Tabitha called out. The vision exploded in a bright flash that stung her eyes.
The room lay before her; dark, silent, real. She felt numb.
Garyll turned toward her sound in his sleep.
She covered her mouth with her hands.
What she had seen could not be true. She sank onto the floor.
Sweet Goddess! Who had enough power to hold her, who would wield power in that way?
Tabitha felt weak, helpless and violated. Tears spilled down her cheeks. The vision played over and over in her mind. Something terrible had happened. The sound of Ethea’s lament ... it was so wrong, it rebelled against Tabitha’s senses. That voice should have been singing the Lifesong, it should have been triumphant, liberating, free. Instead, Ethea was trapped.
Tabitha sat on the floor, in the dark corner of Garyll’s room. She sat there for a long time.
She wanted to be close to Garyll, she needed him, but she couldn’t offer what he needed in return. She could not lift Garyll’s spirit by singing, any more than she could lift her own.
“I grow weak, my love,” Tabitha whispered. She feared what might happen in the morning, when her duty to her people compelled her to call upon the Lifesong again.
Garyll’s chest rose and fell. He did not wake.
3. THREE OF A KIND
“Chance gives you one fool, a bad deal yields two,
but three and the Chaos is coming for you.”—Zarost
Twardy Zarost was in the Gyre Sanctuary, down in the cool gloomy library. He had recently completed his Restitution and so returned to a renewed body, and yet he was not at all relieved. Trouble hung in the air like a lingering scent of wildfire.
He stared at the ragged stubs of what had been a precious ancient text. By the curséd toad, whole pages had been torn out! The Book of Is had been violated in its most sacred section, near the beginning, where the accounts of The Witness laid out the primeval pantheon in all its fascination and ferocity. Zarost knew it held detailed invocations and even an instruction on the ancient language, but he remembered little of it, for the knowledge had never served his purposes.
The Gods wouldn’t listen to his kind.
But there had been rare folk who had transcended their humanity in the past, and that worried him. It was possible. Who wanted to speak to the Gods now, and which God had they chosen? Some Gods were best left undisturbed. To have stolen the pages right out of the Book meant the thief had been very hurried and had wanted to work in secret. This suggested the thief would be calling upon one of those best-left-undisturbed Gods, not the kind who caused fair winds and sunny skies. Trouble was afoot. A company of phantom soldiers began to march in his head, with a stomp stomp stomp that echoed in his thoughts; a new fate marching him toward his doom.
Zarost set the Book carefully on a reading stand, and waved over the slender spritebulb. The light was a relic of the old Moral kingdom, the metal upright crossed with a fine copper weave that glinted as the essence began to glow within the glass sphere. Overhead, two spiders scuttled hurriedly away into the surrounding gloom of the low-roofed basement—spiders, despite the wardings around the Gyre’s Sanctuary. They got in everywhere, the little devils, even here, in the middle of the great southern desert of Oldenworld.
The Book of Is didn’t lie flat, and when he turned to the appendix, Zarost found more page stubs. The formulae were gone, the complicated mathematical works explaining the forces and dimensions governing the Gods, and the theorems proving the growing separation of the Present from the Eternal. Zarost had never truly understood them. They had been penned by a genius beyond his reach, and he’d allowed the formulae to slip from his memory to make space for more important lores, such as causing barking dogs to fall silent, or keeping your hat on your head.
Zarost bent until his bristled chin scratched the paper. He sniffed—nothing, not even the delicate sting of magic that could have been used to cover a trace. Whoever had ripped the knowledge from the Book had left no clues. The very fact that the pages were gone was a clue in itself. Either there was a thief within the Gyre’s eight, or someone not of the Gyre had visited the Sanctuary. Either possibility made his scalp crawl. The Gyre had gone to great lengths to keep the Sanctuary hidden from the Sorcerer Ametheus, for it would spell disaster with a great exploding ‘D’ if he located their refuge. If a stranger had entered the building, its location was no longer secret. That was no good at all.
