The lad rubbed at one eye and looked off into the library, feeling uneasy.
“What is it?” Vincenzé leveled his bright blue eyes on Tanis, moving his head as if scanning Tanis’s thoughts with the motion. “You know something, eh? I can see it in your face.”
Tanis turned him a beleaguered look. The man was too perceptive by far. “I know disrelated things, but you know more than you’ve said. Who is the prisoner in the Tower?”
Vincenzé’s thoughts had been very loud in proclaiming the existence of this unnamed abomination—visions that closely echoed those the High Lord had so thoughtfully gifted to them while coming into port. Only Vincenzé’s thoughts, in contrast, hinted at some relation to the missing Malin van Drexel.
“How does he know about the prisoner?” Giancarlo booted his cousin in the shin.
Vincenzé turned a glare from his cousin to frown at Tanis instead. “He claims he’s not in my head, but I think he can’t tell the difference.”
“You should guard your thoughts,” Tanis grumbled.
“I do, truthreader.” Vincenzé gave him a telling look. “But you push past them.”
“I’m not pushing—”
“Never mind.” Vincenzé held up his hand with a slight smile. “It tells me something of you, eh? So I am pleased. To your question: the man was an Adept. Something was done to him, something very foul.”
“Lui un lunatico.” Giancarlo made wild hand motions and waggled his head.
“Crazy,” Vincenzé agreed, “but frightfully strong despite looking like he ought to be on his deathbed. He was relentlessly truthread, but his mind is gone.”
“Gone?” A sudden chill skittered along Tanis’s spine, an unwelcome reminder of a dark, cold room and the hopelessly destroyed mind of a boy named Piper. “What do you mean…gone?”
“The Empress said he couldn’t even remember his own name.”
“He just kept howling indecipherable syllables,” Giancarlo added.
Tanis swallowed. He suddenly had that feeling again…the one that had first gripped him when he watched Pelas sitting in a café in Rethynnea, enveloped in his personal darkness.
“What were they?” Tanis hoped beyond hope it wasn’t what he imagined. “What did the words sound like?”
“Shalabaaaaaah,” yowled Giancarlo suddenly in a near-perfect mimicry of the madman. “Shalabanaaaaaaaah!”
“Thank you, Giancarlo,” came the High Lord’s voice unexpectedly, “for that incredibly accurate recounting.”
“High Lord,” Giancarlo said with an accommodating nod and a grin.
“Shalabana…” Tanis repeated slowly. He lifted troubled eyes to the High Lord.
Marius frowned at him. “What have you, Tanis youth?”
Tanis swallowed. “Nothing, Your Grace.” He managed a meager smile. “Just a memory of someone I’d rather forget.”
“Very well then. The Endoge has decided to conduct your Invocation personally to better expedite your admission. He will see you now.”
“Yes, Your Grace.” Tanis pushed to his feet and walked with heavy steps of apprehension up the stone stairs to the Endoge’s private study.
Thirty-Two
“The peril shadowing every talent is the lure of playing with it for pride.”
–Liam van Gheller,
Endoge of the Sormitáge
The Endoge was seated behind an ornate desk of bleached alder when Tanis entered his office. The older man looked up and waved the lad on inside. The Endoge’s colorless eyes appeared wise but unreadable. Without his floppy cap, his bald pate shone in the lamplight. Being also clean-shaven, his grey, tufted eyebrows stuck out rather dramatically.
“Welcome, Tanis.” The Endoge stood and walked around to greet him with an outstretched hand.
Tanis clasped hands with him nervously.
“You have a firm grip. Always a good beginning.” The Endoge motioned him towards a grouping of armchairs near a long window. “The High Lord tells me you’ve been training with the zanthyr Phaedor.”
Tanis wondered how many other zanthyrs these people knew that they need always refer to Phaedor by name, but he answered, “Yes, sir. He is my guardian.”
“When you’re finished with your schooling here, you won’t need protecting. Come, take a seat.”
Tanis slowly sank down onto the edge of the indicated armchair while the Endoge relaxed into one directly across from him.
“I imagine you’re a little apprehensive right now.”
Tanis nodded.
“You needn’t be. All Adepts are admitted here providing they have proper sponsorship.”
Sponsorship? Tanis immediately fretted this news.
“With the High Lord Marius di L'Arlesé as your sponsor, of course, you needn’t fear for acceptance.” The Endoge settled into a more comfortable position in his chair. “Invocation is merely our means of ensuring an Adept is placed accurately according to his skill. It wouldn’t do to put an upper level student into classes for those who can barely sense the lifeforce, nor the latter into an applied lecture on the Esoterics.” He eyed Tanis inquisitively at this, ostensibly gauging whether or not Tanis knew of the aforementioned laws.
“Yes, sir,” Tanis said when he realized the Endoge was waiting for some kind of response.
“With this in mind, you and I may proceed with the same understanding: that hoping to impress me is of no value; providing the answer you think I might desire is unproductive; seeking in any way to escape an answer by subterfuge is not only futile but also detrimental. The value of Invocation is in discovering how much you know and how much you don’t know. Do you agree to follow these stipulations of Invocation?”
