by Jim Grimsley
In this way a long time passed, and I became a master of many strange arts. I could speed my heartbeat or slow it, I could control the circulation of blood through my various limbs, I could scan my memory for a particular moment, I could (if I wished) monitor the digestion of my food, the formation of urine or waste. These are functions that the mind does control, whether we are aware of this control or not. By the time the lake women were ready for me to proceed to other studies, I knew myself maybe more thoroughly than I wanted to. Often I found myself dazed by the ceaselessness of these processes, as if my body were a continual jangle.
Vella understood my uneasiness in this regard, and once, near Illyn’s nightfall, while we were drinking the fragrant tea she had brewed, she said to me, “One of the arts you will need to learn soon is the art of forgetting.”
“Pardon me, ma’am? I don’t understand.”
She broke apart one of the sweet white cakes that constituted the mainstay of my diet while I was at the lake. “Now that you know so much about how the mind works, you’ll need to forget it until you need the knowledge. The hidden parts of your mind can go on causing your heart to beat and regulating your breathing without any help from you.”
“I do get dizzy from watching it all sometimes.”
She taught me this lesson herself, and showed me the usefulness of some things I had already learned, including ways to prevent or cure sickness in myself — including the correct method for preventing the fever that had nearly killed me following my first visit to Illyn.
Vissyn taught me different arts and sometimes took me riding as relief from the stillness of my other lessons. She could ride in shadow, hidden from mortal sight, and she could multiply a horse’s speed by her craft, something I would learn, she said. When I asked her, innocently, what circle of power she was in, she simply smiled and refused to answer. I had a feeling most of the tricks she showed me were not things I could learn from the sixth level, and I was right. But in her company I saw Cunuduerum again, and we rode to Nevyssan’s Point, the northernmost part of Arthen. Once we rode to the outskirts of Drii, a fair city of three concentric walls high in the mountains, and I watched the Venladrii moving along the cobbled streets, wearing their cloaks of green or silver cloth, speaking in their apocopated language, word flowing into word almost indistinguishably. This was the only time we strayed from Arthen, and Vissyn was careful to keep us hidden.
Once she took me to see Inniscaudra, the Winter House. We did not ride into the vast stone citadel but stopped at the crest of one of the neighboring hills. The House rises from the summit of a crested hill named Vath Invaths, where scented elgerath hangs from tree to tree in sweeping festoons, and in the season when I first saw the place, the vine blooms in explosions of rich color: crimson, azure, saffron and rich violet. Atop all this sits the Winter House, white walls shining, tall turrets reaching higher than the surrounding hillsides and over everything soaring the High Place, Ellebren Tower. The House is broad, its many wings spread across the hilltop, its outermost walls obscuring the lower floors from sight. The deepest parts of Inniscaudra reached to the heart of the earth below, Vissyn told me, and when I asked her what was in those parts, she tossed her golden hair and with glittering eyes described the treasure rooms, the armories, the barracks where an army of many thousands might sleep indoors. This was the House that No Man Built, and in the turreted rooms and all along the grounds had wakened the Forty Thousand long ago, on the first morning of our kind. I had never seen anything bigger than the market-house in Mikinoos or the mill on East River; the sight of this grand sprawling palace took my breath away.
“Have you ever been to the High Place?” I asked.
“No,” Vissyn said, “That wouldn’t be a good thing for me to do.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not a power of this world,” she said. Her expression had suddenly become very serious. “I was once, but not any longer. For me to stand there would be blasphemous, and I would become like Drudaen Keerfax.”
“But you don’t use Ildaruen when you make magic, how could you be evil like him?”
“Don’t misunderstand, Jessex. Neither Wyyvisar nor Ildaruen is good or evil, any more than light or dark is good or evil. There have been good magicians who use Words of either tongue. What has happened to Drudaen is a sickness that comes to the ones who live so long.”
I studied the Tower again, slender and shining, its highest summit crowned with silver, tatters of cloud floating past. Even then I wondered if I would ever stand there. After a moment I asked, “Is Yron a power of this world? Can he stand on the High Place?”
When I watched her for her answer, for the first time I saw doubt in her. She said, after consideration, “We assume so. Otherwise why would he come?”
Why indeed? Shaken by her apparent uncertainty, I asked no more questions that day.
For the most part Vissyn took me on these rides for relief from the rigors of training; the arts in which she was most knowledgeable were related to riding, travel, survival in harsh environments, and transformations, all of which were too advanced for an apprentice of the sixth level. I envied the ease with which she concealed the mechanics of these applications: I never once heard the whispered, telltale Word in my mind, never saw the relevant gesture with which she moved power.
When the Sisters deemed me sufficiently skillful in the control of my own thought, my training turned to other directions.
To reach the Fifth Circle from the Sixth, one must master the deep magics — the dual trance, insinging, power-singing and patterned movements, including movements into spin. My teachings in these arts began without fanfare.
