Covenant's End - Ari Marmell Page 0,38

only that somewhere, someone suffered. Somewhere, the world teetered on the verge of losing something infinitely, irreplaceably precious.

Again Sicard buried his face in his hands. And for long minutes, grieving for he knew not what, the holy man wept.

She couldn't remember her name, for even the concept of name, of self, had fallen away. If her whole world had become agony before, now there was no such thing as “world.” No consciousness.

No awareness.

No memory.

Not even a desire for it all to stop, because she couldn't recall that there ever had been, or ever could be, anything else.

She screamed, a constant, despairing keen, with no realization that she had ever not been screaming. Body, mind, and soul, she began to break, fractures running ruthlessly through her; fractures that, if permitted to widen, could never possibly heal. Still she didn't care, because she didn't even know she could, and beneath her, all around her, the abyss gaped, nearer, ever nearer…

Something else? Was there something else? She'd lost the very notion of “else,” but it came slowly trickling back as she heard it. Not in her ears, not only in her mind, but somewhere betwixt and between.

She screamed—and he screamed with her. The agony was not hers alone; he suffered, as she had never, ever known he could suffer.

He?

Olgun!

Olgun? Then that would make me…

Opening her eyes in that moment was the second hardest thing Widdershins had ever tried to do.

Remembering Widdershins, being Widdershins, was the hardest.

But she was. And she did. Because he needed her to.

She saw only the floor on which she lay, dark stone covered in dust and grit; and in the corner of her vision, a blurry lump, only slightly brighter in hue, that might have been the leg of a table or a…

Desk. The Shrouded Lord's desk.

As if that single second of sight had opened her other senses as well, the room rushed in on her. She remembered where she was. She smelled the years of boots treading across this stone, the lingering residue of the incense that used to fill the air, smelled—and tasted—the blood and worse that trickled from between her lips.

She heard Lisette, gloating at how she'd found something so much better than the “weak, cowardly god” who'd abandoned her when she needed him most; how her allies would render the Church as impotent as the Shrouded God.

She heard the distant laughter of children, cooing and cackling, and—more closely—the breathing of the child-sized creatures actually present.

And she heard the faint whistle of the creature's switches in the air before they landed again across her back.

Oh, gods, it hurt! Again she screamed, without intention, and it was only the howl of Olgun's own pain that kept her from slipping back under. No individual stroke was nearly so bad as having been stabbed in the stomach, but they just. Kept. Coming. She could feel her skin welting, opening, bleeding, burning.

They were more than whips, more than just injury. It was unclean, a physical and even moral degradation. The magics contained within were poisonous, unholy, obscene.

Which, she realized in the portion of her mind she'd managed to wake up, explained Olgun's response. He didn't just experience the pain through her, as he normally would; wasn't just afraid, for himself or for her. He actually felt the lash of every “finger,” his essence torn and abraded no less than her own skin.

She wondered, with a horrified shudder, if her god had ever experienced direct pain like this. As awful as she felt, at least it wasn't a totally unprecedented experience for her! Poor Olgun…

The creature raised its hand yet again, Shins began to tense in anticipation of the next blow—and Olgun whimpered.

Absolute fury, molten, searing, coursed through Widdershins's veins. Her scream grew louder still, tearing at a throat already savaged by stomach acids and bile, but no longer was it a cry of pain.

The fae torturer's lashing digits descended once more—and Widdershins, impossibly, rolled to her feet to meet them.

It wasn't that she'd somehow ceased to feel the pain. It roared over her, flames licking from her gut and her back, digging white-hot blades across every nerve. What survived of her clothes were drenched in blood, shreds caked tight to her skin. And it was only that blood, still thickly oozing over her stomach, that prevented her, when glancing down, from spotting bits of herself that were never intended to see the light of day.

None of that had gone away. She hadn't escaped anything. Shins knew full well that nothing