“Yes, sir.” Tanis felt like he was back in classes with Master o’Reith, who always gave the impression that Tanis had done everything wrong ever before they began a lesson.
“And how old are you?”
“Ten and five, sir.”
“How long have you been training in your gift?”
“I—” But Tanis realized he couldn’t actually answer that question. There was a truth within it that he couldn’t speak, couldn’t find within his own understanding. So he answered instead, because it was all he could manage, “I started training with Vitriam o’Reith almost two years ago, sir.”
“Very well.” The Endoge clasped hands in his lap. “I find it singularly unhelpful to ask a student what he thinks he knows. Invariably the student thinks he knows far more than he actually does. We will therefore begin with a test that tells me much of your previous study, for the task encompasses many skills. Stand before me now, Tanis.”
Tanis did so.
“You may place your hand in the proper position upon my brow. I will think of a memory, and I would have you tell me everything within it that you see. Begin.”
Tanis placed his hand in the truthreader’s hold, careful to position his fingers properly across the Endoge’s brow, and entered rapport with the older man.
Immediately he saw a scene unfolding before him. At first the images were confusing, for he encountered many layers of memory and had to sort through them all. But his mother had taught him how to do this, so he set to work.
First he worked to find the time and place the Endoge was remembering—it was a memory of a time he was truthreading a boy.
Then Tanis found the images belonging to the boy within that same memory.
Next Tanis had to sort out the memory belonging to the woman who the boy was telling the Endoge about, as the boy recounted his memory of a story the woman told him.
All of these remembered images were jumbled and mixed, and the sorting process involved assigning the many pictures to the right person’s thoughts.
Tanis’s mother had taught him how to sift through a layered memory. He hadn’t had to work with quite so many layers before, but the technique remained the same. Thus, with meticulous inspection, Tanis eventually got all of the images properly sorted, and the vision became clear: in the memory, the
Endoge was truthreading a boy, who in turn was recalling a conversation with his mother.
“Tell me what you see from this memory, Tanis youth,” the Endoge murmured, eyes closed.
Tanis took a deep breath. “From your thoughts in this memory, sir, I can tell the student had caused some recent trouble. You were hoping to find out more about him to better understand him. He submitted to a Telling. One of the moments you contacted during the Telling included a conversation that had taken place between the boy and his mother, where his mother laughingly claimed that his father was an avieth.”
“Is there more to this Telling?”
Tanis considered this question.
His mother had taught him that truth has a certain resonance. If one looked for the resonance, a truth could be read even in the latent memory of another. Theoretically, and if the memory was clear enough, Tanis ought to be able to read not only the boy’s thoughts about what his mother was telling him, but the truth or falsehood in her words at the time she spoke them. Though the boy himself wouldn’t have been able to recognize a truth or a lie simply by its resonance, nevertheless the resonance of truth—or lack thereof—would still have been perceived, even did it pass into his consciousness beneath his awareness at the time.
The nature of the fourth strand made such latent readings possible. All thoughts have force—energy—associated with them. This energy is captured in the memory, and with it is also captured all of the images and perceptions associated with the initial experience.
When a truthreader contacts a memory of another, all of the original perceptions captured in that memory become the truthreader’s own. The actual energy is not transferred—Tanis’s mother had tried to explain how a transference of energy would require doubling the existing energy, none of which Tanis truly understood—yet the memory was copied in the sense that it became the truthreader’s experience as well.
Tanis didn’t actually understand the physics behind all of this, and his mother had informed him that the laws describing latent memories were contained in the Esoterics—which automatically told Tanis that they were hopelessly incomprehensible—but he knew enough to do the working, even if he couldn’t explain its process fully.
To answer the Endoge’s question, Tanis concentrated and looked deeper into the scene, using his own mind to read the boy’s memory newly instead of depending on the Endoge’s memory of it, because the Endoge’s recollection was colored by his conclusions.
This was both like and yet unlike choosing a different way to cross a stream. The stream still flowed the same course, like the memory, but on one side of the stream, the memory appeared as seen through the filter of the Endoge’s thoughts; on the other side was the actual memory.
Tanis had to find the actual memory.
It took all of the skill his mother had ingrained in him to find where the path branched—that smallest of cuts in the mental fabric where the Endoge’s recollection diverted from the actual memory transferred from the boy.
Instead of following the Endoge’s side of the memory stream then, Tanis instead crossed to the other. This was not so easily done. The actual memory was deeply wrapped within layers of energy, all of which had to be transcended. Tanis at times had to make his mind both hard enough to pierce these veils and yet diffuse enough to seep through them without rending the slightest thread.
The Endoge had been correct in stating that this was a test of all of his skill.
When Tanis at last found the true memory—the boy’s own memory, not the Endoge’s recollection of it—everything came into brilliant color.
The lad hadn’t realized the images he was seeing were dulled until that moment, but he couldn’t mistake the change. He explored the scene then for himself, and he looked for the truth in the mother’s words. And then he knew.
“There is more, sir,” Tanis remarked at last, hearing his own voice as if from far away. “The student thinks his mother is lying, but she believes it to be the truth. She knows her son won’t believe her, however, and is using this as a means of hiding behind the truth, as it were. Yet it isn’t true, in the end,” Tanis added, almost sadly, for it would be a fine thing to have been fathered by an avieth.
