The Godstone

by Violette Malan

  “Don’t worry, partner. We need help again, we’re not going to use someone else, now are we? We’ve made an investment in you,” he tapped the boy’s full belly, “and we’re not likely to forget it.”

  Though I would not have expected it, Elva’s gruffness, along with his blatant self-interest, seemed to be what reassured the boy most. It amused me that Oleander would take the word of a man of the street. Each relies most on its own kind.

  I opened the locket the moment we were alone.

  “Didn’t think we’d be back here so soon,” Elva said.

  “There may be a secret here that will help us get to Arlyn quickly. If it’s where I think it is, and if I can use the forran.” I left him standing in the middle of the room while I went to the section of the shelves that held Medlyn’s newest books. These would have been the theories he had worked on after I had left for the outer Modes. I began where the books and papers were strange to me.

  Almost immediately I found a book with my own name on the spine. My excitement died away when I saw the names of other apprentices lined up on the same shelf. Not left particularly for me, then.

  “What makes you think there’s something here to find?” Elva tossed his hat onto the table where we had been eating, sat down, and swung one leg over the arm of his chair.

  “Medlyn used to visit me regularly, every month or so. He would come and spend a few days, teach me a new forran, help me to make one of mine general so anyone could use it. One visit, a young man was dying. He had gone boar hunting, and had the bad luck to get slashed on the thigh. By the time they got him home, the wound was infected and he was delirious with fever. I took care of the physical wound,” I said, “but the delirium would not respond to any forran I knew. Medlyn thought he had heard of one that could help, but he had to go to the City for it. Of course I let him go, though he could not possibly return in time.”

  “What happened?” Elva said when I fell silent remembering.

  “Medlyn left and was back the same day.”

  “The locket, do you think?”

  “Perhaps. But I thought he must have finally created a forran to move from Mode to Mode without using the Road. When I finished my apprenticeship, he was still in the theoretical stage of the research, but I realized that day he must have finished it.”

  Elva remained admirably silent, but as I was rereading a particular page I grew aware of his breathing. When I looked round at him, I found him practicing sword movements with his eyes closed. His balance was remarkable, his movements graceful, almost like a dance, if you could overlook the weapon in his hand. As a rule practitioners do not learn the martial arts, but I knew enough to recognize that Elva performed the standard movements and patterns of fighting with a sword, over and over again, with a slight increase in speed at every repetition. As if he could feel my gaze, he drew slowly to a standstill facing me exactly and opened his eyes.

  “Did you find it?”

  Fifteen

  Arlyn

  AS LONG AS I didn’t know, he couldn’t know. Lucky. Wanted so much for Fenra to be alive, must have hallucinated speaking with her. Maybe the chaos hadn’t consumed her. Maybe she’d used the locket. Maybe not everything I touched got destroyed.

  Maybe—maybe what? Mentally I shook myself. Maybe she was coming to my rescue? Maybe we would all live through this? At least with Fenra and Elva gone I could stop worrying about them.

  “I can feel you thinking,” I say. “Like a buzzing. What are you doing? Why does the body feel so tired?”

  “I’m old, you know.”

  * * *

  Elvanyn

  With one hand resting on the hilt of his sword, Elva examined the whole room again, squinting from time to time, secretly hoping he’d be able to see something where he hadn’t before. “Too much to hope for,” he said under his breath.

  “What was that?” Fenra asked without turning to face him. She looked like she was running her fingers along the spines of books that weren’t there.

  “I said, ‘Is a fire too much to hope for?’ ”

  Now she did turn around. “Are you cold?”

  He brushed this off with a wave of his hand. “It might make the place a bit homier, is all.” He gestured at the walls around him. “All these empty shelves. Gets a bit depressing after a while.”

  “Are you hungry?” Without waiting for an answer, she glanced at the basket and pitcher still on the table at the far end of the room. He could see those all right. And every shelf, basket, chest, pitcher, bowl, and plate. He just couldn’t see what they contained. When he turned back to her she’d gone back to the shelves as if he wasn’t there. His stomach growled, loudly, and she didn’t even turn around. Maybe she was concentrating too hard. Five more minutes, and then I’ll ask her to stop and get me something to eat. Elva sat down on the sofa and spread his arms out along the back. Told himself his guns didn’t need cleaning.

  Fenra stopped moving, and Elva sat up straight, automatically checking his weapons. He’d seen that frown before. From the look of it, she was reading from a small book, her practitioner’s hand half-folded in the air, her right poised to turn a page. She turned it. Her brows lifted, and she began to nod short, shallow movements. When her lips formed a smile, Elva stood up. She’d found it.

  She glanced at him and her smile broadened. “I’ve found it,” she said. “But it may take all my strength. We had better eat. I hope you’re hungry.”

  They both laughed when his stomach growled again.

  “The difficulty is I cannot tell from the work journal whether this is the final version of Medlyn’s forran. There must be one, I know he used it, but is it the one I found?” Fenra said, once she’d fetched warm venison stew, soft rolls that smelled of saffron, and apples from one of the cupboards.

