Sword of Jashan (Book 2) (21 page)

There was no sound. The slight smokiness of the lamp was vanishing even as he thought of it, and there was no remaining fragrance.

He took a deep breath, then another. In and out, in and out. His heart rate began to slow.

“Jashan, remember me now,” he said, and closed his eyes to block out a useless attempt at vision.

* * * * *

Candlemarks later it seemed, Callo strained to see. Not even a stray filament of light crept into the room. A tangle of red drifted upward, and he followed the skein of light, until he realized they were the false visions manufactured by the eyes when there was nothing else to see.

He thought his eyes were closed. He opened them, only to see smothering blackness.

He tried to sense inside, to touch the source of color magery, the ku’an magery. That, after all, was the point of this exercise. His internal barrier stood crumbled and skewed inside his mind, falling apart as he knew it had been lately, but there was nothing behind it.

He tried to reach out his hands, to see evidence of the color magery that frequently escaped his control. He felt nothing. It was as if he’d been abandoned. He had wished the magery gone, but now that he could not find it, he was stricken, as if part of his body had vanished.

Then he began to feel the little touches, the itching.

It was a series of touches, feathering over his skin. He knew there was no other person in the room, but nonetheless someone touched him. The sensation drew little prickles on his chest, on his thigh, the arch of his right foot.

He tried to squirm away, but his hands only jarred within the restraints. “Agh!” he said.

The sound of his own voice was like a bell in the solitude. He stilled, hearing the sound die away fast, muffled in all the cloth lining the walls.

“My voice,” he said aloud, experimentally. He listened, and then shook his head. It would be much better if he could sleep, especially since he was alone, without even the color magery to resist.

* * * * *

“Why’s everyone so worried about a cursed color mage?” Mot asked. She slouched against a bench in Deephold’s mountain garden, sucking on sugar candy. Cleaned up and dressed in some donated clothes, she was—not pretty, Kirian thought, but the vitality in her peaked little face drew the eye.

“He is my friend, and he is ill,” Kirian responded. “Mage Yhallin is treating him.”

“He must be bat-crazy then,” offered Mot. “I heard o’her. She’s the Magegard.”

“He’s not bat crazy.”
Yet.

“Almost feel sorry fer him,” Mot said. “Bat-crazy, and people out to get him too. But—nah, I don’t feel sorry for him after all.”

Kirian could not help but laugh.

Mot grinned at her. It was the first smile Kirian had seen from the girl since they had taken her to Sugetre Castle, then to Deephold. The girl had stopped talking as soon as they had arrived at the castle. She had accepted the clothes with no comment. Only after a bath and some food had the tightness gone from her shoulders, and she had not opened up until this moment.

“Ya haven’t asked me about the attack on Lord Ander,” Mot said.

“I have been worried, and occupied. Lord Callo’s life was in danger, and we needed to run. Now I want to hear what you have to say about the other man, the one Lord Dionar slew in the cells.”

Mot made a face. “He’s a rat, that one. Always has been. My da said use him but never trust him.”

“He exhibited some strength in the cells though. He stuck to his story—for some reason.”

“If he’d known they was about to chop off his head, he woulda told the truth soon enough. They paid us, Hon Kirian. To say what we said.”

“They paid you all to name Lord Callo if you were taken?”

“Well, to say it was a yellow-eyed
righ
. I knew nothin’ about Lord Callo then.”

“Did your father say who it really was, then? The one who paid you to take Lord Ander, and then lie about it?”

“He didn’ say a name.”

Disappointment flooded her. She had hoped this precocious child would have the entire story and be able to clear Callo’s name. “Did he tell you anything about the man?”

Mot grinned. “Wasn’t a man at all, Hon Kirian. My Da said it was a woman.”

* * * * *

Callo felt he had been lying on the cot in the black room for candlemarks. His stomach was rumbling, so maybe he had passed the night and now it was breakfast time. He sighed and looked into blackness, searching within him once again for the magery that had caused so much trouble. He found nothing.

