The concatenation of twenty arches end in an immense door made of glass or something like glass, but milky, impossible to see through. Pressing it opens the way into another circular chamber, something like a hemispherical chevet, with all the ribs of the vaults gathered in a dazzling array overhead. It’s an architecture beyond imagining, a chaos of vaulting; at the same time it has a peculiar, identifiable symmetry. Vaults and walls are made of some iridescent blue-and-green substance that throws these colors everywhere. Waldroup’s ghost whispers, “No human hand ever fashioned this place,” as if he wouldn’t have realized that on his own. He feels it’s a line from one of his riddles, one he cannot recall.
In the center of this terminal chamber, upon a round pedestal bed, sits Queen Nicnevin. She strokes the air, each stroke drawing him deeper into the chamber. She still wears her formal gold and black robe.
She drops her hand then and says, “Now you’re here, come to me of your own accord. Show me your capitulation.”
Capitulation means little if anything, he thinks. He couldn’t find his way back out of this building, much less out of Ailfion, if he tried. If he was allowed.
He walks hesitantly forward, looking about him; passes a red onyx room full of additional small recesses. There are narrow copper mirrors, necklaces, gowns hung like draperies everywhere. No others from her entourage are here, not even Ađalbrandr.
In his head, her voice replies with amusement, “Especially not Ađalbrandr.”
She stands and makes a slight movement with her shoulders. The robe falls to the floor. She is naked beneath it. Lean and strong, with coils of muscle like the ones who carried him from the pond, a physique that looks as hard and polished as marble. Her coloring is different—a flush of rose at her throat that runs down her torso, over the coils, ending in protuberances the two who bathed him lack. The joints of her arms and legs are also more brightly colored. Her ribbed abdomen swells along the vertical holes that open and close like gills.
“Very good,” she says. But he can’t hide his revulsion.
Standing on the dais beside the bed, she towers over him. He is certain she’s taller than he is even on equal footing.
“I am. Does that concern you? It has caused others of your kind to tremble.”
“No,” he replies. He has fought larger men and won.
She laughs. “Good. And do fight me, if you can. It will make our game more challenging.”
She reaches a long-fingered hand to his cheek, and he pulls back before she can touch him. She smiles slyly. Her forearm extends, and the pads of her fingers brush his cheek. He remembers how giddy he felt when she rode past him with Onchu—she touched him then, too, but not with such intent. A talon-like nail flicks to make the tiniest cut, and suddenly he’s drowning in desire. This arousal isn’t abstract—it’s as if the blood in his veins has been replaced with the liquor of Nicnevin. She nods at the result. “I’ll make this easier for you at first. In these our current forms, we’re incompatible. You don’t have the right equipment. But you will.”
As she did at Melrose, she gathers the air around her. This time the energy seems to come from everywhere, and he expects he’s about to be turned into an animal again. But instead, it’s Nicnevin who transforms before his eyes, into the voluptuous human Queen of Heaven. She might have been assembled from his private imaginings and memories, an amalgam of Sìleas, Janet and every woman he’s ever felt anything for in his short life.
“Glamour,” he says. Tries to dismiss what he sees, but his mouth is parched with lust. “Only hides your shape.”
“Ah, well, you weren’t simply glamoured, were you, mayfly? You were a ram. Glamour is appearance. It lies in the minds of the perceivers. Reshaping is far harder to do, and far more exhausting to maintain. Waste not our time.”
Her hand closes around the back of his neck and draws him up onto the dais with her. She catches her lower lip with those sharp white teeth, then leans in and kisses him. Her breath is like ice, her lips honeyed with some moist substance, more of her elixir. The taste of her makes him so drunk with lust that she becomes the only thought in his head. She turns him and pushes him down on the bed, then climbs upon him and without preamble fits him inside herself. “Take me for a ride by the longest route.”
