The Godstone

by Violette Malan

  He took us each by an elbow, ushering us into the tower. As we stepped into the ground floor stable, I pulled away. For a moment Arlyn’s fingers tightened, and I thought he would not release me, but then he relaxed.

  “You’ll want to see to Terith, I take it.”

  All my relief vanished as a shiver ran up my spine. In all the years we had known each other, in all the years Arlyn had known Terith, he had only ever called him “the horse.” Never by name. He knew Terith’s name, but he had never bothered to use it. Arlyn had not been able to see Terith, or other living things for that matter, as persons in themselves.

  Be reasonable, I said to myself. After so long being uncertain and frightened, I had fallen into the habit of it. I needed to relax.

  As soon as the two men had climbed the ladder into the upper story, Terith began to nuzzle at me, blowing warm air into my face, my neck, my hair.

  “You are not helping me.” I ran my hands down his neck.

  He rubbed his long face against me like a cat, pushing me until I had to brace myself against the side of the stall.

  “All right,” I told him in a voice pitched for his ears alone. “You disagree. Fine, I will still be careful.” Terith’s instincts were worth listening to. “Will you be able to free yourself if things go bad for me?” At this he snorted, as I had known he would. Terith believed there was no stable that could hold him. I quietly unlatched the outer door, just in case. Without turning around I told him, “If you feel it necessary, go back to Ginglen’s Hotel. I know they will look after you.”

  I climbed the ladder to the upper floor slowly, buying myself time to think. If I could touch Arlyn even for just a few seconds, I would be able to tell who, or what, we were really dealing with.

  “Predax should return to the City,” Elva was saying as I opened the door to the upper floor.

  “But I’m still just an apprentice. I don’t have a mentor anymore,” the younger practitioner said. He had evidently given his earlier request more thought. He smiled at me, and I smiled back, stepping off the ladder. “I’ll be honest, I don’t look forward to explaining to the council what happened to Practitioner Metenari.”

  I knew exactly what he meant. It was one thing for mentors to lose apprentices—accidents can happen, and carelessness is a characteristic of many, teachers and students alike. But for an apprentice to lose a mentor . . . perhaps it had happened before, but if so I had certainly never heard it.

  “Easiest thing in the world,” Elva said. “The practitioner disappeared in a puff of smoke while showing you a new forran. As an apprentice you could hardly be expected to understand anything about it.”

  Arlyn’s laughter made my skin crawl. “That’s just like you, Elva, an answer for everything.”

  “Things are rarely as complicated as they appear.” Was I the only one who caught that note of caution in Elva’s voice?

  “Excuse me, Practitioner, Captain.” Predax cleared his throat, looking from Elva to Arlyn and back again, even sparing a second’s glance in my direction. “I was just thinking that if Practitioner Albainil’s power does return, he doesn’t have an apprentice and I don’t have a mentor and so . . .” His tone was a combination of diffidence and eagerness.

  Arlyn began to speak and Elva cut him off. “Practitioner Albainil doesn’t take apprentices. He never has.”

  “Don’t be so hasty, Elva. Times change, and people change with them, even practitioners.” Arlyn circled around Elva, reaching out toward Predax. Elva knew better than to try stopping him, but his glance at me had clear concern in it. I shifted to get a better angle on Arlyn’s face, and what I saw there made me interpose myself between him and Predax. As Arlyn swerved to go around me, I managed to snag his sleeve between the thumb and fingers of my practitioner’s hand.

  “Taking an apprentice is a serious step,” I said, when he fixed his eyes on me. I steeled myself not to look away. “Even if it’s only for making furniture, it’s nothing that’s done on the spur of the moment. The two people must be well matched, and well suited to one another in style, and in level of potential, examined and tested before a joining can take place. With no disrespect intended to you, Apprentice Predax, no such preparation has been made in this case.”

