by Carol Berg
Pleasure seeped through me, prickling my skin like a feather. Smell is the most vivid of the senses, the most evocative of memory . . . of obscene pleasure. I remembered the day of my change. . . .
I/we stood inside the whirling oculus, my body on fire with the joining, with the tearing down of my mind’s walls, with the infusion of darkness like acid in my veins, with the impossible bloating of my power. As my human eyes were torn away, our heightened senses encompassed all of Ce Uroth: the sounds of battle and torment, the feel of the lash on recalcitrant flesh, and the smells. . . .
Call them what you will. The smells of Zhev’Na are the savory incense of victory: the fragrance of the slave pens where D’Arnath’s grovelers lie rotting in their own filth . . . the sweet perfumes of blood and putrid, broken flesh after a battle exercise . . . the exudation of fear that flows with the sweat of the damned—the Zhid, the Drudges, the Dar’Nethi, all who stand in subservience to us. The smells hang thick on the hot desert air. A heady brew. Taste it! Let the stench fill our nostrils, seep into our pores, for this is our desire, and nothing . . . nothing . . . will stand in its way.
Pleasure . . . such groaning, writhing pleasure in the scent.
The withered hand caressed my mind. Welcome to your new life, Dieste. Survey your/our domain through the cold, blue-white gems that perfect your sight. See the camps of the soulless ones as far as these immortal eyes can travel, leagues upon leagues beyond the horizon, tents fluttering in the hot wind like the wings of locusts, swarms ready to descend upon the fields of Avonar and devour them. What delight it is to turn a weakling into a perfect warrior—to rip away his soul and eat it, to lick the blood from his cringing flesh, to crush the softness and hear his screams fade into whimpers of helplessness, to grind the bones of his life under your foot, and build them up again into a creature of your own design. To see a man turned, so that a flick of your thoughts will cause him to mutilate his wife of fifty years, or to whisper commands that force a woman to strangle her newborn infant and relish her infamy. What can compare with power over the souls of your enemy?
Push harder. Keep looking. What do you seek here in the pleasures of the past?
In the tents are the thousands of our commanders, each one a weapon to be controlled, each one ready to lead his troops into battle to devour the soft lands, to wrest the final victory from the blight of dead D’Arnath’s grip. The war plans are drawn . . . centuries in the making. The circle of D’Arnath’s control has grown steadily smaller and soon it will be obliterated. The power is at hand. The boy/I, our Fourth, will bring the power, for he is D’Natheil’s spawn, Lord of Avonar and all Gondai, Lord of Chaos. He/I will fit the key in the slot and unlock the fountain of discord that will be our feast, that we may take our fill of the horrors we feed on, so that our will may be unleashed upon every world. . . .
Further. Deeper. Go back before the hours of our joining. Parven of the amethyst eyes sits his black stone chair in the Hall of Thrones, the shapeless stars cold in the void overhead. Without voice, he speaks, and I remember. . . .
Today’s assault . . . the Dinaje Cliffs, the last stronghold of the Dar’Nethi’s western penetration. Take the cliffs and they have no shelter, no refuge. On the dune seas we can pick them off at leisure . . . the bodies sun and desert do not devour first. The decisions have been made, the warnings sent, the avantir made ready. . . .”
The avantir . . . remember . . . broad as a tabletop, a bronze mime of the land from mountain to watercourse, from plain to pebble. . . . How is it used to touch the thousands . . . to direct the commanders? I remember a battle morn. . . .
So which of us shall play the music of the avantir this day? Sister Notole? No? Well, indeed you will have occupation enough with the storm—a charming notion to complicate a battle. You, Brother Ziddari, are you ready to play your own sweet music of war after so long away? I’ll guide you . . . the plan is set . . . just touch the device here and here. . . . We’ll bring the boy here soon enough and teach him how to play. He’s done well in the desert. Charmingly cruel. Now, brother, draw the power through the Great Eye and into the avantir, so it echoes in the Vault of the Skull. . . .
The avantir was so clean . . . requiring inordinate power, of course, but making it so easy to bring death in a thousand forms. Always precise as I/we wished.
