Carol Berg - Rai-Kirah 02 by Revelation

Author:Revelation
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-10T21:56:05+00:00

CHAPTER 22

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Merryt stuck me in a holding room of some kind—a plain, tall-ceilinged, forbidding place that appeared unnervingly like a prison cell. He warned me not to move or speak unless I was told. As in the other place—the warren where Merryt had shown me the room he called his hideaway— the walls gave off a faint light of their own, enough to find one’s way from place to place, but scarcely enough to read by if one had possessed the luxury of books. I stood shivering, hunched over, wondering dully if it was possible that I was in the midst of some grotesque nightmare. After pinching and prodding both flesh and mind in an attempt to rouse myself, I came to the sad conclusion that I was already awake.

“How have you come here?” A deep voice, as strong and cold and hard as if it, too, had been shaped from the ice, rang out clearly, making me jump halfway out of my nasty skin.

Wits. I needed to get some wits about me. This Denas was someone powerful enough to alter the course of Rudai judgment with a simple word of “disinterest,” someone who could send me back to Ham-fist with a twitch of his finger. It had been so long since I’d needed wits. From my thick head I dragged the words I had saved. “I was invited,” I said at last, my whole being clenched in prayer that I guessed rightly about a place where plotting and intrigue seemed the business of existence.

“Invited by whom?”

Your secrets are your only coin in this realm. “He did not give me his name.”

There was a long pause. No matter how I squinted and stared I could see no one in the room with me—neither a being of flesh nor one of glimmering light—yet I could feel his formidable presence. “You carried no weapons when you were taken. Where are they?” And he was sounding neither friendly nor interested.

“I brought none.” Words crowded to my tongue, begging to be heard—babbling entreaties, promises to tell whatever I could remember. What if I said too much or too little and was cast into the pits again? I clamped my trembling hands under my arms.

“You would have me believe that a Warden, the slayer of the Naghidda, has come into this realm undefended? Do our enemies yield when they yet hold mastery of our prison?” I had no idea what he meant.

I closed my eyes and searched for words in the battered pulp that was my head, trying to recapture the reasoning that now eluded me. My hoarded words sounded absurd as I stood naked before a demon lord. And I had to be careful. My own surrender was one thing, yet somewhere Wardens were still fighting. Wardens who had not forgotten what they were about. I could not jeopardize them. You don’t want to appear threatening. Merryt’s advice was probably worth heeding. But I had sworn to myself through months of horror that I would not lie to those who might question me, or grovel before them in shame.

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