Chapter 16

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Maralt sat at the foot of the bed, rubbing his hands on his pant leg as if his hands were actually sweating. Maybe they were, back in the bedroom of the small house he had taken for this purpose, where he sat on a mattress far less comfortable. It was a dingy place. Not at all like his current surroundings.

He put his physical location out of mind. It had taken some time to get here, traveling through one thought to the next, through town, from the Palace gates into the main hall, and then from servant to guard. He waited for what felt a long time for the distant strand of a thought from the King to filter through. Maralt didn’t want to get pulled back to himself and then have to start all over again.

He assumed coming here at night would be easier to reach Ambrose when there would be less clutter to sort through, but it turned out the King was a deep sleeper. The guards were all loud. There weren’t too many of them to choose from either. In order to move, Maralt had to see the next carrier, or hear them so clearly as to be brought in by the strength of the thought. He’d spent hours trying to find a way into the King’s quarters. Finally a regular patrol opened the door, walked in, looked around as far as the bedchamber and then left again.

Maralt had to make one guard stumble to cause a noise and made the other guard talk too loudly when the first commotion didn’t rouse the King. It was a moment only, the rise to consciousness, but enough to attach to. Maralt sat and watched the King dream. These were crisp images, memories of his children when they were younger that shifted to a time with their mother before they were born. Maralt didn’t want to watch, but didn’t have a choice, doubting again how he could do what they wanted.

Ambrose wasn’t afraid of dying, it turned out. He believed that in death, he’d finally be reunited with his beloved wife. There were days he even looked forward to it, leaving the Kingdom in the hands of his capable son. He envisioned it, Dynan grown into a man, with Dain at his side and even Kamien, the breach between them healed with childhood behind them.

“Wake up.” Maralt wished he could shake him. He didn’t want to watch anymore, knowing that dream would be shattered.

Ambrose opened his eyes just when Maralt realized waking him was a mistake. What would he say to him, after all? No, it was better to get it over with, quickly, without awareness. An eternity of it awaited him.

“What is it?” Ambrose wasn’t afraid or even upset that Maralt was in his room, sitting at the foot of his bed in the middle of the night. The mildness didn’t last, before it turned, first to annoyance and then to realization. He knew. Maralt thought so all along and hoped it would make it easier, but he was wrong to hope.

“I was shown something that changes a few things.” Maralt avoided the King’s gaze, looking down at his hands.

“You’re not really here.” Ambrose propped himself up against the headboard. It was a big, carved affair and had probably been the headboard of a couple dozen Kings ahead of him.

“The boundary is weakened. Everything is ... off.” Maralt reached into his pocket, bringing out the talon and showed it to the King. “This is why. Dynan bled on the seal up in the mountains. It was enough to bring this here.”

“And then you stabbed him in the chest and sent him to them.” The King’s tone was caustic. “I’m sure that had nothing to do with the state of things now.”

He jerked the covers aside and got up. He wore regular nightclothes of a light, loose material. The robe he snatched up from the chair where it was draped was thick and dark blue. The bedchamber was large, almost as large as the entire floor plan of the guesthouse at Beren. Ambrose paced the carpeted floor to the sideboard where he slammed the glass stopper onto the cabinet and poured a drink that he swallowed whole. And the next one.

Maralt stood with the King out of habit and training that he should. One look from Ambrose made him reconsider and he eased back down to sit. He watched the King pace the room. Maralt thought to attempt an explanation.

“What happened last year kept the barrier from failing completely. But it is failing. We can’t stop it. All the power is here and they want it. They’re exerting a tremendous force to reach it, your sons specifically. But something happened that no one foresaw would change the balance in their favor after we closed the breach. Dynan saved Fadril Telaerin. She was there a thousand years, fighting them the whole time. Now, this thing – the talisman is here and no one is there, doing what she did.”

Ambrose paused a moment to consider what that meant, his eyes flashing to Maralt in sudden realization. Maralt expected immediate denial, but the King kept thinking it over.

“How does this help my son? Dynan isn’t old enough. The succession committee...”

Maralt wasn’t sure if he should reveal too many details. At the same time, he felt he owed the King an answer. “It won’t be possible for them to stay in one place for very long. The imbalance will ease here for a time, but it will follow them. And grow.”

“Then who?” Ambrose knew the answer then and Maralt didn’t need to say it. Ambrose mulled that over, too. Maralt wondered if there’d come a moment of acceptance. His was wearing away. “I see.”

Maralt wondered if he really did. A clench of fear gripped his stomach and shook through him in anticipation. This didn’t feel anything at all like it did when he stabbed Dynan. This was different on far too many levels. This was permanent.

“So how does one commit murder as a thought wave?” Ambrose put the glass stopper back, this time without making a sound.

The outward calm veneer slipped. “I could just let them take you.”

“Who?” Ambrose moved from the sideboard to the center of the room. He didn’t believe it would happen. Maralt saw it in his face, confident denial and lack of fear telling him the King didn’t understand.

“In a short time, a portal is going to open. It’s somewhat like what happened with Dynan where sending him kept them from taking him. There’s a difference.”

“According to whom?”

“The High Bishop.”

Ambrose scoffed at that. “The High Bishop ... or Alurn Telaerin?”

“Both.”

The air in the room felt suddenly charged and Maralt knew he was out of time. So was Ambrose. Maybe he felt it too, because he turned abruptly. “Why did you wake me?”

“I don’t know.”

“To watch me beg for my life? Ask for forgiveness? Did you think to make it easier by answering my questions, Maralt?”

