Creusus's Arc

Chapter 18 of 21

Creusus walked out of the arena on his own feet. The marshals stepped aside. The crowd noise slid off him. Under his ribs the new weight shifted with every step, curious, awake, wanting a use. He felt it push at his thoughts and try to color them. It liked the sound of the crowd. It wanted to turn and look at the tiers and count who owed him something. He kept walking. He knew whose thought that was. It was not his. He took a room at a small stone bungalow past the arena walls, ivy on the trellis, one door, one window on each side. He paid the woman there and asked to be left alone. Inside, he sat on the floor with his back to the wall and looked at his black-wrapped hands. He closed his eyes and reached inward the way he had reached for the door in the wall. The weight met him. He sorted through it. He found the taste for a throne. He found a hunger to be bowed to. He found the wish to break a man for the pleasure of it. Each one had Diablo's shape on it. Creusus took hold of the first and pulled. It came out of him like a splinter working free. It fought. It told him he was cutting away his own strength. He kept pulling. He pulled out the hunger next, then the pleasure in cruelty, then the small quiet want to be feared. He set each one in the air in front of him and held them there with the same power that had opened the frame in the arena. He shaped that power around them into a thin skin, then thickened it, then closed it. A ball formed between his palms, no bigger than a fist, black as the frame had been, veined with pale cracks where the trapped will pressed against its cage. Creusus poured what he had left into the shell until the shell went hard and cold. His arms dropped. The ball rolled once on the boards and stopped. He sat where he was for a long time. His hands shook. His mouth was dry. The weight under his ribs was smaller now, and quieter, and his. He crawled to the narrow bed and pulled the blanket down and lay on the floor beside it because the floor was closer. He slept without dreams for the first time since the squire had vanished from the sand. When he woke the light through the window had moved across the room and back again. The black orb sat where it had stopped, watching nothing, holding what he had cut out. His knuckles were still wrapped in the black material. The tournament was still waiting. He got up.