The Soul Weaver (62 page)

My heart constricted, laboring to pump blood through my dry veins. “Thank you, Mem'Tara. That would be better.”

The tall woman moved on to other matters.

Roxanne began talking, then, allowing the safe solidity of speech to soothe her. She told me the story of her rescue from the Guardian's dungeon, and how she had tried to order Gerick around and hurt him and humiliate him . . . and how she had never imagined that she could find friendship in that strange land. And then she told me then how Radele had come into the Masters' Chamber at the Precept House while she was hiding there, waiting for Bareil. . . .

“When he pulled out the ring and started it spinning, I knew it was wicked. Gerick was so horrified by the one in the cave of the Source, though he wouldn't tell me what it was. But you had told me how he became a Lord and that the spinning ring was the Lords' tool. Just seeing it made me feel sick. As the ring spun, this Radele began to speak, and I recognized his voice. He was the man I heard taunting my father on the night he was enchanted, the one touching him. If I'd had a weapon, I'd have killed him. Then I heard these other dreadful voices . . . horrid . . . just like here . . . though no one was in the room. As soon as Radele left, I ran out of the house. But I got lost and there were so many people around, and no one understood me. I thought that once it was daylight I could find my way. I've never been so glad to see anyone as I was when Paulo came running down the street, calling my name. But now—” Tears dripped from the end of her nose. “By the Holy Twins, what manner of weakling queen will I be? I can't stop talking. Can't stop thinking.”

“You did the world a great service, Roxanne.” I put my arm around her and laid my cheek on her tousled hair. “This is just very hard.”

Ce'Aret offered one of her aides to attend us, so I sent Paulo and Roxanne with the woman to find something to eat. They needed something to do, while I, though I had no purpose in mind, had no desire but to stay exactly where I was. To leave was simply unthinkable.

I sat with my arms wrapped about my knees and began telling Karon and Gerick how desperately I would miss them. I crafted the words carefully in my mind as Karon had taught me to do so long ago. “It makes my head hurt when I have to sort out one of your thoughts from another,” he would say. “You always have fifteen ideas popping up at once, and very noisy opinions on all of them.” Ce'Aret and Mem'Tara must surely have believed I'd lost my mind to see me sitting by my dead family, smiling at the sweet remembrance. Or perhaps not. Finding joy, even in such overwhelming grief, was the very essence of the Dar'Nethi Way.

“Ah, Vasrin!” The exclamation came from behind me, startling me out of my drowsy contemplation.

“Ven'Dar!” The two Preceptors and I voiced our astonishment as one.

“A considerable delight to see you so quickly recovered, my lord,” said Ce'Aret, opening her palms and genuflecting. “We hoped.”

The Word Winder greeted the two women, and then his firm, warm hands enfolded my own, his kind eyes searching my face as if he could read the story of the battle from my grief. Though I welcomed the comfort and strength he offered, I knew what he needed to be doing. After only a moment, I gently pushed him away. He moved on to the two who lay beside me.

Standing beside the stone table, he swept his eyes over Karon. “Ah, my friend,” he whispered, laying a gentle hand on Karon's brow, “what sorrow can compare with this, unless it is that you'll never know what you've done? You never spoke of L'Tiere. Too close, you said. You had seen the Verges, and the desire would be too strong if you were to dwell on the memory. You wanted to give yourself to life. And so you did. But if there is knowledge of this life in the one that follows, then know this, my Prince, a message has already come to Avonar that rain falls in the Wastes. I cannot but think it is your doing.”

He took Karon's hand and sat down beside him. Dar'-Nethi leave-taking could extend a very long time, Karon had told me, but it always began this way, a little conversation, quiet meditation, embracing with eyes and heart the evidence of one's loss. I did not disturb Ven'Dar. His presence was a comfort.

After a while he shook off his silence, came around the table and took my hand once more. “There are no words sufficient to this day, my lady, even for one so comfortable with words as myself. The event is too complex for ‘I'm sorry,' and ‘thank you' is far too ordinary.”

