by K. C. May
“Not all,” Gavin said, feeling oddly defensive of the Nal Disi.
“Well, maybe not all. It’s probably not to blame for the war with Cyprindia, but it’s at the heart of everything else we’ve had to contend with.”
Perhaps that was true, but she didn’t have to come out and say so.
Gavin shrugged. “Could be.” He wasn’t learned like she was. He’d heard mention of a war with Cyprindia, and Edan had cautioned him that old scores hadn’t yet been settled. His curiosity was strong, but he had more important matters to address at the moment. He turned the Nal Disi in his hands, judging its weight. “It’s not as heavy as it looks, maybe five stones or so. What’s strange is that it felt heavier under water than it does now.”
“That is odd. Must be its magical influence. So what happens next?” Daia asked.
“I got to purify the wellspring by pulling the Guardians’ essence into the crystal. I don’t know how long it’ll take.”
The Guardians who’d once hovered over the wellspring now stood beside him, though their figures were still glassy. This close, he saw the finest detail of what used to be the smooth golden fur that covered their bodies. “That is correct, Emtor.”
They used the respectful form of address that the Elyle Bahn had used when Gavin had visited the midrealm. “You still look like Elyle,” he said.
“Though both our essences were transferred to this vessel and combined into one, it retains the memory of our living form.”
He saw the crystal’s threads connecting the ghostly images of the Guardians to the grayish essence within the gem, but he couldn’t discern any separation between them. “How did two separate essences get in here?”
“That is a long story, Emtor. We will tell you, but now is not the time. Our essence continues to spill onto the earth.”
“Awright,” Gavin said. “How do I do this?”
“Can you sense our essence trapped in the minerals in the water?”
To his hidden eye, the water sparkled, as if miniature diamonds floated within. “Yeh.”
“Hold the Nal Disi under the water’s surface and pull the essence into it. Be careful not to pull it through Nal Disi and into yourself.”
Saying was easy, doing not so much.
He straddled a large rock that sat at the water’s edge, with his toes on dry ground behind him and his hands within easy reach of the water. Instead of using Daia’s conduit to enhance his magic, he drew on the power within the crystal.
“No!” the Guardians said. “You must not use our essence that way. Use the woman’s if she does not mind sacrificing it for you.”
Gavin snapped to attention. “What do you mean, sacrificing?”
“Please, Emtor, our essence spills out.”
“What’s that?” Daia asked, alarm on her face. “Are they asking you to sacrifice yourself?”
“No, no,” he said. “They don’t want me to use their essence the way I use your conduit.”
“Well then, use my conduit. As I’ve said before, it’s yours to use as you will.”
Gavin stretched to crack his neck and back and exhaled heavily, trying to release his tension. “Awright, let me give it a try.”
He imagined the Nal Disi as a sponge, soaking up the essence in the water as he pulled. He envisioned his will as a giant hand stroking the water towards himself. After only a few minutes, he gasped for breath, unaware until that moment that he’d been holding it in. Breathe. Relax. His shoulders and neck were taut with the strain of it, and his stomach muscles burned with the effort of pulling.
“You needn’t tire yourself that way, Emtor,” their gentle two-toned voice said in his mind. “The pulling is done with the magic, not with the muscles.”
“I know that,” he snapped. Magic didn’t come naturally to him. He’d merely inherited King Arek’s magic over several months, starting only a year earlier. Everything he learned to do was learned through trial and error. He didn’t have the luxury of time to experiment and play like a child. As the Wayfarer and King of Thendylath, he felt the expectations of others like a boulder on his back. “I’m doing the best I can.”
He refocused his efforts, but this time he tried to do it without tensing his muscles. The sounds of the birds drifted from his consciousness, as did the feeling of the rock under his arse. The sight of his hidden eye narrowed. What started out looking like a swarm of colorful specks racing towards him and into the crystal between his hands smoothed into ribbons of gray. The Nal Disi became heavier in his hands with every passing moment. Little by little, a hum seeped into his mind, growing louder as the Guardians’ essence filled the crystal. A second hum joined the first, slightly different in pitch, creating a pair of ghostly tones that Gavin heard in his mind yet not with his ears and splitting his mystic vision.
