Matthew chuckled. “If this is how you forgive someone, I pity your future husband.”
“You’re about to be my late-brother,” she growled, getting to her feet and pulling out her wand. With a word, it expanded to the size of a staff and she used it to assist her as she climbed out of the hole.
Relaxing, he sank back to the ground, enjoying the cool feel of the earth. “If it helps any, I agree with you.”
She looked down on him from the rim. “About what?”
“About me,” he said quietly, staring up at her.
Irene climbed back down and offered her hand, dragging him to his feet when he took it. “Stop blaming yourself,” she said. Then looking at him sideways, she added, “That’s my job.” She helped him out of the depression, and then with a word she collapsed her staff back down to its more compact wand size.
Matthew froze, a strange look on his face.
“What?” asked Irene.
“What size was your staff originally?” he asked. “Was it a wand that you make larger, or a staff that you make smaller?” Before she could answer, he shook his head, as though trying to clear it. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. The principle is the same either way.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Can you show me the enchantment you used?” he asked, ignoring her question. Taking her hand once more, he led her back toward the workshop and its now missing door. “I want to see exactly how you did it.”
Chapter 36
I stood on what appeared to be a vast lake reflecting the sky above me. When I stared into the distance, the clouds would race by, but whenever I looked up they froze in place, as though time was standing still. Beneath my feet, the water turned out to be a deception, for the surface I stood on wasn’t truly reflecting the sky; it was transparent, a window that held me suspended above a vast and mysterious world.
My head felt as though it had been turned inside out. The world I saw was broken into facets, as though it was encased within a colossal gem, yet when I studied the various facets, they showed me different scenes, some familiar, some so foreign to my experience as to be alien.
And within it all, I felt a heartbeat, much like the voice of the earth I had long ago become accustomed to. Yet this rhythmic thrumming was different. I knew it in a way that was intuitive—the knowledge was something I possessed, had always possessed, but had only now become aware of. It was my heartbeat, my existence. It was the lifeblood of the universe flowing through my veins.
The pain, which had once been so overwhelming, was a faint echo on the edge of my experience. Realizing that made me afraid, for I knew it should be closer, more painful. Without pain, there could be no life. Am I dying? I wondered.
No, you’re growing, responded the other, the god that wanted to pass on. When the pain vanishes, you will be complete. A new world will be born, and your dream will begin.
Cracks were forming in the diamond that held the universe. Soon it would crumble. It’s dying! I cried with my voice that had no sound. I’m dying!
No, came the answer, that is me. I am crumbling, but you will rise from the fragments like a phoenix from the ashes of my body.
Like a bolt of lightning, the memory of my family tore through me, and I stared down once more, finding them within the crumbling gem. I saw them, eating, arguing, laughing. Rose was with them, and when I focused my attention on her, I became her. I saw through her eyes, felt their love with her heart, and comprehended them through the lens that was her mind.
And what a mind it was. The landscape of her soul was hauntingly beautiful and stunningly tragic. Meticulously ordered, the pieces and memories of her life were arranged in such a way that I could easily see the links between them. In some ways it reminded me of the perfect crystalline memories I had inherited through the loshti, but unlike those memories, these were painted and colored by her painfully human heart.
Her childhood was there, her father, and her mother who I had never known. She had been brilliant, even as a child, and her precocious intellect had utterly captivated the parents who were already predisposed to love her. Rose had grown to womanhood with a far better understanding of the games and politics of life than those who had raised her.
She might have become jaded and cynical if it hadn’t been for the appearance of Dorian Thornbear in her life. He stood out among her memories, a pure and simple being who had restored her faith in the future, simply by existing. Beside him was a man I hardly recognized, a man with sharp features and a face that set my teeth on edge almost immediately. I could tell just by looking at him that he was arrogant, overconfident, even prideful.
He was also perceptive, with eyes that saw too much. The knowledge in his eyes was unsettling and the memory of him seemed to stare back at me, as though he were judging me somehow. His memory aged before me, and I could see a keen mind behind those eyes, one that was slowly becoming wiser.
There was a woman beside him, and I recognized her immediately. Penny! That was when I finally understood what I was seeing: myself, filtered through the lens of Rose’s memory and careful discernment.
For a moment I was lost in her recollections, her love, and her observations of the people around her: her family and mine. It was humbling to see the depth of her devotion to those people, and even more humbling to be so intimately aware of how she perceived me.
She had seen my faults, my vanity, and even my evil, but had judged them to be of less importance than my compassion, my own struggle to provide for not just those I loved, but for those I had never known, the people of Lothion.
Fighting against the tides of memory, I rose to the surface of her mind, to see where her current thoughts were going. And there I found my death.
It wasn’t something concrete or easily visualized. Rose had no idea how it would be accomplished, but she was guiding those around her, giving gentle nudges when necessary, or timely advice when it was warranted. She was doing what she had done for me during most of my previous life, working behind the scenes to make my goals come to fruition.
But whose goal is she assisting? I wondered. Ah, now I see it. She was helping my son.
