“No! Value is a crippling system of thought. Things should not be held onto. They are temporary, value is an illusion.”
“But life has value. People will always fight for that. If they are threatened they will defend themselves. There are dead people there. Maybe they were attacked, maybe there would have been more dead among them, if they hadn’t fought.”
“What does it matter to the world that one man lives or dies? It is only the man in his conceit who believes his life is of value. Life has no value! It is worthless. We shall all be swept aside in the end.”
“You would fight, if someone threatened you.”
“But why do they fight when they cannot win? Why do they want to live!” he shouted, slamming his fist into the bench, breaking the end off.
Tabitha wondered about that for a moment. It was difficult to think clearly in the Sorcerer’s presence, with the noise, heat and sickening unsteadiness to the world, but she could still remember the real world, her world. She wanted to see the clouds spilling down into Eyri ahead of the morning sun, she wanted to feel the joy of singing again; she wanted to watch Garyll’s face as he slept. Moments of joy, high points that were gone in a breathless instant, yet they were the essence of her life.
“Because life is beautiful, at times,” Tabitha said. “It is worth enduring hardship to touch that beauty.”
It wasn’t Seus who answered her then. It was Ethan, in his sleep-slurred voice. “No it’s n-n-not… Life is ugly, and c-c-cruel, and violent. It isn’t worth f-fighting f-for.”
Tabitha craned her neck around to catch Ethan’s eye, while Seus stood immobile. “Don’t you see anything of beauty in your world?”
“What is b-beauty? Show me something b-b-beautiful.”
Tabitha couldn’t see anything in the Sorcerer’s chambers that would qualify. “Beauty is ... It can be a rare thing that is delicate or perfect, but it’s also the feeling you get, when you see it. It’s grace and joy and hope altogether. It’s a song. It makes you happy just by witnessing it.”
“W-what if you n-never get that feeling?” replied Ethan.
“Never?” she asked.
He didn’t answer; he looked down instead.
Did he really not see beauty? Or did he refuse to see it. His immediate world was so responsive to his thoughts, and so there couldn’t be anything of beauty in it while he refused to see beauty, but then how could she be in his chamber? She wasn’t part of his world of violence and destruction. She believed in harmony and peace; he wouldn’t have endured her presence for so long unless he was curious about her. Maybe her task was to show him something of beauty, to change his mind. Maybe he needed her, after all.
“Are you done with your snivelling, brother?” Seus cut in with his harsh voice. “Give me back my attention. I was busy educating the apprentice.”
The chamber belonged to Seus once more and Tabitha was sucked away from her brief contact with Ethan. Seus stepped up to the orb and the image shimmered as he moved close. The Lakelander women fell back as he advanced the image through the crowd. He passed quickly through the village, turning the view from side to side as if he hunted for something.
“Feathers and tails,” he muttered, “Feathers and tails! Your task will be to hold them when they come through.” Seus homed in on an enclosure toward the edge of the settlement, where a group of rangy goats moved nervously against the fence. Speckled fowl scattered at their approach, but Seus struck like a snake. One instant a hen was running pell-mell across the dirt near the centre of the image, the next Seus reached into the image shouting, “I know where you’ll be!” The hen fell squawking from the glass amid a flurry of feathers. When it hit the floor, it ran.
“Well don’t just stand there, catch the damn thing!” Seus shouted. “I must ready the other elements.”
The hen bolted for the far windows and leapt in panic. Its instincts were ruling it.
She had to obey Seus; she couldn’t face his anger.
“It’s okay, it’s okay, shh shh shh,” Tabitha tried to reassure it, walking slowly toward the windows. She jumped to the left but it jinked to the right.
“Don’t be an idiot!” shouted Seus. “Catch it where it will be, not where it was.”
Tabitha tried to imagine where the chicken would run to, but it was hopeless, the thing zigged and zagged all over the place as she ran after it. She tried to visualise herself holding the chicken instead, which brought a shift in the light and time. She scooped the chicken from the floor and it struggled in her hands, its red-rimmed eyes wide in fright. Tabitha thought it would be better if it was a calm chicken and it forgot its panic and eyed her quizzically. It nestled against her chest. She carried it back toward Ametheus.