He saw three different scenes in his mind at the same time. It was like looking at something close up with first one eye shut and then the other, while with both eyes open, the image merged.
In one scene, the essence flowed towards him from the water and gathered into the Nal Disi.
In the second and third scenes, two Elyle sat on the ground holding hands, their free hands on the white crystal between them. Their eyes were shut, and they were humming with their mouths and chanting at the same time with their whistles and clicks. He could sense their hazes flowing into the gem and merging within. Their bodies grew weaker. At first they slumped together, and then they collapsed. As the last of their hazes joined within the white gemstone, the two Elyle died.
Gavin jerked to consciousness and opened his eyes. He was lying flat on his back with Daia and Cirang kneeling over him, their faces crinkled in concern. A hammer pounded at his skull from the inside.
“Gavin, what’s wrong?” Daia asked in a voice shrill with fear.
“Must’ve fainted,” he croaked, his throat raw and dry. Daia gripped his elbow to help him sit up. His vision spun. He felt queasy, like he was going to disgorge. As he sat up, he became aware of wetness on his upper lip, and he wiped it away with the back of his hand. Blood.
“Here,” Daia said, handing him a handkerchief. It was already dotted with fresh blood, and he wiped his face and the sides of his neck, where blood trickled from his ears.
Cirang handed him his water skin, and he guzzled down its contents. The water quenched him and settled his stomach. The healing magic calmed the headache bit by bit.
“You’re looking a bit green,” Daia said. “What can I do to help?”
“I’m awright. Just had a... vision.”
“You witnessed our transformation, Emtor,” the Guardians said. Their ghostly forms hovered as if standing on the surface of the shallow water above the spot where he’d dropped the Nal Disi.
“I saw you die,” he said, looking at them with awe. Was he seeing their ghosts?
“You saw me die?” Daia asked.
“No, them.”
“Our original bodies died,” the Guardians said. “Our intention was to merge our khozhi within the gemstone and withdraw it again, so that each of us would be balanced and could live our lives separately, the way your people do. We didn’t understand until it was too late.”
“Understand what?” Gavin asked.
“That is so confusing,” Daia said, looking at Cirang. “I’m beginning to hate when he does that. I feel left out.”
“That the essence is what animates the body,” the Guardians said. “Without it, the body dies.”
Gavin was confused. He’d been told that the essence wasn’t the same as the spirit. “So essence is the spirit?”
“No. The spirit is the core of what makes us unique as individuals. Both essence and spirit are needed for beings of intellect to live in physical form. The spirit is immortal and moves from body to body throughout time. The essence is fixed on one body until that body dies. It can be removed for a few moments, but must be immediately replaced. Even if the heart stops beating, the body can be revived if the essence remains. Our transfor
mation failed. We were unable to return to our bodies, and they began to decay. We remain trapped in this vessel for eternity.”
For eternity. Gavin shuddered. He couldn’t imagine such a horrible existence, unable to talk and laugh and be with his own kind. “And what of your spirit?”
“We linger to protect our essence within the Nal Disi.”
“So am I talking to your essence or your spirit?”
“You’re communicating with our spirit filtered through the essence like for every being of intellect. What you see is an imprint of our combined essences. When seen with a mystical vision, it inherits its life-bound form.”
“Is that why you remember everything that happened?” Gavin asked.
“Yes, Emtor. Our experiences past and present are bound to our spirit, and we’ll take them with us to new bodies, when that time comes.”
Gavin glanced at Cirang. That explained why she had the memories of Sithral Tyr. Why, then, would she have Cirang’s memories, too?
“Your companion understands this,” they said, as if in reply. “We see in her a spirit not born into the body she’s using. The essence itself is native, yet it is pure zhi. We would like to know how that came to pass.”