Tanis retreated from rapport then and removed his hand from the Endoge’s forehead. The older man opened his colorless eyes, and though he was very good at guarding his thoughts, there was certainly a shadow within his flinty gaze that might’ve been astonishment.
“Tell me, Tanis,” said the Endoge as Tanis sat back down across from him, “with whom did you study?”
“With Vitriam o’Reith in Dannym, sir, and the Fourth Vestal for a time in Rethynnea—”
“The Fourth Vestal?” He stared at Tanis. “This is no small thing, to have studied directly with Raine D’Lacourte.”
“Yes sir,” Tanis murmured.
“And have you any other teachers you failed to mention before?”
“Well…most of my training came from my mother.”
“She was a truthreader?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well. Have you studied your Truths?”
“Yes, sir.”
“All of them?”
“Yes, sir.”
The Endoge gave him a considering look. “You do know that most truthreaders enrolled here do not complete their initial study of the Truths until they’ve gained their Catenaré cuff?”
“No, sir. I didn’t know that.”
“Very well. You’re clearly schooled in Readings and Tellings. What about Truth-bindings?”
“Yes.”
“Compulsion?”
Tanis swallowed. “Yes.”
The Endoge drew back with a frown. “And have you studied the Laws of Patterning?”
“Some of them.”
“Indeed?” he asked skeptically. “Which some?”
“The first, the fifth, the twelfth, the sixth, the fifteenth…a few more.”
“In that order?” the Endoge asked, eyeing him intently.
“Yes.”
“And the Esoterics?”
“Only up through the eleventh, and only in theory.”
“And what is the Eleventh Esoteric?”
“‘A wielder is limited by what he can envision himself envisioning,’” Tanis quoted.
“And the Fifth Esoteric?” the Endoge pressed, looking dubious despite obviously knowing that Tanis spoke the truth in all things.
“‘Absolute Being must equal the scope of a wielder’s concept of effect,’” Tanis said at once.
“Which means?”
“It builds from the earlier Esoterics, sir.” Tanis worked hard to remember his mother’s complicated lessons—there was a reason the Esoterics were so-named. “The First Esoteric states that Absolute Being is the entire concept of actuality, meaning that Absolute Being is form, material composition and position in space as modified by time. The Second Esoteric tells us that patterns lie within the boundaries of Absolute Being. The Fifth Esoteric seeks to further clarify that a wielder must envision the entirety of Absolute Being in order to properly affect change.”
“And what does that mean?”
Tanis broke into a rueful smile. “I think it means, for example, that if you hope to change a lump of rock into a chair, you have to be able to conceive of everything that the rock is, and where it is, and how it interacts with the fabric of space-time surrounding it, as well as everything that the chair would be—it’s entire form—and how it would interact with the surrounding space.” Then he remembered something important that his mother had explained many times, and he hastily added, “But the Esoterics deal with things conceptually, sir; that is, you can’t sit there trying to change a rock into a chair and think through all of this linearly—you have to grasp the entire concept at once.”
“Remarkable.” The Endoge regarded Tanis for a long time in silence then, and the lad couldn’t tell if he was pleased or unhappy or fretful or disgruntled—but obviously many thoughts were swirling behi
nd his colorless eyes.
Suddenly he seemed to rouse from these deep thoughts. He sat forward and held out his hand, palm up. “I would that you might show me these lessons of yours.”
Tanis eyed him uncertainly. “Which lessons, sir?”
“The ones where you learned such esoteric skills,” the Endoge replied with a meaningful smile.
Tanis had already noticed that the Endoge wore three rings on his fourth finger and more than likely didn’t need the contact to read Tanis’s thoughts; that he’d offered his hand was simple courtesy.
There was no avoiding it, so the lad took the older man’s hand that the Endoge might enter rapport with him.
“Now…” the man murmured, closing his eyes even as Tanis shut his, “show me these lessons.”
Tanis felt the Endoge’s firm hold upon his hand, but the older man’s skill with the lifeforce was so deft that Tanis perceived only the merest whisper of his presence in his mind—that the lad noticed it at all was only because he was looking for it.
Dutifully, Tanis sent his attention back to the first of his mother’s lessons, to that day when she appeared beside him so unexpectedly. From there, he let his mind drift forward, touching briefly upon each subsequent lesson. He didn’t realize how many of them there had been, but somehow he’d packed more than a year’s worth of lessons into a single month.
No sooner had he reached the final lesson on timeweaving, however, than something released—like a clasp upon a treasure chest—and suddenly images were pouring out, the golden memories of other lessons that hadn’t yet been triggered into recollection by a pattern upon his wall. Now they flooded into Tanis’s mind, unrelenting, and within every image came the sure knowledge of an entire lesson.
And there were hundreds of such lessons. Years of lessons.
Tanis felt deluged by them, swamped and flooded…a tiny doll riding the wave’s tumbling crest, only just remaining afloat by some mere chance of fate.
Paths of Alir (A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book 3) Page 50