7. Chapter Seven

Chapter Seven

Rafael woke up by himself in the great chamber a little while later. When he realized he was alone, his mouth twisted bitterly. So much for his former master's promise to shadow him. He pushed awkwardly onto his hands and knees, groaning as his shoulders and elbows cracked in complaint. It wasn't as painful as it might have been, though. The blood he'd taken from his last kill was still aiding him somewhat, then. That and Xian's baffling allowances were making his experience so far something he could endure. But what was the point? Rafael looked around the room, trying to distract his mind from questions it had no hope of answering.

The round chamber was set up just as he remembered, with curving tables covered with various weapons, ropes and grapples, locks and lockpicks. The chest beside the tables was probably still filled with alchemical supplies. Attached to the high ceiling were two separate lengths of chain about ten feet apart in the middle of the room. Rafael knelt beneath one of them now, attached to the ankle locks that made for a much more inflexible means of restraint when used with the chain. There was a wide metal cross on one wall, cold and rigid and totally unlike Feysal's. Rafael looked at it and shuddered against the memories that crowded into his mind. He was intimately acquainted with every apparatus in this room.

The physical skills he had learned, the weapons and fighting and tracking and evasion, had all happened in other places, other rooms. This chamber had been more about mental discipline than physical. The ability to subsume pain, to control fear, to retreat behind solid walls of willpower when faced with torture… A spy could be bought. An assassin, once he accepted a contract, had to either fulfill it or die trying.

If Rafael had been caught at his work, his mark could have freely destroyed him. It was only fair. The identity of an employer was sacred, though, and not to be given up under any circumstances. Therein lay the rationale for inuring an apprentice to torture.

It had started the very first day he'd been brought here, deliberate discomfort for the sake of toughening him up. For years it didn't go beyond discomfort, deprivation of sight or sound or several senses at once, being placed in uncomfortable physical positions and told to hold them until Xian returned. He'd climbed the chains dangling above him and held himself in the air for hours, trembling, needing to let go but needing more to make his master proud of him. The few times Rafael had failed to last until Xian's return had been harrowing for him, not because Xian was angry, but because he was angry at himself. His need to belong to Xian, to keep him happy above all else, had been the driving force in Rafael's young life.

They hadn't lived in total isolation. Xian was well known among the High Ones, and many of his contemporaries had had apprentices who he'd encouraged Rafael to get to know. He'd had a few friends, far more acquaintances. Rafael remembered meeting Daeva when he was ten, mere months before Myrtea let the man fall to the Lower City rather than give him the First Draught. He hadn't liked the arrogant youth when he was young, and their reluctant alliance as adults hadn't done anything to make Daeva more palatable.

Rafael had occasionally wondered, as a child, why Daeva had been forsaken and left to make his way in the Lower City alone rather than been killed. Was it kindness? Years later he realized that the greatest punishment Myrtea could inflict on a man like Daeva, so self-assured, so proud, was to cast him into the mud like the animal she equated him with and leave him to wonder about the cause of his disgrace. It wasn't kindness—it was cruelty, a cruelty he only fully understood after he himself was exiled from the Upper City. Living as a failure was far more painful than the brief agony of death.

They had both lived, Rafael because his body was too full of his master's blood to stop healing the wounds he inflicted on himself before Feysal interceded, and Daeva for reasons of his own. Rafael had come full circle, from a childhood spent aching to please Xian to five years of bitter hatred as he hunted down High Ones unmercifully, and now back in bondage to his master.

Rafael cast his eyes up toward the chains. He'd spent long hours hanging there, sometimes full in the air, sometimes with his feet touching the floor. The blood of a High One could heal mortal wounds in large enough quantities, and Xian had taken him to the brink of death several times. The inspection, the instruction, the attention…

He'd loved it.

He was sick. Rafael was sick, he had to be. Mentally unstable and emotionally unfit. Perhaps that was why the council had refused to let him take the First Draught and become one of them. Rafael had blossomed under his master's hands, learning to withstand brutal amounts of punishment while reveling in the fact that, when he was in this room, Xian thought only of him. All of his attention, all of his care, was focused solely on his apprentice. It didn't matter that he whipped him bloody, broke bones, raised him up and dropped him the long distance back to the floor. He was doing it for Rafael, to make him better, to make him worthy of being a High One. Rafael would have endured anything for Xian, with pleasure. Sometimes literally.