“You’ve captured their interest, Cirang.” Gavin reached into the wellspring and pulled the Nal Disi from the water. “They want to know how you managed to take over another body.”
She shrugged. “I simply awoke, as though I’d been asleep. I only remembered my own life at first, but over time, I learned how to remember Cirang’s life, too.”
“Did you hear her reply?” he asked them.
“We heard her voice, but we cannot understand her language.”
If they could only understand Gavin because of his magic, having to relay conversations between Daia, Cirang and the Guardians was going to be tedious.
“Well, let’s get going, and I’ll tell you how it happened.”
He put the Nal Disi in his satchel, retied his water skin to his saddle, and mounted. While they rode down the mountain in single file, Cirang leading and Gavin riding ahead of Daia, he explained to the Guardians who Cirang had been and who Sithral Tyr had been, and how the green cat figurine housing Tyr’s soul had wound up in her possession. Cirang’s memories had come with the body, she claimed, which made him think that maybe the brain was where the spirit was stored, much like how King Arek’s magic was stored in gems until some poor bastard found them in a cave.
He wasn’t sure he understood, and he had no interest in becoming a spiritual scholar anyway. He was merely a peasant swordsman forced to lead a country and now to find a cure for an affliction no one had ever seen before. That was plenty to occupy his mind. Something tickled the side of his neck, and he wiped it away. More blood.
“Why the hell is doing this making me bleed from the ears?” he asked.
“And nose,” Cirang said.
“And eyes,” Daia added. “It’s like your tears have turned to blood. I hope you’ve done all you need to do here. You need rest. You need to heal from all this... damage the magic is doing to you.”
Damage? He’d never considered what kind of damage magic could cause. He used to faint when he was first learning to heal people, but he hadn’t bled from it, and it had never given him a headache as severe as the one he’d awoken with. He wondered how other mages managed it. Jennalia, the Farthan mage who’d enchanted his sword, must have been at least eighty years old. She might be able to offer guidance.
He leaned to the side, took a deep breath and snorted out a wad of bloody snot. He pinched it off and flung his fingers before wiping them dry on his trousers.
“Ugh! Gavin, please,” Daia said with a look of disgust.
“What?” he asked innocently. “I don’t have a clean handkerchief. Was I supposed to snuffle it up and swallow it?”
“Can we not talk about it?”
When they reached the bottom of the mountain where the water trickled down the rock face and spilled onto the ground, Gavin dug wearily into his satchel for the Nal Disi to remove the last of the Guardians’ essence from the water.
“Why don’t you rest for a bit?” Daia asked. “The water that’s spilling out now is plain water, isn’t it? Diluting the corrupted water?”
“Yeh, but I’d rather get it over with. That’ll be one thing off my mind.”
He set the crystal into the pool of water and squatted in front of it. Pulling the spilled essence into it was much easier this time, owing, he supposed, to the smaller quantity of water he needed to work with. While he worked, Cirang gathered firewood and Daia tended the horses.
When at last he was finished, he felt more exhausted than he had since he could remember. He sat against a tree with the strange crystal in his lap, pondering its nature and the two ghostlike beings living inside that only he could see. Soon, sleep overtook him, and he dreamed of people being sucked into the strange crystal, leaving behind only their clothes. He jerked awake and put the Nal Disi into his knapsack, though he had to make room for it by tying his water skin to the right shoulder strap. The crystal would be safer in a bag that he could keep with him.
Around the cookfire that night, they ate the food the Lordover Ambryce’s chef had bundled for them. The relief Gavin felt at having cleansed the well water of the life-altering essence made him realize how much stress he’d felt lately. He had to constantly massage the muscles between his neck and shoulder to relieve the tension.
“May I do that for you, my liege?” Cirang asked.
“Do what?”
She lifted her chin towards him. “Ease the ache in your neck and shoulders.”
