The Pattern Scars

by Caitlin Sweet

  “Tell me where we’re going.”

  I swallowed. Thirst and dread; I wondered if there would be room for words. “Ranior’s Tomb,” I said, and just as I did I saw the turning—the place where a path of beaten dirt began. It curved away from the road, into a copse of trees. Beyond the trees was a meadow, which I did remember. I also remembered watching the line of celebrants surge up and up, toward the rocky hill that reared like a ragged tooth from the meadow. The high place where the War Hound had finally died, at the hand of the Flamebird of the islands. The place where Mambura too had died—his throat torn out by Ranior’s own dogs. The place where Ranior’s bones rested; where, once a year, his descendants came to give thanks for the Pattern he had made, and for the Pattern that had made him.

  The climb was difficult, and knots of people settled at the base of the hill to watch the others wend their slow way among the rocks and the bent, squat trees. There were many paths up to the single stone at the summit—many ways moulded by centuries of feet and hands, by people who had struggled to feel, in some small way, as Ranior must have felt. Grasni and I had reached the top last year; it had been our first time, and we had spun each other around as the wind tore at our hair and skirts and voices. The world below had been both vast and tiny: the crowd, the road, the farmers’ fields, the city itself, with its wall and its castle. Even the castle was dwarfed, from here. Just some spears of red stone surrounded by sky.

  With Grasni, pressed about by others, I had been able to gaze upon Ranior’s monument with simple awe. I could forget, as I looked at the carved lines and spirals that showed the hero’s Path, that Teldaru was behind me. I could forget the stories he had told me as I lay on my narrow, filthy pallet and waited for him to use his mirror and his knife. Mambura and Ranior and Teldaru—these words were echoes, snatched away by wind. Now, though, I stood where the path began to climb and he was the only one beside me and every one of his mad words rang in my ears, as if he had spoken them days, not years, ago.

  I started up the hill. I had taken about twenty steps when he called, “Mistress Intrepid Seer. Where are you going?”

  I turned. A stream of pebbles skittered down the slope; Borl barked and lunged at them. “To the top,” I called back. “Where you will do whatever it is you mean to do.”

  He was shading his eyes with his hand but I could still see them. Black waves; they would have lapped up around my feet if I had let myself look at them for too long. “No, dearest Nola,” he said, “we’re going in and under. Beneath. That is where I will do what I mean to do.”

  He led me around the base of the hill to a low stone door. The stone was the same colour as the hillside’s dirt and spreading plants, and even when he brushed at the ivy that concealed the latch I had trouble seeing its whole shape. He drew a bunch of keys from beneath his tunic and up over his head and I thought suddenly of Uja and her cage. Uja, who had belonged to an island Otherseer; Uja, who did not need keys.

  “You must lead now.”

  I looked from him to the open door. Stepped toward it and crouched to look inside. “We’ll need a light,” I said. I smelled darkness and earth.

  “No,” he said. “This is a place where seers become like their unsighted fellows. Where they stumble down pathways, seeking a bright centre that will make sense of the rest. No, Nola—here you have only your eyes.”

  I crawled forward before I could feel fear. I heard Teldaru behind me; I heard Borl whine and scuffle. The door shut the outside away. I groped and felt an edge that was a stair, and another below it. I reached above me and found only space, and stood.

  “I hear your own Paths are black,” Teldaru said. His breath was warm on my neck.

  Mistress Ket, I thought. Grasni. “I had to know,” I said—just a murmur, but it wrapped around us both. “I had to try.”

  “Of course you did.” I could hear his smile. “I’m a little disappointed, in fact, that it took you so long to ask someone to help you try. But I told myself that you were happy, and that this was good for both of us.”

  “I wasn’t happy.” Louder, so that my real voice would drown out the one in my head: He’s right, he’s right.

  “I was relieved when Mistress Ket came to tell me what you’d asked Grasni to do. When she told me what Grasni had seen. Because now you are ready to return to me.”

