The Daemon Prism, page 47
“You’re correct,” said de Ferrau. “I believed Master Dante the cause of what I saw happening in Ixtador.”
His simple phrasing snagged my attention like a meat hook. “What you saw beyond the Veil?” I blurted. “You’re a Reader….”
“A skilled one,” said the tetrarch. “Since I first inhaled the smokes of a Temple reading room, I’ve seen Ixtador’s blighted fields as clearly as you see Sirpuhi’s cliffs outside that window.”
Dante had always believed that talent for magical practice was far more widespread than the Camarilla, locked into family and bloodlines, would admit. He used himself as the prime example. But he also pointed out Temple Readers, those who claimed to assess the progress of souls on their Veil journeys. Just because the cretins are attached to fancies about gods and angels doesn’t mean they can’t touch dead souls. Whyever not? It’s just another aspect of the aether.
“For that same eighteen years,” the tetrarch continued, “I’ve lied to every petitioner who’s brought me a tessila to read. How can I tell them that their loved ones begin their Veil journey as hopeful as a bride on her wedding night and as eager as a bridegroom, only to starve and wither along the way? Every blasted one of them.”
Exactly as Anne, Dante, and I had posited! Though more skeptical of their skills, I had interviewed a few Temple Readers. None had ever confessed to see anything of the hunger and despair we had witnessed on Mont Voilline. They blamed time’s murky barrier or lack of information to make a proper link with certain souls. “You saw it!”
“I saw it clearly. Did you never wonder why most Readers limit their scrutiny to souls less than seven years dead? Two years ago this deterioration accelerated, taking nearer three years than five or seven. Ixtador has become a seething morass of human refuse. At the same time, rumors flew through the Temples about certain events at Mont Voilline. Master Dante already loomed large in my suspicions. Yet, I also heard disturbing rumors of the man who first brought the mage to Merona. Some said the man ought to be dead but wasn’t….”
Anne bit. “And you sent Rhea to worm her way into Portier’s confidences to expose his heresy and Dante’s.”
Had a lioness’s tooth marks appeared on de Ferrau’s face just then, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“But my faithful spy was changed.” The tetrarch didn’t shy away from the word as the others did, nor from Anne’s accusations. “On her return Rhea tried to give me convincing evidence that the world wasn’t as I believed. But by then I had a city gate collapsed and a dozen bailiffs dead, and I wasn’t listening. I needed her to keep the fool of a chevalier alive so I could get answers from him. When she and the fool, who was evidently not so much a fool, vanished, she left me a letter, detailing her reasons, her horror at my actions, and the urgency she felt that all our skills would be needed in this battle.”
He tossed a little bundle onto the table. “She also left me a small gift she’d brought from Abidaijar—one discovered by you, Duplais, I believe.”
The small yellowed scroll, tied up with a green ribbon, sat on the table like the blood-soaked evidence of a crime—or of marvels too huge to face.
“It is the first chapter of the Primordium,” said the tetrarch, “the tale of the Creation, a tale as familiar as the alphabet. But this is a unique translation, the oldest in existence. It uses a very ancient word for the first of the Pantokrator’s creations—sandaemoni. A notation gives its meaning as—”
“Guardian,” I whispered, though my throat was a raw knot. I knew the text from memory.
“It gives a whole new meaning to the term Daemon of the Dead, does it not? We who heed prophets must get our terms correct before searching for the fulfillment of our needs. A passage in this text tells of the great war between Dimios and those sandaemoni led by Panthia and Celeres, these guardians of humankind. And it tells how Dimios learned he could increase his own strength by—”
“—draining the energies of the human dead.” Again I completed the tetrarch’s speaking. “Eating their souls.”
“Indeed so,” said the tetrarch. “So I asked myself, was this Dante himself the Souleater or his chosen champion, or was Rhea correct that the measure of a man must be discovered in his friends? If these exceptional friends were to be believed, something terrible was about to occur in the southern deserts. And so I came here, willing to listen. I never expected to find events so far advanced … or to discover truth laid in my lap so clearly as it was this morning.”
