The Sigil Blade (23 page)

The sword had stopped at the exact moment it had come into contact with his skin. It didn’t seem possible, but he had to accept that Seoras was capable of a good many things that no one should be able to do. Edryd looked toward Seoras for the first time. The man’s dark blue eyes were dim and devoid of awareness, appearing as fixed empty points in a hollow tormented expression. Seoras’s mind was a blank.

It seemed to Edryd, quite convincingly, as if time had stopped. But it hadn’t. It was only Seoras that seemed to be frozen. That illusion fell away too as the tall man’s legs collapsed and he crumpled to the ground. Edryd couldn’t see whether Seoras was breathing, but he felt certain that the shaper wasn’t dead, at least not yet. There was an emotionless and incoherent chaos stirring within the man’s unconscious mind. It was an opportunity, one that would not come again, to kill Seoras. Edryd would have had a host of points of solid justification for doing so if he chose to act. Self-preservation was high on that list.

Edryd rushed off yelling for Irial, and was still running up to the manor when he saw her running towards him in the opposite direction.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I didn’t do anything…” Edryd began defensively, failing to realize that her question wasn’t meant as an accusation. She just needed to know what had happened. Irial didn’t wait for him to figure it out; she started hurrying down the path again.

“He attacked me,” Edryd explained as he ran along behind her, trying again to make it clear that he deserved no blame for what had happened. “He tried to kill me, and then he stopped.”

Irial glanced back at Edryd, thinking that he wasn’t making much sense, and doubting that he had given an accurate description of events.

Edryd could see the suspicion on her face, but he couldn’t blame her, not when he didn’t understand what had happened himself. It only stood to reason, that once she saw Seoras lying on the ground, she would have to then think him guilty of having struck Seoras hard enough to knock him out.

Had he done something though? His memory of that moment felt indefinite and unreal. He had believed that he was going to die. Might that have broken something loose? It wasn’t without precedent. Something not altogether dissimilar had happened when he had fought and killed his brother Beonen. No, this time had been different; he no longer even had the sigil blade. Whatever had happened in that moment when Seoras’s sword had begun slicing into his neck, Edryd was certain that he had played no part in it other than the innocent object of the unprovoked attack.

Edryd began to consider whether Seoras had done something to himself, waiting too late to stop the momentum from a shaped swing. Seoras could have created a force in opposition to the one imparted into the original attack. Nothing else could have stopped the strike so suddenly. Edryd thought of the stone Seoras had been holding in the air, pushed at by opposing forces, before it exploded inside of the outbuilding behind the stables. Seoras had grasped it so tightly that it had been crushed. Had the mental equivalent happened within Seoras? It was a horrible and unpleasant thought.

Arriving in the practice yard, Edryd stood beside Irial as she knelt over Seoras. He braced for the accusations that were sure to come, but Irial was too focused on Seoras to notice him. She loosened the injured man’s shirt and listened for his breathing. Putting the side of her head to his heart, she listened intently for a short while before pulling away.

“Apart from being entirely insensible, he is perfectly fine,” she said. “He is worn out, but not injured.”

Irial began to check for signs of any bruising on his head.

“I didn’t hit him,” Edryd insisted. “He fell, but he was already unconscious before that.”

Irial turned to Edryd and noticed the long cut across the side of his neck as well as the gash in his leg. The bleeding had stopped on Edryd’s neck, but blood was still soaking into the cloth on his leg, drawn from the wound on his thigh. Forgetting about Seoras for the moment, Irial focused on attending to Edryd’s injuries.

Tolvanes came into the square holding strips of cloth and a bucket of water, which Irial used to carefully clean and then bandage Edryd’s injuries. When she was done she asked Edryd again what had happened.

“I didn’t kill him,” Edryd said.

“No, but you would have been within your rights if you had,” she said, looking at his injuries.

