"Prophets. "
"And prophets are strongly gifted with that ability. Prophecy is one form of magic. But the gifted cannot see you with their gift, remember? To them, you are a hole in the world. Therefore, prophecy, since it comes through prophets, cannot see you, either.
"I have a wisp of ability for prophecy, but I am no prophet. When I was with the Sisters of the Light, since such things were one of my fields of interest, I spent decades in their vaults studying prophecy. They had been written down by great prophets throughout the ages. I can tell you both from personal experience, and from all that I read, that the prophecies are as blind to you as would be Adie. As far as the prophecies are concerned, your kind never existed, do not exist now, and never will exist."
Jennsen sat back on her heels. "Hole in the world, indeed."
"At the Palace of the Prophets, I met a prophet, Nathan, and, while I learned nothing about those like you, I learned some about my talent. Mostly, I only learned how limited it is. Eventually, the things I learned there came to haunt me."
"What do you mean?"
"The Palace of the Prophets was created many thousands of years ago and is like no other place that I know of. A unique spell surrounds the
entire palace and grounds. It distorts the way in which those under the spell age."
"It changed you, then, in some way?"
"Oh, yes. It changes everyone. Aging is slowed for those living under the spell of the Palace of the Prophets. While those outside the palace went about their lives and aged roughly ten to fifteen years, those of us in the palace aged only one year."
Jennsen made a skeptical face. "How could such a thing be?"
"Nothing ever stays the same. The world is always changing. The world back in the great war three thousand years ago was much different. The world has changed since then. When the great barrier to the south of D'Hara was put up, wizards were different. They had vast power, back then."
"Darken Rahl had vast power."
"No. Darken Rahl, as powerful as he was, was nothing compared to the wizards of that time. They could control powers Darken Rahl only dreamed of."
" So, wizards like that, with that kind of vast power, all died out? There have been no wizards like them born since?"
Althea stared off as she answered in a grave tone. "Not since that great war has there been one like that born. Even wizards themselves have come to be born less and less often. But for the first time in three thousand years, one has again been born. Your half brother, Richard, is such a man."
It turned out her pursuer was far more fearsome than Jennsen had given him credit for, even in her all too vivid imagination. Small wonder that her mother had been murdered and Lord Rahl's men were so close on Jennsen's heels. This Lord Rahl was altogether more powerful and dangerous than had been their father.
"Because this was such an epochal event, some of those at the Palace of the Prophets knew of Richard long before he was born. There was much anticipation over this one, this war wizard."
"War wizard?" Jennsen didn't like the sound of that.
"Yes. There was much controversy as to the meaning of the prophecy of his birth--even to the meaning of the term 'war wizard.' While at the palace, I had a chance on two brief occasions to meet the prophet I mentioned, Nathan. Nathan Rahl."
Jennsen's mouth fell open. "Nathan Rahl? You mean, a real Rahl?"
Althea smiled not only at the memory, but at Jennsen's surprise. "Oh yes, a real Rahl. Commanding, powerful, clever, charming, and inconceivably dangerous. They kept him locked away behind impenetrable
shields of magic, where he could cause no harm, yet he sometimes managed it. Yes, a real Rahl. Over nine hundred years old, he was, too."
"That's impossible," Jennsen insisted before she had time to think better of it.
Friedrich, standing over her, harrumphed. He handed a steaming cup of tea to his wife and then passed one down to Jennsen. With the question in her eyes, Jennsen looked back at Althea.
"I am close to two hundred years old," Althea said.
Jennsen just stared. Althea looked old, but not that old.
"In part, this business with my age and how the spell slowed my aging is how I came to have dealings with you and your mother when you were young." Althea sighed heavily and took a sip of tea. "Which brings me back to the story at hand, to what you wanted to know-why I cannot help you with magic."
Jennsen sipped, then glanced up at Friedrich, who looked about as old as Althea. "Are you that age, too?"
