“Of course, my lambling,” replied Elissandra, and bowed to kiss her daughter’s head. Eli surprised her by stomping forward and standing near until she hugged him, too. He was now at the age when he was torn between boyhood and manhood; he hadn’t yet figured out that a true man could be both soft and hard. Who will be around to teach him that lesson? wondered Elissandra. Not Sangloris. Not me…
Eli shrugged his mother off in a speck. “C’mon, I’d like to get back to my lessons, as well.”
Elissandra righted her grip on the wooden short sword she held, and took a merciless swing at her son. As he hadn’t been prepared, she thwacked him soundly on his shoulder—the most important lesson of battle was that one should always be ready. He cried out, and they paused. A few of the Silver watchmen, from whom they’d received the training blades, glanced at the odd, pale trio, before resuming their own vigorous activities. For the most part, Elissandra and her children were left to their own devices. They lingered, like a trio of specters, outside the bustling training ground: where ivory steeds and their riders thundered across the flat escarpment, men whisked from tent to tent, and sorcerers fired crackling bolts into sandbags using bows crafted of glass and coursing wind. She’d come here because war was the discipline of the day, and it was no different with her small three-person army. As soon as Eli shrugged off his soreness, Elissandra launched another assault on her son.
She’d often fenced as a child. Received wisdom taught that a Menosian woman who couldn’t defend herself was a corpse waiting to happen. She’d become rather skilled through the years, and with quick, darting blows easily parried the wide, bumbling strokes of her son. Even Sangloris had found her a challenge. Sangloris. She still hadn’t told her children about their father.
“Mother, I think I’ve got it,” cried Tessa suddenly and excitedly.
Elissandra and her son exchanged narrowed stares as they walked towards Tessa. The little girl stood not far away, spying on the encampment.
“Mother, I need you to look,” said the girl, and tapped her foot, waiting. Gradually, Elissandra and her son relaxed their sparring stances. Tessariel pointed to a group of soldiers surrounding a tent. Their shirts were off and they glistened in the dusk like clockwork soldiers of bronze. The warriors were enjoying a sand’s respite around a campfire. There was a lone woman amongst them, and she wore only her cotton camisole. “Watch the woman,” whispered Tessa.
The girl squinted her eyes so hard in concentration that they were nearly shut. Sight was not necessary for shadow-puppeting, the magikal art of slipping a suggestion into a person’s head. Only a true sorceress of the mind and Fate could bend a person’s will. Tessa, who’d never been able to do more than make a mouse walk into a snapping trap, had finally learned to shape the thoughts and actions of larger animals. With a strain that rippled the air around her, she forced her Will upon the woman, and in her quietest voice, she then bade her move. The commands of shadow sorcery must always be spoken: speech made them real, rendered them audible on some level. They had to be sly and quiet, too, like whispers on a breeze, lest they trigger a person’s self-preservation instincts. Get up, suggested Tessa. Stretch those tired legs. Walk to the fire, take in a bit of its warmth, then dump your drink in the flames.
For a spell, the woman continued to laugh and drink bitter warrior’s tea with her companions. Tessa had tried some once, and it was awful; she was doing this woman a favor with her interference. Suddenly, the woman sat up stiffly and turned her head as if she’d heard what the young Daughter of the Moon had whispered a sand ago. A moment later, the warrior strode to the fire and tossed her tea into its flames. After that, she sat down as if nothing unusual had occurred. Her company appeared unsurprised by her actions even when she asked for more tea; they were unaware of where her previous drink had gone.
“Well done!” Elissandra rubbed her daughter’s head with the stump of her missing hand.
Tessa shied away a little. “When are you going to fix that, Mother? That’s not how it’s supposed to be.”
“Aren’t you sharp with your sight today!” said Elissandra, caressing her child’s cheek with her stump. “I lost these pieces of myself in Dream. My hand, ear, tooth, and hair now float down the river of time and eternity. What is missing can never be restored, because it is as if it has never been. Only the shrewd Iron mind of the Iron Queen noticed the same dissonance in Fate. Most people think I was born this way. Your perceptions are maturing if you can see the layers of truth and lies that form reality, better than she. I am very proud of you, Tessa. One day, your talents will surpass even mine.”
