Daughter of Ancients (40 page)

“D'Sanya, listen. To leave me with them . . . memories . . . the Lords . . . please . . .” I could not get out half the words. Lips and tongue flaccid. Numb. “. . . will break my mind . . . make them real . . .”

“Your pleas are false, Lord.” Her breath tickled my ear. “The tongue of Zhev'Na is ever lying and must be silent. You must remember the crimes you've done and know that you will never be free of them. You will not sleep. You will not die. You will not forget.”

An exquisite pain stung the center of my forehead, and I was engulfed by the past. . . .

 

 

The tale of my training in evil, of my childhood of fear, of the treacherous dreams of my youth played out unceasingly in my mind. I smelled the stink of the slave pens. My hands felt the solid give of human flesh as my sword pierced the bodies of my sparring partners, and my chest and back ached with bruises as my combat masters pummeled their teachings into me. My enjoyment of power grew into incessant craving. I lived my past again entirely, not as an observer but as participant, swept along like flotsam in a spring torrent, drowning in the raging current of profane memory.

One might think it a blessing to be lost in the past when the present is so dreadful. But deep in the core of my being, in the small part of me that knew the days I lived were but memory, I was frantic. This punishment would not end as my wardress believed. The Lords had designed the oculus. If I were to lose myself in the Lords' memories, I would learn how to control it, how to use the oculus to grow power and get free. But by that time the Three would live again in me.

Fight it,
said that resilient core,
you can choose as you have chosen before
. But the memories flowed freely, choking me, drowning me. . . .

 

“How fare you, Lord?” Like the balm of rain on parched earth, the woman's voice cooled the scalding river that had flowed from my extremities for an eternity.

Darkness swallowed the glare of desert noonday. Here in the real world, even the sinuous streams of color from the oculus were scarcely visible. I must be going blind again as I had when I was twelve; the oculus burned away the eyes of those who dwelt in its shadow, hungering for its use. And the bonds on my limbs and head were no longer my only restraints. I lay in some kind of trough shaped to my form. Panic choked me. I could only gargle an answer.

“Do you feel your tomb, Lord?” Soft fingers traced a line through my hair and along my arm where I felt the new constriction. “The shellstone grows well. Only a week gone and already it reaches for your ears. No sound after that. Never again. And here”—tender sadness flowed through her fingers pressing on my throat—“only a few days more and the first layer will enclose your neck. When it covers your face, you will feel neither the movement of the air nor a human touch ever again. No light. No sky. Never again will I have to look on your eyes and see the truth of your black heart. Ah, Vasrin Creator, give me strength.”

“Kill me.” My parched voice sounded like the dry gourd rattles the Drudges used to celebrate a victory of the Lords. Fear forced the words through the barriers of her enchantment. “The oculus . . . madness . . . will make me the thing you hate . . . please . . .”

“You
are
what I hate!” She was sobbing. “And you made me love you. I spoke to your kind father and discovered how you gulled him as well! Did you cause his horrid illness so you could get close to me? I told him that you were trying to kill him by destroying the hospice. I told him you were dead.”

While I yet reeled from her news, her fingers brushed my feet, my wrists, and my forehead, setting them on fire again.

But still the visions came. . . .

 

 

That wasn't right. Nothing like that had ever happened. I shuddered and grabbed hold of a scrap of reason, pricked awake by the discontinuity.

My eyes opened to complete darkness. To immobility, not paralysis. To a stricture that pressed on my throat with every dry swallow. I tried to cry out, but my mouth, stiff and crusted like plaster, produced no sound. Panic threatened to undo me.

A whisper of air moved above my face—the oculus, of course, spinning out my corruption. The place smelled of old stone and the dirt that accumulates in unused cellars and dungeons. I tapped a knuckle on the table, hoping the sound might give me a sense of my prison's size, but the movement caused the pin in my palm to burn and send its scalding wave up my arm. Fighting off visions, I forced myself to lie absolutely still so as not to trigger the rest of the pins, an effort that required every scrap of self-discipline I had ever learned.

So move your mind, if you daren't move your body.
I extended the fingers of my soul outward, as I did when soul weaving.
There . . . someone!
Carefully I eased into the soul I found . . . and fled right back out again.
Breathe . . . don't move . . . hold on . . . it's not your fault. . . .

But I jerked and the poisonous enchantment engulfed me again, dropping me into more days of war and cruelty. Deep in my true self, though, I knew more of the truth. I was buried in Zhev'Na. And the poor dying wretch whose soul I had touched had stumbled into the ruined fortress in search of treasure, only to be speared by a warrior who had stepped out of my dreams. Living.

 

D'Sanya visited me again, weeping as she tormented me with talk of love and light, air and sky. She was happy that I was mute, saying she could not bear to hear my voice as it made her think of a man she had once loved. When she touched my bonds and left me, I fought to hold on to my conscious mind.

Alone in the dark. I could hear the echo of my own breathing now; the shellstone had covered my left ear. I could no longer feel the brush of air on my left arm, only a warm stillness. What would it be like when the stone covered my face? I forced that thought aside and did not move.

