by Carol Berg
"Where is it?"
I glanced over at the sleeping man behind him. "You don't need to know that."
Trust wasn't any easier for me than for Paulo.
By the third day in the dry riverbed, I was getting anxious. We needed to be on our way back to Avonar while we still had food and water. The vision of the city's fall festered in my heart the way Gerick's wounds inflamed his flesh, and I would not rest until I saw the city again, walls intact.
Our patient continued to sleep like the dead. Neither dressing his injuries nor pouring water down his throat prompted him to open his eyes. I couldn't blame him for that. He wasn't going to wake a happy man. Assuming he ever woke. Paulo refused to talk about that possibility.
If we couldn't rouse him soon, though, he was going to starve. Taking him away from the oculus had surely broken the heavy enchantments intended to keep him living without nourishment, but the only thing I could get down him was tiny portions of bread, soaked in our gritty water until they became almost liquid. Thus I was delighted when Nim and Rab arrived near midday with three large bundles of brush to burn, a stone crock of reasonably fresh goat's milk, and the slightly ripe haunch of an oryx.
Relieved to see that Paulo and I were still intact after spending two days with a demon, the ragged scavengers decided to stay for a while. They squatted in the shade, picking their teeth with long splinters, and watched me set the oryx haunch to boiling in a large pot I borrowed from their metal cache. They must have pulled the splinters from the charred beams of Zhev'Na, for their activity gave them slightly dusky smiles as I thanked them again for their hospitality. The old man, Rab, never said a word, but he pulled up a few of the spiky gray plants growing near his bare feet and gave them to me, gesturing at the boiling pot. The root smelled a bit like moldy onions . . . very like Rab, I realized. I smiled at the toothless man, peeled the sandy outer layers from the plants, and slipped the things surreptitiously into my pocket.
While the oryx meat slowly disintegrated into a strong-smelling broth, I soaked a bit of bread in the milk and spooned it down Gerick's throat. Perhaps the milk and the meat broth would give him strength to travel if we could ever get his eyes open.
Evening brought encouraging signs. Gerick's skin had cooled, and Paulo had drained his suppurating wound without sending the fever shooting skyward again. Once he had the foot bound up in our last clean bandages, Paulo sat for a moment, his head drooping, his hands dangling in his lap. He hadn't slept since I'd gone for the oculus. "Might you … I hate to ask it. . . but could you see to his hands? I'm swiped."
"Of course I will. And I'll wake you if there's any change."
I was proud that I resisted any sarcasm in my agreement. But then, he likely wouldn't have noticed. He was asleep before I finished speaking.
The red-gold light faded, and the wind picked up, skirling sand through the rock gorges. Nim and Rab had slept the hot afternoon away, and scurried off as soon as the sun set. I sat by my little thornbush fire steeping a few eutonia leaves, hoping the tart, bracing tea would keep me awake and perhaps reduce the swelling in my shoulder. All the digging and rock-moving to bury the oculus had set my own healing back several days.
"Thank you."
I jumped, almost upsetting my little pot, when the soft voice came from the shadows.
"Heaven's lights," I said quietly. "You scared me out of a year's growth. How are you feeling?"
"Empty. Stiff. Damp. Alive."
With no small trepidation, I cast a faint handlight and peered across the rock floor to the pallet of sand and blankets where our patient had managed to raise himself on his elbows. His skin color was definitely improved-no longer graveyard white—and to my intense relief, his eye color had reverted to a deep brown, and only in the part of his eyes where there should be color. The ugly mark on his forehead where I had taken out the smallest of the barbed spikes was only a greenish bruise with a ragged black line through it.
"Well, you look a thousand times better, and if we can get a little more food down you, maybe we can fill you up again. You lost a lot of blood, and who knows how long it's been since you've eaten anything substantial."
Neither food nor water would cure the worst of his emptiness. But no one was going to be able to do anything about that part of it.
He eased himself the rest of the way to sitting, stretched out his neck and shoulders, and then shifted around and slumped against the rock wall as if the small movements had exhausted him. "How long has it been?"
