If I were a winged god of terror, where would I be?
I glanced up. High above, on the massive support beams right under the newly installed skylight, a man sat, his right leg bent, his left dangling down, a book in his hand. He had no wings, but his hair was a familiar white. For months Barabas took care of Christopher. Now Christopher guarded Barabas.
“How’s our honored guest doing?” Curran called, loud enough for everyone to hear.
“Doing great,” Keana, a thin, dark-skinned merc in her thirties, called out. “We got his money in an hour ago.”
“How much did we net?” Curran asked.
“The Guild took in two million, nine hundred fifty-eight thousand, six hundred thirty-three dollars and sixty cents,” Barabas called from his office.
“Yeah!” Curran pumped his fist.
The Guild erupted in cheers. I cheered, too. He was making them feel like all of them had won, forging them into a unified force, and they had no idea he was doing it.
“Why is the number so weird?” I murmured.
“We charged him his weight in gold,” Curran said. “Would’ve gotten more, but Roland bled him out and starved him, and he needs a lot of food or his body starts to cannibalize itself.”
“Where do you have him stashed?” I asked.
“Third floor, the old archive room,” Curran said. “I talked to Barabas this morning. Saiman isn’t eating or drinking. They had to put him on an IV.”
Saiman burned through nutrients the way fire burned through dry hay.
I nodded at Julie. “Come with me.”
As we climbed the staircase, I asked quietly, “Feel up to it?”
She looked at me. If she’d given me that look and I didn’t know her, I’d consider backing off.
“If it helps kill Roland, yes.”
“Good. When I talk to him, remind me to ask him for his help, but don’t tell him what I want exactly.”
• • •
PRE-GIANT, THE OLD archive room had no windows. Post-giant, it had acquired a large window shielded by thick bars in case another monster came rampaging. Saiman lay next to that window, on a bed, bathed in the sunshine streaming through the clear glass. He was pale and bone-thin, a skeleton wrapped in loose skin and hooked up to an IV bag. Normally he maintained a neutral shape, that of a man of undeterminable age, bald, with unremarkable features, neither handsome nor ugly. The creature that lay on the bed now was a foot and a half taller than any human had a right to be. Light blue-green hair framed his face. His eyes were the pale blue of thick ice dusted with new snow. Whatever my father had done to him was so traumatic that Saiman had collapsed into his natural shape.
He was gazing out the window, an odd expression on his face. Looking at him made me want to bring him food and spoon it into him until the normal, caustic Saiman resurfaced. Someone had done exactly that. Chicken soup and freshly baked bread waited on a tray by the bed. Both were untouched.
Calhoun, a short merc with a shock of wild blond hair, got up from his perch by the door. “Tell me you came to relieve me. I’m starving.”
“Knock yourself out,” I told him. “I’ll sit with him.”
Calhoun took off down the stairs. I pulled up a chair and sat by Saiman’s bed. He ignored me. Julie took the other chair in the corner.
The sun shone on us, warming up the white sheets. Small specks of dust floated in the light.
“There was a window,” Saiman said. “The cell was dark, but there was a window. Too narrow for me to crawl out of and barred, but I could see a small piece of the sky.”
“Hope is a bitch,” I told him. “It keeps you alive when all you want is to die.”
Saiman turned his head and looked at me, his eyes full of winter. “He was draining my blood. As fast as I could make it. When he took it, my body reacted and cannibalized reserves to make up for the shortage.”
“What did he do with it?”
“I don’t know.”
“There was another creature in the castle with divine blood,” I said. “An animal. A saber-toothed tiger.”
“I heard it roar once,” Saiman said.
“Why would he need divine blood?”
“I don’t know.” He sighed. It rolled through his entire body. “They broke my legs. Every day before the sun would rise, they came in and shattered my bones with a hammer.”
Saiman had always been terrified of death and physical pain.
“Why?”
“With that much pain, I couldn’t slow down my regeneration. My body healed itself and there was nothing I could do about it.” He shuddered.
“It’s over,” I told him. “You’re safe.”
“Do you know why I accumulated wealth?”
“Because you thought it would shield you. But there are things in this world that are immune to money.”
He looked away from me. “I knew nobody was coming.”
His voice told me everything. He sat in that cell with his broken legs, looked at the sky, and wanted desperately to be rescued, but he knew nobody would care enough to rescue him.
“We were coming.”
“Why did you save me?” he asked.
“I didn’t.”
A trace of the old Saiman’s impatience touched his face. “Curran did it, but only because you asked him to. The money I paid the Guild is a formality. A pittance. I would’ve given Curran everything I have, but I know him. I remember our history. All the gold in the world wouldn’t convince him to lift a finger for my sake. He did it for you. Why did you ask him?”