Carin shook her head. “I have no idea. This”—she waved the letter—“was written years ago. Theil found it in the house where I lived as a little girl. It’s in the language I spoke back then. I’ve already read it to him.” Carin glanced across at her wysard. “I think it probably means my parents are dead.”
The girl paused, then went on hesitantly. “But it may mean something else, too. It may mean that the bleeding disease came here … to Ladrehdin … with us. With Theil and me.”
Megella went rigid, and her breath caught. “What are you saying, widgeon?” she demanded in a whisper.
Carin looked at her intently. “I’m saying, Megella, that Theil and I let this sickness into the world. We opened a gate. A bleeding disease killed who-knows-how-many people on Earth. And now we’ve brought it back here with us. And if we can’t stop it, it might kill everyone on this planet.”
Chapter 8
The Ashen Curse
Carin read aloud, for the second time, her letter from home. As she did so, she could feel Verek’s gaze boring holes through her. She glanced up once or twice and found him staring as hard as he had on the afternoon, so long ago, when he’d flushed her from hiding in his ensorcelled woodland. The only difference between the look he had given her then, and the way he stared at her now, was the absence of the fierce light of sorcery in his eyes. That fire in his gaze had all but blistered her at their first meeting.
When Carin finished reading, Megella made no response. The wisewoman appeared to be in shock.
Aren’t we all? Carin thought, shooting another glance at Theil.
Now that she had fallen silent, he had closed his eyes and was sitting with his chin slightly raised. The rest of his dinner of roasted antelope waited, cold and untouched, in front of him.
“It’s, uh, what you were afraid of, isn’t it?” Carin softly asked Theil when at least a minute had passed with no one speaking.
At her question, Verek opened his eyes. But as he met her gaze, he still said nothing.
Subduing a flutter in her stomach, Carin pressed on. “You were worried that Morann would bring plagues and pestilence into the world. But we did it, not her. You and me—we built a bridge between Earth and Ladrehdin, and now the disease that killed all those people in my native world has come to Ladrehdin. We brought it here.”
“The gold?” Megella interjected, also looking at Verek. “Those coins you brought from Carin’s world? Diseased? Tah!” The wisewoman clucked her tongue and murmured, “I disfavored those coins from the start. They bear the image of a demoness.”
“You mean the lady with the torch?” Carin shook her head. “No, Megella. I don’t think that’s a demoness. And from what I’ve read”—Carin’s nod at Verek was a nod, also, to his library—“gold is gold, anywhere in the cosmos. It’s inert—inactive. So I’m pretty sure the gold isn’t the problem.”
From under her shirt, Carin pulled her crystal dolphin on its string. “I’m afraid this may be the problem. This, and the one Theil is wearing. We know the crystals can connect worlds. They’ve pulled us across from one to another.” Carin tucked the dolphin out of sight again, uncomfortable with the way it caught and reflected the light from their campfire. “Now it’s looking like something came across with us … something deadly.”
Megella stretched forth her hand. “Widgeon, let me see that crystal.”
Carin glanced at Verek. When he gave her an almost imperceptible nod of permission, she pulled her dolphin back into the light, drew its string over her head, and handed the trinket to the wisewoman.
Meg studied it closely.
“How do you come to be sporting this? Tell me exactly,” the woman demanded, not looking up.
Verek joined the conversation then, though in a strained voice and with evident reluctance.
“We took the crystals from Morann. As I said before, they are capricious things.” He raised his shoulders in a sort of stiff shrug. “Fickle.”
Theil locked gazes with Carin, and she knew he was remembering what Morann had said to him: “The difficulty—as I have discovered by dint of much trouble—is that the charms may act in unexpected ways. One does not always get what one seeks.”
The wisewoman was frowning thoughtfully, still studying Carin’s dolphin. “I have never seen such crystals before,” Meg said, “but I think they must be the same amulets that Merriam described to me.”
