“I do, Master.” And suddenly, overcome with shame, he could not look at the man a moment longer. What had he been thinking? How could he have doubted? He stared at the carpet, swallowing at the sudden tightness in his throat.
“You have some idea now, I think,” Saeral said, “just how powerful-and dangerous-our enemy can be.”
“Yes, Master.”
“Knowing is not enough, though. You still lack the power to stand against them. You will lack it until the Flames live in your heart. And now …” He sighed again. “Well, we do not know how long it will be before that can happen. You must do a penance. It will have to be severe.”
Eldrin said nothing, his chest tight and hot. He had served many a penance, but this would be beyond anything he had yet suffered. He hoped he could survive it.
But Saeral did not pronounce the punishment just yet. Instead he gestured for Eldrin to sit, not in the adjoining chair but on the carpet at his feet.
Eldrin did so eagerly, desperate to show his repentance and remorse.
“Now, my son,” the Father said, “tell me about it. What did they send you to find down there?”
Burning with shame, Eldrin studied his clasped fingers. A … a room,” he said in small, choked voice. A room that would prove…” He swallowed past the constriction in his throat. “Prove you were what they said you were.”
And did you find this room? This proof?” Saeral’s voice was mild, unaccusing.
Eldrin thought of that dark, awful cubicle, with its portrait and the curl of blond hair, and the evil runes on the wall, and in an instant his good feelings vanished, snuffed out like a candle flame. Suddenly his newly gained knowledge rushed back into his awareness, blotting out any notion of Saeral’s innocence, assuring him he was in grave danger. He felt the coldness even here, a thick, stifling sense of presence, not unlike the thing that had touched him in the Sanctum, pretending to be Eidon, but not. Fear bloomed in his breast.
“Eldrin? Look at me now?”
The command lifted his head and brought his gaze into line with Saeral’s before the words had time to register. He was vaguely aware of the amulet on Saeral’s throat blazing scarlet, but then the sense of warm comfort and safety returned to him, melting away all fear.
And what did you see in that room?” Saeral asked him.
“I saw…” He frowned remembering it all still, but as through a curtain of gauze. “I saw a dark cell … with a portrait of myself … my signet rings and evil markings on the wall. And an open casket.”
Saeral nodded, tapping his lip with a finger. “Very inventive of him. He’s good, I’ll give him that.” He fell silent, and after giving Eldrin time to mull those words said, “None of it was real, of course. You saw only what Meridon wanted you to see. He must have cast a spell over you while you were at the palace that blossomed when you had found the room.”
“Yes, of course.” That surely explained it. Though he could not at all remember when Meridon might have done such a thing.
“You’re sure he gave you nothing?”
That question again? But Eldrin considered carefully before finally shaking his head. “Nothing, Master.”
Saeral hmphed, then stood. “Well, you’d better see what it was you really found. Come along, lad.”
Together they descended back into the Sanctum, passing through the vesting chambers to a simple door opening onto a perfectly normal stairway lined with walls of mortared stone. At the bottom lay the now familiar intersection, but this time the short stair led to a curtained meditation cell. Like all the rest, its walls were simple stone and mortar with a single niche of holy flame. It stood empty save for an old straw pallet. No dark casket, no portrait, no curl of hair.
Saeral turned to him with a sad smile. “You see? It was an illusion.”
Eldrin shook his head. “It seemed so real. And I felt. I felt …”
Odd. He felt odd. Right now. As if somehow he were not really standing here in this doorway, but was lying on the floor back in Saeral’s chambers with his shoulders pressed to the carpet. He blinked at the vaulted ceiling in front of him. A rustle at his side drew his gaze to the dark bird standing there, watching him. The moment he saw its long-needled beak and searing white eye, he knew what it was.
With a cry of horror, he wrenched against the hands that held him, tried to lift his arm to knock the bird away, but someone else was holding down his wrist. The bird ruffled its feathers, then lifted its beak and plunged it into his forearm.
At the same moment a hand jerked up his chin and the vision vanished. The screaming pain in his arm became distant, unimportant. Once more he stood with Saeral in the underground meditation chamber.