"Four days since we brought you out."
"Since the day I was . . . taken."
"Almost four weeks."
"Earth and sky . . ." He closed his eyes, and for a few moments I thought he'd fallen asleep. But after a time he opened them again, and peered at the motionless body sprawled on the ground on the other side of me. "Is Paulo all right? He's not—"
"Just worn out." I stretched my hand toward Paulo, hesitating. "I ought to rouse him. I promised to if you woke."
"No! Don't. I don't think I'll be awake long."
"Well, then. You must drink, and you ought to eat something if you can."
I lurched to my feet with only a small grunt of discomfort and grabbed a waterskin.
"You shouldn't—"
"You have to drink," I said, stuffing the pouch in his hands. "Sorry the water's a bit gritty."
He drank long and gratefully.
"So what do you think? Can you stay awake long enough to get some broth down? It's already made. It would only take a short while to warm it."
"You don't have—"
"Vasrin's hand, I know I don't have to do it! But if I were to come up with something, could you eat it?" Were there two more exasperating men in the universe than these?
"That would be very kind."
Stiff. Formal. But on the whole, things could be far more awkward, considering our several encounters of the months just past. I had whacked him on the head, come a hair's breadth from killing him, and pried relentlessly into his private affairs. He had avoided me like a disease for half the summer, and then he had done . . . whatever it was he did when I was stranded on D'Sanya's roof, an incident that still sat in my stomach like undigested meat.
As I busied myself heating up the broth we had stored in a clay jar, I wished I'd gone ahead and waked Paulo. He could occupy his friend so the man would stop looking at me. What did you talk about with someone you'd just rescued from an eternity of horror?
"Why?" Gerick's quiet question was such a perfect echo of my thoughts that at first I didn't even realize the source. But a glance his way confirmed the depth of his interest in my answer.
Fundamentally, I was still without an adequate answer—certainly without any explanation I was going to voice to him . So I handed him the mug of broth and said the first likely thing that came to mind. "Your mother is very persuasive."
His face, so determined in its sobriety, broke into a soft smile at that, eyes brightening with amusement and affection. "I've noticed that myself," he said. The smile fell away quickly, and he dropped his gaze to his cup.
He said nothing more, and drank perhaps half the broth before his eyelids drooped and I had to rescue the cup to keep it from spilling onto his blankets. As well as I could manage with one hand, I eased him down onto his back again, and then resumed my tea-making, as tired and relieved as if I'd just survived a battle.
Only later, as I cleaned and dressed the wounds on his hands, did the thought occur that those very hands had sealed my slave collar.
Disgusted, nauseated, I tied up the bandage, then went out into the ancient riverbed and used every paltry bit of power I could summon to shatter a brittle shelf of rock high on the cliff. The sharp bits rained on my back—an unfortunate miscalculation.
". . . all bloody hell, thinking she's played me for a fool and done for you after all. I can't figure the woman. Not a bit. Gutsy, I'll say, though. Smart. It's a good thing for you I didn't leave her in the desert any of the fifty different ti
mes I thought of it."
"Don't ask me to explain her. I resign from all investigations for any matter whatsoever."
The quiet voices drifted over my head along with the odors of burning thornbush and scorched barley. Though my mouth was full of grit, my eyes stung with the acrid smoke, and my shoulder throbbed unmercifully, I wasn't about to give away the fact that I was awake. There was always a possibility of hearing something interesting when people thought you were asleep—an annoying childhood habit I had perfected while in captivity. And too, these two were friends and deserved some time together without an interloper or the immediate business of the day to disturb them. I shifted ever so slightly so that both of my ears were exposed.
"And she really got you over a horse, up the Vale to the hospice, and tied to a tree without you getting loose? Damn, she's such a scrap of a thing."
"I don't think I'm cut out to deal with women. Especially ones who don't think well of me."
"Ouch! Damnable, useless . . ." Tin pots and spoons clanked untidily. "I don't know how she keeps this stuff from burning. Here, take the part that's not black. Tomorrow you can cook."
