The Daemon Prism, page 52
As we traveled, it seemed to me a peace settled over the world. I didn’t dare suggest what that meant. Anne assumed the quiet was merely the absence of voices in her head.
On our tenth day out from Mancibar, our track from the southwest rejoined the ghost road near the village of the shepherds, the impoverished little place where people spoke of the Pantokrator and the guardians as personal correspondents and the War for Heaven as if it had occurred last month. Comparing the scholar’s map to Andero’s, we judged we’d come out to the north of the village, which meant it required a backtrack to go there.
Anne was of a mind to pass it by. “I’m tired of the road,” she said. “I need to be home.” She didn’t say where home might be, now Pradoverde was ash.
“I want to contract for some of their woolens,” I said. “You know how I adore such fine colors, and, saints know, they could use the coin.”
But it wasn’t that entirely. These people had shown an uncanny connection with the sublime that I believed all four of us could use. The old man Otro had called Dante the Daemon, and spoken of him as wrestling daemons, fighting for his soul. And so he had been. We had come full circle on this journey, and I felt the need to acknowledge it.
“All right, then.” Anne had no vigor to argue, which told me much of her state.
The whole village, save those off with the sheep, came out to greet us. They honored Andero, especially, saying he had wrestled the cruel spirits possessing their man Jono while Dante cast them out. Young and old begged him to tell stories of his journey and the fate of the great and noble mage he served. He deferred to Anne.
Thus, on that night after feasting, Anne told the story of Portier and Dante, Jacard and Xanthe, of the rent in the Veil and our narrow escape from having the Souleater free to ruin the human world. She crafted our grim tale in the language of myth and legend, holding the villagers rapt for near two hours. And when she was done, she smiled at me across the sea of heads and nodded, and I knew it had been right to come.
“Have you called the great sorcerer home?” asked Ertan, the headman, laying a withered hand on hers. “Surely you’ve not left him to wander the stars before his time.”
“I’ve no enchantments to bring him, and I am bereft of prayers.” The weight of sadness in her admission must surely make the stars weep. “He might be prisoned in the ice caves.”
“’Tis only a call, no prayer or enchantment,” said an old women. “We call those who are dead and they come to us, but if your healer lives, how much easier for him to hear. A place away from day business makes it easier to hear. We’ll go with you. ’Tis a night of no moon, so the stars will be bright enough to guide him.” And they began gathering blankets and rugs, children, hats, honey cakes, flasks of tea, and walking sticks.
“Perhaps I could just speak to Otro,” said Anne, a bit dismayed. “We talked last time.”
“Well, then, you see,” said Ertan. “Your voice is clearly heard among the stars. How much easier to call one who shares your heart.”
Anne seemed bewildered. So was I, but being of a less scientific bent than Anne, I caught what he meant. “This Otro,” I said, “he is not living?”
“Gracious, no,” said Ertan. “Otro was my father’s father, and I’m so old my bones wither. Otro loves this land and all of us, so he remains close.”
Anne was wordless. As was I, which my friends will say is not at all usual.
With the entire village shepherding us, we made a jabbering procession out of the village and onto the rolling meadows beyond. Men sang and women laughed. Children darted about like fleas, forging ahead and then bouncing back as if they rode bowstrings, released from dusky bedtime as though it were solstice night.
When we reached the hilltop place of their choosing, they spread their blankets and rugs on the rocks and grass and shared out the honey cakes and cooling tea, as grand a feast as I had ever experienced. There were no prayers or invocations, only quiet conversation and good cheer.
Andero and Rhea were quickly caught up in a game of chase. Anne and I were left alone on the edge of the crowd. A matter of respect for her grief, I believed.
“It is a peaceful place,” said Anne. “No matter their foolish ideas, I’m glad we came. Nice to be somewhere the people honor him.”
“But have you called him?” This from a bent old man now sitting beside us. I wasn’t at all sure he had walked up from the village. I decided that perhaps I wouldn’t look at him too closely.