He started to refuse, but she reminded him of the debt she owed him and all of Thendylath. “Anything you need, my liege, would be my pleasure and my duty to give you or do for you.”
“She’s right,” Daia said. “Let her knead your aching muscles. Hell, you should make her wipe your arse, too.”
Gavin laughed for the first time in days. It felt good and helped him relax even more. “Yeh, awright. Go ahead then. My thanks.”
He bowed his head and closed his eyes while her strong hands kneaded his shoulders and neck. His mind drifted to the crystal in his knapsack and its seductive power. He wondered why the Guardians were so adamant that he not use their essence. If pulling it back into the crystal didn’t affect his khozhi balance, then why not use it to fuel his magic? If he did, maybe he wouldn’t faint or get headaches.
“What are you going to do with the crystal?” Daia asked, pulling his thoughts back to the present.
“That’s enough,” he told Cirang. She returned to the spot she’d been sitting in before the fire, and he tilted his head left and right to work the kinks out. “Maybe I should bury it, but I don’t know. The essence could leak into the groundwater.” He would think about that later. For now, he was ready for sleep. He flapped open his bedroll and blanket.
“Do they have any ideas on how to reverse the damage the water did to Feanna and the others?”
Gavin yawned and settled down to sleep. “I’ll ask them in the morning.”
“You may ask now, if you wish,” they replied. “We don’t sleep.”
“But I do.” If there was a way, he would find it.
Daia and Cirang took his cue and lay down as well. “Sleep well,” Daia said.
His mind kept returning to the Nal Disi, like his eyes to the dancing fire. He turned his mind to Feanna and what she might be doing, but his thoughts came back again and again to the crystal and the Guardians who appeared whenever he asked for them. The temptation to use the crystal to focus his magic was powerful, but he knew that once he gave himself permission to use it, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stop.
Chapter 8
Though Edan would have preferred to read more from the journal Jaesh had found, he didn’t want to ignore his guests. Sharing a bottle of wine with them after supper gave him an opportunity to get to know Thendylath’s enemy on a more personal level, and he found
Kaoque to be exceedingly polite while his stoic guardian, Tokpah, was silent and watchful, refusing to sit, eat or drink in Edan’s presence.
“Tokpah takes his refreshment when we are alone,” Kaoque explained. “It is the training of a Cyprindian warrior to only guard when he stands guard.”
“We mean you no harm,” Edan said. “It is our custom to treat guests with honor and dignity while they’re in our home. This,” he said with his hands open, “is not a battlefield.”
“Please do not take offense. It is the warrior’s way. He does only as he was trained since early in his childhood.”
Edan leaned back, striking a confident, relaxed pose. “I’m not offended. I consider him to be a guest of the king as well. If he’s more comfortable standing and watching, he’s welcomed to. Did you two travel to Tern alone?”
“Yes, we with our horses,” Kaoque said. “From Delham, where our ship is anchored offshore.”
“I hope you didn’t encounter brigands. They frequently patrol the roads, looking for travelers to rob.”
Kaoque pulled something from a small pocket in his shirt—an amulet consisting of a peach-colored gem encased in an artful cage of gold. “We each have one of these. The gem stores a magic spell that hides the wearer from notice. When we do not wish to be noticed, we put them on. Wearing these for most of our journey, we avoided several such patrols.”
Such amulets would also keep a Cyprindian army from being noticed as they marched on Tern. Edan shuddered and tried to cover his uneasiness with a smile. At his earliest opportunity, he would send word to the lordovers in Delam and Calsojourn, and to his father, the Lordover Lalorian, to send armsmen to keep an eye on that ship. “I see. Tell me, Emissary Kaoque, are you married?”
“Yes, I have one chosen wife and two brood wives. Between them, I have eight sons and a daughter.”
“How does brood wife differ from your chosen wife, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Kaoque smiled broadly. “My chosen wife is the woman I selected. She is from my own city, and I fell in love with her many years ago. A brood wife is a woman given to me as a gift to bear my children.”