  His hands were on my neck, beneath my hair. I remembered how I used to stand and tremble, when he touched me like this years ago. I twisted around and found him in the darkness: his cheekbones with my fingertips, his lips with my lips. He started backward and I drew my hands over his chest and down his sides and held him still. His mouth was open a bit; I ran my tongue around and in and forced it wide. My head was filled with words—chattering, noisy ones that were more insistent than the throbbing of my skin. You have no idea I’m grown now I’m not fourteen any more I’m not yours I’ll show you I’m not afraid. . . .

  I pulled away. His breath left him in a rush that was almost a whistle. Before he could speak or grope for me again I turned and began to pick my way down the stairs. I moved slowly from step to step, words still spinning. Idiot; he knows the way and you don’t; he could reach out anywhere and have you.

  At first my breathing and footsteps were so loud that I heard nothing else. I imagined him three steps behind me, smiling, listening. Ten stairs, eleven, twelve, and then floor; I shuffled forward, drawing my hand along the wall. It was stone, pocked with holes or carvings, and so cool that I longed to pause and lay my forehead against it. I followed the wall—its bends and sharp corners—my free hand waving in front of me, lest there be a dead end. Which, very soon, there was.

  I turned and retraced my steps. More bends and corners, and another wall before me, as well as the ones beside. I leaned against this one, my fingers feeling for a door or a crack, a space I could climb through, but there was only rock.

  “Teldaru.” I expected my voice to echo, but it was flat. I set my back to the dead-end wall and called, more loudly, “Teldaru! I’m lost—I’m sure this will please you. I need your help, which will please you even more.”

  I tried to be very quiet. I listened for his footsteps or Borl’s wet panting. Silence pressed on my ears. “Teldaru!” I shouted as loudly as I could, yet still my voice was swallowed before it could truly sound.

  Maybe he is angry at me for having Grasni Othersee . . . maybe he doesn’t need me at all any more and this is where I’ll die.

  “No,” I said, to the darkness and to myself, and straightened.

  “The Pattern is ocean,” Yigranzi had said to me once, “too big to see entire, its currents too numerous to feel all at once. So we watch our own shores—the tides and waves we can see—and we hope they show us more.” I—only eight or nine—had frowned my incomprehension and Yigranzi had clicked her tongue against her teeth. “But how will this ocean talk help you, Sarsenayan land-girl? Let me try this: the Pattern is all the roads, all the paths that lie across the world. You see only the one your own feet are on; you feel its little familiar stones and you know that it will lead you to walk some of the others that you do not know.”

  The small, I thought, in the night-dark beneath Ranior’s Hill. The small within the large. Something I can feel.

  I put my hands back on the wall. Traced bumps and zigzags and spirals: the frenzied, inscrutable shapes of the Pattern. So many shapes; I could feel nothing but confusion, beneath my fingertips. I took several paces and my hands slipped from the raised carvings into the hollows among them. These hollows were smooth and long—so long they had no end I could feel. They ran around the carvings and off into the black, and as I traced one and then another, the space around me shifted. Perhaps it lightened, too; I blinked and saw the wriggling, wobbling images that usually appeared after I had Otherseen.

  The Otherworld, I thought, wondering and certain; it’s here.

  The hollow lines led me. I walked more and more quickly because I knew that no more walls would rise before me. Paths in stone, a
nd the one beneath my feet; I was swift and sure, bathed in a light that only my Othereyes could see. I did not think about where the path would end. I was here, rounding corners, taking stairs two at a time, stepping over tumbled rocks and pools of dark, still water. I breathed deeply, and even the dank air seemed Otherlit as it filled me.

  And then there was a door.

  I stopped before it, my hands still on the lines that had brought me here. The lines that ended here. The door was very tall, unlike the one in the hillside. It was unmarked stone, with a metal ring in its centre. I put both hands on the ring, which was scratchy, ridged with rust. I pulled, expecting it to open just a little—but it swung wide and I stumbled backward.

  Four steps rose beyond the door. I went up them slowly, suddenly aware, again, of the noises my feet and breathing made. At the top there was more darkness; the Otherworldly glow had faded, inside and out, and I stood motionless, my arms outstretched.

