The Brush of Black Wings Read online

  “Why have you taken me?” she repeated.

  “Because when you touched the steps of that temple, this world stopped and waited for you. I want it to stop again, in another place, another time. Whatever you possess inside you is powerful if it can do such a thing.”

  “I have nothing that can help you!” She was starting to sound like one of the colorful parrots a Conclave primicerius once kept in his study and drove the other primicer to distraction with their squawks and echolaic screeching, but she’d repeat her assertion relentlessly and lie just as Megiddo accused her of doing. Far better that than to have the demon king rape her spirit to plunder her Gift and use it for his own purposes.

  Megiddo’s low chuckle revealed his disbelief at her statement. “I leave you to Damkiana’s mercies for now.” With that, he disappeared.

  Martise raised a hand to the unobstructed door. “Wait!” She lowered her arm and growled under her breath. What she wouldn’t give for a bucket of enchanted nails at the moment. She’d happily hammer his feet to the floor. He was as annoying as he was frightening with all that winking in and out of existence.

  “He’ll return. He always does.” Damkiana motioned for Martise to use the wet cloth she held. “That won’t do your leg much good just sitting there in your hand.”

  Martise rested her foot on the edge of one of two benches set on either side of a small table. She hiked her skirt to survey the damage. Four matching puncture wounds decorated either side of her calf. They oozed dark blood that dribbled into her stained slipper. She pulled off the shoe, damp with blood, and set it aside. Her skirts had protected her from the worst of the bite, but the muscle under the puncture wounds throbbed as hard as if someone had clubbed her in the leg.

  She had no doubts that Cael had tried to save her by clamping down on her skirts in an attempt to drag her away from the temple. He’d overreached and sank his teeth into her calf. Martise considered herself lucky he hadn’t torn her leg off. She washed away the blood, hissing at the sting.

  The cottage was nicely appointed—a simple abode, well-kept and furnished with those things to made a comfortable home. “Do you have anything to make a poultice?” she asked her companion.

  Damkiana shook her head. “No, and it wouldn’t work anyway. The pain will still trouble you, but the wound won’t poison. In this place, nothing sickens or dies.” She uttered those words, not with glee, but with faint despair and a resigned expression.

  Martise’s heart thumped hard against her ribs. “Where are we?”

  The other woman shrugged. “It has no name. A world between worlds; a time between times. Nothing changes here except the sky, and even that has gone still for now.” Her accent thickened as she spoke, as if describing this gray prison had swelled her tongue.

  Martise changed the subject for a moment. “You both speak Glimming.”

  “We do? I’ve always called it Common. So does Megiddo. You speak it as well, though your accent is different from ours.”

  Martise returned the blood-stained cloth and straightened her skirts. “My thanks for your help.” She slipped on her shoe and sat down on the bench at Damkiana’s gesture. “Did he capture you as well?”

  Damkiana took a seat on the opposite bench. Martise admired the way lamplight warmed her curls, highlighting the reds and gold woven into her dark hair. “No, not purposefully. Like your dog, he attempted one thing and did another.” A small smile rounded her cheeks. “Knowing that didn’t ease my anger. I think I stayed mad at him for a few centuries.”

  The breath stuttered in Martise’s lungs. She stared at the woman across from her, hoping her words were just exaggerations to make a point. “How long have you been here?” That hope died with the answer.

  “Who can say? Years? Centuries? Longer? I don’t know.” Damkiana peered at Martise. “Megiddo has been here for so long, I think he’s forgotten the life he once had. It’s easy to do when you’re trapped in this cage.”

  After reading the tomes from the lich’s library that described the Saruui Buidu, Martise had a fairly good idea how long Megiddo had lingered in this world. She just didn’t know how or why he ended up here. The thought of being trapped with him as Damkiana was made her throat close with terror. “I can’t stay here,” she said, shoving down her rising panic. Silhara, she thought. If Cael had warned him as she hoped, then she had a chance at escape. He’d be furious, enraged, hunting for her. The thought lessened her terror.

  “Oh, you can,” Damkiana argued. “It’s Megiddo’s hope that you won’t. Mine too if you must know.” She held out a slender hand. “I’m Acseh.”

