“Well, then,” I said to my companions. “Can you ride?”
Rohini cast me a long, dark look. “Can you tell me who you are?”
A short bark of laughter escaped me. “I am the monster who’s on your side. Let’s find a place to camp.”
33. Darkness Incandescent
I sent Nuad forward to lead us through the darkness and find a usable spot, not realizing until afterward that I had simply assumed command and no one had argued. I couldn’t focus on the issue: more stars than I had ever seen stretched above the barren waste we rode, and their energies played over my skin like the fingers of courtesans, begging me to open up and draw them in. Esus echoed around me, His Power thrumming on the silent air. The memory of those brief incandescent moments of connection with Nechton made thrills race periodically up my back, made my hands itch to turn the horse and ride west until I found him, made desires that would have shocked an ethical man gather in the power centers that trace a wizard’s spine.
But I had vowed to answer none of those needs: I remembered this fact, though tonight I wasn’t certain there was any sense in that decision. And I was responsible for the people with whom I rode. I glanced around at them, reminding myself who they were—and the intoxication of arcane power began to drain away.
Rohini rode in a haze of pain, the arcane wards that had shielded her altogether gone. It was a thing to add to the list of events that could knock out personal wards: contact with a Básghilae blade. The delicious shimmering net of spectral light that hung around Letitia might stop an ordinary weapon; might even stop the first blow of a Básghil. But after that she would be lost. I couldn’t allow things to progress that far.
Amien, meanwhile, slumped half-prostrate in the saddle: leaning heavily on the saddle bow, wavering between an expression that suggested a shattering headache and moments when I wasn’t sure he was conscious at all. The shimmer of arcane power I was accustomed to seeing on him lay shadowed by swirling darkness. No member of the Order could best him: the annual Pardan games at Aballo ensure that all know who the greatest Talents are. If Nechton could inflict this debilitation on him through indirect contact, what would happen when the wizards returned to Esunertos after the Moot? The dire answer and the obvious solution to the problem hung around me like a cloud of flies.
Finally Nuad found a withered-looking copse of trees beside the halfhearted flow of some stream that fed the Riga and reined. At least it wasn’t barren rock.
“Lord?” he said, looking at me. “It’s indefensible.”
“It’s all indefensible,” I rejoined. “I don’t think it matters.”
He nodded thoughtfully, the habit of trust and newfound dread of me warring in his gaze. “I don’t expect we’ll see them again.”
“Not tonight,” I agreed, and he gave voice to a humorless chuckle that said I was being dense. Finally I saw what I should have recognized immediately, what Nuad already knew: Básghilae would be useless against anyone who could drain their delicious energy. I wondered what weapon or tactic Nechton would roll out instead. I wondered how a man might follow up on the creation of the Shadow of the Sun.
I cleared my throat, glanced around as if anyone present might think my mind lay within a twelvenight’s travel of the mundane realm.
“Yes,” I said to Nuad. “It’ll do.”
Everyone slid or climbed or more than half-fell from the saddles. Thurro and Seihar set about building a fire. I relieved my horse of saddle and tack, but didn’t even pay lip service to brushing him: just left him in Nuad’s hands for food and water and turned to assess my companions’ needs. Amien had Rohini on his horse’s blanket already, peeling the mail shirt away from her injury while she denied any need for medical attention at all. I left them to it, hearing the patterns of long-standing arguments in their bickering, and turned to Iminor.
The Tan sat on the bare rock with the Básghilae sword in his scabbard, the depthless blue of his eyes reflecting the black abyss of night and cold pallor in his face. Letitia tended his horse nearby, with an air that suggested it amounted to penance for a crushing weight of sin. She glanced at me, guilt giving way to an instant of intimacy before the shame redoubled and she glanced away; when I glanced back at Iminor, his regard was as distant as the remotest of stars. I settled on my heels before him, meeting his dark stare.
“I’m not convinced you should be carrying that blade,” I said.
“I fail to see how it makes any zhevir difference,” Iminor rejoined evenly. “How long would you say I’ve got?”
Behind him, Letitia gave voice to a strangled noise.
I gazed at him, considering. Appropriate healer conduct dictates that one doesn’t leave a question like that hanging, but I seemed to have lost track of my humanity again.
“Are you cold?”
The Tan shrugged. “Just my arm.”
I nodded. Dark energies swirled through him like ink in water. But they weren’t dissipating; in fact they still seemed to be gathering. Was it true that this spell ran differently in the Tanaan, slower and gentler in its working than the horrors Rohini described—or had we simply been seeing its effect at distance? The Básghilae were much stronger in these Esus-soaked places we’d been traveling lately; the spell might well be, too. Would Iminor’s body begin consuming itself from the inside, as Rohini had predicted for her man Luxin? Would the things that made him such a righteous, shaming presence burn away to an inhumanity even I found necessary to eradicate? If it came to that, how would I be sure my blade was raised in mercy, and not because it would leave Letitia’s affections free for me to enjoy?