"No," he gibed, "Althea robbed the cradle for me."
Jennsen saw the looks that passed between them, the kind of intimate glances between two people who were close. Jennsen could see in the eyes of these two that they could read each other's slightest expression. She and her mother had been like that, able to see thoughts in the slightest movement of the eyes of the other. It was the kind of communication she thought was facilitated not only through familiarity, but through love and respect.
"I met Friedrich when I returned from the Old World. I had aged only about the same as Friedrich. I had lived a much longer time, of course, but my body had not aged to show it because I had been under the spell of the Palace of the Prophets.
"When I came back, I became involved in a number of things, and one of them was how I might help those such as you."
Jennsen hung on every word. "That's when you met my mother?"
"Yes. You see, the spell at the palace, the spell that altered time, sparked an idea of how I might help those like you. I knew that regular means of casting webs-magic-around your kind never seemed to work out. Others had tried but failed; the offspring were killed. I struck on the idea, instead, to cast the web, not on you, but on those who came into contact with you and your mother."
Jennsen leaned forward expectantly, feeling sure that she was finally getting to the core of what might prove to be the help she sought. "What did you do? What sort of magic?"
"I used magic to alter people's perception of time itself."
"I don't understand. What did that do?"
"Well, the only way Darken Rahl could search for you was as I've explained-by using regular means. I tinkered with those regular means. I made it so that those who knew of you perceive time differently."
"I still don't understand. How-what-did you make them perceive? Time is time."
Althea leaned forward with a cunning smile. "I made them think you were just born."
"When?"
"All the time. Whenever they found out some thread of news about you, as a child fathered by Darken Rahl, they perceived you, and reported you, as newborn. When you were two months, ten months, four years, five years, six years old, they were all still looking for a newborn, despite how long they had known of you. The spell slowed their perception of time, in relation to you alone, so that they were always looking for a newborn baby, rather than a girl growing up.
"In this way, until you were six, I hid you right under their noses. That threw everyone's calculations off by six years. To this day, anyone who suspected your existence would believe you to be around fourteen or so, when you are actually more than twenty, because they thought you were newborn when the spell ended, when you were six. That's when they began to mark your age."
Jennsen rose up onto her knees. "But that could work. You must only do it again. If you were to cast a spell like that for me now, like you did when I was little, it would work the same, wouldn't it? Then they wouldn't know I was grown up. They wouldn't be hunting me. They would be looking for a newborn. Please, Althea, just do that again. Do what you did once before."
From the corner of her eye, Jennsen saw Friedrich, now sitting at his bench in a back room, turn away. By the look on Althea's face, Jennsen knew that she had somehow said the wrong thing, and precisely what the sorceress had planned on her saying
Jennsen realized that this had been a trap of sorts, and she had just talked herself right into it.
"I was young and masterful in my s
kill with magic," Althea said. In her dark eyes glimmered the spark of recollection of that grand time in her life. "In thousands of years, few had been through the great barrier and back. I had, I had studied with the Sisters of the Light, had audiences
with their Prelate, and with the great prophet. I had accomplished such things as few others had. I was well over a hundred years old and still young, with a handsome and charming new husband who believed I could walk to the moon and back if the fancy struck me.
"I was well over a hundred years of age, yet still youthful, with a full life ahead of me; wise with age, yet still young. I was clever, oh so clever, and powerful in my gift. I was experienced, knowledgeable, and attractive, with many friends and a circle of people who hung on my every worldly pronouncement."
With long graceful fingers, Althea pulled up the hem of her skirt, uncovering her legs.
Jennsen drew back at the sight.
She saw, then, why Althea had not stood before; her legs were withered, deformed, shriveled bones covered with a dry veneer of pallid flesh, as if they had died years ago, but never been buried because the rest of her was still living. Jennsen didn't know how the woman could keep from screaming in constant anguish.