He looked straight ahead—at least he thought it was straight ahead. He was not sure if his head was in the proper orientation.

Then he saw a face, looming out of nothingness. It had wide empty eyes and a slash of a mouth. It seemed very close. The face said nothing to him.

“Who are you?” His voice was hoarse. He tried to clear his throat, but he was very dry, and only succeeded in hurting his throat. He tried to swallow, but there was nothing to swallow with. How long had he been here?

The face stared at him wordlessly. Callo blinked, and the face was gone. A pattern rose out of darkness and turned into a man, turning to look at him, scowling with sword raised. Callo jerked in his bonds, instinctively reaching for his missing sword. Then that man vanished too.

Hallucinations.

He had not counted on hallucinations. He had thought there would be some kind of epic battle between the magery and his own powers of restraint—or perhaps the intervention of a god, as there had been in Ha’las. Not this endless nothing, straining to see so that he made up his own demons. He could no longer even feel the cot against his back and legs. The only sound was when he spoke, and his throat was too sore for that now. He could taste nothing, smell nothing. He drifted, a lone consciousness in the void.

* * * * *

There was only darkness. He felt he had been here forever. It seemed that the cot tilted under him and he pushed his hands against it, trying to hold on.

* * * * *

Kirian and Chiss waited at the bottom of the stairs to the lower levels. Yhallin emerged with her cloak drawn about her.

“How is he?” Chiss asked.

Yhallin shrugged. “I have no idea. There is still no light to see by, and I heard no sound.”

“You cannot see much through that tiny spy hole anyway,” Chiss said.

“Hasn’t it been a long time for the battle to have not even begun?” Kirian asked.

“It seems so,” Yhallin said. “But there was one young man, a color mage from the south, who went an entire day before touching his magery.”

“And what happened to that young man?” Chiss stepped aside, allowing Yhallin access to the stairs. “Was his story a success?”

Yhallin did not reply. Kirian followed her up the stairs, more afraid than ever.

* * * * *

When the first burn of power came, Callo welcomed it. It awakened him from death.

The ku’an magery came first. It was an insidious thing, something he had kept controlled since he was nine, using Jashan’s ritual to reinforce his self-control. But the color magic belonged to Jashan, and it wanted free. It ran through his veins from wherever it had been hiding like a river of fire.

He laughed. It was easy now to break the restraints, the color magery burning them off until they were no more. The acrid stench of burnt cloth and hide reached his nostrils, and he sucked it in, welcoming it, something at last in the everlasting nothingness.

The magery wrapped his arms like ink on his skin, and everywhere it ran it burned. Callo’s senses awoke to the pain. He tried to force the power back where it came from, as he had been doing since it appeared months ago. He opened the prison he had made for Jashan’s magery and tried to cram it back in, where it could do no harm, where it could hurt no one, where it would not kill its user with flame and pain.

It was too strong. He could not touch it. The other source of magery, the ku’an magery, joined it. He could feel twin sources of power blend and join, making each stronger while Callo became just a carrier for their strength.

A carrier who could not stand up to the fire running through him.

“Jashan’s sword, So’mur’s heart,” he rasped. Both gods had fought over him in a little room in Las’ash city. Now it seemed they had joined forces to destroy him.

The pain screamed along every nerve. He fought, struggled, and cursed to shove it back. He wished the magefire back where it belonged, and nowhere near him. Sweat dripped from him until his hands were slippery where they clung to the bed frame. He wondered blankly why he was clinging to the frame now that he was free, and then realized something was trying to drag him away—he did not know whether it was a god or some effect of the magery, but a pull like that of the earth struggled to take him.

He still raged against it.

Mage energies washed up the walls in a sheet of color, turning the room bright. There were flames licking at his fingers; he grabbed a cloth and tried to subdue them, meanwhile trying to drown the magery in the blackness he remembered from a little while ago.

A wisp of smoke rose from the cloth.

Horrified, Callo thrust it away from him. What if he were to set this room afire? This tiny room with no windows, with walls covered in fabric and hide? Then he would indeed be one of Yhallin’s failures, a body carried out charred beyond recognition.

