“Find someone else to weave.”
“There is no one else. I can’t go back to Ezzaria—Aleksander will do what he says if I try it—and there’s no time for you to go and send someone here in your place. Ysanne said she would have no one else weave for me, and I cannot fault her judgment in that matter.”
“You’ll be dead.”
“And if so, who is to care? Except perhaps you, for your duty will be done, and you’ll have to deal with your own demons. And I trust you to be a good witness. If I die, the responsibility to tell the others all this will rest with you.”
“You can’t force me to do it.” She was weakening, which I was in two minds about. In so many ways I hoped she would keep refusing me.
“I can ask. I can say you got me into this mess . . . which, to be honest, is only partially true. I can say you owe me your life; my illusion with the rabbit kept you from being Derzhi sword practice. But I must assume that the reason you’re still with me is your duty. You are compelled to uncover those things that threaten Ezzaria and our war—not just evidence of my corruption. There is enough evidence here . . . enough mystery . . . that to refuse to investigate it, even with such a flawed instrument as myself, would be irresponsible on your part. If you’re searching honestly for answers, then you will come to the same conclusion—it’s worth a try.”
She stared at me expressionless. Unflinching. “We’ll need clean water. I won’t let you skip steps.”
“I wouldn’t think of it.”
I didn’t sleep much that night. I wasn’t afraid. There would be time enough for that. I just didn’t want to dream. Someone had been intruding on my dreams, and I wanted some time for my own. The stars had found their way through the fog and shimmered in icy remoteness above the dark trees.
Fiona pretended to sleep. She rolled in her blanket and lay still. But at dawn when I returned from Balthar’s spring with a filled waterskin, she was already laying out her white Suzaini robes and the spare shirt I had bought in Zhagad, smoothing out the wrinkles with her small hands. We did not speak. She began whispering the verses of cleansing as she swept the dust and leaves and ash from a wide circle around the fire pit. I poured half of the water into one of Balthar’s pottery jars and left it beside her robe. Then I took the waterskin and the clean shirt down to the pool. While I washed myself, I wondered what Fiona was telling Balthar or whether she would just prepare him tea and drop in some herb that would make the old man sleep while we borrowed his soul. But then it was time to close off such thoughts.
I spent an hour at the kyanar, using the slow, studied motions to focus my thoughts and prepare my body. Then I drank the water, put on the clean shirt, seated myself by the pool, and began Ioreth’s Chant. As the sun burned off the last of the fog, I laid aside my connections to the world—a task that was pitifully easy—and soon I was in the state of readiness, halfway between the world in which I existed and the one I would walk.
At some time—moments later or hours or days, I could not have said which—a figure in a white robe came for me and led me into the temple. I knelt on the floor beside a quietly sleeping man, and the white-robed figure sat on the other side. “It is time, Warden,” said the one who knelt opposite me. “Come with me if you choose again this path of danger, of healing, of hope.” She reached out her hands and I touched them, and the world disappeared.
You’ll find a spot that is familiar.
The cool voice spoke clearly in my head
. It will be your lifeline, your anchor, and will not fade until I permit it. Even in chaos you will be able to find it. Once every day I will weave a portal and wait there for an hour. Until you return.
I peered through the gray rectangle that hung in the air before me and glimpsed a ruined tower on a bald, rocky knob. Col’Dyath.
I’ll not forget this
, I said, smiling. I felt no smile returned.
The path was steady beneath my feet. Unyielding. I stepped through the portal onto the familiar rock, then took a deep breath.
Now
. With startling speed the sky began to spin, the ground to crumble beneath my feet, and the light to fade. Fiona closed the portal behind me, as I had asked, and I stood alone on the brink of the abyss.
CHAPTER 20
The elemental spirits, who ordinarily care nothing for the affairs of gods or mortals, watched as the mortal woman challenged the mighty god. They marveled at her courage and took pity on Verdonne. They gave her sunlight as her cloak when the god took her clothes, and thunder and lightning for her weapons when he melted her sword. They gave her rain to wash her wounds, wind to bear her up, and fire to sustain her.
