25: HELL’S DOORS UNLOCKED

Kalindra’s response The Lighthouse at Shadrag Gor

Kalindra rubbed her hands over her eyes. She was crying, unable to stop herself, and also laughing.

She wondered if she might be going just a little mad.

He’d known. Jarith had known all about Kalindra’s secrets—or at least about the secret that had really mattered. She wondered how the emperor had found out, but then answered her own question immediately: the fucking prophecies. Apparently, Kalindra was a predictable, anticipated commodity. Not terribly difficult to identify as an angel of Thaena if one knew what to look for.¹

She found it difficult to grapple with the idea that Jarith had known and not only hadn’t flinched but had kept running forward … Kalindra wanted him to show up so she could scream at him. So she would ask—no, demand—that he explain how he could possibly have been that stupid.

He’d known and he’d married her, anyway. He’d given her a son. Why would he do such a thing? Why would he make her family? She’d always known he was a little naïve, a little too trusting, but this …

He’d known exactly what she was and he’d loved her, anyway. She didn’t understand how it could be possible. Now her loving Jarith? That was different. That had been easy. Anyone would love Jarith if given even the tiniest opportunity. Jarith was kind and diligent and so fucking good. In contrast, she’d always known he would have despised her if he’d known the truth.

Except apparently, she’d underestimated just how good he was.

Someone wrapped their arms around her. She didn’t fight it, too shocked and upset to react normally. After a moment, she realized she was crying on Galen’s shoulder.

“Why would he do that?” she whispered. “Why?”

“Because he was Jarith,” Galen answered, which shouldn’t have been an answer but somehow was.

A harsh, loud scratching sound filled the air, coming from somewhere upstairs. It sounded very much like something dragging a weapon across a stone floor.

Senera asked, “Still no one upstairs, I assume?”

Xivan replied, “Do you feel like checking this time?”

“Not especially, no.”

Kalindra raised her head and wondered, just for a moment, if the person rattling around upstairs might be Jarith. Did she dare take that risk? Did she dare go hunting for him?

But she never found out. The world changed.

Jarith’s memories Stonegate Pass, Khorvesh, Quur

One week after the Capital Hellmarch

It didn’t know its own name.

It didn’t exist, really, not in the way most creatures define existence. It had no face or name or body. No memories of who it was or what it had been.

Just the dark and pain.

It was hungry, and it was cold. There really wasn’t any difference between these two states of being. It was an empty void that existed only to devour. Any goals or dreams it might have ever had in its life were reduced to that.

It was in a city, with no knowledge of how it arrived there. Just the sudden awareness of its existence in a cluster of buildings, a forest made of stone and mortar, quicklime and clay. The scent of burning wood hung thick in the air, the world tasting of fire and fear. The terrified fear of the herd—of the prey—was sweet and rich, the hunting so easy that even someone as weak as it was had no trouble feasting.

They were all so solid, so corporeal. Limited. But it was a massive collection of such prey congregating in one place, a giant herd that screamed and ran, their tenyé flickering with the warmth of their bodies, the sweet taste of their fear. It was not the only one of its kind present, but they all seemed to be in much the same situation it was: hungry.

At first, it filled itself on the fires that rose up all around the city, turning flames to ash and then to ice. But it wasn’t enough, and there was so much prey. So many people filled with so much life, so many emotions.

Many of its kind took on physical forms to attack, to better rend and tear and frighten, but it did not. It was too weak. It didn’t have enough control.

That didn’t mean it wasn’t still dangerous.

It found an injured life-form. Probably he had managed to slay the demon who had caused his injuries, but not before receiving the mortal wound that would kill him. He must have known he was dying, though, and he was scared.

That fear tasted so good. So it fed.

The moment it did, it realized it had made a mistake. Or, no. It wasn’t a mistake, exactly. But as the man’s soul and memories spiraled through its consciousness like a ribbon unspooling from a spindle, it encountered the trap that all demons must deal with sooner or later.

