Revelation (Rai Kirah) by Carol Berg

at him in tight circles, trying to tease his eye as I stepped closer, but I felt ridiculous when he reached out and stopped the movement of the blade with his hand, then jerked backward.
    “Ouch!” He stuck his finger in his mouth. “That’s wicked. Are you really intending to poke that into me?” He looked down at his flat stomach and laid his other hand on it. “Wouldn’t feel pleasant at all. Can’t we just skip it?”
    “We can certainly skip it, but only if you leave this vessel.” Patience. Don’t be drawn in.
    “Ah, he does say something other than the words that burn the ear. But the sentiment is the same. Leave, begone, hyssad.” He cringed and shuddered dramatically when he said the last, the word in his own demon tongue that those of his kind could not ignore. “But I don’t want to go. I like it here, I’m learning a lot, and this”—He waved his hand to encompass land and sky and trees—“this ‘vessel,’ as you call it—quite rudely I might add—doesn’t seem to mind me being here. Why would I want to leave?”
    “It is not your choice to stay. Only to leave or die.” Don’t argue. He’s trying to lure you into distraction.
    “No. Not acceptable at all. You must give me some other choice.”
    “There is no other. Leave or die.” I stood ready, but, before I could blink, we were in an entirely different place. A city . . . deserted, a mournful wind nosing a battered, empty pot through the dirt streets and whining through burned-out buildings. Bones littered a crumbling marketplace, and a tattered flag fluttered defiantly from a pole held by a skeletal hand. My skin shriveled, especially the scar on my face that was the same print of falcon and lion as the emblem on the flag. Aleksander’s flag—the lion of the Derzhi and the falcon of his Denischkar house.
    “What is this?” In my surprise I violated my so recently professed maxim.
    “I thought it might suit you better. You were so grim in the other place. ‘Leave or die.’ So unfriendly. This is where such sentiments take you . . . into the realm of one . . . Unnamed.” A whisper of frost brushed across my soul. “Not a nice place at all. No, indeed.”
    “I am not here to be friends with you.”
    “Then, kill me if you must. We’re getting nowhere.” He sat down cross-legged between the wheels of an overturned cart and ripped open the filmy purple shirt to bare a most humanlike chest. But he looked down at it and ran his long fingers over the skin. “On second thought . . .”
    My stomach heaved as the landscape changed again. This time it was Catrin’s practice arena, with the same strip of bright sunshine along one side that I had seen two weeks earlier. The slender demon had a sword in his hand and brandished it wildly, much in the way of one of Catrin’s newer students. “All right. Come at me!”
    He was pulling things out of my own head. I backed away, trying to forge new mental barriers, while coming up with something to explain how he was doing it. No luck at either task. Most unsettling.
    “Not so bold now, eh? I can give you more of a fight than you think.” And in a flurry of blows so quick I missed seeing them, he nicked the top of my right ear, my left shoulder, and my right knee, and left a five-mezzit slash in the toe of one boot. Before I could strike back, he sat down in the middle of the arena thirty paces away from me and laid his sword down crossways in front of him. “Why don’t we talk?”
    “You must leave this vessel. This is not your place. Whatever you are, you don’t belong here.”
    “Doubts are terrible things. They twist your gut in a knot. Surprised that I know of them? My own, not just yours. Surprised that I have them? Doubt is the enemy of the . . . Warden . . . that’s what you call yourself. I’ve been told of Wardens and the Aife, the scourge . . . warned to watch out for them . . . for you in particular. The Warden who changes himself. The one who is different from