He sipped his tea, then plopped it on the table and shoved it away as if it had gone bitter. “I committed crimes in my pursuit of a man I believed an abomination. Be sure, all of you, that if Temple or king yet stands when we are done here, I will resign my office and submit myself for punishment. But today, I offer my service to you, lady, and to you, Duplais.”
Anne was no longer looking out the window, but propped on the window ledge, examining the tetrarch in that way that made you believe she was counting the hairs on your chest. “How do you think to help us?”
Ah, yes, the tasks of the day. I grasped mundanity. But my gaze flicked to the boiling sky and found no relief for the gaping hollow in my gut.
“Your first mandate, now you have secured Duplais, is to obtain the Seeing Stones before they are used and to destroy them.”
“Only we don’t know how,” said Anne.
“One of us might,” said de Ferrau. “If, indeed, he received them from the hand of the Creator.”
And in a single instant, he gave my dread a name. Several names: Ianne, Os, Vicorix, Altheus …
“I make no claims here,” I said, trying not to sound beggarly. It was one thing to believe. Another to produce evidence of that belief. Logic, intellect, science, study, had failed me. “There’s naught in me to answer such questions. I’ve tried—believe me, I’ve tried.”
Unfazed, de Ferrau jumped to his feet. “If I’m to humble myself before a group willing to take on the Souleater, then none of my nattering arguments with the Cult must get in the way.”
A few steps around the table and he crouched beside me, gathering my trembling hands in his own. Calluses … That surprised me. His nails were blunt. Clean. Consider anything but what he meant …
But the young tetrarch’s eyes bore the color and clarity the desert sky ought to display. And no little sympathy, besides. “Sonjeur de Duplais, if you are who and what some of your friends believe, then your soul has repeatedly passed beyond the Veil. Eighteen years I’ve spent making connections with souls that have undergone this change. It’s true I’ve considered only the soul’s current state, believing that its progress through Ixtador toward the gates of Heaven was all that should concern me. But souls beyond the Veil—those that remain whole—are not constrained by age or time. Neither should their essence be restricted to the life associated with … a current existence … if that soul has truly experienced more than one. It occurs to me that I might be able to touch memories that you, confined to this body, cannot.”
“Read my soul….” I squirmed as if a scorpion crawled up my leg, heading for my nether parts.
“Do you believe you have crossed the Veil or not?”
His clear gaze would not let me turn away. “Yes. But I—”
“And do you believe that prior to one of those crossings you might have held the knowledge we need?”
Logic had foresworn belief and yet … “Yes.”
“Well, then, the choice is yours. If you say no, we’ll find some other way.” He sat there like an impenetrable wall. No tic, no smirk, no doubt or hesitation gave me cause to deny him.
Anne’s gaze flicked between de Ferrau and me, as if expecting one of us to launch an attack. Ilario’s eyes were closed; he was a prayerful man. But we had no time for quibbling, and this de Ferrau—Curse it all, I believed him.
“Unless someone has a simpler way …” I swallowed hard. “Though I suppose it’s not so simple.”
“It shouldn’t hurt,” he said, the corners of those eyes crinkling. “None of my subjects has ever complained.”
Before I could answer … or laugh … or have a second thought, he dropped my hands and whirled into action. “Rhea, your medicine box. Our friend will need a sedating potion. In half an hour, I need him conscious, but wholly incapable of directing his own thoughts.”
“An hour,” she said, firmly, not looking at me. “I can do it more safely, and he needs to eat.”
“An hour, then. No more. Goodman Andero, perhaps you would assist Sonjeur de Duplais into the small chamber adjoining. I’ll have a meal sent in. Lord Ilario, Lady Anne, once I’ve gathered the materials I need from Scholar Agramonte’s cabinets, I’ll need to speak with you outside Duplais’s hearing.” He raised his open palms as if to quell my concern. “This is only to learn what details of your person and … history … might enable me to make this connection. Just as I would do in the deadhouse.”
I nodded, the terror lodged in my throat preventing speech. Drugged again. Helpless again … holy night. I should be glad he hadn’t suggested killing me. Nothing in Beltan de Ferrau’s face or manner suggested he was incapable of that.