Eventually, as he learned how to control the pain, his master's touch began to make him hard. Before that he'd barely noticed his libido, he'd been so exhausted with the constant training. He'd been hanging here, in this exact spot, arching from the snapping kiss of the whip. Xian had stepped close and trailed a finger over the marks on his back, smearing the blood slightly, following the rivulets down over his ass into the crease of his thigh. Rafael hadn't been able to stop it. His erection had been almost immediate, and desperately hard.

There was no way Xian could have missed it; Rafael had been naked. He'd squeezed his eyes shut with shame, sure he was doing something wrong, and sure his master would be angry with him for not controlling his body's response better. Xian had stepped up close to him, cupped his face in his hands and said softly, "It's all right." Then he had kissed his forehead.

Rafael came to understand his body's responses to pain and pleasure, and how the line blurred for him. Other masters looked forward to taking their turns with him, pleased to elicit a more unusual response from their work. It was far harder for Rafael to take what they did to him than it was with Xian, but he did take it, gritting his teeth and bearing it and occasionally getting hard, because he knew his master wanted him to succeed.

If he hated being the object of others' attentions, he hated it even more when his master worked with other apprentices. It was tradition, a way to make sure one's student was well-rounded, but every time he watched the door close on Xian and someone else, Rafael felt such a surge of rage he'd had to run away, put miles of distance between himself and the site of what felt so much like betrayal but wasn't, couldn't be.

"Early riser," Xian noted from by the door. Rafael's head whipped around. He hadn't heard him come in. "You look pensive."

"Just considering my demise," Rafael replied dryly. He could hardly tell Xian what he'd actually been thinking about. "How will you do it?"

"How will I do what?" Xian began to walk toward him. He was still half-dressed, but now his feet were bare and made no noise against the floor.

"Kill me." Rafael was genuinely curious. "I'm assuming you'll behead me, since I'm still capable of some regeneration after my last kill. Unless you want to draw it out, I suppose. I'm sure Myrtea would enjoy that."

"Not exactly incentive," Xian agreed. "I've not decided yet. You and I still have things to do before we can be free to think about death. How did you choose your marks?"

Ah, now the questioning was beginning. Good. A solid goal, a solid boundary was made clear now—don't tell Xian anything.

"Did Daeva help you?" his master asked, passing him by and heading for the table. He ran his hands slowly over the equipment there, stroking the smooth handles with a knowing touch. Rafael watched him and shivered. "He was trained to gather intelligence, after all, and you two had ample reason to seek each other out in your exile. Did he pick them, then?" Xian lifted a lash with seven long, slender tails and turned back to Rafael. "What criteria did he use?"

Rafael smirked and stayed silent. Xian shook his head. "Oh, how soon they forget. We'll have to work on that memory, pet." He pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves and strode back over to Rafael, bending down and unlocking his ankles. Rafael struck viper fast, whipping his newly freed legs around in a scything kick even as he stood and prepared to run. He was in no condition to fight, but if he could just make it to the door…

A splinter of pain burrowed into his lower right side, expanding to the size of a tree trunk in less than a second. Rafael doubled over with the pain, his mental defenses too sluggish to block it out. The spasms paralyzed him, and all he could do was crouch there, panting like a dog until Xian walked over to him and removed the flechette knife from his side.

"Very pretty, pet," Xian congratulated him as he hauled him to his feet by his hair. "A lovely attempt, worthy of a knife to the kidney." He probed the wound for a moment. "It's healing, but very slowly. I think you'll need some help keeping your feet." He pulled Rafael the short distance back to where he had been restrained and lifted his arms to the chain above his head, cuffing him quickly. "Better. Now you can't fall and hurt yourself again." He stepped back and looked Rafael over. "But you're going to bleed all over those pants. If it were certain to be solely us, I'd remove them, but I'd rather not have you on display like that for visitors."

Xian lifted the lash and brought it down again fast, snapping the tails across Rafael's chest. The new sensation distracted him from his perforated side, and Rafael gathered himself as best as he could. He was going to be beaten. He could handle that. He could take that. Calm certainty settled into his body and mind, and his defensive walls rose smoothly into place. Xian was watching his face and smiled a little. "Very nice." Then he brought the lash down again.