“My grandmother?” Verek asked in obvious surprise. “How could she have known of these things? You told me she left Lord Legary’s house before Morann took up residence there.”
Megella tilted her head. “That necromancer was not the rightful owner of the crystals. If you found them in her possession in her mountain stronghold, then we must suppose that she stole them from Legary—on her way out the door, quite possibly, as she fled his wrath. The story I got from Merri was that two crystal dolphyns had been heirlooms handed down in the House of Verek since time out of mind. Where they had originally come from, no one seemed to know. But the family tradition held that they had been a gift from a party of strange travelers … beings not fully human … a species of otherworldly creatures that were possessed of godlike powers.”
Carin gasped, her thoughts spinning. “Otherworldly?”
The wisewoman nodded. “Farfetched, I used to think. But now I must reconsider.”
As Meg handed the dolphin back, the woman rubbed her forehead as if to stir her memories. “That was the story Merri told: The travelers came to Ruain, they presented the crystals to Legary’s ancient forebear, and then they went on their way, never to be seen or heard from again.”
“They crossed the void,” Verek muttered.
Megella shrugged. “That is one interpretation. After my sister teased me with her first astounding tale concerning them, she told me other stories that swirled around those dolphyns. Some in the family had claimed that the crystals were the source of all magical power in the whole of Ladrehdin. Magic began in Ruain, they said, thanks to the gift bestowed on that land by the strange travelers. Eventually, the power would spread through all the world.”
Verek nodded. “That is similar to what my grandfather told me. He recounted no stories of dolphyns—perhaps he was too mortified, having allowed Morann to steal the treasures from his house. But he did say that Ruain was the source of all the magic in this world.”
“Did he ever speak to you of the Ashen Curse?” Megella asked, and Carin thought she detected a certain sharpness in the wisewoman’s tone.
Verek looked startled. Carin knew her wysard well enough to appreciate just how great a shock it took to make him display his reaction so openly.
“Legary taught me much of Ladrehdin’s history,” Verek muttered, frowning now, “but when he mentioned the Ashen Curse he spoke in terms of myth. I never quite knew whether he believed the Curse had swept lethally through the world of his forebears, or whether he thought it merely a legend that had grown with the telling.”
“Oh, wheesht, it happened.” The wisewoman rocked gently back and forth on her blanket. “And according to Merri, the crystals were responsible for that catastrophe. The family tradition, she said, was that the dolphyns brought to the ancient world a great sickness. We who are alive today are the descendants of a relative handful of survivors. And among those survivors, say the legends, were the first wysards of Ladrehdin. From the plague, they emerged with inexplicable—magical—new powers.”
Verek had again fallen silent, but after a moment of staring into the fire he resumed his exchange with his aunt, slowly, as though thinking out loud.
“What I take from this, when these legends of Ladrehdin are viewed through the lens of Carin’s letter”—Theil gestured vaguely at the papers Carin still held—“is that the crystals must be looked upon as double-edged swords. For what they brought to our ancestors, they exacted a payment in blood. The Ashen Curse of the ancients … most of the population killed …”
Even by firelight, Carin thought she could see the co
lor drain from Theil’s face.
“Great merciful powers!” he swore. “Aunt Megella, is that what we are facing now? Has the plague returned?”
“I do not know. I can only repeat the traditions and tell you what your grandmother told me.”
Verek drew from under his shirt the crystal that he wore. He pulled its silver chain over his head and held the dolphin away from him, looking at it with an expression of revulsion.
“Drisha help me. I killed my mother to stop this from happening. And now I have taken her place as a destroyer of worlds. The blood of millions will be on my hands.”
Carin reached for the dolphin and pulled it from Verek’s grasp.
“Wait a minute,” she said as a thought rose out of the ferment in her mind. “There’s something else. In the letter my, uh, mother left for me, she talked about me loving my dolphin necklace.”
“Your necklace,” Megella echoed. “When you were a child? You had one of your own before you left your native world and came here?”