"It's fine. Don't worry. I could eat a raw kibbazi."
Thoughts of breakfast set my own stomach rumbling, and I considered sitting up.
"So . . . the other one . . . how did the Lady find out about you?"
The morning's easy humor fled as quickly as the morning chill. I held still.
"Stars of night, Paulo, I'd decided to tell her who I was. I thought . . . well, after what I had learned that night when I looked into the past, I convinced myself she was innocent. I wanted to believe it. Things had changed . . . were changing . . . between us, and I couldn't lie to her any more. So I went to her house and knocked on the door of her lectorium, and she opened it with an oculus in her hand. I swear, if there were a god of dunces, I would be his most exemplary servant."
He paused for so long, I thought he had said all he was going to. But I felt more than heard him inhale and breathe out again slowly, as a warrior does when trying to ease the pain of a battle wound. "She tried to pass it off as something new. Something innocent . . ."
He told Paulo of his brief struggle with the Lady, and the long, dreadful hours that followed, ending with him bolted to a slab of shellstone, forbidden to sleep. And he told of the ordeal of the past weeks as he had feared he was going mad and of his horror that he might become what others named him. What I had named him.
If I hadn't already learned how close these two were, that morning would have taught me. Constrained by philosophy and custom that forbade us to measure our fellows by which of the Hundred Talents they bore or the strength of power they could bring to their gifts, we Dar-'Nethi spoke very little of sorcery. And we certainly did not dwell on our personal lacks or our feelings about them, unless we were talking with someone closer than kin. Gerick did not detail the torments D'Sanya had inflicted on him in her hospice workshop, but he was astonishingly frank about his humiliation at being so speedily and so roundly overcome, and about his terror as he lay helpless to avert his own disintegration.
"… The worst point was when I felt the power growing," he said, "this huge, overwhelming, monstrous disease inside me . . . and I knew it was the same vile thing I'd grown when Notуle and I worked with the oculus in Zhev'Na. But this time, instead of feeling horrid, the power felt . . . right. Even when I was twelve, I loathed their power at the same time I craved it. But now I lay there knowing I was going mad and knowing the consequences if I did, yet feeling as if I was whole for the first time in my life. If I hadn't discovered that I could expend some of it by manipulating my visions, I would have used it to get free . . . focused it through the oculus . . . used the damnable device . . . and that would have been the end of me. Earth and sky, Paulo, I was so close—"
"But you didn't."
"Not yet. But I'm still not safe. . . ."
He paused, and I tugged the corner of the blanket slightly to uncover one eye.
He had stretched his bandaged hands out in front of him. They were trembling, and he glared at them as if they were diseased. "I feel like a siege cannon with the fuse burning."
He was afraid of sorcery. I could not have been more surprised if someone had snatched me out of my own skin and set me down in an entirely new Jen. It had never occurred to me that a Lord of Zhev'Na could be afraid of anything, much less his own past or his own power. To look at him, ragged and filthy, unexceptional in size, picking up his spoon and gratefully devouring our daily slop of porridge as if it were sweet cream, having just heard him say he'd come a finger's breadth from retaking his place as a Lord . . .
I deliberately shifted weight onto my shoulder just so the sharp little warning would ensure I was awake.
Jen'Larie yna Sefaro, incapable ex-slave, involved in matters of such universal consequence . . . The thought came near choking me. Vasrin Shaper must find great humor in implausibility and incongruity. Yet, somehow, listening to Gerick's admission of his own fears and incapacities led me to analyze his experiences with more clarity than I'd been able to thus far.
He was probably right about the oculus having a particular hold on him. The Lords had deliberately molded him to be susceptible to its lure. I had been an unwilling witness to that. But about sorcery and power … he didn't have the least idea what he was talking about. Truth lay right in front of him, as bald as the rock, truth that must set our course over the next hours. He couldn't see it. And it seemed I was the only person available to do something about that. I just wasn't sure how to broach the subject.