“Very good. Right, now get the blade from beside the chalice.”
“The ... blade,” repeated Tabitha, her stomach rolling over.
“Bring a few bones as well. There should be some on the bench.”
Tabitha froze. This was some kind of sacrifice. It wouldn’t be beneficial to the mourners at the fire or to the chicken.
“Let me explain something to you,” said Seus, suddenly close. “I don’t involve myself in dealing with threats, for my brother is far better than I. Are you a threat? I don’t like to wake him, but I can wake my brother to deal with your dissent.”
“Ethan?” she asked in a small voice. “Where is Ethan?”
“I’m not talking about Ethan, that half-wit is asleep,” replied Seus. A cold smile twisted his lips. He turned and the scarred face of Amyar was revealed, the face of the bully, vicious and feral. A flicker of awareness twitched behind the closed eyes.
No. Anything but that. She did not want Amyar to wake. With Amyar would come the rage and violence. Her blind right eye throbbed as soon as she thought of him. His name alone made her knees tremble and her guts heave.
“I understand,” she said to Seus, “I’ll try to do what you want.”
It seemed Ethan had lost consciousness again. Had Seus stolen his blood? How could she wake Ethan again without alerting Seus? The chicken nestled into the crook of her arm. She scurried away to find the blade and the bone. The dirty wooden bench against the near wall held jumbled piles of strange implements, a clutter of papers, pens and inkpots, stacks of carved tablets, many glasses, vases and gourds. A curved knife was stuck into the bench. She pulled it free. Its pitted edge didn’t look very sharp.
She found a long bone under a pile of junk, wrenched it free and other objects tumbled from the bench. The chaos knocked another stacked pile beside it, and Tabitha caught a bottle on her elbow as she tried to jump clear. Tools clattered to the floor amid fragments of glass.
“Sorry.”
“Sorry? No, no, no! Apprentice, you are spreading chaos, as you should. It is good to disrupt things. Stir them around, break them, lose them. Let them be found again! Come, bring that bone.”
Seus had the image of the fire in the foreground again. “To me!” he commanded.
A burning log fell to the floor. It burst at his feet and sparks scattered in all directions. He did not seem to be affected by the heat. “The bone,” he said. Tabitha handed it over.
“Now this, this is something my father has an affinity for,” Seus announced as he gripped the bone-shaft at either end. “Inside every man is a dead man, waiting to get out. They will feel that now.” He touched the bone to his forehead, whispered “Unbind,” and the thick bone exploded to a gritty dust-cloud. Tabitha gripped the chicken tighter. She had thought Amyar the worst of the brothers. Seus was. He used his power in such a callous manner. She wished she was far, far away.
But that wish didn’t work to change her reality.
What if he decided to unbind Tabitha, just to amuse himself? She tried to calm herself.
Seus leant over and plucked the knife from her shaking hand. “The blood upon the fire will stir in their blood also.” Without warning, he sliced the blade through the chicken where it sheltered against Tabitha’s breast. Blo
od splashed against her arms; warmth soaked through her dress. She cried out and dropped the chicken and blood gushed across her boots. The chicken ran off in a jaggy death-run even though Ametheus retained the chicken’s dripping head. When the blood fell upon the burning log, the flames hissed. Acrid smoke billowed upward to spread over the image that curved over them. It was becoming a nightmare.
Ametheus made a spiralling gesture at the glass and the acrid smoke entered the image, roiling outward to enclose the mourning villagers, rushing through the huts to touch dogs, babes and the aged villagers who watched from the shelter of their doorways.
