The Wanderers

by Paula Brandon

  “I think they can be,” Innesq replied, after a moment’s thought. “But I believe it to be a very rare occurrence. People often place great faith in the truth or prophetic power of their dreams, and I suspect that they are generally misguided, attaching far too much significance to simple coincidence. But perhaps once in a lifetime …”

  The conversation had been conducted in whispers, but the sleepers were waking nonetheless. Perhaps they had been disturbed, or perhaps it was simply the advent of morning. Whatever the reason, they were stirring, stretching, starting to rub their eyes, and the Belandor brothers spoke no more of dreams.

  At first, but for the novelty of the surroundings, it seemed much like any other recent morning. A swift awakening of all present; then, the usual necessities, much eased by the conveniences of Grix Orlazzu’s shelter; then, breakfast, the same as ever in content but, this time, prepared atop Orlazzu’s eccentric cooking surface.

  They ate. Orlazzu requested news of Vitrisi, and also asked about his guests’ journey across the Wraithlands. His queries were answered at polite length, the accounts and descriptions scrupulously detailed. As the meal progressed, however, conversation slowed, and presently died away altogether, as the members of the group wearied of feigning interest in anything other than the great project at hand.

  Breakfast concluded in silence. Ojem Pridisso set his bowl aside and spoke with his customary air of authority. “Well, friends, we’ve come to it at last. Let’s get started.”

  With one accord, Aureste, Sonnetia, and Yvenza rose and moved out of the way. Retiring from the middle of the chamber, they reseated themselves on the floor, backs pressed to the stone walls. Aureste and Sonnetia were side by side; Yvenza—silent and empty-eyed—sat several feet distant.

  Aureste resisted the impulse to take Sonnetia’s hand, for this, he conceded inwardly, was truly not the moment to distract or infuriate Vinzille. There would be plenty of time for hand-holding and more, soon enough. In the meantime, he was privileged to observe a scene perhaps never before witnessed by anyone outside the select circle of the arcanists. For this was to be the greatest arcane event taking place within human memory. Only once in generations did the Source undergo a cleansing, and then the procedure was performed only by a handful of the most gifted adepts. The action about to take place would shape the fate of the Veiled Isles for centuries to come.

  Of course, there would be precious little to see. Arcane practice, almost entirely a thing of the mind, was hardly designed to entertain spectators. The arcanists would stand motionless for a bit, maybe mumble a little something, and fall into their communal trance. Minutes later, they would return to normality and announce their triumph.

  Then everybody could go back home.

  And so, Aureste looked on in some curiosity, but with little hope of enjoying colorful marvels.

  Initially, the scene confirmed his expectations. There was a brief, inaudible colloquy, presumably of some technical nature, among the arcanists. Then the five of them commenced preparation, each in his or her own manner. Aureste recognized Innesq’s brow-massaging, neck-twisting maneuvers. Nissi was humming to herself, Vinzille seemed to balance on an imaginary tightrope, Orlazzu bent and flexed, while Ojem Pridisso engaged in an irritating sequence of joint-cracking exercises.

  This done, they swallowed lozenges; long, narrow, white tablets, the same substance for each and all. The lozenges took hold quickly, their efficacy visible in the general brightening of eyes and dilation of pupils. Arranging themselves into a loose circle at the center of the room, the five did what Aureste had rarely if ever seen them do before—they linked hands.

  They were all vastly gifted. Even the most inexperienced among them possessed enormous knowledge and self-command. Very soon, their bodies stilled to the point of petrifaction, their faces emptied, and life itself seemed to flee the brilliant, blindly staring eyes. They resembled corpses; their upright posture turned them into stationary Wanderers. The dead demeanor would have alarmed Aureste had he not seen it before. Now he knew that arcanists linking their minds and talents assumed a group identity of disturbingly inhuman attributes.

  He slanted a quick sidelong glance at Sonnetia. Her eyes were fixed on Vinzille. Natural concern sat on her brow, but she did not appear unduly alarmed. Like Aureste, she had seen this before and knew approximately what to expect.

