The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [7]
What was he doing? Who was he? Faces were fading in his mind. He glanced at the man beside him and could not remember his name. The place itself no longer seemed familiar.
Now he felt a current tug; the tide had come into him, and now it was going out. When it went, it would take him with it.
Unless…
There was an “unless,” but he couldn’t remember what it was. But he did see something across the unfamiliar space, something his eye told him was the shape of a man but was also something else. It was a river, a stream, a swift bright current. It was beautiful, and he reached for it like a man dying of thirst.
Everything else was paling. The spring was too far away, and the pull inside him was so strong. He realized he had stopped breathing, and suddenly he no longer cared. He could rest, forget, sleep.
No. I am still Marché Hespero. Son of…
He couldn’t recall. With an inchoate cry, he flung himself at the effulgent waters, and something in him reached farther than his paralyzed body, and he felt the stream that wasn’t a stream with fingers that weren’t fingers, and he drew it into him as if drinking. The separation of his soul and corpse eased, and he drank deeper, opening himself completely as everything faded into black.
Impossible, someone seemed to say.
Hespero felt his grin, a grim crescent slicing through two worlds.
Impossible. You have not walked the faneway. Only I…
“You’re right,” Hespero said. “But I am attuned to it.”
Not as I am.
Hespero suddenly felt the chill replaced by fever, and his body stiffened, then began to dissolve.
“No,” he gritted.
Yes. You surprised me…
“Yes,” Hespero gasped.
But I am the more powerful here.
Hespero clenched his fists, but the strain tore his fingers loose from his hands. An instant later his shoulders sagged, and both arms dropped off.
No.
His spine wobbled and then began to crumble, and his torso almost gently collapsed as his knees dissolved. His body broke apart, the black current towing the pieces away.
Shivering with fear, Hespero renewed his grasp on the brightness even as he began to stretch thinner and thinner, becoming a stream himself.
“Here,” a voice suddenly said. He couldn’t see anything, but he suddenly felt something shivery and hot.
“I remember,” he murmured. “I remember this.”
“Then hurry. You will soon forget.”
The voice was right, for even as Hespero struck with the thing, he was no longer sure what he was doing, or why, or—
Something like a scream, and then, and then…
Revelation.
Images came first, fractured and whole. Scents, textures, pain and pleasure, the stuff of matter, the stuff of life but peeled off of life, adrift.
But no longer adrift. In him, now.
The first came from Fabulo: fear and exhilaration. Yes, it had been murder, Lucio’s death, subtle poison, but then, it was all too fast, a life falling backward, flashes jumping out. The electric tingle of the faneway of Saint Diuvo, the stroke of a woman’s fingers, running through a field of tall wheat, the tap of his head on the cold marble of a chapel in z’Espino, shivering, hot, confused in chaffing blankets, the softness of linen, wonder, a face that was the universe, the sweet scent of mother’s milk, pain, light…
And then, for a long while, Hespero could not think at all as the well of knowledge opened, filled him, and—just as he thought he could endure no more—closed.
Something spasmed, and he felt his fingernails biting into his palms, a painful vise on each arm, and in his chest a terrible shuddering.
My heart, he thought. My heart.
It shuddered again, and his chest felt crushed.
Then a thump, pause, thump-thump, pause, thump.
And the agony eased to hurt, then relief. Gasping, he opened his eyes.
“You did it,” Sir Eldon said. The knight was holding him up by his left arm. Brother Helm had the right.
He fought his gaze up the tiers of benches.