Oh God, he thought as the hopelessness of the situation crushed him. Oh, God, I'm going to die here.
Going to take you from here, the bear repeated. It sank its teeth into the ruff of his coat. Not eat you. This time it sounded even more doubtful.
The creature hauled him backward as every part of his body screamed in pain. The stones of the creek bed tore into him like glowing pokers, the burns on his body sizzling anew as they scraped up the bank. His legs dangled uselessly from his body, a pair of dead weights.
Pain and horror combined into a tidal wave of blackness that washed him away.
7
i. Lyseira
"God spoke to me."
She had never made that claim before—even when she agreed to coronate Isaic, she had tiptoed around it. Now she called it out to the entire Majesta square, packed full of Keswick's hungry and desperate. Some of these people had been part of the riots. Few had been sad to see the old Church go. But where she might have expected cries of accusation at her outrageous claim, there came only silence.
Of course they don't question me saying He spoke to me. The thought filled her with despair. They're so used to hearing it, they'd only be troubled if I kept saying He didn't.
Seth had asked her to give this edict from a temple balcony, where she'd be safe if the crowd turned violent, but she had refused. She stood this morning as she had yesterday, on the temple steps, with the nearest citizen just two broad steps below. Seth and a few others stood between, but if worst came to worst, the crowd could easily reach her—and if they did, she would not resist them.
"As I promised, He has a plan. He didn't tell me what it was, but He told me how to enact it."
They were starving, most of their faces filled with naked hope, but some with skepticism. She had to feed them all, and the only clue He'd given her required a journey through madness.
She swallowed the last of her reticence and forced the words out. "We will take the last of the seed grain, and sow the fields."
The hushed anticipation shifted to disbelief. Stunned murmurs rippled through the crowd like wind over the prairie.
"The fields are frozen!" someone called.
"They're buried in snow!"
There's one way they see me differently than the Fatherlord, she thought grimly. No one would dare confront him at a public audience.
"I know only what He told me," she shouted back, "and this is what He said. 'Take the last of the grain seed. Plant it in the frozen soil. And keep faith.'"
The crowd's confusion grew indistinct, the murmurs strengthening.
But how can we—
Doesn't make sense to—
Nothing can grow—
The crowd's doubts were also her own. She had no answers for them.
She put her uncertainty aside and answered regardless.
"He knows the soil is frozen! He calls on us to sow the fields anyway!" Incredulity wrote itself on every face in the crowd, but the murmurs quieted, so she went on. "Enough shovels can clear the snow. We can use those same shovels like picks to chisel out the earth—or we can use actual picks, if anyone has them. It will be hard, cold work, but not impossible."
"And then what?" someone called.
She spread her hands. I have no idea, she nearly said. "Akir will provide."
Again, the murmurs reared. The edges of the crowd began to peel away as people started waving her off or spitting in disgust. Maybe she should have despaired when she saw it.
Instead, it enraged her.
"Is that all the faith you have?" she demanded. "Is faith just a word to you?" She raised her voice still louder to be heard over the crowd's growing rumble. "What did you think? That we would throw off the old Church's yoke and all would be paradise? I asked Him for an answer, and He gave it. You may not like it, but He gave it. And of the three things He said, the most vital, the most critical was to 'keep faith'!"
She sounded desperate, even to her own ears—a fact which only enraged her further.
"Go, then!" she roared at those turning their backs. "If you're so cowardly, so lazy, that you can afford to ignore the word of God, go! We won't chase you. But when our labor bears fruit, when our faith is rewarded, don't you dare come crawling back here!"
This slowed some of them; a few glanced doubtfully back.
"Do you think I want to spend weeks in the cold, trying to plow frozen dirt? Do you think it doesn't sound like madness to me, too?" She threw her gaze along the stairs, saw what she was looking for, and stalked toward it, keeping her face toward the crowd. "Do you think I wanted to come out here this morning, to look you in the eyes and rave like a lunatic? I'm as scared as you are!"