He arches himself to thrust as deeply as possible into her, and tries to maintain it as she moves. If he were coiled like her kind, he would stretch up as high as one of the many parabolic arches that compose this building. No awareness of sensation but where she holds him tight inside her, as if his mind itself has been gathered and stuffed into his prick. Her ride goes on and on, hours, perhaps days—he loses all sense of it. Knows he should have spent himself by now, and maybe he has. Maybe he has a dozen times, but she has hidden it from him so that he remains erect and straining, until she at last takes her pleasure. And that might be an eternity from this moment. If there were any speck of him left uncaptured, he might protest.
She tilts onto her side but doesn’t release him. In that moment she becomes Janet, stolen from his mind, her face leering the way the skinwalkers all leered. Janet becomes Sìleas with a demon’s face, lying across a blue sand landscape—another image stolen from his thoughts, memories. She steals a kiss off him, takes bites of his lip, his neck. He bleeds from a dozen tiny wounds, blood that she smears over him like paint and licks from her fingers. Each tiny bite only drowns him deeper in drugged, biddable lust for her. She could devour him like a mantis and he would hold with her until the last moment before he perished, never cry out; death would be sweet agony.
It might be that years do pass. Then suddenly he’s released, the spell gone, the blood in his veins his own again. She has disengaged, and he is sprawled back, scratched and bitten, nearly insensate. With that abrupt release of his mind, the lightning flashes through his head, the pressure rises.
The Queen with Janet’s face slides away to observe his thrashing. She listens to the storm in his head, and before the riddle can emerge, she commands it to cease. Her presence, like powerful hands inside his head, closes over and squashes the thing before he can speak it, pushing it down inside him while his body rocks back and forth, helplessly. Foam flecks his lips, but the fit fails to twist him up. Instead, it withdraws, a passing thundercloud. He collapses and stares up at her, hollow, consumed, unable to clear his thoughts. She shakes her head. “I have no interest in deciphering any more of your nonsense rhymes. That’s not what I want from you, mayfly.” Her fingers move in the air again. They brush his lips, then slide down to the jewel set in his throat. The sensation of it expands like something closing around his larynx. “Hereafter the choker will keep you silent while I take everything I want.”
He doesn’t even have to try to speak to know that she’s taken away his voice with that jewel. She leans down and licks blood from a wound on his shoulder.
Studies him. Her shape changes to her true form. Yet even as the Queen, she tortures him with faces plucked seemingly at random from his mind. “Now let’s see.”
Agony scours him, shapes him, worse than when she turned him into a ram. His bones must be snapping. He clutches at the bedding, thrashing, in such searing pain that he can’t lie still, rolls and crawls to escape it, but it comes with him. And then she’s upon him, feasting, the liquor of her running in his veins if he has veins any longer. His body’s on fire. Close by, she whispers, “I own you, mayfly, until you die of me.”
Whatever she does next, it splits him apart until he’s blind with pain and screaming.
“Again,” orders Nicnevin.
XXIII. “Again”
“Again.”
It becomes the only word in his head, inflamed by her unappeasable desire. There are moments when the pain withdraws and he comes to his senses lying alone, unsure whether he was unconscious or just so lost in pain that his mind collapsed.
He has come to his senses in Yvag form, bound to her by some sticky substance wrapped around them both; he has come to his senses as she withdraws some appendage from him, feeling as if she’s hollowed him out; he has come to his senses to find himself ridden by Janet, by Innes, worst of all by Sìleas.
They have been nose-to-nose, her golden eyes boring into his, with him pressed so tightly against her that he can feel her muscles coil and expand. It’s like being pressed against a huge leech. Stretching, she flexes, and something sharp and well inside him burns as if thrust straight from a white-hot forge. It’s a pain he can taste, while the liquor of her makes him crave it even as he writhes in agony. His own transformed body feeds him more exotic sensations that nauseate him. He can feel his gills dilate when he breathes. In this form the air may be easier to inhale, but he’s only allowed moments to appreciate it before she starts on him again. His shape ripples. Arms and legs are bitten off, and he lies there helpless while something unholy feasts upon what’s left of him until his screaming outlasts his lungs. Then comes a darkness filled with the stench of her, the corrosion of their coupling. It’s the stink of decay, the reek of bodies on a baking battlefield five days after the war. And when it is done, it all begins again.