  It was silent within Orlazzu’s shelter. No word was spoken; there was not the whisper of a breath or a movement. And into that silence crept a sound; the slow, lifeless vocalization of the Wanderers. Aureste stiffened. He had dismissed that noise, those dead tongues, from his consciousness, but now they were back, and this time he was certain that they stood directly above. A group of them must have gathered around the stone covering the entrance to the shelter, and their voices were echoing down along the shaft. But the stone was large, and the shaft was long; surely he should not have been able to hear them so clearly, unless the lurking presence of the Other within his own mind somehow enhanced his receptivity.

  The arcanists began to chant, or sing, their voices rising and falling in unison, blending indistinguishably. The sound they produced could not have been called conventionally beautiful, or even truly musical, but it possessed the power to arrest and rule the mind. For a few moments, Aureste forgot all else.

  The air was changing, the world reordering itself, his own perceptions striving to keep pace with flying reality. He had expected nothing in terms of spectacle, but he had been wrong.

  At the center of the circle, a point of light appeared several feet above the floor. For some moments it pulsated, tiny and brilliant, and then it began to grow. As the human voices lifted and dipped, the point expanded into the form of a small, spinning globe, then flattened and spread out into a revolving disk, which in turn lengthened and heightened itself into a whirling, radiant column.

  At first, Aureste took the combination of mutable shape and revolution for some luminous representation of a plague-wraith, and did not understand its presence. Once the light had attained its columnar height, however, its form remained more or less constant. From time to time the roughly cylindrical body would throw forth long, ribbon-like arms, but these were swiftly reabsorbed. At first glance, the column appeared to glow with intense, uniform brilliance. A closer inspection, however, revealed many narrow horizontal bands and pockets of shadow marking its length from top to bottom.

  And Aureste finally realized that he was looking at an infinitely miniaturized representation of the mighty Source—an image called into being by the conjoined power of the five. Wonder seized him; he was seeing something glimpsed by few men throughout history. Of course, the representation wasn’t literal. It was an image of a reality filtered through human minds and cast in a form that the human mind could encompass. The actual Source, far underground, doubtless existed in multiple dimensions, and might not be visible to mundane eyes at all. Still, the light-picture before him caught and conveyed the essence of it. And those bands and blotches of darkness dirtying the brightness? Surely they must represent the arcane impedimenta of which the Source must be freed.

  He watched in genuine awe. But it seemed that the same arcane feat that had captured him had similarly caught the attention of the Overmind, awakening It to the objectionable human activity in progress and drawing Its prompt response. So it must have been, for now two things happened simultaneously. A new note of intense, almost life-like fervor transformed the voices of the undead overhead. At the same time, the will of the Other clamped powerfully upon Aureste’s intellect.

  He was not aware of the cry that broke from him. His eyes squeezed shut and his hands flew to his head. Many times throughout the course of the journey, the Overmind had sought to infiltrate, occupy, and absorb him. Sometimes openly aggressive, sometimes seductive, sometimes covertly invasive, always powerfully purposeful—he had thought that he knew all of Its guises. Never before, however, had he suffered an assault so ruthlessly direct. Huge blows battered the gates
of his mind, immense pressure crushed him, and, for a time, all that existed for the Magnifico Aureste was the struggle to preserve identity. He thought to feel his sense of self cracking like a nut in the jaws of a vise, and a rush of terror furnished the energy to shore up mental ramparts, behind which he crouched trembling.

  Again and again the Other flung Its strength against him, until he sensed his will starting to bend. But there was a place buried deep inside his mind, whose location Innesq had shown him; a place so remote and guarded that its entrance usually concealed itself within the realm of dreams. Innesq had taught him how to reach it in a waking state and he went there now, deep down, out of reach, and hid there until the attack subsided.

  Slowly he became aware that the Other was retreating, and he thought then to catch some echo of Its intense immediacy of purpose, which in human terms would have translated to a sense of urgency.

  So It was alarmed, was It? Aureste’s courage and customary confidence returned with a rush. He battled with renewed zest, and presently reclaimed lost mental territory. But the hammering blows did not abate, and as he returned to full consciousness, he perceived that they were real, outside of himself, but close at hand.