The admission felt like leaping from a cliff. It left her trembling. But it arrested the crowd. They turned back, eyes wide.
"But I asked," she went on, "and He answered, and I will die frozen in that field before I will reject the word of God." She grabbed the shovel leaning against the temple wall—the one used to clear the snow from the stairs. She had planned to raise it, to issue a final challenge to the crowd, but she was too tired: of deception, of her own doubts, of the burden of a church she had never asked for.
Instead, she stalked past Seth and shoved through the crowd, pressing toward the square's western avenue and, ultimately, the farmland that lay beyond the city's western gate. The crowd parted for her—whether from respect or abhorrence, she couldn't say and didn't care. She had given them all the justifications she had.
Seth fell in after her. Shaviid and Angbar scrambled after him. Beyond that, she didn't know how many followed, because she didn't look back.
She marched two hours through the streets, from Majesta to the western gate. The guards made room for her to exit Keswick's walls. The road barely existed here, as a narrow churn of horse and human footprints and a wider line of sleigh tracks. Each step along the trail plunged her in to her shins, but she pressed still farther, out into the snow-packed fields she remembered seeing last summer, where the snow reached her knees. There, finally, with every muscle aching from the hike, she plunged in her shovel and began to dig.
Slowly, the dozen peasants who had followed from Keswick caught up and followed her example.
ii. Harth
He had a single egg for breakfast—a luxury few in the city could afford right now—and it left him hungry. He was always hungry. This morning, though, it didn't bother him.
The school was growing. Angbar walked new chanters over to learn the mantras every day, and while most used the knowledge to master their illness and went home, at least one or two per week stayed on, interested in learning more. By midday, the common area would be thronged with them.
The air bristled with the electric thrill of something secret and new, something with limitless potential. Every day was the first of a new history, now. A little hunger was nothing, compared to that—and having Syntal back was an electric thrill of its own.
She'd stayed in her room last night, exhausted from her travels, but she'd promised to meet with him today, to show him the new book they'd found on Thakhan Dar and spend some time teaching him, so he could finally expand his own chanting expertise. The promise of new chants was nearly as enticing as the thought of being close to her again.
Lyseira would sort out the food problems, and if she didn't, Harth still had enough connections and—for now—enough coin to ensure he wouldn't starve. So rev'naas take his hunger. Life was good.
As he entered the common room he found a couple others already awake and working: Takra and Ben. The girl was no surprise—she was always here, as ravenous as Syntal for more knowledge of chanting. Ben, though, he didn't expect. He nodded at the elderman, who returned the nod and approached.
"I was hoping to talk to you this morning," Ben said as he drew near. The old man had a trustworthy grandfather's demeanor, vulnerable yet authoritative. Everyone loved him, which would usually leave Harth suspicious—but he knew Ben's story just as everyone else did, and there was
no treachery in it. The man had come to Keswick to ask then-Prince Isaic to intervene before the Church took his ancestral land. When Isaic had ruled in his favor, the Church had concocted some crime to imprison Ben and steal his land anyway. After he was freed in the riots, the blizzard ended up trapping him here, where he remained—frightened for his daughters and family back home, no doubt, but powerless to act on it.
"What is it?" Harth asked.
"I'm worried about the ones we send home," Ben said, glancing at the door. "Are you sure the mantras are enough?"
"They're enough. Think of it like a child's potty training. A little one might wet the bed in their sleep or really any time, before they know how to control themselves. But once they do, those problems stop. It's the same with learning to Ascend. Once the victims understand what's happening, they understand how to control it—even while they're sleeping."
"No, I understand that," Ben said, "but . . . they started Ascending for a reason in the first place, didn't they? What if they still need to?"
"Then they can briefly Ascend and return."
"But Ascension itself is dangerous."
"Well, that's true, but—it's not like we can lock them up here."
Ben frowned. "No, I suppose not." Harth clapped his shoulder.
