But not today. Today he looked tired, sad, even somewhat at a loss.
And, well...old.
His voice, when he spoke, reflected all of those things, too.
“Alyson,” Vash said. “We warned you of this.”
“You did?” I said, biting my lip.
He went on as if I hadn’t spoken.
“...I myself told you, way back at the beginning, when we first spoke of these things, what the Dreng do to those who work for them down here.”
“You said they got addicted to being in their constructs, yeah,” I said, nodding to acknowledge this. “You said they got addicted to the power, the endless supply of light...the pool of skill sets. You didn’t say they’d go crazy if they left!”
Vash only clicked softly at my outburst.
“I told you of the ways in which they strip their servants of the ability to utilize their own light,” he said softly, his dark eyes shining that compassion again. “I explained to you in detail what happened to him the last time, when he left the structure of the Pyramid. I told you of the work that had to be done to rebuild his aleimic structures, to make him self-sufficient once more. I told you what we had to do to him as Syrimne, once he’d been disconnected from Menlim and the Dreng. In all of these situations, a deep dependency had been created...”
“But this was different,” I said, looking around at all of them again. “He wasn’t in the Pyramid this time. He wasn’t with Menlim...”
Balidor coughed.
I glared at him, then returned my eyes to Vash.
The older seer merely clicked again, his voice mild.
“It is much the same, Alyson,” he said quietly.
Balidor spoke up from closer to where I sat. He stripped his voice of sarcasm that time, keeping his voice a subdued as Vash’s.
“Allie,” he said, giving me a level look when I turned. “He lived, full-time, in a construct of a Dreng stronghold. It functions in much the same way as the Pyramid. It may not have been as sophisticated...but it served very much the same purpose.”
“But I lived there!”
“You lived there as a guest, Esteemed Bridge,” Balidor said, bowing towards me politely. I heard the edge undercutting his words, though. “No offense is meant when I say...to compare these two things is beyond meaningless. His light operated as a part and function of that living construct, in a state of full or partial symbiosis. He was leading them, na?”
Inclining his head, he didn’t wait for my response.
“...As a result of that leadership status, he became one of the construct’s primary pillars. One of those holding and maintaining it for the others who lived inside. To do this, he had to be completely immersed in the functionality of the construct, as well as in its power sources, at all times. That means a direct line to the Dreng, Allie.”
Pausing, he tipped his hand towards me again, another gesture of respect, according to the old forms, but one still tinged with anger.
“...You, Esteemed Bridge, did not.”
I looked at him, at all of them.
“I was connected to him...” I began.
“Not enough,” Balidor said. His voice grew into a mutter. “...Although that was changing, too.” At my hard look, he shrugged, keeping his face expressionless despite the tension I saw in his eyes. “...You told me as much yourself. You would have noticed the changes more, had you remained with him there.”
“But he doesn’t even seem to be the same person.”
Balidor’s voice sharpened, this time carrying an open anger.
“He is exactly who he always was,” he said, the edge rising in his light. “Only it is visible to you now, Esteemed Bridge. The illusion was this man, ‘The Sword,’ who you knew in those hills. Without the crutch of the Dreng, and the construct propping him up, you see past the illusion perpetuated by the Rooks. The illusion that he was a wholly integrated, stable being acting autonomously, according to his own wishes...”
“As opposed to what?” I said.
“As opposed to a puppet of the Dreng,” Balidor replied, blunt. “Which is what I have been telling you for at least a year now that he is, Esteemed Bridge...”
From beside him, Dorje raised a hand, trying to calm Balidor, but the Adhipan leader ignored the gesture, staring only at me.
“You claimed that you understood, Allie...but clearly you did not. Once his light was reunited with the parts of him that were Syrimne, he became entirely incapable of functioning on his own, without the assistance of the Dreng in some form...”
“But what does that actually mean, ‘Dori?” I said, hearing anger reach my own voice. “I need more to go on than that. I need you to explain to me what happened to him...what’s wrong with him.” I swallowed. “And how we fix him...”
Balidor rolled his eyes, seer fashion, making a dismissive gesture with one hand.
“‘Dori,” I began angrily.
But Vash broke in before I could get any further. The old seer’s voice held patience, and a compassion that Balidor’s did not.
The softness emanating from his light forced my eyes back to his.
“Balidor is essentially right, Alyson,” he said gently. “It is why your husband returned to them in the first place.”
“Meaning what?” I said, swallowing. “You mean after D.C.?”
Vash gestured a yes with one hand.
“He needed them, Allie,” he said. “...He could not handle the reintegration on his own. If such a brutal process can be called something as neutral as ‘reintegration,’ given the state he lived in as Syrimne...”
Clicking softly, he shook his head sympathetically before adding,
“...I cannot imagine the depth of his terror when he was reunited with that part of himself, Alyson. You had asked me once, why he did not find you right away, after what occurred in D.C. I think now that it is likely he simply wasn’t capable of it. He likely wasn’t capable of doing much of anything but finding his masters once more, and asking them to help him put the pieces of his mind back together...”
