Sword of the Gods - Bruce R. Cordell [121]
A handful of gray moths escaped the pit before the inferno took hold, though not before being singed. They flopped around on the cavern floor, vainly struggling to take wing.
He briefly considered stomping on the survivors, but it seemed obvious the winged insects were doing the bug-equivalent of gasping their last. Scour was dying. Just as the insects in the pit had eaten so many innocents, now the fire was eating it.
Scour almost ate me, he thought. Or … had Kalkan planned for me to get free of Murmur and the pit all along, as part of his crazy scheme? And who in the name of all the lords of shadow did Kalkan answer to? Why did Kalkan want him to embrace his dark side, and become a rakshasa? What evils did his complete memory contain that—
Demascus lifted his jaw. No. He was done with wondering. He’d allowed himself to fall into Kalkan’s power, and he’d learned much from that lesson. He was forewarned about the threat, and he didn’t have to be a victim anymore. He wouldn’t allow it again.
I almost died, he thought. Worse, so did people I’ve come to think of as friends. He glanced at the faces of his companions, and the queen’s too, lit by dancing orange flames.
If I perish, he thought, I’ll forget everything all over again. But whether I remember or forget, one thing is sure: Kalkan is coming back. He will remember everything. And he will hunt me down again.
He recognized that the time had come for him to seize control of his own fate. Kalkan could come back in four years, or for all he knew, four months. Either way, he had to be prepared.
So … he had to stop agonizing over what kind of person he might have been—he needed his full identity and abilities returned, no matter what he once was. He had to retrieve all his lost artifacts, especially the Whorl of Ioun. He had to take charge of his destiny before his destiny took charge of him.
How long would it take for Kalkan to reincarnate? It took Demascus four years last time. Maybe that was long, and Kalkan could pull off the return trick in just a quarter of that time.
One year, then. Fine.
That should give him enough time to be ready.
The world was a mosaic of colors, of sounds, of smells, and tastes. Countless tiny moving windows revealed textures and experience, and the occasional hot, orgasmic sensation of food. Time was meaningless. All was just the infinite, now of teeming existence.
Something changed. Something registered as … interest? A new morsel, bigger than any that had come before, and richer too, squirting hot ichor and life energy every which way. But none escaped the hundred thousand tiny bodies, each with a mouth, proboscis, a stylet, or pair of tearing mandibles.
As each tiny bite was digested across the swarm, a hundred thousand heartlike organs, each pumping according to its own internal rhythm, came into sluggish synchrony.
What’s this? it thought. So good. Tastes like life itself. Like …
Peels of knowledge tightened and closed together into a whole, its own memories as well as those skimmed from the food that had thought of itself as a being called Murmur.
And I am Scour, it thought.
All it had known of its home fossil dimension, of the attempted ritual that was foiled a world away, and the darkness that followed, Scour knew. And as it finished off the flesh, mind, and soul of what had been its sibling, everything that Murmur once knew became Scour’s too.
It was still integrating itself a day later, assessing its power and potential, plus Murmur’s experiences and abilities, when the casks of lamp oil dropped onto it, followed by the throng of flaming torches.
Then Scour knew only pain.
DRAMATIS PERSONAE
Demascus (da-MASS-kus)
Demascus is the apparent victim of a demon-summoning ritual gone wrong. Though he apparently survived the ritual that left everyone else for dead, his memory of all previous events in his life is absent, save for dramatic flashes.