by C. A. Bryers
“You’re not—”
“If the question is whether I’m going to be naked too, well, we just met, so no. But, if the question is whether I’m getting in there with you? Sure am.” Pulling off her boots, Iriscent climbed in after him. Wading closer, she placed her hands on his chest. “Lots of tattoos. I should show you this one that I’ve got later on. By the way, that one on your shoulder needs some touching up.”
He nodded. “I was a scrapper for six years. Lots of time between targets, and these things just started multiplying.”
“Exciting,” she said, moving her hands down toward his hips.
“Wait, where are you—”
Iriscent giggled. “Wishful thinking, I’m afraid. I’m just using a little bit of tephic to let your body kind of fall asleep.”
He felt it working, his body losing feeling and responsiveness inches at a time as the young ijau’s fingers slid across his skin. A word he hadn’t recognized at the time sprang to mind then, a memory from his discussion with Delflore.
“So being in this place, does that mean you’re…oorets say?”
“Uhreht’sa, you mean? Oh no, not even close.” Her hands traveled down his legs, and she shuffled through the tephic waters to begin work on his arms.
Salla’s brows knitted. “What is that, then?”
“Uhreht’sa is a status that pretty much bypasses the House. You have to have done something really bad to be given uhreht’sa, you know?”
He shook his head, feeling her fingers slide up to his neck. “Not really.”
“Okay. Uhreht’sa is one of those words from one of the old Majdi sects that got adopted by the Order as a whole.” Her voice was slow, soft and calming now as she explained, giving Salla the feeling he was lying on a masseuse’s table. “In common Odyssan, we’d call it a sentence of ‘contemplation.’ It means that you’ve done something that hasn’t gotten you completely tossed out of the Order, but you’re on the verge, right? What it takes to get uhreht’sa is something that the Majdi can’t fix by sending you to a place like this. It’s a stretch of time given for you to think, to decide for yourself whether to leave or stay. But even if you decide to stay, they might’ve decided in the meantime that you have to go, though.”
Feeling almost no sensation from the neck down, Salla thought of Rainne, wondering what she could have done to have been given time to contemplate her future in the Order. Picturing her for those brief moments in his mind was all it took for Salla’s thoughts to turn dark.
“Hey, hey,” Iriscent said firmly, “I just relaxed your body for a reason. I need you calm for this, if you don’t mind.”
Salla cast away Rainne’s deceitful, meddlesome visage from his thoughts in an effort to clear his mind. She was gone, but the resonating hurt of her unwanted intrusion and the lies that had followed lingered.
“Here, let me,” Iriscent offered, placing her fingertips in the middle of his forehead and sliding them down toward his temples. “Shhhh.”
Whatever Iriscent was doing, it was having its intended effect. The anger and mistrust that polluted his waking mind dissipated like mists on a lake being burned away by the increasing warmth of the rising sun.
“I probably should’ve mentioned this before I got your body and brains all feeling like they’re not there, but things might get a bit intense with this.” She bared her teeth in an exaggerated expression of fright. She let it drop a second later and smiled. “And like I said, it’s my first time doing this unsupervised. Exciting on one hand, but I might accidentally kill you on the other. On the positive side, if I do wind up killing you, I’m not even officially down here. So I won’t even get a stern talking to or anything like that.”
Salla gave a choking cough.
“That would be a joke,” she deadpanned. “The part about me not getting a lecture or whatever is, at least. That Delflore lady might not like it that you went and flopped dead on my watch. What do you think?”
“Stop…talking,” he managed. Even his mouth felt sluggish now.
Iriscent gave a heaving sigh. “If you insist. I’ll just entertain myself, then.”
Her hand waved through the air, and Salla heard a click from across the room, followed by a slowly swelling stream of music. It was soft and soothing, the notes singing out through a variety of instrumentation. A voice joined in, powerful and already displaying incredible range and versatility. No discernable words were sung, just notes lilting softly and then forcefully atop those played by the backing ensemble.
