Holder of Lightning

by S L Farrell

  “Lámh Shábhála . . .” Mundy breathed the word, leaning forward to peer closely at the cloch. “So plain, compared to the other ones. No wonder no one believed that it was a true cloch na thintrí, or at best only a minor one. So we did hold it for a time.” An ironic smile touched his face. “Máister Cléurach won’t be pleased to hear that. Not after what’s happened here.”

  “What has happened?” O’Deoradháin asked. “There are marks on the walls of the central tower where it looks like fires have burned, and our reception was definitely cold.”

  “I’ll let the Máister give you that news,” Mundy responded. “It’s nothing any of us like to talk about.”

  Máister Cléurach was a short, balding man with a fringe of snow-white hair that didn’t seem to have been combed in days. He came bustling toward Jenna and O’Deoradháin between the desks of his two clerks. “Ennis!” There may have been pleasure in his shout, but Jenna couldn’t see it in his face. The folds of his face settled comfortably in the lines of his frown. “By the Mother-Creator, I was certain we’d lost you. The last letter was a year ago . . .”

  O’Deoradháin shrugged at the mild rebuke. “I wrote six months ago, and again three months ago as well, Máister. But the tuatha are unsettled, and who knows where those letters have gone.”

  “Aye, we know the tuatha are at war, and we know why.” Máister Cléurach seemed to glare at O’Deoradháin as if he were the cause of it, and then the old man went to one of the arched, open windows of the cloister, staring back south and east over the waves.

  “Máister Cléurach,” O’Deoradháin said, “Mundy hinted that things aren’t well here, and I saw marks on the walls. What’s happened? Why aren’t Mundy and you and some of the others holding clochs? The Order was founded to make cloudmages . . .”

  The old man turned back into the room, blinking as if the pale light outside had blinded him. “Five months ago,” he said slowly, “not long after the Solstice and just before the mage-lights heralded the Filleadh, ships carrying gardai came here out of Fallcarragh. When we realized that this was more than an unexpected visit, it was too late. The gardai wore the colors of both Tuath Infochla and Tuath Gabair. We closed the gates to the White Keep, thinking we could hold them in siege until help came from Rí Thuaidh, but we had acolytes who were from Infochla and Gabair and some of them betrayed us, opening one of the gates. The gardai came storming in, and though we defended the cloister as well as we could, we’re not trained to fight. The betrayal of our acolytes went deeper—these gardai also knew where the clochs na thintrí were kept.” The Máister sighed, his rheumy gray eyes flared. “They took them all, Ennis. All.”

  “Máister . . .” O’Deoradhain breathed. “I didn’t know . . .”

  Máister Cléurach grunted, interrupting him. “The clochs na thintrí were all they were after. They fled as soon as they had them, returned to their ships and sailed away. When our Rí finally sent men and ships—too few of both, and far too late—they were a fortnight gone. Then the mage-lights began to appear everywhere in the sky, heralding the Filleadh, and we knew all hope to recover them was lost. The Order may have the knowledge to teach cloudmages, but now we have no clochs to give them.” The Máister’s sour face regarded Jenna briefly, then returned to rest on O’Deoradháin. “And what do you bring us, Ennis, you who we sent out to find Lámh Shábhála? More tales of failure, no doubt.”

  “I bring you Jenna Aoire,” O’Deoradháin answered. “The tale is hers.”

  “Aoire . . .” The word was a hissing intake of breath. The clerks looked up from their work and Máister Cléurach’s gaze returned to Jenna. He stared at her face. “Aye, I see it now. The shape of your face, your eyes . . . You could be an Aoire—a family whose fortunes, I must tell you, have declined greatly in my time.”

  “My great-mam was Kerys Aoire,” Jenna told the Máister, “and my great-da was an acolyte here named Niall, though I don’t know his surname.”

  Máister Cléurach visibly trembled as Jenna spoke, his hands clenching together at his breast. “I know that tale and those names, and I know Niall’s surname,” he answered. “I know because I was sent here as an acolyte the following year, and the gossip about Niall Mac Ard was fresh and new among the acolytes and Bráthairs, since they’d known him.”

  “Mac Ard?” Jenna couldn’t stop the words, which stabbed her so that she could hardly breathe. “Niall was a Mac Ard?”