I turned my attention to Matthew, and once again, I fell into a strange new world. Through his eyes I saw myself again, this time differently, but I didn’t allow myself to become distracted as I had before. I needed to understand his goal. He’s trying to kill me, and it’s tearing his heart to pieces.
I could feel his sadness and pain, and more particularly, I could see the method he was pursuing, though it was far from complete. I wasn’t sure if it could possibly succeed. At the very least it would require my willing participation. None of the tricks he had in mind would work, certainly not now that I had seen the landscape of his mind.
Desperately I wanted to communicate with him, but my thoughts were invisible to his perception. I tried moving his memories, or altering his ideas, but that failed as well. The mental structures within him were like indestructible stone to my will. I could change nothing.
You’re only torturing yourself, came the voice of the old god, the one I was to replace. Come away from them. Look at something else for a while.
My view dissolved and I found my mind spinning through the world until it found something else familiar to latch onto. Tyrion. I don’t want to see him, I complained.
He’s more interesting, said the voice. What is he doing now?
Despite myself, I found myself studying the man. Tyrion was leaning over a table somewhere—Arundel, I realized. A tiny silver stylus was in his hand, and with it he was etching runes onto strangely shaped arrowheads. With my interest piqued, I descended into the man whom I had come to loathe, examining his thoughts as he worked.
I understood why the arrowheads were so odd now. He had fused bodkin points meant for penetrating armor to heavy irons spheres. The points were being enchanted to pierce, something I had done many times, and the spheres were made to contain a reservoir of aythar, much like my old favorite, the iron bomb.
No, they are iron bombs. Tyrion had planned the enchantment to enable the arrows to pierce deeply and then detonate inside their target.
But there was still something missing, something Tyrion didn’t know, and he was aware of the gap in his knowledge. He wants the enchantment Brigid used on her chain.
Without it his plan won’t work, said the voice of the old god, whispering in my ear, but he’ll find another way.
Studying Tyrion’s mind once more, I found his goal: my family. The simmering pain within the man would find an outlet. Moira was his conscious target, but deeper down his murderous intent would spill over onto all of them.
If only Brigid was there to divert him, suggested the voice. And then she was.
Did I do that? I asked, surprised.
There was a smile in the elder god’s voice. It appears so.
I didn’t want that to happen!
Just watch…
***
The design Tyrion was working on was incomplete, and no matter how he searched his memories he had no recollection of how Brigid had created the enchantment that made her chain such a deadly weapon. Apparently he, or rather his predecessor, hadn’t given it much thought and had never thought to inquire.
That was regrettable, for the enchantment on Brigid’s chain had been one-of-a-kind. Aside from enhancing the weapon’s durability and sharpness, it had caused the chain to shed foreign aythar the way a duck’s feathers shed water. It had been keyed to Brigid herself, such that only her magic could move it, a necessary feature to keep such a weapon from becoming the focal point of a struggle of wills when used against another mage.
He could already make the arrows functionally lethal in the manner he desired, but once his enemy was alerted to his attack they might easily divert his following shots. “Damn it. Why didn’t I ever ask?”
A sudden flare of aythar behind him made him spin in place, dropping into a crouch and activating his shield tattoos. “Ask what, Father?” asked a coarse yet feminine voice.
Tyrion stared at the woman before him, his eyes widening with shock before narrowing in suspicion. It wasn’t possible. He had been delirious before. Yet the figure in front of him was that of his daughter, Brigid. Just as she had been in life, she smelled faintly of blood, wore no clothing, and was obviously in need of a bath. Much like a cat, his daughter had never had much use for either clothing or soap and water.
His first thought was that she was an illusion, but his magesight confirmed that she was physically very real, and her aythar was exactly as he remembered. Had Moira done something to his mind? Only she—or someone who possessed his memories, such as Mordecai—would even be able to create such a realistic copy of his daughter.
“Who are you?” he asked warily.
“Exactly who you think I am,” she replied.
Without warning, he attacked, feinting left and then slicing at her torso from the right with his armblade. The stroke was stopped by an enchanted chain that whipped around her body like a serpent. He stared into her eyes, unable to believe what he was seeing. “You’re dead.”
“You didn’t attack me last time,” she noted. “When I helped get you back on your feet.”
“That was real?” he asked, questioning his own sanity as much as the woman in front of him.
“It seemed real,” she replied. “As far as I know I should be dead, but here I am.”
“This makes no sense,” he muttered. Then a thought occurred to him. “Dampen your power! There’s a mage in this town. He’ll sense you from a mile away if you keep flaunting your aythar that way.”
She arched one brow beneath ragged bangs. “And you’re afraid of a single mage?”
“I’m not here to fight, or to be seen,” he responded, relaxing slightly as she did as he asked. He frowned a moment later, though, as he noted a shift in the position of the mage in question.
The range of Tyrion’s magesight was greater than most, so he had been able to observe the Lord of Arundel from a distance while keeping his own power tightly wrapped up, but the Baron was on the move now, heading for his position in the bowyer’s workshop. A second later, the other mage’s presence vanished.
