by Carol Berg
Our histories say the seven pools have existed since the beginning of time, but that in the years leading up to the Catastrophe and the beginning of our terrible war they were rarely used. Their effects were too strange and unsettling. Only in D’Arnath’s time, when the world was forever changed, did the Balancer Laennara discover the benefits of using the seven pools in turn and create the Rite of Purification. Life is, of all things, the most precious to the Dar’Nethi, and the taking of life throws our private worlds out of balance like a reflection of the great Catastrophe. We are very good at dealing with our joys and sorrows, but our guilts can be devastating.
Supposedly the rite was used quite often in D’Arnath’s day, but as time passed and killing grew more common, the custom died away. Most of us dealt with our guilt in other ways. Only for the Heir was the rite ever required.
I knew it was not to be taken lightly. That was why the petitioner always brought a companion, lest the ordeal be too rigorous or too painful. I was a fool, I believed, as I stripped and gave Bareil my clothing, listening to Ven’Dar’s instruction.
“Do not touch the water until you are ready. You must immerse yourself wholly in each pool and remain beneath the surface for at least a steady count of one hundred. The additional time you spend in each pool is your own choice, though I will bring you out if you stay beyond the point of safety. In some pools that is an hour, in some half a day.”
“Half a - how in the name of all gods would I stay underwater for half a day? There is a small matter of breathing.”
“My lord, you are Dar’Nethi, a born enchanter, and one of the most powerful of your race. You have lived beyond death; you can control the chaos between worlds; you can speak in the minds of others, heal broken limbs, torn flesh, and diseased tissue, and you can create light, that most basic wonder of the universe, from your hand. How can you doubt that you can survive a few hours underwater?”
I gave Bareil my undergarments. As the Dulcé bowed and withdrew, I felt naked far beyond the matter of my bare skin. How hot was water that could produce so much steam?
The Preceptor’s hand rested on my shoulder. “Know that I will be within reach of your voice, or your mind’s call, or a signal from your hand at every moment. I will not desert you, my lord. And I will be ready to guide you between the pools and tell you whatever is necessary for the next.”
“And if I wish to end it?”
“You may end it at any time. Depending on how far you’ve gone, it might take some period of days for your mind to restore itself to something like its current state, but it would do so. Better you should go to the end, once you’ve begun.”
“I will be quite vulnerable.” Stupid, stupid to do this.
He stepped aside, leaving me alone at the brink of the pool. “I’ve set the wards on the gate. And Bareil will remain there to watch, as well. No one can enter the caves without our leave.”
I watched Ven’Dar’s hands as he spoke, wondering if he was casting some winding to convince me to do this thing. But the short, capable fingers stayed still. “And the Lords?” I said.
“We are always vulnerable to the Lords. I will be vigilant.”
“Then I - all of us - are in your hands.”
“Trust me, my lord.”
My last friend closed his eyes and whispered an invocation to Vasrin. As he spoke the last word, I filled my lungs and stepped into the Pool of Cleansing.
Searing… scalding… torment… I would have screamed, but the water was already well over my head. I fought for the surface, but I’d plunged so deep… My feet dragged me lower as if they were made of lead. My flesh would be boiled away before I could reach the air.
“Count, my lord Prince! It has been thirteen, fourteen, fifteen… ” The muffled voice came from an immense distance, but the cadence penetrated mind and body with all the force of Ven’Dar’s will.
A hundred counts. Twenty-eight, twenty-nine… Some part of me began to count, while the rest of my resources were devoted to controlling panic. Others have done this. If Ven’Dar wanted you dead, there are a thousand ways he could have managed it. Don’t fight… kick and glide to the surface… fifty-three, fifty-four…
My chest was on fire inside as well as out. The bottom of the pool was dark, but even hotter than at the surface. As I swam toward the green light sparkling at the surface, trailing mosses of green and red floated from the stony basin walls, brushing my skin… seventy-five, seventy-six…
Almost done. There’s nothing here. You should stop this now… you’ve too much to do to waste time in self-indulgent foolery. Ninety, ninety-one… only an arm’s reach from the air.