  Máister Cléurach glared at her as if she were a dim-witted student. “Aye. That was his name. A well-known Riocha name in Tuath Infochla, and Gabair, too, where a Mac Ard was once Rí long ago. Most of our acolytes are Riocha. You would hear many famous names among them.”

  Jenna felt dizzy and nauseous. My great-da was a Mac Ard . . . Did Padraic Mac Ard know that? She glared at O’Deoradháin angrily. “You knew!” she said to him. “You knew and you didn’t tell me.”

  He was shaking his head, and the confusion in his face seemed genuine. “No, Jenna. I swear I didn’t. I knew the story, aye, but not the acolyte’s surname . . . All that happened forty years before I came here as a boy. It was just an old cautionary tale given to the acolytes and Niall’s last name was never mentioned. None of us were old enough to have known them, and the elder Bráthairs who might have been here then wouldn’t talk about it.”

  “They were told not to talk about it,” Máister Cléurach interrupted. “It was a foolish deed done by a naive young man that cost him his life, and what was important was that it not happen again, or we might lose one of the stones we knew were true clochs. What Niall stole was probably just a pebble and not a true cloch, and almost certainly not the cloch it was reputed to be.”

  “Maister,” O’Deoradháin said, “Jenna is the First. The Holder of Lámh Shábhála.”

  The Máister’s eyes widened in sudden realization and he frowned at her so harshly that Jenna took an involuntary step backward, her hand going to the cloch under her tunic. Her sleeve fell away, exposing the scars, and Máister Cléurach huffed once. He glanced back—the clerks were staring also, and he waved a hand at them. They scattered, leaving the room by the rear door as Máister Cléurach turned back to Jenna and O’Deoradháin. “Then . . .”

  “Aye, Máister,” O’Deoradháin told him. “The cloch Niall took was what it had been said to be.”

  “No . . .” Maister Cleurach protested, then his mouth snapped shut and his eyes narrowed. He seemed filled with a cold anger as he regarded Jenna again. “If you hold the cloch Niall Mac Ard stole from us, then Lámh Shábhála is not yours, but the Order of Inishfeirm’s.” He held out his hand, as if he expected her to place the stone there.

  Jenna returned his glare. Her arm throbbed as she pulled the cloch out and forced the fingers of her right hand to close around it. She shut her eyes momentarily: no, there were no other clochs na thintrí here other than the ones she and O’Deoradháin carried. “Lámh Shábhála is its own,” she told Máister Cléurach, “and it has chosen me.”

  His eyes stared greedily at the stone. “That is the cloch na thintrí I have had described to me. There is a record of it here: we have paintings and drawings of all the clochs na thintrí that were in our collection, and I recognize this—there was no other like it. So . . . plain.”

  “And your Máister at the time thought the stories about the cloch being Lámh Shábhála were false, or that it was at best a minor stone,” Jenna retorted. “That’s what my great-mam believed; that was what Niall had told her.”

  “Indeed, that was Máister Dahlga’s belief,” Máister Cléurach responded. “He wasn’t the most intelligent man and I heard him say that myself, but what else was he going to claim but that bit of wishful thinking? We thought the stone lost at sea—Niall’s body was found a few days later on the coast of Tuath Infochla and brought back here; we believed your great-mam had suffered the same fate until two years ago, when we learned that she’d actually lived, and that her son—Niall’s child—had left Tuath Infochla and traveled south. By
then we also knew that mage-lights would return soon, and so we sent out some of the Bráthairs to look for this offspring of Niall Mac Ard in case he still had the cloch that might be—” He stopped. His lips pressed together. “—that was Lámh Shábhála.”

  “You’re mistaken if you believe you have any claim to Lámh Shábhála,” Jenna told him. “Not after what my family’s gone through. Not after what I’ve gone through.” She looked at O’Deoradháin. “And I made a mistake coming here.” She turned on the balls of her feet, ready to leave.

  “Wait!” The note of panic in Máister Cléurach’s voice halted Jenna in midstep. “Why did you bring Lámh Sháb hála back here?”

  O’Deoradháin answered. “She came to learn, Máister. She came because I told her that you would teach her to be a cloudmage, a Siúr of the Order. She came because this was her family’s home and I told her that the Order would help her. If all that’s wrong, and I’ve unintentionally lied to Jenna, then you can have my resignation. I’m leaving with her.”

