Unfinished, page 19
“What’s wrong?” Imogen asked.
Lilah looked up, and there was a momentary look of confusion in her eyes. “Why do you think she didn’t help?”
“I don’t know what to tell you,” Imogen said. “Abigail has her own motivations, as you know. She can see things that we cannot.”
That was all that Imogen thought mattered. Abigail had her own plan and had seen some different possibility, but increasingly, Imogen believed that perhaps what she had seen, and the plan she had in mind, involved Imogen. Perhaps it even involved Imogen offering some protection to Abigail. She wouldn’t put it past Abigail to plan something like that. But the question was, what had she seen?
“If she wanted you to help me, she would have—”
“She would have simply done what she did,” Imogen said. “She would have forced me to offer you assistance without knowing I was offering you assistance.”
“But you’ve already helped me before,” Lilah said.
Imogen shrugged, and she leaned closer to the renral. He had a strange, musky odor that she didn’t find unpleasant. There was almost an earthy note to it as well, and with the heat radiating off him, and the sense of power that she felt from him, she could practically feel some aspect of the renral radiating outward. It was as if she could feel the electrical energy that she had summoned through him. She closed her eyes, focusing on that connection, on that sacred pattern, and she could feel that energy building within her once again.
She didn’t call it out, though. Imogen worried about what would happen to her and the renral if she were to do so, and whether there would be anything that would explode that power away from her.
“What are you doing?” Lilah asked.
Imogen cocked an eye at her. “I’m resting.”
“I can feel something. I don’t know what you’re doing, but you’re using some sort of magic. What is it?”
Imogen grunted and closed her eye again. She focused, thinking about the power of the renral, thinking about how she used that energy and whether there was anything that she could do as she summoned that power through her. The energy that she felt now was significant, and it seemed to Imogen that there was some part that she should be able to feel, some part that she should be able to draw upon, but she couldn’t tell what it was.
“Tell me about the magic you were doing there,” Imogen said. She kept her eyes closed, feeling for the pattern that she had felt form between her and the renral. As she did, she could tell that there was a connection between them, even if that connection was different from what she had expected there to be. “The lightning. The thunder. What is it that you were doing?”
“It’s just part of something that she was teaching me. She has been working with me on calling storms. The storm serves as a way of summoning her. She can feel it. I don’t know how, as she keeps that from me.”
“She’s a Porapeth,” Imogen said.
“You say that as if you understand the Porapeth.”
Imogen started to smile, and she sat up, glancing back at the renral, realizing that she probably needed a name for him. She wondered if he had one, but perhaps that was expecting too much from him. She would have to come up with one.
She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, and focused on Tree Stands in the Forest. When she did, she immediately began to feel the renral energy flowing through her, as if she was now connected to that power in a way that she had never anticipated being before.
“I don’t understand the Porapeth. The only thing that I understand is that they are magic.”
“That’s what they want you to believe,” Lilah said. “That’s what Abigail believed as well, but there’s something else about them.”
“Now who’s the one who wants to make it sound as if she understands the Porapeth?”
“I do understand them,” Lilah said. “I’ve spent enough time with Abigail to know, even though she tries to keep it from me.”
Imogen frowned. “What has she been trying to keep from you?”
“What she plans. Why she plans it. How she intends to accomplish it.”
“And this army of enchantments and dark creatures is not her?”
Imogen had thought that it might have been, that the army attacking her people had come from Abigail, but if the same army, or something similar, would attack Abigail, and Lilah, that couldn’t be the case.
“It’s not her,” she said.
“Then tell me what you know about who it is.”
“I don’t know anything about who it might be. We’ve been—” She leaned back, cutting herself off as she did, and frowned at Imogen. “I’m not going to tell you what we’ve been doing. That’s what she would want me not to do.”
“Then she trained you well,” Imogen said.
Lilah glowered at her, and her hand went to her neck to clutch her necklace. “Most of my training was in my temple and with my people. She only tried to add to what I had learned.”
“Did it work?”
“Did it work when you worked with him?”
Imogen shrugged. “Benji knew things I couldn’t learn from my sword masters. He didn’t understand how to fight with the blade, but he did understand the power of the sacred patterns.” There was no use in denying that. She had faced Lilah, and she had proven herself capable with magic, so there was no point in denying how she had done it. “All Benji did was help me see the truth of my sacred patterns, and he helped me find the key within it. He helped me see what I needed to do, and how I needed to use those patterns.”
“How is it that a Porapeth understood your patterns?”
“How is it that a Porapeth can teach you sorcery?”
Lilah regarded her for a long moment, lips pressed together in a tight frown, and she squeezed her enchantment. “She helped me see bigger magic.” She looked up. “She said I needed to understand it. She said that was going to be the key to how I could use it. Is that what he taught you?”
