Tan bent toward her and pointed to the nearest copse of trees. Sitting in front of the trees was a small rabbit. “Do you see anything other than the flowers?”
One of the youngest boys gasped and clapped his hands together, scaring the rabbit away.
“I saw it, Utu Tonah!” he shouted.
“When was the last time any of you were outside the city?” he asked.
They stared at him for a moment, no one answering.
“You must have left the city at some point,” Tan said.
A few of the younger ones started murmuring softly to each other, but no one looked over, almost as if making a point to avoid his eyes.
“Mat,” he said, looking at the boy who’d demonstrated earth shaping ability. The boy blanched when Tan called on him, and the others around him parted, giving him space. “When were you last outside the city?”
Mat swallowed and looked at the ground. “We weren’t allowed, Utu Tonah.”
Tan suppressed a sigh. Not allowed. Was that how the previous Utu Tonah controlled them? “The rest of you? When were you outside the city?”
For long moments, no one answered.
“I left earlier in the week,” Fasha said. A smile started to spread across her face. “On his draasin.”
A couple of the children laughed, but they looked at Tan and it died off.
Tan focused on Fasha. “What did you see when you sat atop his back?”
Her eyes went distant. “Everything is so small from there.”
“A view from there lets you see the world is different than it looks here, doesn’t it?”
She nodded.
The older boy who had refused to sit on the draasin shot Fasha a glare. “Not all of us can ride the draasin. Can we, Fasha?”
“You were given a chance,” she shot back. She blinked and turned to Tan. “Wasn’t he, Utu Tonah?”
Tan didn’t want there to be arguments about the draasin. Asgar had been willing to allow Fasha to ride on him in order to make a point, but there might be something that Tan could do that was similar.
“What is your name?” he asked the boy.
He shuffled his feet and didn’t meet Tan’s eyes. They all treated him the same way, and he wondered if the Utu Tonah had not allowed them to look at him. “Henrak, Utu Tonah.”
“We call him Hen.”
Tan looked up to see who had spoken and saw a younger boy whose face had flushed. “Thanks,” he said. To Henrak, he said, “Hen, would you like to share the same view?”
His face went white. “I… the draasin…”
Tan shook his head. “Not with the draasin. Let me show you.”
He held out his hand, and Henrak took it carefully.
Using a shaping of wind and fire, Tan lifted them into the air, sending them higher and higher until they practically stood on the clouds overlooking the city. “What do you see, Hen?” he asked.
The boy trembled. “My Utu Tonah?”
“Look down. It’s okay. I won’t drop you.”
“How can you hold me here like this? When I was bonded, I could barely hold myself above the ground.”
Tan hadn’t considered that some of the children may have been able to shape themselves into the air nearly as well as he could. With the bonds, they would have control over the elementals, and that control would have given them the ability to travel in a similar way. Not the same, not unless they were warrior shapers, but close enough that they would have been able to see the world from this perspective.
“When I first began to shape, I could barely carry myself,” Tan admitted. “Time and experience showed me that I could do much more than that. Now, we can talk of shaping from the ground, but what do you see up here?”
Hen leaned over. His face screwed up as he studied the ground. “I see the city.”
“Look beyond the city,” Tan instructed. “What else do you see?”
“Nothing but the land around Par-shon. And the water.”
Tan nodded. “Water. What do you think is beyond the water?”
Hen looked up at him. “That’s where you come from, isn’t it?”
“There’s that, but can you see that there’s more than only Par-shon?”
From up here, Tan had always had the sense that there was more to the world than his small part of it. That might be the greatest gift the Great Mother had given, sharing with him the ability to have a perspective where he could see from up high and realize that he was only a part of something greater. Too often, he didn’t slow down and take the time to appreciate that fact. Especially now, when he was asked to do so much, and when he traveled on a warrior shaping, moving too quickly to really have the opportunity to slow down and see the world below him.
That had always been the advantage of traveling with Asboel. There had been a peacefulness to riding with the draasin, a sense of the draasin’s part in something greater.
“I can see,” Hen said.
Tan sighed and carried Hen back down to the others. They waited, and a few of them accosted Hen and asked what they had done.
Tan realized that he would have to show each of them the same.
“Next one,” he said.
Back in the tower, Tan was studying one of the marks when Tolman caught up to him. Elanne had called them bonds, but that didn’t seem the right term for them. They were different than runes, though. Tan was certain of that, but not quite sure why.
“My Utu Tonah,” Tolman said as he approached. He bowed his head and kept his eyes fixed on the floor. “You were with the young ones today?”
Tan glanced over. “I thought they could use a different perspective.”
Tolman swallowed. “They tell me that you carried them to the sky?”
Tan pulled his attention away from the rune. Amia still hadn’t had the opportunity to study them with him. She had a different understanding of runes, and he suspected that she might be able to help him. What he really wanted was to be able to reach Honl, but the wind elemental still didn’t answer when Tan tried to reach to him.
“Was that a problem?”
“Not a problem, Utu Tonah, only that you don’t need to burden yourself with working with the students. I have agreed to teach as you requested. You have enough to do otherwise.”