“Yield,” bellowed the forest god. “You are mortal, and when you die I will have my way. You have no hope.” But Verdonne would not yield.
—The story of Verdonne and Valdis as told to the First of the Ezzarians when they came to the lands of trees
I believed I was familiar with fear. I had been only seventeen when I first stepped into a madwoman’s soul to face a demon. While enslaved in Capharna I had come face-to-face with the most powerful demon of my experience, believing I had not the melydda to ward off a flea. For three days entombed in Balthar’s coffin, and again during my summer on Col’Dyath, I had felt my mind slipping into madness. But my long-held conviction was sorely mistaken. I had never known true fear—abject, soul-consuming terror. Not until that day, when the last solid foothold gave way beneath my feet and the last shreds of light were swallowed by absolute night.
“Aife!” I screamed. Only the panicked vibration of my chest told me I had succeeded in my cry, for my voice was lost in a vast nothingness. I was deaf, for there was naught to capture sound. I was blind, for there was no substance to the darkness, no contrasting shadow to work against another. And there was nothing to touch, nothing to feel: no cold, no heat, no air to soothe my skin with the assurance of my existence. I was numb to everything but terror as I began to fall. My stomach heaved. My arms and legs flailed. I tucked in my knees and wrapped my arms around them lest my limbs fly off and lose themselves as irretrievably as my senses.
Oh, gods of earth and sky, what have I done?
Too late to grow my wings. The needed words were already lost in the chaos of my dissolving reason. I had known I was going to fall—I had been close to the abyss several times in my demon combat—but I had deliberately not triggered the enchantment when the portal vanished. In those last moments of rational thought, already so far removed from me as the vision of earth must be from the stars, I had told myself it would be a waste of melydda. I could not fly forever, and if I was to find some other existence beyond the realms of the soul, then I might as well get on with it. Or if I was to die when the portal dissolved, no reason to put it off.
Imbecile! Prideful, wretched idiot.
I begged the gods for help . . . though I could not remember their names. I fought to control my bowels that spasmed like those of the dying. I longed for the impact of solid earth, though it might crack my spine and crush my head. But I continued to fall, and I felt the wail of madness rising in my throat . . .
The brush of frost on my cheek saved me. Only a moment’s variation in the emptiness as I plummeted into that well of endless night. But it cooled my fevered panic just long enough for my training to take hold.
No. No. No. You will not enter this realm like a squalling infant, whether it be the realm of death or demons. You are a Warden of Ezzaria. Your whole life has prepared you for this. If those who wait in this darkness are your kin, then you’d best scrape together a bit of dignity.
Dignity. Too grand a word for a quivering lump of terrified flesh, but at least I was not screaming when invisible fingers began to pick at my clothes and my hair. And by that time, though my churning stomach and entrails had not yet realized it, I was no longer falling.
“I am the—” I had to clamp my teeth to cut off the familiar challenge. I smelled demons. My skin crawled with the nearness of them—the strength of them. But I was not in this place for battle. “I’ve come in peace,” I said, my voice almost unhearable in the void. I tried to remember the words I had so carefully crafted for whomever came to greet me in the abyss. “
Dargoth viagh
—let us bargain.”
No answer. Only a hundred cold fingers feeling my limbs, tracing my bones, probing my mouth and my ears and every other part of me, inside and out. When they reached inside my head, and into my chest and stomach, exploring the bones and muscles and organs they found there, I twisted and tried to push them away. As I resisted, the probing touches grew sharper, scoring my flesh with thin, stinging cuts inside and out until my skin was on fire. I lashed out, but no solid mass anchored the invisible fingers.
Hold patient. You’re here to learn, not fight.
Was this what it felt like to be possessed? Exposed. Nauseated. Violated.
“I seek answers to what happened to us—my people and yours—back at the beginning. The reason for our war. Why it is that we fight, though it wounds us so terribly to kill each other. Please let me speak. I won’t harm anyone.”
“Sykkor. Asethya dv svyadd.”
“Mezzavalit.”