In the deep magics one learns to use the control of the mind one gained in earlier training — to see with the mind alone, to transfer thought, to release memory and, finally, to free portions of the spirit from the body for travel or work on other levels. One can also think of this as compaction, as moving the awareness into a smaller space, in order to draw more energy from it; though in fact what we are speaking of is a smaller duration of time, since awareness exists in time alone. This duality of expansion out of the body and compaction within the body is the crucial difference between applications of the fifth level and those of the lower circles. A magician who can encompass this duality, who can leverage the spirit free of the flesh, can work magic from both levels at the same time — or from three or sometimes four levels — and thus will always have the advantage over the magician who can work only from the body, in the visible world.
The beginning of these arts is the same as the beginning of nearly every part of magic: control of breathing, relaxation and the cleansing of the mind.
I spent uncountable hours gazing into the glowing heart of fire, emptying my mind of thought and letting it remain empty, relaxing control of muscles one by one, while Commyna or Vella monitored my progress, making certain that I did not lose my grip on the involuntary organs. Apprentices who attempt to enter a deep trance-state without supervision have been found dead of the attempt rather often, their hearts stopped cold, their spirits unable to reenter lifeless flesh. I had no desire to take such risks, and the Sisters found me to be cheerfully obedient and very attentive to instruction.
Trance-state is not hard to master. Seeing with the mind is more difficult, and the twin art of compression of the awareness and working out of the body is harder still. I quickly learned to enter trance-state, at first using fire as an aid to concentration, later using small gems for the same purpose, and finally learning to go into trance with no aid at all. At the end of one of these training sessions, I returned to consciousness to find Commyna watching me with a baleful expression, holding in her fingertips the gem I had used as an aid. I asked what was wrong, and she answered with another question. Lifting the gem slightly — a small red stone, set in gold and dangling from a delicate chain — she asked, “What does this remind you of?”
I studied the gem again, and the chain. The stone was pretty, strikin
g fire from sunlight, and the chain seemed well made. “It doesn’t remind me of anything,” but as soon as the words left my mouth the image of another necklace came to me, the one I kept hidden. That stone was the same color as this one, and the stone the same weight.
Commyna watched me with keen eyes, noting every flicker of feeling that touched my features. “Tell me what you just remembered.”
I felt helpless, hearing again my mother’s voice, Let no one see it, ever, as she handed the locket to me. “It’s like something my mother wore once. That’s all.”
She eyed me suspiciously, and finally said, “Are you sure there’s nothing you’re not telling me?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
She let the subject drop, but she was clearly dissatisfied with my answer. I hid my relief by returning to meditation, and after a moment of hesitation Commyna began to give me the usual round of instructions and tutorial abuse in Wyyvisar. She was harsher than was warranted by my efforts, I thought, and I wondered if I were really the simpleton she seemed that day to think me, or if she were disturbed by whatever intuition had prompted her to question me about the pendant.
In the press of events that followed, the incident was forgotten.
One afternoon at Illyn, in the midst of another exercise in the cleansing of the mind, while I was in sixth level trance an image of my mother unfurled.
I was not expecting it and had not been warned that any vision might come to me, nor was I, to my knowledge, using a different application in maintaining the trance. I had managed to enter the deep state without the aid of any jewel this time, but I had even managed that trick before. My mind was clear. I ceased chanting in Wyyvisar and was gradually slowing my breathing, carefully, still feeling the slight pressure of Vella’s fingertips on my wrist pulse. The image came to me clearly, my mother on horseback in country I had never seen before, colorful fields, golden, violet and bright green, circular houses with red roofs. My mother wore garments of gray and a drab cloak of the same color. A hood drawn over her head. The horse she rode was a well-fed roan mare wearing a criss-crossed bridle of a type I had never seen. My mother held the reins in her hands though her wrists were chained together with links of bronze. Riders flanked her on either side.
I saw this as if I were hovering above the riders, a party of a dozen altogether; yet, when I wished, I could see her face as clearly as if we were facing each other across the dinner table. She was sick and weak. She had no notion I was anywhere near her, and I could feel fear radiating from her, along with deep anger. In her eyes was a wildness that had never belonged to the mother I remembered.
Since I was in trance-state I simply catalogued these different elements of the vision; one does not bring feelings into the trance. I watched the party of riders for some time. Something warned me not to question what I was seeing but simply to catalog as many elements as I could. The riders were wearing white cloaks. The figure at the head of the party, also wearing white, was a woman, and I gradually realized I had seen her before as well, raising her arm to call down lightning the morning I entered Arthen with Uncle Sivisal. She was a milk-skinned beauty in this light, arms covered with jeweled bracelets, green eyes flashing, white tunic clinging to her spare figure. She was not aware of me, though I could feel her power. Strange words formed in my hearing. Before the vision faded I saw, in the distance before them, a gray-walled fortress on a hillside, a red-domed tower rising beyond the turreted walls.
