This was not a nightmare. From any nightmare Teia had ever known when asleep, she would have woken by now, sheets drenched, cheeks wet with tears. But she could not wake.
This was not her psyche pawing through the jagged detritus of what had unsettled her in the day and sorting her fears. This wasn’t a twisted confusion of things she knew. This was stark clarity. And he used terms she’d never heard.
This was not Teia speaking to herself.
At her sudden certainty, her throat clenched, at war with a stomach rebelling to empty itself.
Nor did he stop speaking.
“You shall be the asymptote of suffering incarnate, beyond whose limit is insanity, a land whose surcease of sorrow you shall never know. Eventually, you will choose me over freedom, me over love, me over every good. I, Abaddon, will be your god.”
His voice had risen through the stones beneath her like grasping vines, and now they wrapped around her, imprisoning her, prodding into every gap, sliding sibilant across her skin.
“But whatever you say”—his voice had gone quieter, soothing, full of anticipation of pleasure—“however you praise me through your shattered nubs of teeth, no matter what you do or don’t do, you will never know an end to suffering. Never. Not when you have served me for ten thousand faithful years. Not when your very sun expels its last exhausted breath of light and collapses into cold, dark dirt. You will suffer until you beg for your suffering not to end, for I will give you such uncertain respite from pain that each beat of rest is counted only in anticipation of the entire orchestra of pain reaching a new crescendo for which you are unprepared, and your nerves will have healed and regained old capacity for feeling. You will beg, for the pain renewed will be pain redoubled.
“Perhaps you hope I brag, perhaps you dare to disbelieve such suffering is possible, or you hope that you could not be so special to one such as I. And it’s true. You’re not special. For I have been offended before, and more grievously. But eternity is long, and the worlds are many, and time is vast when you may move about it at will. I am punishing a million such as you, even now. Would you like to see?”
For one moment, as her emotions skittered uncontrollably like a drop of water on a steaming-hot pan, Teia felt a flash of queer gratitude. For one heartbeat, Breaker broke her free of quicksand fear with memories of his quicksilver humor at all the wrong times. Though not in so many words, Kip the Lip had taught her this:
If you think you’re helpless, if you think you’re powerless; as long as you can speak, you’re not helpless, and you’re not powerless until you’re too afraid to. If you’re trapped in the darkness all alone, how do you know you’re alone and not actually surrounded by an army of friends, also silent, also afraid in the dark, merely waiting for the sound of one voice to rouse them from fear, to fight for freedom?
Silence is isolation chosen. Silence is darkness, and every evil loves the dark.
Kip, Kip the Lip? You marvelous wrong-girl-marrying turd, you gave me this cloak that’s gotten me out of and into every kind of mess, including this one. Kip, you tried to tell me about this guy, didn’t you? I thought you were crazy. Maybe I was right, and crazy’s contagious. But forget that. Kip, this one’s for you, buddy.
“Eternity?” Teia interrupted, impressed. “That is a long time. And you’re going to talk for all of it, aren’t you? You’re wrong about me not dying, though. I’ll die of boredom.”
It took Abaddon off guard. There was sudden quiet, and Teia felt those twisting tendrils of fear shrivel back.
“Mortal, you have no—”
“What, now you’re mad so you’re going to torture me worse? Longer? How’s that work?” Teia asked as if he were unbelievably stupid. “You play music? Me neither, but even I know that you never start at a fortissimo. There’s just no way you can go up. Raging along at a monotone as loud as possible? You’re like an eight-year-old boy, screaming every word, from a total lack of either control or awareness. So get out of here, kid. You bother me.”
But the presence wasn’t gone. She hoped he was aghast at her audacity, that he would give up before her courage did.
“Oh please, do go on with the insults and the terribly convincing defiance,” he said. “Because every word you speak helps me in my hunt for you. A young woman—that much is very helpful to know. Parian-born? Abornean perhaps? Lower-class, certainly, from the accent, with an urban muddle to it. Maybe raised in several cities? And uneducated, which usually goes with lower class, but not always. You claim not to play an instrument and then prove the truth of it by misusing terms. So, young—well, I won’t say ‘lady’—is there anything else you wish to say?”
Oh, shit.
“Yeah, one last thing,” Teia said. “Thanks for the cloak, you little bitch.”
If Teia had thought that Abaddon had been shouting at her in a fortissimo, the sudden draconic roar of a hatred that stretched to the very bounds of infinity quibbled that perhaps the immortal’s former threats had been spoken sotto voce: her mortal ears simply weren’t capable of hearing more than the minutest modulations in the volume of his mammoth voice.
The pressure of his scream clapped cupped hands on the ears of her mind, blowing blood from her every orifice at a pressure her psyche couldn’t contain.
After she wandered a trackless season of dizzied pain, his voice descended to words that she could slowly begin to understand, now bated with acid malice. “You are an ant on the finger of a curious giant, daring to bite him. My amusement is at an end. You will soon know the—”
And then he was gone. Like a soap bubble popped on a blade of grass. Just. Gone. Leaving only a stretchy film of horror over her.
He knew her gender, her voice. Could guess she was on the Jaspers. And who else was close enough to Kip that he would entrust with such a treasure?
Abaddon was gone. For the moment. But he hunted, and where could she go that he would not find her?
But where had he gone?
A sense of peace came over her. A fathomless well of quiet, somehow qualitatively different from the silence that had come before. Peace.
And Teia slept once more.
But this she heard, first, before the soporific waves closed over her consciousness.
“Can we not save her?” a man asked mournfully, but his voice was layered as with his own echo. It was like no human voice.
“Too close. She might hear,” a woman said, her quietly resounding voice soothing as a summer rain, warm as blankets by the fire.
“She’ll think she dreams,” he protested.
“Even dreams may move a mortal.”
“I have time left there. I could protect her myself—” he started.
“Not while she has the cloak,” the woman insisted. “If he knew we’d already found it, you know what that would mean for this world. He could rally many to his cause. Our only hope is in her stealth.”
“And she has no hope at all? We demand that of her, without even asking?”
“She holds the most precious possession of—and willfully insulted—the former angel of death himself. We’re not demanding anything of her she hasn’t chosen already.”
“This is our war. We owe it to—”
“And it is war! Or have you forgotten whose skins Abaddon used to make that abomination?!” The woman’s voice had risen to thunder and lightning looking for a place to strike. “And now I’ve stirred her, and she will remember.” She sighed. “Nor was that an accident, was it? Sometimes I wonder how I was assigned to the Guile and you to this woman.”