He circled Rafael slowly, striking everywhere, sometimes in forceful, concentrated blows and sometimes little more than a tickle. He hit his chest, his back, his flanks and shoulders and ass all in turn, not keeping a rhythm, not letting Rafael anticipate with any success.

It was…perfect. Absolutely perfect. Bright beads of blood welled up and rolled down his skin, his breath came heavy and fast, his shoulders ached and his neck popped from the force of the blows, but Rafael felt an internal peace that he hadn't known for five years settle into him. Xian asked questions, never heatedly but persistently—about his contacts in the Lower City, about his kills and his work and his connection to Daeva—and Rafael steadfastly refused to speak a word. It felt wonderful, like he was accomplishing something. He was good. He was obedient. He wasn't a failure; he could still protect his sources.

It went on and on, but he didn't feel the passage of time. Rafael was sheltered deep inside his own mind, the blissful recipient of his master's attention and detail. The chime of the doorway cut through his reverie though, and in a moment their solitude was interrupted by Myrtea. Rafael glared at her through glassy eyes. It was possible he had never hated anyone quite as passionately as he hated her at that moment.

She clicked over to them, stopping several feet away to keep her long velvet skirts from soaking up spatters of blood. Xian stepped forward until he was beside Rafael. "Myrtea."

"Xian." Her colorless eyes roved appreciatively over Rafael's glistening form. "I see you've continued your appointed task with more vigor. Has he said anything of use?"

Rafael waited with anticipation, the burning all over his body a vivid reminder that he had given Xian nothing to work with. It made the next few moments all the more shocking.

"Daeva does business out of a slaughterhouse in the commercial district, on the west side of the stockyards." Rafael stiffened with surprise, but Myrtea didn't seem impressed.

"This we knew already. The council requires more relevant information. Who are his connections in the Upper City?"

"There are many," Xian said with a shrug. "Whom he uses depends on what sort of information he's after. He learns the schedules and daily movements of High Ones from the charwomen who haul away our refuse. He's bought at least one guard in every ten that we hire to protect ourselves when we venture out into the Lower Half. He has a vested interest in making sure your major-domo becomes our human slaves' next spokesman to the council because he's been bribing him with rations of our blood for three months."

Rafael was just as surprised as Myrtea. He hadn't said any of this. Hell, he hadn't even known some of this. The charwomen and the guards yes, but not the news about Myrtea's own household. He briefly entertained the thought that Xian was fabricating that part but abandoned it. Xian had known. He'd known all of this. He'd asked the questions but he hadn't needed Rafael to give him anything. He'd only needed Myrtea to think he had.

If she was disturbed by the news, she didn't show it. Instead she smiled appreciatively. "If the student never surpassed the teacher in some instance, it would be rather a waste of our time to take them, wouldn't it? Perhaps I underestimated Daeva's tenacity. It is a lesson for me, and well learned." She gestured at Rafael. "How goes your own instruction, beloved? You're into your second day. I would hate to think you were prevaricating with your precious time. His precious, ever-dwindling time."

Xian smiled faintly. "We're making progress. Far better for me to be the one to chip away at his defenses, since I helped to build them in the first place." He brushed one leather-covered finger down Rafael's cheek, and to his horror Rafael found himself hardening. Gods, no! Not now, not in front of her, not like this ! It was useless. His body responded to his master's touch, his hand tender and intimate against him. If it had been his bare skin instead of gloves, Rafael might have choked on the rush of desire. As it was, it was all he could do not to whimper. "Your concern is noted, however."

"I heard the stories," Myrtea mused as she watched Rafael's reaction. "How he was designed to be used like this. How he craved it. No wonder you didn't often share him, beloved. He thrives on such efforts."

"Rafael has always been unique."

"Clearly." Myrtea tapped her chin with one long nail, head tilting to the side slightly as she looked at them. "You dislike the idea of your former apprentice being butchered for the amusement of the council tomorrow evening. I may be able to convince them to commute his sentence, and trade in his public execution for a private one at your hands, if you will give him to me to use as I see fit for the remainder of today and tonight."

