The Well of Prayers

by Anne Boles Levy

  He raised one eyebrow in response. “So what do you hear?”

  “You mean because I can understand them all.”

  “This big puddle of stink is talking to us in about six different languages.”

  “More.” I held a finger to my lips. I needed a moment to concentrate. I caught nuances of Tengali, the Feroxi tongue Fernai, the common tongue, and perhaps Belai and a western dialect or two. The songs came in waves, with a current of sound lapping up from the steam and drifting away as another swept forward, back and forth, gentle but constant. The air rippled in time with the praying, carrying the steam’s fine mist upward in soft spirals.

  The muddy, steaming pits burbled up these voices and their muffled prayers, as if it had all welled beneath the surface for an age or so and could escape only in slow drifts. I had no sense, however, if these prayers had been uttered a century ago or this morning or this very moment, as we listened. It was all a confusing jumble. I wanted desperately to understand.

  I had no answers yet; only more questions, always more. I would’ve kicked the mud in frustration if it would’ve done anything but get me dirty.

  Valeo stuck his hand in the steam again, which parted around his palm and dissipated. That didn’t prove much. Sticking my hand in would be the real test.

  I was right. The steam parted clear down to my feet, forming two streams around my hand. The ground trembled faintly beneath me, and I glanced up at Valeo.

  “A quake, you think?” he asked.

  “It’s only in my spot.”

  He picked up a rock and tossed it into the puddle. It splashed, but didn’t sink. “Solid ground.”

  “Then it’s not a sinkhole or a bog,” I said. “I’m going to walk out there.”

  “Keep your sandals on. You don’t want scalded soles.”

  Something my mother would say. I shot him a quizzical look. He chewed his lower lip and I realized he looked as worried and confused as I felt. I bit back a snotty reply and simply nodded at him. Keep my sandals on. Yessir.

  The yellowish mud stuck to my soles with a splick-splack sound as I took careful, gingerly steps to the pool’s center. It took long minutes to get used to the heat, but it stopped just short of scalding. Even so, I couldn’t stay in it long. From deep within the mud, bubbles of air welled up beneath my feet, as if the ground itself would burst with me on top. But the steam and soft burbling kept on as usual, the distant, praying voices rising and falling without change.

  “What do you feel?” Valeo scowled down at the ground near my feet.

  I glanced around for the Gek but didn’t see them.

  “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel. It’s just … I don’t know. Like the air is very heavy around me.”

  “More than the humidity?”

  “Yes, like it’s pulsing upward.”

  And then the air burst. Phantasms poured up from the ground; faint outlines of people sobbing, throwing themselves in supplication, praying, pleading with hands clasped before tear-stained faces. They rose, glowing a pale mustard color from the mud. The murmured, formal chants of prayer services gave way to desperate pleas and shouted prayers.

  As these ghosts sifted around me, their terror became my own. What if Nihil never forgave me? What if I’d taken on too much, sinned too broadly, strayed too far from the path he’d set out for me? I might never see my family again, never meet them beneath the fruitful boughs of the Eternal Tree or meet my grandmother.

  My grandmother. I jolted back to reality. There was no Eternal Tree in the afterlife, and my grandmother—my heretical, exiled, executed grandmother—would certainly not be meeting me there. The flood of other people’s grief swept me up with its raw, emotional force.

  Nihil forgive.

  Please, gardener of the Eternal Tree.

  Take pity.

  Have mercy.

  Kind Master, please.

  Prayers and supplications welled beneath my feet, venting in heaves and belches from the ground. The blunt, open neediness of so many nameless, ghostly souls built within my chest, down to my feet, up through my shoulders, my fingers, neck, ears—my whole body filled with the power of others’ sorrow and desperation. I had to force it to stay down, pressing my entire being into the effort, sweat beading on my upper lip.

  Nihil, they all thought. I heard this thought. It was the same, all of it.

  Nihil.

  Please.