Namely, who defines a demon’s sense of self? As every lower soul was eaten and every upper soul absorbed, a demon’s identity was subsumed into a whirling maelstrom comprised of all the other souls proceeding it. That first infected soul was less a consciousness than a seed, the personality it would later develop growing and evolving as more and more souls merged together into a seething ball of hunger and need.

And possibly—probably—it would have been like that in this instance as well, except for one little quirk of luck: Hivar remembered Jarith.

So when it—when he—killed Hivar and devoured his souls, some of those memories that had flooded over him, cool and bright, had included very specific memories. Memories of himself. Memories of Jarith.

And Jarith woke.

Perhaps not fully. Not completely. But enough to know his name, enough to remember that he had once been a man. Enough to know how much he’d lost and exactly who he had just betrayed. Hivar had congratulated him on his wedding, had been there with a wry smile and a last round of drinks when he’d been transferred back to the Capital. Hivar had—

Jarith screamed and screamed and screamed. The people couldn’t hear him, and the demons didn’t care.

Jarith still didn’t have a body: he wasn’t strong enough to craft his own. The best he could do was a swirl of darkness, like ink spilling into water.

He fled into the Blight.

Kihrin’s story Inside Vol Karoth’s prison

We were all quiet when those visions ended. They’d come hot on each other’s heels, close enough that we hadn’t yet moved from sitting on my re-creation of Mouse’s couch. There’d been no warning, but that had been true for several visions now, from both sides.

I was no longer participating in the conversation.

“Fuck.” Teraeth pulled his feet away from Janel and righted himself, putting a hand to his forehead. Janel slid down from the arm of the couch and just sat there.

I closed my eyes and tried not to think about … oh, how exactly was I supposed to not think about Jarith? I spent a few minutes cursing Vol Karoth and his delightful little gift of knowing exactly how much Xaltorath had broken my friend.

Janel scowled. “I still cannot believe…” She sighed. “What am I saying? Of course Xaltorath would be so base and petty as to try to arrange Jarith’s destruction at my hand.”

Teraeth raised his head. “What?”

I threw an arm around him, kissed the top of his head, even though I had to stretch a little, because he is taller than I am. I assumed that in the time I’d been gone, lost in his own grief, Teraeth certainly hadn’t made an effort to read through the other chronicles. It’s unlikely Thurvishar would have offered either, under the circumstances. “Xaltorath tried to trick Janel into eating Jarith. Very maternal. ‘Won’t you be a good child and eat the demon I brought you? It’s fresh.’”

Janel shuddered, so I threw the other arm around her and drew her in to rest her head on my chest. “I hate her so much,” Janel said. “You know she didn’t have to … do that. She didn’t have to do any of that.”

I kissed the top of her head too, which was much easier. “I thought we’d established that she—they?—is a petty bitch. Does she need any more reason than that to hurt you?”

Janel drew short, pausing as some idea occurred to her. Her eyes blazed as she stood. “In this case?… Yes. I think she does.”

Teraeth and I looked at each other.

“What did you just realize?” Teraeth asked her.

Janel put her hands behind her back and began to pace, lost in her own thoughts, not so much as glancing at either of us for several moments. “She didn’t turn Jarith into a demon because of me. Or rather, if she had turned Jarith into a demon purely to hurt me, then none of what follows would make any sense. Xaltorath clearly tried to strip Jarith’s mind and reduce him to nothing but malleable hate, and then she dumped him into a major population center. That should have resulted in him cannibalizing his way through a veritable swath of souls to the point where Jarith’s personality would have been destroyed in the tumult of a thousand souls battling each other for dominance. Which means that when I ate him, I wouldn’t have recognized him.”

“Huh,” Teraeth murmured. “You have a point.”

There was something wrong with that logic, but it took me a moment to put my finger on the fault. Then I saw it. “But you can identify individual souls. That’s what happened when you tried to eat Xaltorath, wasn’t it? You could identify the unique constituent parts.”