“Until then, Lady Anne, perhaps you would consider writing down the message we heard this morning. There’s ink and paper on the writing table. We’d best not lose a word.”
Once they’d shown me to a pallet in an otherwise empty room, Rhea brought in a vial and a glass dropper. “I’ll give you only a little at a time,” she said. “That way, I can judge better when it’s enough. I’d take a dose myself—double even—but—”
“I’d prefer you stay clearheaded,” I said and swallowed her bitter drops. “And please don’t apologize any more. When we’ve time, we’ll sort it out. Besides, I’ve a friend here to protect me.” Andero remained in the doorway, neither in nor out. He’d said not a word since de Ferrau’s arrival.
Biting her lip, Rhea touched my arm and hurried off.
“Come talk to me, Andero, if you would. I never knew Dante had a brother….” I surely didn’t want to stew for an hour.
Andero was good company, once I convinced him I was neither on the brink of death nor a god. “Honestly, I’ve had limited success with everything I’ve done,” I said as we shared a glorious hotchpotch of veal bone, dates, and lentils. “I was a decent librarian but a terrible son, a fine investigator who convicted the wrong man, and only by your ‘little brother’s’ grace can I do a lick of magic. As to this other thing …” My spoon paused. I blew a long sigh in an attempt to calm my gut. “That could be but one more grand delusion.”
“You’re the first man ever made a friend of Dante,” said Andero, attacking his bowl as if he’d not eaten in a decade. “Even his teacher—this fellow Salvator—was a brute, forever trying to bind his wildness, more than half scared of him.”
“I don’t know anyone who wasn’t—isn’t—more than half scared of Dante. Every time I’d start to believe us friends, he’d get angry with me about something. But we partnered well.”
The smith told me of their grim childhood, of playing together and growing apart, and he shared the tale of their journey south—their father’s death, Adept Denys, Jono the foolish shepherd, and the settlers of Hoven. Between the times Rhea arrived to drop her bitter potion on my tongue, I came near forgetting what we were doing. Almost …
When my eyes grew heavy, my tongue thick, my fear swollen, Andero crouched close to my face, his broad face grave and thoughtful. “Most of this morning, I’ve felt the need to break your neck for dragging Dante and me into this. The life we were born to was no place a divine hand would nurture a favored son. But telling the whole of it … That tetrarch made sense with what he said about prophets and gifts and looking for the right person. That’s what you did. You found him.” A grin creased his face, and he gave a rumbling chuckle. “Guess that’s what your king did, too, way back at the beginning. Went looking for what was needed and found you.”
Maybe Andero left then. Maybe he didn’t. But I laughed until Rhea’s worried face appeared above me. Her features swirled and flowed like the reflection in a poor-quality mirror, and I tried to answer. “Sorry pair … Dante and me … prophet’s nightmare …”
My lips grew numb and refused to convey anything more of sense, and I slipped into that swirling glass as a sleek longboat into a current. Candles bloomed in the swelling grayness. Vague shapes came and went. My thoughts dissolved amid the scents of incense and burning herbs and whispered invocations. Names fled, and time and logic. I drifted. So pleasant merely to exist … until the world dropped out from under me.
I plummeted through a waterfall of smeared images: books, knives, fire, and blood, chains, drowning, and desert peace….
A javelin of green flame tore through me in fiery agony, pinning me like a butterfly to a biologist’s display….
“Go ’way,” I said to the man slitting my lost flesh with a silver knife. A green jewel was suspended on his breast.
He smiled and pressed the cup to the shallow cut to draw out my blood. “Sorry, no. We’re going to spend eternity together, you and me. You’ll make a fine slave….”
As quickly as it had struck, the green javelin was withdrawn, and I plummeted downward again. Another pause …
A battle raged, as I stood atop a grassy hill of brilliant green, my wand held high….
Another gut-hollowing descent. Then the fiery weapon pierced a green jewel on my own breast….
The tent billowed in a dry breeze, the sweet promise of desert sunset. The tents of my soldiers spread across the rosy landscape like the santorillium that bloomed when the rains came. How I loved this land. But my bones were weary, my skin dry as the sand.