  A scraping, pounding tumult had commenced overhead. He heard the drone of relentless undead voices, the pounding of countless violent blows, and it was like the Other’s assault upon his own mind, but this time taking place within the physical world, where the assembled Wanderers strove with all their strength to dislodge the great stone guarding the entrance to Grix Orlazzu’s shelter.

  He listened to the rain of blows and cringed, as if they fell upon his own body. His eyes turned to the arcanists, and he beheld the five of them, faces vacant and remote, eyes unseeing, bodies paralyzed and minds entranced, at once unimaginably potent and utterly vulnerable. An enemy gaining access now would find those five extraordinary beings as defenseless as newborn mice.

  The violence of the overhead assault was dying, and Aureste’s fears did likewise. The stone guarding the entrance was huge and massive. Whatever the sum of their unnatural strength, the Wanderers could not dislodge it. All was well.

  Back to the arcanists and their efforts, and even as he watched, the column of light whirling at the center of their circle took on a new and searing brilliance, so intense that he had to close his eyes and turn his face aside.

  They were winning. It was partially done, and would soon be complete. The Overmind had done Its best to stop them, and failed.

  His eyes were tightly closed, his ears open, and he realized that the commotion overhead had dwindled and the voices of the arcanists had likewise stilled themselves. Presumably the mental bond of the adepts was fully forged, requiring no additional reinforcement. In the midst of the lull, another sound arose.

  A woman’s voice, very near. A droning, senseless stream of syllables. The speaker lived, yet the cadences and incomprehensible content belonged to the Wanderers.

  He opened his eyes and turned his head in time to see Yvenza, already on her feet, and moving. Her face was blank, staring eyes dead, and he knew at a glance that the Overmind had her. Before he had fathomed Its intention, before he could stop her, she advanced a couple of long paces to lay hands upon the oblivious Nissi. Effortlessly plucking her victim out of the circle, she spun the slight form around and drove her clenched fist straight into the white little face.

  Nissi fell without a sound, and lay still. Her colorless hair trailed across the stone floor. Blood marked her face.

  Instantly the dazzling image of the Source blinked out of existence.

  Amid gasping intakes of breath, the arcanists emerged from their broken trance to gaze about in profound, almost paralyzed shock and confusion.

  A few quick steps carried Sonnetia Corvestri to Nissi’s side. Her face was full of amazement, alarm, and determination. Placing herself protectively before the fallen girl, she addressed Yvenza. “That’s enough. Stay away from her.”

  The warning was unnecessary, for the Overmind had lost interest in Nissi. Moving to Orlazzu’s cooking device, Yvenza shoved the big block aside and snatched up one of the heavy iron rods upon which it had rested. Thus armed, she advanced upon Innesq Belandor, slumped half dazed in his wheeled chair.

  Springing forward to intercept her, Aureste lunged for the weapon. Both his hands closed on her wrist, and for a few moments they struggled. At all times, she was a woman of exceptional physical strength; just now, her natural power seemed enhanced. He quickly discovered that she was easily his match—perhaps more than his match. Back and forth they wrestled, and he could not pry or twist the heavy bar from her grasp. Viewed at the closest range, her wide-set eyes were blank and eerily unblinking, their grey the color of slush, and he remembered her son Onartino, who had possessed eyes of just such a hue. Revulsion seized him. Releasing her wrist, he thrust her from him.

  She staggered back a few paces, then recovered her balance. Pausing only to take a fresh grip on her weapon, she resumed her interrupted advance, iron bar swinging in murderous arcs, expressionless face innocent of hostility or rage.

  “Woman, come back to yourself. Hear me,” he commanded harshly.

  If she heard, there was no sign of it. She swung iron at his head. He dodged, and the bar brushed his hair in passing. Before she could swing again, he slid in close, applied a hand to her throat, and flung her backward with all his strength.

  She crashed against the stone wall. Slowly she lifted a hand to touch the back of her head, and brought the fingers away red with blood. Her eyes, no longer empty, shifted to Aureste, and locked on him.

