He stared deep into my eyes with a new kind of intensity that alarmed me. “You know, I fear I’ve gone about this entirely wrong.”
He walked around me, eying me from different angles as I did my best to remain upright. I refused to move with him, standing in place facing forward, knowing to spin around would have me crumbling to the grungy floor.
He smiled. “You’re an intelligent woman and much more aggressive than that dopey Prince of Fire’s affai. Perhaps if I explain a few things, you’ll understand why I’m forced to appear as if I’m in the wrong. When, in fact, I’m the injured party here.”
Did he seriously think I would listen to anything he said with an open mind after torturing me for what felt like days? It could have been minutes or hours or longer. He’d done something to my mind that made everything fuzzy until all I understood were pain and malevolence.
“Sit.” He motioned to a chair that suddenly appeared.
I dropped into it, swallowed a groan, and tried to regain my strength.
“You know only what the Storm Lords have told you. In my error, I treated you like one of them, even knowing you should not be held accountable for your ignorance.”
Oh gee, thanks for being so noble. Does that mean you’re not going to rape and kill me now? I bit my lip, wanting to light into him but for once refusing to give in to my temper.
“The Storm Lords are but one facet of Tanselm’s history. The true believers, the ones who made Tanselm what it is today—a world of magic and promise—are the Dark Lords.”
“Dark Lords?”
He nodded, seeming thoughtful. But what did he hope to accomplish by telling me any of this?
According to Marcus and his brothers, most humans from a world with no magic weren’t worthy of the great Sin Garu’s time. Just my luck he found me interesting.
“The Dark Lords, my people, once ruled Tanselm. We were warriors, sorcerers, healers, and academics. People like the Light Bringers, people like you, even. Our scholars are still mentioned in Light Bringer texts as men and women of great renown.”
I hadn’t expected Sin Garu to sound so academic, as if he were reciting a passage from a history text. The minute he’d said Dark Lords, I’d imagined a legion of wraiths and worse tearing up Tanselm.
“And the wraiths?”
“Unfortunate souls trapped in the tug of war between the Dark and the Light. They were once as you and I but encountered a dreaded curse. Today they exist as wraiths.”
“The Netharat.”
He scowled. “What the Storm Lords call those diseased with madness. I control them through spells, because I thought I might find a place for them in our world. But the Storm Lords call them foul beings and evil creatures. Yet those poor souls can’t help the way they feed and that they prefer the dark.
“Wraiths cannot help that they are cursed to need flesh and blood to survive. They were innocent bystanders in a battle that should only have affected the lords of Dark and Storm.” Icy rage resounded through his voice, and despite my belief he sought to manipulate me, I could feel his sincerity.
He stared at me with regret. “I do not ask you to believe me. I’ve treated you so wrong, done to you what the Storm Lords have done to the Netharat.” He lowered his gaze, his lips flat. “I cannot express to you how sorry I am that my hatred brought me to this.”
Oddly enough, I started to feel a smidgeon of compassion for him. There were two sides to every story, so perhaps there was more to Marcus’ tale than he and his brothers had shared with me. Sin Garu seemed so sincere, and that scared the shit out of me.
He just put you through hours of torture killing those he supposedly pities, my conscious shouted. But a strange inability to differentiate truth from lie clouded my sense of judgement.
I didn’t care about the fog over my brain. I wanted nothing more than to hear him talk.
“All of this must seem ridiculous in light of the way I’ve treated you. But had you come to me first, without the influence of the River Prince,” he said with disdain, “you might be fighting with me instead of against me. Darkness is not evil. Light is not necessarily always good.”
A sudden glow above him made him flinch, and I felt for him.
“The illumination is uncomfortable for me. Not because I am evil, but because of the way I’m made.” He watched me with sadness. “You’ve probably been told the Netharat, like me, are evil. Wraiths, Shadren, even the Djinn, I suppose.”
Shadren? Who were they?
“While Michael Davis was certainly unbalanced, not all Djinn are bad. The Djinn are a handsome race. Intelligent too. Unfortunately for them, they’re also more comfortable in the dark than in the light.”
He chanted and flicked his fingers in a strange pattern, and suddenly we stood once again in Michael Davis’ stark living room. Davis’ body was nowhere in sight, but his house stank of death.
“Here we see the Djinn for what he was, an individual wanting to help me even the score against the Storm Lords.” He added in a quiet voice, “Yet all Djinn are not evil.”