Tessariel grinned, then frowned as another thought struck her. “Why did you lose these pieces, though, Mother?”
“Pick up your blade,” demanded Elineth of his mother.
“A speck, my lambling,” said Elissandra and turned back to Tessa. “When I had to travel here to reach the Iron Queen in time and stop her from destroying all of this—” She waved her only hand, continuing, “—these pieces of myself were the price I paid for my careless race.”
“But you got here. In a day, no less.” Tessariel was awed.
“I did.”
“Pick up your blade!”
“Not now!” barked Elissandra at her son. Tessa’s question had stirred her. Silver-eyed daughter and mother were locked in a trance, focused on each other. Fates hummed, their Seekers buzzed, their hives nearing a secret. A gray shroud fell over the pair, a pall of prescience. They saw and knew only each other.
“How much farther could you go?” asked Tessa.
“To the ends of the land and sea,” replied Elissandra.
“What would that cost you?”
“My flesh. My self.”
“Would you live?”
“For a time, my spirit would exist outside of death, yes. I would be as unstoppable and radiant as the sun. I could stand against the mad king himself: as a warrior of soul.”
“Then that is the answer.”
“The answer…”
Thwack! A flat object hit Elissandra’s ribs. Their trance fell away in smoky dissolution, and each felt stunned, Elissandra especially, as it had been her body that sustained the blow.
“Ha!” cried the lad. “I gave you ample opportunity to raise your guard. I win. Now you’re dead. Dead, Mother. Mother?”
Dead. The gray fog returned, and Elissandra was swallowed once more, sent tumbling from one fugue of prophecy into another. This time, she soared alone through vast, whispering spaces. The river of Dream cast her far and wide, and finally gushed her back into the valley of black rock—back into the Dream where she’d floated over a land immemorial, a scar in Geadhain, and pondered and grieved over the losses of life. With a sigh and tear, Elissandra came back to her children, who huddled around her, afraid.
“No need to fear, my children. I’ve sorted through something. I know where I must go, and, more importantly, how to get there.”
Tessariel’s Seekers buzzed a warning to the girl that she could almost construe. Lacking clarity, she knew only that she should embrace her mother more tightly, and she did. When Tessariel opened her eyes, which were teary, her mother looked in that instant as if she were made of mist and light—beautiful, transcendent, and no longer having a foothold in this world. The vision vanished as her mother wiped away her tears.
“We have our training to get back to,” said Elissandra, and picked up her sword. She wasted not a moment and swung at her son. Wood clashed against wood; the boy grunted from his mother’s brute force. “The strongest minds and bodies will be needed for what lies ahead.”
No more questions were asked. The family of seers could sense that war and death were imminent. Eli felt his sweat tingling like droplets of electricity. Tessa could smell a distant rot, like that of a dead rat buried under the floorboards.
Elissandra watched her children wind tight with resolve. She saw their young faces pinch into the countenances of angry generals. They would be ready. She would ma
ke certain that they were prepared. She’d brought them here to test them, to make them strong. In days or weeks at most, she would no longer be their teacher and parent, but a ghost. But Tessa and Eli had given her hope for the future. For now Elissandra understood what must be sacrificed, and how she was to die. She knew how she was going to become the bird of sun and moon.
I am coming, Morigan. I shall save you, so that you may save us all.
Elissandra brought down her sword so hard that Eli crumpled to the ground. Neither he nor Tessa, who had gone back to filling people’s heads with suggestions, were bothered by his tumble. The child picked himself up, growled at his mother, and attacked again.
XII
SINNER’S PATH
I
Making it out of Alabion was an ordeal for a spoiled, soft-boned child whose magik did not serve him anymore. The last manual exertions in which Sorren had engaged had been a series of races through the hedge mazes of the old estate—races Vort had always won.