  So much desperation and desire, focused, singular, aimed like an arrow to the one being who could take all that raw sorrow and … do what?

  “It’s like a well,” I said. “A well of prayers.”

  Valeo humphed, his gaze tracing the outlines of mourners and supplicants as they dissipated above his head. “A well is only a hole dug into the water table. So there is some underground table of prayers?”

  “From which Nihil draws,” I said, the realization hitting. “Listen, people’s prayers—this is why he needs all of us to worship him.”

  “I don’t get it. He stores prayers?”

  “S’ami said Nihil steals power from the demons, but he has other sources, too, sources S’ami believes are irrelevant. Maybe he’s wrong.”

  Valeo glanced at the sobbing phantasms and shook his head. “Not if he could see what we’re seeing.”

  Prayers were that other power. And that power was more fierce and deadly than weapons, than witchcraft—than words, even. Here was proof, screeching out of the ground around me as my breathing gathered speed, panting as I took in some of that power for myself, pulling it in through my nose and mouth, breathing it all in. My brain sparked with sudden static, my senses becoming more acute: colors grew sharper, the outlines of objects more vivid. Beyond the sharp stench of the sulfur pits, I could make out the most delicate aromas of flowers and berries ripening. Then sounds: chirps and hums of a million insects, the Gek chittering and clicking their anxiety and curiosity. My skin prickled against the breeze as if I could feel every dust particle, every pollen spore beating against me one by one by the thousands.

  A vibration in the air, so subtle, it barely moved, told me Valeo had spoken, even in the fraction of an instant before the words hit my ears.

  “A prayer well. What thirst does he quench with our prayers, except our free will?”

  “No, not quench.” My mind raced ahead of me, making sudden connections as the powerful chants and pleadings swirled around me, nearly drowning out my voice. “This is his power. Millions of focused minds, all turned to him. When we pray, we know our belief can overwhelm us.”

  I was ranting, I knew it, but the words poured out as if they, too, had been suppressed beneath the surface, waiting to bubble up. “We fall to our knees, we prostrate ourselves, we stagger back to our feet, we cry and moan, we feel humbled, but hopeful, downcast, but redeemed. Don’t we? Isn’t that what it’s all about, that next chance, that forgiveness, that hope that something larger, that someone, can save us from ourselves?

  “What if you took all that prayer and its power and concentrated it by the millions, and aimed it, straight as a crossbow?”

  “Are you saying you will? Or that you can?” I heard hope in Valeo’s voice.

  Could I? He didn’t need the answer: I did.

  I closed my eyes and stretched out my arms, feeling the power course through me in urgent waves. How could I shape it into something magical? And did I even want to?

  I focused on the prayers and pleas swirling around me. I could feel them leaning in, pressing into me. I gathered the phantasms, circling my arms as if embracing them. The power in my limbs surged, like I could climb a dozen mountains, like I could fly.

  They prayed, and I caught their prayers. These were mine. I took their wishes and longings and I could do as I pleased. My fingertips crackled and sparks flew from my nose, eyes, and mouth. This was power. I could shape it, level the mountaintop, uproot trees, set the world afire.

  Magic.

  I opened my eyes and sighed, the extra strength immediately dissi
pating.

  This is how Nihil does it, I thought.

  And I didn’t want anything to do with it.

  My stomach curled at the thought, and bile leached up into my throat. I shuddered, a giant, involuntary shake that rattled me from shoulder to knees. I’d rather this magic kill me than master me—because I would be its slave, needing more and more and ever more, like a drug. You couldn’t wield something like this; you succumbed to it and it owned you.

  I wondered if Nihil was like that, a slave to what he’d created.

  “Hadara, explain. You looked like you were spellcasting. Can you do it?” Valeo leaned in, but didn’t step into the prayer well, as I was already calling it in my head. “If you can, it could change the world. It could …”

  The martial gleam in his eye came from someone I should’ve recognized sooner. This was the real Valeo, not the one who made flower garlands. His every muscle tensed, his body coiled and ready to spring, hand hovering over an imaginary scabbard for a sword he must miss.

