Elantris (40 page)

“Life, life, life, life, life….”

“Oh Domi, where are you? When will it end? Oh Domi….”

He usually had to block the words out after a time, lest they drive him insane—or worse, reawaken the pain within his own body. Ien was there, floating around sightless heads and weaving between fallen bodies. The Seon spent a lot of time in the room. It was strangely fitting.

They left the Hall a solemn group, quiet and content to keep to their own thoughts. Raoden only spoke when he noticed the tear in Saolin’s robes.

“You’re wounded!” Raoden said with surprise.

“It is nothing, my lord,” Saolin said indifferently.

“That kind of modesty is fine on the outside, Saolin, but not here. You must accept my apology.”

“My lord,” Saolin said seriously. “Being an Elantrian only makes me
more
proud to wear this wound. I received it protecting our people.”

Raoden turned a tormented look back at the Hall. “It only brings you one step closer …”

“No, my lord, I don’t think it does. Those people gave in to their pain because
they couldn’t find purpose—their torture was meaningless, and when you can’t find reason in life, you tend to give up on it. This wound will hurt, but each stab of pain will remind me that I earned it with honor. That is not such a bad thing, I think.”

Raoden regarded the old soldier with a look of respect. On the outside he probably would have been close to retirement. In Elantris, with the Shaod as an equalizer, he looked about the same as anyone else. One couldn’t tell age by looks, but perhaps one could tell it through wisdom.

“You speak discerningly, my friend,” Raoden said. “I accept your sacrifice with humility.”

The conversation was interrupted by the slap of feet against cobblestones. A moment later Karata dashed into view, her feet coated with fresh sludge from outside the chapel area. Kahar would be furious: she had forgotten to wipe down her feet, and now she was tracking slime over his clean cobblestones.

Karata obviously didn’t care about slime at the moment. She surveyed the group quickly, making sure no one was missing. “I heard Shaor attacked. Were there any casualties?”

“Five. All on their side,” Raoden said.

“I should have been here,” she said with a curse. During the last few days, the determined woman had been overseeing the relocation of her people to the chapel area; she agreed that a central, unified group would be more effective, and the chapel area was cleaner. Oddly enough, the idea of cleaning the palace had never occurred to her. To most Elantrians, the sludge was accepted as an irrevocable part of life.

“You have important things to do,” Raoden said. “You couldn’t have anticipated Shaor would attack.”

Karata didn’t like the answer, but she fell into line beside him without further complaint.

“Look at him, sule,” Galladon said, smiling slightly beside him. “I would never have thought it possible.”

Raoden looked up, following the Dula’s gaze. Taan knelt beside the road, inspecting the carvings on a short wall with childlike wonder. The squat-bodied former baron had spent the entire week cataloguing each carving, sculpture, or relief in the chapel area. He had already discovered, in his words, “at least a dozen new techniques.” The changes in Taan were remarkable, as was his sudden lack of interest in leadership. Karata still maintained a measure of influence in the group, accepting Raoden as the ultimate voice but retaining most of her authority. Taan, however, didn’t bother to give orders; he was too busy with his studies.

His people—the ones who had decided to join with Raoden—didn’t seem to mind. Taan now estimated that about thirty percent of his “court” had found its way to Raoden’s band, trickling in as small groups. Raoden hoped that most of
the others had chosen solitude instead; he found the idea of seventy percent of Taan’s large band joining with Shaor very disturbing. Raoden had all of Karata’s people, but her gang had always been the smallest—if most efficient—of the three. Shaor’s had always been the largest; its members had just lacked the cohesion and the motivation to attack the other gangs. The occasional newcomers Shaor’s men had been given had sated their bloodlust.

No longer. Raoden would accept no quarter with the madmen, would not allow them to torment innocent newcomers. Karata and Saolin now retrieved everyone thrown into the city, bringing them safely to Raoden’s band. So far, the reaction from Shaor’s men had not been good—and Raoden feared that it would only grow worse.

