Amia nodded, touching her hand to her neck, where she once again wore the silver band marking her as First Mother. Since learning of the binding symbol on the other side of the band, a symbol that had mirrored what they found in Par, she had worn the necklace, almost as if it would protect her. And maybe it would.
“That makes sense. I had wondered why you found the other Marks but nothing for spirit.”
Tan took a deep breath and reached within him, straining for the spirit bond. It was there, faint and beneath the surface of his mind, and took significant strength from him. The time in the temple had sapped his strength, draining him of his ability to easily reach spirit. The other elements were much stronger, and he reached them through the bond, reaching to the elementals to augment his strength, but there was no augmenting his ability with spirit.
None, except for Amia.
She pushed her connection to spirit through their bond, bolstering him. Tan reached for her hand and squeezed, and then used this connection to reach for the spirit bond. As he did, he felt the surge and the connection of power that came from spirit, and it flooded from him. Not only him this time, but Amia as well. And, surprisingly, the bright white light that he associated with spirit also poured from Alanna.
Tan would have to consider that later.
Using spirit, he settled into the bond the same way that he had in the temple, searching for understanding, not for power.
Spirit filled him, surging through him, and he allowed himself to relax into it. The connection showed him the bonds throughout Par, the Great Seals, and also another, one that had faded. Not above him as he expected, but below.
Tan held onto the connection with spirit as he walked through the tower. He passed a few of the students but couldn’t focus on them, needing to hold onto the connection so that he didn’t lose the knowledge that spirit granted. Down and down he went, reaching the lowest levels of the tower, and he knew where he needed to go.
Drawing not only on spirit but on the other elements, he pulled open the hidden entrance to the lower levels, and he and Amia, with Alanna, descended beneath the ground before letting the door close above them. From here, they would be able to reach the estate easily enough.
“Why here?” Amia asked.
“This is where spirit led me,” he answered. He looked overhead but saw no sign of the mark, nothing that would tell him that any attempt had been made with spirit.
“Where is it?” Amia asked. She stared at the ceiling as well. The timbers crossing the ceiling created a pattern, but that wouldn’t have been the way that the ancients would have made the Mark. They would have carved it into the stone, but why not in the top of the tower? Wasn’t that how the carvings were made?
Perhaps in the temple, but in Par, they were not on the ceiling.
He turned his attention to the floor. The stone was smooth, almost perfectly so, and worn with hundreds of years of feet walking across it. Tan pushed into the stone with spirit, questing for whether there might be something more there than what he could see. Spirit resisted at first, but then eased into the stone, and the pattern surged into place.
Color exploded, almost blindingly bright.
The power of the seal returned, and with it, connections to the Seals in Par. Tan could feel the way they connected, the strength from each Mark stretching toward the long-missing spirit bond and reforming the binding.
“This is the evayanth,” Amia said.
“That’s what Logan called it.”
Amia studied the ground. “He would be the expert now that Assan is gone. A shame that we lost him. So much knowledge gone.”
“Is it possible that Marin took him?” Tan asked.
“She is a spirit shaper, Tan. She wouldn’t have been able to influence another spirit shaper. That’s not how spirit works.”
“But what if she uses a different source of power than spirit?” He hadn’t told her what he’d learned about Nightfall and did so now. Her jaw clenched as he described what the San had put him through in Incendin, and he expected her to say something, but she didn’t. She still struggled with trusting Incendin. “What if Marin used this connection to Nightfall, sort of like the opposite of our connection to the Mother?”
“There is nothing else like that,” Amia said.
“We didn’t think so, but then Asgar was attacked. Kota was attacked. My mother! The darkness is real, even if we don’t want to acknowledge it. And I know that you felt it. When it attacked, I know that you experienced it.”
“Tan,” Amia began, resting her hand on his arm, “you keep searching for a different explanation, but what if the answer is what you initially thought? What if this is nothing more than another elemental, a powerful one, that had been held from our world? Think of what you’ve seen and what you’ve faced. How is it different than kaas?”
Tan tried to think about how to describe it. With kaas, the elemental had been almost overwhelmingly powerful, but there had also been the sense that it sat within fire, that the elemental was a part of the world, only twisted in ways that required help. That had been why Tan had been able to help him. But the connection to the darkness, that sense that he had when he had pulled the bond from Amia to himself, that had told him how powerful this entity could be. There was more power than any single elemental possessed. What he had detected rivaled the Mother.
But what if Amia was onto something? Could the Mother be nothing more than a super strong elemental? That would explain how there could be another that rivaled her.
Only, Tan never had that sense when he reached into spirit. There was never the sense that he simply spoke to an elemental, or that he reached into anything less than that which had created the world. The Mother was different than the other elementals.
“You experienced it yourself,” Tan said. “You know what you detected.”
Light jumped from Tan’s shoulders over to Amia’s. Like a snake striking, she shot her tongue out and ran it along Amia’s forehead.