Now to the other matter . . . D’Arnath and his child. ... D’Arnath the Tormenter . . . the Imprisoner . . . the Unjust . . . vengeance everlasting . . .
Deeper. Not the man himself, but his child . . . the girl . . .
... Could we have but made him immortal, so he could know his pain forever . . .
. . . He knew, brother . . . his petty triumphs were never more than ash in his mouth . . .
. . . Even when he dwells in the realms of death, the King of Pride shall feel our victory . . . such hatred as we bear cannot be bounded . . . to rape his world is to rape his child . . . to use his child, to ravage her, is to ravage him . . . destroy him. . . .
Time . . . time . . . hurry . . . What did I/we do with her? Think of the girl . . . the captive . . . go back, if you must . . . all the way back to the beginning. . . .
We have her! The pride of this king’s blood is too stout a liquor for his children’s veins . . . it makes them fools. Thou art wise, O King, to keep thy sons close. . . . But this soft one will rend thy heart and mind and soul. Keep her safe, Brother Ziddari . . . for now. If he refuses to bargain, then we shall force her to live under the knife. . . .
... Damnable insolent man . . . if he will not give, then we must raise the wager to induce him. . . .
We flaunt her . . . bargain her . . . but the proud bastard will not bend. . . .
Everlasting be thy torment, King of Deserts, Prince of Rubble, Sovereign of Corpses! So be it! We will degrade thy innocent . . . use her talents . . . break her . . . destroy her . . . but thou shalt take no comfort from her death. We will bury her, but she will yet live, undying for as long as we breathe the air of this prisoning world you have left us. We shall unmake her and remake her in our image, our daughter, not thine. Woe and ruin will be thine only grandchildren. If knowledge could stretch to five thousand years, thou wouldst know she was yet in our hands . . . our undying captive, subject to our whim . . . Before and after thy death, even until the world’s ending, thou shalt curse the day she was conceived for the reiving of her. . . .
“Come back. Leave it, son. It’s been far too long. Can you hear me?”
The voice grated at my ears like a buzzing mosquito, and I slapped it away, cursing the interruption. My hand met solid flesh. “How dare you interfere with me?” I roared. “You will be a smear on the face of the deep!”
Lamplight pierced the darkness, glaring in my face. On the floor by my feet sprawled a man grimacing, a rapidly darkening bruise on his forehead. But his eyes did not leave my face. “What is your name?” he said. “Speak your name.”
“My name . . .” I was trembling, my body clenched into such a knot that my teeth ground against each other, and my skin felt like to rip. Easy to see why my fist throbbed. The room wavered and shifted. . . . No black glass floor . . . no columns of ice . . . no man-high torches . . . just soft chairs, green carpet on a tile floor, a brick hearth with its spitting fire, and an injured man. . . .
“Demonfire, Father!” I uncurled myself and started to get up.
“Answer him!” Paulo stood beside me, something . . . a poker . . . raised over my head. “Say it.”
I held up my hands. “Gerick . . . of course, my name is Gerick.” And as I said it, the world settled a little further into its more familiar pattern.
My father’s head sagged to the floor.
“Stars of night, Father! Forgive me.”
Paulo heaved a sigh, threw down his poker, and together we lifted my father into his chair. I was not much help, as I could not stop shaking. “I’m sorry. Your head . . . we need something. . . . Gods, I’m sorry.” My tongue fumbled at finding the right words.
“I’m all right.” I sank to the floor at his feet, trying to regulate my breathing and slow my heart.
Paulo poured wine for my father. “Do you want something?” he asked me. “Ale? Saffria?”
I shook my head. Nothing would taste proper or settle for a while. I just wanted to get this over with. “There was a place in Zhev’Na called the Vault of the Skull . . .”
The Vault was a stone chamber buried under the fortress, I told them. It lay close to the Chamber of the Oculus, where they kept the Great Eye, the largest of the spinning brass rings. In the vault were kept the Lords’ greatest artifacts of power: the three smaller versions of the oculus, one for each of the Lords, a large bronze map of Gondai called an avantir, and the gold and brass earrings. Every Zhid wore an earring, its sharp spike thrust through the earlobe and locked securely on the other side. I had worn one from the day I pledged my childish fealty to the Lords, though mine, of course, had been unique. Jewels of ruby, emerald, and amethyst linked me directly, constantly, to the minds of the Lords until the day I became one with them.
