Tatparo’s performance had only been average during his level one training. It wasn’t until his Level Two training, wherein warfare was the sole focus, that Tatparo began to shine. He had an inherent understanding of warfare strategy and battlefield tactics that put even Gemynd’s years of research on the subject to shame. It was as though the Deis created him solely for the purpose of fighting, and winning, a war. And it made Gemynd believe that, perhaps, the Deis could be on their side.
Gemynd nodded once. “Very well,” he said. “Stand with them.”
Gemynd watched silently as Tatparo descended the spiral staircase to join the troops on the floor of the pit. He had mixed feelings about demonstrating his abilities to the warriors. On the one hand, by seeing what he could do, they had something to strive for. On the other hand, he feared they would compare their abilities to his and find themselves lacking. He could not afford discouragement in even one of his warriors. Every single Iturtian in all of Todor was a warrior in his army, from the babies up to the elderly, men and women alike. And still, they numbered just shy of five thousand. He needed every single one of his warriors to be at top fighting condition, especially within their minds where it counted most.
When Tatparo reached the floor, he organized the army into pairs, every other warrior playing the role of Zobanite, just as they always did. But this time, Gemynd stopped them. “All of you will be Zobanites this time,” he said. For a moment, they hesitated, but then they each armed themselves with a wooden training sword and stood in the rectangular formation of the Zobanite army. Tatparo stood at the front as the leader of the forces. Gemynd shivered. That would be Soman’s spot on the real battlefield.
As Gemynd watched his army below and prepared for the demonstration, he recalled vividly the first time he’d seen his father do this very same thing. It was the day that Gemynd had fought Golath. He had not known that such glinting power was possible and he was utterly awed by his father’s ability. Until that moment, he had believed it was possible to psychpersuade only one individual at a time. But he had witnessed it with his own eyes: his father psychpersuading thousands at once.
Gemynd began practicing his father’s technique and within days had mastered it. He had not yet found the limit to the number of individuals he could psych-persuade and sometimes wondered if he could control all the minds in Todor at once.
Tatparo nodded that they were ready and Gemynd closed his eyes, mentally sending out a nudge in the form of a wave that passed through the minds of everyone in the pit. In the same instant, they all nudged back, which felt like the blow of a blacksmith’s hammer to his brain, but he steadied himself and allowed the sensation to pass.
Then he began to send out the thoughts: You are Zobanite. The warrior beside you is your enemy. Kill your enemy. Remove his head.
In a matter of seconds the battle was over. All five thousand of them hit one another in the neck with the side of their wooden swords and Gemynd retreated from their minds, closing all the doors behind him.
As most of the warriors were busy comparing neck wounds and boasting of who would have the biggest bruise, Tatparo smiled up at Gemynd. “I am honored to serve in your army,” he said in psychspeak.
Gemynd smiled back. Although he’d shared his techniques with all of his warriors, most were only able to psychpersuade one or two others. Tatparo seemed to be the only one catching on and his numbers increased each day. “It is your turn for a demonstration,” Gemynd said to him and descended the stairs to meet him on the floor. “I will stand as one of your warriors so I can see exactly how you are using the techniques I showed you.”
Tatparo nodded eagerly. “Thank you, Warden,” he said. “I am grateful for your assistance.”
Gemynd picked up a wooden sword and stood next to a young, female warrior. She blinked at him dreamily, then her cheeks turned red and she looked away. Gemynd reached out and grabbed her wrist. “Do not be so moved by a man’s face that it affects your fight,” he said sternly. “It is not a thing worth losing your life for and, I assure you, our enemy’s faces are far handsomer than mine. Until we have won, your only purpose is to fight. Do not forget that.”
The girl’s face turned red again, but this time her eyes and mouth narrowed into thin lines. “I was not moved by your handsomeness, sir,” she said. “I was moved to irritation by the fact that you took my sword. But seeing that you are the Warden, I figured it was your right. I had planned to keep my mouth shut on the matter until, of course, you made that impossible.”