Imogen smiled. “Bigger, I suppose. He wanted me to understand the power that existed in the world, and how I might be able to find it. He wanted me to see that power, and feel it, so that I could understand what my role might be. He intended for me to recognize that we all move through the world in various patterns.”
The wind whispered in the back of her mind, she could practically hear Benji chiding her, or perhaps harassing her. Whatever it was, he was there, saying something.
“What sort of things did Benji tell you?”
Imogen shrugged again. “You traveled with him for a while. You knew the kind of things that he said. He was strange, a little quirky, and he made a point of trying to tell us that he could see power in the world, that he could hear the wind, that he could feel it talking to him.”
That had been the most amusing thing for Imogen, but she also realized that it had been true. He had been able to hear something on the wind, something in the stone and the earth, perhaps even in the grasses. That had been Benji.
“She hasn’t given me anything like that,” Lilah said.
“Have you asked?”
“That’s all I’ve done is ask.”
Imogen understood that feeling all too well. “One of the things that bothered me most about Benji was the fact that he kept things from me. Often they were things I thought that I needed to know, but he continued to tell me I did not. That I simply had to trust him.” She looked over at Lilah, and she shrugged. “You know how hard it is to trust somebody you don’t even understand? Somebody who has the kind of power you cannot even fathom, and yet you’re expected to rely upon them and believe what they tell you. I didn’t understand what Benji was doing, but I did trust him.”
As she said this, she realized that it was true.
There was a whisper in the back of her mind again, and once again she could practically feel Benji there, either taunting her or perhaps pleased by this turn of events.
“He had his own agenda, and I was never privy to it. There are times now when I feel like I should have better understood what he wanted from me when he gifted me an aspect of his power. I still don’t understand it. I think it’s there in me, but I don’t know how to access it.” Imogen closed her eyes and thought she could sense it, and thought she understood Benji, but it was a fleeting sense. He was still there with her.
“She didn’t care for him,” Lilah said.
“I know.”
“I think she did once.”
Imogen looked up. “What do you mean?”
“She tried to keep it from me. She tried to keep many things from me, but I think that she cared about him. I think she was upset by something he did a while ago.”
Imogen closed her eyes for a moment. She focused on the sense of Benji in the back of her mind, trying to see if he might whisper something to her, but there was nothing there. It was quiet, an emptiness that she wondered if she could come up with anything to understand.
“Why?”
“I don’t really know,” Lilah said. “It was in some of the comments she made, things that she would say about him, ways she would speak about him. She had a look about her. Like she’d been scorned at one point.”
Could they have been close?
Imogen focused on Benji’s presence. Would he acknowledge something?
“That might be useful to know,” Imogen said.
“I doubt we will learn anything from her. And he’s gone.”
“Not entirely,” Imogen said.
“Even if you can find something, I doubt it will make a difference. They are Porapeth, and they keep anything from us they think we don’t need.”
“They do so as they guide us,” Imogen said, her hand going to the bamboo-sheathed sword. “Do you remember what Benji said when we first found the branox in the forest?”
“I remember he feared them.”
Imogen snorted. “I’m not sure Benji feared anything, and certainly not creatures like that, but that’s what I mean. Do you remember what he claimed? That they had fought those creatures. That they had dealt with them and faced them and worked with others who had fought alongside them years ago.”
Lilah looked over at Imogen. “What are you going on about?”
“There was a time the Porapeth were willing to engage with the world, but something happened.” Imogen leaned back, resting her hands on her legs. “And they disappeared from the world, but not completely. It occurs to me that during my time outside of the Leier homeland, I didn’t encounter anybody who made any reference to the Porapeth.” She hadn’t given much thought to it, but it was a mistake for her not to have. It was strange in hindsight, especially knowing how powerful Porapeth were—or had been. “The sacred temples of my people were founded by the Porapeth, and I think they were the origin of the sacred patterns.”
“The Porapeth don’t guide people.”
Imogen leaned toward Lilah, resting elbows on her knees. “What if they did? And not just my people, but yours as well. Our people are not that dissimilar. We were separated.”
And she would bring them back together.
It was the journey that she had been on ever since meeting Benji, when he had guided her to the Shadows of the Dead to show her the truth of her brother, and the truth of the power that he chased. It left Imogen wondering just how much Benji had seen.
And perhaps it didn’t matter.
Imogen needed to be a part of this in some way. She needed to help bridge the gap between the Leier and the Koral. They were her people. This was her land.
“That’s not the sense I get from Abigail,” Lilah said.
“I’m not sure we can trust what Abigail was trying to show you,” Imogen said. “And even if we can, I’m not sure we can trust that she wasn’t trying to work her own angle. What else has she had you doing other than serving as bait to draw out the Sul’toral?”
“Nothing but the Sul’toral.”