Suppressing a sigh, Tan smiled at the other man. “I will make time for those with potential, Tolman. They need to understand a better way to use their abilities.”
Tolman nodded and clutched his hands together. “Of course, Utu Tonah. I don’t mean to imply that you can’t work with the students, only that I understand you have other demands of your time.” He hesitated. “Was there a reason you chose to carry them above the city?”
“I wanted to show them a different view than the one that they get down on the ground.” More than that, he had wanted to have a chance to simply interact with them and had used the opportunity to get to know them better. Most still viewed him as the Utu Tonah, the man who killed the previous Utu Tonah, but a few began to see him differently. It was those he thought to reach, especially as he continued to struggle with understanding Par-shon.
“I notice that you’ve been studying these lately,” Tolman noted, motioning to the runes.
Tan reached toward the rune, sending a shaping through it. Was it coincidence that the rune that had sat overtop opposed this particular element, or had the Utu Tonah placed that here for a different reason?
“Par-shon has many of these throughout the city,” he said.
“These are the ancient bonds,” Tolman said carefully. “The Mistress of Bonds could tell you more about them, I think.”
Tan pulled his hand back and looked down the hall. Another of the same type was located farther down the hall. Much like this one, there was more power to it than what he saw at first. But what was it? More than simply the effect of the rune, what pattern was he missing in it?
“The Mistress of Bonds does not want to share what she knows with me.”
Tolman gasped s
oftly. “She should share with the Utu Tonah.”
“She claims that I’m interested in destroying the history of Par.” Tan sent another shaping into the rune, determined to understand the secret that he detected within it. There had to be more to it, but what exactly? “Why would she feel that way, Tolman?”
The man looked at the ground. “Utu Tonah, I don’t believe that I can answer for the Mistress of Bonds. If you would like me to bring her here…”
Tan shook his head. “No. I don’t think that will be necessary.”
Tolman nodded with a relieved expression and shuffled his feet, leaning away from Tan. The message was clear.
“You may go,” Tan said. But as Tolman started away, Tan raised a hand. “Tell me, where would I find the records for Par?”
Tolman blinked. “The records, my Utu Tonah?”
Tan nodded. Elanne didn’t want to share with him, but she had more of a spine than Tolman. At least, it seemed that she did, but what did Tan really know?
And Tolman surprised him. “There are no records,” he said. “The Utu Tonah did not want records of a time before Par-shon.”
“What do you remember of the time before Par-shon?” Tan asked. “What can you tell me about Par?”
Tolman flicked his eyes to the wall briefly before looking away and staring at the ground in front of Tan’s feet. “There is nothing that I can tell you, really, Utu Tonah. That was a difficult time for all of us. Better that we simply forget.”
“You would forget your history?”
Tolman’s brow wrinkled in a pained expression. “We would forget the torment, my Utu Tonah. We would forget what was done to our people, and how many were lost. We would forget what it was like before—” He swallowed. “I am sorry, Utu Tonah. I get ahead of myself.”
Tan studied Tolman. Here was a man who could shape, one who could use earth with reasonable strength, but he feared what Tan would do to him. “What do you know about him?” Tan asked.
Tolman looked up. “Who?”
“Him. The Utu Tonah.” Tan inhaled slowly, thinking of what he’d seen of the previous Utu Tonah. He’d been so determined not to be killed—and not lose his bonds—that he knew nothing other than that the elementals referred to him as the Bonded One. The title suited him as well as Utu Tonah, two words that had some vague meaning in ancient Ishthin, but not so much that Tan could translate them easily enough to understand why the title had been chosen. Maybe Amia could help; all of his knowledge of Ishthin came from the shaped gift of knowledge that she’d shared with him. It was possible that she’d shared everything that she knew, but Tan figured it was also possible that there was more than what she had shared. “What can you tell me about where he came from before he came to Par?”
That much he had worked out, as well as some of the events after the Utu Tonah had come here and begun forcing bonds. As he gained power, there wouldn’t have been anyone able to withstand him, letting him grow even more powerful and forcing more and more bonds. But there had to have been something before he came to Par. The more that he considered it, the more certain he was that was the key to understanding the Utu Tonah.
“We never learned much about who he had been before,” Tolman said. “When he came… He showed strength with fire, much like you, summoning flames and performing shapings of such strength that many struggled to believe that what he did was possible.”
Tolman glanced up and met Tan’s eyes.
Maybe that was the reason they feared him as much as they had feared the previous Utu Tonah. Didn’t Tan come with the same connection to fire? And wasn’t what he was capable of doing just as impossible, especially given the connection he shared with the elementals?
Had he gone about reaching the students the wrong way? He thought that by demonstrating fire and showing his connection to the elementals, they would understand that there wasn’t a need for a bond, but maybe they feared him even more because he didn’t require the same type of bond as the Utu Tonah. At least with him, the bonds were visible, and they could see how heavily bonded he was, even if they didn’t know what it meant.
“Do you know why he came to Par?” Tan asked.