Contrition and guilt filled Sorren when he thought about his brother. Even as icy thorns tore at his newly minted flesh, fanged mammals bit his ankles and numbed him with poison, and furry masses roared beneath the snowy trees that he scraped and tore his hands to climb. For the first time in his life he felt as strong and proud as Vort. He was fairly sure, though, that he was no longer a sorcerer: that spark of him had died with his resurrection. However, the seed Death had planted within him when she had used his body as her avatar remained. Her shadow now infused his being, and its magik didn’t require activation by his Will; it was innate. He was now a child of Death: invulnerable, or at least difficult to harm.
Earlier, he’d been bitten by a colorful, lethal snake, and watched his ankle bloat like that of an old woman with gout. But hobbling around for a time appeared to flush out the toxins. Later, while walking across a frozen stream, that same foot had broken the ice, and he had lost his boot and a few toes to a vicious snapping turtle. He had cried a bit, but the bleeding had staunched itself, and the snow had made for a numbing replacement to his footwear. A day later, four little nubs like knots in wood had formed where his toes had been—he had all five now.
I’m coming, my brother. I am coming for you, Mother. These were the thoughts that drove him onward through the pain of injury and rebirth. For despite his body’s hardiness, the healing process was agonizing. Indeed, he likened it to experiencing fleshcrafting without ether or sedatives. The cold helped a little, but for whatever reason, even without a boot and despite his shoddy cloak, he never felt cold enough. When his toes grew in, his foot still throbbed, bringing tears with each pulse. When fanged mammals took their turn with his flesh (why was nearly everything poisonous and deadly here?), he was plunged into delusional, sweaty fevers, during which he often harmed himself through carelessness. When he regained consciousness, he’d then find himself trapped in new cycles of pain. A path of torment lay under his feet, and Sorren the wicked—now Sorren the penitent—walked every aching step with humility.
The young witch, Ealasyd, didn’t believe he could change. She had called him Viper, after the old legend. Perhaps some of what she said of him was true. He was selfish; he had been the cause of great suffering. Still, even a viper had its brood—fellow serpents. None of his family was without sin: his covetous brother, his voraciously greedy mother. If he were a viper, then they were as well. Also, the golden sister had not experienced the gnawing madness of his imprisonment within himself, within the world of Death’s mind. That terror could change a man—and had. Often, as he stumbled through Alabion in a haze of agony, Sorren remembered the lifeless realm he’d wandered while Death reigned in his body.
He flies in a sooty wind over great worlds of ash. Below whistles the blasted nothingness of wastelands where all living creatures are grains of black sand on the desert that reaches in every direction. There are no fossils, no oil, only sand and eternity. There is no sound but that of the wind that bears him. When the current spins and his invisible body flips, he stares at a sky glowing with three red moons: drops of blood on a gray expanse where the stars shine so weakly that it’s clear he’s seeing only the ghosts of their light from eons ago.
Is this a place? he wonders. Some world of Death’s? Perhaps it is the one that first fell to her rule. Its peace is comforting, especially after the intensity of his journey; it suggests a tranquil garden where all sights and sounds are familiar. Sorren soars and spins with the wind. However, a mind—especially a Thule mind—cannot be still forever. And a mind without a body soon thinks of what it is missing. Sorren finds himself thinking of flesh, greenness, and life, of all the elements that cannot be found here—the ones that Death has removed from this perfect vision. Without his body, the vehicle of his ambitions, his desires seem as hollow as the land beneath. How can man desire, yearn for pleasure, without flesh? Questions and doubts assail him. What was it that turned his mother into so cruel a woman? Her love and her pride, he realizes. Why had he even been jealous of Vort? Because he was faster? Stronger? Because his brother had stolen Lenora’s heart—and she’d stolen his in turn? None of these reasons hold any weight outside the world of flesh. None of these reasons is cause for him to have murdered and tortured. As Sorren slowly reflects in this void of clarity, a storm brews. What was quiet now becomes loud. Loud with roars from the screaming, bloody mouths of those he killed—loud with the squelching, burbling death rattles of every one of his victims.