My lungs strained to bursting. But as I stretched out my hand in a last pull for the surface, the water around it swirled dark, as if I were… bleeding. In horror and disgust, I thrashed it away, only to have more of it leak out of me. Soon blood flowed from my every pore, from hands and arms and legs, from my eyes, my ears, my nose, from under my fingernails.
I never knew when the count passed a hundred, or when my body began using the scalding water instead of air, for I was preoccupied with the dark exudation from my flesh. So much blood… The water scalded my throat and my gut, yet I wished it hotter so as to clean all the blood away. I rubbed and scraped at my skin, gouged my eyes and ears, and still it flowed. Instead of reaching for the surface, I reversed course and swam deeper.
At the bottom of the pool, moss-covered boulders of all sizes lay in a jumble, radiating heat like a blacksmith’s furnace. Soul-sick, weeping scalding tears, I huddled in the dark, mossy depths and prayed the cleansing waters to boil the blood away.
An hour passed. Two. Eternity…
The distant surface of the water appeared as a patch of pale green light. A shadow moved beyond the surface… beckoning… Ven’Dar, reminding me of the passing time. Reluctantly, I kicked from the bottom of the pool. I would stay at the surface only a moment, long enough to tell him how I had to go down again until I was clean.
But as I rose to the top, the water around me bubbled clear. My hand broke the surface, and a strong, cold hand clasped it firmly and pulled me out.
My reddened skin protested the chill in the air as I knelt on the uneven floor beside the pool and coughed up a bucket of water. Someone dropped a robe of soft wool over my shoulders. A hand on my elbow helped me to my feet - not an easy task. Besides my violent shivering, my legs were as limp as soggy bread.
“Only a short way, my lord. Breathe deeply and slowly as we walk. The Pool of Truth lies just beyond the archway.”
A short passage. Ven’Dar carried the luminant. A brief burst of fire and another diamond-paned lamp revealed a cavern rimed with frost and a long, narrow pool of deep blue. Jagged shards of ice protruded from the surface, knife edges glittering in the lamplight. The water could be nothing but glacial. It was all I could do to let Ven’Dar take the robe away. My fingers and toes were already numb.
“Ah, Ven’Dar, I don’t know… ” My throat was raw from the scalding water, my words little more than a rasping whisper.
“Deep breaths, my lord. Count. There are things far worse than the pain your body reports to you. Step in just here where the water is deep, and no ice can cut your skin. Don’t hesitate. Don’t think. Just do it.”
I stepped forward. My nerves exploded in shock as the icy blue waters closed over my head.
“Count, my lord, one, two, three… ”
… four, five, six… I sank into a blue-white sculpture garden, twisted frozen flowers, trees, gargoyles, every fancy of a demented artist who worked in ice rather than stone… twenty-five, twenty-six… Why did they call this one the Pool of Truth? Pool of Ice would be better. Pool of Madness. Pool of Breathless Folly… fifty, fifty-one… My head felt like to split with the cold. I was desperate for breath, my chest rigid, constricted… sixty… impossible…
But as Ven’Dar had warned me, some things are worse than physical pain. Truth lay waiting for me in the frigid depths - the face of every
person I had slain, every person I had sent into battle to die, every person I had failed to protect, to save, to heal, all of them depicted in unyielding ice, eyes cold and empty and accusing… Seri’s face was there, so sad and alone, and beside her a newborn infant… Gerick, the child I had abandoned to his fate because I would not compromise my youthful ideals, because I would not fight… And Martin, Tanager, and Julia, our friends who had died for love of me. Dassine and Exeget, Jayereth and Gar’Dena. Gods, there were so many…
Suspended in the frigid water, I drifted from one to the next and touched their cold faces, drowned in guilt and shame and grief. To take life… to be responsible… to throw it away carelessly in anger or vengeance or thoughtless, pious arrogance…
How long I faced my accusers, I could not have said. Long enough that my heart beat with the ponderous pace of a funeral dirge, and the blood in my veins was surely turned to slush. My extremities were dead, my face numb, my heart a lump of ice in my breast. And when the cold and the guilt and the grief became unbearable, and I reached my hand above the surface, I could feel neither the hands that helped me out nor the robe laid over my shoulders. I staggered through the next passage unspeaking, able to walk only from habit rather than from any sensation in legs or feet.