Alternatively, another one of the octad had turned against the flow of the Gyre. But who?
Something fluttered near the stairs. Zarost looked quickly over his shoulder, but it was just the wind tumbling a loose page. No, there couldn’t be a traitor within the Gyre he didn’t know about. To steal knowledge from a library every Wizard had access to made less sense than nonsense. Besides, they had risked their lives together; they had proved their alliance too many times over for too many centuries to fail now.
Ametheus’s last spell had almost broken them. They had dispersed the wild chaos of the Writhe near the border of Eyri. Most of his colleagues were still healing their wounds by remaining comatose in the nurturing vagueness of Infinity. They had faced down their first eighth-level spell, and Zarost knew that if the Sorcerer’s power grew any further, their lives would all be forfeit. There had never been a worse time for a division in the Gyre. They needed to be united, to be able to lift the One high enough to end the Sorcerer for good. No, there couldn’t be a traitor hidden among the other seven.
But the Book of Is was torn.
Knowledge had been stolen from within the Gyre’s sacred Loreward—arcane knowledge only a wizard could have sought out. Zarost felt along the damaged binding, a jagged signature that spelled out ‘Chaos’ clearer than a stroke of wildfire. Uncertainty gnawed at his stomach. It had to be an outsider who had stolen the lore, but he didn’t know of any wizards still alive beyond the octad, except for Tabitha Serannon. She was the most unlikely candidate for a thief among all of them—he would suspect the Gods themselves before Tabitha. She hadn’t even emerged yet—she was still in Eyri, and there she would have to stay until he introduced the trigger event.
He retrieved the single loose page lying beside the stairs. The margin was torn, ruining a carefully rendered diagram of an altar used for the invocation of Zorzese, detailed down to the placing of the runestones, the preparation of the sweet nectars and the precise position that the elements needed to be in.
Zorzese wasn’t the one he was worried about—a gentle west wind would pose no threat—but if someone beat upon fiery Baalbashãn’s door, or that of warring Rgnøtheris, there was a chance, however small, that they would be answered with celestial wrath. Someone as mad as Ametheus might even attempt to reach the upper hierarchy, to attempt a dialogue with the Destroyer himself, and that would spell disaster.
As soon as he framed that thought, a chill ran up his spine. Ametheus would do such a thing, oh yes indeed! The omens of Chaos were upon this event, they stood out like goblins among gold.
Whoever had stolen the lore for the Sorcerer wanted to prevent the Gyre members from using the same lore. The Book had once been a popular religious text in the days before Order, before the Three Kingdoms had united. Zarost knew of a place where a copy might have been preserved. He folded the loose page neatly in half and thrust it into a pocket—it would be useful to match against a copy to verify its authenticity.
He needed that missing lore! To understand the reason for the theft and to know what they faced, they would need to study it, and if Zarost remembered correctly, the Book of Is had contained rituals to end a dialogue with the Gods, a way to restore the Veil of Uncertainty that protected fragile human minds from the immensity and intensity of the Gods. The Gyre might have great need of such a ritual, to sever any dialogue that had been set up and restore the natural rift between the dimensions.
The Destroyer had a fire-dappled skin, and a terrible stare that struck all who saw Him speechless. Zarost remembered that much from his
reading of the Book. Zarost calmed the sprites in their bulb, and lifted the tome from the reading stand. Should he announce his findings to the other wizards when they recovered? Who should he tell, until he was certain the Gyre numbered eight, and not seven and one traitor?
No, he should keep his discovery a secret, and begin his investigation alone, because he had his own special plans for the Gyre—ones which relied on the element of surprise. He couldn’t afford to be surprised himself. Not with so much at stake.
He slipped the damaged Book of Is carefully back into its place. It had fallen from the shelf when he had entered the library, probably a result of the thief’s hasty exit. But had it been a wizard from within, or one from without—a hole in the circle, or a circled hole? Solving such riddles had earned him his seat in the Gyre. Zarost was determined to find the truth.
Ametheus was more than enough on his own. They did not need a wrathful God to fight as well.
