The Hammer and the Blade

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Memories pelted Nix, a storm of thoughts and experiences not his own. The mental onslaught knocked him backward to the sand, left him face up to the twilight sky, screaming in pain at the setting sun. His head pounded, the pressure building in his temples to such a degree that he knew his head would soon explode in a shower of gore to rival that of the eunuch's.

He was distantly aware of Egil's screams echoing his own, the priest writhing in the sand with his hands on either side of his head as if he could hold his skull together with the strength of his arms. Jyme, too, seemed to be screaming.

Nix rolled over, the pain in his head curling him into a fetal position. He pressed his face into the sand and screamed into the granules. He felt as if acid had been poured inside his skull. He could not bear it; he could not. Images, memories, and thoughts slammed into him, rooted into his mind as if they were his own. He could not shelter himself from them. He could only writhe, scream, and endure.

Phrases thronged his mind, filling his skull, the words portentous: breeders, House Thyss of Hell, the Pact. They stuck in the forefront of his consciousness, the stars around which everything else orbited.

Of a sudden he knew that House Norristru had pacted with House Thyss of Hell. He knew, too, that to seal the Pact, the Norristru men had sacrificed their seed, cursing themselves to infertility, while the Norristru women had been made to sacrifice their wombs, cursed to annual violation by fiends. They were fertile only to a Thyss-born devil.

A fiend from Hell — it had been Vik-Thyss for the last hundred and eleven years — arrived once every two years on the night of the Thin Veil, when the walls between worlds were weakest, and violated all Norristru women of child-bearing age. Of the resulting offspring, House Thyss claimed those of fiendish appearance and House Norristru retained those who could pass as human. The alliance with Hell brought the Norristru line ever more arcane knowledge, brought them command of spirits who feared Hell's wrath should they disobey.

Nix understood that the Pact had become harder and harder to honor with each generation, as more and more of the offspring proved devilish in appearance and were taken by the Thyss. House Norristru had become less like the house of a noble family and more like a mausoleum, empty rooms filled only with memories and the horrors of the past.

Memories knifed into his brain. Nix was Rusilla, filled with measured hate.

He was lying in his bed, speaking to Rakon, who stood at the door of her chambers.

"The Pact was made by Norristru men, for Norristru men. Yet it's the women who suffer for it."

Against his will, images solidified around the words, mental pictures of diabolic violations of generations of Norristru women. He tried not to see them, tried not to understand the reality of the horror, but the images would not relent. They filled him with disgust. He did not know if they were actual memories or Rusilla's guess at what had occurred, but they were terrible enough make him squirm.

"Not this," he groaned, his mouth full of sand. "Not this."

He lay on his back in a bed, arms chained above him to the bedposts, while the scaled, hulking form of a devil pressed down on him, nearly smothering him. He gritted his teeth against the agonizing pain below his waist, at the dry, reptilian stink of the creature. He wept with shame and fear and pain as the creature drove itself into him again and again.

He was himself, remembering the dreams he'd had in the Wastes. They had come from Rusilla. She had been trying to reach him, show him what awaited her and her sister. But he had resisted and never seen. He recalled the swelling, engorged doors, the blood leaking under the jambs, the horrors occurring on the other side of the wood, the bestial sounds of lust a counterpoint to the desperate screams of pain that they hid.

He could not bear it.

"Stop!" he shouted. "Stop."

He was Rakon.

"Vik-Thyss is dead," the sylph said in its singsong voice. "His death has been in the wind for many days."

His thoughts had swirled. In his mind's eye, he saw the family's power foundering, saw House Norristru losing what wealth it still possessed, its seat on the Merchants' Council. He saw himself losing his position as Adjunct to the Lord Mayor, saw his many enemies emboldened and coming for him. Without the protection of House Thyss of Hell, he would be quickly dead and his house annihilated.

"How?" he asked.

And the sylph had told him.

"An ancient breeze in Afirion had the tale of the devil's death," the sylph said. "Vik-Thyss was slain by Egil Verren of Ebenor and Nix Fall of no god, whose names are known on earth, in the air, and to the knowledgeable in Hell. They killed Vik-Thyss while robbing the tomb of Abn Thahl."

He needed another true scion of House Thyss, no halfbreed born of human-devilish blood would do. He'd queried the sylph, and again the sylph had answered — Abrak-Thyss lived, imprisoned somewhere on Ellerth, but the sylph did not know where.

Rakon would find out.

Nix was himself again, and understanding dawned. Rakon had located Abrak-Thyss's prison in the Demon Wastes, at the sea of glass. That is what he had been looking for. And he needed the horn to free him.

Nix screamed again as more memories filled him. He was Rusilla.

She lay in her bed, her mind reaching out through the manse, her thoughts gently poking, prodding, drawing Rakon to her chambers. Her magic worked poorly at a distance, but still she reached, filling the air of the manse with a disincorporated need to see her. She simply wanted Rakon to bump into the idea and respond to it.

He was Rakon.

As he walked the halls of the manse he was possessed of a need to see his sisters, a need he didn't understand.

Nix was himself, and he understood. He understood it all, now.

He was Rusilla.

Her brother stood in the door of her chambers, his smaller form almost invisible behind the hulking form of the memory eater. She sensed his preoccupation and snuck through his mental defenses. Once in, she sifted gently through his recent experiences, touching them as lightly as a ghost, seeing them as if they were her own. She saw his conversation with the sylph, learned the fate of VikThyss.

