others, or just to prevent Aisner's complete chaining of Belahb..."
"I want his suffering."
Kyn shakily lowered his hands, stared at this ghost of a man who should have died long ago, a shade that was flushed with more color than his own cheeks - chill from dread and uncertainty - could possibly hold. Jenner's hatred suffused him with unnatural life and intensity, so at odds with the half-dead husk he had been through all of Kyn's memory. "How?" he asked again, little more than a mouthing of the word, unable to get anything else past a dry throat and numb lips.
"You will kill him." Before Kyn could more than blink at this seeming contradiction - for was not death a release from suffering? - the man continued with venom lacing each syllable, "When the time comes, I want you to kill him - not before, not after. He will become the sacrifice...my sacrifice to Belahb. It will return to its own realm, and gladly take Sen with it."
Kyn shook his head slowly in mute confusion. "I do not understand...the duke means less than nothing to you. How could he become a sacrifice...?"
"If you are fool enough to delve further into the arts, boy, you will learn that the traditional sacrifice only serves two purposes - as a means of gaining attention, and as a catalyst. Aisner's death will be simply a beacon to draw the appropriate attentions, while the completion of my promises will do the rest.
"All those years ago, Belahb was drawn by the taste of whatever Aisner first offered as sacrifice, but its bindings were not complete until it accepted the further payments of his adopted family. Belahb might have been under Aisner's control altogether instead of merely shackled, if I had not offered it a sacrifice in turn that night..."
It took only a moment's expectant pause, before Kyn finished in a hoarse whisper, "Yourself."
A hand rose, drew down the smooth, unblemished seeming of his right cheek. "Not just myself. Its instructions had been to slay us all, and it could no more ignore the order than to break free from Sen's hold on its own. I offered myself in order to begin the bargain - and then I offered the rest of the Mrr'Thaines to seal it."
Kyn stared, and wondered how he could still be standing. It seemed as if he did not even have the strength to draw another breath to sustain himself, as his mind sifted mercilessly through the meanings.
Jenner smiled, a skull's mirthless baring of teeth. "I could have fought it, and perished, along with all the others and leave Aisner unopposed. There was no use in such an action beyond futile heroics; with no preparation, no warning, our deaths were a foregone conclusion. But Aisner was the last variable. He had to pay for the murders! And so I caught Belahb's attention by offering myself, and then offered that which was the most dear to me for that chance - I offered the lives of my blood family uncontested.
"Belahb had realized the trap by then. It was furious, and clutched readily at any hints of escape it could find, whether now or later - and how much better if it was able to take the one responsible with it to toy with? So it agreed, and took just enough of me to allow me the time to plot, while insuring that it would eventually fulfill Aisner's edict..."
Kyn was certain that if he had not been numb enough to wonder whether he was still clutching the tree behind him, that he would have been violently ill. You gave your family - our family - to the fires. You will eventually die from what it had claimed, and so passes another Mrr'Thaine. But...there is still one unaccounted for... "What about me?" Kyn could barely recognize his own voice. "What did you promise it in return for me?"
One, single corner of the man's mouth curled upwards, and with the fall of the shadows just so across the other half of his face...Kyn had to brush a hand over his eyes, to banish the insistent illusion of the scarred Master. It had become just as frightening to be in his presence as to be away from it, for with every breath, every blink, he was being reminded that this man was a stranger.
Kyn had lived with a stranger all his life, and never known it.
"There are no promises for you, boy. You should have no fear on at least that count - your sacrifice is done with. There is nothing else that you owe Belahb."
"I don't understand..." he whispered, helplessly. He was terrified of the answer, and yet his entire being yearned for an explanation. Perhaps, if there had been time enough, he could have vacillated forever, unable to decide...but, for once, it was with a certain relief that the decision was taken out of his hands, like so many other things in his life.
"Consider," Jenner began in a painfully familiar pedantic tone, clasping his hands behind him, "your first memory is of the manse - and nothing before. It was no trauma that blocked them from you - there are no nightmares, no phobias, much less an unreasonable fear of fire, which is Belahb's domain." There was a short pause as he stared expectantly at Kyn, but when no response was forthcoming beyond a small shake of the head in denial, Jenner continued in deceptively quiet tones - soft and implacable. "You were sacrificed, Kynfaellar. Belahb reached into your mind and consumed your memories, the boy that you were, the boy and man that you could have been. That night, Kynfaellar Mrr'Thaineson and all his potential died - leaving only you behind."