If I could just endure for a few days . . . a few weeks. Someone would come for me. Surely my father would not believe I was dead. Surely. Paulo would not believe it . . . not until he saw my corpse. My mother would guess where I was; she had unraveled much more difficult puzzles. But what if they came when I was dreaming?

If I had possessed more capacity for fear, the consideration that my own dreams might kill my rescuers would have overflowed it.
Don't move. Don't panic. Don't think.
It could be weeks until they came. It could be a lifetime.

I prayed for an earthquake to bring the roof down to crush my head. I prayed for starvation or thirst to kill me quickly. But they didn't and they wouldn't. She would have seen to that. Always the oculus burned in my mind, speaking to me of power. Gather power enough and I could escape this place. . . .

Over and over my father had assured me that I was strong enough and decent enough to withstand the lures of the Lords' power. But he lay in D'Sanya's hospice, and if he stepped over the wall she had forged with her devilish oculus, he would die in agony far worse than anything I was experiencing. It wasn't fair. He had already died in torment. Burned alive . . . how had he borne it?

“I had to let it happen,” he'd once told me, “to feel it, not trying to ignore it, but to accept it and embrace it . . . and the terror and despair right alongside. I told myself that this was my life, and if it was to have meaning, then that meaning would only be made manifest by experiencing every part and portion of it, even the very end.”

I inhaled the sour air of my silent prison, the stink of my fear. The oculus spun, cooling my sweat. Did I have that kind of strength? Not to fight, not to endure, but to embrace?

Carefully I exhaled, trying to imagine that tiny plume of breath rising through a room of unknown size, leaking through its cracks and pores into the vastness of Gondai's desert. I imagined my mind floating upward with it, and from that lofty height I looked down upon myself and considered all that had happened to me.

The desert wind blew outside this chamber. The flat silver sun wheeled across the flat silver sky. I could not see or hear or feel these things. But I believed them. Accepted them.

The shellstone had crept to the corners of my eyes. Instead of shoving that marrow-deep dread aside, I inhaled and exhaled, breathing my fear, understanding that it was and would ever be a part of me. My only task was to explore it and see what it might reveal about the world. Next, consider thirst. . . .

I worked at this for hours. Eventually I moved—breathed too deep or trembled with fear or thirst or longing—and my visions came ravening. But eventually I fought my way out once more and worked again at experiencing and embracing my life and death, hoping to discover my place in the universe. The exercise gave me some semblance of balance, some semblance of peace to leaven my terror.

Unfortunately, upon each subsequent waking I found it more difficult to maintain my state of quiet, not less. The periods of control grew shorter and shorter, and the potency of my visions seemed multiplied by each respite, so that I worried that my efforts were speeding my inevitable disintegration. But I clung to this semblance of sanity, even when I felt the burning rush that signaled the onset of my dreams. Madness. . . .

As these cycles of unsleep and waking passed, something new began to grow inside me, an immense and subtle potency, half familiar, half strange, that filled the cracks and crevices of my flesh and spirit. After a while its sheer enormity itched my skin and stretched and strummed my idle muscles like harp strings. Power . . .

Delirious with terror, I lay in that everlasting darkness trying not to move for one more heartbeat, trying to delay the inevitable. It might take one hour or one day or one turning of Gondai's moon, but I knew I would soon be quite mad and quite invincible, Dieste the Destroyer, the Fourth and only Lord of Zhev'Na, and I would destroy D'Arnath's Bridge and everything it protected. How would I be able to embrace that?

Paulo and I had been on the desert road for seven days before he allowed himself to go completely to sleep. As he was so much taller, stronger, and more experienced, it was gratifying that he took my capabilities so seriously. I wasn't bothered by the lack of conversation as the white-tipped mountains and the last pale swathes of green slipped farther beyond the horizon with each day's journey. I already knew he wasn't a particularly talkative person, and I had a lot to think about.

Lady Seriana had agreed to get a letter to my father for me. I didn't want him to worry that I was embarked on a journey of vengeance. Discovery was a far better word. Sometime in the past days I'd begun searching—not willingly, not without diversion, not without error—for truth instead of evidence. Papa would like that. A Speaker lived for truth. But I didn't like changes going on inside me without my direction. I wished I had time to talk to him about them, but time was precious. Paulo and I had set out within a few hours of Lady Seriana's command.

For a thousand years the road to Zhev'Na had been hidden, masked by the power of the Lords so that one could wander the trackless desert for a lifetime without happening upon it. After the fall of the Lords, Geographers had found the remnants of the fortress within a few days. By Paulo's reckoning it should take us a little less than three weeks to get there.

A portal would have been very nice. But, even believing the Lords were dead and their lair in ruins, no one had felt comfortable opening a permanent portal between Avonar and Zhev'Na; a thousand years of terror could not be discounted overnight. And, now that the Zhid were on the attack again, no one would dare risk it, nor would anyone be fool enough to expend so much power on an uncertain mission. Portal-making, while not one of the Hundred Talents, and thus theoretically possible for any Dar'Nethi, was the province of those with exceptional power and a special knack for it, something like those who can mind-speak or those who have a bent for geometry. Aimee had said that the few people she knew who had power enough had already gone off to serve the prince or Je'Reint. So Paulo and I were left to cross the barrens on horseback and on foot.