"Look, we're just getting started here. If anyone has a problem, I'm sure they'll come back, and we can help them then. We'll have to just see how things go. I don't know that we have much choice."
Ben nodded uncertainly. "It's Clive, in particular, that I'm thinking of. Yesterday, he―"
He fell quiet as Takra came over. "I need more," she said. "I've been over everything you gave me, and it's . . ." She bit her lip, chewing it along with her words. "It's elementary. There has to be more."
"You went through both of those third-Seal spells?" Harth said, impressed. "You can read them; you understand the runes?" He'd given her copies of Cyclone and Soothing, both conceptually difficult, third-Seal chants that were nearly impossible to practice—one because of its effect, the other because of its application. Hel, he had only recently mastered them himself, just a few months ago when Syntal had left for Thakhan Dar.
"Yes. I understand them, and there's a hundred different branches from the Soothing alone that could be applied to different ideas. I want to see where they go."
"Well, why don't you write them yourself?" Harth could hardly believe he was giving this advice to someone who had just started chanting so recently, but the idea thrilled him all the same. Syntal had already proven new chants could be written, that the chants Lar'atul shared in his wardbooks were intended to be the backbone for a field of study, not its sum total. Harth found the idea intoxicating. He had already started notes on a half-dozen new chants, but the school itself kept him so busy that he hadn't had time yet to finish even one. "If you see branch points in the chants, take note of them and see if you can plot them out yourself."
Takra shook her head. "Some of them are probably dead ends. I don't want to waste time—and I'm not sure they're all valid. The next set of chants would clear up everything. I want to see the fourth wardbook."
I haven't even seen the fourth wardbook, Harth thought. "Well, Syn should be walking me through it later this morning. Afterward, maybe I'll talk to her about it."
Takra pursed her lips, clearly unsatisfied with this answer, but turned back to her table.
"Custom chants? Is that much different from chant-less casting?" Ben whispered once the girl had gone. "She's only seventeen summers, Harth."
And I'm only twenty-three, Harth thought. "What of it?"
"Well, it's dangerous, isn't it?"
"Sure. All of this is dangerous. But she's right about the branches—you haven't seen Soothing yet, but it has a lot of promise. It really gets into the weeds. Reversed syllables, inverted commands—there are ideas there that could lead Akir-knows-where. We should follow them."
"M'sai, but might it be smartest to understand the full lay of the land we can already see, first? If Syntal has more spells she hasn't shared yet―"
"You wouldn't be alive right now if Syntal hadn't researched a custom spell," Harth said, not unkindly. He dared a teasing smile, poked Ben's shoulder. "Think bigger, elderman."
Syntal emerged into the common room as if summoned, blinking and wild-haired. "Harth," she said.
"Look who's awake," Harth answered, turning away from the old man with the stale ideas, and toward the sleepy ravenhead with the striking green eyes.
She beckoned him over, ducking back around the corner as he approached. "It's gone," she whispered, her breath still thick with the stink of sleep, and for a terrifying heartbeat he thought she was talking about the wardbook. "The pain—the curse. I think it's gone."
He scrambled to keep up. "The Fatherlord's curse? The one you told me about?"
"Yeah," she said. "It . . ." She looked around, as if confirming she was really awake. "It's always worst in the morning, but when I woke up, it . . . the pain is just gone."
"Is it the water from Ordlan Green? Did Iggy―?"
She shook her head. "That helps, but it's never gotten rid of it entirely." She ventured a smile. "I think it's really gone!"
He gave her a quick hug. When she returned it, he felt an answering smile of his own. "That's wonderful!"
"Well . . ." Her joy faded. "Maybe. I can't understand what happened."
"What do you mean? The curse is gone."
"But how? Lyseira and Angbar went through a hundred books when the King gave them Majesta, looking for a way to remove it—there's not one. The miracleworker needs to die, or the terms of the oath have to be completely fulfilled."