  O’Deoradháin’s rebuke put color in Máister Cléurach’s cheeks. His chest expanded as if he were about to shout something in return, then he let the breath out with a sigh. “I’m sorry,” he said simply. His hands opened in a gesture of apology, then fell to his sides. He sat on the edge of one of the desks, slumping. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “It’s just that it’s all gone, everything Máister after Máister worked for over the centuries. He knows—” Máister Cléurach pointed to O’Deoradháin—“but do you? Do you know why the Order of Inishfeirm came to be?”

  Jenna shook her head, silent, still half-turned away.

  “Come with me, then,” he said. He started to walk toward the door through which his clerks had gone, then stopped at the door when he realized that Jenna wasn’t following. “It will be easier if you see,” he told her. “I promise you that it’s not a trap.” He held the door open.

  Reluctantly, with another glance at O’Deoradháin, she went through.

  38

  The Vision of Tadhg

  THEY walked down a corridor of marble flags. Twin rutted hollows were worn in the hard stone, unpolished and stained: the marks of countless sandaled feet over countless years. Jenna realized then just how old the White Keep was. The halls of the Order were quiet; the conversations that drifted from the open doors they passed were whispered and hushed. Even the laughter she heard once had the sense of being muffled and held back. The occa sional acolytes and Bráthairs—no females, Jenna noticed—they met in their walk gave a quick bow of obeisance to the Máister, but Jenna felt their eyes on her, curious and wondering.

  They came finally to a set of ornate, twin doors of bronze, the metal cast with curling flourishes and spirals that Jenna knew all too well: the same lines that marked her arm. Máister Cléurach pushed the doors open and beckoned to her to enter.

  The room was large, with columns of polished marble in two rows down either side. At the end of the hall was a huge statue, easily twenty feet high, larger than any carving Jenna had ever seen: the figure of a man, elderly yet still vital. He was a seeming giant, his clóca white and flowing as if in some unseen breeze, his skin tanned, the eyes a startling blue under grayish, thin hair. He seemed to look directly at them, his expression solemn yet pleasant. His right arm was raised, the fingers curled into a fist as if he held something, and on the dome above him were painted the hues of the mage-lights, dancing in a black sky dotted with stars. For a moment, Jenna couldn’t breathe, staring at the colossus. “Go on,” Máister Cléurach told her. “Look closer . . .”

  Jenna walked down the wide corridor between the columns, her footsteps echoing loudly. The gaze of the statue seemed to follow her, watching her as she approached. It was only when she reached the railing set a few yards before the statue that its regard left her. “Go up to him,” Máister Cléurach said. “Touch him.” She could hear Máis ter Cléurach and O’Deoradháin following behind. She went to the statue, her head reaching only halfway to his knee. She spread her left hand on the leg, expecting to feel cold, painted marble.

  The leg was warm, and the flesh seemed to yield under her touch. She drew her hand back with a gasp, half-expecting the giant to be looking down at her with a sardonic grin. “That is the founder of our order and its first Máister—Tadhg O’Coulghan, Holder of Lámh Shábhála and the da of Severii O’Coulghan, who would be the Last Holder.” Jenna could hear amusement in Máister Cléurach’s voice. “And no sculptor carved this image of him. No, the chisel was Lámh Shábhála, the marble the stuff of the mage-lights, and the artist Severii. He made this image of his da with the dying power of the cloch in the last days of the mage-lights.” Máister Cléurach gave a soft laugh. “It startles all the acolytes in the same way, the first time they touch it. The statue has remained warm and soft and lifelike for over seven centuries now.”

  “I’ve never seen anything to equal it,” Jenna said. She touched the statue again, wonderingly. The detail was exquisite: the pores of the skin, the fine hair of the legs. She almost expected to feel the pulse of blood under her hand.