The black waters of the Pool of Darkness lay in perfect stillness, swathed in shadows the diamond-paned lamp could not penetrate. I did not fear it. Darkness was exactly what I wanted. I prayed it would blot out the images of truth frozen into my vision. The water was thick like honey, and I embraced its warmth. It would be easy to make it to the hundred, to force myself to relinquish air and swallow the dark water.
But as I sank into the depths of the pool, I lost myself. Blind in the blackness, I quickly lost track of which way was the surface and which way the bottom. The thick water formed a barrier about me, preventing any part of me from touching any other part. Nor could I feel where the water ended and my skin began. I might have been a loose mind floating in the emptiness of a universe before its creation, alone with myself - both selves - my thoughts and my fear. After a time, set free from any physical containment, thoughts and memories floated away, leaving only fear. And eventually fear, too, dissolved, and nothing at all remained.
Perhaps it was my total emptiness that allowed me to float to the top at last. Gentle hands pulled me out, wrapped me for a moment in dry softness, and led me blind and deaf to the next pool - the Pool of Oblivion. The wrapping was removed again. Warm water swallowed me…
Gray light. A gentle rocking. Soft slurping sounds. Salt on lips and tongue. Throat, nose, eyes stinging…
“Come on, then. Half a day is the most allowed here, and you’re already well beyond.”
I knelt, pressing my head to the cool grit of stone, gagging and coughing weakly on the remnants of the salt water. The robe he laid over my back was damp and chilly now, making me shudder. Lethargy held me to the ground. So much water… such perishing thirst.
Hands grasped one shoulder. “Come, my lord, you mustn’t stop here. It’s farther to go back than to go forward, now. You’ll like this one better - the Pool of Refreshment.”
My companion dragged me to my feet and led me slowly toward the sound of splashing. Dull, mindless, I huddled in my robe, too weak to turn my head as he lit the lamp, illuminating a gigantic cavern with jeweled light. Greens, blues, purple, and silver were reflected from a pool of turbulent water. Water dribbled, dripped, trickled, and splashed on every side: seeping rivulets feeding the pool, a waterfall, its source lost in the heights, a sheer veil of shimmering drops whispering across a wall of green stone. I stood numbly at the pool’s edge, my ears and eyes throbbing painfully with the sounds and colors.
Ven’Dar removed my robe. “Deep breath, my lord. Enjoy yourself.”
He rotated me until my back was to the pool, and then gave me a gentle push. I toppled backward, the shock of the cold water forcing me to inhale just before the water closed over my head.
Through the brittle, shifting surface, I glimpsed a tired smile. “One, two, three… Count, if you remember how.”
Cold. Drifting… seventeen, eighteen… Something tickled my back… my feet. A school of brilliant red-and-orange fish darted past my nose. A warm current bathed my legs and dragged me deeper. The water was so clear… water and light, swirling, teasing, caressing… thirty-one, thirty-two…
Scarcely had the count passed a hundred and my body made the transition to breathing water when I was sucked into the vortex of the waterfall pool and swirled to the blue-green deeps, tumbled past smooth stones of purple and green, a lacework forest of sculpted stone, and a garden of sea flowers… a thousand vivid colors. An eddy tugged at my hair. From a crack in the rocks at the bottom of the pool a small geyser vented a pillar of bubbles that danced around me, as I floated in a hammock woven of lush fronds of water grass. The water that flowed through me bore the tang of new wine and commanded every nerve to wake up and live.
The pool must have extended half a league into the caves. By the time I reached its farthest limit I was swimming on my own, diving deep and rolling over like a dolphin just to feel the flow of the glorious water on my skin. I explored every crevice and eddy as I lazily paddled back to the beginning. There I arched my back and burst through the surface into the cascade, laughing aloud and blowing the water from my mouth in a fountain.
“You’ll have to drag me from this one, my companion,” I said, my voice crackling and strange, brittle like the clank of metal in the air after a storm. “Join me! While away the day.”
Ven’Dar smiled regretfully. “Another day, my lord Prince. Come. Time to press on.”