I’ll have to do something about them
, he thought. That, however, was a problem for another day. He had studies he needed to get to for the moment.

Once they reached the chapel, Galladon went back to his planting, Saolin’s men dispersed to their patrols, and Karata decided—despite her earlier protests—that she should return to the palace. Soon only Raoden and Saolin were left.

After the battle and sleeping so late, over half the day’s light had already been wasted, and Raoden attacked his studies with determination. While Galladon planted and Karata evacuated the palace, it was Raoden’s self-appointed duty to decipher as much as he could about AonDor. He was becoming increasingly convinced that the ancient magic of the characters held the secret of Elantris’s fall.

He reached through one of the chapel windows and pulled out the thick AonDor tome sitting on a table inside. So far, it hadn’t been as helpful as he had hoped. It was not an instruction manual, but a series of case studies explaining odd or interesting events surrounding AonDor. Unfortunately, it was extremely advanced. Most of the book gave examples of what
wasn’t
supposed to happen, and so Raoden needed to use reverse reasoning to decipher the logic of AonDor.

So far he had been able to determine very little. It was becoming obvious that the Aons were only starting points—the most basic figures one could draw to produce an effect. Just like the expanded healing Aon from his dream, advanced AonDor consisted of drawing a base Aon in the center, then proceeding to draw other figures—sometimes just dots and lines—around it. The dots and lines were stipulations, narrowing or broadening the power’s focus. With careful drawing, for instance, a healer could specify which limb was to be healed, what exactly was to be done to it, and how an infection was to be cleansed.

The more Raoden read, the less he was beginning to see Aons as mystical symbols. They seemed more like mathematical computations. While most any Elantrian could draw the Aons—all it required was a steady hand and a basic knowledge of how to write the characters—the masters of AonDor were the ones who could swiftly and accurately delineate dozens of smaller modifications around the central Aon. Unfortunately, the book assumed that its reader had a comprehensive
knowledge of AonDor, and passed over most of the basic principles. The few illustrations included were so incredibly complex that Raoden usually couldn’t even tell which character was the base Aon without referring to the text.

“If only he would explain what it means to ‘channel the Dor’!” Raoden exclaimed, rereading a particularly annoying passage that kept using the phrase.

“Dor, sule?” Galladon asked, turning away from his planting. “That sounds like a Duladen term.”

Raoden sat upright. The character used in the book to represent “Dor” was an uncommon one—not really an Aon at all, but simply a phonetic representation. As if the word had been transliterated from a different language.

“Galladon, you’re right!” Raoden said. “It isn’t Aonic at all.”

“Of course not—it can’t be an Aon, it only has one vowel in it.”

“That’s a simplistic way of putting it, my friend.”

“But it’s true. Kolo?”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Raoden said. “That doesn’t matter right now—what matters is Dor. Do you know what it means?”

“Well, if it’s the same word, then it refers to something in Jesker.”

“What do the Mysteries have to do with this?” Raoden asked suspiciously.

“Doloken, sule!” Galladon swore. “I’ve told you, Jesker and the Mysteries are not the same thing! What Opelon calls the ‘Jeskeri Mysteries’ is no more related to Duladel’s religion than it is to Shu-Keseg.”

“Point taken,” Raoden said, raising his hands. “Now, tell me about Dor.”

“It’s hard to explain, sule,” Galladon said, leaning on a makeshift hoe he had crafted out of a pole and some rocks. “Dor is the unseen power—it is in everything, but cannot be touched. It affects nothing, yet it controls everything. Why do rivers flow?”

“Because the water is pulled downwards, just like everything else. The ice melts in the mountains, and it has to have a place to go.”

“Correct,” Galladon said. “Now, a different question. What makes the water
want
to flow?”

“I wasn’t aware that it needed to.”

“It does, and the Dor is its motivation,” Galladon said. “Jesker teaches that only humans have the ability—or the curse—of being oblivious to the Dor. Did you know that if you take a bird away from its parents and raise it in your house, it will still learn to fly?”

Raoden shrugged.