Gemynd blinked at the girl. Though she was small in stature with brown hair and eyes, her pluck and candor reminded him so much of Numa that he found himself reaching out to her. Realizing what he was doing, he quickly pulled his hand back and turned to face Tatparo. But it was impossible to focus on the boy with the room becoming smaller by the second as it was. Were the walls really moving closer together? Would the entire Iturtian army be rendered bloody remnants, crushed between the stone walls? Or was it just a trick of Gemynd’s mind? Was his sudden inability to breathe merely a function of his imagining?
Before he could compose himself, he felt Tatparo’s nudge inside his mind. Instantly, he nudged back and tried to keep his mind open and free of thoughts to help the boy influence as many people as possible. Then Gemynd heard the command within his mind: You are Zobanite.
“I am?” Gemynd asked himself and looked down at his hands, wondering if they should be bigger. They seemed too small for a Zobanite’s hands. Soman’s hands were at least twice the size.
Gemynd imagined Soman’s hands and saw them pulling at tufts of snakegrass and working the oilpress and fumbling through a game of pick-up-sticks. Then he saw Soman’s hands the color of ash as he lay dying. “You are my brother,” Gemynd said. “I miss you. I have only my father now. I long for your friendship. How can they expect me to kill you?”
Then the command, “The warrior beside you is your enemy,” sounded in Gemynd’s head and he turned to look at the warrior beside him. But something caught his eye. Something in the center of the room. Something large and familiar.
Gemynd turned all the way around to look at what had caught his eye. It was the Baldaquin tree, growing right up through the center of the pit. “How did you get here?” Gemynd wondered aloud and began walking towards it.
It was just as massive as he’d remembered, the trunk taking up a vast amount of the pit floor and stretching up beyond where Gemynd could see. Strangely, the trunk was dappled with sunlight as it always had been in Aerie. Yet there was no sun in the pit.
Gemynd pressed his hand against the trunk and it felt like coming home. It was warm and felt alive, as though blood rushed through veins just below the bark’s surface. He pressed his cheek against it, inhaling its familiar, earthy scent and realized that it even seemed to be breathing.
Gemynd took a step back to see if, indeed, the tree was breathing when he noticed a grey-robed man sitting on the ground, leaning his back against the Baldaquin’s trunk. He held a book open in his lap and laughed heartily at something he’d just read.
“Keeper Stout?” Gemynd asked, approaching him.
“Gemynd!” Keeper Stout exclaimed, Joy radiating from his eyes and smile. “Won’t you sit with me for spell?”
Gemynd sat down next to Keeper Stout and smiled. It was all just as he remembered. His favorite teacher. The Baldaquin tree. Looking at Keeper Stout now, he couldn’t imagine that the man had ever betrayed him. Surely he had not really voted to use Gemynd to destroy Golath. He loved Gemynd. He always had. “Are you reading the Book of Life?” Gemynd asked.
Keeper Stout nodded and closed the book, showing Gemynd the title stamped into the old leather. “Do you remember it?” he asked. “Do you remember the Truths?”
“I remember them,” Gemynd replied. “But I don’t think I believe in them. I don’t know that I ever really did. It seemed I was always on the brink of madness when I studied them. They brought me only questions, never answers.”
Keeper Stout laughed again, the sound so familiar a bittersweet pang of nostalgia tightened Gemynd’s chest. “Oh, my boy, you always were a wily one,” he said. “The Truths brought you questions because that is precisely what you wanted from them. What would an Iturtian be without questions?”
“I found the questions infuriating and frustrating,” Gemynd argued. “They prevented me from being satisfied with knowing. I always envied Soman’s ability to simply accept the Truths.”
“I wonder where your thoughts would have turned had you not focused them so completely on the Truths,” Keeper Stout said. “Numa, certainly, but what else? What would that brilliantly clever boy in Aerie have thought about?”
Gemynd leaned back against the tree—certain now that it was breathing—and matched his breaths with it. What would he have thought about? He let his mind wander back to his life in Aerie. He wouldn’t have been satisfied for long in simply figuring out the workings of everything in Aerie. No, he would have required a bigger mystery than that to solve. He would have needed answers that were not readily apparent. As he thought about it, he remembered a deep feeling of loneliness, like a hole within him that could never be filled. “I would probably have spent my time obsessing over what had happened to my father,” he said. “I always felt incomplete without him.”