Rafael went chill with sudden terror. It was a visceral reaction, one he couldn't hold back. Not with her. Not after this. He realized then that, fundamentally, nothing had changed for him or in him. His years of anger and hatred and carefully planned revenge had all come to nothing. In the end, he was the same person he had always been—Xian's. Utterly and completely. In the sanctity of his master's attention, however it was being given to him, he was content. He could do anything, withstand anything, give anything to him. Myrtea would break Rafael just because without Xian there was no more reason for him to try, not even for himself. He waited listlessly for his master's judgment, his erection wilting rapidly.

"No."

Myrtea raised one thin, elegant eyebrow. "I would think you'd be glad to avoid the public humiliation of destroying your failure. Why advertise your imperfections? Give him to me and you'll be spared all that. We needn't even use his name."

"No." Xian was implacable. "My tenure is already reduced to three days and I don't mean to diminish it further. Leave."

"You're being unreasonable."

"And you live in a fantasy world where the past can be changed and the future can be bargained with, and I don't have time to waste with you there. Leave."

Her face couldn't pale any further, but to say that Myrtea was angry would have been a gross injustice to her sudden rage. Her heavy eyelids lowered in a glower, and her lips thinned as she hissed, "Then he will be castrated before the council by my hand for your selfishness, disemboweled and led about on a leash of his own entrails before I put him out of his misery like the pathetic cur he is.

"And as for you, beloved… Your house will be under continuous guard until he is turned over to me personally tomorrow evening. Any interference will result in your punishment as well, which will be a permanent maiming if I have anything to say about it." She turned on her heel and stalked out. The door closed behind her, leaving Rafael trembling with a hundred chaotic emotions. Xian didn't say anything, just squeezed the nape of Rafael's neck and sighed before turning and releasing him abruptly. Rafael collapsed into his master's arms and Xian laid him gently on the floor, carefully refastening his ankle cuffs before turning away.

"No!" Reaching out was excruciating, but Rafael couldn't help himself. "Don't leave me again."

"I already promised I wouldn't," Xian reminded him gently. "Trust me." He walked back over to the table and grabbed a small bowl, a large metal pitcher of water and several pieces of cloth, then came back and sat down beside Rafael. He filled the bowl with water and held it to his former apprentice's lips. "Drink, pet. I know you're thirsty."

Thirst abruptly won the battle over emotion in Rafael's head, and he drank the water as fast as he could stand to until the bowl was empty. Xian set it aside and wet one of the cloths, then drew it slowly over Rafael's cuts and bruises, some deep and weeping, some hardly more than a shadow. He lingered over his punctured side. "It's not healing as fast as we need." He brought his hand to his mouth and bit fast and hard into the palm of his hand. Blood pooled there, and he offered it to Rafael. "Drink."

Rafael shook his head. He didn't want to heal, didn't want anything to do with the blood of a High One now. Tomorrow would be bad enough without lengthening the amount of time he could endure it without dying.

"Rafael, this may very well be the last time you ever taste my blood, but not for the reasons you're thinking. Drink it and I'll explain everything to you, but I need you whole for my plan to work." Xian kept his hand there insistently. "Trust me."

He did. He couldn't do anything else. He was Xian's puppet, empty without his regard. Gods, he was pathetic. Rafael turned his head and licked up the small pool of blood. The sharp, metallic tang was like lightning in his stomach, and in less than a minute his wounds closed. He pushed to his knees carefully, mindful of his restraints.

"Better," Xian said. He shook his head ruefully. "I played that last round poorly. I shouldn't have provoked you in front of her; it tightened an already stringent schedule. I wanted to ease you into what I'm going to reveal to you, Rafael, but we don't have the luxury of patience any longer."

"This was you being patient?" Rafael objected with a gesture down at himself.

Xian smiled. "Of course. I told you the beatings were more for your sake than mine, and you can't tell me you didn't enjoy yourself. It centered you. Focused you. You did very well."

Rafael cursed himself for feeling better with that approbation. "So what do you want to tell me then?" Fragments of memory rose up in his head. "Is this about what you said earlier? About the High Ones' power waning?"

"That's part of it," Xian said. "But not the most important part, not for me." He made a ‘come on' gesture with one hand. "Questions are acceptable, Rafael."