"You were six," the sorceress said in a terribly calm and quiet voice,
when Darken Rahl finally discovered what I had done. He was a very ingenious man. Much more shrewd, as it turned out, than a young sorceress of a hundred-odd years in age.
"I only had time to tell my sister to warn your mother, before he caught me. ~9
Jennsen remembered running. When she was little, she and her mother had fled the palace. It had been night. It had been shortly after a visitor had come to their door. In the dark hall, there had been whispering. And then they had fled.
"But, he ... he didn't kill you?" Jennsen swallowed. "He showed you mercy-he spared your life."
Althea chuckled without humor. It was an empty laugh at encountering a profoundly naive notion.
"Darken Rahl did not always believe in simply killing those who displeased him. He preferred, instead, that they should live a good long time; death would have been a release, you see. If they were dead, how could they regret, how could they suffer, how could they serve as an example to others?
"You cannot imagine, and I could not begin to tell you, the terror of such a capture, of the long walk to be taken before him, of what it was like being in the grip of that man, of what it was like to look up into his
calm face, his cold blue eyes, and know you were at the mercy of a man who had none. You cannot imagine what it was like to know in that single terrible instant, that everything you were, everything you had, everything you had hoped for in life, was about to forever change.
"The pain was what you might expect, I suppose. Perhaps my legs can partly attest to it."
"I'm so sorry," Jennsen whispered through her tears, hands pressed over her heartache.
"But the pain was not the worst of it. Not the worst by far. He stripped me of everything I had, but took for granted. He did to my power, to my gift, worse than he did to my legs. You just cannot see it-you are blind to it. Every day, I see it. That hurt, I assure you, you cannot begin to imagine.
"Even all that, though, was not enough for Darken Rahl. His displeasure at what I had done to hide you had only begun. He banished me here, to this sunken, foul place of hot springs and sickening vapors. He imprisoned me here, filling in about me a swamp with monstrosities created by the very power he had stripped from me. He wanted me close, you see. Several times he visited, just to behold me in my prison.
"I'm at the mercy of those things out there that are given life by my own gift, a gift to which I no longer have access. I could never drag myself out by my arms alone, but even if I were to try, or if I had the help of another, those beasts, created from my own power, would rip me apart. I can't call them back even to save myself.
"He left a path, in the front, so that provisions and supplies could be brought in, so I would be sure to have the things I needed. Friedrich had to build a home for us, here, because I cannot ever leave. Darken Rahl wished me a long life-a life I could spend suffering for displeasing him."
Jennsen trembled as she listened, unable to say anything. Althea lifted a hand to point with one long graceful finger toward the back room.
"That man, who loves me, had to witness it all. Friedrich was thus condemned to a life of tending to a crippled wife he loved, who could no longer be a wife to him in ways of the flesh."
She ran a hand over her bony limbs, tenderly, as if seeing them as they they once were. "I have never again had the joy of being with my husband as a woman is with a man. My husband never again was able to share and enjoy the intimate charms of the woman he loves."
She paused to regain her composure before going on. "As part of my
punishment, Darken Rahl left me with the power to use my gift in the one way which would haunt me every day: prophecy."
Jennsen could not help herself from asking, thinking that this must be one thread of possible comfort left to the woman. "It's part of your giftcan't it bring you some joy?"
Dark eyes fixed on her again. "Did you enjoy the last day with your mother-the day before she died?"
"Yes," Jennsen finally said.
"Did you laugh and talk with her?"
"Yes.,,
"What if you had known that the next day she was to be murdered? What if you saw it all, long before it happened? Days, weeks, or even years before? Knew what was to happen, when, every ghastly detail? Saw, by the power of your magic, the horrifying sight of it, the blood, the agony, the dying. Would that please you? Would you still have experienced that joy, that laughter?"
Jennsen answered in a small voice. "No."
"So you see, Jennsen Rahl, I cannot help you, not because I am selfish, as you put it, but because even if I were willing, I have no power left to cast you a spell. You must find within yourself the ability to help yourself, the free will to accomplish what you must. Only in that way can you truly succeed in life.
