The Soul Weaver (52 page)

Ven'Dar nodded. “You have told me the story of your own coming to talent, my lord. Of how desperation to save your young brother's life forced you to take up the knife and recite the Healer's invocation. You've told me how only when you looked back through the years could you recognize the precursors of your talent: aversion to combat, fear of carrying a knife, a thirst to know how the human body worked . . .

“Now consider your son. He has told young Paulo here that he's been seeing visions of the past: his mother as a young woman, his friend Paulo as a crippled child, and his true father's face—your true face—that no portrait has ever shown him. And each of these visions occurred in the presence of the person most concerned. He has dreamed their dreams, felt their joy and shame, experienced the pain of a broken wrist that was his father's, not his own. I believe he has been slipping in and out of souls, uncontrolled.

“And even earlier, what do we see? What could be the trigger that charted his course? Desperation, just as you experienced. Four years ago, on your journey out of Zhev'Na, desperate to escape the pain of separation from the Lords, your son's soul fled his own body. Not understanding what was happening, unable to control his gift, he could not seek refuge in any of you three. That left him adrift in chaos . . . as if he were a part of the Breach itself. I believe that by his act, he imposed order upon the crippled bits of matter and sentience that existed there, forming a solid center . . . a source . . . from which a world has grown—immature, awkward, with all of the spotty wisdom and ignorance of a sixteen-year-old who has experienced too much and too little of living. He loaned a world his life.”

“And that's why the firestorms come near killing him as they destroy the Bounded,” said Paulo.

“And why the Source knew what he'd done, even though he didn't realize it himself,” I said. “Because the Source is a reflection of himself.”

“Yes,” said the Preceptor. “And when this strange joining occurred as you traversed the Breach, he was still connected to the Lords . . .”

“. . . through the jewels and the mask they had given him in Zhev'Na . . .” I said.

“. . . and so the Lords indeed obtained their foothold in the Breach.” Ven'Dar's conclusion dropped a pall of silence over us, so that Gerick's desperate plea echoed in that firelit cavern as if he stood before us. If it was possible for Gerick's link to the Bounded to be severed, a Healer of Karon's skill and power was the only one likely to accomplish it.

Karon stood up and walked away from the fire into the shadows. Only after a long time did he speak, his voice no more yielding than the stone walls of that cavern. “And so you agree that Lords are still part of him, that the oculus in the cave of the Source is the manifestation of his soul's link to them. Somehow, they can control him, just as he says, and make him do things he would not, even to attempting the life of his mother.”

“Yes, my lord. This connection lay dormant for four years, manifest only in nightmares and the boy's unsettled nature. But I believe it was rekindled when you took him across the Bridge that night. Everything started after—”

“And have you even considered the rest of it? If all this is true—if he's been in the mundane world and the Breach and now here in Gondai—then he has taken his friend Paulo across the Breach unscathed, not with struggle and difficulty and expense of power as I do, but easily. Do you know what that means? Do you see the implication? The danger? The impossibility? It means he can transport Zhid between worlds.”

“Indeed. It would seem so,” said Ven'Dar, quietly. “My hope is that when you go to him knowing all of this, you and the boy together will discover how to resolve the problem. Your son needs to understand he is not evil, my lord. As do you. If nothing else, perhaps you will be able to do what he asks of you.”

The knot around my heart drew tighter yet. Karon's resolve was written in his face. The rite . . . the revelations . . . had led us nowhere new.

“Where is he, Paulo?” Karon's words hung in the air like a headsman's ax.

“What will you do?” I blurted out before Paulo could answer.

“Tell me my choices, Seri.”

“There's got to be another way, now we know he's not one of them. They're just using him.”

“For now.”

I stood up, too. Though I fought to stay calm and reasoned, my voice rose. “So what prevents the Lords from crushing Avonar right now? What prevents them controlling him all the time? There's something else at work here, and you can't stop looking for answers just because Gerick has. He doesn't understand what he is, so his solution may not be the only one. We just need time. . . .”

“Time is exactly what we don't have. If there is the smallest possibility that I can do what he asks, what Ven'Dar has tried to give me the chance to do, it must be now. The war won't wait. If the Lords come to this same conclusion, they won't wait. And D'Natheil won't wait.” He turned his back on me. “Where is he, Paulo?”

“Half a day's ride, my lord. A ruin out at the edge of the Wastes near the place you found me. The young master said it must have once been a portal between worlds, like the one in Valleor where we went into the Bounded, as it was easy to find once he knew to look. I'll take you there.”

“Perhaps I could make a portal to take us there, my lord,” said Ven'Dar. “It would take me only an hour or two.”

“No. No portal so close to Avonar. Not when we can't be sure—”

Not when he wasn't sure who would be waiting for us on the other side of it.

“I don't mind riding,” I said.

“You're not going.”

The ten paces between Karon and me stretched wider, across the cavern, across Paulo and Ven'Dar and the litter of packs and supplies and pulsing coals . . . across sixteen years of grief and anger and longing, of loneliness and pain.

“Gerick is our son, Karon. I
will not
abandon him.”

The waves of the Pool of Rebirth, wreathed in mist beyond the shadowed arch, lapped softly.

“I will do what I have to do, Seri. I cannot say what that will be. But neither my own desires nor my feelings for you can weigh in my decision.” He had not moved from the growing shadows, so I could not see his face, only the shape of his powerful body, taut and still.