  “Teldaru!” His name echoed; I was listening to its throbbing, thinking of Yigranzi’s waves, when light blazed around me. I dug the palms of my hands against my eyes, rubbing at tears. A very long time seemed to pass before my vision was clear.

  Teldaru was sitting on the edge of an enormous stone sarcophagus. Two lanterns burned beside him, and two torches behind him, in wall brackets. The sarcophagus was painted in patterns of scarlet, white and gold, as were the walls that stretched up and up, into a dome that was all gold. I caught glimpses of figures in the paint—Ranior with his hounds behind him, and his army, and his enemies. I did not look at these. I looked at Teldaru, who was leaning forward, his legs swinging like a boy’s.

  “Come here.” He sounded like a boy, too; happy, eager. I took two steps over red flagstones. Two steps; I saw a knife in his hand. Bardrem’s knife, so small and simple. I stood still.

  “Come here, Mistress Reluctant Seer.”

  Two more steps; I saw Borl, lying on his side beneath Teldaru’s dangling feet. I waited for him to leap up and snap at me, but he did not.

  “Look at you.” Teldaru was smiling. I had forgotten how bright he was, in firelight. “How have I kept myself away from you, all these years? But this is what I needed to do. I needed to be sure that we were both ready.”

  I touched him, I thought as I took another step. I kissed him, and he was surprised—but now he is above me, watching, and the knife . . .

  I glanced again at Borl. I was close now; surely he would growl, at least. I saw his sides rising and falling—only I didn’t: it was something else moving, easing outward, darker and larger than he was.

  “What have you done?” I said as Borl’s blood seeped toward my feet. His eyes were half-open and his tongue was lolling, nearly touching the blood. His neck was soaked black, except for the lips of the wound that ran across it. These were a livid, wet pink.

  “I have killed him,” Teldaru said in a low, warm voice—a voice for secrets and plans. “As you can see. I have killed him, and now you will bring him back again.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Borl’s blood was nearly at my feet and I could not move them. “I can’t bring him back,” I said. “It’s impossible.”

  Teldaru frowned. “Nola. When have I ever told you to do something impossible?”

  “And forbidden,” I said, my voice rising. “Even looking into the Otherworld of an animal is forbidden, just—”

  “Just as Otherseeing for a seer is forbidden? Just as using Bloodseeing is forbidden?” He pushed himself off the edge of the sarcophagus and landed lightly on the floor. “Your ‘forbidden’ is not the same as ‘impossible.’ Do not let your fear make you careless in your thinking.”

  “I’m not afraid.” And I was not. I did not believe him, and I was not afraid.

  He crouched by Borl, balancing away from the blood. He put his hand on the dog’s head and rubbed it so vigorously that it flopped against the stone. “I suppose it would be unreasonable of me to hope that you were already bleeding?”

  “I’m not,” I said. I was relieved, for a fleeting, deluded moment—and then I looked at the knife.

  He shrugged. “A pity. I hate to hurt you.”

  “Liar.”

  He smiled up at me. “Listen, now. This is how it will go.”

  I am alone in thick grey fog. It is in my eyes and nose and between my fingers. I turn myself around and around, or I think I do, since the view does not change.

  “I can’t,” I cry. My mouth is full of mud, porridge, sweet rotten fruit, but he hears me somehow.

  “You can.” His voice is so clear; I should be able to see him. “His Paths are fresh. Look for them.”

  “But I don’t know what to look for—”

  A wisp of orange like flame that flutters by me and vanishes.

  A flash of yellow.

  Red that rises and froths around my knees.

  “Colours or shapes, Nola—you’ll see them—weave them together.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “You will.”

  If it were somewhere I recognized, like the desert of Chenn’s death, the desert I made of Laedon when I undid his Paths—but this place is strange and suffocating, and it throbs with the throbbing of my cut skin, drips with the dripping of my blood, and I cannot concentrate.

  Another yellow flicker, this one brighter. I reach with my aching hands and catch the end of it. It is rough, pocked like a tongue. I grip it, even though I do not want to. Let go, I think; turn away and close your eyes (all of them, real and Other)—because what is he going to do? Kill you too?