Amia gasped. Her eyes rolled back and she nearly dropped Alanna.
What are you doing? Tan asked her.
Helping her to remember.
Amia shook a moment. Tan took Alanna from her, and their daughter giggled again, reaching for Light. The shaking eased, and Amia blinked, opening her eyes.
She studied Light with a strange expression. A shaping built from Amia, and Tan suspected that she was speaking to the elemental.
Light jumped back over to Tan’s shoulders. What did she say to you? he asked Light.
She said her thanks.
Looking at Amia, somehow he didn’t think that was what she had said.
“She has a unique connection, doesn’t she?” Amia asked.
Tan nodded. “Unique doesn’t capture it all the way, though, does it?”
She laughed. “She was right to show me.”
“What did she show you?”
“A reminder. She reminded me what we have already faced so that I would not forget.” Amia sighed and looked from Tan to Alanna. “I wish… I wish that we did not have to experience this. And I wish that you weren’t pulled in. I fear what will happen.”
Tan squeezed her hand and looked down to the evayanth that had reappeared on the ground. “If we understand the binding, then maybe we’ll be able to suppress Nightfall again.”
Amia bit her lip, studying the evayanth.
“What is it?” Tan asked.
“It’s this,” she said. “You’ve repaired this binding, and the one in the temple.” Tan nodded. “But whatever these bindings are meant to suppress has already begun to escape into the world. How are we going to bind it completely?”
Tan stared at the binding, realizing what Amia said. They might have repaired the damage, but it was too late. He still didn’t know what it would take to suppress the darkness, to force it back to where it had been before the bindings began to fail, or even how those ancient shapers had managed to suppress it in the first place.
Tan crou
ched in the Records, staring at the wall and still not understanding the meaning of the runes. Behind him, the draasin eggs released steady heat which slowly oozed into the cavern. The heat filled the space and created a fluttering breeze billowing out the top of the cave.
Light circled slowly around the eggs. Occasionally, she would stop and lick one before moving on to the next. Each time that she stopped, Tan felt a surge through the fire bond of what she did, as if licking the eggs connected them more tightly for a moment. But then that sense faded, disappearing again into nothing more than a soft hum against the fire bond. Finally, she reached the last egg, the one that had changed rather than hatching, and she ran her tongue all along it. There was no surge through the fire bond, nothing like he had experienced with the others.
“I still haven’t managed to understand most of these runes.” Elanne had a long page rolled out across the floor of the cavern that she bent over, drawing a few of the runes. Her pen hovered atop the page as if she debated what to add next. “There is a pattern here that matters as well, but I can’t understand it.”
Tan turned his attention back to her. Finding her was the reason that he had come. She needed to understand that other runes had been found, a place similar to the Records, though they might not know what it was for.
“In the kingdoms, there is an archivist who knows the ancient languages,” Tan started.
Elanne’s brow creased, and she shook her head. “Par does not need the help of anyone from the kingdoms to understand our Records.” She seemed to realize what she had said and shook her head. “Anyone else, Maelen.”
Tan smiled and waved away her concern. “I don’t know how much I trust the archivists anyway. We know about the binding,” he said, and Elanne nodded. “And you know that there was another place of binding.”
“You have told me of this place. A temple of much power, where this darkness nearly escaped.”
Tan wasn’t certain that it hadn’t escaped. He might have been able to reach for the connection to spirit, but that didn’t mean that he had stopped the darkness. He wasn’t sure that he could stop the darkness. If the ancients, those with the knowledge and understanding to create these bindings, couldn’t do much more than suppress it, how did Tan expect to actually stop the darkness himself? He didn’t, and couldn’t. What he needed to learn was how to suppress it again, to remove it from the world. And that required trusting the archivist so that he could learn from them, using whatever resources that they had.
“The Temple of Alast,” Tan said. “I returned to it recently, trying to understand what we face.”
Elanne took a sharp breath. “Are you sure that was wise, Maelen? Think about how much we nearly lost here. Had you not been here, and had you not known how to separate this darkness from the elementals, what would have happened?”
The elementals would have continued to attack. Or they would have retreated, still controlled. Only, the more Tan thought about it, the more certain he was that the attack on the tower in Par had been nothing more than a distraction. Marin had wanted to pull him away from searching for the other bonds. She had wanted to have the time that she needed to do… whatever it was they had intended to do with Alanna. That was what Marin had been after.
But why?
Could it be that Alanna had more of a connection to spirit than he realized? She had already shown that she could connect to spirit in some ways. The fact that she had taken on that soft glow when he and Amia had reached for the spirit bond told him that Alanna had potential with spirit. Considering her parents, it should not come as a surprise, either.
“I needed to know what we face,” he said. “And that was the only way that I knew of to find anything else.” He hadn’t told her about going to Incendin, and would not. What did it matter to Elanne that Tan had learned of Issa and the way that Incendin served a fire goddess? “But that’s not why I tell you this. I tell you because, in the temple, there are other Great Seals, similar to what exist in Par.”
