The Age of Light (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 1) (17 page)

Staventu smacked his hand against the table covered
with the map, cursing. “Damn it, the little fool! She doesn’t realize the kind
of danger she’s gotten herself into! Or rather she didn’t,” he said grimly,
scowling.

“Staventu, please,” Otaga admonished gently.

“If that thing is strong enough to suck the life out
of the Av’ru, what’s to keep it from draining all the life out of her like a
ripe mango? Solu help us, she may be dead already!”

“Staventu, she isn’t dead. We would know. The
Av’rujo
would know.” Rilantu sighed. “But that still leaves the question of her
whereabouts, her absence and her silence. Could the thing have captured her
somehow?”

“If it even exists anymore,” Otaga pointed out, her
face skeptical. “That happened over four hundred cycles ago. I find it hard to
believe that it would live for that long. Only the High Queen and the
Av’rujo
have been know to have such long lifespans.”

“Well something is causing the
Zehj’Ba
,”
Rukto pointed out. “Perhaps feeding off of its light has kept the thing alive
all these cycles.”

“I think our sister has gotten in over her head,”
Rilantu said, looking around the table. “Because she isn’t dead does not mean
that she isn’t near death, or weak and in danger of being killed. Her silence
could be an indication of this.”

“Perhaps she is keeping silent for a reason,” Jarisa
suggested. “Fear, maybe. Or a warning of danger. Her very silence could be a plea
for help.”

“Or she could be in a delicate situation where such
silence is necessary,” Pentuk ventured.

“We have to track her no matter what the
circumstances. Which brings us back to our original problem.” Staventu looked
around the faces. “How do we track her with a four ten’turn old trail?”

“I don’t see any choice but to have Mother perform
the rite of seeking that she has prepared. That’s the only way to pinpoint her
location exactly.” Rilantu sat back, rubbing his eyes. It was getting late. The
darkness was turning toward
Av’
dawn.

“But that could take two or three turns to find
her,” Otaga protested, though it was a moot point.

Pentuk spread her hands, cleared her throat. “Has
the High Queen ever used the
Av’ru
in a rite of
seeking?” she asked hesitantly when she had their attention. “Being of the
blood of the
Av’rujo
, the Heir is linked to the
Av’ru
,
however indirectly, as are you,
Av’S
ons. Perhaps
using the
Av’ru
will make the seeking quicker and easier.”

Staventu shook his head, grinning. “You
have
found a gem in this one, Rukto. She is brilliant! I might even suggest that
Mother steal her from the Library and start training her as a future Voice!”

Rukto chuckled. Pentuk ducked her head, began
restacking her books to hide her embarrassment.

Rilantu smiled. “That’s a good idea, though I don’t
see why she can’t do both. She can train to take Ashmisa’s position when the
time comes.” He looked at the book in Otaga’s large, callused hands. “Show that
to Mother. If she gives no other orders concerning it then destroy it. Tell her
I commanded it so.” He stood and stretched, placed his hands on the table.
“Friends, we must make preparations to leave. And we must make haste.
Now more than ever.”

slowly the light turned, living...

The
light died. It turned, slower and slower, turned away, fading to darkness, veil
after veil whispering away to black. And with the light came the cold
a-borning, filling the darkness with its hardened grip. The cold stung deep
within, deep into the soul, a soul-drenching cold that smothered and rolled,
like a river of ice, over everything in its path; a deep so cold as to
extinguish the stars...

Jeliya woke to a soul-deep cold. And with the cold
came a hunger as of the very cells of her body crying out in some need. A
yearning, a burning for the vanishing light, the vanquished turning of her life
energy to the dark with the cold.

She shuddered with the internal spreading of that
dark cold, like the last set of
Av
. It was a prick
of cold so total that she might have imploded in its brittle grip. She moaned,
the accumulation of many turns of pervading cold evident. It was the
lor’den
.
The cold-dark sickness. And she was deep in it.

Jeliya moved to a delicious warmth on her face and
arm. It was a familiar warmth, reassuring as the embrace of a mother, striving
to drive out the cold. It was the light steps of
Av
,
a reminder of life and passing time.

Desperate need drove her unwilling body to action.
She took a careful inventory of herself as she lay on her belly, found that she
did not ache quite so much, or at least, not so much as to prevent her from
getting to the light. The wounds on her back seemed to heal apace, and the pain
behind her eyes had dulled so that it did not dominate her dark world.

Having reached that conclusion she decided to try
sitting up, striven by cold. She braced her hands against the soft surface of
the pallet and pushed herself back so that she was sitting on her heels. The
skin on her back felt tight and the air was a chilly match to the strains of
silent cold within her as the
desi
slid off her
shoulders. Her muscles were very stiff and sore, but if she moved slowly and
carefully, it was bearable.