“To hear your hopeful news and to see you living is thanks enough. You will be D'Arnath's Heir as my husband intended. I wish you a path of great beauty.”

He eased himself onto the stone platform beside me. “Would it pain you to tell me what happened? I've heard only bits and pieces since I've come back to my senses.”

“I believe it went very much as Karon had planned, even after he understood about Radele and the oculus. You probably know more than I do.”

“Not at all. He told me nothing of his plan save my own part: I was to be named his successor because it wasn't possible for his son to serve, as the boy's mind was still linked to the Lords. My first duty as his successor would be to bait the trap for Men'Thor with myself. Yes, you were to be his witness to tell the Preceptorate of Men'Thor's treachery if it came necessary. That's all I knew.”

When I had told the full story, he punctuated it with a puff of amazement. “Vasrin's Hand! If this is true . . . if the Lords were fully joined with the boy at the moment of his death . . . Well, we shall see what results from it. Your son was blessed that you were here to remind him of his own goodness before the end. It sounds as if you did exactly what was needed.”

“Play the part. Follow the Way,” I murmured. Somewhere beyond the outer guardroom a door opened and banged shut again, causing a slight movement in the air. The torchlight flickered.

“What's that?”

I told Ven'Dar of Karon's nighttime visit and the words that had echoed in my head all day. He looked bemused. “He told you not to give up even in the depths of sorrow and also to follow the Way—contradictory admonitions, for, of course, following the Way could be said to be ‘giving up,' relinquishing our desires to change what is.”

Like a bubble rising to the surface of a pond, words welled out of my grief. “If he would just have told us more of his intent. Gerick was in such pain, such despair, and Karon offered him nothing until he was almost lost. I didn't understand it. I still don't.” It didn't seem right I should be saying such a thing, but I couldn't stop myself.

“Think, dear lady. He planned to rob the Lords of their prize by an extraordinary means. And if the Lords took possession of the boy, both living in his body and linked to his soul at the moment of his soul weaving . . . his transference into his father . . . his death . . . perhaps the Lords would die, too. But if Gerick, or any of us, had the least suspicion of what was to occur . . .”

“. . . the Lords might never have come.”

“In order to make their sacrifice meaningful, the Prince had to proceed alone, to relinquish the very comfort for the boy and for himself and for you that might have made it bearable.”

“So we're left with his words. ‘Follow the Way. You must not give up . . .' Give up what? It's been three hours; they're beyond the Verges. I should let Mem'Tara have her way with them, and go find Paulo and Roxanne.”

“Mem'Tara?”

“She wanted to take the pyramid stone. I couldn't bear the thought of her touching it, so I reminded her that the bodies shouldn't be moved for half a day.”

“Follow the Way . . . must not give up . . . play the part . . .” Ven'Dar's calm voice took on an edge of excitement. “Tell me, my lady, have you—please, don't think me foolish or rude—
spoken
to your son or the Prince as you stood vigil with them here?”

Ven'Dar wouldn't pry without reason. Politeness and embarrassment were trivialities. “So much never gets said, and we'd been apart so long. In a way I've been speaking to them since it happened, but—”

“And before the Prince touched the crystal?”

“Yes.”

“As you did in Zhev'Na when the boy was transformed?”

“I suppose it's much the same. Why?”

The Preceptor—no, he was the Prince of Avonar now—jumped up and went to the other side of the platform, where he closed his eyes and placed his hands on Gerick's breast. After several suspended moments, Ven'Dar sighed deeply and shook his head. “I thought perhaps—Paulo told us that when your son first entered him, he unlocked his own cell door and pulled his own body, still breathing, from confinement. To take young Gerick with him beyond the Verges, the Prince would have had the boy come into him—perform his soul weaving. Only then could the stone have released them both. Your bond with your son was strong enough to survive his transformation into a Lord of Zhev'Na; with the thread of love and words, you led him out of that darkness. And so I had a brief hope. . . .”

