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“Get out,” Megiddo commanded in a voice no longer thin but forceful, adamant. “Get out before they do!” He threw his head back against the scaffolding, driving one of the short spikes through the newly healed flesh of his neck, and roared.
The sound trumpeted above thehul-galla's screeching, a blast that buffeted them aside and away from the shining seam. The monk howled a second time, uttering words Serovek didn't know but that lifted him off his feet and flung him backwards, into the heart of the shadow, through it, to the edge of his nightmare where a voice waited to yank him across to the other side of consciousness.
“Wake up, margrave, before I punch you awake!”
Serovek hurtled out of sleep, Megiddo's tortured screams still ringing in his ears. He awakened to the sight of Anhuset's grim expression and her narrowed yellow eyes blazing brighter than a lamp. He clutched her arms, breathing as if he'd tried to outrun his horse on foot. “Megiddo,” he gasped, gaze sliding to the bier on which the monk's soulless body rested, enveloped in a shimmering blue corona.
The light pulsed in shallow rhythm as if mimicking a racing heartbeat. Unsettled neighing from the horses in their stalls and the hard crack of hooves against wood rails filled the stables. Anhuset stared at Serovek, silent and unflinching as his fingers burrowed into her muscular arms while he tried to rid his mind of the echoes ofgallalaughter and Megiddo's suffering. Cerulean luminescence played off her angular features, sculpting her high cheekbones into more pronounced relief and sharpening her jaw. A Kai under a blue sun. Beautiful. Deadly. Not human.
“A man caught between worlds strives to reach you in this one.” Her yellow eyes flared with a greenish tinge under the spectral haze. “Are you truly here with me?” At his nod, she pried his fingers off her arm, slid her hand up his forearm and pulled him to his feet. “Wake fully, Lord Pangion, and plant your spirit in the world where you now stand.”
Her command snuffed out the last of the echoes but not the memory of the monk crucified on a scaffold of black bones. He stared at Anhuset, concentrating on her features. “Can you hear them at all? Thegalla? I dreamed them, but I swear it was more than a dream.”
“I believe you.” She left him to rummage through one of her packs, returning with a small hand mirror. “Take a look,” she said, handing it to him.
He held the mirror up and swallowed back a gasp as horror flooded his veins. The blue luminescence hadn't confined itself to a corona surrounding Megiddo's bier. Serovek stared at his reflection with eyes flooded in the same shimmering hue. His natural eye color was blue as well, but of a more natural shade. His dead wife had once likened his irises to the deep of a cold ocean. Now they glowed with the ethereal strangeness of a Wraith king's power, like the simulacrumvuhanahe'd ridden into battle against thegalla. As he continued to stare, the light faded, his sclera becoming white again, even as his irises darkened, losing their definition to pupils dilated from the dimness of the stables and the last vestiges of his nightmare. “Gods,” he breathed, before thrusting the mirror at Anhuset.
Her claws scraped across the glass as she took it from him. Her eyes glowed as well as she regarded him, but from the nature of her heritage instead of sorcery. “How long has this been happening?”
Serovek shrugged. “This is the first time I've seen it.”
“But is it the first time you've looked?”
“No.”
This was the worst nightmare he'd had about thegallaor Megiddo so far, but not the only one. Each time he'd awakened, the shuddering aftermath left him bathed in a cold sweat. He'd suffered through battle sickness when he was younger, less inured then to the savagery of war. This wasn't battle sickness. No one's eyes glowed ethereal blue when they fought their own inner demons.
Anhuset put away the mirror, switching it for a flask. “You look like you need a drink. If this doesn't chase away the echoes, nothing will.”
Serovek ran the flask under his nose, rearing back when his eyes watered at the familiar smell. Peleta's Kiss. He saluted Anhuset, took a healthy swig and braced for the burn as the spirit scorched a path over his tongue, down his throat, and into his stomach where it ignited with a heat to melt the last splinters of ice coursing through his veins. This time the shudder that threatened to break his joints loose had nothing to do with the nightmare and everything to do with the flask's contents. Clear-headed, with a warm glow burning in his belly, he thanked Anhuset for her offering and returned it to her. “The spirit that cures all ills,” he said.
