also have dealings with them?”
Zephario didn’t answer the question. Instead he said:
“She deals with the Nephauree?”
“Yes. What does it matter to you?”
“You have to stop her. The Nephauree?
“What?” Carrion said, faintly irritated now. “What are you talking about?” He didn’t give Zephario time to fail to reply. He looked directly at Candy. “Do you know what he’s talking about?”
“No. Not really.”
“But you brought him here.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he had to see you.”
“All right. Again:
“He’s your father, Christopher.”
There was a long, brutal silence when everything that eyes could express flickered in Carrion’s gaze. “That’s not possible,” he said. “My father is . . . not . . .” The words slowed as they emerged. “Not . . .”
“Not a blind, broken old man dressed in filthy rags?” He sighed. “I would have preferred to have come before you in a more noble state, I will admit. But we take what we are given, when it comes to the clothes upon our backs. And I trusted you had enough of your mother’s heart in you to look past the rags to the spirit.”
He lifted his hand, as though to touch his son’s face, even though they were ten strides or more apart. Despite that distance, Carrion flinched behind the wall of glass and the circling nightmares as though he’d felt the touch.
Zephario sensed his response.
“You’re angry,” he said.
“No,” Carrion replied. “Just doubtful.”
“I wouldn’t have brought him here if I wasn’t certain,” Candy said.
Christopher turned his baleful gaze on Candy. “Speaking of bringing him here, how did you do that? My grandmother thinks she saw you die on Galigali. And I saw the place where you were standing erupt moments later. So why aren’t you dead?”
Though Carrion asked the question of Candy, it was Zephario who replied.
“We left the mountain before the death sentence could be delivered. You don’t need to know how. But you can be certain the power she used to carry us away wasn’t got from a bargain made with destroyers of worlds, like the Nephauree.”
“How do you know what they’ve done, old man?”
“You still don’t believe me, do you?”
“That you’re my father? No. I’d know you. Even after all these years . . .”
“Why? You never saw me. We three survived the fire. But you were so small, and so traumatized by being in the middle of all that death . . . hearing them all.” The strength in his voice began to falter. He drew several quick, shallow breaths, but they failed to carry him through the terrible truths that awaited utterance.
“Your brothers and sisters, your own mother . . . burning alive . . .” His voice was shaking, but so was his entire body. Candy wanted to somehow help him tell this terrible story, but how could she? There was nothing in this vast burden that she could carry for him. It belonged solely to this tragic father, who could only pass it on in his own anguished fashion to his already wounded son. “I sometimes wondered when I looked at you, how or why you even held on to life. Why?”
“Wait!” Carrion said. “Now I know you’re lying. You said I never saw you just a moment ago. Now you say you looked at me.”
“Oh, I looked at you, child,” Zephario said. “Many times. But only when you slept. I wanted to get my fill of you, as any father would.”
“The fire didn’t blind you?”
“No. I blinded myself,” he said. “She made me crazy, your grandmother, and I poured poison in my eyes to kill my sight.”
“Why did she make you crazy?”
“Because she found me one night in your nursery, holding you sleeping in my arms, singing to you.”
“Nobody ever sang to me.”
“The ‘Lullaby of Luzaar Muru.’ You don’t remember it?”
He began, in that shaking voice to sing:
Candy had no idea what the words meant, but she had no doubt that she was indeed listening to a lullaby. The simple melody, even sung by a voice so close to breaking, was still calming.
She allowed her eyes to stray, very cautiously, toward Christopher. The look of triumph on his face, having caught Zephario out in a lie, had vanished. So had the doubt. Very softly he said what might have been the two most important words Candy had heard him say. Perhaps that he had ever said.
“I remember.”
Something essential had changed in him, Candy saw, the greatest evidence of which was the behavior of his nightmares, which no longer circled his head, but lay acquiescent at the bottom of his collar. Not dead, but simply robbed of any belligerent purpose.
“Why didn’t you show yourself to me, Father?” he said. “Why only hold me when I slept?”
“I wasn’t a pretty sight, believe me. The doctors told me if you even saw me, so badly burned, it might be too much for you. That you’d just give up on life. So I only held you when you slept. But that stopped after she caught me. No more singing ‘Luzaar Muru’ to my baby. I should have left that night, because in my heart I knew she would win the battle for your soul. She wanted a true servant of her will, whose mind she knew as well as she knew her own, because she’d shaped it. And she couldn’t afford to have anyone else taint her perfect apprentice. So she had to rid herself of me.”
“But you knew—”
“Of course I knew.”
“Still you didn’t leave.”
“You were all I had. All that was left from a tragedy I thought I’d caused. It never occurred to me that my own mother would kill her own grandchildren. No, I thought it was me. All me. And the only sacred, beautiful thing that had been saved from what I’d done, was you. So how could I abandon you? How could I give up my times holding you while you slept? I couldn’t. So even though I knew she would try to take my life sooner or later, so that she could own you completely, I stayed close. And I was always ready for the moment when her assassin came. I knew how to defend myself against any blade she might hire to dispatch me. What I didn’t consider was that there might be no blade. That she would be poisoning me slowly. Sewing seeds of madness in my head, so that the assassin who almost took my life was myself.”
He stopped. His voice had become so thin, so insubstantial, that it was barely louder than the sound of the candle flames gathering.
“You know the rest,” he said.
“How did you live?”
“I somehow found my way back to myself, when I began to read the cards. Piece by piece I put my memories back together, though I’d forgotten almost everything.”