“No, Your Majesty. I would stop you from begging, if you would, and I already know forgiveness isn’t possible. Not for me. I’m damned as surely as you are. I woke you, because I want to say I’m sorry we couldn't find another way.”

The King looked to him for a moment, judging him, judging the words impassively before he drew in what would be his last breath. “Maybe that’s just an excuse.”

Maralt decided as these words were spoken that he didn’t want to hear any more. He couldn’t bear it and he’d fail of his purpose if he kept listening. He cut Ambrose’s ability to speak, reaching into his mind, but then failed to look away soon enough as realization took hold. Maybe he would have begged.

Maralt didn’t look and he tried not to listen, going in further until he found the place in the mind that controlled all the involuntary actions. Some called it the soul’s center. It was a place of dazzling light and all Maralt had to do now was take it.

He reached his hand in, grasping the pulsing orb.

Here was a kind of power he’d never felt before, shooting through him. Ambrose fell to his knees, the pain of his resistance sapping his strength with amazing speed.

The thought to stop crossed Maralt’s mind, stop before it was too late, stop before the life before him was extinguished, but the drug tearing through his mind was an immediately addictive thing. He wanted it, just as he feared. He drank in the essence of life that all men carried, pulled it in, reveling in the sensations it caused. Here was the most basic of pleasures, rushing through him with rapidly increasing intensity.

The King’s face flushed and his body jerked, when in his mind, Maralt took hold of his heart, held it in hand, clamping down hard enough to stop it from beating.

Ambrose trembled beneath him. Maralt watched, almost from without, seeing himself, horrified by his actions, a part of him splitting away and fleeing from the thing he was becoming. Maralt closed his fist, crushing the force that gave life, pulling the living soul into himself in one last exhilarating rush. He felt it move inside him, a burst of energy that left him shaking. The body he stood over collapsed into itself. An empty shell now, unmoving.

Almost simultaneously, something else moved through him, into him and he turned. A portal spread open before him and he stared at dark pillars that surrounded a stone shelf. At the heart of the circle an altar stood and Ambrose Telaerin lay upon it, writhing in agony.

It came in a flash of realization where the King was and that it wasn’t supposed to have happened this way. He wasn’t supposed to have gone to them, to the heart of evil. He should have taken Fadril’s place in the Between. Maralt had been assured of it. This was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.

“Of course it is.”

The man who appeared before Maralt looked just like Alurn Telaerin, though it was immediately apparent that he wasn’t the First King of Cobalt. A cloud of inky darkness encircled him, shifting one way and then another so that only glimpses came through.

“He took your memory, which would explain why you have no idea who I am.”

Before Maralt could rear away from him, the man reached a hand out, holding him despite the struggle to escape that had no effect. Memory blasted through him.

“They keep lying to you.” Adiem released him. Maralt gasped, blinking at this man who was his forefather. “You keep letting them. Oh I suppose it isn’t your fault when Alurn is the responsible party in all this. I’m going to show you a few things. The truth of what really happened. You’re going to see how you’ve been used all this time, especially in this. Ambrose Telaerin is of no use to us at all, but he is a hindrance to them and their schemes. That’s what it is, Maralt. Schemes and plans to collect us all, like trinkets, taking everything we are. You know where.”

“The Room of Orbs,” Maralt said when he didn’t want to.

Adiem nodded, turning to look from the body of the King to the spirit of him, lying on the altar as bands of black sank into him. “We’ll have to find some use for him.” A smile twitched at the corners of his mouth. “And for you as well.”

He put his hand to the back of Maralt’s neck, his fingers sliding up into his hair and latching onto his head. Maralt felt something come into him and he couldn’t stop it, or maybe he didn’t want to. There were things he was shown, of a different time, a different destiny that was taken away, and he was shown what others intended for him, the terrible void awaiting him that filled him with a sense of betrayal toward people he knew as his family, the only family he ever had.

“But it doesn’t have to be your fate.” Adiem stepped back. The open hole was narrowing. “We’ll talk again soon.”

The vortex closed. The King’s bedchamber shrank, pulled away as fast as a fleeting thought. Maralt gasped as his own room surrounded him, this small unkempt living space he called his own. His whole body ached, as if he’d just spent the last days running. He knew what he’d done. He saw it happening over again in fresh detail. He felt it too, sickened by what he saw and what he now knew. He didn’t want to believe it, but the truth Adiem showed him was too compelling.

The noises that started coming out of him weren’t human. It was a raging lunacy that, if he let go, would consume him. This wouldn’t be contained. He was a murderer now. His stomach rebelled, while his mind recalled the sweetness of power washing through him as life left the King. He started throwing up, but in between the spasms, there came an unrecognizable cackle, until he realized he was laughing.

Later, when the eastern sky began to lighten and the Kingdom stirred, unaware yet of anything but a new day, a pounding knock roused Maralt from the half stupor he’d fallen into, lying on the floor in his own vomit. He got up, wiping his mouth and his hands, and staggered to the door. He opened it without looking to see who might be there, maybe Palace messengers come to tell him the news, or Palace guards to take him.

Three men stood in the doorway, looking at him and around themselves in nervous suspicion. One had albino white hair. One had hair of no distinguishable style, blond and matted, spikes protruding in random disarray. The last had brown, lanky hair that fell in his face. Aldridge Faulk, Logue Riztrin, and Arlon Drayer. Maralt knew them, having met them once before in a dark alley early last year; Dynan’s attackers.

“We were told to come here.” Arlon spoke for the three, nervously glancing down the street.

Maralt wiped his mouth again, trying to get rid of the taste. He hesitated. He should chase them away like he had before. Instead, he stood back and held the door open. “Come in.”