My dusty, scarred hand smoothed the polished facets of the holy jewel. How could I possibly destroy the Fire of Heaven? Tyregious warned my sons would fight over it and ruin everything we’d built. But how would they survive Aroth’s onslaught without divine aid, given for this purpose? Garif was everything I’d hoped for in an heir, but he would not exile the brothers he loved. Nor would I. I should never have sired children. The gods had warned me, but Kassima was so dear, so lovely…. The wizard had not gleaned how to destroy the Stone but said he could split it into three, give each their own power … protect them from one another….
Another withdrawal. Another plunge into the abyss. Again and again, smeared voices, elation, fear, victory, defeat, love here and there, and with no constant save the green spear. A piercing agony …
Naked, purified, empty, my heart lodged in my throat, I crawled through the worm’s passage into the lightless cave. Eight, ten, perhaps twelve passages of the sun I lay there in the dark … faint with hunger … shivering with cold … every drip of moisture a thunder, every scurrying beetle trampling on my emptiness. A vain spirit I was to beg such a gift. But the war in Heaven raged. The shadow was growing as daemons’ blood damped the holy fire. Tales of wonder would sustain hope.
Only when reduced to nothing did I fumble for the pots. Feel the marks—circle for red, cross for yellow, two lines for black. Stir the ground pigment and the water. Dip the brush. Let the daemon guide my hand to paint the story of our need. Then I lay down again to wait, until the body grew numb and thoughts vanished….
“Wake, Os!” Flame’s heat bathed my frail skin. The vault of stars filled my eyes and then the painted face of the modran who had sent me into the cave. “Have you brought an answer?”
My hand ached from clenching hard, sharp edges. When my fingers uncurled, the light of Heaven, the color of rich grass, spread over the gathered clan, drawing sighs and songs of joy.
Ingratitude I closed my eyes and touched the mystery again. “I vow … yes, to learn always, to care always, to mind duty by sharing the light, and to return this gift should it be damaged by your kind or mine own….
A plummeting descent; another skewering …
Another winter coming. The wind of year’s end carried a knife-edge as the sun settled beyond the white cliffs. I licked my dry lips and prayed the woman came tonight to bring me mead. Its heat would warm my belly against the coming storms. The daemon had chained me near the top of the mount so I could look on the lands of men beyond the Ring and see the life forbidden me: hunting and herding, coupling and birthing, walking vineyards and fields. He of the gold and gray hair and beauteous face said I had stolen what was meant for greater beings.
“Out there is your proper place, Ianne, groveling in the filth with other beasts.”
But I told him, “Celeres taught us the stories. The Creator holds us in his heart and wishes us raised up. If our daemons will not, then we must do it ourselves.”
Which did nothing to soothe his anger. And so was I chained and abandoned, allowed neither to cross the Veil nor to live as mortal man. But as the sun fell, I watched the green fires blossom against the night and knew I had done right. A stone house snug against the wind. A knife kept sharp enough to carve a vine on a shepherd’s staff. A frightened child soothed with a hero tale that took shape in the flames. Magic …
“Portier, swallow this.” Sweet syrup seeped into my dry mouth. “Rhea says it will help you wake.”
“We need you to look at—”
“Hush, Tetrarch. Have you no shred of mercy?”
I smiled—inside, if not without. Only Anne de Vernase would hush a tetrarch.
The effort needed to open my eyelids suggested that someone had glued them shut. I could feel nothing, save the uneven warmth of a hearth and the hovering presence of those beside me. Anne and Tetrarch de Ferrau, the Reader.
With a lung-searing gasp, I sat bolt upright, head, body swelled to bursting with images, voices, names, faces, battles, dancing, horrors, grief, joy, mystery, magic. My heart galloped; my lungs pumped as if trying to breathe for a thousand lifetimes….
No—nineteen. Nineteen lifetimes, and more than a hundred deaths shared among them. Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.
“Easy, my friend.” Hands grasped my arms, held me still lest the swelling propel me through the ceiling. A tall man, lithe and fair. Hair should be pale, not false black. Friend. Swordsman. I gawked at him, grappling with five thousand names. Panic set in.
