"Marron..."
He stiffened at the sound of the voice behind him.
Carunirian dropped the opened locket back into his shirt, watching with disturbing intentness.
"Marron."
He couldn't think. Dimly, distantly, logic attempted to assert itself---this was a trick. An obvious and predictable trap, meant to distract or unnerve him. He should ignore the voice behind him and concentrate on his mission. It would be foolish---dangerous---to do anything else. But he could not. The voice was too familiar. His feelings were too newly-returned, and too unresolved. His soul was too unprotected.
Slowly, his stomach clenching, he turned.
Zeii: as he had once been. Tall and magnificent in simple linen, every movement full of quiet grace, a knowing and calm smile curving his lips. Standing before him, not three feet away, near enough that Marron could feel the barely-tangible warmth of his presence.
Some small part of him still functioned and reasoned; he heard that part speak, through the haze that had settled in his mind. "No," he said, softly. "Illusion."
"Not illusion, Marron," it said---why did it have to sound so real? It couldn't be Zeii. He remembered the weight of Zeii's corpse in his arms, the fading warmth of Zeii's lifeblood on his hands. No magic in the world save that of the gods themselves could resurrect the dead. But it sounded like him, and it looked like him, and irrational as it was, foolish as it was, his hands twitched and tingled to know if it felt like him as well---
The man in front of him stepped forward, smiling that gentle smile again. "No illusion is tangible, Marron---isn't that what I taught you?" One graceful hand, then the other, drifted forward, reaching for his, and he could not force himself to move away. A whisper of cloth, and then contact---solid, warm, firm. Real. The hands lifted his, still holding them tenderly, and he stared down at them, half-expecting them to vanish into mist, half-fearful that they would not.
"You see? As real as you are. For you, Marron. My beautiful dancer." One of the hands lifted, bringing Marron's up to familiar lips for a gentle kiss. The pale brows twitched in a frown. "You're trembling." It sighed. "I've left you too long alone. Forgive me. You must have been in such pain."
No. No. This isn't--- this can't--- no. Yes. Oh, gods, I want this... too much...
Too much.
Too late.
He looked up, finally, into Zeii's eyes. Into twin orbs that were, not the warm, knowing, sea-change blue he remembered, but a glowing, featureless, inhuman white. The lips below them curved again in a gentle smile that was, abruptly, not at all gentle.
"Such pain," said the soft, loving voice. "My dancer. Let me take it away from you. All of it."
The astonishingly long and creative string of oaths and invectives that Mirufi unleashed when they arrived at Carunirian's palace would have shocked Gateau on any other occasion. Somehow, though, the sight of the terrifyingly vast, still dome of utterly lightless black that surrounded the palace managed to diminish the impact of Mirufi's profanity.
Kei and Carrot were silent as well, staring up at the dome in dismay and awe. It was only when Mirufi slammed a gauntleted fist against the dome, hard enough to send a shiver through the whole thing, that Gateau managed to pull his attention back down to earth. "Gods damn you, Zeii!" Mirufi looked up at the sky and shouted. "Why in all the hells did you have to teach him everything? For somebody so wise it was a fucking stupid thing to do!"
Carrot finally managed to tear his eyes away from the dome to look at him. "What? You're a Haz Knight. Do something magic. Open this thing up."
The look Mirufi threw Carrot was so venomous that the younger man flinched and took an inadvertent step backward. "I can't," Mirufi said coldly. "This is the most powerful form of water-magic---ice, absolute zero. He's used it before, but I thought it was instinctive. I should have realized." He shook his head and sighed. "The boy's too damned powerful. There's not enough fire-magic on the planet to counter this. It would just eat all of my spells and laugh at me." He stopped, and fell silent for a moment.
There was, abruptly, another person there with them---tall, brooding, silent, in armor covered by a black shroud that obscured all details of face and body. Carrot gasped and Kei flinched; Gateau tensed and frowned.
Mirufi looked at the newcomer, who examined the barrier silently. "Dou?"
"It will take time."
"How long?"
"Perhaps an hour. It is well-built."
Mirufi sighed in frustration and slammed his fist against the barrier, setting the dark magic rippling again. "It won't take him long to kill Carunirian and Oparu. He could be dead in an hour. But do it, if it's the only way."
The shrouded figure nodded and turned to face the barrier, falling silent. A light breeze blowing across the courtyard did not stir the man's dark robes.
Gateau watched the slow, stiff undulations of the barrier in the wake of Mirufi's blow, spreading and rippling across the domed surface. And abruptly he understood.
"Mirufi," he said, stepping forward. The aura of magic gathering about the dark Haz Knight stopped, and the hooded head turned to regard him silently. Mirufi blinked in surprise and frowned at him. Gateau looked up at the barrier.