Feeling a bit resentful, I threw off my blanket, sat up, and sniffed the dry air. "Is it truly impossible for a man to cook a meal without charring it beyond recognition?"
Chapter 27
Seri
"Someone's here to see you, my lady," said Aimee, knocking on the door of my bedchamber and poking her head inside. "She says her name is V'Rendal, an Archivist."
"One moment," I said, tugging on the leather strap that bound my small case.
Twenty-four wretched days had passed since Paulo and Jen had set out for Zhev'Na, three more than I had sworn to wait. Aimee had arranged for a cousin to drive me northward by carriage, believing it the best way for me to travel discreetly now that the roads in and out of Avonar were so heavily guarded. Unfortunately this night was the first the carriage had been available. Every vehicle and animal that could be spared was being used to transport men, women, and supplies for the Dar'Nethi army being assembled on the northern borders. An enormous force of Zhid had been sighted in the northern Wastes, marching toward the Vales and Avonar. But nothing more was going to delay my going to Karon. Nothing.
T'Laven reported that Karon seemed confused and disoriented, one moment asking where Gerick was, the next incapable of communicating his own name, and the next overcome with grief and guilt, recalling the Lady's report that Gerick had been executed for treachery. The Healer had chosen not to tell Karon of our belief that Gerick lived or of Paulo's mission. He was concerned that Karon might inadvertently reveal our secrets to others at the hospice. If we were to have the smallest chance of saving Gerick, we could not let D'Sanya know what we were doing. But imagining Karon grieving alone for Gerick tore my heart.
"Supper is laid, as well, and Qis'Dar will be here with the carriage within the hour."
"Thank you, Aimee. Any word from T'Laven?"
"He says he will meet you at the Nightingale, the new guesthouse just outside the north gate. I'm to dispatch a message stone when you leave here. And do take your cloak, my lady; the weather seems to be taking an ill turn." Even as she spoke, the night sky outside my window flashed with lightning, and thunder rolled over the mountains in a constant grumble.
"I'll follow you down." The whole universe had taken an ill turn as far as I could see.
The young woman vanished back into the dark passage. With her servants called up to war, Aimee was having to mind the magical house lamps herself and was rare
ly home to do it. Her house had become a patchwork of darkness and lamplight.
I snatched up my cloak, the small case, and a soft bag that held my journal and some coins that Aimee had supplied. With no hand free to carry a lamp, I navigated the unlit passage and stair by the flashes of lightning that brightened the windows.
An imposing figure wearing a sweeping green satin cloak and a glittering silver comb in her red hair waited at the bottom of the stair, next to one of the house's garden alcoves. "Good evening, madam," she said. "I had no idea you were preparing to depart."
I dropped my bags and cloak beside the door and reached for the Archivist's hand. But she extended both hands, palms up, and bowed stiffly, and I cursed myself for my distraction. I was in Avonar. Dar'Nethi, who could probe bodies and souls with their magic, did not touch each other without invitation.
Turning my own palms up, I returned her bow. "It's a pleasure to see you again, Mistress V'Rendal. What can I do for you? I've a little time before I need to go."
"I have always admired Gar'Dena's exotica," she said, twisting her neck and peering into the thick little jungle of ferns and blooming pink orchids. "I seem to remember some fine bird specimens here."
"Mistress Aimee has sent the birds to an Aviaran, as she has no one to care for them right now. Please, come sit down." I gestured toward the small sitting room door, trying to restrain my impatience.
"Yes … everything is disrupted with the Zhid attacks. And now these new dangers in the east and south— Astolle Vale preparing for a siege by a force of thousands, and Seraph under warning. I've heard the palace is in complete confusion tonight. The Preceptors have officially summoned Prince Ven'Dar back to Avonar to answer questions."
She straightened up and examined me as if I were one of her rare books. "I need not stay so long as to sit down. I am on my way to a musical evening at another house along this road; even in perilous times, we must feed our souls. But when I passed this house, I thought of you."