  I made a fist. This is exactly what I had feared—that he envied me my power, or he’d fight me to use it. What would I do if he charged me and killed me?

  “I won’t. I will not.”

  To my surprise, he backed off. “No, of course not.” He eyed me warily, hovering and alert, just a few steps further back.

  “Can I trust you?” I already knew the answer; I needed to see if he knew it.

  “No,” he said. “You’re a fool for even asking.”

  “And could you trust me with power like this?”

  He hesitated, one eyebrow rising. He hadn’t considered whether I could be trusted. Had he forgotten his mission so soon? But then, which mission had he chosen after all—to kill me or bring me back?

  Then he popped his own surprise: “Do you trust yourself, Hadara?”

  “Yes,” I said, about as firmly as I’ve ever said anything. “If I did this—”

  “You don’t need to explain.”

  “But I do. I’ve fought my whole life, in one way or another, against magic. Am I going to use it now? It’s more likely to destroy me than Nihil.”

  Disappointment and disdain rolled off him like the heat. “There are so many who would help you.”

  “They could be my priests, is that it? I’d need temples, too, and tithes and worshippers—especially those.”

  He paused. “And some way to keep them all in check, I suppose. So you’d need guards. A whole, huge system to make sure your prayer well was always full.”

  “So you understand?” I blinked in disbelief.

  He stubbed the ground with one foot and stared at it, then shot a look at me that was hard to read. Was he angry? His tone was curt, brief, hard. “It’s not tough to understand. You drag me here to this stinking pit and it’s like the edge of salvation itself; everything most of the world has ever wanted. To be free of Nihil, to have someone loving and responsible and kind wielding this power instead. And you’re pushing it all away.”

  Loving and responsible and kind? This was the flower-garland Valeo instead, though he hadn’t dropped his coiled pose. But his words and their resigned tone told me this wasn’t about seizing that power for himself.

  “If I won’t seize Nihil’s power,” I began, “I can try to at least cut it off.”

  A half-smirk stole across his lips, just a faint raise in one corner of his mouth. “Now, that would be a thing worth doing.”

  “Happy enough?”

  The smirk broadened into a grin. “Seal it off forever? Make him the impotent, weak little despot that he is? Damn, yes.”

  I grew confused. He was again imagining far more than I thought I could do. I didn’t want to fail him, and said so, in a fumbling, stupid-sounding way. I stammered what I thought I could do, how I could seal this up, perhaps, but if it was his prayer well, maybe it wasn’t the only one? What if there were others?

  He shrugged. “My commander always says we can only do what we can do—and that is the impossible.”

  “Meaning?” I had never liked his Commander.

  He flicked his wrist toward the pool around me. “I know you can do this. Then I can take you home, if the Gek don’t make you queen.”

  27

  I took the best of my followers and taught them to subdue Nature. I made them more powerful than drought, than flood, than sea currents and winds, than mountain or desert, or the body and its frailties.

  —from Verisimilitudes 7, The Book of Unease

  The afternoon sun beat down on my shoulders and heated my knot of hair. I hunched on a boulder, defeated and angry, my chin to my chest, elbows on knees. I had been fussing all day at the mud pools, at times trying to suck the phantasms from the ground, at other times shoving them back down. I had no idea what I was doing and nothing worked. As soon as I walked away, the commotion had died down and the specters and noises faded.

  The Gek had recovered some of their bravery and nosed around the prayer wells, as though scouting for evidence that I’d done anything, anything at all. They had accepted my explanations with a variety of excited chitters and croaks, with the chieftain praising the sunbeams lucky enough to light my path, or some such drivel. I didn’t want a Temple of Gek and told him so. He had agreed, and the Gek had returned to skittering in a wide berth around us as they inspected the steam vents.

  Valeo sat beside me, arms folded across his chest, lost in thought. Finally, he cleared his throat.