  “I am Xandra Albainil. I’ve forgotten more about the practice than you will ever know. I think I’m capable of choosing my own apprentice.” Arlyn pulled his sleeve free of my grasp with a sharp movement and reached out for Predax.

  “Fenra!”

  I did not need Elva’s warning. Simple common caution told me that whoever this was, he could not be allowed to touch Predax. I set my fingertips together, focused on my pattern, pulled my fingers apart, and grabbed Arlyn’s wrist with both hands.

  The wash of power pushed me to the floor, drowning me. I clung harder. I had expected something, but nothing as great as this. From far away I heard Elva’s voice— “Do you want to be consumed? Go! Take a horse and get as far away as you can”—and understood that he was speaking to Predax. I had a minute to think, If he takes Terith, that will get him back to the City.

  I focused on the fog, the beach, and stepped sideways into the other place, pulling Arlyn with me, and found my hands empty. On what I thought of as Arlyn’s rock, someone—something—sat. It flickered, and turned its face toward me. Arlyn’s face, younger, sharper, less worn, with eyes shining. A skull glowing bright and anonymous through the skin. I called on the fog and the wind to come to me. Rather than finding my way through them, I hoped to use them to push this person who was not Arlyn away. It was contrary entirely to the vow I had sworn to heal and help whenever I could, but when I considered the whole of the world, I knew I did the right thing. Sometimes it is necessary to excise poisoned tissue. Would it be possible to cut away only the Godstone?

  I might have succeeded, if I had not hesitated long enough for that thought. Fog rose up out of the ground around us, wind blowing it toward me rather than Arlyn. A thick mist, a sea mist, cold on the skin and leaving droplets of moisture behind it. A dull blow to my head and I was back in the tower room, my forearms raised to block another strike from Arlyn’s fist. We sometimes forget to guard against physical attack, we practitioners. I saw a muzzle flash, though I heard nothing more. Elva, I thought. He is trying to help me. I did not think he was succeeding.

  I felt Arlyn drag me across the floor. I made myself go limp, giving him a dead weight. I dug in my heels, striking at him as well as I could with my right hand, but nothing I did even slowed him down.

  “Thank you for teaching me this trick.”

  I heard the door open, felt the wind of chaos blowing past it, the vacuum it created pulling at my hair and clothes. I clung all the tighter to his arm, concentrating on calling the fog, on drawing power from him, to weaken him. Anything. But the noise and the drag of the wind made concentrating difficult. I felt two hands closing on my ankles, and for a moment I knew what it was like to be the rope in a tug of war. Then all I felt was the noise, the buffeting wind, the scrape of sand, dust, and gravel across my face.

  * * *

  Arlyn

  I yank the door shut on them just before I’m sucked through myself. I only meant to frighten her, to make her more compliant. I wasn’t afraid of her. Imagine thinking that she could drain power from me.

  “She could, though, that’s the thing,” I said. “She’s spent all her time as a practitioner healing—apart from the time she spent as a lorist’s apprentice, studying all the history she could find on healing people. Killing someone’s just the reverse of healing, you know.”

  “Spare me your platitudes,” I say. “You she might be able to affect, but not me. I have all your power as a practitioner and all Metenari’s as well. What could some youngster who’s barely a second level do to affect me?”

  I stayed quiet, trying not to give anything away.

  “What?”

  �
��You’re right,” I said finally. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “You must have been thinking more clearly before,” I say. “Or you wouldn’t have been able to best me.”

  “That must have been it,” I agreed. It couldn’t have been that I felt so tired. Or not tired so much as . . . as . . . run down. No, that wasn’t the word. Listless. “I need to sit down,” I said to him.

  * * *

  Fenra

  At first the noise, and the wind, and the needle-prick pain of the flying grit distracted me so much I could not focus. I choked on the debris, and the wind sucked the breath from my body. But there was more than sand and grit. I had bonded with rock and bricks and mortar as if they were living things, and I felt the same kind of presence around me now. As if I tossed in the lungs of some vast creature, damp, hot, and intolerably noisy.

