Sayeed and Zeeahd wanted nothing of war. They had come in search of the Abbey of the Rose and its oracle.
“What if this abbey and its oracle are just myth? Then what do we do? Both could be stories the Sembians tell themselves to preserve hope.”
“No,” Zeeahd said, shaking his head emphatically. “They exist.”
“How do you know?”
Zeeahd stopped and turned on him. “Because they must! Because he told me! Because this,” he gestured helplessly at his body. “This must end! It must!”
Sayeed knew who Zeeahd meant by “he”-Mephistopheles, the archdevil who ruled Cania, the eighth layer of Hell. Merely thinking the archfiend’s name caused Sayeed to hear sinister whispers in the falling rain. He took a moment to drink from his waterskin: a habit, nothing more, the ghost of a human need. Sayeed did not need to drink, or eat, or sleep, not anymore, not since he had been changed. If the Spellplague had fouled his brother’s body, it had perfected Sayeed’s, although the price of perfection had been to make him as much automaton as man.
“Why are you slowing to drink?” Zeeahd called. “I said we must hurry!”
Zeeahd’s agitation conjured coughs from his ruined lungs, thick and wet with phlegm. The cats mewled and crowded close to him, their feral, knowing eyes watching with terrible intensity. Between hacks, Zeeahd tried to shoo the animals away with his boot, and Sayeed tried to ignore the unnatural way his brother’s leg flopped at the hip as he kicked at the cats. The coughing fit ended without a purge and the disappointed cats wandered back into their orbits, tails sagging with disappointment.
“The cats disgust me,” Sayeed said.
“Not cats, and they’re a gift,” Zeeahd mumbled, as he wiped his mouth with a hand partially covered in scales. His dark eyes stared out at Sayeed from the deep, shadowed pits of their sockets. His hatchet-shaped faced was dotted with pockmarks, the result of a childhood illness.
Sayeed looked past his brother, across the plains, and his mind moved to old memories. “I can’t picture our mother’s face. Can you? She had long brown hair, I think.”
Zeeahd drank of his own waterskin, swished and spit. The cats pounced on it, saw it was naught but water, and left off.
“It was black,” Zeeahd said.
“I used to dream of her, back when I slept.”
“You’ll sleep again, Sayeed. And dream. When we find the Oracle, we’ll make him tell us-”
His voice cracked and broke into a cough. Sayeed moved to help but Zeeahd waved him off with a hand, and one cough followed another into a wracking, wet fit.
Once more the cats crowded close, mewling, circling, jostling for position as Zeeahd fought the poison the Spellplague had put in him. He hunched over in the rain, coughing, warring with the foulness of his innards.
Sayeed could only watch, disgusted. He looked away and tried to remember his mother, the exercise helping distract him from the shifting swells and lumps that bulged under his brother’s robes, the mucous-filled gasps, the wet heaves.
Sayeed could not recall his mother’s eyes, or even her name. His memory was fading. It was as if he were someone new every day, someone he hated more and more. He remembered with clarity only one day from the distant past, one moment that connected who he was now to who he had been before the Spellplague-the moment Abelar Corrinthal’s men had chopped off his right thumb with a hatchet.
He remembered screaming, remembered the knight who’d cut off the digit apologizing for the mutilation.
Zeeahd’s coughing intensified, turned into a prolonged heave, and the sound pulled Sayeed back into the present. The cats meowed with excitement, circling, tails raised, eyes gleaming as Zeeahd gagged. And finally the felines received what they wished.
Zeeahd’s abdomen visibly roiled under his robes and he vomited forth a long, thick rope of stinking black sputum. The grass it struck smoked, curled, and browned. The cats pounced on the mucous, hissing and clawing at one another, a fierce caterwaul, each lapping at the mucous.
Zeeahd cursed and wiped his mouth.
“Thrice-damned cats,” Sayeed said, stomping a boot on the ground near the felines, splashing them with mud. The cats arched, hissed, and bared their fangs but did not back away from their meal. Sayeed had never seen them eat anything other than the black result of his brother’s expulsions.
“They’re not cats, but damned, indeed,” Zeeahd said. He cleared his throat again and the cats, having devoured the first string of mucous, turned to him, hoping for another meal. When none was forthcoming, they sat on their haunches and licked their paws and chops.
Zeeahd lowered his hood, threw his head back to put his face to the rain. He ran a hand over his thin, black hair. With skin pulled taut to reveal sunken eyes and cavernous cheeks, he looked skeletal, the living dead.
“The purgings only slow the advance of the curse,” Zeeahd said. “I need someone soon, Sayeed. A vessel. Otherwise the curse will run its course.”
Sayeed nodded. Their use of vessels had left a trail of aberrations in their wake.
“Come,” Zeeahd said, and threw up his hood. “We must get to the next village. The urge is strong.” He inhaled as well as his ruined lungs would allow and stared down at the cats. They looked up at him, far too much intelligence in their eyes.
“I can’t let it happen to me,” Zeeahd said softly.
“Let what happen?”
His brother seemed not to hear him and Sayeed was, as always, left to wonder.
The Spellplague had transformed both of them, but differently. Sayeed had been made unable to sleep and increasingly dull to life’s pleasures and pains, his emotions and appreciation of physical sensations had been ground down to nubs.
Zeeahd, on the other hand, had been killed. But the blue fire had not left him dead. Instead, it had somehow filled him with pollution and returned him to life. Sayeed well remembered how Zeeahd looked upon his return: the panicked eyes, the animal scream of terror and pain. He had shivered with cold but, inexplicably, smelled of brimstone, of rot. Zeeahd had pawed frantically at his own body, his breath coming in strained gasps.
“What is it?” Sayeed had asked.
“I’m. . unchanged?” Zeeahd had said, his tone amazed and relieved. “I was torn, Sayeed, burned, flayed. For centuries. I saw the master of that place and he spoke to me, made me promise to seek. .”
Sayeed had thought him mad. “Master? Centuries? You were gone only moments.”
Zeeahd had not heard him. “I’m unchanged! Unchanged!”
But he was not unchanged. His laughter had turned to wheezing, then coughing, then his first purging, and both of them had stared in horror at the squirming black mass expelled from his guts.
“Oh, gods,” Zeeahd had said. He’d wept as if he understood some truth that Sayeed did not. “It’s in me still, Sayeed. That place. It’s a curse, and it wants to come out.”
Only later had Sayeed learned that Zeeahd’s soul had gone to Cania, where his brother had forged a pact with Mephistopheles to seek out someone the archdevil could not find alone. And only later had Sayeed learned what the purging actually meant, what it would require, again and again until Mephistopheles set them free of their afflictions.
“Come on,” he said, hating himself for saying it. “We’ll find you someone.”
They walked on, two men who weren’t men and thirteen cats who weren’t cats, bent under the weight of the rain. In time they came upon a packedearth wagon road.
“Must be a village near,” Sayeed said, scanning the shapeless black expanse of the plains. Wisps of shadow clung to the trees and scrubs, a black mist.
Zeeahd nodded, his head bobbing strangely on his neck. His voice, too, sounded odd when he spoke.
“Let’s hope so.”
Gerak awoke before sunrise, or so he judged. Dawn’s light rarely penetrated Sembia’s shadow-shrouded air, so he relied for timekeeping on the instincts he’d sharpened as a soldier.