Faced as he was with a sudden flood of information, Rafael's tongue grew heavy in his mouth. This was it. He was being offered the chance to know why he had been rejected, why he had been judged unfit to ascend, and the thought was paralyzing. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to marshal his thoughts. In the end, his first questions were inevitable. "Why didn't you turn me? What did I do wrong?"

"Nothing," Xian replied immediately. "It was never your fault."

"But it must have been!" Rafael insisted angrily. "I presented myself at the Hall of Ascendance and they told me I was unfit! They threw me away and broke my legs when I tried to return to find you. You wouldn't see me! Why?"

"It was never your failure, pet, it was mine." Xian's face clearly expressed his pain, tension radiating from the corners of his pale, inert eyes. "I failed as your master, Rafael. I made you unable to obey another.

"From the first you were the perfect apprentice—eager, malleable, so willing to hang all your hopes on me, and I let you. I abused your trust. I took your faith and centered it on me, not on the council. I took your talents and honed them to my needs, not the needs of a future master. I took your love and welcomed it, rather than teaching you to bury it for duty's sake. If I had come to you that night and given you the First Draught, given you to the council, you would have been brutally handicapped by my excesses with you. They would have tested you and found you wanting. So I lied to the council and they turned you out instead."

Rafael shook his head numbly. "I wish you had killed me instead. I tried to kill myself."

"I know."

"How could you know?"

Xian folded his legs more comfortably. "I followed you for days, Rafael. I watched you try to kill yourself over and over again. I stayed close to you and bled for you when you needed it until you found your feet."

"Until Feysal found me."

"Yes."

"You're the reason I kept healing."

"Yes, pet."

Rafael shook his head again. It was too much to take in. "What was the test? That I would have failed?"

"The same test all my apprentices are given," Xian said regretfully. "To kill me."

Rafael was shocked. "That— Why would the council do that? It makes no sense! It would be a ridiculous waste of your life if someone was to succeed, and when they failed… Failure always means death."

"Not in this case. It's the only exception to the rule, and not one we can discuss beforehand. The test proves that your loyalty is to the High Ones as a people, to the Upper City as a whole, rather than to me. You lived in hell for five years, hating me for what I did to you, and even then you couldn't drive yourself to kill me when the opportunity came."

"I tried!" Rafael insisted. "I truly tried, I wanted to kill you. I was close…" The memory of it made him feel sick and he averted his eyes.

"I know. Close, after five years of abandonment. What could you have done before that, fresh from your apprenticeship, proud and eager to please me? Could you have done that test justice, or would it have been clear to the council that I had made an unforgiveable mistake with you?"

Rafael sighed. "No. I couldn't." He knew it for the truth, ugly and bitter though it was. The stinging in his thighs eased to the point where he could kneel comfortably and he sat back, his hands resting on his filthy, blood-soaked trousers.

"And here we are today." Xian shook his head. "Only with something as vicious and volatile as love could I ever break you, Rafael. You always exceeded my expectations as an apprentice, but my understanding of the depth of your attachment came too late for me to do anything about it but accept it."

Rafael felt wrung out by his master's confessions. So much of his painful past was clarified, but it was a cold comfort. He was exhausted, in pain, and his heart felt like it was going to shatter anew. There were still questions to be asked, however. "What is Myrtea so afraid of?"

"Many things," Xian replied. "Things she hasn't had to fear for hundreds of years. Old age, sickness, death…the specter of her own mortality."

"High Ones are immortal."

"As long as the source of our immortality continues to flow, yes."

Rafael's head jerked up in shock. "The source is drying up?"

"The flow has been steadily diminishing for the past decade. At first our wizards thought the conduit to Erran was being blocked by something simple, a change in the earth below Clare, something that could be blasted free with magic. Now a simpler and more final truth has become apparent. Erran is dying. The gods are giving their son the freedom he rejected so long ago, and when he loses his immortality, we all do."

"Fucking hell." Rafael was dumbfounded. "Bloody fucking hell."

"Succinct as ever, pet."

"What… What will happen here?"

"You tell me." Xian stretched his legs out in front of himself, his bloodstained toes gleaming darkly in the torchlight. "Assess the situation."