“The Seals?” she asked.
Tan nodded.
“But if there are Seals, does that mean that there are Records?”
“Similar, but not the same.” Tan turned and studied the Records. “Whatever is written here is important. We knew that. But now that I’ve seen that others exist, it seems that they are even more important than we might have realized.”
Elanne swallowed. “If that is true, then they are not the Records of Par. They are a way to describe what happened at that time.”
Tan sighed. Elanne had hoped for something that would enlighten her people about what might have been lost in Par, and what he had for her was in some ways less than that. “They would still be the Records of Par,” Tan said. “Think about what they must have experienced at that time for them to go through all that they did to suppress this darkness. That they were able to do so is in many ways a greater legacy.”
“I know that you are right, Maelen, but most within Par believe that the Records detail more than that. That they would tell the history of Par in such a way that we can understand where our people came from. After what happened here, after what the Utu Tonah did…”
Tan understood. There would be those who wanted to know that there was value in Par. “I think the Utu Tonah came because of what Par represented,” Tan said. “I can’t prove it yet, but I think he knew something about the bindings and he recognized the power they suppressed.”
“And he what? Thought to come replace the power that already existed? Maelen, you cannot know what it was like living under his rule. The bonds. The competition for his favor. The thirst for power. None were immune to it. And then he was gone, but you appeared. Those who knew that you managed to defeat him thought that you would be worse, that the battle for power would only get worse, vying for your favor now rather than the Utu Tonah. Most recognized what the Utu Tonah was capable of doing, but you… you were unknown.”
“I don’t think he came intending to replace the power that existed,” Tan said. “But I think he recognized there was a greater power here, and I think he also knew that power was in danger of release.” Tan had never put voice to that concern, but that had to be the reason that the Utu Tonah had come and the reason that he had continued to acquire bonds. It was about power, but not only about power. Somehow, he must have known about Marin, or whoever had come before her.
“What do you know about the Mistress of Souls?”
“Marin?” Elanne asked. “You have already asked this question, Maelen.”
“Not only Marin but whoever came before her.”
Could that be the secret to understanding? Did he need to understand what role the Mistress of Souls had played in Par before the Utu Tonah had come? They must have known something, and the Utu Tonah must have discovered something, to bring them here.
“Par has had a Mistress of Souls for many years, Maelen. They have long guided the spiritual connection of Par. Before the Utu Tonah, they occupied the tower.”
“Have they always been here?”
“Always? Not always. Even Marin, the last Mistress of Souls, was not of Par.”
“Not of Par?”
Elanne nodded.
“Don’t you think that would be something I should have known?”
Elanne gripped the fabric of the wrap she wore. “Maelen?”
“Where did Marin come from if not from Par?” Tan asked.
“Par has not always been isolated. Before the Utu Tonah, our people were known to travel widely.”
“To the kingdoms?”
Marin shook her head. “Not often to the north. The Sunlands—what you know as Incendin—never cared for our intrusion. Doma was often too far unless we traveled on Xsa ships. And your kingdoms were never too welcoming.”
“The kingdoms had visitors from Xsa,” Tan commented.
“Perhaps from Xsa, but Par… I do not know why, only that it was a different matter welcoming those from Par.”
Tan wondered why that would be, and
what reason there would be for Par not to be welcomed in the kingdoms. “Then where did Marin come from if not from Par?”
“The same place that most of the Mistresses of Souls came from,” she said.
“Wait. There is a place where they come?”
“One of the Xsa Isles, yes. There is a place of worship there.”
A place of worship. And Honl had wanted him to learn about the ancient gods. Could that be related? How could it not, especially knowing what he did about Marin now?
And suddenly, Tan knew where he had to go next.
11
Search for the Mistress of Souls
The air above Xsa carried the sea and the spray, even as he floated high above the clouds. A cool breeze gusted through, fluttering against his cloak and pushing against his shaping, in some ways almost as if it resisted him. Tan pulled on his elemental connections and forged ahead.
Next to him, Elanne did much the same. She wore a heavy cloak over her shoulders, one that she wrapped tightly around herself, and pushed through her connection to wyln. Even as she did, there was some resistance.
It was this resistance that told Tan that they likely headed in the right direction. Far below, the circle of islands that made up the Xsa Isles spread out around a massive central island. Elanne had told him that the island they sought was outside the main circle of islands. Tan could feel the pressure against his shaping that likely came from where they needed to head.
A part of him wondered if he should be coming alone. Even with Elanne, he might not have enough shaping strength if he were to get into trouble. The strange shaping that the Xsa excavators had used on him had nearly trapped him once. What would happen if they used the same one again? Would he be able to free himself or would he end up trapped, leaving Elanne with him, neither able to call for help?
Tan pushed those thoughts from his head and pressed onward.
Light of Fire (The Cloud Warrior Saga Book 10) Page 8