"Are you saying . . ." He sorted through her words, chasing the ramifications glinting just behind them. "You think something happened to the Fatherlord?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. Maybe. How could he die? Either that, or―" She took a sharp breath. "Or he learned to chant."
"To chant?" The possibility created far more questions than answers.
"He made me swear to teach him to chant. That's the oath I'd broken, that was why I was in so much pain. It has to be why the curse is gone, now. How else could it be fulfilled? He must have learned another way."
"But . . ." The idea was like a puzzle box. He turned it over, trying to make some sense of it. "Why? Why would he want that? He has a whole church full of people hunting chanters."
"I don't know. Maybe he realizes what a threat it is. Maybe he finally understands he can't ignore it."
"You think he . . . you think others know? The Archbishops?"
"I don't know." She sighed. "Rev'naas take it. I feel better just to feel worse again."
After breakfast they retreated to one of the private offices. Syntal dropped the new book to the table with a thud. "I looked through it during the journey," Syntal said, "but I haven't tried any of the chants yet. The curse was holding me back—the stronger the spell, the worse the curse surged. I think it had something to do with the chanting suppressing the effects of the Ordlan Green water." She waved this concern off. "Anyway . . . do you remember what I told you about the fourth book? The clues?"
"'Each shall point the way to its brother,'" Harth quoted. He knew the exact words. "I remember. It was the first Farstep you cast, in the dungeons."
"That's right. I knew the spell was supposed to move the caster from one place to another without having to cross the distance, but I'd never used it before. I gave it a destination when I chanted—I didn't know where I was, so I had to guess—but it ignored what I told it. I was aiming to come out in the street somewhere to the west, assuming I was on street level. Instead it put me on the southeast roof.
"At the time I didn't even notice or care. It wasn't until later, when I started thinking about it more and got to know the city a little better, that I realized the spell actually put me somewhere completely other than I'd intended. When I repeated the spell, it did the same thing. I ended up a block away, in some herb seller's
attic. Southeast again."
"You told me all this," Harth said. "That's how you eventually figured out the next book was on Thakhan Dar. The spell was pointing the way to its brother."
"Right. I forgot." She tapped the fifth book, a dare in her eyes. "Should we find the sixth one?"
Harth didn't hesitate. "Yes, ma'am. You have a chant in mind?"
"There are a couple I think might work. One should make an illusion, if I'm understanding it right—of just about anything. I can decide. Then there's another for speaking with someone else through your mind. Those two seem the most likely to work, except . . ." She chewed her lip. "Well, there's another one that might be a good candidate, but I know Angbar wouldn't like it."
"Angbar's not here," Harth said at once. "What is it?"
"It's . . . I don't want to say it."
"You didn't write it, right? It's not as if you invented the thing. I won't judge you. Just tell me. Or, if you want, I can look at it."
The suggestion surprised her. "Kiir, that would be good. Angbar could never . . ." She waved the thought away. "Yes. Right here." She flipped open the book and then stepped back—arms crossed, eyes pensive.
Sehk, Harth thought. He'd never seen her act like this around a new spell. Whatever it is, it really unnerved her. He Ascended easily, ignored the siren's cry of the universe's infinite truths all around him, and leaned in to look at the chant.
It was complex, far deeper than anything he'd seen before, even the Soothing. It needed an anchor, like some other chants did—Ves required a living being, Hover required any kind of physical object—but with this chant, the anchor wasn't clear. He put a finger to the page, trying to make sense of it.
"The anchor," Syn said.
"Yeah," Harth answered. "Yeah, it's something different, I can't―"
"You'll see it. Descend if you have to, catch your breath. It took me a few tries."
He didn't want to Descend. He wanted to find the answer.
He skipped ahead, looking past the anchor to the chant's actual commands. She'd taught him to analyze chants by looking for commonalities with other spells, and he tried. But this was so different, he couldn't make out any of it. And all the while, the Pulse's hyper-reality buzzed around him, screaming for his attention.
Of Dark Things Waking (The Redemption Chronicle Book 3) Page 13