She'd formulated rough plans on the instant, knowing she'd not get another chance at her brother while he was so distracted. She shoved thoughts into Rakon's mind as rapidly as she could.

When you find Abrak-Thyss's prison, you will need help entering it and freeing him. You should use the same tomb robbers who killed Vik-Thyss in the tomb of Abn Thahl, Egil of Ebenor and Nix Fall of Dur Follin to assist you. What delicious irony. After Abrak-Thyss is freed you can kill them in revenge for what they did. You'll use the memory eater to kill them. The eater will kill them. The eater will kill them. But only they can do it. Only they can do it. And the eater will kill them, the eater must kill them.

She'd buried the idea deep, made it as compelling as she dared, then added another.

You cannot leave Rusilla and Merelda alone in the manse. They must accompany you. You'll drug them. But you must take them with you. It's too dangerous to leave them alone. You'll tell your men they are sick, that you're seeking a cure. But you must take them with you.

But she'd pushed too far, too fast, and Rakon had sensed her mental invasion. He'd flooded his mind with foul arcana and reasserted the integrity of his thoughts. But she'd seen what she needed to see, done what she needed to do.

For the first time in years, she'd dared have hope for herself and Merelda.

Later, she'd entered the mind of the memory eater, enduring the screams of the vanishing eunuch while she shoved memories, thoughts, and images into the vacant spaces of its mind, some her own, some stolen from Rakon. She knew Rakon would drug her and Merelda, making it difficult for her to communicate with anyone. The eater would be the vessel to carry the truth, her living plea to this Egil and Nix. She hoped the memories would go unnoticed by the eater long enough to reach their target.

She'd thought that if Egil and Nix could slay Vik-Thyss, then surely they could kill her brother and free Rusilla and Merelda. Surely they could.

But only if they were the kind of men who would feel obliged to save them.

And in that, she was taking a risk. She didn't know their hearts, couldn't know, but she had no choice.

A knife stab of pain lanced Nix's head, burning itself into his skull, and it carried a single thought.

Be that kind of man.

He was Rusilla once more.

She lay awake in her bed while Merelda slept, thinking of the frailty of her plans, thinking, too, of what awaited her and her sister if the plan failed and Rakon somehow found and freed Abrak-Thyss.

The hopeless, helpless terror caused Nix to weep. He'd had a taste of it in dreams, but then it had been attenuated. Now he felt it firsthand, what the sisters had endured, and he felt deep pity for them, deep shame for himself.

He'd thought them witches. He'd feared them, thought they'd been trying to hurt him. He wept for his own foolishness.

Abruptly the pain subsided, but the memories remained, images of horror etched into his brain forever. He lifted his head from the sand and vomit rushed up his throat. He puked into the sand.

A word moved through Nix's mind, a foul word, an appalling word irreducible beyond the horror and pain it evoked, the word at the center of everything he'd learned from the memories implanted in the eater's mind.

Rape.

Rusilla had not been trying to manipulate him. She'd been trying to communicate to him the horror of her existence, the debased, painful fate that awaited her and Merelda if they did not free themselves from their brother.

Their brother. Their own brother.

Thinking of Rakon filled him not with his usual sense of smug contempt for fools, but with rage, righteous wrath. His fists balled around the desert sand.

Rakon had enslaved his own sisters, made them whores to Hell.

And for what?

For power.

Nix had never before wanted a man dead as badly as he wanted Rakon dead. Nix had lived in Rusilla's skin, even if only for a moment, and what he'd felt was beyond words.

He thought back on his dreams, wincing over the lustful grunting he'd heard behind the doors of the hallway in the Norristru manse. Through the dreams, Rusilla had made him feel an inkling, a mere inkling, of what she and Merelda had felt, the terror and helpless rage that generations of Norristru women had felt while being made to suffer at the hands of Norristru men and the foul devils of Hell.

He wept anew.

How could a man do that to his sisters? To any woman?

Be that kind of man.

The words echoed in his mind, in their way more compelling than Rakon's spellworm had ever been.

The many lewd glances and lascivious comments that Nix had made to women through the years stared at him accusingly across the gulf of his memory. Tesha. Kiir. He'd always told himself that he was a wit, a flirt, but he could not escape the feeling that his words echoed, however distantly, the kind of thinking that allowed Rakon to justify his sisters' sexual enslavement. He suddenly felt like he weighed four hundred stone. Shame weighed him down.

"Nix?" Egil called.

He sat up and looked around, bleary-eyed, and saw the priest standing over the ruined body of the eunuch. Egil, too, had tears in his eyes. He covered Ebenor's eye with his hand as if doing so would blind him to what he had seen. The priest's voice broke when he spoke.

"What have we done, Nix? Gods, what have we done?"

Nix bowed his head. He had no words.

Be that kind of man.

The priest turned and looked up at the twilight sky, in the direction the sylph had carried Rakon and his sisters. They were no longer visible. The sylph flew as fast as the wind. There was no way they could catch them. Rusilla and Merelda's hopes had died on the Afirion sands. Egil and Nix had failed them.

"I'm upside down here," Egil said, in a voice smaller than Nix had ever heard the priest use. "I didn't see it. I was so, so wrong."