“Incredible, isn’t she? You know who this is, don’t you?” Iriscent asked with an excited flourish, inadvertently splattering the liquid across Salla’s face. “Sorry. If you did know, you probably couldn’t tell me anyway, could you? It’s Arissalyth—an audio cap of one of her performances, at least. Just listen. It’s beautiful.”
Salla did, allowing his numbed mind to be swept along in the current of the rising and falling textures of the music. For the first quarter of an hour of Iriscent’s examination, time passed by as if in a soothing, painless blur. She slid her palms across his body, stopping and starting again, applying pressure and decreasing it in random intervals. Throughout the process, Salla’s eyes grew leaden. Sleep was closing in fast.
He felt her slimy fingers grasp him about the jaw. “Not yet, you don’t. Take a deep breath. If I can get this to happen, you might feel a little pinch.”
Salla drew in a long, languid breath. It was the most his largely catatonic body could muster. But a second later, something happened. He had no clue what Iriscent had done, but his skull felt as though it was threatening to implode. His eyes throbbed in agonizing pulses, and his body felt as though monstrous currents of electricity were being shunted directly into his nerves. He wanted to scream, to jump up and hurl himself out of this tephic pool, but he was a prisoner in a body that refused all commands.
It was the Eyes of the One, he realized, rising up out of the temporary reprieve given to him by the Majdi to crush him at last. He stared upward through tear-flooded eyes and found Iriscent looking back down.
Lips parted breathlessly, eyes alight with excitement, the Majdi girl started to laugh hysterically.
13
The episode in Iriscent Saffora’s makeshift cocoon pool felt like a bad dream. His back ached and his muscles protested as he forced himself upright. He was no longer submerged in the unidentifiable liquid. He was clothed and dry. But how long had he been out? Hours? A week? Considering how ragged and disused his body felt, a more prolonged state of unconsciousness wasn’t out of the realm of possibilities.
As Salla sat there on the corner of his bed for long moments, his thoughts bogged down in a stagnant mire, a realization dawned on him. He was no longer in the cramped, musty, cobweb-ridden cell any longer, no longer sitting on a decades-old moth-eaten mattress.
He was still in a cell—that much was evident from the pair of barred doors set a few feet apart before him. Everything else was different. Like the space where the portable restora had been installed, two cells had been joined to become one elongated cell. Fresh bedding lay underneath him and the floor looked as though it had been scoured so clean a few layers of stone might have been reduced to powder.
But that was where the positives ended. Everything was new, but the time and care taken in restoring and refurbishing this expanded cell was disconcerting. It made him wonder if the decision had already been made as to whether he was too dangerous to see the outside world ever again. His accommodations were more comfortable now, certainly, but was it only a meager gesture when he was faced with the possibility of spending the rest of his life in this eight-by-sixteen-foot cell?
The day wore on, and before long, it was night again—according to the small chron hanging on the wall opposite his new cell, at least. Below ground in this windowless compartment with no visual distinction between night and day, Salla contemplated whether it might not be better if he were buried in a more literal sense.
He slept. There w
as nothing else to do, no worries to keep him awake at night. His fate was out of his hands. And worse, there was no hope for escape. His captors could do things beyond the spectrum of normal men, foresee weaknesses in his cell and bolster them accordingly. Dark thoughts became more frequent visitors in the long hours he spent in abject silence. With a dry, morbid laugh, he imagined the sole method of escape left available to him—an episode from the Eyes of the One so powerful that it would at last finish him off.
Two more days crawled by, and then three. Apart from near-wordless deliveries of food and water, the corridors remained as still and silent as a tomb. No one came to apprise him of what was happening with his evaluation. He was in limbo, a state of existence with no future of his own and no reason to be. He exercised to keep his body ready should any opportunity for escape somehow materialize, but noticed he’d taken up the habit of talking to himself more often than he would admit to anyone—if there were someone around to admit such a thing.
Troubling, he thought, and half-jokingly waited for some disembodied voice to spring up out of the ether to agree or disagree.