Carin nodded. “According to my mother, I wore it everywhere. At night, it hung beside my pillow as I slept. If the crystals spread the bleeding disease—the Ashen Curse—then why am I still alive? I would have been exposed to it constantly in my childhood.”
She looked from Meg to Theil. “The same goes for both of you. About being exposed to it, I mean. If I’ve understood you correctly, these two dolphins”—Carin held up Verek’s on its silver chain and her own on a ratty string—“were in Ruain when you and Merriam lived there, Megella, before the necromancer came to the house. And Theil must have been around them—under the same roof with them—for the first ten years of his life, before Morann took off with them.” Carin gazed at the wysard. “You remembered them from your childhood, didn’t you?”
Verek lifted his chin, then slowly nodded, as though finally accepting something that had not been clear in his mind until another’s voice affirmed it.
“To say that I ‘remembered’ the crystals is putting the case too strongly. But there is no denying that the shock of recognition jolted me almost off my feet when I saw them. Though my grandfather never spoke to me about them, and I could not summon a definite memory of having glimpsed them in my boyhood, my eye went immediately to your crystal dolphyn when you, Carin, first showed me the image of your childhood bedroom. The crystal’s being there unsettled me to my core. I felt I viewed an object of power—a power lost to my world. I believed I was within my rights to reclaim it. And so I had you bring me the amulet.”
Carin tilted her head.
“But now I’m wondering,” she said slowly, working it out as she spoke, “whether those same ‘strange travelers’ who came to Ladrehdin could have brought my dolphin to Earth, maybe a very long time ago. Who knows how many people have worn that crystal, down through the years? Eventually it came to me. And when I got to Ladrehdin and found another two dolphins just like it, they were on a chain that is meant to hold three pendants.”
Carin held up Verek’s dolphin again, taking care this time to display the two empty mountings on its chain. She dangled her crystal from the mounting that it had once occupied, then jerked her head in the direction of Ruain, which lay far to the north still.
“It can’t be a coincidence, this necklace that Morann stole from Legary, with its place for a third dolphin. Maybe those travelers—whoever they were—left these two crystals here but stashed the third one on Earth. Or maybe they were all three here originally.”
Carin shook her head, feeling sore-brained from trying to work it out.
“The more I think about it, the more I get the idea that the dolphins may protect anyone who has been around them at any time. The three of us, for instance … and even my parents on Earth.” She picked up her letter from the blanket beside her and fluttered the several sheets of it. “While everyone was dying around them, my mother and father remained healthy. They buried the dead, wrote me these pages, and then left on their boat to search for survivors.”
Carin lowered the dolphins and her letter. “I think I’ve changed my mind. Maybe the crystals aren’t the problem. Rather than spread the bleeding disease, maybe they give people immunity to it.”
“Perhaps they do both,” Megella said, straightening her back and extending her hand questioningly toward her great-nephew, as if seeking his help in grasping something she couldn’t quite reach. “What is it called, Theil? I read it in a book once—the notion that a physician may build a patient’s resistance to a sickness by deliberately exposing him to a weakened or milder form of the disease.”
“I never read that book, Aunt,” Verek replied, “but it makes a certain kind of sense. It might begin to explain what Merriam said about the crystals being the source both of the Ashen Curse and of magical power on Ladrehdin.”
Carin shifted on the blanket under her. “And on Earth, too?” she murmured, mostly to herself.
Leaning in to listen closely, she added, “Please tell us what you read in that book, Meg.”
The wisewoman sighed. “My memory is not what it was, widgeon, but I will try.” She frowned in concentration. “As I recall the story, it was a village wisewoman who noticed that dairymaids almost never came down with the pox. So she persuaded the local farmers to employ the children from her village to milk their cows every summer. And after that, the villagers were never again afflicted with the pox. The physician who wrote of it—and I am sure I must have read his account in your grandfather’s library, Theil—the physician conjectured that the children had contracted a mild form of cowpox during their summers in the barns. The cowpox did them no harm. And when they had recovered from it, they were protected afterward against the more virulent pox that erupted from time to time in other villages.”