  What felt like a rough hand brushed the hair back from my face. I forced my hands up against the wind, but whatever it was had gone. I tried to cover my mouth and nose. Hands. Around my ankles. Metenari? He could not have survived. I flexed my foot and stopped immediately as I felt the hand shift. Elva. Elva had tried to save me, and he must have followed me in. My first thought a selfish one: I was not alone. My second thought equally selfish: now I had to save Elva as well as myself.

  I could not be proud of these thoughts, but on the other hand, it did not occur to me until Elva mentioned it later that I could have simply kicked him away.

  Instead I bent at the waist, covering mouth and nose with only my right hand, and reached down to tap his wrist with my practitioner’s hand. Immediately he released his hold on that ankle and transferred his grip to my forearm. I was so relieved I could have kissed him. If he had been slower to understand—slower to trust me—it could have killed us both. As soon as my practitioner’s hand closed on his forearm, Elva released his hold on my other ankle and, using his new grip as leverage, pulled himself up until we were both oriented in the same direction. Considering there still was no “up” or “down” this gave me a remarkable sense of accomplishment and, strangely, security. Only the change in my middle ears told me we were spinning. Otherwise we might have been floating suspended. If the wind would only die down a little, and take the noise with it, we could almost be comfortable.

  Elva kept his grip on the wrist of my practitioner’s hand and slipped his other arm around my waist until we were hip-to-hip and one of his revolvers pressed into my breast. I hooked a leg around one of his for greater security. He seemed to be trying to tell me something, his lips to my ear, but I could not hear anything over the clamor around us.

  Still, holding fast to Elva I felt anchored and even peaceful. The chaos still swirled around us, over us, through us, but somehow it felt calmer now, as if the impacts striking us were no longer random. I felt, very faintly, the sensation I would get when walking through woods, knowing that some animal watched me. We were not alone, something lived here. Something—no, someone—someone was trying to communicate with us. As if in response to that thought, the hand that had brushed my face before touched me on hip, elbow, shoulder, forehead, touched Elva the same way—I felt him flinch—and then traveled across to my ankle, my knee, and back to my hip. What breath I had caught in the back of my throat. This being lived here, in this chaos, perhaps was the chaos. My mouth dried and I squeezed my eyes shut, clinging to Elva as strongly as I could.

  As the touching began its second cycle, Elva loosened his hold around my waist and bent elbow and wrist awkwardly, reaching for the grip of the pistol on that same side. I hugged him closer, trapping his hand between our bodies. After a moment of resistance, he relaxed again. The being touching us had done us no harm so far.

  As soon as Elva relaxed, a warmth spread over us as if we had been slowly lowered into a carefully drawn bath, as if the chaos now approved of us. The wind supported us, the air around us clearing. I felt my tense muscles relax, and I did what I had not had the chance to do before. I reached into the front of my shirt and closed my hand around Medlyn’s locket.

  * * *

  Arlyn

  I should have been horrified, grief stricken, but to be honest what I felt was a kind of envy. Fenra and Elva—at least it was over for them. They didn’t have to keep trying, figuring out what to do next, hiding from him. They could just let it all go. If I hadn’t already known it wouldn’t work, I’d have been looking for a way to kill myself.

  “Elva was my best friend,” I reminded him. “That’s the second time I’ve lost him because of you. And now there’s Fenra.”

  “She’s the one I don’t understand. Why have her with you? She’s not what I’d call pretty.”

  “No.” I stifled my thoughts. Easier than I expected. Just let the same thought go round and round. Fenra working as a healer—no, too close, think about the horse, the horse didn’t like me.

  “Best you could find, out there on the perimeter, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not as much use to you as you hoped, though.”

  I stood up. My arms swung back and forth. “As you say, best there was.”

  “Why didn’t you tell them who you were?” Clasped hands went up over my head and my back stretched out.

  My head shook. “It seemed like a good idea. I’m not sure it matters anymore.”