“He’s a Prathion?” asked Brigid with faint surprise. “Didn’t we kill them all?”
“Human,” remarked Tyrion. “He’s a descendant of my breeding project.”
“And he’s hunting us?” said Brigid, her lip curling into a wicked grin. “I haven’t had this much fun in…” she paused. “How long has it been since I died?”
“A little over two thousand years,” answered Tyrion. “If you’re even real.” He began rolling up the oilskin that the arrowheads were laid out on, packing them away. “We’re leaving.”
“You’re going to run?” asked Brigid in disbelief.
“I’m not here to wipe out the few human mages left,” Tyrion explained. “There are few enough as it is. I have no quarrel with this one.”
His daughter remained immobile. “What of the She’Har? Did we succeed?”
He froze for a moment, considering his answer, then replied, “Mostly.”
“Mostly?”
“The Illeniel survived. That’s how I’m still here. I became an Elder. Lyralliantha survived as well,” he told her.
Brigid scowled. “Is that what you’re working on, a means to kill them?”
Tyrion stopped, his mind going back to his conversation with the peasant girl. “Fix your story,” she had told him. His main goal had been to eliminate Moira, but now that seemed small. She did need killing, there was no doubt of that, but was that all he should be trying to accomplish? He hadn’t questioned his creator’s purposes, but they seemed contrary to what he had truly wanted, the extinction of the She’Har.
Had he gone soft? Had two millennia as a tree turned the original Tyrion against humanity? What would happen in the future, if mankind and She’Har tried to coexist?
There were several people on his kill list—Mordecai, Rose, and Moira—but was that really all he wanted?
No.
“Yes,” he replied, his conviction resolving even as he answered. “That’s exactly what they’re for. In fact, I need to know how you created the enchantment on your chain.”
His daughter nodded. “I didn’t do it alone. Layla helped me.”
“Layla?” He had never expected that answer. The slave-mage had been one of his most ardent followers, practically worshipping him, and while she had been cunning, she hadn’t been particularly intelligent or creative. She had just been one of thousand of human slaves born with the Prathion gift. The Prathion gift, he repeated silently to himself, of course. He put the oilskin back down on the table. There was no need to run. Everything he needed was here.
Chapter 37
George Prathion, the Baron of Arundel, woke suddenly and found himself sitting upright in bed. He had been having a wonderful dream, one he wished he could go back to, although it was already fading from his mind, replaced by a strange sense of foreboding. What had awakened him?
As the fog cleared from his mind, he saw it, a flash of aythar in the village nearby. He wasn’t expecting any visitors, nor did he recognize the aythar. Since he had met every human mage in Lothion already, that meant the stranger was probably one of the She’Har, or possibly one of the strange magic users that had recently begun crossing over the dimensional divide.
Focusing his attention, he detected a second mage with the first, though this one was dim and hard to see. It only took him a second to recognize Tyrion, however. Why is he trying to hide his presence? George wondered.
Then he remembered that Tyrion was a wanted man. The message had arrived from the capital just two days earlier. George’s heart sped up as adrenaline brought him fully awake. Almost reflexively, he cloaked himself in a veil that would make him invisible to magesight, but he knew they had already seen him. From what he had heard, Tyrion’s range was greater than his own.
And there’s no way I can handle him alone, much less with a
nother mage helping him, thought George. His sister, Elaine, along with most of the Illeniel family, had gone to wherever Lancaster was these days. The only person he could think of that might possibly be able to handle Tyrion was Gareth Gaelyn, and that notable was in Albamarl.
George dressed quickly, then left his room. As he went, he modified the veil that covered him, rendering himself almost completely invisible to normal sight as well as magesight. For convenience, he left a small opening so he could see. He could close that later, when he was close enough for normal visibility to matter. For now, he simply wanted to leave his manor without alerting the servants.
Confronting Tyrion directly was not a wise option. He could only hope the man had no ill intentions toward the people of Arundel. What he could do—what Prathions did best—was get closer and find out what the man was doing here. Once he knew that, he would know better what course of action to take.
Slipping out a side door, he walked around the house and found the paved road that led toward the village. Although Arundel wasn’t as large Washbrook and Castle Cameron, it was more spread out, so it took him a good ten minutes to get into the village proper. By then he had identified the building Tyrion was in, which was Mattley’s shop and home. The old bowyer usually did a lot of business, but not at this time of night.
As he got closer, George fought the urge to peek. The veil that protected him from magesight also left him blind in that regard, so he was limited to the small amount of normal light that entered his peephole in order to see. Consequently, he couldn’t be certain of Tyrion or the other mage’s current location, not without revealing himself.
Since it was nighttime, there wasn’t much light, but he only needed a little to avoid tripping. He just wanted to get close enough to listen in to their conversation. Carefully, he crept toward Mattley’s front door, modifying his veil once again to ensure no stray sounds could betray his approach. When a Prathion doesn’t wish to be found, they aren’t, he told himself with a grin.
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