Janel didn’t seem the slightest bit unsettled. I saw immediately that she’d already considered and dismissed that point. “She didn’t know I could do that,” Janel said flatly.

Teraeth scowled. “How can you be sure?”

“She’d have never let me anywhere near her if she’d thought I could do that,” Janel said. “Now that she knows, the only reason I’m still alive is because she thinks she needs me as leverage more than she needs me destroyed.”

“Leverage? Against who?” I said.

Janel just gave me a look.

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

Janel pointed at Teraeth with an amused flick of her fingers. “Your emotional connection with our darling Anointed Hero wasn’t so predictable.”

“Nice to know I can still surprise someone,” Teraeth said.

Janel smiled as she gave him a bow. “But I believe the point of the original argument still stands; Xaltorath wouldn’t have tried to destroy Jarith’s personality if her entire motivation for doing so rested on me identifying that same personality so as to understand the enormity of my sin. Thus, she had a different reason for targeting him.” Janel held out her hands to both of us—an invitation to stand. “My suspicion is that if Xaltorath really is repeating the same loop of time, manipulating it with each repetition until she gains the result she wants, then in one of those previous time lines, Jarith was much more of a problem.”

As we both stood, Teraeth chuckled. “Oh, not just in a previous time line. I think Xaltorath’s fucked up here. If Jarith can pull himself together, he’s going to be a problem for Xaltorath now.”

A slow, quiet smile spread across Janel’s face. “Gods, I do hope so.” She kissed both our hands, eyes glimmering with mischief, before dropping them as she headed for the door. “We should keep going. We have a lot to redecorate.”

Kalindra’s reaction The Lighthouse at Shadrag Gor Just after Jarith’s memory

If Kalindra didn’t cry this time, it was only because she’d already shed all her tears, leaving only a pervasive, thorough numbness.

Her gaze flickered around the room. Galen was still next to her, arm thrown around Kalindra’s shoulder. Kalindra honestly wasn’t sure which of them was comforting the other. Maybe both. Talea lingered over near the stacked bunks where Thurvishar, Teraeth, and Janel’s bodies were laid. Senera and Qown had formed a sort of scholars’ area to one side, commandeering one of the tables and using it to spread out several journals, stacks of paper, and inkstones (one of which was that inkstone). Xivan paced over by the door, occasionally giving stricken glances toward Talea, and Sheloran sat primly on one of the other couches, eyes closed and practically hiding behind her fan. Talon held up one of the walls.

When Senera set down her brush, Kalindra could all but feel the whole room flinch.

Before Senera could even open her mouth, Qown chirped, “Finally! Some good news!”

Kalindra was up from the couch before Galen had a chance to pull her back down. “What?”

Senera visibly winced while Qown didn’t seem to have any idea what he might have said wrong. “Oh yes.” He turned to face Kalindra. “This is very promising. Much better than I expected. If that vision was supposed to upset us, well.” He drew himself up. “It didn’t do a very good job.”

As Kalindra’s jaw began to ache, she realized she was grinding her teeth. How the ever-loving fuck was a vision showing her husband as a demon so lost and broken he didn’t even remember who he was until he murdered one of their oldest friends “good news”?

“Hoookay,” Talea said as she slid over in front of Kalindra. “We’re all going to pause for a second, and the scary lady with the knives—as opposed to all the other varieties of scary lady present—is going to let the man explain what the fuck he’s talking about.” Talea gave Kalindra a stern look. “Right?”

Kalindra glared. Xivan was right about Talea. Kalindra could see the resemblance to Jarith. He’d have liked Talea. “I wouldn’t stab him just for being an idiot.”

Talea cocked an eyebrow.

Kalindra crossed her arms over her chest and huffed. “It would be like hurting a puppy for chewing on a shoe.”

Qown’s eyes widened as it seemed to finally sink in that he might need to watch what he said. “I, uh … um. What I mean is, the level of self-awareness and cognition between this vision, which seems to have occurred during nascent development, and the later vision we saw with the both of you on Devors, are significantly different.”