It was like being in the classroom again. Rafael stared at his master's bare feet and contemplated the unthinkable, speaking his conclusions aloud as he worked the problem through. "There will be…hoarding. Infighting as the High Ones struggle to preserve themselves for as long as possible. Assassins will be very busy. The council members will move to protect themselves at all costs." He lifted his head. "There aren't going to be any more ascendances. The council can't afford to make more High Ones."

"Entirely accurate."

"The Lower Half will get suspicious when no more of them are inducted into the ranks."

"They're already growing restless," Xian affirmed. "Your killing of our chairman's major-domo to draw me out delayed the inevitable, but the fact is that he would never have been given the First Draught. Our servants know that something is wrong, and it's a matter of months or weeks until they discover what. Some may already know."

A comment Daeva had made to him earlier, about rivaling the power of the High Ones and nothing lasting forever… Could he know? If anyone among the Lower Half did, it would be Daeva. "Some may," Rafael agreed.

"And once the Lower Half realizes our plight?"

"There will be anarchy." Scenarios whirled through Rafael's mind. "You're outnumbered. There will be fighting, slow at first but it will gain speed as the panic spreads. You can't win over the long term."

"Over the long term, pet, Clare will cease to exist."

"What? How?"

"Clare is a city that lives on the sufferance of magic, Rafael. In order to make it great, extreme things were done. You've traversed the dead zone; you know how fragile the ground beneath our feet is. Clare was built on the strength of our wizards' spells, not a solid foundation of earth. We tunneled rampantly in an effort to find more wellsprings early on, and that greed is going to sink this city, quite literally."

"When?" Rafael breathed. His mind was working overtime now, casting up visions of entire city blocks crumbling and falling immeasurable distances, carrying thousands of screaming people with them. How would anyone survive? Feysal and Mina… "Damn it, when?"

"No one is certain," Xian said quietly. "The magic holding up this city is ancient and still very strong. It could be decades before the collapse, but Clare will collapse eventually. That's not the council's greatest concern right now."

"They're concerned for their own necks," Rafael spat.

"Naturally. Losing one's immortality isn't an easy or painless process. It's agonizing, a loss so great it ruins almost everyone who's ever gone through it. I suspect that most of the High Ones will kill themselves after the source truly runs dry."

"You were mortal originally," Rafael argued. "Can't you return to your mortal form?"

"If you live through the process," Xian replied. "I only know of two people who ever managed it. The strength of our addiction to Erran's blood is overwhelming. Can you see us losing our immortality, our power, and our city and staying sane? No. Our servants don't love us enough to care for us during the period of withdrawal, and thanks to opportunists like Daeva, our corpses will barely have time to cool before we're split apart for mass consumption. A very tidy and poetic solution, really."

"This is…" Rafael shook his head. "This is unbelievable. Truly."

"Everyone on the council would love to agree with you, pet."

"So you're all going to die."

"As everyone eventually should," Xian said philosophically.

"What does this mean for me?"

"It means that you and I have some decisions to make." Xian pulled his feet beneath himself suddenly and stood up. "But you're in no condition to make them at the moment. You need to rest. I wish we had more time, Rafael, I truly do." He bent down and unfastened Rafael's ankles, then gently helped him to his feet. "I'm not going to bind you again."

"I don't understand."

"I never brought you here with the intention of giving you to the council for retribution, Rafael. Everything we've done so far has had another purpose. You have three immediate options—running, staying, or killing, either me or yourself. If you choose to run," he continued blithely, ignoring his former apprentice's stunned stare, "I suggest you find fresh clothes, and do be careful. The house is undoubtedly surrounded at this point. Killing me, well, we know how well that went last time. And if you try to kill yourself again, I'll just revive you and make you suffer for it, but you can attempt it if you really want to."

Rafael looked down at his master's hands gently encircling his wrists. Like the cuffs, but far stronger. "I'll stay. For the moment."

"As you wish." Xian let him go and Rafael immediately felt off balance. "There's clean water in the bathing chamber, if you want to use it. Then I suggest you find yourself a room and sleep a bit more. You need to be rested before the next step." Xian turned and walked away, leaving faint red footprints in his wake as he left the lofty room.

Rafael shuddered when he lost sight of him. Moving slowly, his body still aching despite his master's restorative blood, he also left the room, not even glancing back. That part of his life had just ended. The next part of it would be…confusing.