Before Tabitha could move away, Ametheus gripped her wrist and drew her close to the flaming log. The reek of attar mixed with cloying sweetness stung Tabitha’s nostrils. She closed her eyes against her burning tears, but she was assaulted by a sickening swaying gyration. Then the heat hit her. They were standing in the fire, no longer in the Sorcerer’s chambers. He had moved them. The fire flared up; flames leapt all around them. Ametheus stood at her side, as deep as she was in the coals. Tabitha fought a moment of panic as the sea of glowing embers shifted underfoot, but although the heat was intense, she wasn’t getting burnt. She fought to free her trapped arm, but Ametheus held her in an iron grip. The air was almost too hot to breathe. A great wailing could be heard over the crack and hiss of the fire, dogs howled beyond it all, goats bleated, chickens clamoured and children cried. Stricken faces circled beyond the wall of flame.
She was there, in the village they had been watching, standing in their fire. She was inside the people as well; she knew their agony as her own. Tabitha felt their devastating woe, the fragility of their self-control. The people were close to the limit of what they could tolerate, a small step away from madness. They had lost so much of their family, the battles had gone on and on, for many years, and they were at the end of their wits, but they had held onto something through it all. They had held onto their village and the land they farmed. It was everything to them. It was their home, their security, their order.
Seus began to chant.
It was no language Tabitha could understand, if language it was. He drew some words out in sibilant moans and cut the next one short with clipped restraint, as if time wasn’t constant through his speech, and his tone was staggered as if he drew on more than one voice in the same moment. Had he wakened some of his brothers, was he drawing on their voices? It was disturbing. Tabitha felt as if she should recognise the chants, they spoke to something within her, she could sense an awful shift within her body, a pulling apart, a feeling of disintegration, as if she would be blown apart should a wind press against her back.
His language was like the Lifesong, she realised, it had that fundamental effect, but it had no guiding rhythm, no beauty. It was weird, wanton and wild. Ancient.
From the folds of his robes, Ametheus produced a tubular shaker. Seeds or stones were trapped inside it, for it rattled as it moved: a dry, distressing sound. Ametheus tightened his grip on her arm and chanted louder, faster. With each pulse of the shaker, she felt her heart jump, as if her own pulse was being ruled by the random timing of the Sorcerer. Beyond the flames, a tall woman collapsed. Seeing this, a thin old man placed his spear before him, and tilted its tip at his own chest. A young woman cried out shrilly and stumbled toward him but she was too late to prevent the grip of the despair. Ametheus chanted, the shaker shook and the old man spread his hands wide to fall upon the spear. The jagged tip protruded from his back, thrusting upward like a red finger of accusation as his body slipped down the slick shaft. The young woman wailed hysterically and tried to lift him, but he was stuck half way to the ground. His legs kicked out and he slewed over to impact the trampled dirt beside the fire.
“Those who want to die will die now. Those who want to fight will fight. I hasten their fates and bring their freedom.”
Tabitha held her hands over her mouth. The horror was too much. Seus was truly insane. The shaker shook again, and her grief burst through her veins like a sudden poison. Tabitha stepped away from the Sorcerer, but she was free for only an instant before he caught her wrist again.
“They must live to the extreme, live with chaos, or not live at all. They must work to enhance the spread of anarchy, or they are wasting their lives.” The Sorcerer’s fanaticism shone in his eyes. “I will clear apathy from the world. I will clear the dross and duller blood from life.”
“But they were innocent! They did nothing to you.”
“Hah! Innocent? They are alive and so they claim also the consequences of living. If they do not live out loud, if they choose to snivel and bemoan their lot, to mourn and weep, to be idle, then they forfeit their privileges. So do you.”
“What were they supposed to do? How does it serve any purpose to punish the villagers for their grief?”
“They should be out fighting, not dripping tears into a fire,” Seus snapped.
“You are a monster,” declared Tabitha.
Seus stepped close, crushing the log underfoot with his weight. It’s going to end right now, Tabitha thought. The Sorcerer had a gaze like thunder. He loomed over her and her heartbeat boomed in her ears. Ametheus held his shaker still and, for a terribly long moment, Tabitha’s heart stopped. She closed her eyes against the intense fear shared through the whole village, the fear of being ended at the whim of the Sorcerer.