  “You’re right there.”

  Eating next. Not sure how I got there. Didn’t remember anything for a while.

  * * *

  • • •

  It’s strange how he still thinks of himself as apart from me. As if we are two different people. Perhaps he went mad while I was gone. The same thoughts seem to circle and circle. Do people do that? Go mad when they lose half of themselves? And the better half too, as far as I can see. If he sighs one more time I’ll have to slap myself in the face. I try again.

  “I tell you it’s because you tried to change the whole system at once. Do you think the world was created like that? It would have been done one Mode at a time. If we did the same, it would work. That’s just logic.”

  “Logic’s been wrong before.” He tries to draw in another breath but I cough instead. No more sighing. “I don’t know that this change is necessary any longer, in any case.”

  “Really?”

  “The City’s advanced far enough that even in the outer Modes people live comfortably.”

  I roll my eyes. “But then I’d never know—you’d never know. And stop trying to look at that door. What do you think? Your little class-three friend will find her way back from there? What? What is it?” I think he’s about to say something but whatever it is fades away unexpressed. I wish he’d stop sulking.

  “Here,” I say. “Let’s close up that door permanently. I’m surprised you haven’t already had someone do it.”

  I stand up, smiling, and take a deep breath. A relaxed focus, that’s the key. I feel the power bubbling up, eager to express itself. His—my—forrans float just below the surface of his mind, ready for use like underground springs just waiting for a well. I put my hands together, palm to palm, and bring the tips of my fingers up to touch my lips. Now. Another deep breath. Concentrate. Feel the power. I lower my hands from my face and pull them slowly apart. Now the pattern would emerge.

  Light blooms, solid, bright, almost too much for my eyes to bear without blinking. But it can’t blind me, it is me. I feel it wash over me. I feel him come to life. I turn my hands around each other, as if I opened a jar. Nothing. The light fades, dissolving away, leaving emptiness behind.

  “What are you doing?” I should be able to use these forrans. We’re using the same brain. We’re the same person.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, stop it!”

  “I feel the power, but it slides away. I can’t concentrate,” he says to me, voice hard.

  “What’s wrong with you? Metenari was one thing, I can understand w
hy I couldn’t get his forrans to work, but yours? Your patterns are my patterns. We’re the same.”

  “Are we? Are we the same? You’re not Xandra, you know, no matter what you feel. You’re just an artifact wearing an imprint you absorbed with my power. Like a mundane wearing a shirt.”

  “You think because we’re in the same body I won’t hurt you? Try harder. Concentrate. Focus.”

  “I’ll try, but I can’t promise anything. I don’t know. I’m tired, I guess. I must be having a low day.”

  Thirteen

  Fenra

  THE SILENCE AND the warmth, even the homely smell of the wood, told me we had reached Medlyn’s vault. I blinked away tears of relief. Elva held me by the elbows; otherwise I am sure I would have fallen. My brain could only think of irrelevant things. Elva’s mustache needed trimming. Had his eyes always been this dark? The bridge models on the shelf behind him weren’t dusty. My fingers closed around the leather straps of his gun holsters.

  “You’re warm,” I said. My voice sounded loud and rough in the silence of the room. Unrecognizable.

  “I thought that was you.” Elva’s voice I recognized immediately.

  To the left of where we stood, the sofa Arlyn had used beckoned and my knees trembled under me. “We could sit down,” I said.

  “Can you walk?”

  “Of course.”

  “Great, because I’m not so sure I can.” A ghost of his usual smile flitted over his face. Still clinging to each other like two people skating on a pond for the first time, we made our way over to the sofa and sat down. My breath left my body in a deep sigh. Elva’s hands floated across his pistols, and he frowned when his fingers brushed empty space instead of the hilt of his sword.

  “Do not worry,” I told him. “If you need one, there are three swords hanging on the wall.”

  He looked at the spot I pointed to with eyebrows raised. “Too bad I can’t see them.”