  “Tadhg saw that the clochs na thintrí were being used primarily as weapons, that the possession and holding of them was the cause of dissent and war and death.” Máister Cléurach continued, his voice reverberating from the dome above them. “He believed that they should be used not as weapons, but as tools. He and a few followers built the White Keep, using the powers of their clochs to create the buildings, erecting in a few years the work it would have taken hundred of laborers and artisans a dozen years or more to create. Yet as the Holder of Lámh Shábhála, he also could sense that the mage-lights were beginning to weaken, that the time was approaching when they would die completely and the power in the clochs would vanish with them. He was right, for that would happen in his son Severii’s holding. Tadhg felt that there must be a repository, a place where knowledge of the clochs and how to use them could be kept alive over the long centuries of their sleeping. That was the public task of the Order—to keep safe the old knowledge, to be the place where the Riocha and others would come to learn the ways of the cloudmage.”

  “The Order’s public task,” Jenna said, emphasizing the word, and Máister Cléurach nodded as if pleased.

  “Aye, and as you suggest, there was also a private task. Tadhg envisioned the Order gathering to it most of the clochs na thintrí after their magic was gone and forgotten. That, he knew, would be impossible at first, but as the years and decades passed and the clochs were given to sons and daughters, and then given to their sons and daughters, they would become pretty jewels, their power forgotten or dismissed. Then, Tadhg believed, they could be bought or acquired in other ways—when a tiarna sent his son or daughter here to be an acolyte of the Order, one condition was that the child be given the family’s Cloch Mór, should they possess one. And if that acolyte took the vows of the Order, then the cloch would be passed on not within the family but into the Order. As Tadhg perceived it, long centuries later when the Filleadh came, it would be those of the Order who held the majority of the Clochs Mór. It would be the Order that created the cloudmages. It would be the Order that ensured that the wars and strife and fighting didn’t happen again. It would be the Order that put together a better world, one where the clochs na thintrí were used not for death and fighting, but for life.”

  Jenna glanced up again at the statue, at the face of Tadhg, imagining him saying those words. It was easy to visualize that kindly face speaking. The words awakened an echo inside her. Yet . . . “That’s an admirable goal,” she said. “But not an easy one. And ‘better’ for whom? The Riocha? That’s who holds the clochs, that’s who send their children to the Order, so even if the clochs hadn’t been stolen, you’d have been making cloud-mages of Riocha, and war is exactly what they’ve always used them for.”

  Máister Cléurach took a long breath yet didn’t answer. “This way,” he said. “There’s more to see.”

  They went out from Tadhg’s Hall and b
ack to the corri dor. Máister Cléurach stopped before another door, this one simple, thick wood. “Try to open it,” he said.

  Jenna glanced at him, but went to the bronze handle of the door and pushed, then pulled. The door rattled in its frame but wouldn’t open. “It’s locked,” she said.

  “Keep trying.”

  “Máister,” O’Deoradháin interjected, but Máister Cléurach raised his hand, finger to lips.

  “It’s nothing you didn’t try, Ennis. Let her.”

  Jenna looked at O’Deoradháin; he shrugged. Jenna pushed and pulled again at the door, then again. The third time, there was a snap and sudden pain like quick sharp knives ran up her arm. “Ow!” she exclaimed, stepping back and shaking her hand, which still tingled.

  Máister Cléurach’s expression was solemn, but she thought she saw amusement in his eyes. “Most acolytes try the door at one time or another,” he said. “The truly persistent and curious are the ones who feel it, is that not so, Ennis?”

  “Aye, Máister,” O’Deoradháin answered. “ ’Tis.”

  Máister Cléurach placed his hand on the door. Jenna heard him start to speak, then he stopped and removed his hand. “You know the word, don’t you, Ennis?”

  O’Deoradháin took a step back, his eyes a bit wide. “No, Máister. How would I . . . ?”

  Máister Cléurach snorted derisively. “Don’t treat me like a fool, Ennis O’Deoradháin. I’m not as blind as some of you Bráthairs might think.”

  With a glance at the old man, O’Deoradháin put his hand against the wooden planks and spoke a soft word that Jenna could not hear. A violet light glimmered around his ringers. The door swung silently open. “The ward was placed on the door by Tadhg himself,” Máister Cléurach said. “And ’tis no less strong now than when I was shocked by it, many years ago.” He nodded toward O’Deoradháin. “The opening word is at best an open secret. Only the Máister, the Librarian, and the Keeper are supposed to know it, but acolytes and Bráthairs have sharp ears, and some elders aren’t as careful as they might have been. Eh, Ennis?”