Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong

by Greg Hamerton

  “I don’t do such things, Goddess,” she whispered. “I wouldn’t do this!”

  “But you live here, in this world! You must understand what it is they do?”

  “We are all different, Goddess. I don’t understand these wicked men. I don’t know why they torture you. We are not the same kind of people. We are not even of the same kingdom.”

  “You are not linked? Of course you are linked! My song runs through everything and you live together. You are the part that has taken flesh. Oh my swan, my swan!”

  “No. It is not so, Goddess! We are individuals! We are isolated within ourselves. Very few hear the song as I hear it. Most people would not believe it is there.”

  Ethea looked down at her for a long time. The water rose slowly up her shins, lapping desecration against the holy giver of life. “That isolation you speak of must be what I feel. I can not hear my sisters and brothers, I can not feel our bond. Is this what it means to be alive? Oh, it is horrible. How do you live with that? We Godkind are all unified. We are all part of One. We live in each other. Oh, oh, oh, I am so alone.”

  “What can I do to help you?” Tabitha asked. There had to be something she could do.

  “They say they shall fill this with blood and water until I have no air to breathe. If I do not sing the song they want, they will keep me shackled here and leave me to die. I do not understand how to die. I have taken the force of life from creatures before and moved it to new beings, but always I remained, I must remain, or there cannot be life. I am the channel. I cannot be gone! I am at the beginning and the end. But I am here, in this terrible place, instead of…everywhere. What happens if I am still here when the water comes to my head? This form they have forced upon me does not work in that element. It needs air to breathe. This is so wrong. This form will fail. It will fail! What will happen to me? Oh-me-oh-my.”

  She will die. She is trapped in the Present and they will kill her if she doesn’t do what they require of her. Tabitha had to reach her quicker than ever.

  But first she had to cross the Shield of Eyri.

  “I need your strength,” Tabitha explained. “I must sing to be free from where I am held. How can I reach more of the Lifesong’s power?”

  Ethea looked forlorn. “I have no song here. I can not reach any power. They do not understand this. They have forced me into a form I cannot be in; they expect something of me I cannot do. In the days when I had an audience, those who spoke the Word always released me again so I could answer their prayers from within the plane of my power. But the three brothers do not release me, they have bonded me to this earthly plane, they have cast their foul silver upon me, and I have been trapped in this weak flesh. I cannot help you. Only you can find the highest levels, Lifesinger. Only you can save me. Oh! Look at what they have done to my little messengers. I cannot sing! I cannot sing!” She cried as she uttered the words, as if her heart had been torn from her breast. Tabitha followed Ethea’s gaze to where a small white dove lay on its back in the pooling water, flapping hopelessly against the dragging force of the water. It twitched, opened its beak, then it lay still, floating in a spreading bloom of blood. The rain drove it deeper into the water.

  Fear and horror grasped at Tabitha’s throat and the vision darkened. That was how Ethea would end if Tabitha didn’t find her in time—butchered by a madman’s greed. She came back to herself, through layers of sound, along cords of elusive music within a deep groaning darkness, rising until a familiar pressure pounded in her ears. She came through the blackness of eternity into two blue pools, which shifted, then blinked.

  She was staring into blue eyes. She was on her knees on the cold stones of the Penitent’s pass.

  Ashley!

  He smiled up at her weakly. His fair face was calm, but he looked immensely sad.

  “I feel better, thank you, but I understand now why we have to go. She will not last long there.”

  “You saw?” Tabitha asked incredulously. She struggled to adjust to the sudden change. She had been in one world, now she was in another.

  Ashley nodded. He had been with her.

  He squeezed her hand, looking deeply into her eyes.

  “Only you can find the highest levels, Lifesinger. She cannot sing. You must do it.”

  He had been with her.

  “I think you know what to do, but you are too afraid to. You have become like a child wanting to hide behind your weakness, when in fact you have more power than any of us.”

  Her ears stung.

  How dare he say that?