Irial turned her attention back to Seoras. She seemed to be going through the same debate he had only moments before. It was an opportunity to end the man. An unnecessary one, Edryd thought, remembering again the stone he had seen shattered into thousands of pieces.

Tolvanes, who had quietly moved closer to Edryd, leaned in close. “Why didn’t you kill him,” he hissed.

Edryd was a little taken aback, until he remembered what Tolvanes had once asked of him.

“If you want him dead,” Edryd said, “do it yourself.”

Tolvanes regarded Edryd warily, his gaze travelling to the short sword resting in its sheath at Edryd’s side. Edryd could not tell whether Tolvanes was eyeing it as an implement with which to carry out his ambition to kill Seoras, or whether he was just worried about what Edryd might do to intervene.

“We need to carry him to a bed,” Irial said. Whatever Tolvanes had been contemplating, this pulled him out of it.

“Of course Mistress Rohvarin,” Tolvanes obliged, positioning himself near the feet of the still unconscious Aed Seoras.

Edryd moved into place opposite Giric Tolvanes and together they prepared to lift Aed Seoras from the ground. As he knelt and took hold of Seoras, placing his arms under the injured man’s shoulders, Edryd felt Seoras begin to stir.

“Get back!” Edryd ordered, jumping to his feet and shielding Irial.

The displacement emanating from Seoras was unfocused and without form, but it was powerful, encircling all of them and extending past the edges of the courtyard. Irial and Tolvanes had not noticed anything, apart from Edryd’s strange behavior, but Edryd felt successive waves of pulsing distortions that left him feeling disoriented and unsteady. Loose gravel began to vibrate around the still prone figure of Aed Seoras, and seeing this, Irial and Tolvanes backed away cautiously. Edryd couldn’t move. He was fixed in place within a smaller circle of gravel that was resonating around his own feet. Some of the small stones began to rise in the air, and then they fell abruptly to the ground as Seoras woke and stabilized the distortion.

Seoras rose to his feet, untroubled by, or perhaps just unaware of, the several vacant minutes he had spent laying on the ground. The distortion he was shaping and maintaining with ease was more powerful than ever. It stretched far beyond the range he had formerly been capable of, and the window through which Edryd could observe his teachers mind was clearer than it had ever been. Seoras was admiring the strength he was now wielding with a look of wonder and awe. He turned to Edryd and stared in amazement.

“You really can’t shape,” Seoras said. “I can see that now, I just don’t understand why. If you could touch the dark, you would be something this world has not seen in hundreds of years.”

Seoras allowed the displacement he was shaping to dissipate. It continued to shrink until its boundaries passed over Edryd, at which point it collapsed to nothing and vanished. Seoras ceased his hold on the dark reluctantly, feeling the loss of the raw power that had been at his command.

“You may not be able to pattern the dark, but you see it clearly. Far better and much further than I could have imagined. We will work with that. There is a way forward, but we have to approach everything differently.”

Seoras said nothing more for a moment, formulating new possibilities as he integrated the fragmented discoveries he had just exposed. “I need to think on this,” Seoras said, and then turned away, looking confused.

Edryd wanted to tell him to take all the time he needed. He did not understand any of what had just happened. He ought to have demanded answers, but he felt too frightened to try to follow Seoras, who was now heading up to the manor. Edryd felt weak, and realized he was shaking. Seoras was nothing less than an absolute monster. No person should be able to control so much power.

He felt Irial place her hand on his arm. “Let’s go home. You don’t need to be here today,” she said, her face tight with worry.

Edryd didn’t argue. His head hurt fiercely and his body ached. It seemed to Edryd as if his soul had fought against the confines of its vessel, exceeding what should have been withstood, leaving him worn and unstable. There was a residual effect in the courtyard left over from what had just happened, undermining the reality of the place where they still stood, and Edryd wanted nothing more than to get as far away as he could.

He began to feel better almost immediately after they left the estate, but one lasting aftereffect remained. It lessened but did not disappear. Edryd felt like something trapped within him was trying to force a way out. The concept terrified him, and he did what he could to put it out of his mind.