It wasn’t until the fourth day that Salla’s period of isolation ended. The sounds of approach called to him from down the hall, but this time, what he heard was not the steady click-clack of a solitary figure coming to see him.
He rose to his feet to meet them. Delflore strode in the lead, with Adrik Usladislau to her right and Iriscent Saffora trailing a few paces behind.
“Open the door,” Delflore said, her expression stoic.
Adrik hurried forth to comply. The tephic ward protecting the lock was disabled, and the door swung open.
“Thank you,” she said with a brief touch on Usladislau’s shoulder before turning her attention to Salla. “As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, I’m here to discuss the results of Iriscent’s evaluation and my own findings.”
“Took your time.”
Delflore nodded, removing her eyewear. “That’s right, I did. Reason being, I wanted every piece of information in front of me before I rendered a decision. As Iriscent may have told you, our orders in handling you were not to intercede should a fatal event occur. I don’t feel that way. The power that is inside of you, it was instrumental in your finding your way to Tempusalist and aiding in the removal of the Gargazant Ikahn syndicate’s threat.”
“So my story’s not so unbelievable now, is that it?” asked Salla with brows raised.
“You’re a scrapper, and therefore difficult to trust. I think most who’ve had a run-in with one would agree.” She let out a heaving sigh. “But it seems there is some evidence backing it all up. Gargazant Ikahn survivors in our custody placed you at Tempusalist, with one man even having witnessed the guardian catching a shattered piece of the causeway that held two occupants.” Delflore shrugged. “I’ll buy it that one of those people the guardian caught could have been you.”
“Some would say that earns me a free pass out the front door.”
Delflore smiled. “You and I know it’s not that simple.”
He steeled himself for the answer he was all too certain was coming. “So make it simple. Am I going to spend the rest of my life in this dungeon of yours?”
“The rest of your life? That’s not clear yet. But for the time being, yes, you will remain in Majdi custody. There are just too many variables, the sort of variables that, if presented before the Majdi Chamber, would make them understandably nervous. Our findings would convince them that it would be safer for you and those around you if you were kept under protection.” Delflore scratched at the side of her nose and replaced her eyewear. “I’m sorry it’s not the news you were hoping to hear.”
Salla’s expression went bitter. “Protection. That’s a nice way of saying imprisonment.”
“The news I bring isn’t all bad, however. From the data mined during Iriscent’s evaluation, it seems there could be a chance these attacks you’re having can be brought under control, perhaps even stopped.”
From behind both Delflore and Adrik, Iriscent wore an effervescent smile as she wagged her fingertips at him in greeting.
“Call me skeptical, but I’m not sure I’d trust a word from her findings.” He pointed back at the girl with intense red hair. “Here I think I’m dying, and this girl’s laughing like a lunatic while it happens.”
Delflore glanced back at the ijau with one eyebrow cocked curiously.
“What?” Iriscent offered a sheepish shrug. “I was excited. I didn’t think I was going to be able to trigger one at all, and then bang, off it goes. It’s a good thing it did happen, too. You having that episode in the cocoon is how I got all the information I did.”
“Information that could save your life,” Delflore stated.
Salla glanced about his cell. “So I can live longer in this place? Isn’t that just the best news I’ve heard all day.”
“Figured out what’s causing your attacks, too.” Iriscent bounced once up on her toes with a giddy grin.
“You have to appreciate the rather unprecedented situation we find ourselves in, and think not just of yourself. I know that isn’t easy right now, but given time, perhaps you might. The power of the Eyes of the One is still with you.” She glanced back at Iriscent. “What Iriscent also discovered was that the power of the Eyes is not the only power inside of you.”
Salla took a step forward, folding his arms as he set his shoulder against the bars of his open door. “Oh?”
“I isolated it and blew through a whole afternoon trying to identify it. I could tell it was spiritual energy, but it was way stronger than anything I’ve ever come across.” Iriscent’s fingertips tapped against her thighs, her face screwing up to reflect the uncertainty she’d felt. “So, I ran it by Delflore.”
