Pilgrim. Sara Douglass

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       14 In the Chamber of the Enemy

      Noah looked at one of the empty chairs, as if considering asking Drago to sit in it, then gave a tired sigh and took Drago’s hand in his. He glanced at the newly-healed scar on Drago’s neck, but said nothing.

      Drago settled on the floor, moving the staff to one side as the lizard crept over and curled up against his legs.

      “Tell me,” Drago said, and Noah nodded, raised his head, and searched the panels under the window.

      “Will you press the copper knob on the panel?” Noah asked, and Drago leaned over, hesitated, then firmly pressed a glowing knob.

      Instantly the view from the forward window changed. The stars disappeared, and Drago found himself looking out on a world filled with mountains and valleys, plains and oceans.

      He frowned. “I have not seen this place before.”

      “Nay. This is not Tencendor, although it is much like it. It is my world. My home.”

      Drago looked at Noah. Beneath his pain, the man’s face was lined with memory and regret.

      “And its name?” he said.

      Noah’s hand clenched a little more deeply into the black leather of his tunic. “Not important. For all I know it no longer exists. It has been hundreds of thousands of years since I have seen it.”

      The view altered. There were the same mountains and valleys, plains and oceans, but all had changed.

      Now they were a wasteland of pain and despair, of tempest, pestilence and starvation. Maddened people and animals roamed, tearing at their own bodies and at the bodies of any who ventured near them. Their eyes were blank save for their madness, and ropes of saliva hung from their mouths. All the people were naked, their bodies emaciated and covered with boils and streaks of rot. They lived, but in a hell that Drago could barely comprehend.

      “The same world,” Noah rasped into the silence, “after the TimeKeeper Demons had come to ravage. Drago, listen to this my story.”

      The view in the window shifted again, back to the stars.

      “We do not know from where they came. We simply woke one morning to find half our world gone mad with hunger, and the pain continued through the day, and then into the night.”

      Drago remembered how the TimeKeepers had leapt from world to world. No doubt they’d found some other poor soul to drain in order to enter Noah’s world.

      “Hunger, then such tempest as we’d never before endured, and then midday — oh God! Midday!” Noah shuddered violently, struggled to control himself, then continued, his voice hoarse with the remembered horror.

      “Midday is too terrible to even speak about — thank every god you pray to, Drago, that Tencendor has not yet been subjected to Qeteb’s malice!”

      Yet. The word echoed about the spaces between them.

      Drago studied Noah’s face. The man seemed in more pain than when Drago had first entered. “But you found a way to trap him.”

      “It took us forty years, Drago.”

       “Forty years?”

      “Can you imagine,” he whispered, “what those forty years were like?”

      “How did your people survive?”

      “In caves and tunnels and basements, mostly. Drago, your first lesson, and one Faraday already understands, is that the Demons, even Qeteb, cannot touch any who rest under shade. They cannot work their evil in shade. For some reason, the mere fact of shade protects the mind and soul from their touch.”

      There was more, but Noah was in too much pain to be bothered explaining it to Drago. The man would discover it soon enough, in any case.

      “Ah, thus the forest keeps myself, Zared and his army,” Drago slid a glance towards the feathered lizard, “and all the fey creatures safe.”

      “Until the Demons gain enough power to strip the leaves, СКАЧАТЬ