Anne did, of course. “Otro! Can you tell me where he is?”
“He wanders. Weary and lost. Searching. Call him. They’ll bring him if they hear.”
I’d swear on my blessed father’s dead eyes that the old man vanished or perhaps turned into a star. And I’d swear on my blessed mother’s heart that when Anne closed her eyes and began whispering Dante’s name, that naught but a sheet of stars topped the next rise, though I blinked and a dark shape stood there. And I’d swear on my own hope of Heaven that he was escorted down the swale and up the hill we inhabited accompanied by a sea of faces that you could see only if you weren’t quite looking at them.
He leaned heavily on his white staff and was as naked as a plucked chicken save for the silver chain and pendant I’d put about his neck myself. “Anne!” he called, hoarse as if he’d been calling for a century. “Where are you? Anne!”
All our hearts stopped, I think. Mine certainly. Anne’s hand flew to her mouth. Andero halted in his tracks, the game of chase swirling below him like a turbulent river about a rock. Rhea paused beside him.
None of us moved toward Dante. I wasn’t sure our feet could tread the swirling darkness between us. He paused and touched the nireal, then straightened his path directly toward Anne. Hurrying. Faster. Shedding his companions. Another hesitation.
“Dante!” she called.
Even when he came within a few metres, he strained to see…. Then he touched the nireal and took a few more steps. Felt his way with the staff. Blind again.
“Dante, beloved!”
“Oh, blessed gods …” He slumped to his knees and pressed his brow to his staff, rocking back and forth. And then he craned his head back and released a great bellow, of triumph and hurt, of joy and exhaustion, of loneliness and pain and grief beyond a mortal lifetime’s measure.
Anne knelt in front of him and stroked his hair, and I could not say what was spoken. But she soon laid his staff aside and enfolded him in her arms. He rested there, his head upon her breast, hers upon his black hair, and never did her hands stop soothing and comforting. After a while, she helped him to his feet, and they walked hand in hand up the hill.
I snatched up our blanket, and though my mouth was full of questions and good wishes, I did not spill them. Instead, I passed the blanket to Andero and jerked my head toward his brother.
“Who’s this naked jaybird walked out of the wilderness, my lady?” No crack in his robust basso revealed the tears streaming down his face as he threw the blanket across Dante’s shoulders.
“Andero …”
A reunion for all ages of the world. Dante was not at all surprised to find me living. “You weren’t there.”
The experience contained in those three words set me shivering. When some idiocy skipped off my tongue, something about prayers, he snapped one finger in the air. “No more of the peacock, lord. I know the man who saved me. The chevalier. The man of honor.”
The villagers, gratified but not surprised, rounded up their children and drifted back toward their homes. The five of us, for Andero caught Rhea before she could escape, sat on that hillock and talked.
We told him of de Ferrau and Will Deune, and how his reworking of Kajetan’s spell had worked. And we told him of Portier, and how we had discovered what had to be done.
“So he found what he wanted.” Sadness and weariness entwined a laugh. “Knew it was him. He called me student….”
Dante had too few words that night to say much of his battle beyond the Veil. But he told a bit … and the ending struck both Anne and me very hard. “… I drove Dimios back through the gates of Gedevron and set the dead to hold him while I explored the construct of Ixtador. It was a girl of seventeen, dead long before her time, who led them, along with a faithful guard captain who saw one last duty for his noble chevalier. By the time I unraveled Ixtador, the gates of Gedevron were closed and the dead had scattered—all of them. I didn’t think it wise to open my eyes. Whatever I might see …” He twisted his mouth in wry humor. “Well, I didn’t want curiosity to make me stay. I wanted to go home. This”—he touched the pendant on his breast—“told me where I belonged.”
The sun kissed the horizon when we decided we could not utter one more syllable. Andero, Rhea, and I spread blankets on the grass, for it was a fair night under the stars. We left the lambing shed to Dante and Anne. Andero and I agreed, we’d allow no more talk of guesthouses.