“And I compared it against your story. We don’t have any sampling of the Magsem’s energy signature, but it stood to reason that this powerful spiritual essence, for lack of a better term, had been transferred to you somehow,” Delflore explained.
“Somehow?” He gave a short-lived laugh. “That glowing blue stickman jammed its arm halfway through me.”
Iriscent laughed. “‘Glowing blue stickman,’” she repeated. “Not the most reverent way to describe one of our hallowed Magsems, but it sure paints a picture.”
The elder Majdi ignored the comment. “A Magsem is a powerful spirit, Salla. Immensely powerful. This is one reason we keep them hidden away to mediate the flow of tephic. Those traces of the Magsem are interfering with and attacking the power of the Eyes of the One.” She gave a sympathetic smile. “That is what is causing these episodes. That is what’s killing you. These two very potent energies are not compatible and their struggle for supremacy within you has escalated to its current state.”
“Meaning I could flop over dead at any time.” He whistled. “Got any more good news today?”
Delflore nodded. “Maybe. Listen to our solution, at least. If you decide letting these clashing elements continue the battle to its inevitable conclusion is preferable, it will be your choice to make.”
Salla’s head drooped, pausing to let the new information take root. “Fine. What’s the plan?”
“It’s quite simple, actually. We teach you the principles of manipulating the tephic arts.”
His eyes narrowed, dark suspicions prickling at once. “Your solution is for me to become one of you? So instead of someone out there using me like Cron-jearre wanted to, you can use me? Forget it.”
The elder Majdi sighed. “This is where the trust I spoke of earlier comes into play, Salla.”
Salla stepped back, spreading his arms wide. “I’m only showing you as much trust as you’re showing me. You can only fit so much of it in so small a cell, after all.”
In the shadows behind Delflore, Iriscent gaped in stunned surprise at the remark.
“All right, Salla. We’ll discuss a more mutual trust later. Will you hear me out now?” Delflore asked with a fold of her arms.
Salla flung his hand
in the air, blithely giving permission for her to continue.
“Learning tephic is learning to tame and control energy through your mind. Tephic energy is in the world we live in. We here in the Odyssan Archipelago and surrounding territories draw ours from the channeling chamber you presumably saw in Tempusalist.”
Salla recalled all too vividly the room within the sanctuary held above the city, the room that had gone dark the moment Cron-jearre had enslaved the Magsem.
“From the readings Iriscent collected, our theory is that, by adopting the methods of controlling tephic, you could teach your body and mind to naturally bring under control other energies within you—the power of the Eyes of the One and that of the Magsem.” She eyed him critically before continuing. “However, there is a potential downside, should this method succeed. If you gained control over these forces within you, you could conceivably access the powers of the Eyes of the One again. Depending what on your aptitude with tephic turns out to—”
“Wait, don’t tell me.” He rubbed at his temple as if in anticipation of a fatal episode. “That brings us back to the start. I can’t leave. Ever.”
With sober eyes closed, Delflore nodded.
Salla nodded as well, taking a step forward. Adrik Usladislau advanced to meet him, the look on his face challenging the prisoner to try anything. It was then that he noticed the bandage over the Majdi’s broken nose was gone, and the huge bruise under his eye had vanished as well.
“Hey, relax. I wasn’t—”
“Weren’t you?” Usladislau cut him off, teeth bared.
“Actually, I wanted to apologize. I felt bad for…you know.” He waved his hand in the direction of the bearded Majdi’s repaired face. “That tephic bath stuff is great. I mean, you can hardly tell anything even happened.”
Adrik’s stance softened slightly. “Well—”
Delflore started to speak, her tone clipped in warning. “Adri—”
The hand that gesticulated before Adrik Usladislau’s face balled up into a fist suddenly, and Salla thrust it at the Majdi. Adrik reeled backward in pain and alarm, hands cupping his nose. Salla bolted then, cutting a line between the staggered Majdi and Delflore. However, his escape attempt came to a halt as soon as it began. It was as if he had run chest-first into a stone wall, and then the wall grabbed him and refused to let go.