He sent me images along with his words, clearly enough that I had no response at first. For a moment I could only sit there, digesting what I’d felt, staring at the table between my splayed fingers. Despite what I’d said to Balidor, nothing in me felt angry...even before Vash spoke.
The anger in me had petered out. I wasn’t sure the hollowed-out feeling that replaced it was much of an improvement.
Even so, I knew what Vash was trying to tell me. I knew what he was reminding me of, too.
I remembered the boy.
When I married Revik, I hadn’t known about the Syrimne thing at all. All of that had been excised from his light body by a group of seers back at the end of World War I...a compromise of sorts...orchestrated by Vash and Galaith and some of the other ancients in the Seven.
They’d created a fiction, instead of killing him outright.
They created Dehgoies Revik.
The parts of him that made up Syrimne...the deadly, telekinetic seer my husband had been as a child, and then as a young man...were the same parts the old seers excised. They attached that part of his aleimi, or light body, to the body of a dead seer boy. Then they housed that reanimated corpse in a dungeon where they hoped no one would ever find him. At least not before the original body died, and the boy along with it.
I think they’d really hoped that would be the end of it. They’d hoped to wait out the long lifespan of Syrimne and, in the process, give him back at least part of the life that had been stolen from him. They saw that as justice, of a sort.
Or perhaps compassion.
I’d slowly pieced together maybe about half of his personal history since the death of the boy, with the help of Vash and even Revik himself. When I stayed with him in those mountains, he told me pretty much whatever I asked him about what he could remember about his life. He even told me things he remembered about his childhood...parts of it anyway.
He told me less about Menlim
and what Menlim had done to him.
I’d heard from Tarsi, his only living blood relative, that he’d had a family once, who loved him. The Sword, the version of Revik I’d grown to know in those mountains, had nothing to tell me about them...not even their names.
Vash told me that the Dreng had likely restored his memory only selectively, despite Revik’s claims that he remembered all of it after the boy died.
He’d been six years old when they’d taken him.
A few decades later, my husband became the most hated and feared seer to ever have lived. To the seers, Syrimne d’Gaos remained a legend, some kind of avenging angel.
To humans, especially those who encountered him when he first surfaced during World War I, he was more like the angel of death.
Clicking softly, in the cultured, older style of seer verbal cues, Vash raised a long-fingered hand, making a regretful gesture.
“...Under Menlim,” he said, as if he’d been listening to me think about all of this. “From the very beginning, Alyson, he was being groomed for this type of dependency. They did this so he would be less likely to fight their plans for him...so he could not leave them, when he grew to be a man. The Dreng and Menlim broke his mind...then held the splintered pieces of his personality in place. Your husband was incapable of living independently, Alyson. He truly was broken...in a very real sense. While he was being trained as Syrimne, they deliberately fractured his mind, giving him situations he could not handle...”
“Situations he couldn’t handle?” I said, swallowing. “Like what?”
“I do not know the specifics, my dear friend,” Vash said gently, his dark eyes softer on mine once more. “...But whatever they were, they forced him to split himself, to create personalities that could cope. The process made him pliable. It also made him entirely dependent on the Dreng for the integration of those personalities...for the stability required for sanity.”
Pausing, he gave me another regretful look.
“He needs them, Allie...quite literally. It is why, when we brought him down the first time, following the war, we compromised. We removed the parts of his personality that we knew to be unstable and put them in the vessel of the boy. We knew of no other way to give him back the ability to govern his own life. It was that, or leave him a slave to the Dreng...”
I tried to think about the old seer’s words, to make sense of them. I tried not to feel like I’d murdered him again...like I’d somehow murdered the man I loved wholesale while trying to help him get free. I’d wanted more than anything to get him away from those people, especially Salinse, who was blood cousin to Menlim and seemingly cut from the same cloth.
I wanted him away from the Dreng, from the influence I could feel they had over his light, and increasingly, over his mind. More than anything, I hated how subservient he was to them, even when he pretended he wasn’t. I hated how he made excuses for them, for Salinse, for his own behavior when he was following orders.
And I hated how Salinse treated Revik, the one and only time I ever met the fossilized seer in person. The smug attitude of propriety made me want to punch him in the face, bare-knuckled, about twenty or so times.
I didn’t really realize until later why it made me so angry.
Then it hit me. Salinse treated Revik like a pet.
A prized one, sure...maybe even a beloved one. But a pet, nonetheless.
“So is he stable at all...?” I looked only at Vash.
“Right now, no.”
“Will it get worse than this?”
“I do not know, my dear. If he follows the same pattern as before, it could get worse, yes. But essentially, he will shift personalities as he needs, to evade our attempts to reach him. It will seem worse at times than others, as some of these personalities are more benign than others...but essentially his condition will remain the same.”
I bit my tongue, hard enough to taste blood.
Shaking my head, I tried to focus back on the problem at hand.