Tolman shook his head. “Perhaps some of the council will have known, but most lost their lives in those early days.” Tolman forced a smile and nodded to Tan. “He brought order, and Par-shon was better for it.”
Tan sniffed. “But Par was not.” He nodded to Tolman. “Thank you. You have given me much to think about.”
Tolman bowed his head as he took a step back. “Of course, my Utu Tonah.”
13
A Search For Understanding
Tan sat alone in the home that had once been the previous Utu Tonah’s. No fire burned in the hearth, and he pushed away the sense of the elementals, searching for a sort of silence and solitude, wanting nothing more than a sense of emptiness around him.
He needed to understand what had brought the Utu Tonah to Par-shon. There had been something that was more than about the elementals here, though he couldn’t find it in the journal.
The journal lay open in front of him, and he had pored over it again, searching for answers and thinking that they might be found within the pages of the text that the Utu Tonah had left behind, but the only thing that he found was the detail of his desire to reach for the elementals. Not so much desire, he realized, but a need for the connection, for the power that came from it, though Tan had not been able to understand what more the Utu Tonah had wanted other than power.
Closing the book, he leaned back in the chair. There had to be something more. The Utu Tonah had chased power—that much was true and undeniable—but there was something more to it than what Tan had discovered. Why had he come here? From what Tan could tell, the Utu Tonah had already forced several bonds even before he had come to Par-shon. To Tan, that meant that he’d come seeking bonds, but possibly something else as well.
Searching the tower yielded no clear answers, not where Tan thought they would have been. When he had been trapped here in Par-shon, the Utu Tonah had occupied the tower. But that wasn’t the sense that he had now that he’d returned. The Utu Tonah might have spent some time in the tower, but it wasn’t the only place he had occupied.
That had been this home.
Would he find any answers here, or would there only be more questions?
With a sigh, he left the room and made his way down the hall. The need to understand his predecessor drove him, even thought he recognized that he might not be able to. The people of Par-shon—most of them at least—didn’t necessarily want him to remember. But Tan needed answers.
The longer he searched, the more he began to wonder if he should have left the former Utu Tonah alive. At least then Tan would have been able to question him. With the man gone, there was no way for him to know—to really know—what his goal had been.
What did the runes scattered all around the city mean? Were they tied to the reason the Utu Tonah had come or was there something else? And why were so many in a state of disrepair?
The sprawling estate was massive compared to the small home that he shared with Amia in Ethea. There were dozens of rooms, many for the staff assigned to serve them, and a massive kitchen. Tan had searched all the rooms in the estate, but so far had not found anything that would help him understand.
As he passed another servant in the hall, he paused. “Maclin,” Tan said, turning to face the man.
The servant stopped, his back straightening with tension. “My Utu Tonah,” he said carefully. All of the servants moved cautiously around him now, especially since he had destroyed the runes in their jewelry and their clothing when he’d first arrived. He began to suspect that had been a mistake, but how could he do anything to repair that?
“You served here with the previous Utu Tonah.”
Maclin nodded. “Yes, my Utu Tonah.”
“What was he like?”
Maclin finally turned to face Tan. He kept his eyes lowered, and his chubby cheeks
were flushed. Like all of the servants in the estate, he wore a long, gray robe cinched at the waist with a length of black silk. “I am sorry, Utu Tonah. I do not understand the question.”
“The previous Utu Tonah. What was he like? What did he do when he wasn’t at the tower?” Or off trying to steal bonds from the elementals, Tan chose not to say.
Maclin’s head bobbed, and he gripped his wrist in front of him and swayed slightly. “He was a powerful man, much like you, my Utu Tonah. As you said, he spent much of his time in the tower, but not all.”
“Where else did he spend his time?”
Maclin shook his head. “We never learned. He would leave Par… Par-shon,” he corrected himself.
Tan suppressed a smile. There weren’t many who still referred to the island as Par, which meant that maybe Maclin was older than Tan even realized. If that were the case, he would have a different understanding about the Utu Tonah and what had changed once he came.
As far as Tan knew, the Utu Tonah had others he trusted, some nearly as bonded as he had been, who had been responsible for securing Doma and Chenir. They likely acted on his behalf, but Tan doubted they had done so under his direct guidance. Would Maclin know who they might have been?
“What can you tell me of Par before?” Tan asked Maclin.
“Before, my Utu Tonah?”
Tan nodded. “Before the Utu Tonah. Before Par-shon. What was it like here before all of that?”
Maclin’s eyes narrowed slightly, and Tan sensed a growing distrust at the reason behind the question. It was the same distrust that he sensed from Tolman, though why would Maclin feel the same way? Tolman had lived the Utu Tonah’s rule, had experienced the torment firsthand, but Maclin? How had the Utu Tonah treated his servants?
“Why would you ask of what is gone, my Utu Tonah? There is nothing remaining, not that matters. He took everything. Our temples, the protection of the land, and even the hearts of the people. Now we are Par-shon. Some say that it is better.”
Born of Fire (The Cloud Warrior Saga Book 8) Page 12