  Martise blinked and clasped her fingers. “Not Damkiana?”

  This time Acseh grinned. “No. Megiddo gave me that name. Even when I told him mine and corrected him a thousand times, he still insists on calling me Damkiana. I gave up after a while. It’s a nice enough sounding name, even if it might mean ‘idiot’ or ‘slapskull.’ I’ve asked him what it means; he just smiles. I’m probably better off not knowing.”

  Martise almost told her but changed her mind. Whatever reasons the saruum had for not telling Acseh its meaning, she didn’t want to risk angering him by revealing it. Not a name, but a term of endearment and a telling one at that.

  Could a demon hold affection for anyone or anything? Especially a demon who once tried to annihilate all humanity? She frowned. Not possible. These creatures weren’t capable of such feelings, and she shivered at the thought of Acseh trapped here with such a being—ruthless, soulless, heartless. Still, the idea refused to be banished, especially when Acseh sat across from her, seemingly unharmed. Martise stiffened. Looks were often deceiving.

  Acseh rose and left the table, only to return with two cups of water poured from the same pitcher she’d used to wet the cloth. “You won’t thirst here or hunger, but sometimes it’s good to have a reminder.” She raised her cup in toast, and Martise obliged by mimicking the gesture. “He called you ‘kashaptu.’ Witch.”

  Martise sipped her water, surprised at its fresh, sweet taste. “I’m neither witch nor mage.” Again, a half-truth based on interpretation. She possessed a Gift; in the eyes of Conclave, she was a mage, even if she was a failed one.

  “Nor are you nameless.” Acseh’s knowing gaze told Martise she’d noticed the exchange of names had been one-sided.

  Martise returned the look. “No, but names have power. I’ll answer to “witch” even if I’m not one.”

  Acseh nodded and toasted a second time. “Fair enough.” Her dark eyes shone with curiosity. “So there is still magic in the world.”

  Oh, if she only knew. Martise quelled her chuckle. “Yes, probably more than anyone desires.” She paused. “Who ruled your country before the saruum brought you to this world?”

  Acseh thought for a moment. “An obeth named Anguis out of Clan Tuleo.”

  Martise searched her memory of Conclave records she’d both read and recorded. Her eyes widened and she gasped. “You were there when Megiddo and the other saruui buidu ravaged the earth.”

  She might well have uttered that information in Kros sailor slang if Acseh’s perplexed expression was anything to judge by. “What are you talking about? And what is a saruum?”

  Martise hesitated. Acseh exhibited no fear of their captor. She called him Megiddo. Just Megiddo. Not Megiddo Saruum or King Megiddo. His otherness was obvious, but did Acseh assume him to be something besides a demon? Something still not human but not nearly so terrifying or lethal as one of the Wraith Kings? And how could she not know of the devastation they wreaked on the world? Or was she taken just before it happened?

  So many questions with no answers. Yet. Martise didn’t assume that Acseh’s loyalties lay elsewhere than with Megiddo. She stepped carefully with her explanation. “’Saruum’ is Makkadian and means ‘king.’ ‘Saruui’ is more than one king. ‘Saruui Buidu’ means ‘Wraith Kings.’ They were demons and almost destroyed the world a long time ago. Your time I think.”

  Acseh shook h
er head, her features more guarded than puzzled now. “I don’t know of any Wraith Kings. Vigestri was at peace when I was taken. Though we heard rumors of a strangeness in the north and east where the gray Elders lived.” Sparks of unease ignited in her eyes. “Megiddo is just a monk. Or was until he became trapped in the gray world.”

  “A monk?” Martise gaped at her. Her knowledge of demons and their behavior was far less than Silhara’s, but she found it hard to reconcile the idea of one, especially a demon king, claiming false identity as a lowly monk, and to a harmless human woman no less.

  Acseh’s voice echoed the uncertainty in her eyes. “Yes. One of the Nazim. Do you know of them?” Martise shook her head. “They’re a holy order devoted to Faltik the One. They act as guardsmen and protectors to royal households.”

  Conclave kept records of aristocratic geneologies that stretched far back into time. Ancient holy orders held no importance for them unless they possessed magic, and Martise had never come across records that mentioned the Nazim or a deity called Faltik the One. Megiddo probably lied about him being one of those long-ago monks.