Senera tilted her head. “Yes. We know this. Thurvishar has several eyewitness accounts of Jarith going after other demons. Once in the Manol and then again later at the Well of Spirals. In both cases, the description was consistent. A man-shaped being formed of shadows with a featureless, eyeless porcelain mask. A fondness for using swords—I’ll assume Khorveshan imchii.”

Kalindra didn’t know what she was feeling. “He was hunting demons?”

Qown nodded enthusiastically. “That’s what I mean! Independent ideation, consistent bodily autonomy, self-identification. From this vision, I would expect him to be just leaving nascent development for the Imp stage, but this is … this is Malice-level development at the very least. That’s so fast.”

Senera looked like she might be in physical pain. “Qown?”

The priest looked over at her. “Yes?”

“Malice level?” She gave him a flat stare. “What are you talking about?”

“What do you mean?” Qown blinked. “I’m talking about Jarith, obviously. Oh. I, uh…” Qown’s expression turned to embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I suppose I should have first explained the ranking system I created to describe the stages of demonic development.”

“Yes,” Senera said dryly. “You should have.”²

“Right.” Galen choked back black laughter. “Your specialty is demons, isn’t it?”

Qown threw him a vaguely hurt look. “You don’t have to say it like it’s some sort of vice. It could be very helpful in this instance.”

“Qown!” Kalindra snapped. “Who cares about the ranking system? So my husband is more demonic than you think he should be. How is that a good thing?”

“Because he’s still Jarith,” Qown explained. When he saw the blank look on Kalindra’s face—on more faces than just her own, Kalindra was willing to bet—he stood up from his chair and began gesturing. “So most demons are infected—the nascent stage—and then put through what I call the Imp stage. That’s when their minds and personalities are broken down through a combination of torture, forced inhumanization, and deprivation combined with a violent merging of multiple souls. In many ways, demons are the spiritual equivalent of Talon—”

“Excuse me,” Talon interrupted with mock outrage. “I most certainly am not—oh. Hmm. You know, actually, that is a fair analogy.” She flicked her fingers. “Carry on.”

“Talon is a physical accumulation of memories, but demons are a spiritual accumulation of souls. They are not a single entity by the time you or I would ever meet one. It usually isn’t an exaggeration to say that a demon isn’t the person you once loved anymore because they literally can’t be.” Qown scanned the room and held out his hands, clearly waiting for the “Aha!” of understanding. It didn’t come.

“And?” Kalindra said.

“But Jarith is still Jarith,” Senera said.

“No, he isn’t!” Kalindra protested. “He doesn’t remember who he is. He has a list he repeats to himself. That’s not the same thing at all!”

Qown shook his head. “It’s not, but it’s a thousand times better than most other demons. He’s skipped the Imp and Spite stages and landed directly on Malice—which is the stage where a demon can travel around on their own and have their own unique personality and appearance. Demons who reach that stage aren’t salvageable—normally. Your husband might be the exception.”

“Don’t give her false hope, Qown,” Senera said. “You can’t promise that Jarith can be saved.”

“But if there’s even the slimmest chance,” Qown said, “doesn’t she deserve to know?”

“Yes,” Galen said firmly. “She does. We both do.” He seemed to be daring Senera to contradict him.

Kalindra breathed in and out for several long counts. She wasn’t sure she agreed with Galen. She wanted her husband back. Obviously, she wanted her husband back. But at the same time, she didn’t know if she could stand it if that turned out to a false, impossible hope. It would be too much.

She wondered if Vol Karoth knew that. If what otherwise might have seemed like a colossal misstep—giving them something that seemed like a glimpse of light—was really just a colossal drop into darkness.

“There really isn’t anything else I can pull from Jarith,” Talon said. “Not the way he is right now. So … if no one minds, I think I’m going to return to picking on the mortals.”

“Which one—?” Galen started to ask.

The world changed.