Anne
CHAPTER 41
“Read it to me again. Please. There’s something …”
Dante had been restless the entire afternoon, the last before Andero and Rhea set out for Hoven, and Ilario, Dante, and I for Sabria. The two of us had taken long walks. We had explored the joyful awkwardness of love. We had sat with the elders to drink tea and shared more of our own stories with our friends. My heart soared so high, I felt one with the hawks and kites.
Dante’s ordeals had made him no more comfortable with politenesses and large gatherings where it was difficult to distinguish one stranger’s voice from another. And, after three months of seeing, he found it humiliating to be back to the beginning with eating and drinking and other simple tasks he had once mastered. He hated knocking over things or dipping a spoon outside a bowl. But he would bury his face in my hair and laugh at his own discomfiture. “I have been and will ever be a boorish oaf,” he said. “How do you put up with me?”
All I had to do was touch the nireal he wore around his neck and he would wind me in his arms. “Oh, gods, Anne …”
While I visited each family in the village, he spent a great deal of time walking in the swales. Sometimes at night, I saw him with Otro. In the sunlight, it was more often with one of the elders or Andero or even Rhea. He said Rhea had examined his eyes and told him the nerves were dead and would not recover.
“… but it’s all right,” he added quickly. “Unlike blessed Portier, I live. You are here at my side. And my brother. And my friends. Though I will protest to the gods that it isn’t at all fair that I didn’t get to see you all when I had both eyes to do so and a rational mind to savor it.”
With the elders he talked mostly of sheep and the land. “I’m going to have to find a new profession,” he’d told me that morning. “Sheepherding might suit. I like the quiet and the countryside. Though you’d have a dreadful time marking routes so I wouldn’t get lost.”
“I’m not ready for you to be gone so much,” I said, as I worked—very awkwardly—with the hand spindle one of the women had given me. “And I would make a terrible shepherd’s companion. I’m all thumbs at spinning, as well as needlework.”
“Then, no sheepherding. Perhaps I’ll take up smithing, persuade Andero to set up shop in Laurentine and hire me on as an assistant.”
We spent an hour talking of various occupations a former sorcerer of good mind and bad eyes might take on. And then he grew quiet. “Ah, Anne, I do miss it so very much. For one moment, the world doesn’t feel so very different; then it bludgeons me again … no voices … no friend of the mind … and I can’t conjure a feather.” He rubbed his fingers over the hornbeam staff and its carved crescents and stars and other symbols. Not even a spark resulted.
Though I had finally experienced the glories of his art, my own small loss was soothed by his presence. Dante had lost his life’s work.
That’s when he asked me to read the transcript of Portier’s memories yet again. I had read it to him at least five times already. Not that I minded … anything and everything to do with Dante was a joy. But the transcript had become an obsession with him.
“Doesn’t this strike you as something of a violation?” I said as I unrolled the paper I kept carefully in a hollow tube. “Like constantly peering into someone’s bedchamber.”
“Certainly not! Portier was a man of science and would wholly support—”
His cheeks displayed his acknowledgment of my teasing. “I keep thinking I’ll glimpse something beyond the words written. Are you sure you recorded everything the tetrarch recalled?”
“I wrote as fast as I could, and Andero listened, so he could supply the bits I missed. De Ferrau never hesitated. I suppose it’s a skill a Reader develops.”
“Aye … they’ll have a difficult change, too. We won’t need Temple Readers anymore.”
We lapsed into the shared quiet that swelled whenever we considered the implications of our deeds. Sometimes he would hold my hand to his forehead and pretend we could yet feel each other inside, even if the other voices were silent. In the rare times he was out of my sight, I would reach into the void in search of him and imagine I felt some unruly warmth just beyond the range of my senses.