After rounding a corner that blocked the town from view, they travelled another half mile before leaving the path and climbing a short distance to a field of grass that lay beside a cold clear stream. It was the same stream that met the path further down the mountain, following alongside it until reaching the town where it flowed through a channel that fed into a pond on the southern edge of the settlement.

Edryd gathered water in cupped hands and drank deeply, before dipping his hands back in again and bringing up more water to wash over his head and across his neck and face. The water was neither deep nor wide here, or he might have been tempted to submerge his head in it.

Irial unwound a scarf from around her shoulders. Edryd supposed that she planned to gather some of the blackberries that they had spied yesterday, and maybe collect assortments of herbs growing in the wild. He normally would have offered to help. It wasn’t often needed, nor was he often much use when he did help, but he usually learned something from assisting her.

“You should rest for a little while,” Irial said, concerned about the injuries that she could see, and even more worried over those that he hid from her. She couldn’t experience changes in the shape and pattern of the dark the way Edryd did, and so would not have been able to directly understand the magnitude of what had taken place that morning, but she could see that it had shaken him.

“I’ll just take a nap then until you get back,” Edryd agreed. He smiled, trying to reassure her that he was fine.

“I will be quick,” she promised.

“Not too quick,” he said, still smiling, “or it won’t be much of a nap.”

Edryd watched for a little while as Irial picked berries from the branches of a nearby bush. Lying down in the low grass, he closed his eyes for a moment.  She was gone when he opened them again.

Closing his eyes once more, he tried to calm the thoughts and worries racing through his head, but failed. He tried again to shut everything out, the fragrance of the fresh grass, the sound of the wind filtering through the leaves of the forest, and the warmth of the sun washing over him. Achieving no measure of success, he settled on the opposite approach and opened himself to everything at once. He was aware of pain from the cuts in his skin, the damp ground beneath him, currents of air carrying bits of pollen and the aromatic fragrance of juniper trees, and the sound of water splashing over the stubborn stones that impeded the stream’s descending route down the mountain. Each additional sensory contribution weakened distinctions between all of the others until they bled together into a meaningless union.

His physical awareness receded, his mind disregarding signals to which it could no longer assign meaning or importance. Conversely, his comprehension of the dark, and through it his connection to everything else, deepened. Everything, living things in particular, distorted the shape of the dark into subtle but complex patterns. He could intuit information about the objects that created these patterns, and in doing so construct an understanding of the world around him.

It felt unexpected yet familiar, as if discovering a depth that had always been there in the periphery of his experience. It wasn’t new. He had been discerning patterns in the dark for a long time now, but by subduing his other senses his mind was able to see the world in a new way. It afforded a unique and fluid perspective.

As if from an external viewpoint, Edryd could see himself, and he saw that he was warping the shape of the dark in all directions, a constant unchanging passive effect fixed tightly around him as its source. From within the limited range across which this envelopment extended, Edryd’s mind accounted for the effect and subtracted it out. From beyond its circumference, it disappeared as if neither he nor the displacement were even there. Edryd could infer its existence, only while shifting perspective near the edge of the effect. He tried to alter the shape, believing that something might have changed, but was rewarded with confirmation that nothing was any different. He might as well have been trying to form a piece of pottery out of flowing water.

The new mode of experience was taking a toll. It felt ungrounded, and it was disorienting to feel so disconnected from physical perception. Concerned that he could become lost, Edryd discovered that he did not know how to exit this altered state. In a panic he tried to tear free. As had happened earlier that morning, he became aware of something inside. Some shaped piece of the dark nestled in his mind, resisting his every effort. Terror sparked a cascade that collapsed everything. Edryd was assaulted by blinding light and roaring sounds, and the pain from his injuries was overwhelming. Then everything returned to normal. Edryd blinked. The world was again a place of physical sights and sounds.