  “You don’t understand!”

  “You told me you command the clear essence because you combine your talents. Well, I think a Shadowcaster would fight. A Shadowcaster would use every way to win, no matter the cost.”

  “How can I fight this? It’s too big, Ashley! I’m too small!”

  “You have a stanza for destruction. I shouldn’t know it, but I do, now.”

  “You’ve been in my head again! You’ve been in my head!”

  “You must use it. You must break the Shield.”

  “You had no right!”

  “What does it matter, when you have Ethea to save?”

  She glowered at him. “I can’t use my power. If I draw on the Lifesong I will weaken Ethea.”

  “That’s a lie! You’re thinking that if you use the Lifesong you will use the last bit of it up and you will lose your power. You’re thinking about yourself, not the Goddess!”

  “How dare you!” she cried out. “I’m not lying!” But she was, and she was angry that he knew it. “You don’t know how hard it is!”

  He rose on unsteady legs and dusted himself off. “Everything you do separates you more from ordinary people, from…us.” He understood, which made his criticism all the more enraging. He should know she was afraid. “I thought you were a wizard,” he said. “You’re just being a weakling.”

  Tabitha filled with cold rage. “Oh yes? And what are you doing to get us out of Eyri?”

  “Using what power I have to get the reaction we need,” he said, looking down on her.

  She jumped to her feet. “You’re trying to anger me? Hang you! Hang you!” Her anger at Ashley pounded in her head. Knowing he was playing her just made her angrier.

  “I can’t fight—this,” he said, indicating the daunting wall of magic ahead of them, “but I can fight your despair. Look around you. This place is going to kill us if you don’t do something now!”

  Garyll was standing beside the horses, watching Ashley with a hard stare. The green-tinged mist whipped past them, the horses stamped nervously upon the patchy moss, and all around them the Shield crushed life to the bare ground. Ashley was right, the pressure had begun to hammer against them again even in their little haven. The seven wizards had woven the spell. What hope was there of her unravelling it? She didn’t even know how they had cast it.

  Tabitha tried to ignore her rising panic. Even if they decided to abandon the attempt, they would have to endure the ordeal of pain on the way out. They might not even make it back. It was so unfair. She had to save Ethea, but the wizards had penned her with this deadly ward of clear essence that enclosed the entire realm. She found her hand upon one of the two orbs at her throat, and under her fingers it grew cold again as she explored the strength it offered, the fury. The power was welcome. Darkness escaped through her fingers. She did not have to accept this denial of her freedom. The violence could be returned. She would break its hold, tear it away, destroy it! All of it.

  Garyll backed away from her when she turned, but she didn’t stop to think what that might mean.

  The edge of their little haven in the mists rippled. She faced the ordered threads of liquid energy which bound them in their prison of pain—clear essence. If she could destroy the binding pattern she could exploit it to form her own creations. She should break the pattern and impose her own.

  She sang the Lifesong. Her voice rang out with the defiance she felt—her magic, her song—and yet the
effort weakened her at the same time. She had to reach farther away to find the flow of the Lifesong, and in doing so she felt ever more stretched. The effect of the first stanza pushed against the mist, billowing outward from her spreading hands, searching through the pattern as she extended her will and claimed the right to command the world before her. She sang on into the second stanza of the Lifesong, careful to keep her focus tightly on the Shield and nothing else. If she slipped just slightly in her attention, one of them would die, blown away in a violent gust of unbinding energy.

  She experienced the spell-pattern of the Shield as a sound—it was that deep binding guttural pulse, the impossibly low chant of an ancient mantra. The antithesis of that grinding thrum was…the Shiver, as perfect and as high a note as she had ever sung. She lifted her voice up, up and up, and drew on the Lifesong to carry her intent.

  Something small and fundamental turned in the pattern, like a key turning in a lock that was repeated thousands of times through a crystalline structure of thought. The first layer of clear essence was hers to command. She had to do something with it at once or the influence of the spell she was fighting would recreate the inner layer of her prison.