A shell, his mind offered up, eventually, into the chill silence of his heart. Master may have been ruined, left with only half a body, half a life - but I was left with not even that much. Just a vessel... "To be shaped by you." The words came out in a low hiss, surprising Kyn more than Jenner, the thought skipping his conscious mind altogether as it escaped through his mouth.
The man inclined his head slightly in acceptance of the accusation. "To be shaped by me," he echoed implacably.
In that moment, Kyn felt the most terrifying clash of desires - a revulsion so strong that it made him gag, even as his heart longed so much to return into this man's influence that his eyes stung and his vision wavered. Remorseless and unyielding, the man had defined all boundaries and limits around himself to the sharpness of a blade and then worked steadily to shatter each one. Jenner's ruthlessness both attracted and repulsed him; Kyn longed for the strength to support him once more even as he feared what would happen to him if he ever set himself directly against it. "Why did you not try to bring him back?" he asked, a child's question, full of hurt and incomprehension. "Why did you ask me to call you 'Master' and told me nothing of what had passed?"
The green eyes narrowed, darker and deeper than any sky reflected in black waters. "I needed your unthinking, unquestioning, complete and mindless obedience. Do you think I would have received it if you were to call me 'Dear Uncle Jenner'?"
"Then you failed!" he cried, unable to stand the scathing condescension, as if he had been the one to do wrong. But I haven't! I know enough now that I know I haven't! "I'm not exactly as mindless as you wanted me to be, not anymore!"
Jenner sighed, shaking his head with a grimace of disgust, and a flare of anger born from frustration crossed his cold countenance, warming it to something almost human. "Have you learned nothing under my tutelage?" the man snapped. "I never wanted a mindless automaton. If I did, I would have done well enough pulling any scapegrace vagrant off the street. I wanted your obedience so that I would have the greatest freedom in shaping you as I possibly could. I could not afford to have you or any of your potential lost to some vagary of chance or adolescent upset."
"My potential?" Kyn mocked. "What potential would that be? I do not see how a vagrant would have been any different...in fact, would it not have been better all around? You wasted no time in pulling Stefahn into your fold."
Jenner made an impatient sound, closing his eyes and rubbing the bridge of his nose in a gesture that Kyn could not help noticing bitterly that he had frequently mirrored. He had patterned himself after this man, all but worshipped him, had believed in - no, had been made to believe in him...
"Stefahn was a mistake. But you should never have let that concern you."
Shock collided with incredulity as Kyn stared at the man he had called 'Master' for as long as he could remember. "How could I not?" For all his amazement that the man actually admitted to an error, his surprise was subsumed completely by the hurt that followed. "I had not had contact or any communication with you for weeks! As far as I was shown, you had cut our contact off! And then Stefahn was trotted before my nose, smug and secure in the role that I used to play while you would have nothing to do with me..."
"Control yourself, boy! Have I wasted all my time on you for nothing? Think! Stefahn was merely a temporary hire. If your gardener takes sick, the garden must still be tended, in which case someone else must be found. You were not performing your tasks, and so someone else had to do them.
"But, in the end, he was only a temporary hire. He was convenient for his relations with Mennifei, but he overstepped his bounds in his interaction with you. I freely admit to my misjudgment in that particular case, and I have taken steps to correct that error."
Kyn flinched at the reproof, but all it did was to make him clasp his pain all the closer. "Then what necessitated the blocking of my Foresight!"
Master - no, Jenner - clasped his hands behind him with a deliberate moment of stern silence. "That was to make you curb yourself," he said in low, dangerous tones, true fury rather than simple irritation beginning to surface. "Have I not taught you the dangers of trusting your Sight too easily, to depend on it too much? You know you made several mistaken assumptions based upon them. The place and time for Mennifei's death, for example."
It would be reckless to continue the argument. It would be reckless to accuse Master directly. And yet, had he not been opposed to the man thus far, and still remained standing? And a new, traitorous thought snaked its way through his head...Master needs me. He cannot get his revenge alone. The worst he can do is to simply not answer... And so, reckless though it was, he let his heart carry his last suspicion free of his lips. "Don't chastise me for trusting my Sight when you made me what I am according to your own Seeings."
Silence, as honest surprise flitted across the man's face, and Kyn watched that strange-familiar countenance with a hawk's attention, waiting for a confirmation that he felt he already knew in his very bones.
"So. You believe yourself clever, now." Jenner's expression flickered, his weight shifted, and then... "Touche."
Kyn stared, as his Master bowed low to him.