“Then the Lady
must
go with you, my lord,” said Ven'Dar quietly. “If she reminds you of the past with all its joys and guilts, then you are indeed the man who should be making these dreadful decisions. And truly, our Way says she must make her own choice as to the physical dangers, the risks to her heart, and the way she will endure what is to come.”

Ven'Dar began wrapping a round of cheese in a piece of cloth, and soon it was as if time had taken up its path again. Uneasy, but moving forward.

“It has been three days since you slept, my lord,” said the Preceptor. “And before that you were in combat for five more. You can scarcely stand. Even the urgency of your mission cannot preclude your need for rest. Any chance of success in whatever you attempt will require all your strength.”

Karon's shoulders sagged a little. “Damnable body . . .” He came back to the smoldering fire, then, and sat heavily beside me, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes.

Taking his shoulders, I pulled him sideways until his head rested in my lap.

“Three hours, Ven'Dar,” he said, his command already slurred. “No more.”

“Aye, my lord. Three hours it is.”

I stroked his damp hair with my fingers as he dropped instantly into profound sleep. His sword belt lay just beside us, sword and dagger within easy reach of his hand. D'Arnath's weapons. Some among the Dar'Nethi believed these sacred talismans ensured that the city of Avonar itself would never fall and had been willing to sacrifice the incapable D'Natheil to the Lords to retrieve them. Karon had laughed and said he was grateful that our first venture to the Bridge had returned both Prince and weapons safely to Avonar. The memory of his laughter was a knife in my breast.

Ven'Dar had closed his eyes and sat motionless for a moment. Now he blinked and gave me a sad smile. “I've cast a winding to wake me in three hours, so I am going to take the opportunity to sleep a bit myself.” He bundled a cloak under his head and pulled a blanket up to his chin, yawning. “You should do the same.” He closed his eyes and was instantly asleep.

My back rested on a protruding rock. My fingers traced the wide brow and sculpted jaw, grizzled with many days' growth of light hair . . . D'Natheil's face, stern even in rest. I closed my eyes and tried to remember Karon's face, but for the first time since his death, his features would not resolve clearly, as if we lay together in the darkness and I could catch only the shape of his cheekbone or the line of his dark hair. I wished I could sleep.

Paulo had sat quiet since giving his testimony, looking soberly from one of us to the other. Now he, who could usually sleep anytime and anywhere, sat staring into the dying fire. After a while he muttered a quiet oath, jumped up, and wandered restlessly back through the arch to the Pool of Rebirth. Before very long, he was back.

He crouched beside the fire and poked it aimlessly. Then, so quietly I almost missed it, he said, “If we was to leave now, ride hard, you'd have three hours' head start.”

Three hours. To do what? Hold my son? Convince him to run away? Find an answer?

“Not deceiving. You could leave the Prince a writing to tell him we've just gone ahead. . . .”

And so, many hours later after our frantic ride from Avonar, I crouched behind the still-warm rocks and waited for the signal from Paulo that all was well. After an interminable, breathless time it came, two flares of light in quick succession—a pause—and the third.

I hurried down the barren slope toward the crumbling stone walls. A tall, lanky figure appeared against the lighted rectangle of the doorway. Paulo. And another, smaller person beside him. Not tall enough for Gerick. I hesitated, just outside the light that spilled from the doorway.

“Come, my lady. It's all right. I didn't mention we brought someone else with us when we come from the Bounded,” said Paulo, as soon as I was within earshot. “I thought it best to leave her out of my story until I knew what was what. She's watched over the young master's body when he wasn't in it. Lady Seri, this is Princess Roxanne. I told her you know her da.”

Evard's missing daughter! I'd not given the girl so much as a thought in the hours since my awakening. Fair like her mother and just as regal in her bearing. A pale, smooth complexion out of place amid the half collapsed walls and piles of windblown debris that shaped the little haven. Yet her sturdy brown shirt, tunic, and breeches looked strangely appropriate on her, and her father's sharply intelligent eyes flashed in the firelight as she sat on the cracked paving stones and watched over my sleeping son.

Gerick was curled up in a dusty cloak, his head pillowed on a small bundle. If I'd not laid my hand on him and felt the slow shallow breathing, I would have believed him dead already. He was as pale as starlight and dreadfully thin.

“Another day and the water will run out,” said Roxanne, as she dripped a clear liquid from a tiny cup into Gerick's mouth. “He said he'd come back before the water was gone, but he's not moved so much as a finger since he put himself back to sleep three days ago.”

“What do you mean, ‘come back'? How is it you're here? It wasn't Gerick who abducted—”

“No. The confounded little Vroon and his friends took me to the Bounded by mistake. Gerick freed me from their wretched prison, but he never really told me anything that was going on—not then—only that the place we were was ‘not Leire.' ”

The girl's animated expression took fire in the firelight as the torrent of words poured out of her. “Then, after he almost goes crazy when he finds that ring spinning in the cave, and just before he leaves for this cheery place, he tells me he needs to sleep for a few days while Paulo goes off to find his mother, and that he needs a friend—a friend, he says—to come along and watch and make sure he doesn't die—for heaven's sake—to make sure he doesn't die by giving him water from the Source! I'm not an idiot, and you couldn't be in the Bounded very long without becoming accustomed to the fact that the world isn't quite as you believed. But I'd never had anyone trust me like that. And I said that if we were truly friends, then he needed to tell me what this was about. Of course, he didn't tell me everything, not by a league or ten. After we got here, he lay down and went away. Gone. His body was here for me to keep alive, but he was riding around with Paulo like a fat duchess in a carriage to help him look for you, while hiding where his enemies couldn't find him. Who could believe that?”