His simple phrasing snagged my attention like a meat hook. “What you saw beyond the Veil?” I blurted. “You’re a Reader….”
“A skilled one,” said the tetrarch. “Since I first inhaled the smokes of a Temple reading room, I’ve seen Ixtador’s blighted fields as clearly as you see Sirpuhi’s cliffs outside that window.”
Dante had always believed that talent for magical practice was far more widespread than the Camarilla, locked into family and bloodlines, would admit. He used himself as the prime example. But he also pointed out Temple Readers, those who claimed to assess the progress of souls on their Veil journeys. Just because the cretins are attached to fancies about gods and angels doesn’t mean they can’t touch dead souls. Whyever not? It’s just another aspect of the aether.
“For that same eighteen years,” the tetrarch continued, “I’ve lied to every petitioner who’s brought me a tessila to read. How can I tell them that their loved ones begin their Veil journey as hopeful as a bride on her wedding night and as eager as a bridegroom, only to starve and wither along the way? Every blasted one of them.”
Exactly as Anne, Dante, and I had posited! Though more skeptical of their skills, I had interviewed a few Temple Readers. None had ever confessed to see anything of the hunger and despair we had witnessed on Mont Voilline. They blamed time’s murky barrier or lack of information to make a proper link with certain souls. “You saw it!”
“I saw it clearly. Did you never wonder why most Readers limit their scrutiny to souls less than seven years dead? Two years ago this deterioration accelerated, taking nearer three years than five or seven. Ixtador has become a seething morass of human refuse. At the same time, rumors flew through the Temples about certain events at Mont Voilline. Master Dante already loomed large in my suspicions. Yet, I also heard disturbing rumors of the man who first brought the mage to Merona. Some said the man ought to be dead but wasn’t….”
Anne bit. “And you sent Rhea to worm her way into Portier’s confidences to expose his heresy and Dante’s.”
Had a lioness’s tooth marks appeared on de Ferrau’s face just then, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
“But my faithful spy was changed.” The tetrarch didn’t shy away from the word as the others did, nor from Anne’s accusations. “On her return Rhea tried to give me convincing evidence that the world wasn’t as I believed. But by then I had a city gate collapsed and a dozen bailiffs dead, and I wasn’t listening. I needed her to keep the fool of a chevalier alive so I could get answers from him. When she and the fool, who was evidently not so much a fool, vanished, she left me a letter, detailing her reasons, her horror at my actions, and the urgency she felt that all our skills would be needed in this battle.”
He tossed a little bundle onto the table. “She also left me a small gift she’d brought from Abidaijar—one discovered by you, Duplais, I believe.”
The small yellowed scroll, tied up with a green ribbon, sat on the table like the blood-soaked evidence of a crime—or of marvels too huge to face.
“It is the first chapter of the Primordium,” said the tetrarch, “the tale of the Creation, a tale as familiar as the alphabet. But this is a unique translation, the oldest in existence. It uses a very ancient word for the first of the Pantokrator’s creations—sandaemoni. A notation gives its meaning as—”
“Guardian,” I whispered, though my throat was a raw knot. I knew the text from memory.
“It gives a whole new meaning to the term Daemon of the Dead, does it not? We who heed prophets must get our terms correct before searching for the fulfillment of our needs. A passage in this text tells of the great war between Dimios and those sandaemoni led by Panthia and Celeres, these guardians of humankind. And it tells how Dimios learned he could increase his own strength by—”
“—draining the energies of the human dead.” Again I completed the tetrarch’s speaking. “Eating their souls.”
“Indeed so,” said the tetrarch. “So I asked myself, was this Dante himself the Souleater or his chosen champion, or was Rhea correct that the measure of a man must be discovered in his friends? If these exceptional friends were to be believed, something terrible was about to occur in the southern deserts. And so I came here, willing to listen. I never expected to find events so far advanced … or to discover truth laid in my lap so clearly as it was this morning.”