We had walked out from the village to the hilltop where he had returned to me. It seemed a miracle we had come to this obscure little village to find Dante making his way back to living. Yet I decided this case was much like the tetrarch said of prophecy and destiny. To bring him back we had needed a place where one could reach across the barriers of time and memory to call or to hear. A place of quiet, of peace and simplicity, of harmony with the divine. This happened to be one such place. It could have happened at Pradoverde or in the summerhouse at Castelle Escalon. As long as I was there, he said. As long as he was listening for my call, I told him.
Our backs propped against a great rock, we bathed in the stretched sunlight. I scrunched myself into the hollow of his broad shoulder, a place quite near to Heaven, so I had discovered, though he always froze, startled for the first few moments when I took advantage of it.
When he had shifted a bit, exhaled, and snugged his grip on me, I began to read….
Transcript of the Reading of Portier de Savin-Duplais. Beltan de Ferrau, Reader.
I focused on glimpses of the peculiar deep green color of the Seeing Stones.
First probe: “Go ’way.” The man was slitting my lost flesh with a silver knife. He smiled and pressed the cup to a shallow cut….
First probe discontinued. This was the present, the subject’s encounter with Iaccar, Regent of Mancibar, in the bleeding chair.
Second probe: A battle raged …
Second probe discontinued, as the brilliant green that cued my attention was a grassy hillside, not the Seeing Stones.
Third probe: The tent billowed in a dry breeze …
Dante had withdrawn his arm and drawn his knees up, forehead resting on his clasped hands. He lifted his head when I finished. “So Ferrau believed that these probes were in reverse time order. Newest first and on through the oldest.”
“Yes. He said that was always the way of it.”
“Then read me the last two again in the order he recorded them.”
I did as he asked. First, Os’s journey of the spirit and the cave painting that had given us the Seeing Stones, the key to our victory, and the answer to Portier’s long yearning. And the last, lanne’s ordeal on Mont Voilline.
“Did you not think it odd that the order was Os first and then lanne?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Ianne was his original identity, his first life, and thus the oldest story.”
“Would you—?” He hesitated. “I need to be alone for a bit. Think. Without the distraction of … companions.”
His expression gave nothing away. Each of us had needed thinking time since leaving Mancibar. But this was different somehow. A subdued eagerness gave his muscles life, as if he were on the hunt, tracking down another puzzle.
“All right. Certainly. You can find the path down.” His staff, just a walking stick now, would identify the well-worn track and help him down the steep. I knew better than to coddle him.
“Come back at sunset,” he said. “And bring the others … ours.”
“All right.”
As I stood, he caught my hand, kissed it, and pressed it to his eyes. “My only light,” he said softly, as he did every time we parted.
I puzzled over his odd behavior as I bargained with one of the women about buying one of her rugs to take home. We would rebuild Fradoverde around a reminder of warmth and welcome, starlight and holiness. Ilario had already contracted for their entire year’s output of fabric. I laughed inside while watching Ilario consult with Rhea, trying to nudge her toward colors more vibrant than dark blue, while she quietly moderated his inordinate love of yellow.
The three of us, along with every child in the village, gathered to watch Andero’s deft hands use oil, stone, and file to sharpen every nail and knife blade in the village while he bellowed a medley of marching songs. Rhea watched him closest of all, and when I looked at Ilario, he smirked at me, waggling his eyebrows in a most self-satisfied manner. Perhaps I’d been mistaken about the ties of affection forming in our little party….
At sunset, the four of us trudged up the hill and found Dante sitting cross-legged in front of a small expanse of dirt. Laid out on the bare patch of ground were five small piles of dry grass. He hushed us before we could speak. At the wave of his hand, we sat in a half circle like children around a storyteller.
Once we were settled, he pointed to me and said, “Anne. You radiate light like a balefire.”
After a moment’s pause, he pointed to Andero. “You, my brother by blood and history and giving, you’ve a forge buried deep beneath an ocean of peace.”
Then Ilario. “And you, my chevalier, you who watched my back when I was truly blind, my brother by the faith of our friend who is not here. Your fire shines silver like the steel of your sword and with the brilliance of your honor.”