I practically dragged my weary friend through the passage to the Pool of Memory. “What’s next?”
“Every petitioner I’ve taken through has gotten frisky after the Pool of Refreshment, just when the hours start to weigh on me,” he grumbled as he held the luminant to the diamond-paned lamp. “I would order the pools a different way were I designing them. And I would vent this chamber much better.”
None of the pools had looked so formidable as the Pool of Memory. Thick, yellow-green liquid bubbled in the narrow basin, giving off an acrid yellow smoke that made my eyes water.
“Are you sure of this?” I asked, my exuberance quenched. “Others have entered? Submerged?”
Ven’Dar nodded without expression. “Be of good heart, my lord. We are almost at an end.”
The thought of swallowing the ghastly muck turned my growling stomach. “I was of good heart until we came here.”
With the largest breath I could muster, and the vague hope that my encounter with the Pool of Memory would be exceptionally brief, I stepped from the edge and dropped into the vile mess.
I could bear the heat - vicious, but not quite so fierce as the Pool of Cleansing - but whatever substance gave the water its putrid color and villainous smell caused it to eat its way into the skin. Stinging, abrading like acid in a wound. How could I possibly let it inside me? My count reached eighty, and I had yet to open my eyes.
It was time to end this exercise. Surely I’d gained whatever benefit Ven’Dar required of me. I’d not felt so near myself in at least a year. But I couldn’t remember why… which must be why the Pool of Memory followed the Pool of Refreshment. First reawaken life and sensation, then reimpose the patterns of history. I knew who I was… but why was I here?
So instead of following my instinct and my most profound desire to climb upward and out of the pool, curiosity held me to the count of one hundred. I released my breath and let the foul mess flow into me…
The yellow sludge ate its way through me, inside, outside, body and spirit, reawakening the tale of my life - my lives - twenty-two years as D’Natheil, forty-two as Karon, ten of those dead, a disembodied soul in Dassine’s captivity, and almost six as this strange joining of Prince and Healer. In a moment’s passing all these times were made clear to me, etched into my renewed soul, all the deeds I had done - good and evil together - t
he words I’d spoken, the faces I’d known, even my own death and rebirth, all laid out in unfiltered clarity. Orderly. Unaltered.
Instinctively I curled into a ball, floating there in the vile yellow stink, as if I were trying to contain it all or prevent its escape… or perhaps protect myself from the intensity of feeling that must surely accompany such a panorama. But, for the moment, only the facts as they had happened floated there with me. In the hot, murky silence, I existed with my past until I uncurled and floated free.
Enough. I was becoming increasingly nauseated in this pool. I reached for the surface, but could not find it.
Relax… drift… make sure which way is up. Now, reach again. Still nothing. My heart beat faster. Easy, easy. Ven’Dar is watching. You are not abandoned here to drown in the past.
There was a pulse to the Pool of Memory, a throbbing life somewhere in its depths, faint when first I entered the pool, but growing in strength as I reached and strained to find my way out. The pulse drew me in a direction that every instinct screamed was wrong. Deeper. Panicked, I thrashed and struggled against the pull, opening my eyes to a dark blotch on a scaly yellow shelf of rock. Though my body cried out for air, I forced myself to keep drawing in the foul liquid. The blotch grew larger - a swirling vortex with a bottomless black center. I could not hold back, and inexorably the sluggish whirlpool swept me into its dark nexus, my head and feet in a tangle.
Some dense, fibrous, elastic material settled about my flailing limbs, squeezing tighter and tighter, until even the turgid yellow of the pool was lost in darkness. The pulsing continued, squeezing the yellow stuff from my body, but leaving me nothing at all to breathe.
In a single, stifling, choking instant of blind terror and despair, I was shot into a pool of cold, sparkling crystal. With my first desperate gulp of the waters of Rebirth came the emotions I had feared - a vast universe of feeling. Love, loneliness, grief, joy - so much joy I had known - all my anger, too, and hatred, and terror, but in proper balance and proportion. In the span of an hour I drowned in the feelings of two lifetimes, feeling them settle into their rightful positions like sand into the crevices of a stone path.