  “You pulled out and stuffed in,” he said. “There’s no sideways or inside out or upside down way you could try to seal this?”

  “No, no, and no.”

  “I’m trying to help.”

  I couldn’t mask my irritation. “It’s too big. It’s like the whole world is in there.”

  “Would it harm the world, what you’re doing?”

  “How on Kuldor would I know?”

  “Listen, hold on. There’s no rush. I know I said get it done, but you don’t need to be short about it. We can ask S’ami—”

  “We are not asking S’ami.”

  “For a text or manuscript of some kind. He’s the Curator of the Boundless Repository, remember? If there’s so much as a scroll on this, he’ll have seen it.”

  “A scroll? Of what, instructions?” The moment I said it, I regretted it. If Nihil’s penchant for journaling was true and not a myth, likely something, somewhere, could help. Only a fraction of his writings made Scripture—even I remembered that from lessons. But I’d had so little interest in Scriptures as they were, I’d never been curious about what hadn’t made the final cut.

  And the only textbook, a true book, I’d ever seen had been the one on anatomy I used as a healer.

  “That’s it!” I said. “Thank you, Valeo. You’re right. So right!”

  “Glad to know it,” he said. “Even if I have no idea what I’m right about.”

  “A text! My anatomy text. Look, my mind just made a huge leap, alright?”

  “From anatomy to … ?”

  “I’m a healer, right? I might be able to heal the prayer well. Not seal it, more like a bandage.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  I was already halfway out to the largest pool again, waving my arms madly, skipping across rocks and jumping in an attempt to get the phantasms started again. They cooperated, sifting up with the chanting and beseeching. Again, I let the power of their raw need course through me, only this time I didn’t stop there. My mind reached down, far down into the ground to the hot, coursing veins of the volcano. The heat didn’t touch me this time—only the sheer muscle of Kuldor’s center welled up within me. The prayers and this volcano sharing an essential power was infinite and mighty.

  The white-hot core of the mountain didn’t merely hold the prayers, but also distilled them down to energy that rumbled through my body. I could use the volcano itself to repair the damage to its side, but I had to do it without converting this energy to magic. I had to resist that temptation. I had Valeo’s confidence in me to bols
ter me, not to mention the Gek’s obvious need for this.

  But as I dug deeper, feeling around for the beginnings of the prayer well—where did it start? —I also felt the rest of the island. I closed my eyes again and its rocky shoreline became my bones; the trees rising above the swamps were my skin; and muddy water coursed through my rivers of veins. The fizzing I’d learned to associate with magic sprung into my head with such force, I staggered backward. My footing would’ve been unsure, but my feet were the roots and boles of trees. But all of it made me sick, a dizzying, nauseating spin in my head that turned the horizon into a wheeling storm of color. I parted my feet, planted them more firmly, and kept exploring with every part of me, swallowing back bile, closing my eyes against the whirling scenery.

  Beneath the island—far beneath—magic was at work. The very soul of New Meridian had become corrupt and black. Of course the swamp had burned—an unnatural current had surged beneath its murky surface for generations, waiting for a spark to ignite it. The prayer wells must be merely blisters where the infection surfaced first.

  And where would it strike next? The force welling beneath me was shifting water, lapping and eddying, swirling this way and that. I couldn’t see any pattern to it.

  “Because I impose the pattern.”

  My eyes jolted open and I shouted to Valeo, who watched me from the boulder we’d been sitting on. “Did you say something?”

  “No.”

  “Did you hear a voice?”

  “I hear lots of voices. All praying. Anything new?”

  “Well, this one’s more of a—” I stopped mid-sentence. A tenor. Rich and pure, lilting and flawless.

  “It is I, your Master.”

  Nihil.

  Panic seized me. My feet froze to the spot, sticking in the coarse mud. I rubbed my palms against my makeshift skirt, which loosened and began to fall off. I clutched the cloth to my chest instead, stifling screams, which came out as short, shrill hiccups.

  “You have come again,” Nihil said. “And you will fail again.”