  Trees, she would create an avenue of trees out of the essence, she decided, silken trees, the ones in which sprites danced. She threw her vision against the tide of essence. The mists were blown ahead of her wrath, and the trees formed in a moment of rainbow brilliance, silken trees, bending away from her as if years of great winds had sculpted their growth. She sang harder, and another layer of the Shield broke; she demanded more power and another layer cracked. For each layer her trees changed in nature—the first of them showed a pale timber, but as her spell progressed outward through the layers of the Shield the trunks changed; darker and darker they became as her fury found its focus, until the last of the trees were as black as pitch, gnarled and tough, with branches gathered like claws against the unnatural wall, their dry leaves rattling.

  Tabitha hit the final limit. The seventh membrane of the Shield denied her; the spell bound the essence too tightly. The wizards had trapped her; it made her mad. She reached into the depths of her fury. The sky grew dark and the wind howled. It was unfair! There had been seven wizards. The power of seven wills, against her one. They had made Eyri into a prison, and the thief Bevn had been able to pass through with the Kingsrim, yet she was being denied that right to freedom!

  It was unacceptable. The Shield was old and some part of its power must have faded during the four hundred years since the Forming. It was supposed to weaken if the Kingsrim left the realm. It had to break! She realised what the howling sound was. She was screaming.

  The black trees thrashed, leaves were torn from the closer boughs then broken limbs flew in the gale. Stones struck her body. Somewhere, horses squealed and men shouted. She took her anger to the sky. She raised her scream, up and up beyond the notes of the Lifesong again to the Shiver note, the polar opposite of the booming of the Shield. Then, she pushed with her sound, into the space between one binding pulse and the next.

  She felt the Shield flex outward. It contracted again at once, pressing her down with more force than ever, but it had moved. She knew what she could do now. She delivered the Shiver note in short burst, and felt the shield bend away from her, then come back to crush her down with terrible might.

  She pushed back, faster and faster, singing her Shiver in a staccato pace until she had matched the Shield pulse for pulse, every push outward finding less resistance, every nadir pressing back against her worse than before, and all the while the Shield wobbled like a great sheet of glass being flexed by an insistent finger, the warping growing wilder and wilder. She drew her rhythm toward perfection. Her spirit expanded, reaching outward, seeking freedom from bondage. She drove her intent against the Shield.

  It gave way.

  A bright explosion lit the sky above the crest of the pass, and a rainbow flashed away in a circle. Then the sound came to her, a random music which danced across the entire scale, released as her note rippled across the fabric of the Shield.

  The mighty spell broke with a great sundering crack; a giant jagged separation ran upward through the bonded essence, arching over Tabitha’s avenue of trees, ripping and crashing, high into the sky overhead. From there it splintered in a thousand directions, like the lines in a shattered bowl of glass.

  Tabitha shuddered with the after-effects of wielding so much power. The black rage faded slowly from her mind. She walked unsteadily to her horse. It rolled its eyes at her and danced sideways, but after a while it accepted her presence. Garyll gave her a leg-up and she sat quite still, holding the pommel of her saddle, looking up the avenue to the crest of the pass. Only then did she appreciate the terrible danger of what she had done. She had broken the Shield of Eyri, and she didn’t know how to repair the damage.

  Chaos could strike into her homeland now. There was no protection for anyone.

  With a final roll like distant thunder, it was over.

  The breeze pulled at her hair.

  “Come,” said Tabitha. “We must go now, before there is nothing left.”

  THE SECOND MOVEMENT

  INTO OLDENWORLD

  She’d never seen a dance so fair—

  Life’s melody of light and air.

  —On the Goddess Ethea,

  Revenant Ruellen, Book of Is.

  14. BROTHERHOOD

  “Bad blood between brothers

  is a potent poison.”—Zarost

  The misshapen youth sang in an off-key voice as he stomped along the shoreline.