  She didn’t argue Acseh’s assertion that Megiddo was a Nazim. This woman was not an ally, and she had no wish to make of her an adversary. The demon king was more than she could handle at the moment as it was. She turned the conversation to something safer. “How did this cottage come to be here?”

  Acseh’s gaze shuttered. She wasn’t fooled. “It came with me. It belonged to our gamekeeper. I was hiding inside—avoiding the attentions of a suitor at my sister’s wedding—when Megiddo appeared. If only I’d known there was something worse waiting for me in the cottage. When this gray—this prison—pulled Megiddo back, it took everything. Him, me, the building. It’s all I have as a reminder of my world.” The despair in her voice was palpable. She plucked at the folds of her dress, more finely made than anything Martise had ever owned. “I’ve worn this same dress for a long time.”

  Martise opened her mouth to offer sympathy and screamed instead when Megiddo suddenly appeared next to her. She almost fell off the bench.

  “Getting acquainted?” he casually asked, as if he’d just strolled through the door with a wave and a pitcher of ale to share.

  Acseh didn’t flinch, but she did glower. “Stop it,” she said.

  Her heart galloping hard enough to crack her ribs, Martise gawked as the demon king respectfully bowed his head at Acseh before turning to her. “My apologies for the fright.”

  Martise shifted as far to the bench’s edge as she could, ignoring his widening grin. She met his gaze and tried not to look away from the lightning-riddled eyes with their steel-colored irises and reflective pupils. “I can’t help you,” she said. “I won’t help you. You have no right to my world, not after you and your kind tried to destroy it.”

  “Megiddo, what does she mean?” Acseh’s voice was soft, threaded with a rising fear.

  The demon king’s brow knitted and his shoulders slumped a little. Surely that wasn’t regret Martise just witnessed? What demon ever experienced such an emotion?

  She ceased to wonder when his back stiffened and his stare turned as icy as his touch. “It’s my world too,” he said in dead tones. His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean ‘tried to destroy it?’ We gave up everything to save it.”

  Ice water spilled down her spine, and the gut instinct that she walked a blade’s edge between life and death dried every drop of saliva in Martise’s mouth. She gripped her cup until her fingers ached and cleared her throat several times before she could speak. “What is written tells a different tale. Five kings, demons all, who led legions of lesser fiends against me, destroying everything in their path. Entire cities fell to ruin. People, animals, land—everything laid waste.”

  Megiddo reared back. “And yet you are here, alive and well in a time beyond mine.”

  There was no stopping now. If she refused to say more, he’d force it out of her. “You—the kings—were defeated by an alliance of kingdoms and your hordes driven back to the Abyss.”

  His eerie eyes gleamed white with lightning and his upper lip curled into a sneer. “Is that so?” The table vibrated under his drumming fingers. Dents in the wood marked where his fingertips tapped. His gaze slid past Martise to an unseen point beyond her shoulder. “We prevailed,” he said softly. “We prevailed.”

  Martise couldn’t help the fearful squeak that escaped her lips when that bright gaze landed on her once more. His voice, brittle and sharp, held the same despair she’d heard in Acseh’s tones earlier. “For all that we suffered, this is how we’re remembered?”

  Suffered? What had they suffered? The kings had wrought suffering on an apocalyptic scale. He made no sense.

  “You aren’t remembered,” she said shortly. “None now speak of the Saruui Buidu. I know of you from forgotten tomes stolen from an undead necromancer.”

  Gooseflesh peppered her skin at his humorless chuckle. “Fitting, I think, that those who led the dead should now only be remembered by them.” He glanced at Acseh who’d risen from the bench and crept along the wall toward the door, her features drawn with horror. Megiddo’s eyes went as flat a gray as the landscape outside, and his mouth turned down. “It’s pointless to flee, Damkiana. You know this.”

  Acseh halted but stayed plastered to the wall, fingers laced so tightly together, her knuckles were bloodless. She stared at the demon king, new revulsion in her gaze.

  Martise’s own revulsion was no less than Acseh’s despite the sudden doubt creeping into her thoughts. Doubt in the tome’s accuracy; doubt in recorded memory. Demons were known to be sophisticated and subtle liars. She had no trouble believing Megiddo possessed the same skill, yet something in the way he reacted to her revelation of history’s treatment of the kings made her wonder.