But in the Vault of the Skull were hundreds of the common ones: the gold that were given to the commanders, and the brass for the ordinary warriors. Everyone had seen the earrings worn by the Zhid, but no one in Avonar could have known they were linked to the Lords through the avantir, a broad, cast-bronze map of Gondai that was played by the Lords as a musician might play his harp.
Paulo had brought a damp towel for my father to hold on his forehead. Regrettably, I had no scrap of sorcery left in me to chill the thing and help keep down the swelling.
My father leaned forward in his chair. “So they used the oculus to gather the power, focus and enlarge it, and then used the power to manipulate this avantir.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Everything necessary for the Zhid to know would be communicated from an avantir through the earrings: the battle plan, the tactics, who should be taken prisoner, who was to be turned. Everything.”
My father grimaced as he shifted the wet towel. “But we always examined the earrings when we took prisoners and never found the slightest enchantment on them. We thought them only a talisman, like a battle flag or a badge on a tunic.”
“There would have been no trace,” I said, shivering. Paulo grabbed a blanket and threw it over my shoulders. I felt no warmth from the fire. “As soon as a warrior was captured, the connection to the avantir was severed. It’s why you could never learn anything valuable from a captive Zhid. They really didn’t know much of anything. Only the Lords and their generals knew.”
“And when we destroyed the Lords . . .”
“. . . all connections would have been severed. The oculus that Radele used to control me—Notole’s—was destroyed at the same time. Mother saw it happen. Witnesses have told Ven’Dar that the fortress crumbled at the same moment. The temple, the statues, the Great Oculus . . . supposedly all the magical artifacts were destroyed along with it. That makes sense. The statues and the Great Oculus could not have outlasted the Lords. Their substance was so intimately bound with the Lords’ existence.”
The black stone statues of the enthroned Lords had been so large three men could have stood in the carved palm of Ziddari’s hand. I could still feel what it was like to inhabit the one made to my likeness . . . the huge, heavy, solid sensation, as if my bones were granite, my flesh impenetrable. The sense of permanence . . . of power . . .
When my nails bit into my flesh, I forced my fists to unclench.
“So what does it mean that these things are happening?” said my father, watching me. Worried.
I could not stop trembling, nor could all the wine in Avonar have diluted the foul taste in my mouth. “They had three avantirs, Parven’s the master. At least one of them must have survived, and someone out there knows what it is and has power enough to use it. You have to understand—that would be a great deal of power, equivalent to that the Lords derived from using the Great Oculus.”
“Earth and sky!” My father stared at me. Paulo’s eyes were on me, too.
“It’s not me doing it this time,” I said, smiling at them. A weak effort it seemed, as their shocked expressions didn’t change. “I promise. And it’s not D’Sanya. I went looking for the answer to her, too . . .”
At every echo of D’Arnath’s name, I had been filled with hatred so bitter I could have clawed the sun from the sky. The Lords would have eaten the king’s flesh if they could have gotten their hands on him. By the time I was one with them, the malevolence that filled their minds at the mention of him left no room for other thoughts.
“. . . and so I had to go back to the beginning to remember the story,” I said. “When D’Arnath’s warnings were proven right on the night of the Catastrophe, the Lords focused all their fury and frustration on him, and when the king set himself and his heirs the sworn duty to stand between them and the power they craved—the hunger for power made insatiable by their workings—they swore everlasting revenge. And so they set out to trap one of his children.”
I closed my eyes and allowed myself to believe. “Every element of D’Sanya’s story was confirmed. Her year of safety while they tried to bargain her. The two years of abuse and degradation . . .”
She had told me only part. They had treated her like an animal, using every humiliation a depraved mind could think of, every demeaning task, constant taunting . . . in a systematic attempt to destroy her identity . . . to destroy her soul. That she had survived with so much human feeling . . . so much compassion . . . such appreciation for beauty . . . and any power at all . . . was a wonder beyond telling.