  “You,” said Yvenza. Her voice was human again. “Always you.”

  She had reclaimed her mind, for the moment. The grey eyes devouring his face glittered with elemental hatred. Iron bar poised to strike, she came at him.

  For a moment, incredulity froze him. His astounded consciousness focused on her eyes, her bared teeth, the taut cords in her neck, the weapon in her grip. He was scarcely aware that instinct conveyed his dagger from his belt to his hand. She brought the bar whistling at his head. He jerked back out of the way, then his body and arm shot forward reflexively. Almost before he recognized his own intent, he drove the dagger in under her ribs and up, to conclude with the vicious twist that he had learned a lifetime earlier.

  Her eyes bulged and the bar fell from her hand. Still ruled by instinct, Aureste pulled the blade free and stepped back to avoid the spray of blood. Yvenza dropped to the floor. Convulsions racked her frame, and desperate sounds issued from her mouth. To Aureste, it seemed to take a long time. But nobody came to her side, so perhaps it was not so very long, after all. Soon all sound and movement ceased.

  She lay there dead on the floor, wide eyes still fixed on his face. Aureste returned her regard. It had all happened so quickly that he was only just beginning to recognize his own sense of relief and satisfaction.

  His companions did not appear to share his sentiments. The arcanists were shaking off their confusion and emerging from their paralysis to encounter a scene that appalled them.

  “Your doing, Belandor?” Ojem Pridisso was white and shaken, yet still capable of censure. “Another murder, and this time a woman?”

  “She tried to kill him,” Sonnetia spoke up. “I saw all of it. She was possessed, an instrument of the Other. She struck Nissi down, then attacked Master Innesq with an iron bar. The Magnifico Belandor defended his brother, and protected you arcanists when you couldn’t help yourselves. All of you owe him your lives and your thanks.”

  “She was only a woman; he could have controlled her.” Pridisso folded his arms.

  “The magnifica didn’t have to die,” Vinzille suggested. “There must have been some other way.”

  “There wasn’t, she was far too dangerous,” Sonnetia told him.

  “It’s no surprise that you would take his part, Mother.”

  Sonnetia forbore reply.

  “Don’t think you’re going to get away with all of this,”
Pridisso advised Aureste. “Don’t think that your crimes will just be dismissed and forgotten. Maybe nothing much can be done here and now, but soon we’ll all be back to civilization, where you’ll meet up with a good, sound system of Taerleezi justice. Then you’ll get what’s coming to you, depend on it, Magnifico.”

  Innesq was not listening. He had moved his chair a few feet to Nissi’s side. Now he bent forward and extended a hand to her. Her eyes opened. She grasped his hand and sat up slowly.

  “Did she injure you, child?” Innesq inquired.

  Nissi shook her head.

  “You must rest and recover.”

  “No … time.” Nissi shook her head again. She wiped the blood from her face with her sleeve. Her eyes strayed to the corpse of Yvenza Belandor. She shivered and looked away.

  Aureste and Orlazzu lifted Yvenza’s corpse, moved it off to the side, and set it down beside the wall. Aureste felt Orlazzu’s speculative gaze touch him as they performed this task. Whether the arcanist’s regard was hostile or neutral, he could not judge, and did not concern himself. There were only two extraneous opinions that mattered. Sonnetia had already expressed hers. And Innesq—he would surely understand and condone, provided he caught no hint of his older brother’s well-concealed pleasure in ridding the world of the Magnifica Yvenza once and for all.

  The arcanists needed time to recover from the devastating disruption of their mental bond, worsened by the shock of a violent death in their midst. Not too much time, however, lest the mind-enhancing effect of their lozenges ebb, obliging them to swallow more; a perilous course to be avoided, if possible.

  For a while they sat in troubled silence. During this period, Aureste strove with all the force of his will to catch his brother’s eye. He possessed no arcane power of sending, or of silent mental linkage, but the bond between the two of them was potent nonetheless, and soon his efforts were rewarded. Innesq turned and looked at him. There was nothing of accusation, condemnation, or reproach in his glance. There was only a perfect understanding.