"There's another way," he said. "Let me try."
He struck swiftly, instinctively, before doubt or hesitation could interfere; four years of drills in the school and seven journeyman years of life-and-death practice demanded nothing less. Without a spell to shape it, the magic was raw and inefficient, but more than enough to incinerate any living thing. He flung it at the being that held him through their clasped hands, bared his teeth as light flared, and waited for it to die.
The entity that wore Zeii's face smiled again, another mockery of Zeii's tenderness. "My beautiful dancer... don't be afraid. You long for death, don't you? I can give you that. Just give me this in return."
Its hands, viselike from the moment Marron had recognized its nature, tightened further still, until agony flared in the delicate bones and tendons. He gasped and tried to pull his hands away and could not. The creature shivered, its eyes half-closing, a look of greed crossing its rapidly-blurring face.
"My dancer..." it whispered again, and he snarled despite the pain.
"Stop calling me that!"
The creature's outlines were blurring as deception was no longer needed. It was now little more than a shimmering outline of a man, its form shot through with flickering white light. Its voice, however, was still Zeii's. "It pleased you, once. It stirs memories, does it not? Memories of times with him. In the tower, with the wind blowing through the curtains... he called you his dancer for the first time after you kissed and caressed in the practice hall..."
And unbidden the memories came, forced to the fore of his mind before he could stop them. The practice hall... the scent of the beeswax candles that burned there at night... the softness of Zeii's lips... the heat in his belly...
He cried out and struggled, trying to force away the images that this thing was somehow pulling from the depths of his memory, and the savage pain they invoked in his heart. "Stop this! Carunirian--- you coward---"
"All is fair in love and war, dancer," breathed the thing that held him, tenderly. It was now a vaguely-man-shaped column of blazing white light, its tendrils wrapping around his hands, entwining his fingers. The tendrils tightened suddenly and he was surprised into a shout as three of his fingers broke at once. Through the white haze of pain and confusion he tried to categorize whatever it was that held him. Kinjyu: no other magic was so impervious to elemental attacks. But all Kinjyu had a purpose, and in that purpose lay its weakness. If he could just determine---
The greatest magician isn't always the most powerful, Zeii had said. His voice echoed now in Marron's mind. Just the best diagnostician. Figure out what you're facing and you've got the key to its destruction.
Yes--- that had been one afternoon shortly after he'd come to the school, when he'd finally mustered the courage to ask Zeii a question. And Zeii had---
"No. No!" Bile was in his throat, tension in his gut; he fought the memories away and gathered his strength for another strike. The thing was made of light. He summoned shadow magic from the depths of his being and attacked again, directing the force of his blow at the glowing ropes that now bound his hands and forearms, intending to disintegrate. He would tear this thing apart, for corrupting the memories that were all he had left of Zeii, for daring to dishonor Zeii's image---
The light didn't flicker. He gasped and struggled against both the thing and the fear that flowered, suddenly, in the pit of his belly.
"Ah... yes..." There was something sickeningly familiar in the voice's purr this time, although mercifully it no longer sounded like Zeii or even remotely Human. But there was something in its inflection, something in the thick satisfaction in its voice, that stirred fragments of memory, flickers of understanding. And as he sank into the next hallucination he clung to that instant of near-recognition for as long as he could. It was the key, he knew.
If only he could figure it out before the Kinjyu killed him.
It broke the rest of his fingers and crushed his hands, and purred for more as he screamed. Then it plunged him into another memory of Zeii, and everything else he'd lost.
"Will it work?" Carrot asked Mirufi in a stage whisper. Beyond them, the hooded Haz Knight remained still and silent, a dark statue in the middle of the courtyard.
"No one's ever defeated magic of this magnitude with physical force, to my knowledge. But I guess we'll find out in a minute, ne?"
Gateau stood silently before the barrier, his head bowed and eyes closed. He'd removed his vest and shirt, despite the cold. In the slanting light of the afternoon sun, the smooth, carved lines and planes of his torso gleamed in stark relief. On his hands and forearms, Mirufi's gauntlets gleamed.
They had reshaped themselves to fit his hands as he'd donned them, and he could feel the faint, eldritch hum of the magic worked into the strange metal. He would need the magic to protect his hands from the deadly cold of Marron's barrier. The power that would break that barrier, however, would have to come from him alone.
"It'll work," he heard Kei say with quiet, proud conviction. Neither of the others, it seemed, could think of a suitable reply.
Gateau opened his eyes and lifted his head, and felt a smile of pure, almost feral anticipation touch his lips. Then he drew back his fist and struck.
He had tried, in his last moments of lucidity, to strike at Carunirian. The thing that held him seemed invulnerable to every kind of magic he'd sent at it, and it was killing him. He did not mind death, but he could not leave Zeii unavenged. And so he had summoned up all of his power and flung it raw at his enemy, heedless of the fact that it would drain him to nothing, determined to drag Carunirian into oblivion with him.
