But Ironfoot's relationship to fear had changed in the intervening months. Fear was a driving force now, and it was something he could control. Whenever it got to be too much, he simply reached in and damped it down.
From time to time, Sela poked her head out of the den to see how he was doing, or to go collect another stack of briefs and dispatches from the analysts upstairs. Neither of them took a break, even for a moment. To stop would be to think about what had happened, and neither of them had any interest in that.
The two patterns from Ironfoot's dream upon the Arami net reappeared on paper in front of him, and he saw what these patterns had been all along. Not too surprisingly, one was the map, which he'd stared at so many times that he had the thing damn near memorized. The other was the overview from Timha's plans, which he'd examined just minutes before falling out of the sky in the burning yacht. The two were clearly connected, but something was very, very wrong.
It was morning before he realized what it was. He'd gone over everything a dozen times before he spotted it.
"Sela," he said, coming into the Shadows' Den and falling into his desk chair. "I believe I've worked it out." He was smiling.
Sela had dozed off at her own desk, and now looked up.
"What? What have you worked out?"
"I've discovered exactly why the Unseelie thaumaturges were unable to construct an Einswrath weapon from the plans that Timha gave us."
"Really?" said Sela.
"Yes," said Ironfoot. His smile widened. "Because they're fake."
"What?"
"Oh, it's a very clever hoax, but that's all it is. Whoever dreamed it up, presumably the estimable Hy Pezho himself, spent a great deal of time composing plans for a massive feat of thaumaturgy that is brilliantly, extravagantly, and quite subtly, a total fraud."
"What are you saying?" said Sela.
"There's no way these are the plans for the Einswrath," said Ironfoot, standing. He stood and kicked his chair violently, where it struck the wall with a loud crash and shattered.
"You get it?" said Ironfoot, laughing. "They're totally worthless! It was all for nothing! Silverdun died for nothing!"
Ironfoot continued to laugh, and at some point his laughter turned into tears. He sat down on the floor, crying. After a moment, Sela came and sat beside him, and they wept together.
An Easterner calls a lightsmith to his home to charge the witchlamps."What color would you like them?" asks the Iightsmith.
"Oh, it don't make a lick o' difference," says the Easterner. "I'm blind, you see."
"Then why do you need your lamps charged?" asks the lightsmith.
"Well, I hates to admit it," says the Easterner,"but I'm afraid o' the dark."
-Seelie joke
But not black. Black implied sight, seeing nothing. This was the lack of sight, lack of the knowledge of sight.
Things had been going well. Very well. He'd been as close as one could get to the fulfillment of his every dream. Everything had fallen into place just as he'd planned. And then at the moment of his ultimate victory, his triumphant revenge, like a beard-flicking villain in a mestina he was defeated utterly. The fel-ala, his own personal wraith of vengeance, had turned on him and devoured him, at the moment it ought to have devoured his nemesis. Yes, nemesis. After what he'd gone through as a result, he had a right to absolutes. He had a right to thoughts of revenge that passed understanding, that left logic and justice and morality far, far behind.
Where the fel-ala's tentacles had touched him, there was pain. A deep burning sensation that went beyond the skin and traveled through channels up his arms and legs, through his spine and into his brain. A fierce, unbearable sting, infinite, breathtaking, unfathomable. Then the wraith enveloped him and swallowed him whole. Inside the creature was darkness, a darkness he'd thought complete.
He'd known nothing about darkness then.
Inside the beast was the pain of dissolution. The knowledge that he was being devoured. Eaten alive. The thing had something like teeth, but they were hooked; they dug into the flesh and tore, slurping away skin and blood. They reached around bone and snapped and sucked. Time slowed for him, a reitic property of the fel-ala that he himself had designed. The purpose of this was so that each cut could be experienced fully, individually. His consciousness was forced into the depths of the pain, each slice, each bite, one after another after another.
This was the pain he'd devised for her. The nemesis. Using only himself as a measure, he'd constructed the most nightmarish end he himself could imagine. And now it was his to experience.
As he twisted and thrashed in the belly of the fel-ala, it occurred to him that the pain was only the prologue. Only the appetizer to the true meal. Knowing it was coming made it all much, much worse.
If he ever escaped from this-and he wouldn't, he knew-he'd have to remember that knowing made it worse. A bit of useless knowledge to ponder forever.
Because that was the meal; that was the meat. After the pain, came the eternity. Even as he thought it, he felt the pain begin to recede, not because the fel-ala had finished with him, but because there was less and less of him to sense it. His body had been consumed almost thoroughly. His eyes had been ripped from their sockets, his manhood shredded, his entrails drawn from him, tied in knots with nimble hooks and yanked piecemeal from within. He'd felt internal organs puncture, rupture. By the time his lungs collapsed and he stopped breathing, it was almost a relief. The death of the body was imminent.
There was the rising panic and wholly other pain of suffocation. His chest, what was left of it, bucked and heaved. He would not have guessed that he'd have the energy for that by now. The pressure grew in his chest and head. The pressure soon pushed out all of the other pain. He felt his heart stop with a sickening, straining leap. Then it all faded away. The sound of flesh tearing and his own gurgling (and from somewhere, tinkling laughter). The visceral, seething agony. The smell and taste of thefel-ala's digestive liquids and his own blood mingled. And last, the blackness that was not yet complete. The blackness that was a painting of night compared to night itself.
True darkness. Infinite darkness, eternal. It embraced him. A silence beyond silence.
If he'd had a body he would have shuddered. The lack of sensation of any kind enveloped his mind, and at first he was relieved; the pain was over, finally over. For a time he was calm. Had he any lungs he would have breathed deeply, sighed.
Then he noticed the darkness. The lack, the total lack of light, of sound. The lack of being. Nothing with which to reach out, nothing with which to see or hear. Nothing.
For a time there was only the darkness and the horror of the darkness.
Then the itching started.
In his quest for power he had seen enough horror-caused it, experienced it-that he had lost the ability to go insane. It was a requirement of the Black Art, one of the first things his father had taught him. And if he was unable to lose his mind, then his nemesis was doubly so. She had been committing atrocities when the gods themselves were young. This was only an expression applied to anyone else, but with her it might have been a reality.
It was cliche, he knew, to think that it was thoughts of revenge that sustained him. He'd been avenging his father's death for as long as he could remember. But now it was his own death that demanded satisfaction, his own torment. This was new.
No, he would never lose his mind. And in that knowledge there was a slim hope. The slimmest. Even though he'd been certain of his victory, some paranoid part of him had compelled him to devise an insurance policy. Even if it never did him any good, the thought of those idiots bumbling around trying to follow in his footsteps, using useless plans for his masterpiece, gave him a touch of satisfaction. And a touch of hope.