“The shades had gone, but they had left something of their eternal damnation inside him.
“Most of all, when he closed his eyes and imagined the scent of the Janne blooms, he knew that magic had left the land.
“I felt Delgon’s terror, and more time passed. His skin was burnt and crisp from long exposure to the sun. His vision was obscured by a gray haze, and he knew that the sunlight was making him blind. The pain in his hands had eased, but his shoulders felt as though someone was keeping a fire alight in them. Each slight movement aggravated the flames. He had slumped to his knees, his chest was tight, his stomach was distended from dehydration and an intense hunger he had never experienced before.
“And then the screaming began. He had believed himself to be alone, but the first cry came from behind him, back toward the heart of the city, and he recognized the voice of another Elder. It was quite obviously mad. Other screams started up then, spreading back and forth across Hess like echoes looking for a home. Delgon added his own voice to the cacophony. It was as if they had all believed themselves to be alone, and now the only way they could communicate was to scream.
“The screaming went on until nightfall, and as the sun went down and dusk hid the worst of the destruction, Delgon wondered again why they had all been left here like this.
“An execution, O’Gan? Or an offering?”
“I have no idea,” O’Gan said. “Something bad.”
“Something bad,” Darshall said, nodding. “Delgon could not sleep. Tiredness swamped him, but the pain kept him awake, and the certainty that something terrible would stalk through the red-strewn streets to eat him. Magic had gone, and he would die.
“So he stayed awake for three more days, watching the sun rise and fall on the screamed agony of the sacrificial Mystics of Hess. It was not until dusk of the fourth day that he realized he was already dead.
“I felt the pain he went through: the pain of being dead. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before, and I never, ever want to feel it again. I can barely think about it now…hardly talk about it…but imagine: you feel yourself rotting. You smell the rank stench of your flesh growing bad, your blood hardening in your veins, your eyes being pecked from your skull by birds. You feel the teeth of sand rats as they gnaw at your stomach, opening you up so that they can get at the organs inside. You feel your heart being ripped out…and you feel it being eaten from a hundred steps away, the dozen tiny mouths of a sand rat litter shredding it and fighting over every morsel.
“Then you feel the action of their stomach acids, the pain of being broken down and shit out and lying in the sun to dry…
“Eventually the weight of his torso ruptured the already weakened shoulder sockets and Delgon fell onto his face in the rubble. This was three weeks after the end of the War. The sand rats were shunning him now because he was too far gone even for them. But he felt the pain of decay in every part of his body. His wraith was trapped within a rotting corpse, unable to move, still attached to the land with all his senses even though his eyes were gone.
“He suffered there for a long time. Eventually he came apart, and parts of him went underground. Suddenly possessed of movement, his hands crawled from the weakened elbow sockets and retreated down into the dark, his feet shifted themselves in opposite directions, and still he felt every wound to his body, every rip and tear of flesh, every bone prised from its socket…he felt them all, and his wraith started to wander this place looking for escape. Even if there had been someone to chant it down to the Black, the Mages’ magic had set it adrift and given it its own appalling doom.
“S’Hivez had exacted his own vengeance upon those Mystics who banished him from New Shanti.
“Delgon’s body rotted away, but parts of it remained mummified. They shift here and there, peering aboveground on occasion and showing themselves to anyone who happens to be looking. There was no helping Delgon and the others, so we ordered that these places be paved over and a fountain placed at their centers. Small tribute to such suffering. A paltry symbol.”
She looked up, waved her hand around, dripping water into the dust. “His wraith is here now, and he still suffers the agony of death, and perhaps he always will. And we became the Elder Mystics. We swore that we would keep such unbearable truths to ourselves.”
“WHY?” O’GAN ASKED. “Why not tell us? Why hide that part of history?”
“We needed Hess to live again. Who would have wanted to dwell in a city haunted by such things?”
“So you’re giving in? Every Elder is giving in just because-”
“Just because?”Elder Darshall shouted, and the effort clenched her stomach muscles and extended the wound. She winced but continued through the agony, perhaps ashamed at feeling pain from something so negligible. “You have no idea, O’Gan,” she said, shaking her head and at last lifting her hand from the water. She stared at it for a few seconds, perhaps expecting it to be coated in Delgon’s blood. “You cannot imagine the pain…the time…every second an eternity.” She drifted off, still staring at her hand, mumbling something that O’Gan could not make out.
“I won’t just roll over and die!” he said.
“Heed my wisdom! It’s the end of the Shantasi.” Elder Darshall’s gaze went to her hand once more. “Mystic Delgon, guide my hand.”
O’Gan moved, but he was already too late. Darshall clasped the knife with her other hand and ripped upward, slitting her stomach, leaning forward as she turned her hands and angled the blade to the side. He caught her as she fell, smelled her insides and felt the warmth of the steam rising from her spilled guts, and he saw the instant that life left her eyes.
“I hope you’ll be at rest,” he said. “But it’s not the end until every last one of us is dead.” He laid her along the stone sill of the fountain and knelt beside her, chanting her down into the Black, trying to keep his mind from her story but all the time desperate to believe that she could no longer hear his words, see his pale face, smell his fear.
He left the square and headed back into the heart of Hess. He looked for shifting shadows on the way, but anything watching from the darkness kept to itself.
O’GAN PENTLE HAD been a Mystic for more than fifty years, but he had no idea how to command an army. That was the job of the Elders, passing orders down from the Temple to the upper echelons of the Shantasi forces, commanding them here, there, back toward the sea and out into the edges of the Mol’Steria Desert. True, he had trained warriors in his time and sent them into the world, condemning them to lonely vigils for absent magic. He often wondered where his charges were and what they were doing. Mystic he may be, but he had never traveled beyond the boundaries of New Shanti. He had read much about Noreela City, the Cantrass Plains and Long Marrakash, but he had seen none of it. The warriors he trained were destined to see the world, while he, a Mystic committed to the good of New Shanti, was tied to his land.
He had trained warriors, but that did not mean he could command an army.
They can’t all be giving in, he thought. They can’t all be killingthemselves!
He hurried through the streets of Hess, hating every sign of the panic that had spread through the Mystic city. The streets here were mostly deserted now, many inhabitants having fled eastward toward where the sun should rise. Clothes lay trampled into the dust. A chair lay on its side beside an ornate iron door, and beyond the open door O’Gan could see the insides of a wealthy home, tables heavy with precious statuettes and floors carpeted with rugs woven by Cantrass Angels. Whoever had fled this place never expected to return.
He could barely believe what was happening. The city was retreating without any thought of protecting itself, listening without question to the mad mutterings of the Elder Mystics and panicking at the sight of their public suicides. And why not? They were held in such high esteem, and if they viewed death as the only escape, what hope could anyone else raise against this catastrophe?