As merely ash on the wind, a passenger without control, he cannot escape from the horror of his life. Flesh does not matter! He shouts to ward off the madness. But these faces and hauntings are not flesh, and neither are the agonies he can remember in such extraordinary detail—every bubbling slice with a scalpel, every jitter and warm pissy smell produced by his attempts to fry and magik mutilated women back to life. Names. He remembers the names of every woman he ended: Minenway, Clarise, Eudora, Samantha...He remembers their animal squeals, their final gasps, and the lipstick of blood that each woman wore. When he had flesh, it had been easy to ignore these details, or, somehow, to treasure them as a butcher does the cutting of meat. He felt himself a great and aspiring genius: transcending death through technomagik. He was blinded to his own madness. In the calm of Death, however, Sorren sees himself more clearly than a normal man can ever see himself. I am petty. I am vile. I am a murderer, a rapist. I am filth. Everything I did in my life was wrong. The root of my birth was rotted. I shall never be able to atone for what I have done. There is not enough mercy in all the world.
Wailing with the spirits of his memory, screaming at the horror of himself, and shrieking for the opportunities for light that he had cast into the darkness, Sorren and his wind soar through purgatory. When the wind abruptly stops, the world tumbles like a sandcastle hit by a hurricane, and a green-eyed woman blearily appears—kneeling, whispering to him. Sorren knows that nothing he suffers on Geadhain will be worse than the silent terror of facing himself and his evil in Death’s realm.
Thus, as Sorren limped his way through Alabion—a land meant to punish—he was thankful for every gash and tear. His pain was his gauntlet, and there should be no end to it for the crimes he’d committed. Life was a blessing, yes, but for him, it was a prison—and one he was grateful for, after his confinement in the mind of Death. Occasionally, when struck by a transcendent moment of suffering, Sorren smiled.
II
Sorren stirred from his waking nightmare. He was in pain all over: he’d twisted his “better” ankle in a pothole, and then later lost most of his left hand to a hungry thing hiding in a frozen bush. He wanted to groan, but kept his mouth shut—wolves were on the move. They howled and beat drums as they marched, and the icy forest shimmered with wispy torchlight. Sorren hobbled toward a barred window of icicles under a great oak root and then huddled behind it. He concentrated on making himself quite still, although he’d discovered recently that only certain predators noticed him—the carrion ones, the beasts that didn’t care whether flesh w
as dead and green. Another sign that there was something grossly wrong with his body: he hadn’t pissed or shat since reawakening to this life. There must be some logic to the metamorphosis he’d undergone, but he couldn’t think about that now. Not when there were wolves in the forest.
The thicket thinned ahead, and he could see flames and fluttering shadows. There was a growing din, a cringing chorus of barks, howls, breaking frost, slammed drums, and rattling metal. At least the cacophony muffled the screaming of the victims in Sorren’s mind; for that he was grateful. At that moment, a war band rushed through the trees, filling the forest like the rush of water from a shattered dam. There was so much threatening movement in the glittering blackness and torchlight that he reached for his wonderstones, the ones the golden witch said could work miracles. However, his hand paused: to save himself would not be a miracle. The pouch of magik stones was meant to secure the fortunes of others. His die had been cast. He would cower, and if he were found, his unkillable body would know only as much pain and torture as it deserved.
Sorren faced this potential judgment, as around him flowed waves of wolves, half-wolves, whipped beasts in iron collars, snapping mouths, and dog musk. At one point, a woman with a skin of milk shone amid the darkness. Somehow, though, she also resembled a red sun. He’d begun to see fewer shapes and details but more colors lately, as if peering through a lens of fever. The woman and wolf sea moved past him in a chorus of haunting howls. The army of hundreds, or perhaps even thousands, had moved by in sands. Much like other predators in this forest, they hadn’t sensed him. Sorren wasn’t sure where the wolves were headed, though he figured he would know soon enough. Something about that pale woman who was also a terrible red sun drew him—she seemed cursed in much the same way he was. Like a lost dog, he followed her army down the trail of trampled ruin. At the very least, she’d lead him out of Alabion. Beyond this deadly wood, he’d begin the search for his family.
Feast of Chaos (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 3) Page 48