  “He had two brothers and they went with him,

  he had two brothers and they went with him,

  he had two brothers and they went with him,

  every wherever that he went.”

  The others sang along too.

  There was no getting away from them. They were his brothers, they were his beginning and his end. They were his left and his right, and he was facing backward, staring with his single eye through the clumps of white hair at his broad retreating footprints.

  It was so unfair, to be at the back. Brother Amyar should have been born at the rear, not him. Amyar was the one who looked ever into the past. The word Amyar meant ‘the one who was loved’. It was so ironic he almost laughed. Amyar, the scar-faced grunt, all he was good for was dwelling on the pain, remembering all that had been done to them and seething in hatred. Ethan couldn’t get him to think about where the next meal would be coming from, or ask him for any practical solutions to their problems. Amyar was useless. Just blame blame blame all the time.

  Talk about a chip on his shoulder. Ethan had a whole lifetime.

  Brother Seus was even less help, always gazing off into the distance, seeing so far into the future, entranced by the great power they would one day inherit. What did it matter? Plans for tomorrow didn’t put food in their belly now. Dreams didn’t spare them from discomfort. “Reach into the future,” his noble-faced brother would say, “reach with me, and you can have everything you need; you can change the world.” But Ethan refused the swelling seductive awareness of his brother Seus, just as he refused his vision, because he knew that a life in Seus would be short-lived. Seus would neglect their body. Seus would steal his mind. But most of all, Seus was a magic-user.

  Ethan hated magic.

  Magic was a foul, terrible thing, a perversion, an ugly trick that had already scarred them for life. The wizards used it. They forced nature into false and rigid patterns. They restricted things which would grow free. They demanded that the world behaved according to their decrees. They hid things from people—under the temptations of technology there were bitter laws—but Ethan knew what was going on. Ethan could see through all the deception because he was outside the system, forced to be an outcast, forced to watch from the shadows.

  As the years had passed he had grown stronger, and his awareness of the present extended ever more into the time that his brothers saw. As he claimed more of
Seus, so he understood the things his brother would come to understand. Ethan had begun to bleed further backward into Amyar’s mind as well. He supposed that in a way, all three of them looked out of his single eye at the present and witnessed the corruption of Oldenworld. What they saw was magic, rigid lines of cruel structure, laced through every enterprise, a spreading network of compulsion that was taking control of the world.

  There was an evil idea beneath the growing system. It was wrongness that they called Order. Men and women placed themselves above other men and women, in levels and levels, from slaves to servants to artisans to supervisors to managers to directors to clerks to mayors to lords to regents until at the very top were the kings and queens. And the people didn’t see what was really happening! The true power was in the wizards’ hands. They manipulated the system they had helped to develop, tilting their crossed sceptres in their hands, while the puppets danced beneath them.

  People began to believe that they had the right to condemn, deprive and kill others because they had been told to do so by someone higher up in the hierarchy of Order. Few people questioned what they did, because they were being rewarded with comforts and wealth, all the way through the system. Even the slaves were given better meals, clothes and shelter than they could find as outcasts, and they were consoled to help forget their hankering after freedom. The system was designed to rob the populace of power. When anyone was given a difficult decision to make, it would always be easier to pass on the decision to someone higher up, but they never seemed to realise they passed on their power as well, and all that power flowed upward, through the ranks, until it reached the wizards.

  Soon no one would question the order that was being imposed across every inch of land between the tipped mountains to the east of Koraman to the soulful seas west of Orenland, everywhere in the fertile plains north of the great range known as the Winterblades. Once the order was complete in the Three Kingdoms, they would spread south beyond the mountains. Ethan couldn’t guess what was there, for he’d never been over the glistening barrier. He wanted to go one day, and as he considered it a hope flickered in his heart. Maybe the lands there were still untainted, natural—wild! But he suspected that nature herself would not be strong enough; the mountains would not stop the wizards. They wanted everything… they wanted all life to dance according to their pleasure.