The thing had absorbed the magic, harmlessly. Then it had surrounded him, tendrils twining around his arms, his legs, his torso, his waist, his throat; hot white light lapped and suckled at his strength and quivered with relish at his pain. He floated above Carunirian's conference table, prone, helpless now that the last of his magical strength had gone. Dying. A sacrifice laid upon a bright moving altar, waiting for the fall of the knife.
Dimly, he was aware of Carunirian standing beside the table, saying something. Hovering on the brink of consciousness---suspended there, mercilessly---he could not comprehend and did not care. The Kinjyu was in his soul, now, prowling the paths of his memories and attacking wherever it found the most poignant. It dragged them out and savaged them until he existed only in the prison of his loss. The pain it had inflicted on his body was nothing in comparison.
Zeii... Oh, gods, Zeii... I was right. I'm nothing, without you.
And the thing drank down his despair.
Dragging forth his memories of past happiness had been only the beginning. It had found his memories of sorrow, and it seemed to savor these, lingering on the images of Zeii's torture and death in particular. He had seen that death; although his mind had been elsewhere, his eyes had been open, and some part of him had recorded what they'd seen. Now it replayed those memories for him, again and again, reveling in his silent horror as he watched Zeii struggle and scream and finally go beyond pain.
He had known that Zeii had left some of himself in his body as he died, even as the rest of his mind danced with Marron; it had been the only way to keep Carunirian distracted long enough. It was one thing to know this. Another thing altogether to see.
And see. And see.
Dance with me, beloved, said the thing, its whisper thick and low, slithering. It was in his mind, now, and he no longer had the strength to keep it out. But he knew, at last, what it was that he had almost recognized in its voice, earlier.
The sound of sadism. Feeding pleasure.
Not much longer, now.
On the third blow, the dome of magic shattered.
Into a thousand deadly, freezing shards. Gateau gasped, but before his arm or any of the rest of him could be frozen into oblivion, something blurred across his vision and Mirufi was in front of him, shoving him back and raising a translucent shield that glowed faintly red with the fire-magic that powered it. Shards hit the shield and bounced before fading into nothingness, and within only a few seconds all traces of the broken spell were gone.
Mirufi dissipated the shield with a flick of one hand and turned to glance at Gateau, smiling. Gateau blinked and belatedly remembered to remove and hand back the Haz Knight's gauntlets.
"Well done," Mirufi said, bemused. "Remind me to call you the next time the end of the world is at hand."
Gateau snorted. "Bring a full purse," he replied. "I'm renegotiating my salary after this. Let's go."
Shattering---
Marron gasped as a sensation shot through him. Not pain.
Backlash. A spell he'd crafted had been broken.
What---?
The thing was inside his body, working its way up his veins like living poison, inching toward his heart. Blessed numbness came with it, as it extracted the last of the pain from his body and spirit and left nothing at all in its wake. He had stopped screaming some time before, recognizing at last the pointlessness of it. It was only pain, after all. And soon, he would be with Zeii again.
But the backlash jerked him rudely out of the miasma into which he'd drifted, and he struggled to marshall his senses in its aftermath. The spell---yes, he remembered, now. The barrier. He had felt its death-cry as the power he'd put into it came rushing back into him. And with it, carried in its sorcerous wake, an impression of its destroyer.
Gateau!
The Kinjyu hissed and twisted in him, and he gasped as the pain redoubled, both within and without. Zeii again--- Zeii's pain, Zeii's death---
---Gateau's caress.
His ribs, his ribs were being broken---
---Gateau's lips. Closing on him, tongue lapping, pressing, suckling. His voice, low and warm, a lover's murmur: "Tell me what you want." And Marron had replied---
The Kinjyu shrieked.
The pressure on his ribs eased; the numbness moving into him stopped, then pulled back a little. He felt its confusion and its anger, felt it gathering itself to strike and hurt and feed again...
...but he had the measure of it, now.
It was a parasite, like all Kinjyu---one that fed on pain. Body-pain and heart-pain: it took what was there and amplified it and inflicted more, drawing it out to increase its own strength and pleasure. It was a glittering reflection of Carunirian's own cruel soul, given substance and power of its own by magic. And he had been particularly vulnerable to it, carrying around the still-raw wounds of Zeii's loss in his heart.
Diagnose, then counter. The counter for pain was pleasure.