That question burned my delicious intoxication away, taking the distance I’d enjoyed with it. This was a true champion sitting before me, a worthy consort: like Gwydion in Tílimya’s Well, he laid down his own life for the one he swore to serve. If I used the excuse of the things Nechton’s spell would do to justify the ending of his life, I’d never look Letitia in the face again—let alone meet my own regard in mirrors.
I forced myself to confront the blue-black abyss of his gaze. “Take off the sword. Let me see what’s happening.”
The Tan just raised an eyebrow, regarding me with frank skepticism.
“Indulge me,” I said, shifted to kneel before him, and marshaled the will necessary to keep staring until he sighed and shook his head and unbuckled the sword.
“Thank you,” I said, and held out my right hand. After another skeptical glance he put his left hand into it. His skin was warm, his fingers strong: I settled the fingertips of my other hand against his forehead, feeling an essentially normal flow of energies between hand and brain. I released his hand and drew back: the Tan sighed as if relieved.
“Now the other one,” I said, and held out my left.
Again he sighed, but put his hand into mine.
Oh, yes, there it was: the skin was cold against my own. I touched his forehead with my free hand, and immediately lost track of everything else: Nechton’s death spell shimmered all around my awareness. I saw it pour in from the hollow of Iminor’s hand, wind its way up the muscles and sinews of his arm, trace lazy ink-swirling patterns into the rest of him. Tendrils of horrifying, delicious black energy wound around his heart, spiraled about his spine like streamers on a Bealtan-fest pole, shot up the narrow spaces inside that column to blast into his head. The black rage that followed in the energy’s wake made me catch my breath at its depth and familiarity, at the way it echoed the tempests that so often stormed in me.
“Damn,” I said softly. That wasn’t healer conduct, either: I hadn’t come nearly as close to the realm of humanity as I’d thought. Alarm flared inside Iminor, echoing into me; resentment came on its heels. I never would do anything useful, just ride around looking dangerous and picking fights with everyone. He should have known better than to hope.
“Well, let’s see what we can do, then,” I said quietly. “With your permission.”
Surprise shocked through him; he met my eyes with that damn
able look of unexpected respect he’d given me at Laetrif and nodded. It just reminded me how faithless I was, how little I deserved his esteem. Nevertheless I encompassed him; as soon as he condensed inside me, a developing vortex manifested in my mind. It spun slowly around him, drawing me into its circle and gaining speed even as I assessed its flow. Iminor wasn’t the focal point, but rather the place where the maelstrom’s mouth opened to swallow. The black rage in him was only a foretaste of the impenetrable dark at the origin of the abyss.
I turned my attention on the energies swirling within him. Cold gathered in my mouth like a mockery of water; the elusive poppy smell of death crowded around. I touched one of the streamers of black energy—and it shifted to wrap itself around me, a silken caress whose black hue burned away, revealing itself in luminous ripples of color and raising thrills of delight where it brushed against my flesh. I followed it beyond Iminor, beyond the mundane world, beyond any place of which the Aballo Order ever dreamed—into the deep velvet darkness, to grasp the heart of the spell.
The universe stopped. Everything created and as-yet-uncreated hung in breathless suspension while I encompassed the working’s terrible magnificence. The spell was cunning, surprising, using the rules limiting such operations against themselves; it banked against the cold fire in the darkness between the stars, opening a conduit between the victim and a source of power so huge and frigid it was guaranteed to kill. The more the victim fought, the faster the spell would work, because the energy spent would just draw the cold in faster. Only by embracing that cold, dark fire could anyone who came into contact with this spell survive it. I reached out to grasp the deadly power, forgetting to fear.
I recognized it now: this was the magic that woke me on the morning of the ard-righ’s death, wrapping me in crystal music and lightning flavor, its spectral spidersilk caress carrying a shattering breadth of arcane charge. But this time, with it occupying the dark spaces of my awareness, I saw it for what it was. The cold was a deception; its truth wasn’t darkness: rather an intensity beyond mortal comprehension, a pleasure that exceeded any description a harpist or even a wizard might give: the inverse of the sort of white light that rains down upon a wizard at the moment of Union with a god. It stampeded through me in pleasure that tore a half-formed exclamation from my throat, burning away all my illusions of ethics and humanity, showing me how precious and inconsequential those ideas were and revealing Myself to me. This was what it was to be a god. This was what it was to encompass not only the good and generous but also the consuming and hideous. Of course its truth would destroy any mortal soul.
Except Nechton. Except me. Mortal though we were, neither of us should be described as human. To us the virtues of humanity did not apply.
Iminor, of course, was another matter entirely. He was something more virtuous than human, and he was looking at me, seeing straight into my depths: eyes full of awareness no mortal should ever have. But he lacked the Talent to control the power’s flow: now that his connection with it had been established, there was no way for him to disengage. And no one else could do it for him.
You lying whore, he thought.
I should have expected this. While I’d been looking at him and the power he’d absorbed, he’d been seeing everything inside me. Our shared mindspace was filled with images and sensations and flavors that made me blush before him, all of them so suffused with Letitia that need erupted in me at the memories.
Behind his controlled tone boiled blinding rage. You murdering, whoring sack of dung!