“Do we need to provide him the same kind of structure somehow?” I scanned my own light, trying to think of ways this might happen. “...How do we do that?”
Balidor clicked at this in irritation, but Jon snapped at him.
“Hey, man...why not stop the petty crap and help her with solutions?”
I glanced at Jon, swallowing. I’d forgotten he was there.
He loved Revik, too.
Balidor gave him a level stare. “I’m not in the habit of pretending there are solutions to problems that have none, young cousin.”
“Or looking for one when you’d rather none existed, apparently,” Jon shot back.
“You can go ahead and help your sister maintain her delusions,” Balidor said. “Or you can be a real help to her and assist her with embracing reality...”
“You can give up if you want, man. We all know your stake in this...”
Balidor’s lips pressed together, tightly enough to form a white line in his face.
Before he could speak, I held up a hand to silence them, looking at Vash.
“Can we help him?” I said. “What can we do? You have some ideas, right?”
After a long pause, the old seer purred another of those clicking sounds, leaning back into the high-backed chair. Gazing solemnly at my face, he folded his hands over the front of his robe, lacing long fingers.
“I honestly do not know, Alyson,” he said. “I would have said no before...I would have agreed with Balidor, that he cannot be helped, not in this form. It is, in fact, why we split him. The breaks were too severe...the insanity too great. He viewed us all as his enemies. He did nothing but try to thwart our every attempt to reach him. We tried to show him compassion...and even affection...”
Vash sighed again, clicking softly.
“He was like, how is it you say in America...a broken record? Stuck on the same groove. Unable to get off of it, to position himself objectively...to see himself or us in any but the one way. We were the enemy in his eyes, and he fell back on his training, on what Menlim taught him to do when in the hands of the enemy...”
“And what is that?” I said, not sure if I wanted to know.
“To kill us all,” Vash said, smiling faintly. “Or, perhaps more accurately...to defeat us, in any way he could. Even if it meant his own death. He was taught to never give in, Alyson...to never cooperate, never show weakness, to never surrender an inch of ground, no matter what was being done to him. His ability to withstand coercion in any form is remarkable, really...I don’t believe there is anything we could do to him physically that would make the slightest bit of impression on him...”
“You mean torture,” Jon said, his voice angry again.
Vash didn’t respond immediately, but his dark eyes shimmered at Jon in a kind of pained silence. He looked away just before he shrugged with one hand.
“Not entirely,” he said. “But yes...in part.”
“You’ll never beat him that way,” Balidor added, giving Jon a dismissive look. Folding his rougher hands across his own broad chest, he sighed as well, but his held more anger.
“We tried to break him. Numerous times.” He looked at me. “We tried everything. It was not a short project, our attempt to resurrect the man who had been Syrimne. We tried every tactic at our disposal, gentle and hard, to reach him. Including torture...” He gave Jon another level stare. “At times, that seemed to be the only language he understood. Unfortunately, it was also the least effective, as Vash says...I wondered at times if he even enjoyed it...”
Jon looked away, face flushed with repressed fury.
“It made no difference, cousin,” Balidor told him, raising his voice. “Nothing we tried did, and we tried many more soft methods than we did hard.” He glanced again at me. “He shut us out so completely that we were forced to admit defeat.”
“But he can’t,” Jon blurted. “Not anymore.”
Seers from around the table swiveled their eyes in his direction.
“Can’t what, cous
in?” Dorje said, from his right.
Jon looked at me.
“He can’t keep Allie out. He can’t...” He looked at me, his eyes faintly pleading. “That’s right, isn’t it, Al? With the bond between you, he has no choice but to let you in...”
Before I’d really processed his words, every eye in the room had turned to focus on me.
Still staring at my splayed fingers, I replayed Jon’s words.
Once I had, hope bloomed in my chest.
It was a small hope, so small I found myself scared to believe in it at all, scared even to acknowledge it. But it wasn’t nothing.
“Yeah,” I said, clearing my throat. I glanced around at the rest of them, seeing the forbidding look that had already risen to Balidor’s eyes.
“Yeah, Jon,” I said again. “That’s exactly right.”
Vash surprised me then, maybe surprised all of us.
He chuckled.
Still looking at me with his dark eyes, he broke out in a warm smile from across the table.
I was still staring at that smile, trying to decide if it was real, when he chuckled again.
4
FIRST CONTACT
I WATCHED WITH held breath as Balidor walked out of the organic cage.
It was only the fourth time I’d watched him go in, although I knew he’d been in there a lot more times than that. His face looked about the same as it had the three times I’d seen it before.
He didn’t look at me before turning to shut the door to the tank. I watched as he locked it methodically, activating the main lock with the keypad to the right of the organic hatch and twisting the wheel that activated the pressurized seal with the outer wall.
The door looked more like something attached to a bank vault than a prison. The organic material alone, even without the dead metal locks, measured over three feet thick on each side. I estimated it at closer to five in the center, where most of the mechanics lived.
Allie's War Season Two Page 58