  “Can you use it anyway?”

  She shrugged. “At first the forran made no sense, but I finally realized that, unlike most of Medlyn’s other forrans, this one wasn’t designed for general use.”

  “How do you mean?” Elva asked.

  “All forrans begin as something unique to their creators,” she said as she tore a roll in half. “Then they’re reworked and refined until they can be used by others—if that’s the creator’s intention. Only a few of my healing forrans have been reworked, for example, since I have always worked alone, without even an apprentice.”

  “But you know how to fix this one so you can use it?”

  She paused, spoon halfway to her mouth. “If I had not already experienced what the locket can do, not to mention the self-filling containers . . . I was a good apprentice. I spent many hours studying my mentor’s forrans, and he gave me the key to his vault.” She touched the locket through the thin cloth of her shirt. “His pattern recognizes me. So yes, I should be able to adapt this forran for my own use.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Now they’d been together so long, Elva thought he could tell what Fenra was thinking, even though her expressions—like all practitioners’—didn’t change very much. But there, the sudden obscuring of her right eye as the lid flickered down and up again.

  “You’ve done it?” He wished, not for the first time, that he could help her. She smiled, her teeth ivory white against the darkness of her skin. Her hands moved as if she was shutting the book he couldn’t see.

  Then she was gone.

  His sharp intake of breath sounded as though it came from someone else.

  “I’ll be damned.” He hoped the locket still worked wherever it was she’d disappeared to. He knew that people could last quite a time without food, but he’d feel the lack of water much sooner. He looked around, lips pursed in a silent whistle. Empty shelves. Empty pitcher on the table. Empty baskets. He checked the cupboard where Fenra had returned the stew pot. Empty.

  At least Arlyn had abandoned him in a place he could
survive.

  That thought should have made him feel worse, but instead a smile formed on his lips. Fenra wasn’t Arlyn, or Xandra, or anyone else but herself. And Fenra Lowens wouldn’t leave him here alone if there was anything she could do about it.

  A whoosh of air and Fenra stood dripping on the carpet exactly where she’d disappeared, smelling of lilies and green water. She held up one hand just in time to stop him from hugging her.

  “I am soaking wet,” she said unnecessarily. “And I stink.”

  “Swamp?” Elva knew brackish water when he smelled it.

  “A round pool, at least that’s what it looked like,” she said. “Wherever it is, there’s no movement to the water. Achhh!” With the very tips of her fingers, Fenra picked up something he couldn’t see, shook it carefully, and set it on the nearest flat surface. She then pulled the fronts of her jacket away from her body with a squelching sound. Elva took hold of the collar and pulled it down off her arms, careful not to strain the seams. Cufflinks and narrower sleeves made the shirt trickier.

  “Maybe I’d better make sure there’s something for me to change into before I go any further,” she said, wringing the shirt out as Elva shook out the jacket and hung it carefully over the back of the chair. Water dripped off the sleeves onto the floor. Where it disappeared.

  “Perfect.” Fenra straightened up from looking into one of the chests against the wall. She had green trousers and a cream-colored shirt in her hands. She tossed the fresh clothing onto the next chest and dove in again, coming up with vest, socks, and cravat. Under other circumstances he’d enjoy watching things appear out of the air.

  “Where does everything go, when you’re not touching it?” he asked her as she pulled the silk shirt over her head and tucked it into the trousers.

  “If I had to guess—and I do—I’d say nowhere,” she said. “I think it doesn’t exist until it’s needed, and then it’s always here, like the food. You did not find yourself suddenly hungry when we left the vault, did you? The food didn’t disappear from your stomach?”

  He waved his hand around the room. “But what about the books, and the other things on the shelves? Why can’t I see them, even when you have one in your hands? Is it like the changes in the Modes that commoners can’t see?”

  Her eyes narrowed and she turned around once, scanning the empty shelves. Finally she nodded. “It could be . . . or, unlike the items in containers, the books and artifacts are always here—unchanging,” she said. “Their invisibility could be a forran, either laid on any mundane who enters, or laid on the contents themselves.”

  “Can you undo it?” Things would sure be easier if he could see what she saw. He might even be able to help her.

  “I have only just now considered the forran’s existence. There is no estimating the amount of time it might take to undo it—if I could. As you can see,” she indicated the pile of wet clothes, “I have an imperfect grasp of Medlyn’s work, even when I have read the forrans and notes myself.”

  “What about laying one of your own forrans on me? One that would counteract this one without trying to undo it?”

  She tapped her pursed lips with the index finger of her practitioner’s hand. “I can try.”

  * * *

  Fenra

  It hadn’t even occurred to me to draw over Medlyn’s forran with one of my own. That changed the nature of the problem entirely—modify, do not destroy. The endeavor struck me as being similar to some aspects of healing. If I could adapt one of my own forrans—say that which allowed me to isolate or enclose foreign matter in an ailing body . . . could my forran treat Medlyn’s like matter foreign to Elva’s body? I began to concentrate.

