The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [205]
“Life and death. Memory and forgetfulness. The one drinks, the other gives back. Piss on the left, sweet water on the right.”
“I’d like you to be more clear.”
“I’d like to smell rain again.”
“Are you he?” she asked. “The man who attacked me in the place of the Faiths? Was that you?”
“Interesting,” Qexqaneh mused. “No. I cannot wander so far. Not like this, pretty one, disgusting thing.”
“Who was it, then?”
“Not who,” Qexqaneh replied. “Who might be. Who will be, probably.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Aren’t mad yet, are you?” he replied. “In time.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Good enough for the geos, milk cow,” he replied.
“Her, then,” Anne snapped. “The demon. What is she?”
“What was, what hopes to be again. Some called her the queen of demons.”
“What does she want with me?”
“Like the other,” Qexqaneh said. “She is not she. She is a place to sit, a hat to wear.”
“A throne.”
“Any word in your horrible language will do as well as the next.”
“She wants me to become her, doesn’t she? She wants to wear my skin. Is that what you’re saying?”
The shadow laughed. “No. Just offers you a place to sit, the right to rule. She can hurt your enemies, but she cannot harm you.”
“There are stories of women who take the form of others and steal their lives—”
“Stories,” he interrupted. “Imagine instead those women finally came to understand what they really were all along. The people around them didn’t understand the truth. There are things in you, Anne Dare, aren’t there? Things no one understands? No one can understand.”
“Just tell me how to fight her.”
“Her true name is Iluumhuur. Use it and tell her to leave.”
“It’s that simple?”
“Is it simple? I don’t know. Don’t care. Neither should you, since you’ll never live for it to matter. Your uncle’s warriors block your every exit. You will die here, and I can only savor your soul as it leaves.”
“Unless…” Anne said.
“Unless?” the Kept repeated mockingly.
“Don’t take that tone,” Anne said. “I have power, you know. I have killed. I might yet win my way through this. Perhaps she will help me.”
“She might,” he said. “I have no way of knowing. Call her true name and see.”
Anne coughed out a sarcastic laugh. “I somehow find that an outstandingly bad idea despite your reassuring words. No, you were going to offer me a way past my uncle’s troops. Well, then, what is it?”
“I was just going to offer my assistance in defeating them,” he purred.
“Ah. And that would involve…”
“Freeing me.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?” Anne mused. “Free the last of the demon race who enslaved humanity for a thousand generations. What a wonderful idea.”
“You have kept me for far too long,” he snarled. “My time is past. Let me go so that I may join my race in death.”
“If death is what you want, then tell me how to kill you.”
“I cannot be killed. The curse holds me here. Until the law of death is mended, I cannot die any more than your uncle can. Release me, and I shall mend the law of death.”
“And die yourself?”
“I swear that if you release me, I will deliver you from this place. I will leave, and I will do all in my power to die.”
Anne considered that for a long moment.
“You cannot lie to me.”
“You know I cannot.”
“Suppose I consider this,” Anne said slowly. “How would I free you?”
The shadow seemed to waver for a moment.
“Place your foot on my neck,” he snarled bitterly, “and say, ‘Qexqaneh, I free you.’”
Anne’s heart raced faster, and her belly seemed to fill with heat.
“I want to go back to my friends now,” she told him.
“As you wish.”
And with that she stood once more in darkness, with the earth tugging harder at her feet.
Aspar followed the woorm trail up a talus slope wiry with young trees to a great crack in the mountain, a natural cul-de-sac fifty kingsyards wide at the mouth and narrow toward the rear, where a great cascade of water plunged from far above. Predictably, the waterfall had dug a deep pool for itself, and just as predictably, the creature’s trail vanished into it.
The holter dismounted and walked the border of earth and water,