Imogen got to her feet, and she started to pace in a small circle. They were on the top of the mountain, on a peak that had a very small flat section, so she couldn’t pace nearly as much as she wanted. She needed to think, and she needed time to pace, to work through this. She felt she was close to some answer, but even as she made a steady circuit, Imogen couldn’t tell if she was right.
“Timo was after Benji,” she said, speaking the words aloud. They seemed to be carried on the wind unprompted, but as she said them, she could feel something about the wind, something about what Benji was doing to the back of her mind, the way that he was guiding her, as if he wanted to make sure that she made this connection. “And he failed. But then there was another chase.” She looked over at Lilah. “And Abigail was pushing, but was it because she wanted Benji’s power?” She frowned. At the time, that was what she had thought that had been about, but perhaps it wasn’t.
Abigail had wanted something else. She’d wanted something more.
She’d wanted access.
She’d wanted back into the Leier lands.
“Why was Abigail where she was?”
“What are you going on about?”
“Abigail. She was using us. She used you, and she used the guardians, and she was trying to use me. What was she after?”
“You saw what she was after.”
“No,” Imogen said. She continued to pace, but the longer she paced, the more she started to question whether she was right. Perhaps this was not exactly the right way to come to the answer that she needed. When she had found Abigail before, she’d been hiding. She had been afraid. Why? “She was running. The same as we were.”
Sul’toral.
Timo was out there, but there were other Sul’toral. There were many of them. As far as she knew, there were a dozen, maybe more, and they all served some dark power. But Sul’toral were after something else. Benji had been running from them as well. They had nearly killed him once, and had it not been for Imogen, they might have succeeded.
“This wasn’t about Abigail trying to harm Benji. This never has been.” Imogen looked up, holding her gaze on Lilah. “And it wasn’t about you being bait in some attempt to draw out the Sul’toral. At least, not entirely. Perhaps that was part of it, but I wonder if she was after something else.”
“I think you’re giving Abigail more credit than she deserves.”
Imogen squeezed the hilt of her sword. “Maybe. But I think that I’m right about this.” She looked out over the mountainside, and she could feel something.
Abigail. Porapeth. Benji.
All of this was linked.
The Sul’toral.
“She tried to draw them out,” Imogen said. “What reason did Abigail have for trying to draw them out?”
“I don’t know. She never told me.”
“And you don’t think it strange that Benji is gone, and now the sacred temples are gone, and who knows what has happened in the Koral lands?” She had started this journey thinking that she had to get help, and perhaps she still did, but maybe there was a different reason behind it. “It’s about the Porapeth.” It had always been about the Porapeth. “Abigail the Lost,” Imogen said. “I can’t help but wonder if perhaps she’s now Abigail the Last.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
She ran her hand over the renral. He looked up at her, his dark eyes glittering in the early-morning light. Imogen could feel power of a storm cloud, like lightning, radiating from him. Perhaps the renral wanted her to be aware of the kind of power that he possessed and the connection they had formed. But tracing the pattern on his back, she opened herself to something different. She could now feel the connection and that power, and she could practically use it, but she was not entirely sure if she should.
She looked over at Lilah, who was standing staring out over the mountainside. Imogen wondered what she was doing, and what she was thinking.
Abigail had been hiding.
The Sul’toral had been after her.
They had been after Benji and had essentially succeeded, in that Benji had been eliminated. Not in the way that they probably expected, and with her having gained some of Benji’s abilities, Imogen suspected that the Sul’toral would be disappointed in what they had been able to accomplish, but they had still removed Benji, one of the original, and most powerful, Porapeth. Whatever other Porapeth had existed, whatever others had remained, were probably gone.
And that left Abigail.
Imogen had always known that the Porapeth were rare, and that they were incredibly powerful, but she did not know much else besides that.
Her time with Benji had given her more insight into the Porapeth, but certainly not enough for her to know what they might do, nor to know what role they might have. That was a question she should have asked Benji before.
Then again, there were many questions she should have asked Benji before.
Abigail. The Leier. The Koral.
Was there a link in some way?
Not for the first time, Imogen wished she could see the various possibilities that existed, and she felt the frustration that Benji must have felt in having nothing more than a blur around him.
She turned to the renral, holding her hand out. “I think we need a name for you. What kind of name does a renral have?”
“Why would you name this creature?” Lilah asked, turning back to her.
Imogen shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because you saw what they did.”
“You saw what the renral Abigail sent our way did, but these—and him in particular—are different.” Imogen could feel it, especially now that she had formed some sort of connection between herself and the renral. She didn’t fully know what that connection meant, but she felt it.
“Until it decides to eat you.”
Imogen patted the renral, and the massive bird looked up, his long beak, almost razor-sharp, slightly opening, but it seemed to snap shut at Lilah, as if he understood.
Imogen patted him again. “Don’t listen to her,” she said. “But you do need a name.”