_____
Prince Bevn stared at the hated door. They said the Serannon girl stayed there now, the singer, with one of her wardens. Bevn sneered. He knew what that really meant, he wasn’t a child anymore. She took that warden to her bed. She probably took a different one every night, whichever of her wardens she chose.
He wanted to get close to the window. Maybe he could sneak a look through the curtains, and catch them at it.
“Come away,” hissed the woman behind him. “That place is too well guarded. See the men in the alley beside it? Don’t be a fool. We must move! Come away.”
Bevn wouldn’t listen to the woman, because she was a woman, so he waited for her to brush angrily past him and continue along the street. But she was right—they had a greater purpose. He spat at the distant door then followed Gabrielle. They passed through Levin, keeping to the shadows.
Black Saladon had promised them great things. A skilled wizard, much more powerful than anyone Eyri had ever seen! Black Saladon had said he was only a servant of the great Chaos-wielder. The excitement of that night returned to Bevn.
They had been in Ravenscroft. He and a few Shadowcasters had fled there after the disastrous end to the battle in Stormhaven. There they were, stuck in the tunnels below the Keep. Bevn felt like one of those stupid flies that always came over to see what their friends were doing in the sticky pot, among the gum and syrup. Eventually his father would send the Swords into the vale to clean out the last survivors, and he would be found, but he’d learnt that people did silly things when they were scared. He’d stolen the crown, and he didn’t know where else to hide. He couldn’t identify himself to anyone, so he had become a Nobody. And Nobodies, he had discovered, ended up hungry and cold. At least there was food and shelter in Ravenscroft. It was the farthest away from Stormhaven that he could go, so he stayed there, with the others. He hated it, because it was such a stupid place to hide.
He’d often saved those flies in the sticky-pot then pulled one of their wings off, to watch them fly in tight circles. Would his father would punish him? His father was a soft-hearted fool. He never struck Bevn for anything. He would forgive him after a few days of pretending to be angry, if Bevn said he was sorry. Bevn could say he’d been made mad by the Darkmaster, and he hadn’t known what he was doing. Maybe he should return to the palace before he was caught. That would be smarter than being a fly.
Smarter, but still pointless. He knew what kind of life he’d return to: a cosseted life, where he was treated like a showpiece, a young thing not old enough to matter. He was thirteen, for pity’s sake, he was practically a man! Yet he wasn’t allowed to be one. He’d never been in a fight at home. Even the butcher’s boys whom he always taunted hadn’t faced him down because they knew his father would have their necks if they laid a hand on him. He had all that protection, but he had no importance of his own, it was always “Yes Master Bevn, but I’ll have to see what your father the King says”, and “Have you asked your father the king if he thinks it’s wise?” He had royal blood in his veins, but he was not allowed to wield that power. Nothing changed, no matter how many years passed. Of course not! His father didn’t want him to have power. He wanted to keep all the power for himself. That was why Bevn had taken the crown, in that moment of confusion when the Morgloth had dived upon Stormhaven, and he was going to keep it.
So he stayed in Ravenscroft.
He was playing with the Darkstones, arranging them over the headboard of the late Darkmaster’s bed, when a Shadowcaster sneaked up on him unnoticed. The Shadowcaster gripped his ears from behind and pulled him away.
“You leave the stones alone, or I’ll tear these little flaps off your head, piglet.” The woman’s voice was deep and self-assured.
“I’ll call the Swords!” he squeaked at once. It was his standard threat. It left his lips before he could consider his words. The blood was rushing to his face, pounding in his ears.
“If that were likely, you wouldn’t be hiding here. You have no power to call upon,” the Shadowcaster said, her tone full of mocking laughter. “Promise to leave the stones alone.” His ears were burning with pain as she twisted his ears harder and harder. Shameful tears were getting ready to betray him.
The bitch. He did have power. He would show her.
But he didn’t.
“Promise?”