She sat for a while, gathering her strength, the creeping,
consuming fan of frost in the core of her being reminding her of the goal of
her exertions: to get to the light. She had not performed the Rite of
Solu
in well over a ten’turn, possibly two. And apparently her caretaker did not
know that he had to do it for her. This negligence brought on the
lor’den
,
the withdrawal sickness that was brought on by deficiency of the light of Av.
She could feel the advanced stages of
lor’den
within her
- she prayed that she would be able to keep it from getting much more serious.

She felt about her, arms exposed to the frigid air,
and slid forward slowly, seeking the edge of the pallet. She figured it was
like any bed, a thick mattress on a low wooden box. She figured that the
mattress was just somewhat thicker to be so yielding. She found the edge of the
huge bed, finally, and painfully swung her legs out, questing for the floor. To
her surprise and chagrin she found her feet suspended in the frost-limned air.
Puzzlement and a little irrational fear touched her - how high could she be?
Clamping firmly on her emotions, ignoring the call of the cold, she pulled her
legs back in and sought for the bottom edge of the pallet with her hand. She
discovered that it was a depth almost the length of her arm. Arm-length?

Great turning
Av
,
what does he keep it filled with?!
Surely a whole flock of
taro’birds
,
whose feathers made the best bedding, would be required! She began to wonder,
with a real pang of anxiety, just how high the surface of the pallet was from
the floor. Surely not too much higher..!

Jeliya swung her legs out over the edge again and
crept forward, keeping a tight grip on the surface of the pallet. She did not
panic when her knees passed the edge, or when her hamstring moved over that
border. But when her buttocks hung on the edge and the floor was not to be
found beneath her waving feet she felt a thousand prickles of fear crawl up her
back, causing chill bumps to rise along her arms. Why would he make a bed so
ridiculously high?

Then she remembered his half-equine physiology. He
had built the bed to suit himself. But still, how high would he make it?

She decided to stretch her
av’rita
a fraction, a small sacrifice of her failing warmth to the defeating cold. She,
with a raw expenditure of power without use of rite, fashioned a hollow staff
of energy. For more complex structures or ceremonies, rites were required to
give shape and direction to the thing being constructed or the ceremony being
performed. But the simple probe required no such refined shaping.

She made it seven heads tall, and in her dark mind’s
eye she could see it and vaguely anything surrounding it that came within the
nimbus field that radiated from the edges. She saw the side of the cold-gray
pallet and the frame and her own numb feet, but in the false-frost colors she
could not tell how far away the ground was, even when she extended her
frostbitten senses into the staff. She guided it between her dangling, icicle
feet, the bottom the center of her sense of touch. It went passed her feet, an
eighth of a head, a fourth, half - and struck the frigid floor.

Feeling both aggravated and relieved and colder by
the moment, she slid off the knife-ice edge of the bed, dropping the short,
arctic distance. Her frozen ankle buckled under the strain and she cried out
into brittle air and stumbled, the staff the only thing saving her from
falling. Leaning against the bed she rubbed her ice-ankle, grimacing as
ice-pain radiated from the slightly swollen frozen joint up to the cramping,
frozen muscle. It was too tender to walk on.

Numb with the cold that walked on needle feet along
the surface of her skin, she used the staff to support herself as she numbly
inspected the bed. The wooden ice-frame did not reach the sub-arctic ground.
Further investigation revealed that the thing was a raised ice-frame supported
by four ice-poles with the thick glacial pallet on top. She laughed to herself,
the sound brittle enough to break off in the cold air, wincing a little as her
injured ice-foot touched the ice-ground. Imagine, a raised ice pallet! The idea
was novel, and she rather liked it, even though the cold concept did not make
any sense, and the cold bedding was a bit too soft for her taste.

She hunched over her staff, shivering, her legs
weaker than she had anticipated, and she shuffled along toward the light, her
deeply chilled mind wandering over her cold-dark illness.
Lor’den
on top of poisoning, and a serious fall! It was a wonder she could move at all.

Warmth! exploded over her ice-burned skin, flowed
over her cold-bitten mind and she laughed with mindless delight, the puzzle of
the ice-cold
thrista
momentarily forgotten. It ran
like acid linen over her frozen, outstretched arm, its particles falling upon
her like golden, molten rain. She sighed with thawing pleasure as it drove
relentlessly into her body-turned-ice. It touched her frosted face, her chilled
arms, her frosted breasts, her chilled stomach, her legs that had become liquid
as the frozen rain of the Deep Norae confronted with the glare of Av. She
turned unerringly toward the white-hot window through which the boiling light
of
Av
was pouring.