  But I grasp the colour, and as I do I feel what Teldaru told me I would: a tremor in my veins; a new pulse so strong that I lurch, on the hard, splintered ground. Something flows from me to the yellow, and it is not a flicker, any more—it is a ribbon, slender but solid.

  I stoop and run my hand over the red foam. It is real, just as the ribbon is; it gathers in my palm and hardens to the pulse that is mine and more than mine. Other colours, other shapes; I reach for each of them and somehow do not drop the rest. My arms move fast and faster and so do my feet, as if I am dancing. I gather in the vein ribbons and the bone roots and spin and they arc away from me, though I still hold them.

  “Nola—good; very good, my love—you are doing it.”

  Doing what? I think. I don’t understand—but my Otherself does. I dance through the pain that blooms in my hands, feet, legs and then all the way into my chest. The ground is no longer hard; it yields beneath me, and the fog lifts, and I see dark earth and a horizon, close and curved. I run toward it. If I run far and swiftly enough I might plummet off an edge.

  “No!” he shouts, and he is beside me, matching my stride, reaching for me with huge, crooked hands. I scream at him and at the soft, bright web that I am still weaving, even as I try to escape it. He cannot be in this Otherworld with me. Another impossibility—and yet I suddenly remember when I nearly lost myself in my vision of Chenn. The eagle with the golden head and crimson beak; its wings filling the sky until Yigranzi pulled my Otherself free. We were together, I think now, as Teldaru runs beside me. Yigranzi was with me in that vision and he is with me in this one . . . I whirl, or try to, but the pain is too great and he is too close. He wraps his hands around me and we fall.

  I was so cold I could not even shiver.

  “And now . . . you see.” His voice was thin and halting and close. I opened my eyes. Tried to, thought I had, but saw nothing. Not even grey fog or dancing black shapes. I was completely blind.

  “You see . . . the last thing about blood. Two Otherseers together. Both bleeding. Same vision.”

  “Impossible,” I wanted to say, one more time, just to make him angry, but my voice did not work either. My sense of touch, at least, seemed to be returning; I had begun to feel the stone beneath me. It was so hard that I nearly forgot the cold.

  “You see . . . another thing,” he rasped. I wondered, with a jolt of annoyance that made me feel abruptly alert, why my hearing was the only sense that se
emed truly intact. “Why I need you. So much. Remaking is . . . not like unmaking. Gives no strength. Steals it, instead. Took me too long to realize. Now I am certain . . . I need your help. When the time comes.”

  I tried to remember how I had felt after I had killed Laedon—whether I had felt strong. I could not. Though I did remember staring down at his twisted body. His bald head and his eyes weeping blood. I wondered suddenly where Teldaru was bleeding now; where he had cut himself, to enter my vision. Probably just a prick on a finger. Something tiny. (He had cut me on the underside of my right arm, which was throbbing—from the wound itself and from the tightness of the cloth he had already managed to bind around it.)

  The air seemed to be lightening. I hope it isn’t, I thought. I hope I really am blind and can never do his bidding again. Only I did not believe this, for as the world did brighten a bit, there was more relief in me than disappointment.

  He was silent for a long time. I dozed; he might have, too. I started awake when he spoke, closer than before, in his own smooth, light voice.

  “Many things must change. You and Grasni and Selera can no longer be students. You will take your place at my side and I will send the other two away. Find them posts in other royal households. Selera will like that, though she will stamp her feet and cry when I tell her she must go.”

  Another silence. I was definitely beginning to see again: stones and muddy colours that hurt my eyes, just as the quiet hurt my ears and the floor hurt my back. Everything too heavy, with too many edges.

  “Up now, my sweet.”

  His hands were on me, easing, propping, smoothing at my clothes and hair. I managed to wrench an arm away from him and he laughed, said, “Good girl!”

  I was sitting against the sarcophagus. Ranior’s bones, I thought, and felt no awe or even interest.

  “Look, Mistress Nola. See what you’ve done for me.” When I did not move he took my chin in his hand and angled my head down, to what was beside me.