I squeezed Bea’s hand once. “Don’t go anywhere just yet, darling. Hold on.”
I called for Harik and lifted myself toward the place where gods offer power to sorcerers if they agree to eat dirt and pay too much. A moment later, every star was smudged out of the sky, along with the useless hint of light drifting from them. Every sound and touch suffered instant death, as abrupt as chopping off a chicken’s head mid-cluck. I felt my heartbeat stop and I couldn’t draw a breath.
Harik’s curt, cultured voice rolled over me, the only thing I could perceive. I’m sure that fact satisfied his ego as much as sweaty frolics with supernatural beauties ever could. “Murderer, at last you have come. I am here to save you.”
After so many years of insults, threats, and diatribes, I thought that nothing Harik could say would terrify me anymore, but he had just shown me I was wrong.
EIGHTEEN
When I was sixteen, my teachers told me that I had learned all I could from them. It wasn’t that I was exceptionally smart. They knew thousands of things I still didn’t understand, knowledge they passed on to my fellow students. But they said I was too willful to learn anything more from another human being. They told me to go away, do some good things, and try not to get myself killed right off.
Since then, I have saved dozens of people from death, at least temporarily. I’ve healed their bodies on the cusp of expiring, and I did the same for myself on occasion.
One winter when I had become a mature, settled man, I preserved two important assholes from dying. I don’t remember who they were or why I did it, but I thought it vital at the time. Afterward, a tavern keeper I knew well slapped me on the back and shouted congratulations. He bought me a drink and proposed that we open a healing shop. We’d be rich in a month. He would handle the business details. All I’d need to do was relax, heal whoever wandered in, and enjoy a few drinks between customers. It would be like an eternal holiday.
I didn’t kill the tavern keeper. Instead, I explained how much it would hurt if I decided to turn his liver to the consistency of porridge. I slit open the skin of his forehead so that a cascade of blood gushed over his face. I pressed my knife against his neck until I had him rolling his gigantic, twitching eyes and gurgling out of his slack mouth. I convinced him that merrily prancing around in the grim affairs of sorcerers was self-destroying behavior. Then I hauled him off the floor and set him trembling in a chair before stomping out of the tavern, which was full of silent people who had watched me terrorize him for no reason.
I can attest that this is how people get a poor reputation.
However, my behavior toward the man was abrupt at worst. The healing that impressed him so much was accomplished with power I had bargained from Gorlana, the Goddess of Mercy. In exchange, she required that I give my little girl, Bett, a puppy that was destined to die within a month. I couldn’t explain or warn her of what would happen. But once the little creature died, I then had to tell my daughter what had happened and what I had done so she’d know how I decided to hurt her.
That’s a horrible thing to do to a six-year-old girl, and I am a cast-iron piece of shit for doing it. But with two men dying in front of me, I couldn’t quite convince myself that their lives were less important than my daughter’s happiness and mine.
Sometimes I recall that self-sacrifice and can scarcely believe I engaged in it. It sure as hell doesn’t sound like me now. Urges toward selflessness tend to perplex me. My little girl forgave me, but afterward she never looked at me the same way. She didn’t fully trust me, and she was right not to.
In the Gods’ Realm, with Bea busy dying in the world of man, Harik said to me, “Murderer, why have you waited? Have you been counting blades of grass? Attempting to recall how it felt to bathe? That woman’s remaining breaths number less than twenty.”
“How much less than twenty?” I tried to say it sarcastically, but it shocked me that he even recognized Bea’s existence.
Harik sniffed. “That is unimportant.”
“Which means it’s critical.” I tried to push down my fear so I could be ruthless and clever, or at least less foolish. Harik didn’t answer me, so I said, “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have mentioned the number of breaths, you reeking nest of armpit hair.”
Harik still didn’t answer. I tried to picture confusion on his relentlessly ideal face, but he had said he was here to save me, and I couldn’t imagine what that meant.
I envisioned drawing my sword, which allowed me to see in the Gods’ Realm. Harik perched forward on the top bench of the marble gazebo above me, but he didn’t appear confused. He smiled at me like I was already salted and on a plate.
Before I could come up with a sharp comment about Harik’s attitude, the entire sky convulsed with lightning, sheets of yellow, orange, and blue flame, and what appeared to be geysers of lava. None of the shattering violence made a sound, though, unless it sounded like the breeze and some cheerful birds.
Although no clouds floated amid all that carnage, little hailstones started falling. I caught a couple and saw they were diamonds the size of my pinky nail. I stared up at the firestorm. “What in the ass-knackering hell . . . ?”
Harik glanced up. “It