He sipped his tea, then plopped it on the table and shoved it away as if it had gone bitter. “I committed crimes in my pursuit of a man I believed an abomination. Be sure, all of you, that if Temple or king yet stands when we are done here, I will resign my office and submit myself for punishment. But today, I offer my service to you, lady, and to you, Duplais.”
Anne was no longer looking out the window, but propped on the window ledge, examining the tetrarch in that way that made you believe she was counting the hairs on your chest. “How do you think to help us?”
Ah, yes, the tasks of the day. I grasped mundanity. But my gaze flicked to the boiling sky and found no relief for the gaping hollow in my gut.
“Your first mandate, now you have secured Duplais, is to obtain the Seeing Stones before they are used and to destroy them.”
“Only we don’t know how,” said Anne.
“One of us might,” said de Ferrau. “If, indeed, he received them from the hand of the Creator.”
And in a single instant, he gave my dread a name. Several names: Ianne, Os, Vicorix, Altheus …
“I make no claims here,” I said, trying not to sound beggarly. It was one thing to believe. Another to produce evidence of that belief. Logic, intellect, science, study, had failed me. “There’s naught in me to answer such questions. I’ve tried—believe me, I’ve tried.”
Unfazed, de Ferrau jumped to his feet. “If I’m to humble myself before a group willing to take on the Souleater, then none of my nattering arguments with the Cult must get in the way.”
A few steps around the table and he crouched beside me, gathering my trembling hands in his own. Calluses … That surprised me. His nails were blunt. Clean. Consider anything but what he meant …
But the young tetrarch’s eyes bore the color and clarity the desert sky ought to display. And no little sympathy, besides. “Sonjeur de Duplais, if you are who and what some of your friends believe, then your soul has repeatedly passed beyond the Veil. Eighteen years I’ve spent making connections with souls that have undergone this change. It’s true I’ve considered only the soul’s current state, believing that its progress through Ixtador toward the gates of Heaven was all that should concern me. But souls beyond the Veil—those that remain whole—are not constrained by age or time. Neither should their essence be restricted to the life associated with … a current existence … if that soul has truly experienced more than one. It occurs to me that I might be able to touch memories that you, confined to this body, cannot.”
“Read my soul….” I squirmed as if a scorpion crawled up my leg, heading for my nether parts.
“Do you believe you have crossed the Veil or not?”
His clear gaze would not let me turn away. “Yes. But I—”
“And do you believe that prior to one of those crossings you might have held the knowledge we need?”
Logic had foresworn belief and yet … “Yes.”
“Well, then, the choice is yours. If you say no, we’ll find some other way.” He sat there like an impenetrable wall. No tic, no smirk, no doubt or hesitation gave me cause to deny him.
Anne’s gaze flicked between de Ferrau and me, as if expecting one of us to launch an attack. Ilario’s eyes were closed; he was a prayerful man. But we had no time for quibbling, and this de Ferrau—Curse it all, I believed him.
“Unless someone has a simpler way …” I swallowed hard. “Though I suppose it’s not so simple.”
“It shouldn’t hurt,” he said, the corners of those eyes crinkling. “None of my subjects has ever complained.”
Before I could answer … or laugh … or have a second thought, he dropped my hands and whirled into action. “Rhea, your medicine box. Our friend will need a sedating potion. In half an hour, I need him conscious, but wholly incapable of directing his own thoughts.”
“An hour,” she said, firmly, not looking at me. “I can do it more safely, and he needs to eat.”
“An hour, then. No more. Goodman Andero, perhaps you would assist Sonjeur de Duplais into the small chamber adjoining. I’ll have a meal sent in. Lord Ilario, Lady Anne, once I’ve gathered the materials I need from Scholar Agramonte’s cabinets, I’ll need to speak with you outside Duplais’s hearing.” He raised his open palms as if to quell my concern. “This is only to learn what details of your person and … history … might enable me to make this connection. Just as I would do in the deadhouse.”
I nodded, the terror lodged in my throat preventing speech. Drugged again. Helpless again … holy night. I should be glad he hadn’t suggested killing me. Nothing in Beltan de Ferrau’s face or manner suggested he was incapable of that.
“Until then, Lady Anne, perhaps you would consider writing down the message we heard this morning. There’s ink and paper on the writing table. We’d best not lose a word.”
