Shadowsword by Guy Haley

Author:Guy Haley
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2016-09-02T10:59:03+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

The sacrifice

IMPERIAL GOVERNOR’S PALACE, MAGOR’S SEAT

GERATOMRO

087298.M41

Dostain couldn’t sleep any more. He didn’t like to. His dreams excited and repelled him in equal measure. He feared that were he to sleep too much, and sink into that nocturnal netherworld too often, his disgust would melt away, leaving only a fearful longing for more depravity, more excess.

But sleep deprivation does things to the human mind almost as terrible as the worst of dreams. When he moved his head, it seemed his soul shifted within the box of his skull, imparting a delay to all sensation. His mouth was dry, no matter how much he drank, and he was maddeningly, insatiably hungry. At the edges of his vision small black shapes flowed over the objects in the room, new companions whose faithfulness he had not requested nor desired.

So it was that when Dib crept through his door, Dostain took him at first for a hallucination. One of the sliding shapes given flesh, and he laughed at it in fear and resignation.

‘Heir the Second? My lord?’ said Dib.

Dostain blinked stupidly. He had to swallow three times before his tongue worked around the words his brain commanded it to say.

‘Get out,’ he said. ‘Leave me be. These dreams. They are your doing. I know it.’

‘Me? I give nothing that is not already there,’ said Dib.

‘Get out!’

‘Are you sure, my lord? You are losing this war you started, and you know that too,’ said Dib. ‘And that is not my doing.’ He was no longer a youth, but a glorious and powerful man. He was naked except for a long, horizontally pleated kilt that garbed his perfect legs. Armlets and medallions of strange gold decorated his body, clinging to his muscles in ways that accentuated them uncomfortably for Dostain, for it made Dib too beautiful to bear. His second greatest fear was that Dib would seduce him, his greatest that he would enjoy it. Dib sat at the end of Dostain’s bed and gave him a sad, understanding smile.

‘I offered you a choice between slavery and power. You have done nothing! Choices need tending as much as any garden. They are not simple boxes to be filled on a form, sealed away and forgotten, but living things! Your choice requires attention, or it will turn and the outcome will not be to your liking.’

Dostain peered closely at Dib. The youth wavered, replaced by Pollein, beautiful Pollein, immodestly dressed in Dib’s strange clothes.

‘You like this body, I know. I do not think you care much for the soul that it clothes, but the flesh itself... Well, that has cast a deep and powerful spell on you.’ When she spoke, she did so with Dib’s voice. She leaned onto the bed and began to crawl up it, her eyes fixed on Dostain’s. ‘Do you know, the most powerful urge of any organism is to reproduce. Of course, there are individuals within a sentient species such as yours that try not to. They deny themselves the genetic continuation of offspring for one reason or another, but most of them still practise the act of coupling.

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