Verek nodded. “Suffer first a minor illness, and from it gain immunity to worse afflictions. I have seen it happen. And if that is the case with those”—he pointed at the dolphins Carin had lowered to the blanket beside her crossed legs—“then we should seek their widest possible exposure. The more people we meet, the more protection we may bestow.”
“Or the more disease we may spread,” the wisewoman countered. “We cannot ignore that possibility, given the timing of this outbreak. The pair of you come skipping across the void, and mere days afterward I watch a young family bleed to death in their beds.” Megella gestured toward the funeral pyre, where embers and gobbets still glowed in the night. “My vigil brought home to me, most forcefully, why the ancients called their plague the Ashen Curse. The bleeding disease drains its victims of the red blood of life.”
“We are going round in circles,” Verek muttered.
“That is, perhaps, to be expected,” Megella said, “when one has little more than hearsay, old stories, and legends to go on.”
“And letters from home,” Carin added, waving hers, “written by people who may or may not still be alive.”
She noticed Verek running his gaze over the dolphins on the blanket beside her. Carin glanced down and saw the crystals sparkling in the firelight.
“You have planted a question in my mind, fìleen,” Verek said, raising his eyes to Carin’s. “Together, we took from Morann all the amulets that could link this world to others. You risked your life to return four talismans of power to their native realms. I dealt with the others as best I could—the untried ones that you bundled for me in my knotted shirt, which I carried with me to ‘Earth.’ I burned them in a bonfire, crushed their charred remains to powder, and buried the powder in as deep a hole as I could dig in the sands of that world.” Verek rubbed his hand down his thigh, as though drying a sweaty palm. “I pray to Drisha that I destroyed their power with them.”
He was silent for a moment, his gaze turning inward. Then he refocused.
“But those remain”—Verek nodded at the crystals—“and their power is intact. From time to time against my skin as I wear the dolphyn on its chain, I feel the potency course through it. Do you, fìleen?”
“I did at firs
t,” Carin replied. “There’s an energy in them. I used to dislike it. But then I guess I got used to the way it feels, because I don’t notice it now.”
“And that, I think, is dangerous,” Verek muttered. “We have grown too accustomed to these things. We think of them as our safe-conducts through the void. Even now when we are safely returned to Ladrehdin and on our way to Ruain, we still wear the crystals as though they are nothing more than jewelry.”
“But they are much more, aren’t they?” Carin whispered. “I remember what you said after we took them from Morann. You said, ‘The crystals act for themselves and need no magician’s voice to stir in them the power they possess.’”
Verek rubbed his right hand down his thigh again.
He wants to use his magic, Carin thought. But he can’t. Until we get him home to Ruain and back on the brink of his wizards’ well, he’s got no powers to draw on.
“Fìleen,” Verek said suddenly, intensely. “Can you destroy the crystals the way you destroyed the giant cat and the mantikhora?”
The wisewoman gasped audibly.
“Surely not!” Meg exclaimed. “A mantikhora? That is a creature of myth. You are not telling me you met with one?”
Carin shrugged. “I don’t know what the thing was, but Morann had a pair of them. She’d brought them across the void from a desert world that crawled with freakish animals. I called them mantikhora because they reminded me of the creatures in the fable—part crocodile and part scorpion. Very ugly. We killed them both.”
Verek laughed, a sound that seemed out of place, given the seriousness of this discussion. He was, Carin thought, further gone into a state of nerves than she had imagined he could get.
“‘We’ did no such thing,” Verek said. “Carin alone killed them. With her magic, she destroyed them.” He looked at Megella. “Do not be deceived, Aunt. By that point I was helpless, at the mercy of the daeva. If Carin had not drawn upon her powers to save me, I would have died then and there.”
The Wisewoman (Waterspell 3) Page 9
