'Kill yourself,' a voice whispered from the darkness.
Shandower rose and walked to a display of edged weapons he had collected from the corpses of the monsters he had killed. His fingers were inches from the hilt of a dagger, which he planned to ram into his own throat, when he identified the owner of that voice.
By then it was too late.
Seventeen
Myrmeen found Krystin sitting at the edge of the pit where Shandower had secreted the apparatus. Her long legs hung over the edge and she kicked absently as if she were trying to swim through the darkness that seemed to rise from below. Myrmeen sat beside her, tucking her legs beneath her, afraid of the abyss waiting beyond the shaft's cleanly polished lip.
The locket was in Krystin's hand, and she stared at its emerald surface in frustration. 'So close,' she whispered. 'I'm sorry?' Myrmeen asked. 'I didn't hear you.' 'Nothing,' Krystin said as she slipped the locket into her breast pocket and looked at Myrmeen with eyes that mirrored the older woman's sadness and exhaustion.
They sat quietly, appreciating each other's company, when a sudden flicker of memory came to Myrmeen, chilling her. 'By the gods,' she whispered. 'What's wrong?' Krystin asked.
Myrmeen hesitated, then decided she would never keep secrets from Krystin again. Haltingly, she began her story.
'Fourteen years ago I did something terrible. It was the night of the great storm. I guess I was delirious with pain. I couldn't think clearly. I know that's no excuse, but-'
'Go on,' Krystin urged.
'It was a few seconds after the delivery. My mind was swimming. Dak said the baby was gone. In that moment, a nightmare came to me. I saw a madwoman in red carrying her dead child in her arms. The woman wailed her agony for all to hear as she shambled through the streets. She begged anyone who came close to her for the smallest gesture of reassurance, a hint of kindness, a compliment for the noisome, bloated body she cradled in her arms.
' 'My child,' the woman whispered, 'my child is beautiful.'
'But it wasn't a nightmare. I had seen that scarlet woman wandering the marketplace when I was a little girl. A handful of drunken guards, evil men, all of them, had threatened to arrest her for making a public spectacle of herself-and, more importantly, for frightening off the tourists and their much needed gold.
'The woman had ignored them, and finally a guard snatched the corpse from her hands and threw it to one of his comrades. The scarlet woman chased after her child, but it was kept out of her reach. When she attacked one of the men, clawing at him with her bony hands, her fingernails scraped away, the guard ran her through and left her to die slowly in an alley. He stood there and waited until she was dead before he gave her back the child.'
Myrmeen shuddered at the horror of that distant morning. She looked at Krystin. 'Dak told me you were gone, and all I could think about was the scarlet woman. I suppose I thought that if I had seen the baby, I would have become her. My sanity would have been lost, so I didn't ask to see the baby. I just let it go.
'I made a mistake, a horrible mistake. I allowed my fear to overtake me. If I hadn't, I might have saved you.'
'Or you might have died in the attempt,' Krystin said. 'Besides, you don't know for sure that I'm your daughter.'
Myrmeen thought about her next words carefully, afraid to say the first thing that came to her mind. That doesn't matter, she wanted to say, but she knew those words would ring false, because it mattered to a great degree. There was something, however, that had equal importance.
'Krystin, all I can say is that if something were to happen to you, I would feel as if I had lost my daughter a second time.'
The young woman stared at Myrmeen in shock. She was unprepared for such an admission and had no idea how to react. With a cry of longing, Krystin threw her arms around Myrmeen and began to weep.
Myrmeen's arms closed over Krystin, gently caressing her hair and the flowing line of her back. She told Krystin how their lives would be in Arabel, of the palace they would live in, the luxury and splendor, the people who would be her friends, the subjects who would adore her. 'An education,' Myrmeen said excitedly, 'a proper one. The finest tutors, only the best. You will have everything you want. Everything.'
Krystin pulled back slowly and Myrmeen wiped away the child's tears. 'It sounds wonderful.'
'It will be,' Myrmeen promised. 'Believe me, it will.'
Krystin touched Myrmeen's hand. 'You're shaking.'
The older woman rose and kissed Krystin on the forehead. 'I need to talk with Reisz and Ord. Then I'm going to get some sleep. Will you be all right here?'
'Yes, Myrmeen,' she said, fighting back the urge to call the magnificent woman before her by the name they both desperately needed to hear: 'Mother.' Instead, she said something that rocked them both even more. 'I love you.'
Myrmeen dropped to her knees and hugged Krystin so tightly that she feared she would hurt the girl. 'Sweet dreams,' she said as she pulled away and covered her face with her hands to mask the tears that were welling up in her eyes as she walked away. She found the tunnel that led to the chamber shared by the Harpers, and disappeared from view, leaving only the slight echo of her boots on the stone floor in her wake.
Krystin sat alone, waiting for the sudden wave of sickness that had overcome her to pass. When she no longer felt the pain behind her eyes, and when the cold, metallic taste in her mouth finally vanished, Krystin removed the heavy, dead weight of the locket from her blouse and stared at its seductive, gleaming emerald surface.
There was a good reason why she could not call Myrmeen her mother: It would have been a lie.
Lord Sixx had helped her remember the truth, unlocking her buried memories with his power. It was a simple enough task, considering he was the one who planted her false memories in the first place. Exposure to the magic of the apparatus, when she took Shandower's hand in the safe house to prove that she was not a member of the Night Parade, had created fissures in the walls that Sixx had erected in her mind. Through those cracks had come glimpses of her true life, memories of friends and family.
A part of her had feared that these new memories could also be a lie, and so during the ride to Shandower's retreat, Krystin had spoken to the assassin several times, making excuses to be near him. She had found reasons to take his hand in hers, allowing the gauntlet's energy to course through her. This time, the magic had not affected her. Although Sixx had not restored all he had taken when his emissaries had kidnapped her and arranged for the desert slavers to find her, these memories were true, and he had promised that once the apparatus was in his hands, he would restore all her memories.
The images that had been haunting her were so easily explained that they almost appeared to be mundane facts glimpsed on a tired afternoon rather than sleek, sharp-as-steel revelations cutting across her darkened field of memory like swords meeting, their metal crashing during a death duel, the rain of sparks adding much needed illumination.
Her life, all the gods help her, had been dull.
Her name was Krystin Devlaine. She had never been a hunter for the Night Parade. In fact, she had never known that such creatures existed outside of tales she had heard in harsh whispers at the boarding school where she had been sent by her parents. Those stories were generally used to frighten the younger children who believed in all manner of haunts and demons who knew their names and would come for them if they misbehaved.
The kindly old man she had glimpsed had been her grandfather, who had died several years ago. He had lived in Calim-port and had visited her much more frequently than her own mother and father, who were restless travelers and explorers. They had relegated the task of raising Krystin to others for most of her life. The vulgar, dark-haired man with rotted teeth, who had tried to club her with a shattered table leg, had been a nameless drunk in a tavern. She had crept away from the school and had been trapped in the bar when a brawl erupted. Physical fitness had been stressed at the school, and she had been an especially apt pupil during the lessons on self- defense. Those hours of instruction had benefited her that night. She had crushed the man's instep, left him howling