Gateau's hard arms around him, bracing him. Gateau's mouth hot upon his as between his legs Gateau's hips pumped. Gateau's soft panting in his ear as he tore his mouth free to moan out Gateau's name. Good, it had been good---
"Stop it!" The Kinjyu was no longer in his mind. Now it spoke aloud, its voice sibilant, furious as its tendrils lashed on his limbs and body, writhing as his thoughts disrupted its feeding and drained its power. "You cannot---"
---good, as it could never have been with Mirufi, as it should have been with Zeii, as it could only be with a lover: one who loved, and who was loved in return. So good that he had laughed when his release came, truly laughed for the first time in years, and Gateau had laughed with him. So good that he had begged for more and Gateau had given it to him, given him everything he needed, stinting nothing. And for the first time he had given it back, as much as he could, more than he'd ever before dared, the least of what Gateau deserved. And it had been good.
Another inhuman shriek, and then the numbness was gone. He opened his eyes to see the Kinjyu---a lashing, shapeless tangle of living light, not glowing so brightly now---tear free of him, whipping up and away to flee the feast that had suddenly turned foul.
No, you don't... Such magic was an abomination. It could not be permitted to escape and harm others. It had used Zeii's image to ensnare and nearly kill him.
He lashed out with the power that Gateau had sent back to him and caught it in an invisible fist, and snarled with a momentary sadism of his own as he crushed it into oblivion.
Light flared and blasted through the chamber in a soundless concussion that flattened everything in its path, warping and then shattering the windows, cracking and splitting the walls on all sides. Fortunately, because he was already lying flat on his back, he was spared the small discomfort of being knocked sprawling. Carunirian and Oparu were not so lucky.
They had just entered the main foyer when the entire palace rocked on its foundations and they heard, from three floors above, the sound of Carunirian's scream.
"Karuua!" Mirufi spun toward Carrot and Kei, and the dark Knight shot forward to touch Gateau, and in the next heartbeat they were in the remains of a conference room that could have passed, easily, for a warzone.
The plaster was still falling and the air still crackling faintly with just-spent energies, but Carrot's mind registered none of it. He had seen the table, which was the only item of furniture still standing in the room. The chairs around it had been flattened as if made of matchwood rather than good solid oak. Its surface was charred and pitted, resembling less a stately work of art than a leftover fireplace log that had burned the whole night before being doused; here and there it still smoked. He could care less, though, for the devastation. Marron lay there.
He broke free of Mirufi's grip and stumbled through the tangle of charred chair-legs to the table, only vaguely aware of Gateau gasping behind him. It was Marron---Marron!---unmoving but breathing, as alive and real as he'd been on the last day Carrot had seen him. Three long years before, in a forest, playing a flute.
"Marron..." He touched his brother and felt tears on his cheeks; his hands were trembling. For a moment, Marron did not respond, and all at once he realized that his brother was hurt. Badly. Something---a farm-grade meat-grinder, by the look of it---had savaged Marron's arms up to the elbow and feet up to the knee, leaving them barely recognizable. Lines of further damage wrapped around his torso, visible only as darker, wet patterns in the black fabric of his clothing. Only his face seemed unharmed. And that was still, composed. As if in death.
"No!" He caught Marron's shoulders and shook him, heedless of the damage. "Marron--- don't you do this, or... or I swear to the gods I'll kill you. Do you hear me? I'll call Oyaji and let him hug you to death! Marron---"
The crushed chest rose once more, higher than before. The cracked lips parted and moved. "I hear you, Niisan."
"Marron!" He let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding, in a weak laugh of relief. Marron opened his eyes, blinked for a moment as they cleared, and then looked at him, swallowing. His smile---the same slight, gentle smile as ever---was warm.
"Gomen ne, Niisan."
"For what? Scaring the shit out of me? I'll beat you up for it later. Mirufi's here; he can heal you."
Marron sighed and closed his eyes again. "No."
"No?" Frowning, he looked up at Mirufi in confusion---and froze when he saw the Haz Knight's face. Mirufi's expression was sober and bleak. He would not meet Carrot's eyes.
"He knows, Niisan." A slow, difficult sigh, and now Carrot heard the weariness in his voice. The carefully-controlled weakness. "Not all the healing in the world can save a body that's too far gone. It reached my heart." Another sigh. "Carunirian used the perfect weapon. I only defeated it because of Gateau."
Carrot looked up in surprise at his former teammate, who stood on the other side of the table. Gateau looked up at him and shook his head in confusion, his face stricken with anguish and stark fear. But then Marron spoke again and Carrot looked back at him. He had to lean close. Marron's voice was very soft.
"I failed." His face constricted, momentarily, in pain that was not physical. "He's still alive. He won."
"He won't be for much longer," Mirufi said solemnly.
Carrot pushed aside this cryptic exchange and gripped Marron's shoulders more tightly. "I don't believe it and I won't accept it, Marron, if you die I'll never forgive you, don't you dare do this to me."
"Gomen ne," Marron said again. And then he quietly died.
**End Ch. 20