Once they’d shown me to a pallet in an otherwise empty room, Rhea brought in a vial and a glass dropper. “I’ll give you only a little at a time,” she said. “That way, I can judge better when it’s enough. I’d take a dose myself—double even—but—”
“I’d prefer you stay clearheaded,” I said and swallowed her bitter drops. “And please don’t apologize any more. When we’ve time, we’ll sort it out. Besides, I’ve a friend here to protect me.” Andero remained in the doorway, neither in nor out. He’d said not a word since de Ferrau’s arrival.
Biting her lip, Rhea touched my arm and hurried off.
“Come talk to me, Andero, if you would. I never knew Dante had a brother….” I surely didn’t want to stew for an hour.
Andero was good company, once I convinced him I was neither on the brink of death nor a god. “Honestly, I’ve had limited success with everything I’ve done,” I said as we shared a glorious hotchpotch of veal bone, dates, and lentils. “I was a decent librarian but a terrible son, a fine investigator who convicted the wrong man, and only by your ‘little brother’s’ grace can I do a lick of magic. As to this other thing …” My spoon paused. I blew a long sigh in an attempt to calm my gut. “That could be but one more grand delusion.”
“You’re the first man ever made a friend of Dante,” said Andero, attacking his bowl as if he’d not eaten in a decade. “Even his teacher—this fellow Salvator—was a brute, forever trying to bind his wildness, more than half scared of him.”
“I don’t know anyone who wasn’t—isn’t—more than half scared of Dante. Every time I’d start to believe us friends, he’d get angry with me about something. But we partnered well.”
The smith told me of their grim childhood, of playing together and growing apart, and he shared the tale of their journey south—their father’s death, Adept Denys, Jono the foolish shepherd, and the settlers of Hoven. Between the times Rhea arrived to drop her bitter potion on my tongue, I came near forgetting what we were doing. Almost …
When my eyes grew heavy, my tongue thick, my fear swollen, Andero crouched close to my face, his broad face grave and thoughtful. “Most of this morning, I’ve felt the need to break your neck for dragging Dante and me into this. The life we were born to was no place a divine hand would nurture a favored son. But telling the whole of it … That tetrarch made sense with what he said about prophets and gifts and looking for the right person. That’s what you did. You found him.” A grin creased his face, and he gave a rumbling chuckle. “Guess that’s what your king did, too, way back at the beginning. Went looking for what was needed and found you.”
Maybe Andero left then. Maybe he didn’t. But I laughed until Rhea’s worried face appeared above me. Her features swirled and flowed like the reflection in a poor-quality mirror, and I tried to answer. “Sorry pair … Dante and me … prophet’s nightmare …”
My lips grew numb and refused to convey anything more of sense, and I slipped into that swirling glass as a sleek longboat into a current. Candles bloomed in the swelling grayness. Vague shapes came and went. My thoughts dissolved amid the scents of incense and burning herbs and whispered invocations. Names fled, and time and logic. I drifted. So pleasant merely to exist … until the world dropped out from under me.
I plummeted through a waterfall of smeared images: books, knives, fire, and blood, chains, drowning, and desert peace….
A javelin of green flame tore through me in fiery agony, pinning me like a butterfly to a biologist’s display….
“Go ’way,” I said to the man slitting my lost flesh with a silver knife. A green jewel was suspended on his breast.
He smiled and pressed the cup to the shallow cut to draw out my blood. “Sorry, no. We’re going to spend eternity together, you and me. You’ll make a fine slave….”
As quickly as it had struck, the green javelin was withdrawn, and I plummeted downward again. Another pause …
A battle raged, as I stood atop a grassy hill of brilliant green, my wand held high….
Another gut-hollowing descent. Then the fiery weapon pierced a green jewel on my own breast….
The tent billowed in a dry breeze, the sweet promise of desert sunset. The tents of my soldiers spread across the rosy landscape like the santorillium that bloomed when the rains came. How I loved this land. But my bones were weary, my skin dry as the sand.