“You can see there is nothing evil here,” Saeral said.
“Yes, Master.”
“It’s just another meditation cubicle, like tens of others.”
“Yes, Master.”
Saeral sighed. “You’ll have to be purged and cleansed of all vestiges of this evil, you know.”
Eldrin swallowed uneasily. Absently, he massaged his throbbing arm. The cell seemed to waver around him, the sudden disorientation making him dizzy.
Saeral’s eyes narrowed. “I can see it’s affecting you even now, trying to reassert itself. We should go.” He turned and Eldrin backed out of the doorway to let him pass, then stepped down the stair after him.
His arm throbbed again, fire blazing from his wrist to his shoulder. The room spun and sudden agony wrenched his middle, doubling him over, buckling his knees.
He was on the floor again, pressed to the carpet, the vaulted ceiling whirling overhead, the pain in his wrist like a knife shooting fire into his veins. He was making strange breathy sobs, writhing against the hands that pinned his shoulders, arms, and legs.
Oh, Eidon! What is happening? What are they doing to me?
Terror swelled till he thought he would burst with it, feeding off the pain and nausea and this awful cold heat, spreading now across his chest like an invading army.
“Don’t fight it, lad.” Saeral’s voice. “Don’t fight it and it’ll go easier.”
“I’ve never seen such a strong reaction,” someone said.
“He wasn’t ready.” Saeral again. “But we had no choice.”
Eldrin’s middle convulsed with terrible pain, and suddenly he was vomiting, vaguely aware of people jumping back, releasing his arms, shoving him onto his side as he retched and retched and retched forever.
A period of grayness followed, then an eternity of bizarre and awful nightmares, of thrashing on a hard stone bed, falling first into cold, briny depths, then into the fiery pit of Torments and back to the cold sea again, shivering and sweating and shivering again.
Time passed. During brief periods of lucidity he found himself lying on a stone pallet in a small room. A tongue of flame danced in the wall-niche just beyond his feet. Sometimes the walls were made of stone, sometimes of shimmering black ice. A man wiped his brow, tended the wound in his wrist, poured liquid between his lips. Sometimes afterward, his stomach knotted into painful cramps that spewed out whatever he’d ingested. Other times he simply fell back into the weird dreamworld of delirium and knew nothing again.
Occasionally he heard voices.
“Is he going to make it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are we going to do if he dies? We’ve told everyone he’s in seclusion.”
“We’ll deal with that when and if it happens.”
The light flickered. A door opened and closed. Water trickled between his lips. The voices returned.
“Should we try the feyna again?”
“No. Sensitized as he is, more spore would only kill him. I’ll just have to do it the hard way, little by little, step by step, until he gets used to it.”
“But that takes so much out of you. And if he keeps throwing you off…”
“You think he’ll outlast me?”
“Of course not. But what if he calls upon-“
&
nbsp; “He won’t.” There was a pause. When next the voice spoke it was closer, softer. “Deep down, you see, he really does want what we’re offering. I just have to make him see it.”
Eldrin turned the words in his mind, a deep concern pressing him to grasp their significance. But it was too hard. His mind couldn’t follow the thought long enough, and finally he let it drift away, returning to the familiar gray void.
Some time later a hand touched him. “Eldrin. Eldrin, attend me.”
Groggily Eldrin turned toward the voice.
Saeral faced him, seated on a three-legged stool beside the low pallet. Gently he helped Eldrin sit up, smoothed his long hair back over his shoulders, and finally lifted his chin to bring their eyes together. A soft red light flared from somewhere under Eldrin’s own chin, washing over the beloved face, filled now with tender compassion, filling him with warmth and wellbeing.
“Master,” he said, his voice faint and rasping from disuse. “It is … good to see you.”
Saeral smiled. “Come. Let us go outside for a while.” The High Father helped him to his feet, then led him into a warm summer’s eve on the shore of Whitehill Lake, where his grogginess fell completely away.