  “Even were I willing, I cannot help you open the gate.” She wasn’t the catalyst that had anchored him to the temple.

  Before she could expound on her statement, he lunged for her, gripped her shoulders and jerked her up from the bench as he stood. Martise dangled midair, caught in a frigid, unbreakable grip. Megiddo pushed his face close to hers until they were nose to nose.

  “Who says I need your willingness, kashaptu?” Her stuttered plea for mercy evoked no sympathy as he shook her hard enough to make her head snap back and forth. “I will take what you refuse to offer.”

  “Megiddo, stop! Please!” Acseh’s voice sounded miles away in Martise’s ears as Megiddo threatened to break loose everything in her skull.

  He didn’t release her, but he did stop shaking her. Martise tried to catch her breath even as her vision swam. “Not me,” she wheezed. “The sword. The king is the sword.”

  Megiddo dropped her as if she’d suddenly sprouted spikes from her shoulders. Martise struck the bench’s edge as she fell. A shockwave of pain rolled across her shoulder blade and back, and her right arm went numb. She scuttled away from the king on her haunches and good arm, helped by Acseh who dragged her back to a corner of the room.

  The two women huddled together, staring at Megiddo once more enrobed in the chimeric shadows with their tortured faces. He hadn’t changed beyond the robes, but his presence filled the cottage, swelling to enormous proportions, and the structure’s wooden frame groaned and popped with the strain.

  “What do you know of the sword, kashaptu?” His voice swallowed stars, a dry well into which oceans had drained and left their dead rotting in the briny mud.

  Terror robbed Martise of speech. Acseh keened softly in her ear, a wordless cant composed of every fear and nightmare that had plagued mankind in the deep hours when darkness was more than the absence of sunlight.

  Megiddo strolled toward them, his pupils preternaturally large and bottomless, his spectral face merciless. “Answer me, kashaptu,” he commanded. “What do you know of the sword?”

  Acseh’s grip around her midriff threatened to cut off her air, and Martise inhaled shallow breaths in an effort to speak. “The king is the sword; the s
word is the king. Yours is buried beneath the temple. I’m not the anchor or the key. The blade is. You shouldn’t have taken me. I can’t retrieve for you what isn’t here. The gate is locked to all of us now.”

  Her declaration accomplished one of two things—guaranteed her own execution or bought her a chance at returning home. If he believed her. Her gut churned, and in this world with no sun and no heat or cold, terrified sweat beaded her brow.

  His expression didn’t change, but the robes reacted. Writhing around his body in convulsive gyrations, they twisted the faces in their depths into new, more warped visages. Open mouths emitted screams no less horrific from sounding far-off and faint.

  “You made a mistake, Megiddo Saruum,” she said softly.

  He advanced on them, his demon-white face blank and distant. Acseh whispered prayers into Martise’s hair. “Holy mothers, I beg your mercy. Hear this handmaiden. Save us. Save us.”

  Something listened. And answered.

  A lonely sigh echoed through the entire cottage, fluttered Martise’s skirts and sank into her bones. Megiddo’s eyes rounded. He spun on his heel, surveyed the room, glanced at her and Acseh and disappeared.

  The sense of space in the cottage grew once more with the demon king’s absence. Acseh and Martise sat together in the corner, each shivering in the other’s arms.

  “What was that?” Acseh’s voice was thick with tears.

  Martise dared not hope too much but added her prayers to Acseh’s. Silhara, she prayed. Let it be Silhara. “I don’t know,” she said aloud. She escaped the other woman’s embrace and helped her stand.

  Acseh wiped her wet eyes with her sleeve and swiped at her red-tipped nose. “He isn’t a monk.”

  The urge to apologize hovered on Martise’s lips. Apologize for destroying a merciful ignorance, no matter that the truth would be revealed at some point. Still, she’d sensed Acseh’s acceptance, if not affection, for Megiddo. From what Martise could tell, it had made the woman’s imprisonment with him bearable. Now there was fear and disgust, and soon hatred. “No,” she said. “Nothing so simple or human as a monk.”