  The basic pattern of my healing forran appeared quickly between my hands, and I set it in place to examine it as closely as I had done when I first created it. I walked around it, turned and spun it, examining it from all sides. Not that it had sides, but thinking of it as three-dimensional helped me to come at the thing from a new direction. Eventually I thought I could see how to modify it. I had frequently used this forran with good results to isolate infection. As any good healer knows, infections are caused by tiny, minute bits of matter, tangible, but too small for the unaided eye to see, though not too small for the practicing mind. It was only one step from there to using the forran to isolate intangible matter—also, in its way, too small for the eye to see.

  When I was ready, I opened my eyes and almost lost control over my forran.

  Medlyn’s pattern hovered around Elva. I could see it now, like dust particles in a ray of sunshine. Except that these particles formed a specific shape.

  “What is it?” Elva said. “You have a funny look on your face and you’re smiling.”

  “I can see Medlyn’s forran. Using the locket so frequently must have fine-tuned my sensitivity to his work.” I felt lighthearted, as if I had performed some test well and my mentor had praised me.

  “So you can take it away?”

  I shook my head, lower lip between my teeth. “If I had more time, I think I could. I can see, for example, that it is a forran that overlies you, it is not part of you. It’s like a garment that, in a way, you step into when you enter the vault. And like the garment, it can be removed.” Unlike my own healing forrans. When I healed someone, a small part of my pattern remained within them. They could develop some other illness, but never the same one again.

  “So it’s back to the first plan? Neutralize it somehow?”

  I nodded without answering. I walked around Elva and watched carefully as my modified healing forran settled around Medlyn’s, connecting here and there with tiny flashes of light that made me blink. Finally my forran began to shrink, pulling softly at Medlyn’s, tucking in here, folding over there, until it became so small that I saw it only because I knew it was there. At this point, in healing, I would reach in and pull my forran out, taking the infection with it, leaving a tiny piece of pattern behind. As it was, I felt I could not attempt that now. Medlyn’s forran was not an illness. What if it would not come out? What if I injured Elva somehow in the attempt?

  His lips curled into a smile as he turned from one side to another. Clearly he could now see what I had been seeing all along. Though perhaps not all, I thought. He was so delighted that though his hands moved, they forgot to go through his touching ritual.

  “This is marvelous,” he said, approaching the shelves holding the models of bridges.

  “Do not touch those artifacts!” I moved fast enough to catch him by the elbow before he got any closer. “You do not know what any of them do.”

  “If they do something.” His face told me he was not disagreeing with me. “Anything here could be like the locket, couldn’t it? It could take us somewhere else.”

  “Wait.” His words triggered a thought and I laid a finger on the nearest shelf. All of the models were either of fountains or of bridges. Medlyn had started making these in the last year of my apprenticeship—I should have known they weren’t just a hobby; he would not have brought them to the vault unless they had more than a personal significance. But none of them opened, or appeared functional in any way.

  I turned to Elva, sliding my practitioner’s hand from his elbow to his upper arm. Hard muscle tensed and then loosened. “Now that you can see everything, and can find food and drink, it’s safe for me to leave you here.”

  He pulled his arm away. “Leave me? Are you insane?” His right hand actually shifted as though he would pull out one of his guns.

  “You would be so much safer.” I could not believe he would argue with me. “You could have been lost—I almost lost you in the chaos.” I could feel my face grow hot.

  “I was trying to help you!”

  “Your trying to help me could get both of us killed. And stop yelling at me.”

  He closed his mouth on what he was about to say and took a breath. In a much calmer and qu
ieter voice he said, “What if you don’t come back?”

  “Why would I not—” I stopped talking when he raised an index finger to me.

  “I know you would, but what if you can’t? I’d be alone here. I won’t even know what happened to you. How long do you think I can last?”

  “But there would be food and . . .” I subsided again. Evidently I had not thought this through to the logical conclusion.

  “And how long before I blow my brains out? Never mind food and drink, how long can I last in here alone?”

  I heard the words he did not say aloud. In the other world at least there had been people, animals, things to do and places to go. Crossing my arms, I leaned against the shelves behind me, the wooden edges digging into my shoulder blades. I tried to imagine what it would be like for Elva to be alone here. Here there was nothing. How long before the jug that always provided the drink most needed gave Elva poisoned wine? A year? A month? A week?

  Finally I raised my eyes to meet his. I had no answer, and he knew it.

  “I’m a soldier, a sheriff,” he said finally. “I know the world is dangerous, and that my job could get me killed—most likely to, in fact. I can face the danger. What I can’t face . . .” He gestured around him with his hands.

  I found myself looking into Elva’s dark eyes, reading everything in them. “It is better not to be alone,” I told him. “For me as well. But,” I added as a smile returned to his lips, “we go as partners. You are not my bodyguard and I am not yours. We are each able to protect ourselves, and we will act accordingly.”

  He shrugged and touched his pistols and sword hilt. “Well, I hope you’ll save me, if you should see the need. Practitioner,” he added. “We’ll be like a posse, with you the sheriff and me the deputy.” This time his smile reached his eyes. “You tell me what to shoot, and I’ll shoot it. Now what, boss?”