When the vision was gone, awareness of my breathing returned to me, and after that came pressure, more and more insistent, Vella’s fingertip on my wrist, and her voice calling “Jessex! Jessex!” along with the Wyyvisar command that brings an end to trance.
She was leaning forward, gripping both my wrists in her hands, calling the Words urgently over and over. When I opened my eyes she said, “Praise YY,” touching my forehead with the back of her hand. “You were too deep,” she said, when I gave her the sign that means one is oneself enough for conversation. “Your breathing slowed to nothing and your heartbeat was gone.”
“I saw my mother, riding with a party of white-cloaked riders.”
When she understood what I had said she became utterly silent. For all I know she may have been reading my mind. “You’re telling the truth.”
I told her everything I had seen, every detail. She listened without responding. When I was done, she said, “I’d better tell this to my sisters.”
“Have I done something wrong?”
She stood, gracefully, for such an ample woman. She carefully brushed grass from her skirt. “No.” But she would say nothing else till she had brought me to Commyna and Vissyn, who were under the duraelaryn in the meadow, Vissyn working the broadloom and Commyna spinning thread. Both watched us approach with some surprise; my lesson had just begun and here we were returning. Commyna watched calmly as Vella built up the fire, sending me to the lake to fill the teapot. I could hear them talking as I returned.
Commyna blandly directed me to tell her what had happened, and she and Vissyn listened, broadloom and spinning wheel falling silent. I had learned to give a plain narrative and did, ending with the red-domed fortress. A moment’s silence ensued.
Vissyn broke it. “Well, that’s something, isn’t it?”
Commyna watched me sharply. “You’ve had no reports from the Prince’s spies that warned you about any of this?”
“The last report I had was before Kirith Kirin left camp. Soldiers took my mother to the Queen’s palace on Kmur. They told me she was sick but no one knew what was wrong with her.”
Vella spoke in a hush. “Commyna, I think you should tell him everything.”
“So do I.” Vissyn stepped away from the loom.
Commyna watched me. Finally she said, “I plan to. Sit down, Jessex. Sit down all of you. Pass me a cup of tea.”
Vella poured the tea and handed it to her. Finally Commyna said, “There’s no question but that you’ve seen a true thing. This morning my sisters and I noted in our own far-seeing that Julassa Kyminax was riding north in the Kellyxa in the same country you’ve described. The red-domed fortress is Pemuntnir, where the Osirii and the Osar fork. Those are the rivers that wash through Ivyssa on their way to sea. We didn’t know who the woman was; her identity was hidden from us, and we couldn’t have learned it without challenging Julassa directly.”
Kellyxa is the southern plain. If she was riding north —
“Julassa is going to meet Drudaen,” I said.
Commyna nodded. Vella laid her hand in my hair.
I remembered the woman I had seen, the gaunt-faced stranger with the wild eyes, my mother, and my eyes filled. For a while no one spoke. I let the tears fall without any thought of shame, wiping my face on my sleeves. “Is there nothing I can do?”
“No,” Commyna said. “Nothing would suit Drudaen better than for you to try.”
Vissyn knelt in front of me and lifted my face. “I’m very sorry, Jessex.”
“So am I.” Sudden weariness in Commyna’s face. “It can’t be a good sign that Drudaen has sent for her. But Jessex —” She took a studied sip of tea, and then looked at me. “The wonder is that you’ve seen it. Do you understand? We’ve taught you nothing of this technique, and yet your mind has found it. The vision came to you.”
“But I couldn’t control it, I didn’t know where I was —”
She shook her head. “No one could, without a device. You had no jewel, no godstone. You were in sixth-level trance. I myself could do no better from that level.”
Vissyn spoke gently. “Not only that. Julassa Kyminax suspected nothing the whole while, but you saw through the protective magic that disguised your mother. This shows a rare talent. Seeing with the mind is not like seeing with the eyes, Jessex. Your mother’s face would have been obscured from those far more practiced in magic. We ourselves saw nothing through the veil, and could only have gotten through it by using a higher level application. Julassa would have been aware of that.”
> Vella stroked my hair. “In other words, we’re proud of you.”
The words gave me a warm feeling. The lake women had never praised me before, and to tell the truth I had begun to wonder if I were impossibly dull-headed. Commyna did not let me linger long in the courts of self-satisfaction, either. She turned over the spinning to Vella and led me to the center of the golden meadow, to see if I could repeat the meditation.
I did so, with no prompting. The trance came quickly, and I was able to see without a device. Clearing my mind was not as easy as it might have been, with so much anticipation to get rid of. But at last I was in the proper state, my breathing slowing, and an image forming, a clearing lit with morning light, silvered trees bending in the breeze, Kirith Kirin standing perfectly motionless over a runnel of water. He wore no tunic, only buckskin leggings, his torso bare, colored like the bronze chains that had wrapped my mother’s wrists. He bent with a silver basin and filled it with water. A voice called out from the undergrowth behind him, and he turned. His face struck me full on.