They settled on the sloping grassy bank, wavelets lapping softly at their feet. A nighthawk swooped down, then up. Fish kissed the water’s surface, setting off slowly expanding concentric circles. The scent of flowers and grass sweetened the air. Across the lake a couple walked arm in arm, and nearer a flock of white geese glided across the glassy water.
Leaning back on both elbows, Eldrin drew in a deep breath of contentment, feeling as if he stood on the threshold of something great and glorious.
“You have trusted me long, Eldrin,” Saeral said from where he lounged at Eldrin’s left. “Have I ever given you reason not to?”
“No, Master.” He watched three swans glide past, their elegant forms made double on the still water. Reality and reality’s reflection. It was hard to tell the difference. The thought seemed to carry great portent.
“I have loved you as your own father did not. You know that.”
“Indeed I do, Master.” A tinge of the old bitterness ruffled his tranquility.
“If only you knew how I ached at the torment you suffered at your brother’s hands, the injustices you were forced to bear. Your father knew, of course, but whenever I addressed the matter, he refused to do anything about it. Said it would make you strong. But it only drove you away.”
“Yes,” Eldrin agreed. The bitterness deepened, sharpened. Old memories, long repressed, marched through his mind, stirring up old anger and that deep, burning frustration.
“It’s no wonder you hated him.”
Hated him. Yes.
“Hatred is wrong, of course. It feeds the darkness. But you can have redress. Eidon is a god of justice. He’s promised he will judge the enemies of those who serve him.”
An image of Gillard kneeling at Eldrin’s feet superceded those of the past, intoxicatingly vivid. Eldrin stretched out his hand, touched the fine white hair on his brother’s head, and felt him flinch. What bitterness must churn now in that massive chest. He could almost taste the bile rising to the back of his brother’s throat. To have to kneel and murmur words of submission to the one he had so long discounted and disdained must be all but choking him. Perhaps he even felt a measure of fear.
Eldrin smiled. Yes. That was nice. Especially the fear.
“It will happen, Eldrin.” Saeral’s voice came quietly, fervent with conviction. “We can bring it about as surely as we live. Justice can be yours.”
The desire for that reality surged within him. Oh yes, he wanted it. More than anything in life, he wanted it.
Saeral’s face filled his field of view. Beloved face. Trusted face. The gray eyes seemed to suck him into them. “Join us, Eldrin. Come to us and know his power. He wants you just as much as you want him. Wants you never to be spurned and lonely again.”
He felt the master’s nearness-his warmth, the sweet wash of his breath, the pressure of his arms around his shoulders, embracing him as a father embraced a son, protecting, guiding, comforting. Eldrin relaxed into it, hungry for that approval and acceptance.
And then he smelled the roasting grain, felt the cold pressure close about him, felt that now familiar tendril touch his mind. Again he recoiled in instinctive revulsion. But not so violently as before, for he still held to that vision of the promise it had offered.
The pressure tightened around his flesh, and the tendril began to penetrate, worming slowly, carefully into his soul. Awash with an intensifying sense of safety and comfort, dazzled by a renewal of that vision of justice, for a moment he tolerated it.
But only a moment. As before, his aversion kindled swiftly, fueling a wild burst of claustrophobia, desperate to rid himself of this grasping, clinging thing. He jerked away, and his soul convulsed in a frantic cry for help.
Eidon, I know this isn’t you! Help me! Deliver me!
A flash of white enveloped him, and for the briefest of moments there was pain, an alien rage, a sense of ravening hunger prowling the borders of his soul. The breath crushed out of him; fire and ice rolled through him. Reality writhed and bucked. Then he lay again on the stone pallet in his small cell-limp, gasping, and blessedly alone.
C H A P T E R
8
Eldrin awakened from what seemed to be his first normal period of sleep in a long, long time. For once his head was clear, his ears weren’t ringing, and he could actually string more than two thoughts together at a time. Even so, staring at the black glass-slag walls of the small, windowless room in which he lay, he could not at first imagine where he was.