“A monster, you think me? You have much to learn. Much change will come to this place now, much intensity, fierceness that was waning, rage that had faded to discontent. Those who are left will wish to exact revenge for what was done to them, and who will they turn to? Why, their neighbours, the Lûk. The war in the upper lands shall find its heart again. We may even see the Lûk women taking arms at last.”
He shook his shaker and life pounded in the village again. Tabitha gasped. His manipulation of them all was abominable; his plan for the villagers was worse. People shouldn’t be driven to fight. They deserved to live in peace.
“You are evil!” she accused.
“Good and evil, why waste my time by making judgments? Order is served by having rules. For Chaos to thrive we must abandon judgments. Action is everything!”
“But you are forcing it upon people. They don’t want what you bring!”
“The desire to run amok is always there, I just set it free. Chaos is unbinding life from the rules that would control it. The chaos is already there in the weave of the world, just pull the right strings in the right places, and the weave comes undone, as it must.”
“You are no better than the Order you try to destroy.”
His eyes flashed with cold fire. “You have seen but one minute of my life’s work which Amyar tells me has spanned almost a thousand years. Do not be so quick to judge! No, best you observe, watch as I work and learn what you shall be required to do as an apprentice.”
Tabitha watched the vision shift before her eyes. “You mean that figuratively, don’t you?”
“What’s that?”
“A thousand years. Nobody lives that long.”
Seus raised an eyebrow. “Take what you know of the world, multiply that by the length and breadth of all the stars you can see in the night sky, and you would still have no concept of what is possible in my domain. Chaos is unlimited, apprentice. An ordered world is flawed, it can never be complete. That is what they don’t understand, those stupid wizards in their Gyre. It ends in Chaos. I have seen it and it will always be true no matter what they strive to build. Nothing can prevent that end. Chaos is the natural state of the universe, Order is an abomination. I endure because I am meant to be here, they perish because they are not.”
He was insane. She would have to flee. Her heart fluttered as she tried to gather her courage.
“You pull away from me and you’ll burn in the fire,” Seus warned in her ear. “I am your only protection. I am your only path to return from this alive.”
The brief flare of fire against her legs announced the truth of that, but she couldn�
�t endure the Chaos he was inflicting upon these innocents. The world swirled and swirled in her vision. Two women had begun to club each other with abandon, incited to violence by his strange rhythm. Another woman collapsed. A man threw himself into the flames, roaring as he leapt with outstretched hands. Tabitha staggered back as far as she could, trapped as she was by Seus’s grip. The man screamed as the flames bit through his clothing, but his leap carried him all the way to Tabitha, and he fell upon her.
He passed straight through her.
A cloud of hot sparks burst over the man’s back as he impacted the firebed and scorched at Tabitha’s feet. It was difficult to reconcile what she saw and heard, but she understood they were not really there. Ametheus had immersed them in his vision, but both of them were also standing in the chamber in the Pillar. She hoped. She had lost contact with her body; all of her awareness was in the place of smoke and fire.
The man who had leapt at her rolled away through the coals and staggered a few steps before falling on his face. His hair was ablaze. The villagers threw handfuls of earth over him, trying to quell the flames ”eating” at him, but Tabitha knew the man’s pain, she felt his agony. He was too far gone, he would die.
Ametheus shook his shaker wildly.
“No!” she cried. “No! You cannot do this! You cannot do this!”
Her rage gathered and swept outward through the world ruled by the Sorcerer’s vision, and the fire became suddenly dark, extinct. The smoke blew outward across the village and silence filled the air. She stood before him, a small figure before the great bulk of the Sorcerer, and she quivered with anger.
“Ah, do you feel that?” asked Ametheus. “The breaking of your utmost extremity. You are beyond your limits now. That is Chaos. You tried to measure my power and then you wallowed in despair and defeat. Now you reach beyond yourself, now you ride the winds of Chaos. You face your own ruin. Now we will see what you are made of.”
Tabitha gathered her power, reaching out to all the essence she could grasp. She gathered her lyre and plucked the vital notes. The force of the Lifesong was a moment away. She could punish him for his vision. She could destroy him. Her essence began to brighten, turning gold and vital.
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 70
