Chapter 9: The Devil in her Heart

"What is more evil?" Zarisha asked us as her intense blue eyes touched with that strange gleam of pure malice moved between Quaila and me. "To have evil done to you, or to do evil?"

She sighed and looked down, her talons, or maybe it was her own fingers that was just twisted into claws by some disease, clutched together in a desperate grip.

"I have not always been good, Questor," she said, the words dripping from her lips like bile. "But I guess, oh I hope!, that I have been no worse than we people of Neghast tend to be."

With her pale skin, almost strangely snow white in places, and her copper hair which was lank and thin, she looked like an unfunny joke of a true native citizen.

"When I was a girl, I lied, I stole, I played the games of power and bullying that we tend to do in this city, Questor. Yes, I did. Of course I did."

Zarisha's earlier composure seemed to be breaking down and there was only a thin veil of arrogance covering her imploring core. I suspected she was speaking as much to herself as to me.

"Well, when I was accepted to the Web, I did not change. Of course, I became a rather important person. I could mix a brew that might befuddle the senses, inflame emotion, and cause strength or sickness. My spells could see far and influence the very threads of the elements that surround us. And like any other Neghaser I sold my services dearly, and did not discriminate with whom or what I traded. I continued playing the power games of course, only now within the Web, seeking to get closer, always closer, to the center. No-one knows what resides in the Equilibrium, but all are drawn to it. Anyway, I was certainly no holy woman, but Questor, I swear that evil, true evil, did not enter my soul until I met Hetar."

I could not take my eyes of her face. The sardonic face of a human which seemed to twist themselves into a grin of evil, an utterly alien grin. Devoid of all other emotion it seemed, so simple and crude in its encompassing malice. "Yeah, until I finally learned that stupid lesson that love is stronger than magic which they tell use in fairy tales," the acid had returned to leave splotches of rust on her syllables. "I learned that love makes one stupid, and that we so-called thinkers tend to fall deeper and harder than others. Oh yes, I fell like a pigeon into the jaws of the hungriest rabid wolf in this town."

"This Hetar," I prompted her as she fell silent, her gaze lost somewhere to the left of infinity, her clawed hands shaking.

"The filth," she spat, her flat hand striking the table, the shaking intensifying. I reached out my hand towards her, and she took it like a drowning woman clutching at the rope thrown her.

"Questor!" She caught my eye. Her hand was bony and sweaty. "Save me! I, I don't want to hurt no-one. I want the dreams of rage to end! I want to be a normal lying, thieving, sinning Neghaser again!"

"I will," I replied, trying to appear calm. I would, of course. I was Called.

"Hetar," she growled, "didn't mind me being a Weaver. Oh, he loved me all the same, this truly wonderful man. And I..." She gave me a look so full of fury that I almost tore my hand away. " ... I loved him so madly, that lopsided grin of his and the strong and gentle hands and all those charming words, and I drowned in a world of pink fluff. I would do everything he asked me to, which he rarely did, and do it all again if he would just look at me, which he did almost constantly. Pathetic." The last word was accompanied with a derisive snort.