She dropped to her melting knees, spread her
dripping arms wide, drinking in the devastating heat of the late
afterzen
light as if it were liquid fire, the molten mead of life. Then she dropped her
thawing hands and beat upon her deliquescing thighs in lieu of drums, the
pay’ta
that began the Rite. It grew and evolved, hot, bright, brilliant in the sinking
cold of her darkness, taking her name up to the heavens, to
Av
,
the most brilliant embodiment of
Solu
.

“In Av’s peace
and Av’s place

Lend to me Av’s
grace

In Av’s light
and Av’s dawn

From Av’s heart
I am reborn.”

Light-heat flooded in through the window,
intensifying with each passing moment, suffusing her with a bright yellow glow,
scorching a path to her innermost center of cold. She laughed as the light
scoured into her, filling her, burning away all sensation of her physical body,
almost-all sensation of the cold, until she was a pure, blazing soul, a drop of
life-blood of the Supreme One. Almost. The light roared in her ears, broiled
her eyes, cleansed her spirit of almost-all cares and worries and woes and
ice-floes, purifying, rebirthing. Almost. It was not enough.

She invoked the second order of the Rite, her voice
rising, calling down the fury of
Av
.

“In
Av’s sight and Av’s sound

Let
the cold be bound

By
Av’s Rite and Av’s will

Let
the dark-cold be stilled!”

It battered down into her, stormed her wasted
ritu’chi
like a hurricane, came close to burning her out to ash and gone. She let its
fury rage through her, unchecked. She directed it toward the insidious
cold-dark, letting it battle the deep seed of cold that neglect of the Rite had
planted. She let it deluge her, walked the thin line between salvation and
destruction, dancing as close as she dared to one to embrace the other. What
she did was madness, for few dared let the first order of the Rite reign
unchecked, much less the second. Madness born of desperation. Salvation born of
skill and power. A thing born of
Av.

The light rampaged within her, dancing upon the
kindling of her soul, blazing through her
ritu’chi
like a brush fire gone wild. Feeding on the darkness. Biting back the chill.
Driving out the cold. She held the Rite as long as she dared, to the brink of
incineration, total burn out. Then she terminated each order carefully, her
being feeling as if it had been over-baked in an immense kiln. She kept hold of
the heat energy for as long as she could as the Rite ended. She held it like a
lover, pressed it to the retreating cold. Then reluctantly she released it,
slowly, before it rushed out of her all at once and depleted and chilled her
even more than she had been before performing the Rite. And when she had not
the strength to hold it more, she threw it away from her in all directions,
striking living sparks upon the air. Slowly the light surrounded her, and
slowly it dissipated, as if loath to vanish. All returned to normal, with no
sign that the Rite had past.

She hoped it was enough to kill the cold. She
seriously doubted it.

A distant sound made her turn fast, the scorched,
tight skin on her back protesting.

Could he have been listening? Or watching? The
possibility made her run cold, a different cold. The Rite was a private, sacred
thing; only under special circumstances, such as when one is first shown the
Rite, or when one is too sick to perform it oneself, was it shared between two
people.

“Hello?” she said softly, liquidly, cocking her
feverish head, her ears pricked. She heard the scorched clatter of hooves but
they were distant, and fading. She sighed, began making her singed way back to
the raised pallet, troubled.

She had been unable to store any of the light, a
testament to her deteriorated state. She still was not anywhere near strong
enough to send a message or
av’tun
home. And
the threat of
lor’den
hung over her head. Still.

Again her thoughts turned to the seriousness of her
condition, this time without the distraction of cold, treading in the footsteps
of flaming heat. She knew the effects of
thrista
.
The poisoning had taken a huge toll on her, more than it should have.
Thrista
was not that potent, even in large doses. It was not life-threatening. It
caused a slight fever and minor irritation in the eyes, yes, and an upset
stomach if there were a large concentration. It did not cause a fever so high
that delirium ensued, or make the eyes so sensitive that they would not
tolerate light of any kind. It did not incapacitate a healthy person for a full
ten’turn. Jeliya shook her head, which ached dully even as she thought about
her symptoms. It was like
thrista
poisoning,
but amplified a thousand times. Could he have been wrong about the type of
stinging nettle she had fallen in? But no, she had identified it as
thrista
herself. Could it be a new breed? Could she have been poisoned with something
more potent afterward? But why would he poison her and then cure her? She
rejected the idea. She was sure that he was curing her, at least for as long as
she had been awake.