19
“No!”
Glaeken squeezed his eyes shut and jammed the heels of his hands against his temples. He backed away from the window and dropped into one of the thick-upholstered chairs.
Something had happened, something terrible.
The Lady . . . it had to be her. He didn’t sense her. Mortality had stripped him of certain abilities . . . awarenesses. The Lady’s existence was like a scent in the air, and now that scent was gone.
The workaday world out there would not realize what had just happened. They did not know her scent, could not feel her presence, so they would be unaware of what they had lost.
But the Ally would notice and would turn away from what it perceived as a dead world.
Glaeken felt a sense of loss, a wave of sadness almost overwhelming in its intensity. She hadn’t been a person, not in a true sense, just a physical manifestation of something much larger and more complex, but she’d been a personality, and thus a person to him. He’d grown fond of her over the millennia, perhaps even grown to love her. Not like he loved Magda, of course. More like a sister, or a dear, dear friend.
He’d had but two constants in his attenuated existence: Rasalom and the Lady. Now he had only Rasalom. And very soon Rasalom would—
He started at a crash behind him. He rose and saw a figure slumped facedown across the coffee table. A woman—naked, old, frail. For a moment he thought it might be Magda—it wouldn’t be the first time she’d forgotten to get dressed—but then he saw the marks on her back and knew.
“You live?”
She raised her head and looked at him with bleary, pain-wracked eyes.
“Help me. Please . . . help.”