And this wing of Deephold would likely be burned as well.

Free from the destroyed restraints, he pushed the cot aside. Standing in the center of the room with magefire arcing around him, he tried to assume the first stance in Jashan’s ritual. Swordless, he began the first turns of the worship that had kept the ku’an magery under control since he was nine years old. There was not much room, and he could not attain the peaceful focus of a normal form.

As he spun on his heel, he stumbled, falling to the floor.

He felt as if every nerve was aflame. He tried to stand again but his legs shook so much he could not summon the strength to do so.

This was it, then. He was unable to stand or push the cursed mage energies back behind his wall. He had been destroyed by captivity and drugs, and the magery was uncontrollable.

They would find him here when this was all over, probably burned by the mage energies that roared out of control. He was one of Yhallin’s failures. King Martan would not mourn him, but would undoubtedly curse the ruin of his plans. Most of the
righ
would exult—Callo’s death would solve a problem thrust upon them, an unacceptable bastard color mage in line for the throne. The boy Ander would be glad no one stood in his way anymore.

Chiss and Kirian would mourn.

And there would be no one to avenge Arias.

He had left much undone while he struggled to control what the gods had given him. He regretted it, but only for a moment. The change from utter blackness to the roar and flame around him now overloaded his senses.

Callo decided there was nothing else he could do. He leaned back against the padded wall and closed his eyes. He stopped fighting.

* * * * *

“Go in,” Kirian whispered. “Mage Yhallin, you have to go in.”

The stuffy room was as dark as they could manage, so no light could leak into the place where Callo endured his struggle. Though it no longer mattered. Even through the walls, Kirian could hear the roar and crack of the energies Callo struggled with, and the brilliant colors of the magery streamed through the spy hole.

Yhallin turned to her. “Kirian,” she said, an odd tone in her voice. “Think. No one can go into that room now until it is all over, or they will be destroyed along with Lord Callo.”

* * * * *

The mage energies abandoned the room they had been destroying and rushed back into Callo’s mind and body.

He lay there on the floor, letting the magery consume him. It filled him as water does a jug, fitting its shape into all his corners, pushing everything else out.

He burned with it, in pain so intense he almost passed out.

His eyes were closed, but the space inside him was on fire with light.

He had tried his best. He had fought it from Ha’las to Seagard, to the forest of Northgard, to here. He was not equal to it. He would fight no more. Let Jashan’s fire burn him alive if that was what the god wanted; he was done. Sighing in acceptance, he let go his resistance and allowed Jashan’s magery to etch along the trails of his nerves and his blood vessels and the paths of his life force from limb to trunk to heart and head.

He was consumed.

It was a relief to let Jashan do with him what he willed. The fire was in him,
was
him. He lay like an offering on the sand, letting the magery light him and illuminate him. After a few seconds he realized he was the fire too, fierce and angry and hungry, and jubilant.

He felt raw, as if the magery had scoured his flesh away. He accepted that, refusing to fight, because he could not fight any more. The pain dragged his consciousness open and spread it out for the gods’ reading.

In his mind he began to go over the patterns of Jashan’s sword ritual. Each stroke, each cut, every counter and salute as fresh as a year ago, before his life had been turned upside down by Sharpeyes’ revelations of his birth. His breath went in and out with the measured exhalations that accompanied the form.

The magery danced, turned from destruction to exhilaration. So this was it, Callo thought in an agony of power.
This was the secret of how to live through Jashan’s gift of magery.
In extremity he had been forced to stop the fight against the magery—against the god. And the magery had become one with him.

His barrier wall was gone. Magery lived in him, in his heart. He opened his eyes to see the darkness in the room, the magery subsumed in him.

He smiled. The skin of his cheek cracked; it must be burned. But there was no pain. The door to the hallway opened, letting in a shaft of normal, human-lit lamplight, cool on Callo’s eyes after the fury of the mage energies.

Yhallin Magegard stood there, looking haggard. “You will be all right, Callo ran Alkiran,” she said. “You have made it through.”