Obsidian Ridge - Jess Lebow [98]
"The mimmio will be your voice until I am suet you will behave yourself," said Xeries through the creature. He handed the rodent to Matiko. "You try."
The princess accepted it, cradling the squirming ball of fur in her open palms.
"I want to kill you," the mimmio said. Mafiko shrunk back, not prepared for the creature to be so blunt.
Xeries laughed, sounding like a young couple giggling together. "You must be careful what you think. There is no filter. The creature will say whatever it reads from your mind."
"I hate you. What do you want from me?"
Xeries smiled, steepling his fingers under his chin. "I want you to be my bride."
"Your bride?" The mimmio repeated her thoughts as soon as she had them.
The arch magus nodded.
"Why me? You know nothing about me." Mariko tried to calm her mind, control her thoughts, but it was difficult.
"Ah, but I do." Xeries poured himself a goblet full of wine. "I know that you are from a very good bloodline. I know that you were born in Eleint, what you now call Erlkazar, and that you are a descendant of my first wife's charming sister."
"You want me because I'm a relative of your wife? That's sick."
"Not exactly." Xeries took a sip of his wine, rolling it back and forth in his mouth before swallowing, then he continued. "You see, I have lived for more than twenty of your lifetimes-"
"Twenty?" interrupted the princess through the mimmio. "Ate you some kind of immortal?"
Xeries nodded, seemingly unfazed by the abruptness of the unfiltered conversation. "In a sense, yes. My first wife and I created a spell-one that would prolong our lives and allow us to live together forever."
"Then why do you want me? Get bored with your wife?" Mariko smirked. There was a certain amount of freedom in not having to choose her words carefully-or indeed, be able to choose them at all.
The topic did not please Xeries, and he scowled at the princess. "She died during the spell."
"Died?"
Xeries's scowl deepened. "Yes. And now I need to have a new bride every hundred years, or else I will lose the benefits of the spell."
"You killed her?"
Xeries grit his teeth. "My wife died during the spell," he repeated, "but I have found a way to get the immortality that we both so desired. In her memory, I live on, the way she would have wanted. But the spell requires that I always have a bride. One from the same bloodline. That is all you need to know."
The doors to the small chamber leading off of Xeries throne room ground open, and a woman in long flowing robes, a veil over her face, came into the chamber. She hobbled toward them, clearly having a hard time moving.
"Is this her?" said a cracked and raspy voice.
"Yes, my dear," replied Xeries, putting down his goblet and going to the woman's side.
"Do you think she is as pretty as I was, all those years ago?
Xeries looked at Matiko, then back to the woman. "She is very pretty," he said. "But so were you."
The woman grabbed hold of the arch magus with both hands, holding herself up by clinging to his robes. "You have killed me, Xeries. I blame you."
Her grip went limp, and she slowly slipped to the floor. Xeries held her weight in his grotesque hands, gently lowering her to the ground. He carefully arranged her dress around her body and lifted her veil. The face beneath was nothing but wrinkled gray-brown flesh, clinging tightly to her narrow skull.
Xeries bent down and kissed her lips. "Rest well, my dear. I will put you in your place in short order."
"Is this what happens to your brides?" asked Mariko. "You use them up?"
"It is a fair trade," replied Xeries, his echoed voice sounding somehow saddened. "I give them wealth and power, and they give me their life-force." "You take their souls."
The arch magus shook his head slowly, still fussing with the fringes of his wife's dress. "I don't like to look at it that way. I prefer to think they die for