XXXI. CLOAKS
Why was he always fighting in darkness?
He had been raised on tales of war in which sunshine was always implicit. Glittering gemstones in crowns and on hilts, gleaming swords, shining armor, banners vibrant with color. He had never actually fought in a war, but in his imagination he saw military conflict the way a general or bird might–from on high, two opposing tides crashing into one another among distinct landforms, the sun picking out the prickle of weapons and flares of heraldry the way it picks out spume on the tides. Light and space–air–clarity in sight and in action–the ring of clashing metal–
Not this.
The thing’s membranous flesh was hideously strong, the darkmantle all over again, but more wicked and repugnant. Its touch was not like a person’s or a beast’s. He understood that he was being wrapped up in it, but he could not understand how it was unwrapping him from within. There was a hand where a hand shouldn’t be, a nerveless grip on his soul. Take nothing.
When the party entered the plateau’s topmost cavern, the cloaker sailed down from above. It looked like little more than a wind-stolen tattered cape. Make nothing.
When it enclosed Graddick, it did so daintily, as if his flesh was as repulsive to it as its was to him. Shut.
Its plan, Cuatala understood, was to kill the party’s most formidable fighter first and then make its way through the rest of them. She saw it but couldn’t do anything about it. The keening moan the cloaker made shook her auditory and psychic senses. She retched.
“Vahaera, Ystrien! I–can’t–do–anything,” she cried.
Vahaera’s magic, which relied so much on making extraordinary her ordinary powers of suggestion, wasn’t working. The one suggesting must understand; the one taking suggestions must want understanding. What could she suggest to an alien monster whose only language was this keening moan? That moan, she thought. That moan! Vahaera had spent much of her life anatomizing emotion without seeming to feel it. But now she felt it. Now she screamed in horror and ran away.
As Ystrien fought, he thought back to his recent but distantly felt youth, to sparring. One of his many rivals had been a boy a year older than he. He moved like a leopard and teased all his opponents in the most maddening way. He snorted in derision when Ystrien’s jabs were wild and laughed at his tangled footwork. He unnerved him with unpredictable and strangely intimate taunts. But one day Ystrien bested him by ignoring all that and bringing his training sword around on his back.
He did the same with the cloaker, slicing its flesh a cloak’s thickness away from Graddick’s ribs.
