The Cursewright's Vow

Chapter 26: The Wolf of Light, Part 3

 Ammas knelt at his father's side. One hand cupped the nearly hairless dome of his skull; the other twisted helplessly in the linen sheets of his sickbed. For what felt like an eternity the question how danced on his lips, but his throat was too dry for speech of any kind, and soon he realized how didn't really matter. He had never actually seen his father die, after all, having fled the theatre before the Emperor's hounds could break through the box where Senrich had been kept. In the last twenty years he had never consciously sought out more details of what had transpired that night in Talinara, and when he did hear further accounts, none of them touched on what had happened to Senrich beyond the Emperor kicking the crate to the arena floor. The notion that it had been a sham execution never occurred to him, but it didn't surprise him now that he was confronted with its reality. No depravity was beyond Somilius Deyn III, especially where a traitor was concerned.

So Ammas asked the only possible question he could: "Why?" His voice was so hoarse he could barely understand it himself. Senrich stared at him as fixedly as he had since Ammas had entered the room, the corner of his mouth twitching. So old. He looked so old, far older than the seventy-odd years Ammas knew he could claim. The mutilated creature in that bed seemed to carry the weight of centuries. There were no bedsores, no marks of torture, and while he was fearsomely thin he did not look to be starving. Senrich's gaolers had kept him well, which was probably a sort of torture all on its own. "Why are they keeping you here, papa? Why?"

"Don't you know, Am?" Senrich whispered. "The Emperor can't rule without us. He has none of us left. No cursewrights. No astrologers. Some healers -- none for me, of course, wouldn't waste them on me, nothing to be done about me -- and one seer-magistrate lackey in the Palace." 

He cackled, his diminished body moving strangely on the sheets, something unnatural about the way the nubs of his arms twitched as if he wanted to clap his hands together with the deliciousness of this little joke. Ammas swallowed hard, hating to see it, unable to look away from it. 

"I thought you must have known. I thought that was why you came. I told her, I told Abbess Ketheri, I told her you were here, I told her I saw you when I walked abroad last night. And I did. At your old bedroom, just like always."

"'Walked?'" Ammas's heart, already stricken merely from the sight of Senrich, seemed to split in two at the growing signs of his madness. "Papa, you -- you can't -- "

But Senrich was laughing, the sound shrill and splintered. "I taught myself to do it. So I could go above now and then, when the Abbess and her sisters aren't around. Taught myself to walk on the wind, like the astrologers do." His voice took on a singsong quality, like a child at a nursery rhyme. "Stories from the sisters. I think they knew. Stories of the Hangman of the Harbor, like the ones you loved your mother to tell. If they knew the truth, yes, Am? If they only knew!" Senrich tilted his head back, laughing that shrieking laugh.

"Papa," Ammas whispered. "I -- I didn't know. I never knew. I -- I would have come sooner. Found you. I -- I -- " Ammas could not imagine what to say. He could not imagine what he might have done. Come to the Grand Curia by himself, haul Senrich out on his shoulder like a sack of meat? And then what? Bring him to Munazyr, find some silent Madrenite sister to take care of him? He didn't know. But anything would have been better than this, kept as a pet for the Emperor.

"You would have done nothing." The cracked, strained quality of Senrich's voice seemed to have lessened, and for a second he looked dimly like the severe but fair Overseer of the Curia he had once been. "You would have died if you had come here. I wouldn't have that." With a sigh he lay back on his pillows. "I did what I had to do, Am. So did you, I am sure."

"What you had to do?" Ammas had a terrible feeling he already knew what Senrich meant, but he didn't dare say it aloud. "What did you have to do, papa?"