He looked at the wretched thing on the floor … the last of many men Sekkady had ruined. Pity for the man, whoever he had been, whatever he had been of good or evil, brave or craven, rested on him lightly as a flower’s petals: that man was dead, his story ended. The spirit that had stolen his life and now animated his body, the spirit that had stolen Kieri’s childhood and tormented so many more as well, that spirit still alive, powerful, and malign, must be dealt with.
When the others had left the room, Kieri released the lock on the man’s speech. Sekkady began with curses—curses he clearly thought potent, though Kieri felt them as little as grains of sand. Finally, gasping for breath as if he had been running, Sekkady slowed. “You will become me,” he said then. “When you kill me, that will free me to invade you as I did this body—”
“You cannot,” Kieri said. He was sure of that.
“If you torture me—you want to, I am sure—” Sekkady smiled, that cruel smile Kieri knew so well.
“No,” Kieri said. “You delight in others’ pain. I do not.”
“Then why have you not killed me already?”
“To learn pity,” Kieri said. “I pity already the man—all the men—whose bodies you stole. But I do not yet pity you—I do not yet understand what made you what you are.”
A smile—a smug smile this time—settled on that face. “Well. Then you will surely become like me in your own time, and that will give my death savor. For to understand me—even more to pity me—is to become me. You cannot understand without realizing how much more I have than you, and you will want it for yourself.”
“No. But tell me: What made you what you are?”
“What made me the greatest mage since the fall of Aare?” The smile widened, gleeful and feral at once. “Power. Strength. Will. I never flinched from what I had to do to become that, whatever it was.”
Despite himself, Kieri shivered. In Luap he had sensed some good eaten out by evil, a weak man who might have been good if he had not been tempted beyond his strength. But here … here was strength, not weakness, and one who had chosen evil freely. He sensed nothing good, if ever there had been.
“The iynisin are right,” Sekkady said. “When the First Tree turned traitor, when it revealed weakness and could not resist a human’s song, all creation was contaminated. Love is weak. In every love song, every tale of love, the lover is weakened until he cannot resist the beloved. Your weakness, too—you would not let those you love kill me lest they be harmed. That is folly. You should have learned better from me. All that matters is power, and power means the power to kill, to destroy. If you can destroy, you can control anything. So I learned when they taught me how to create the most powerful of all the jewels of power—the bloodstone. You must care only for power, they said. You must kill any you love first and always. Their blood is in the stone. That proved my worth to them—”
“You are in league with the iynisin? They taught you, didn’t they?” Kieri glanced around the room, looking for any sign of an iynisin’s arrival.
“I am Gitres’s servant, as are they. Together we will unmake this flawed world riddled with weakness. That silly woman who thinks Falk can protect her, who intends to restore water to Aare—she will not succeed. She was thrown overboard with a broken back and sank like a rock. Even if some power aids her—and it won’t—and even if she succeeds in her quest, I can undo what she has done. No one can destroy the bloodstone, and any who holds it will use it.”
“She has succeeded,” Kieri said. “Rivers flow where only sand blew; the drought here in the north has ended.”
“You lie!” The voice was nearer. Sekkady had moved in spite of the power Kieri had used. He was only an armslength away now, and he held the great red jewel Kieri remembered. Its power had clouded his mind despite his own defenses.
“You see,” Sekkady said. “I still have more power than you. Your blood is in this stone, too—blood from the wounds I dealt you. Your blood gave me power over elves as well as humans. Either your blood in the stone will force you to submit and you will be my slave again, you and your queen and your children—or you will take it from my hand and—join me.”
A flicker of light from his own heart-hand caught Kieri’s attention: the dragon figure deep in his ring writhed, glowed. Simultaneously the torc around his neck loosened, straightening, sliding down his arm toward the ring, its gold covering uncurling to reveal the spiraling whiteness Kieri had briefly glimpsed before, this time clearly a long white horn.