She nodded and tucked the flask back into the satchel where she'd stashed her mirror. “Nectar of the gods.” Her mouth curved. “For when they want their insides set on fire.” The amusement softening her features faded as she eyed him. “I've had bad dreams, but yours was worse than what most of us suffer, I think.” She inclined her head toward Megiddo. “And him being here has something to do with it obviously. Do you wish to speak of it?”
He liked that she didn't demand he tell her what he dreamed, though holding such a nightmare close did the dreamer no good. “Not really, but we both know this was more than a dream. I think it was a warning and probably something you should relate to Brishen when you return to Saggara.” Her features remained expressionless as he recounted the grotesque visions and the sounds of thegallaas they tortured the Nazim monk. Only her eyes changed, their yellow brightening or darkening as he spoke of the hairline crack of light in the writhing darkness and Megiddo's desperate command that Serovek get away.
When he finished, she turned to stare at the monk's bier and the body lying peacefully under the blanket. The blue light had disappeared completely. “How long have you dreamed of thegallaand Megiddo?”
It felt like several lifetimes. “Since a couple of months after returning home from Haradis. They've grown progressively worse as time passed but nothing like tonight.” He followed Anhuset's gaze to the bier. “Then again, this is the first time I've been in such close proximity to him since I turned him over to his brother for safekeeping.”
His anger over Pluro keeping his brother's ensorceled body stashed away in a rundown barn lessened at the memory of the man's explanation for doing so. Nightmares, he'd complained. Horrific nightmares that aged you a decade in a night. If Megiddo's nearness spread night terrors like plague to anyone sleeping nearby, he couldn't so harshly condemn Pluro for exiling his brother away from the house.
Either his musings played across his features, or Anhuset thought as he did at that moment. “We may have rushed to judgment about your vassal's actions. The dream you just woke from had you downing Peleta's Kiss like water. If Pluro Cermak and his household fought such battles in their sleep more than once, he probably couldn't get his brother out of the house fast enough or far enough. And who could blame him?”
Serovek twitched back a corner of the concealing blanket to gaze at Megiddo's peaceful, austere face under the transparent shell of protective sorcery. “He hung on some kind of scaffolding, begging for mercy while thegallaflayed the skin from his body in strips no wider than reins. And when they were done, they healed him and started over again.”
It wasn't the sight of such gruesome cruelty that made Serovek's hand shake when he covered Megiddo's face again, but the memory of his voice, the hopelessness in those screams for mercy. The madness.
A sudden thought occurred to him, making him frown. “Has Brishen complained of bad dreams in which thegallaand the monk play a part?”
“If he has, he's not shared those complaints with me,” Anhuset replied, her features serene, her voice mild.
Unlike human eyes, which gave away numerous tells in the shift of a gaze or the dilation of pupils, a Kai's eyes gave away very little. He'd discovered through years of careful observation that they actually did possess pupils, but they were the same color as the iris and the sclera: yellow upon yellow upon yellow. They moved and shifted just like a human's eyes, but the monochrome coloration obscured such movement instead of highlighting it. Anhuset's citrine stare didn't reveal anything, but her studied composure did. He knew her well enough now to know she was, by nature, neither serene nor mild. She'd dodged his question with an answer that wasn't a lie but also not quite the truth.
Serovek chose not to push. Sha-Anhuset's devotion to thehercegeswas absolute. He could do to her what thegalladid to Megiddo until the end of time, and he'd not get a word out of her until she chose to share one. Besides, if he were honest, he prayed Brishen slept untroubled in his human wife's arms and what Serovek dealt with now was merely a mind trying to rid itself of poisonous memory.
Pray hard, an inner voice told him.
He turned his attention to his silent companion and gave her a short bow. “I'll not be rolling up in my blanket again, and I doubt you're one to wile away the hours in chit-chat.” He laughed at her derisive huff. “I propose either a round of dicing or sparring. Your choice, though I'll have to go back to the inn for the dice and my waster.”