It occurred to me that a Tan using the word whore constituted an entirely new flavor of irony. He extracted his hand from my grasp, reared up on his knees, and delivered a surprisingly heavy right cross that I saw coming and allowed to connect with my jaw anyway. My brain exploded with pain that made him wince and sever our connection; my head snapped around on its axis, making the vortex around us spin faster. The campsite flashed into my awareness as if it had just resumed existence: seven astonished stares fixed on us; Letitia’s cheeks blazed as red as her cloak. She buried her face in her hands. I shook my head to clear it. My skull still rang.
“Yes,” I said with a calm I didn’t feel, forcing myself to meet his gaze. “I deserve that and more. You should probably kill me, or try. But first you should decide what to do.”
The Tan gave voice to an inhuman laugh. “About what?”
“The spell.”
He settled down to sit on his heels, staring at me.
I nodded. “It’s as we thought: there’s a spell on these swords, and now the power it invokes is in you. If I leave it this way, you will die.”
Iminor’s narrow jaw went hard; his pale lips grew almost white. “But you can fix it.”
I raised my eyebrows. “It’s not that simple. Once a wizard forges a connection like this, the connection exists. All anyone can do now is change you.”
Abruptly Iminor was on his feet, walking away. “Into someone who can enjoy the presence of evil?” He paused, pinning me with a stare that made something inside me shrivel. “Into something like you.”
I couldn’t help it: I glanced away. “No, fortunately for all concerned, no one can generate something like me. The truth is more complex. There is a place in you that is open now, and power is flowing into you. It’s not power that’s meant to exist in people; very quickly it will overwhelm your natural energy. If you want to live, I need to create another opening, one that will allow the power to flow through you.”
Iminor stopped pacing, fixing me with an abyssal stare. “But that’s not all.”
“No,” I admitted. “This power—even passing through you, it will make changes you’re not prepared for. There’s a risk it will destroy who you are, destroy your soul.”
“And then I will be just like you.”
A humorless smile came over me, but I resisted the bait. “It will be painful. I can’t say whether death is the easier option. Only you can choose.”
Iminor stopped pacing, folded his arms across his chest. He glanced at Letitia, a flavor of rage so deep and encompassing in him that his face looked perfectly emotionless, then turned his black gaze on me again.
“If I begin to turn into—you… Will you still be able to kill me?”
Again I found it necessary to glance away. “That is not a power you should put into my hands.”
“And yet there it is,” the Tan rejoined.
I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. I couldn’t look at any of them. “You will still be vulnerable to steel. But I suspect—can’t prove, but I suspect… that the Básghilae death spells won’t be able to touch you.”
“Because the evil is already in me.”
“Because the connection those spells depend on has already been otherwise grounded.”
Iminor gave a snort of humorless laughter. “And still I make the mistake of thinking you capable of truth. Dance around this, then: will I still be alive?”
What a strange question. Was I still alive? I glanced again at the black incandescent power, feeling the connection that remained between me and it, tasting the flow that would pour into me if I but gave it leave—and that terrible laughter the touch of the Básghil incited in me threatened to erupt in my throat again. Alive? I hadn’t been this alive in a decade.
I met the Tan’s cold gaze. “Yes, indeed you will. You’ll just be different.”
Iminor’s mouth twisted; he stared at me, contempt in his gaze and fear radiating so powerfully from him that I found it necessary to push the energy away. Breathless silence hung all around.
“Do it, then,” he said finally, voice crackling with controlled rage. “And goddess forgive what I do after.”
He settled before me, fixing me with a cold expectant stare. I nodded and held out my hands; his mouth twisted, but he put his hands into mine, and I encompassed him again. All his rage and fear blasted through me; breath shuddered out of me, and I twitched against the impulse to withdraw.
“No,” he said
aloud, the word echoing through our shared mindspace. “Finish it.”
I nodded, but terror still swirled in me, kicking up memories I hadn’t examined in years. A clearing in Tellan exploded with channeled power as my father met my eyes; I stood over the first man I ever dueled with swords, Ballarona resuming existence in my awareness and rage boiling away to horror of what I had become; I sat in an ill-lit corner of Aballo’s library with the dust-and-parchment aroma of Aechering’s ancient grimoire rising in my throat, recognizing myself in his words.
I would never practice from that volume. I probably shouldn’t even be redirecting the flow of this spell, even though I wouldn’t draw power to do it. I could still read the words from Aechering’s pages in my memory. Every day now I tested the limits of this vow I’d so hastily taken, and every day found them a little more elastic than I’d thought. I still itched to explore Aechering’s great mystery. Would I recognize the true boundary when I encountered it? What if I had passed it already?
Iminor’s humorless laugh echoed through me. You know this is completely esoteric, right? It’s not what you DO that makes you evil, fool.
So be it, then. But the duelist in me couldn’t resist the riposte. Let me know what you think a month from now, braugh. Take a good look at the dark side of the world and let me know.
This time it was Iminor who shuddered.
The Shadow of the Sun (The Way of the Gods) Page 63