Keeper Stout smiled. “Perhaps, then, your questions about the Truths protected you from wondering about something more infuriating, more painful,” he said.
Gemynd felt his skin flush and he inhaled sharply in amazement. “You may be right,” he said. “Perhaps I should turn to the Truths once again and look upon them with fresh eyes. Study them anew without a hidden motive of blocking my loneliness. Perhaps it is time to forge a new relationship with them.”
“Perhaps,” Keeper Stout agreed and opened the Book of Life in his lap once more.
“What Truth are you studying now?” Gemynd asked, peering over his teacher’s shoulder.
“The eighth Truth: To exert power over another or to take power from another or to give up your own power is to make a choice that disrupts the Oneness of Life,” Keeper Stout said and gave Gemynd a wink. “That is just about as straightforward as a thing can be. Surely you have no questions about that Truth.”
Gemynd smiled, knowing that Keeper Stout was only teasing him. Then he put all his attention on the eighth Truth. It should be straightforward. To maintain the Oneness of Life, Gemynd knew he needed only maintain his own power while respecting the power of others. But what about in times of war? Does the eighth Truth mean that war was always disruptive to the Oneness of Life? Is there never a time when war is justified and necessary; when war is what preserves the Oneness? “What if a person must exert power over another in order to not give up his own power?” he asked aloud. “What if those are the only options? Which choice then is the better one? Which choice maintains the Oneness of Life more than the other?”
Keeper Stout smiled at him again, but this time there was a deep sadness in his eyes. “My dear Gemynd, in every situation there is always a point of balance,” he said. “Sometimes it is very hard to find, but it is always there. If you look hard enough, you will always find a way to hold on to your own power without taking power from another. I am certain of that.”
Keeper Stout’s words filled Gemynd with a sense of peace and hope that he had not known for a long time. He sighed and looked into his teacher’s eyes. “I miss you,” he said, feeling tears fill his eyes.
“Nonsense,” Keeper Stout said and laughed. “I am always but a memory away.”
Keeper Stout reached out and lightly patted Gemynd on the cheek. It was a touch of reassurance and Gemynd smiled. But then the Keeper continued tapping his cheek, over and over, to the point of annoyance. And the tapping grew harder and more insistent, until Gemynd had no choice but to pull back from the man’s reach. When he did, he saw Keeper Stout’s face twist and melt and reform itself into that of Tatparo.
“Warden. Warden. Are you well?” he asked as he lightly slapped Gemynd’s face.
“Of course,” Gemynd replied, trying his best not to appear confused. He looked around and noticed that the Baldaquin he had just been leaning on had become the warden’s watchtower in the center of the pit. Everything was just as it had been before the tree appeared. The cavernous pit was dark and sunless, filled with the heat of fire and five thousand Iturtian warriors.
“Was this part of the demonstration?” Tatparo asked.
Gemynd nodded, still reorienting himself to the present moment. “How many did you control this time?” he asked, remembering that Tatparo had been about to demonstrate his abilities.
“Fifteen, sir,” Tatparo said, beaming with pride.
“Well done,” Gemynd said, standing. “Perhaps tomorrow it will be twenty. Keep practicing. I am off to see the Director.”
Gemynd walked to the stairs and began his ascent to the surface. Although it was impossible to tell inside the pit, Gemynd’s internal sense of time told him that it was nearly sun down. For the last four weeks, since Numa had left, Gemynd met Golath outside and the two watched the sunset together as they discussed battle plans among other things. It had become a treasured time for Gemynd and he looked forward to it every day. He had grown even closer to his father over this time and Gemynd realized he loved him in a way he’d never expected. Golath had become his closest friend—his brother—along with being his father.
Normally Gemynd used his ascension time to review their battle strategy and look for any faults in their plan. But this time, he could not stop himself from wondering what had just happened. His encounter with Keeper Stout had seemed so real, but it couldn’t have been. Then what was it? A dream? A phantasm? A hallucination? His final plunge into madness?