“How did it learn, sule? Who taught it to fly?”

“The Dor?” Raoden asked hesitantly.

“That is correct.”

Raoden smiled; the explanation sounded too religiously mysterious to be useful. But then he thought of his dream, his memories of what had happened so
long ago. When the Elantrian healer had drawn her Aon, it appeared as if a tear were appearing in the air behind her finger. Raoden could still feel the chaotic power raging behind that tear, the massive force trying to press its way through the Aon to get at him. It sought to overwhelm him, to break him down until he became part of it. However, the healer’s carefully constructed Aon had funneled the power into a usable form, and it had healed Raoden’s leg instead of destroying him.

That force, whatever it had been, was real. It was there behind the Aons he drew, weak though they were. “That must be it…. Galladon, that’s why we are still alive!”

“What are you babbling about, sule?” Galladon said, looking up from his work with tolerance.

“That is why we live on, even though our bodies don’t work anymore!” Raoden said with excitement. “Don’t you see? We don’t eat, yet we get the energy to keep moving. There must be some link between Elantrians and the Dor—it feeds our bodies, providing the energy we need to survive.”

“Then why doesn’t it give us enough to keep our hearts moving and our skin from turning gray?” Galladon asked, unconvinced.

“Because it’s barely enough,” Raoden explained. “AonDor no longer works—the power that once fueled the city has been reduced to a bare trickle. The important thing is,
it’s not gone.
We can still draw Aons, even if they are weak and don’t do anything, and our minds continue to live, even if our bodies have given up. We just need to find a way to restore it to full power.”

“Oh, is that all?” Galladon asked. “You mean we need to fix what is broken?”

“I guess so,” Raoden said. “The important thing is realizing there’s a link between ourselves and the Dor, Galladon. Not only that—but there must be some sort of link between this land and the Dor.”

Galladon frowned. “Why do you say that?”

“Because AonDor was developed in Arelon and nowhere else,” Raoden said. “The text says that the farther one traveled from Elantris, the weaker the AonDor powers became. Besides—only people from Arelon are taken by the Shaod. It can take Teoish people, but only if they’re living in Arelon at the time. Oh, and it takes the occasional Dula as well.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“There’s some link between this land, the Arelish people, and the Dor, Galladon,” Raoden said. “I’ve never heard of a Fjordell getting taken by the Shaod, no matter how long he lives in Arelon. Dulas are a mixed people—half Jindo, half Aonic. Where was your farm in Duladen?”

Galladon frowned. “In the north, sule.”

“The part that borders Arelon,” Raoden said triumphantly. “It has something to do with the land, and with our Aonic bloodlines.”

Galladon shrugged. “It sounds like it makes sense, sule, but I’m just a simple farmer—what know I of such things?”

Raoden snorted, not bothering to respond to the comment. “But why? What’s the connection? Maybe the Fjordell are right—maybe Arelon is cursed.”

“Hypothesize away, sule,” Galladon said, turning back to his work. “I don’t see much empirical good to it, though.”

“All right. Well, I’ll stop theorizing as soon as you tell me where a
simple farmer
learned the word ‘empirical.’”

Galladon didn’t respond, but Raoden thought he could hear the Dula chuckling softly.

CHAPTER 20

“Let me see if I understand you, Princess dear,” Ahan said, holding aloft a chubby finger. “You want us to
help
Iadon? How foolish I am—I thought we didn’t like the fellow.”

“We don’t,” Sarene agreed. “Helping the king financially doesn’t have anything to do with our personal feelings.”

“I’m afraid I have to agree with Ahan, Princess,” Roial said with outspread hands. “Why the sudden change? What good will it do to aid the king now?”

Sarene gritted her teeth in annoyance. Then, however, she caught a twinkle in the elderly duke’s eye. He knew. The duke reportedly had a spy network as extensive as most kings’—he had figured out what Hrathen was trying to do. He had asked the question not to provoke her, but to give her an opportunity to explain. Sarene exhaled slowly, grateful for the duke’s tact.