“. . . and then they buried her in a stone chamber and did not let her die, planning to wake her every few years, allow her to remember who and where she was, and force her to do whatever they desired before burying her again. They wanted D’Arnath to go to his death knowing that his child would live forever in torment. Father, she was their prisoner. . . .”
Their prisoner, not their pupil, not one of them like me. I hoped, beyond anything I had ever hoped, that I remembered truth.
“And what of the thousand years since? Did they carry out that plan?”
“That . . . I don’t know . . . I presume they did. You woke me up.”
CHAPTER 18
By the time my father was halfway through his reply to Ven’Dar’s letter, telling him of my conclusions, he was asking me to repeat everything I’d said. The third time he scratched out an entire paragraph and asked to whom he was writing this letter, I took the pen from his hand, helped him to bed, and promised to write the letter myself so that Paulo could take it back to Avonar first thing the next day.
“Do you think the knot on his head will heal, here in this place?” Paulo asked.
“I hope so. But I don’t know whether it’s my fist or this place that’s affected him tonight.”
“I’ve seen it. Some nights when I come, I can’t get him to talk at all at first,” Paulo said, shaking his head. “Most nights, after I’ve been here a while, he gets back in his head. But sometimes not.”
“Now I’m more sure of D’Sanya, I’ll ask her about it,” I said.
If I could ever persuade D’Sanya to talk about sorcery, I had a number of things to ask her. My mother had written to ask about D’Sanya’s true talent, and I wasn’t familiar enough with most of the hundred talents even to make a guess. The Lords’ memories had told me only that they planned to discover her skills and find a proper use for them. Had anyone ever hired a sorrier spy?
Paulo returned to his place in front of the fire and, with the ease I had always envied, was soon snoring. My hand steady again, I wrote the letter for Ven’Dar, sealed it with my father’s ring, and then wrapped the blanket about my shoulders and thought about sleeping. It was impossible.
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An avantir had survived the Lords’ death. That was hard to swallow. But I had told Ven’Dar everything I knew. I had done what I could, and survived the remembering. He and D’Sanya would have to deal with it as best they could. That should be reassuring.
Of course I dreaded what was to come with my father if we declared our mission satisfied. But I could not wish him to linger here as he was. Was it the hospice enchantment that had such terrible effect on him, or was it that by living here he had abandoned the Way of his ancestors? Having read his manuscript, I could not but think the latter as likely as the former. That same could be true of all the hospice residents. The Way was more important to them than I’d ever understood.
And D’Sanya? Though concern for my father and the news of the avantir dampened my elation, I treasured the discovery I had made. The Lords were dead. Their plan for her had come to naught. The power of life she held was stronger than they had ever imagined. I believed her. Tomorrow held the promise of the future. We had come so far already, the rest would take care of itself.
So, why could I not sleep?
As I stared at the dwindling fire, loathsome images swirled in my head like the scum stirred up from the bottom of a very old cistern. Hoping to make them settle again, I focused my mind on pure flame . . . on clean nothingness. . . .
A sharp stab through my earlobe. Whispers . . . Power awaits you, young Lord. Dip your hand in the blood; the slave doesn’t need it any more. Taste it . . . the world exists to feed your hungers. . . .
I jerked awake, shuddering, the flat coppery taste lingering on my tongue. No good. An empty head would not do. So think of something else. Something beautiful. My eyes sagged again, and I imagined D’Sanya riding. . . .
. . . her hair streaming out behind her, cheeks flushed with the wind and the joy of her freedom . . . I caught her, and we laughed and ran across the garden, the shower driving us inside. The rain hammered down as we sat by the fire, the flames made more beautiful by their reflection in her eyes. I inhaled her scent, of new grass and clean air. Felt the comforting weight of her head in the hollow of my shoulder, and her soft fingers as they traced the line of my jaw and then reached for my hands. . . . No, she mustn’t see. Where are my gloves? Gods, no! She turned my palms up, ready to kiss them. But instead she pulled away, fear and revulsion twisting her face. “You’re one of them . . . one of them . . . one of them. . . .”