To make matters worse, it was not the first time this sort of thing had happened. Ever since Numa had left him, Gemynd had been haunted by her presence. She was like a shadow, ever-present out of the corner of his eye and a constant ache that pressed at his periphery. And there was no remedy. It would not leave him. All he could do was try to stay one breath ahead of it. He managed well enough on days like today when he could focus on the warriors training below. But times when there were no distractions—especially when he tried to sleep—he was plagued by a cycle of pain and rage.
During those times, he relived the moments of Numa’s departure again and again. He would find himself back in time, Numa standing before him as real as anything. Sometimes, they were still in his chamber in the moments before she saw the pit, and he would talk her out of seeing it. In those times, she didn’t leave and he tried with all his might to stay there, but always he returned to the present as he knew it. Other times, they would go to the pit, but instead of leaving, she would turn to him with a smile and say, “Thank you for sharing this with me. I love you even more now.” But, again, he could never stay in that time as he wished.
But more often than not, he would relive the events as they had actually transpired. Over and over again, he saw Numa’s face fall as she fully took in what was happening in the pit, his hands reaching for her just as she vanished, leaving him to grasp at nothing. And then there were the times when Numa did not flee when she saw the pit, but instead became a stranger before Gemynd’s eyes. With a look of pure disgust in her eyes, she spat in his face and pulled her lips back in a snarl. “How could I have ever loved you? You sicken me, you soulless, wicked beast. All the cruelty you have shown these children I will deliver to you tenfold,” she would say. “When you are frightened, my specter will be there, slithering beside your ear, whispering reminders that you are utterly alone. When you are lonely and hunger for the feel of my body, I will be there, just out of your reach, taunting you with my beauty. You will spend every moment of the rest of your life aching for a love that will never be yours. And I will delight in every second of your pain.”
Her words felt like hot knives ripping through his chest, tearing him apart, until there was nothing left of him but fury and
he would lash out, striking her face hard with the back of his hand. As she fell to her knees, blood trickling from her lip, Gemynd felt an instant of satisfaction. For the briefest of moments, it felt good to cause her pain. But just as quickly as it came, the feeling would fade into guilt. No matter what she had done to him, he never wanted to hurt her.
Those times were the worst by far. He hadn’t known that there could be anything worse than Numa leaving. But that had been pure foolishness.
Golath was already at the surface when Gemynd arrived. As it had been for the last few weeks, the wind blew fiercely, blasting Gemynd with an abrasive spray of fine sand. He wrapped his cloak over his head and around his face, leaving only a tiny slit to see through and faced the west next to his father.
“We march tonight,” Golath said to Gemynd’s mind since the wind made speaking difficult. “As soon as the sun goes down.”
Gemynd nodded. He had known the time was approaching so he was not surprised to hear this, but an unexpected feeling of dread welled up inside him. “As you say,” he replied, trying to remind himself of his own faith in his father.
“There is a storm over Zoban mountain tonight,” Golath explained. “It will take us two days and nights to reach the mountain through the tunnels. If we are fortunate enough that this storm brings snow, the Zobanites should all be tucked into their cozy homes, avoiding the cold, when we attack.”
Gemynd nodded again. The tunnels had been Golath’s second best-kept secret after his ability to control many minds at once. For the last twenty years, Golath had planned and dug a system of underground tunnels that led from the pit in Iturtia directly beneath the city of Zoban. It was a strategic masterpiece, allowing the Iturtian army to reach Zoban undetected and attack when the Zobanites’ defenses were down. It was also completely unnecessary. As was the Iturtian army. Gemynd knew that he and Golath already had the power to control every Zobanite mind in Todor. There was no need to march an army there. There was no need to risk Iturtian lives. There was no need to fight the Zobanites at all. Still, Gemynd had learned not to question his father. His wisdom had always proved right. “The scouts have been watching Archigadh’s movements for several days now,” Gemynd said. “We should know exactly where he is when we attack.”
Disintegration: The Todor Trilogy, Book Two Page 16