The whispers crept up my spine, a cold, oily salve on the fire of my skin. I tried to be still and decipher the words, but I couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t remember. Though I didn’t recognize the words, what I heard was indeed the language of demons. Ezzarians knew only a few words of the demon tongue. But if I had possessed any remaining capacity for fear, these words would have filled me to overflowing. They were the very vocabulary of hate.
“Yddrass!”
That word I recognized. Warden.
“I’ve not come to fight. I’m unarmed.” I would have laughed, had I remembered how to. I wasn’t even sure there was substance under my feet, much less whether these beings cared about my intentions or noticed that I carried no weapon. All I knew was that I heard . . . felt . . . three different voices, and that as soon as they realized I was a Warden, they started arguing among themselves. I didn’t have to know the words to figure that out. Nor to discover how they felt about Wardens. The cold fist that had held my stomach captive for at least an hour reached for my entrails and came near pulling them out of my body. And that was only the beginning.
Warden’s training warned of the consequences of demon captivity. It was all speculation, of course, based on the virulence and methods of a thousand years of demon opponents. The warnings were meant as encouragement to judge your skill and your opponent wisely, for there was certainly no additional teaching as to how one might cope with those consequences. Just as well. Our estimate of cruelty and torment and pain was so under-calculated as to be but a dust speck beside the mountain of the truth.
One of the cold fingers wrapped itself about my neck and dragged me, choking and gagging, through the darkness. The ground beneath me felt like great slabs of ice, though when the dragging stopped, I could no longer feel my surroundings at all. I could force my hand through the floor—the darkness that was underneath me—or the ceiling—the darkness that was above me—or to any side with equal ease. The air was bitterly cold and very still. I could not tell whether I was out of doors or inside a structure of some kind, but I believed, for a moment, that I was alone. Carefully I sat up and with trembling fingers tried to cast a light. No luck.
“Garaz do tsiet, Yddrass.”
The hissing breath was just in front of my face, enveloping me in the stench of an open grave.
Even as I recoiled, gagging at the smell, a powerful blow to my stomach took my wind away. Another to my back cracked a rib. I reached out to grapple with my attackers, but my hands came up empty. “Wait! I’ve come just to learn—”
“Garaz do tsiet, Yddrass.”
A blow hammered my head. The red lights I saw were only within, for there was no light in that place of horror. I rolled into a knot to protect myself, but the cold fingers grabbed my wrists and ankles and forced me to spread out. Then someone dropped an anvil on my chest.
“Stop! There’s some danger to us all. One of your own warned—”
“Garaz do tsiet, Yddrass.”
And it began raining anvils.
Eventually I learned that those words meant, “fight me now, Warden.” They might well have meant “you’re going to be sorry you’re alive.” In those first hours, they beat me until every bone in my body was broken. I fell insensible a number of times, but they always woke me up again to demonstrate how this arm or that finger or that foot or this rib was in multiple pieces. Only when I was shattered wreckage did they leave off.
Not at all what I had hoped.
Empty silence. Frigid darkness. A floor beneath me that was not a floor, that left me with a constant nauseating terror that I was going to fall through it. I could not breathe, could not move, could not imagine living a moment more in such pain. Each limb, each muscle, each bone cried out its ruin, finding a distinct pathway to send its message until my body lost its solid substance. I became a fibrous jumble, each thread a fiery torment. Perhaps I was already dead. I had just never expected it to hurt so wickedly.
I lay in this state of misery, drifting in and out of gruesome consciousness, for some hours. The fifth or sixth time I came awake, I smelled something new. Food. Not pleasant-smelling food, but then nothing would have smelled appetizing at that moment. I wondered if there was drink beside it, and the thought became obsession. From the smell, the food could be no more than an arm’s length from my head. Might as well be on the moon; I wasn’t sure I could move any of my broken limbs. But the throbbing in my left arm had eased a bit, so I cautiously shifted it out from under me. I didn’t die. In fact, as I dared move a little more, I realized that despite what I had experienced as painful truth, only a few of my ribs were broken, together with both of my ankles and several fingers on my left hand. Everything else was only battered to the edge of ruin.