When next he wakes, he finds himself alone in a small round cell made of the same nacreous substance as the massive arches he walked through however many days or weeks before. A smell of braised meat has awakened him; his stomach growls but also threatens to heave. What has been done to him?
He’s lying on a spongy pallet, beside which sits a concave wooden paten containing a small feast. He swallows down his bile, leans over, and tries a small piece of the meat. His hand trembles so much that he barely manages to stuff the meat into his mouth. When it doesn’t rise back up in his gorge, he falls upon the paten like a madman; meat juices run down his chin, his belly, which he’s happy to discover is his own, and not coiled yellowish alien flesh. He’s been shredded as if whipped, scored with countless cuts, colored with bruises everywhere. There’s a scar on his side that looks freshly healed. He thinks he remembers knifelike pain there, but even now all of it runs together. Better to blot all of it out, focus on what’s in front of him.
Where this shoulder of beef has come from, he doesn’t care. He saw no cattle, no animals at all on the journey here, no crops, no farming. But elves are well known to steal from human farmers—cattle, sheep, crops, as well as babies. He’s far too hungry to care how it got here. He drinks whatever is in the cup. It tastes wonderful, sharp and sweet both, and must be some sort of potent liquor, because by the final sip, he’s barely able to sit upright, and falls back on the pallet.
Under the smell of the food, he smells her on himself. Even the meat juices can’t wash her scent off him, that stink of decay.
He lies back, helpless, drunk and sated, staring into the twilight, with no clear idea of anything. “Again.” The word rises unbidden, as barbed as an Yvag dagger. Time has tangled around him like threads off a loom. It’s akin to being Thomas Lindsay Rimor the halfwit all over. No way to cling to any clarity; he can’t even put the snippets he recollects in order, but mostly he doesn’t want to look at what she’s done with him, to him. If her goal is to torture him until he breaks apart, she may already have cracked his shell and put him back together again. He’s sure she’s not finished devouring him.
On the pallet, his fogged mind turns to Janet and Morven, to Sìleas probably pulled to bits by now. Soon he’s curled up, sobbing for the poor girl who died because of him, wretchedly asking himself what he did to give himself away, how did he fail all these women? Was it that night over Old Melrose, the little homunculus he killed there? Had that fae given him away somehow? He gets up, stumbles on weak, trembling legs to the garderobe behind a panel in one corner, then crashes back to the pallet, where he finally passes out while thinking that what he wants is for Nicnevin to use him up. Let her kill him or throw him in that well—anything so long as he knows, feels nothing further.
He wakes up to two Yvag knights dragging him back to the pond for another scrubbing. There seems to be something in the soap or the water that kills lice and keeps his beard from growing out. Afterward he’s deposited back in the Queen’s chamber, shivering and wet. She must hear his despair, because upon arriving she draws back and observes him a moment. “Yes,” she says, “you do dwell too much on past irrelevancies. So much so that you haven’t even noticed how easily you breathe now in your own form. The choker”—she taps a finger on the jewel at the front of his throat—“also helps you to inhale our air. You see, it’s not all punishment. Lying with me isn’t punishment, is it?” She smiles seductively with Innes’s sickly face. “Now . . .” She puts a hand to his cheek, and the flood of her carnal appetite offers to drown him in a mindless escape. He closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to behold his sister so reduced. Her carnality drags him down regardless, an anchor pulling him to the very bottom.
No nights, no days, only the perpetual umbra above this place she calls her summer house, which is surely as massive as the greatest cathedral ever built and more complex than a fortress.