Some sort of meditation cell, he guessed. In the lower levels of the Keep from the look of the walls. This obsidian slag must be the reality, then, not the stone and mortar Saeral had tried to—
Saeral.
It all came back in an instant, tumbling through him in a chaotic wave, devoid of order or logic-the disembodied voices, the struggle in the High Father’s chambers, the black cell with its bizarre niche, the pain in his wrist, the cold, grasping presence wrapping around his soul … The memory roared through him, pounding away the bulwarks of denial and leaving in its wake the gut-wrenching acceptance of truth: Saeral had been using him. From the beginning, he’d been nothing but a pawn, the puppet by which Saeral meant to grab the Crown. All the affectionate pats, the sly, twinkling winks, the words of praise and comfort and approval, the expressions of piety-all false, the snares by which the prey was caught.
He stared at the ceiling’s red-lit surface, and something broke inside him. His throat tightened and tears blurred his vision, trickled down the sides of his face.
He had believed Saeral understood him, that he was the only one besides Carissa who knew how much Gillard’s abuse had tormented him, the only one who could see his humiliating inaptitude for soldiering and accept it, encouraging Eldrin to accept it as well and focusing on his strengths instead: academics, religion, the arts. Many a winter day they had passed by the fire, discussing the relative merits of the latest play or the technique of some old master of painting. Sometimes they argued theology or matched wits at the game of uurka or harmonized in duets of lirret and pipe.
He had accorded Saeral the love and respect he had not been able to give his own father, trusting him, emulating him, revering him. It was Saeral who had planted and nurtured the desire to take holy vows, Saeral who had convinced him he was not like the other Kalladornes, was not meant for a life of violence but rather one of righteousness and purity.
And it was all a lie.
A sound in the hallway brought him back to the present, and he remembered that he was a prisoner. He ran through his most recent memories again, hoping desperately they were more nightmare than real. That bird, driving its beak into his forearm—
He sat up, sick with horror as his fingertips danced over the raised ovoid scar just above his left wrist, a scar that had not been t
here before. A moment later he discovered the amulet at his throat, the woven metal strands of its neckpiece pressing tightly against his skin. He fumbled for a clasp but found nothing, as if the thing had been fused by magic around his neck. It was stout enough it wouldn’t be pulled off with bare hands.
Another memory goaded his rising fear. That cold, alien presence that was the real Saeral. It must be one of Moroq’s rhu’ema, though how it had penetrated to the highest level of Mataian service, Eldrin could not begin to imagine. Nor did he try. What mattered now was that the thing was here, and it wanted his soul and body for its own.
The notion of being a puppet suddenly acquired new and more sinister meaning.
“Plagues?” He raised a trembling hand to his forehead, feeling sick again. “I have to get out of here.”
But the door had no inside latch. With a hand braced against its polished wood, he stood there, fear twisting in his middle, a hairsbreadth from exploding into panic. Think! He told himself. Control yourself and think!
He turned back, gaze fixing on a pewter flagon and cup standing on the low table beside his pallet. From the talk he’d overheard, they meant to wear him down. They’d want him docile, he suspected, as unresisting as they could get him. He snatched up the flagon, ignoring the sudden awareness of his burning thirst, and sniffed the contents.
Sure enough, the acrid scent of hockspur stung his nostrils. But not hockspur alone. There was something else with it, a faint sour scent … ah … redhart. To keep him thirsty, so he’d drink more hockspur should he happen to awaken. There was probably even a little badger tail in the mix to dull his wits.
Good. His attendants would not expect him to be awake and alert, and they’d be counting on the hockspur to quiet any notions of escape. Evidently Saeral knew nothing of his resistance to the herb. He just might be able to surprise whoever came to check on him.
Now. How was he going to do it?
He fingered the belt at his waist thoughtfully, then abandoned the idea and took up the flagon instead. The liquid splatted on the slick floor as he poured a bit of it out. Then he lay facedown on the stone slab, one leg braced against the floor, head turned toward the door, hair pushed back out of his way. He draped one arm on the floor, fingers wrapped loosely around the flagon’s neck.
Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) Page 9