AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Tell me it’s true. Tell me that this is necessary. Tell me that we are not just carrying out the sadistic games of a cruel being.” When he said nothing, I went on. “Tell me it’s true and vital and that we are saving existence itself from extinction, Messenger. Even if it’s not true, tell me it is true.”
“It is true,” Messenger said.
The day would come when I would see Isthil myself. The day would come when I knew the truth of it all.
The day would never come when I would forget what I had seen, or forgive myself.
“Now I have a question,” Messenger said, surprising me. “For deliberate, calculated murder, what is the usual penalty?”
That caught me off guard. I frowned. “In some states it’s the death penalty. Otherwise it’s life in prison.”
“Yes,” Messenger said. “Death. And yet Barton Jones lives. Or life in prison. For a teenage boy with no great physical strength, no gang to protect him. Decades in a cage, being beaten, raped, degraded, possibly killed or driven to suicide. If Isthil’s justice is savage, what of human justice?”
I had no answer to that. Had I ever given a thought to those we throw into our medieval prisons? No. And given the choice for myself, would I endure what the Master of the Game and Messenger had inflicted on Barton rather than spend thirty or forty or fifty years in a cage?
Yes. Which still did not entirely put to rest my moral doubts.
I hoped Barton would find a way to move on with his life. He was a cold-blooded killer. He had been a victim, as well, of his teacher’s predation. But that had not been his motive for murder.
He had murdered over homework.
He had murdered out of laziness.
We wield a great and terrible power, we Messengers of Fear and apprentices. That power is not a gift but a curse. And my duty, the unknown years of it that stretched before me, are a punishment for my own terrible deeds.
Messenger left then.
I don’t know how long I stood and just stared blankly at my bare walls. Time has lost much of its meaning for me. Was it an hour? Was it a day?
But like Barton Jones, I now had to find within myself the will to go on. The Shoals could welcome me, too, if I let myself be destroyed by my duty.
I vowed never to let that happen. There was no snake, just as there had been no fire that consumed Derek Grady. All of it was illusion. I knew that. And for all I knew, the Master of the Game was illusion as well.
But terror is terror, whatever the source.
I knew that Lisa Bayless’s terror had been as great, and though she deserved punishment, she had not deserved to die choking in her bathroom. Barton still had a life, however traumatized he was, but Lisa would be dead forever.
For me at that moment, no terror was greater than the knowledge that this wouldn’t be the last of it for me. I was still only an apprentice. In time, all the weight of my despicable obligation would be on my shoulders alone.
Then two paths would be open to me. In time, I would cease to be Mara the apprentice. I would be the Messenger of Fear. And in that role I would either find a way to harden myself, and thus lose myself, or I would suffer unspeakable agonies in the pursuit of brutal justice, in service to a god that was not my God.
No third way was possible.
There was no escape. . . .
There was no way out for me. . . .
At least, none that I knew then.