He nodded, but suddenly he felt her hot breath on his ear, and her teeth as she nipped him. Then she let him go and he spun around to face her. There was an exciting twinge in his groin.
“Hey! What was that for?”
She didn’t answer him, only raised one eyebrow and smiled. “You’re younger than I thought. What are you doing here?”
He didn’t answer her at once—he recognised her, he had seen her around Ravenscroft. Her name was Gabrielle. He’d heard the whispers between the Shadowcasters during the time he’d been held ‘captive’—men who wanted her, women who wanted to be like her. He’d never spoken to someone who had actually been with her, except maybe the Darkmaster, but he’d had all of the women. Gabrielle was reputed to be the best seductress in the Croft, and seeing her now, up close, he had little doubt that the rumours were true. The light from the smoking cresset danced over her strong face, the full lips, the deep dark eyes, and the glistening hair cascading over her shoulders. The furs she wore didn’t hide the swell of her body and her tight waist; the cut of the clothes emphasised those curves. He was so confused. A growing need thumped through his loins, but she had twisted his ears and mocked him.
“I-I was looking for a way to get my rock off,” he stammered, pretending to pull at his chain.
Her lip twitched. “Why are you in Ravenscroft? You belong with your daddy.”
“I can go wherever I want to!”
“You were just the master’s pet when he was alive. You are not a Shadowcaster. Go home, copper top.”
She had a way of looking at him that was both condescending and enticing, as if she wanted him to challenge her, as if she was looking for a fight.
“I don’t want to be a Shadowcaster. You’re just cheats and criminals. Without your master, you’re nothing. None of you are important! But I’m going to be King!”
Her expression darkened. “Keep flapping your lips and you’re not going to live long enough.”
“I can say what I want. You can’t stop me! Tart!”
Gabrielle swung an open hand at his head. She was quick, but he’d been expecting it. Bevn ducked, and kicked for her groin. The Darkmaster had taught him a bit about fighting, and he’d said you always should start a fight with a groin kick—that way your opponent would taste the first fear, because he knew you’d fight dirty. Gabrielle didn’t have the same equipment down there as a man did, but she folded over nicely nonetheless.
He had won the fight! “Don’t get too big for your boots, pussy,” he added. It was something the Darkmaster had loved to say—he’d always laughed and Bevn had too, though he’d never really caught the joke.
Gabrielle slowly raised her head. There was no sign of pain on
her face, no hint of defeat, but she did remind him of a cat—a mean and angry cat. He really, really shouldn’t have kicked her. He began to back away.
“My father will send the Swords in! They’ll clean you out!”
Gabrielle stalked towards him, her eyes never leaving him, her hands loose and low.
“This place isn’t going to last a week!” he blurted out. “Then you’ll need my mercy.”
She had backed him into a corner. He was suddenly very scared of what she might do. He panicked, and he tried to dive aside as she drew close, but she hooked his chin and threw him back against the wall. If he hadn’t been wearing his knapsack his head would have struck the rock hard. He dived the other way, but she blocked him with her leg and placed her foot on the wall, trapping him with her body. She reached quickly into the darkness then struck with gathered fingers into his shoulders, and his arms became numb and useless.
Dark essence! She must have used Dark essence on him! He’d thought it was all used up, he’d bet on it. If she had use of motes, even a few, she could do terrible things to him.
Gabrielle paused, watching his face impassively; then she slowly raised her right hand and slapped him across his ear, hard. Pain jammed his mind. Bevn almost wet himself. It wasn’t anything close to pleasure, like they said it could be. It was horrible. He lost his balance, but Gabrielle’s leg stopped him from falling.
Her open hand waited, high above him.
“What am I?” she asked. A flicker of a smile curled her parted lips. She was enjoying this! Be damned, he wouldn’t let her win. She was just a commoner! She was just a woman.
“A tart!”
Wham.
Pain. Worse than the first time, it ran all through him. He was sure something had broken in his head. What if he couldn’t think any more, what if she turned him into an idiot? He couldn’t see straight enough to read her expression, but she was waiting for him.
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 3