“But he does not breathe.”

“No. His heart is still.”

Red-clad guards from Ustele's house carried Men'Thor and Radele away on velvet-draped litters, and Ce'Aret and Mem'Tara finished their examination of the room. “We should go now, my lord,” they said to Ven'Dar.

“The people are afraid and hear only one rumor more dreadful than the next. When word goes out with Men'Thor's and Radele's bodies, it will be worse. They need reassurance from their Prince.”

Ven'Dar shook his head. “As most senior Preceptor, Ce'Aret, it is your place to inform the people of Gondai that Prince D'Natheil is dead. Do so, and tell them I stand vigil with him as our Way prescribes. I would ask them to do the same—to hold the Prince and his beloved son in their thoughts as a lighthouse shines its brilliance into the tempest, so that wherever they journey, they may find the Way.”

The two women bowed and left us there, Ven'Dar and me, sitting together with Karon and Gerick. After a while Paulo's torch guttered out, leaving us in the dark, but Ven'Dar made no move to create another light. Instead he held my hand in quiet companionship, and I felt his gentle thoughts of Karon entwine with my own. As it had been sixteen years before on a bitter day in Leire, I was left to mourn, only this time, I was not alone.

And so it was in the darkness of the silent guardroom, as I drowsed against Ven'Dar's shoulder, trying to maintain my one-sided conversation with Karon and Gerick, that I felt the first tug on the other end of the lifeline. . . .

 

It was a long wicked time from the moment I possessed my father's body until I realized we were dead. The last true physical sensation was the touch of my father's hand. He gripped it firmly . . .
I
gripped it firmly, for I was both of us. And more. I was not only Gerick, not only Karon, not only some intrusive scrap of D'Natheil, but I was also the Three, the vile, immortal, all-powerful Lords of Zhev'Na, who believed their day of victory was come after a thousand years of devouring desire. I could scarcely hold a single thought together, and if I'd waked in the madhouse in Montevial, it wouldn't have surprised me at all.

I suspected my father had done something extraordinary when I looked down to see our bodies draped across the palace guardroom . . . or perhaps I was traveling with the Lords again, on my way to call down lightning over the Wastes. But I'd never felt sorrow when I traveled with the Lords, not like that which overwhelmed me when I saw my mother kneel weeping at our sides just before the darkness fell. And the Lords and I had never reached out to comfort one who wept at our passing as my father reached out for my mother with his body's last breath.

With the darkness came the fire . . . fire that drove me to the edge of reason . . . that set my blood boiling in my veins. Choking, acrid smoke scorched my lungs, all the more horror because it smelled of my own seared flesh. My vision failed as my eyes charred in their sockets.

The fire set the Three howling. They had felt no pain since they were transformed, but had only consumed it, lusted after it, for it fed their power. But this fire was their pain, as it was mine, as it was my father's. Neither true flesh, nor blood, nor eyes were necessary, for all of the horror was in the memory of my father, at last made real for the ones who had caused it, and for me, because I had to be there to bring the Lords.

Ten years my father had lived with his death fire fixed in his conscious mind. I'd never really understood.

It had been the most difficult thing I'd ever done to take my father's hand, more difficult than leaving Zhev'Na, more difficult than enduring the firestorms in the Bounded or D'Arnath's fire in my prison cell, more difficult even than allowing Notole, Parven, and Ziddari to enter my body and mind again. Once they were inside me, choking off every sensation of life, devouring every shred of humanity I'd regained, my craving for power was magnified a thousandfold. To touch my father's hand would be to give it up all over again. And who knew what else I might be letting myself in for. His sword was out of the way, but his enchantments had come near killing me fifty times already. Though I'd spent a great deal of effort trying to convince myself that my father's silence had been intended to prevent the Lords' learning of his plans from me, it was almost impossible to relinquish the Lords' cold comfort for something I couldn't imagine. I had to trust him, and I wasn't even sure who he was.