He was Rusilla.
Her brother stood in the door of her chambers, his smaller form almost invisible behind the hulking form of the memory eater. She sensed his preoccupation and snuck through his mental defenses. Once in, she sifted gently through his recent experiences, touching them as lightly as a ghost, seeing them as if they were her own. She saw his conversation with the sylph, learned the fate of VikThyss.
She'd formulated rough plans on the instant, knowing she'd not get another chance at her brother while he was so distracted. She shoved thoughts into Rakon's mind as rapidly as she could.
When you find Abrak-Thyss's prison, you will need help entering it and freeing him. You should use the same tomb robbers who killed Vik-Thyss in the tomb of Abn Thahl, Egil of Ebenor and Nix Fall of Dur Follin to assist you. What delicious irony. After Abrak-Thyss is freed you can kill them in revenge for what they did. You'll use the memory eater to kill them. The eater will kill them. The eater will kill them. But only they can do it. Only they can do it. And the eater will kill them, the eater must kill them.
She'd buried the idea deep, made it as compelling as she dared, then added another.
You cannot leave Rusilla and Merelda alone in the manse. They must accompany you. You'll drug them. But you must take them with you. It's too dangerous to leave them alone. You'll tell your men they are sick, that you're seeking a cure. But you must take them with you.
But she'd pushed too far, too fast, and Rakon had sensed her mental invasion. He'd flooded his mind with foul arcana and reasserted the integrity of his thoughts. But she'd seen what she needed to see, done what she needed to do.
For the first time in years, she'd dared have hope for herself and Merelda.
Later, she'd entered the mind of the memory eater, enduring the screams of the vanishing eunuch while she shoved memories, thoughts, and images into the vacant spaces of its mind, some her own, some stolen from Rakon. She knew Rakon would drug her and Merelda, making it difficult for her to communicate with anyone. The eater would be the vessel to carry the truth, her living plea to this Egil and Nix. She hoped the memories would go unnoticed by the eater long enough to reach their target.
She'd thought that if Egil and Nix could slay Vik-Thyss, then surely they could kill her brother and free Rusilla and Merelda. Surely they could.
But only if they were the kind of men who would feel obliged to save them.
And in that, she was taking a risk. She didn't know their hearts, couldn't know, but she had no choice.
A knife stab of pain lanced Nix's head, burning itself into his skull, and it carried a single thought.
Be that kind of man.
He was Rusilla once more.
She lay awake in her bed while Merelda slept, thinking of the frailty of her plans, thinking, too, of what awaited her and her sister if the plan failed and Rakon somehow found and freed Abrak-Thyss.
The hopeless, helpless terror caused Nix to weep. He'd had a taste of it in dreams, but then it had been attenuated. Now he felt it firsthand, what the sisters had endured, and he felt deep pity for them, deep shame for himself.
He'd thought them witches. He'd feared them, thought they'd been trying to hurt him. He wept for his own foolishness.
Abruptly the pain subsided, but the memories remained, images of horror etched into his brain forever. He lifted his head from the sand and vomit rushed up his throat. He puked into the sand.
A word moved through Nix's mind, a foul word, an appalling word irreducible beyond the horror and pain it evoked, the word at the center of everything he'd learned from the memories implanted in the eater's mind.
Rape.
Rusilla had not been trying to manipulate him. She'd been trying to communicate to him the horror of her existence, the debased, painful fate that awaited her and Merelda if they did not free themselves from their brother.
Their brother. Their own brother.
Thinking of Rakon filled him not with his usual sense of smug contempt for fools, but with rage, righteous wrath. His fists balled around the desert sand.
Rakon had enslaved his own sisters, made them whores to Hell.
And for what?
For power.
Nix had never before wanted a man dead as badly as he wanted Rakon dead. Nix had lived in Rusilla's skin, even if only for a moment, and what he'd felt was beyond words.
He thought back on his dreams, wincing over the lustful grunting he'd heard behind the doors of the hallway in the Norristru manse. Through the dreams, Rusilla had made him feel an inkling, a mere inkling, of what she and Merelda had felt, the terror and helpless rage that generations of Norristru women had felt while being made to suffer at the hands of Norristru men and the foul devils of Hell.
He wept anew.
How could a man do that to his sisters? To any woman?
Be that kind of man.
The words echoed in his mind, in their way more compelling than Rakon's spellworm had ever been.
The many lewd glances and lascivious comments that Nix had made to women through the years stared at him accusingly across the gulf of his memory. Tesha. Kiir. He'd always told himself that he was a wit, a flirt, but he could not escape the feeling that his words echoed, however distantly, the kind of thinking that allowed Rakon to justify his sisters' sexual enslavement. He suddenly felt like he weighed four hundred stone. Shame weighed him down.
'Nix?' Egil called.
He sat up and looked around, bleary-eyed, and saw the priest standing over the ruined body of the eunuch. Egil, too, had tears in his eyes. He covered Ebenor's eye with his hand as if doing so would blind him to what he had seen. The priest's voice broke when he spoke.
'What have we done, Nix? Gods, what have we done?'
Nix bowed his head. He had no words.
Be that kind of man.
The priest turned and looked up at the twilight sky, in the direction the sylph had carried Rakon and his sisters. They were no longer visible. The sylph flew as fast as the wind. There was no way they could catch them. Rusilla and Merelda's hopes had died on the Afirion sands. Egil and Nix had failed them.
'I'm upside down here,' Egil said, in a voice smaller than Nix had ever heard the priest use. 'I didn't see it. I was so, so wrong.'
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jyme, prone in the sand to Nix's left, groaned and rolled over to face the sky.
'Gods, what happened? Why do I…? How do I know what I know? Is it real?'
Nix did not bother to explain. He looked over to the eunuch, at the bloody crater in the skull from which the truth had erupted.
'Gods,' he said, balling his hands into fists. 'Gods.'
He stood, pacing the sand on his wounded leg, agitated, periodically returning to the eunuch's corpse and unleashing a frustrated kick into his bulk.
'You're bleeding,' Jyme said, pointing at Nix's side.
Nix's shirt was stained where the eunuch's blade had penetrated his leather jack. He waved off the wound with a grunt.
'We have to follow them,' he said to Egil. 'We have to.'
Egil's expression fell. 'How? They're gone.'
'Follow who?' Jyme asked. 'Rakon? Are you both mad?'
Nix whirled on Jyme, the hiresword a convenient target for his displaced ire. 'Did you see what we saw when