My dusty, scarred hand smoothed the polished facets of the holy jewel. How could I possibly destroy the Fire of Heaven? Tyregious warned my sons would fight over it and ruin everything we’d built. But how would they survive Aroth’s onslaught without divine aid, given for this purpose? Garif was everything I’d hoped for in an heir, but he would not exile the brothers he loved. Nor would I. I should never have sired children. The gods had warned me, but Kassima was so dear, so lovely…. The wizard had not gleaned how to destroy the Stone but said he could split it into three, give each their own power … protect them from one another….
Another withdrawal. Another plunge into the abyss. Again and again, smeared voices, elation, fear, victory, defeat, love here and there, and with no constant save the green spear. A piercing agony …
Naked, purified, empty, my heart lodged in my throat, I crawled through the worm’s passage into the lightless cave. Eight, ten, perhaps twelve passages of the sun I lay there in the dark … faint with hunger … shivering with cold … every drip of moisture a thunder, every scurrying beetle trampling on my emptiness. A vain spirit I was to beg such a gift. But the war in Heaven raged. The shadow was growing as daemons’ blood damped the holy fire. Tales of wonder would sustain hope.
Only when reduced to nothing did I fumble for the pots. Feel the marks—circle for red, cross for yellow, two lines for black. Stir the ground pigment and the water. Dip the brush. Let the daemon guide my hand to paint the story of our need. Then I lay down again to wait, until the body grew numb and thoughts vanished….
“Wake, Os!” Flame’s heat bathed my frail skin. The vault of stars filled my eyes and then the painted face of the modran who had sent me into the cave. “Have you brought an answer?”
My hand ached from clenching hard, sharp edges. When my fingers uncurled, the light of Heaven, the color of rich grass, spread over the gathered clan, drawing sighs and songs of joy.
Ingratitude I closed my eyes and touched the mystery again. “I vow … yes, to learn always, to care always, to mind duty by sharing the light, and to return this gift should it be damaged by your kind or mine own….
A plummeting descent; another skewering …
Another winter coming. The wind of year’s end carried a knife-edge as the sun settled beyond the white cliffs. I licked my dry lips and prayed the woman came tonight to bring me mead. Its heat would warm my belly against the coming storms. The daemon had chained me near the top of the mount so I could look on the lands of men beyond the Ring and see the life forbidden me: hunting and herding, coupling and birthing, walking vineyards and fields. He of the gold and gray hair and beauteous face said I had stolen what was meant for greater beings.
“Out there is your proper place, Ianne, groveling in the filth with other beasts.”
But I told him, “Celeres taught us the stories. The Creator holds us in his heart and wishes us raised up. If our daemons will not, then we must do it ourselves.”
Which did nothing to soothe his anger. And so was I chained and abandoned, allowed neither to cross the Veil nor to live as mortal man. But as the sun fell, I watched the green fires blossom against the night and knew I had done right. A stone house snug against the wind. A knife kept sharp enough to carve a vine on a shepherd’s staff. A frightened child soothed with a hero tale that took shape in the flames. Magic …
“Portier, swallow this.” Sweet syrup seeped into my dry mouth. “Rhea says it will help you wake.”
“We need you to look at—”
“Hush, Tetrarch. Have you no shred of mercy?”
I smiled—inside, if not without. Only Anne de Vernase would hush a tetrarch.
The effort needed to open my eyelids suggested that someone had glued them shut. I could feel nothing, save the uneven warmth of a hearth and the hovering presence of those beside me. Anne and Tetrarch de Ferrau, the Reader.
With a lung-searing gasp, I sat bolt upright, head, body swelled to bursting with images, voices, names, faces, battles, dancing, horrors, grief, joy, mystery, magic. My heart galloped; my lungs pumped as if trying to breathe for a thousand lifetimes….
No—nineteen. Nineteen lifetimes, and more than a hundred deaths shared among them. Impossible. Impossible. Impossible.
“Easy, my friend.” Hands grasped my arms, held me still lest the swelling propel me through the ceiling. A tall man, lithe and fair. Hair should be pale, not false black. Friend. Swordsman. I gawked at him, grappling with five thousand names. Panic set in.