"I cannot give you a spell to solve your problems. I have spent a good deal of my life suffering for the last spell I cast for you. Were it only me, I would endure it willingly, for I was doing what I believe in; this is the fault of an evil man, not the fault of an innocent child. Yet I suffer each day because it was not just my life forfeit, but Friedrich' s, too. He might have-"
"I might have nothing." He had come up behind Jennsen. "I have considered each day of my life a privilege because you are in it. Your smile is the sun, gilded by the Creator Himself, and brightens my small existence. If this is the price for all of that I have gained, then I paid it willingly. Don't devaluate the quality of my joy, Althea, by minimizing it or trivializing it."
Althea looked back down at Jennsen. "You see? This is my daily torture: knowing what I have not been able to be, to do, for this man."
Jennsen withered, sobbing, at the woman's feet.
"Magic," Althea whispered from above, "is trouble you don't need."
chapter 24
Jermsen's thoughts were lost in a forlorn fog. The swamp was only there because it was beneath her feet, around her, above her, but her mind was in a more confused and tangled jumble than all the twisted things around her. So much of what she believed had turned out to be wrong. That meant that not only were many of her hopes lost, but her solutions, too.
Worse yet, Jennsen had come face-to-face with the misery, hardship, and heartbreak her existence had ended up causing others who had tried to help her.
Through the tears she could hardly see her way. She moved almost blindly through the mire.
She stumbled at times, crawled when she fell, sobbing in racking agony when she paused, supported by the limb of an old, gnarled tree. It was like the day of her mother's murder all over again-the anguish, the confusion, the insanity of it all, the bitter despair-but this time for Althea's tortured life.
Staggering through the dense growth, Jennsen g
rasped vines for support as she wept. Since her mother's death, finding the sorceress and getting her help had given Jermsen's life a direction, a goal. She didn't know what to do, now. She felt lost, in the midst of her life.
Jermsen wound her way through an area where steam rose from fissures. All about her, angry vapor bellowed as it was unleashed from un-
derground in billowing clouds. She plodded past the stench of the boiling vents and back into the thick growth. Thorny bushes scratched her hands, broad leaves slashed at her face. Reaching a dark pool she vaguely remembered, Jermsen shuffled along the ledge, gripping rocks for handholds, weeping as she made her way along the brink. Rock crumbled and came away in her hand. She fought to keep her balance as she snatched for another handhold, catching on just in time to keep herself from falling.
She gazed over her shoulder, through blurry vision, at the dark expanse of water. Jennsen wondered if it might be better were she to fall, better to be swallowed into the depths and be done with it. It looked a sweet embrace, a gentle end to it all. It looked like the peace she sought. Peace at last.
If she could just die there, on the spot, the impossible struggle would be over. The heartache and sorrow would be ended. Maybe, then, she could be with her mother and the other good spirits in the underworld.
She doubted, though, that the good spirits took people who murdered themselves. To take a life, except to defend life, was wrong. If Jermsen were to give up, all that her mother had done, all her sacrifices, would be for nothing. Her mother, waiting in eternity, might not forgive Jennsen for throwing her life away.
Althea, too, had lost nearly everything to help her. How could Jennsen ignore such bravery-not just Althea's, but Friedrich's, too? Despite how miserably responsible she felt, she could not throw her only life away.
She felt, though, as if she had stolen Althea's chance at life. Despite what the woman had said, Jennsen felt a sense of burning shame for what Althea had suffered. Althea would be imprisoned in this miserable swamp forever, every day paying the price of having tried to hide Jennsen from Darken Rahl. Jennsen's mind might have been telling her that it was Darken Rahl's doing, but her own heart said otherwise. Althea would never have her own life back, be free to walk, free to go where she would, free to have the joy of her own gift.
Pillars of Creation Page 25