Axis dropped his eyes, and turned his half-empty mug around slowly between his hands.
Surprisingly, his overwhelming emotion was one of relief. DragonStar had just presented them both with the perfect solution. Axis knew he could never think of this man across the table as his son — too much love had been denied, and too much hatred had been passed between them for it ever to be possible for them to embrace as father and son. But "friend"? Axis suddenly realised how much he had missed having a friend ... how much he had missing relying on and loving Belial.
Axis knew he would be catastrophically jealous if a son proved more powerful than he, but, strangely, he knew he could accept it if a friend was.
An aeon seemed to pass as Axis thought. A friend. DragonStar a friend?
Something dark and horrid shifted within Axis — jealousy, resentment, bitterness — and then shifted again, and, stunningly, slid into oblivion.
He needed a friend. Badly. The thought brought such profound relief that Axis realised he had tears in his eyes.
He blinked them away and raised his gaze back to DragonStar. "How did you realise how much I needed a friend?"
A corner of DragonStar's mouth twitched. "I have learned a great deal of wisdom since I demanded of you that you set Caelum aside and make me Star Son instead."
Axis almost smiled, and then felt amazement that he could smile at this memory. "You were a precocious shitty bastard of an infant."
"Well ... technically 'bastard' I was not, but everything else you say is true enough. Axis, whatever else has happened between us and whatever else I have said to you and thought about you and hated you for, I do thank you for setting me on the path of adversity, for without it I would have been another Gorgrael, or another Qeteb. Do you remember what you told me in Sigholt, that first time you set eyes on me?"
"I said that I would not welcome you into the House of Stars until you had learned both humility and compassion." Axis paused, considering DragonStar carefully. "And sitting across from me now I can see a man whose face is lined, not with hate and bitterness as once it was, but with humility and compassion.
"DragonStar —" Axis shook his head slightly, "how strange it seems to call you that — I think the time has finally arrived to welcome you into the House of Stars."
DragonStar paused before replying, allowing himself time to cope with the emotion flowing through him. How many hours had he spent lost in useless bitterness as a youth and man, longing for this moment, yet refusing to admit the longing?
"I would be honoured if you would accept me in, Axis," DragonStar said, "but as your friend before anything else." Caelum had already welcomed DragonStar into the family House. The fact that Axis now wished to do the same meant that the final bridge between DragonStar and his birth family would finally be repaired.
Tencendor could not be rebuilt without it.
Axis stood, and as he did so the door to the chamber opened and Azhure walked in.
DragonStar rose, staring at her. He wondered if it was her womanly instinct that allowed her to walk into the chamber at precisely the right moment, or just her attentive ear at the keyhole. She had changed from the ordinary day gown she'd been wearing when she'd fetched him to this chamber, and now wore a robe of purest black that was relieved only by a pattern of silvery stars about its hem. Her raven hair tumbled down her back to be lost in the folds of her skirt, and her blue eyes danced with love and, possibly, even a little of her lost magic.
DragonStar stared, then collected himself and half-bowed in her direction, acknowledging her as mother, woman and witch.
Axis smiled and held out his hand to Azhure, then held out his other hand for DragonStar. "It seems, my beloved," he said to Azhure, "that we have a new companion for our faded constellation."
She laughed, then embraced them both. "I welcome us all back into the House of Stars," she said.
Chapter 4
WolfStar
WolfStar rolled over on his back and screamed. Agony knifed through his belly, then ran down his legs in rivulets of liquid horror. He jerked his knees to his chest and hugged them, now gasping for breath, and trying to ride out the successive waves of pain that coursed through him.
Raspu's poison, he supposed, or Mot's, or Barzula's, pumped into him during successive rapes.
"Ahhh," he groaned, and rolled over, weeping with the pain and the loss and the overwhelming humiliation. Humiliation, not so much from the demonic rapes he'd been forced to endure, although that was part of it, but from the realisation that everything he'd done, and everything he'd thought himself master of during the past few thousand years had been a lie. He'd been a tool and a pawn as much as had the sweatiest and stupidest peasant and now he'd been disposed of as easily.
The Maze — well taught by the Star Dance — was the hardest and cruellest master of all.
WolfStar — Enchanter-Talon, feared by every Icarii in existence.
WolfStar — crazed murderer, loathed by scores of generations of Icarii.
WolfStar — Dark Man, Dear Man, friend and ally of Gorgrael the Destroyer.
WolfStar — lover and ultimate destroyer of Niah.
WolfStar — manipulator of the entire world and all who lived within it.
WolfStar — utter, utter Fool.
A rat ran over his right foot, scratching deeply into his flesh as it went, but WolfStar paid it no heed. Over the past hours (days? weeks? he did not know) countless creatures had scrambled over him, trampled him, urinated on him, nibbled, bit and tasted him, and yet none had done him the kindness of killing him.
All WolfStar wanted was to die ... to escape the utter humiliation his existence had become. But no thing or one would grant him death in this world of death made incarnate — this damned, cursed Maze. Bleakness swarmed constantly over him, and madness probed intermittently at his mind: the hours when the Demons raged drove him to the brink of insanity, but never (oh please, stars, let the horror tip me over!), never beyond into the oblivion of total insanity.
Why? Why couldn't he become one of these mindless creatures that swarmed incoherently and incontinently through the Maze? All WolfStar wanted was to become mindless, because then he would feel no pain.
WolfStar's fingers scrabbled over his chest, feeling again the clotting blood of Caelum. He gagged, sickened by the feel, as also by the damned persistence of the blood.
He couldn't wipe it off, it wouldn't go away. It wouldn't even dry to a scab that he could scrape off.
WolfStar was marked by Caelum's blood, and he wondered if that was what protected him.
What had happened to the boy? Why had he walked onto the point of Qeteb's blade?
WolfStar had turned the horrific moments of Caelum's death over and over in his mind, and yet he still could not understand them. What had gone so wrong? Why hadn't Caelum fought back?
