One eye opened. “Elianas, I do not want apology from you. Not for the ages of silence, not for the truth you threw at me earlier, not for betrayal, not for Kalgaia and not for the many times we played this game to the detriment of others. I would have to rip an apology from you, one that would keep, and I refuse to do so.” He extended his right hand. “Help me up, my head hurts.”
Elianas took that hand and levered him up. “What of forgiveness?”
“You tell me where we stand on that.”
Elianas glanced at Tristan and then commenced checking for injuries.
Torrullin paced nearer. “Look this way.” When the dark man did so, he said, “Nose and left cheek … right jaw.” Elianas touched those places and pointed out Torrullin’s injuries. “We are not about forgiveness, so how do we move past this?”
Elianas took Torrullin’s right hand. It was bruised and swollen. He turned it palm up, saying, “I never asked forgiveness for betrayal, because I believe it has defined us. Of course, I now realize my recollection of that night was not quite the same as yours.”
Stroking the palm in his cupped hand, he turned it over again to touch carefully in the webbed spaces between the knuckles.
“I won’t ask forgiveness for that night, not even knowing how far we went; I still believe it defines us, and I think you lie when you say you need to forgive me. Kalgaia proves how far in you went with me. As regards forgiveness for ages of unspoken accusation? What would it change? Anger remains, as does hurt. Will saying ‘I forgive you’ change it, will it ease anything? I think not, and I further think you are not prepared to forgive this, thus why expect it?”
He held Torrullin’s healed hand in both of his and pressed it firmly, and then stepped forward to lay that hand against Torrullin’s chest and held it there. The action brought him close.
“You are not willing to forgive this transgression, because you know how narrow the line is for you. Nemisin could have asked you to rid him of my father and it is likely you would have done so. He merely asked another, did he not? I serve to remind you of how close you were and, thus, there can be no forgiveness. I accept it; you must do the same.”
“It seems I must beg it of you,” Torrullin murmured. “Having been so close.”
Elianas moved even closer. “You want me to assuage your guilt, is that it? Forget it. As you said, we are not about forgiveness. These complications are part of us and it will not change.”
“It could have been different.”
“No doubt, yet only if we had been different. Come, my brother, how many cycles? And how many times did we actually choose another path? This is who and this is what we are. Stop fighting.”
Torrullin murmured, “It is in my nature to fight.”
A hooded look, a sly smile. “I know.”
“Back away, Elianas.”
Elianas gave a rueful grin and released Torrullin’s hand. He stepped away. “We need to discuss the Lorinin. I cannot believe you did not know.”
“Are you claiming you knew?”
“Not so as to have named you, but there was a sense of knowing. Now there is understanding mixed in. Much begins to tie in, lost connections reaching out … gods, fucking Lorinin. Danae and Lorinin. Fabulous, how crazily fabulous.”
Torrullin frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Elianas stared at him. “Gods, you are telling the truth.”
“Tell me why this has you in a spin. Tell me what the keys are, what the Syllvan meant.”
Licking his lips, Elianas glanced at Tristan, and shook his head. “Sorry, it cannot be told. It must be shown, it must be felt. In the dark, Torrullin, where sight is touch, where …” He paused, swallowed, and gazed steadily into grey eyes. “At least, it is how I know to reveal the Lorinin in you, to you.”
Torrullin’s eyes shifted away. “Does this entail crossing the line?”
Elianas barked a hard laugh. “Is that all you worry about? We would not have to go that far.”
Torrullin was wary. “That worries me.”
Elianas mulled it over. “I foresee trouble.”
Tristan called out, “Whatever you two said, it has been sufficient. Try looking around you again.”
THE STANDING STONES had vanished. The circle of grass was gone. In its stead there was a wall of glass, thick, ensorcelled glass.
Beyond stood a man, his features twisted into alien moving shapes by the thickness of the transparency, and he was silent and calm, hands laced out of sight behind his back.
Torrullin gripped Elianas’ arm. “Can you get us out, can you built a bridge to soar beyond this glass? I would rather experience and re-experience into eternity every pleasure and pain you bring me to than stand face-to-face with that one.”
Elianas blanched. “Who is it?”
“He is the source of the laughter, the source of the prompting we both felt through the ages, and, all gods, he is the one who made me Elixir.”
“Then he made me Alhazen,” Elianas whispered, and a similar dread grew in him.
“Build a bridge,” Torrullin said.
Tristan’s heavy hands descended on their shoulders and held them. “I am warned to halt you before you attempt escape. We are to listen or this is the end of the road. He says he cannot take our lives, but he is able to remove every shred of sentience. He says to hold.”
Utter darkness came then.
Utter oblivion.
Chapter 64
Appearances are deceiving
~ Truth
Cube of Manipulation
TRISTAN RETURNED TO awareness first.
He opened gritty, dry eyes and attempted to determine where he was, but an absence of light surrounded him. It felt like genuine dark, not manufactured oblivion, and for that he was profoundly thankful. Nothing in Lethe made sense, thus even a touch of something familiar was welcome. He moved, wanting to use his hands to discover his environment, and found he could not. Panic was instant and it was over-powering. He was bound, he was gagged and blindfolded.
How far had he lost himself if he thought it a more acceptable state of darkness? Who was responsible for this? The individual who told him to curtail escape? The male voice in his mind sounded calming, reasonable, and had proven false.
Tristan squirmed to test the limits of binding. He was on his back, his ankles tightly wrapped, heels digging into a hard surface of some kind - wood possibly, for it was warm under him - and a strap across his forehead held his head down and immovable. His chest was criss-crossed - cotton not rope - and his wrists were as tightly wrapped as his ankles. The ability to move was non-existent.
He groaned around the gag in his mouth, hoping to elicit a response from either Torrullin or Elianas, but nothing came back. It meant, he attempted to reason, they could be unconscious or as bound and gagged.
Or it meant he was alone.
He panicked again, struggling against the bindings, shouting muffled curses without decipherable sense. For long minutes he struggled thus, exhausting himself. He tried to spit the gag out and forced his head from side to side - infinitesimal movements - to dislodge the blindfold, and then surrendered to the situation. He was bound, gagged and blindfolded, and there was nothing he could do to change it. He would wait for change; change brought new factors into a situation, even a desperate one.
What was wrong with him? He was a sorcerer, for pity’s sake; there were spells to undo bindings.
A spell, Tristan Skyler Valla, would not be in your best interests. You are confined, Kaval leader. If you attempt magic it will reverberate and cause harm. I would avoid it.
Tristan stilled. He lay quiescent and gave due thought to what was happening and to who his gaoler could be. What do you want with me?
You are the whip to be used. Your inability to escape and the likelihood of harm befalling you; these are the lashes to be meted out upon your two companions. Please, do not take this personally, Tristan Valla, for I have no quarrel with you.
Well, I now have
a quarrel with you, Tristan thought privately, and then wondered how he would be used against Torrullin and Elianas, and why it was necessary. He guarded his thoughts and sank into silence and inactivity, which caused the voice in his head to withdraw with a satisfied grunt.
He would await the change that heralded new factors; it was the only plan he had.
ELIANAS ROLLED ONTO his back.
Opening his eyes, he barely registered anything before a sharp jab in his side caused him to contort away from a possible source of the pain, and he lost sight of his surroundings. He shoved a jagged rock out of his way and sat up. He was groggy as if he had slept over-long or was drugged or - he stiffened as awareness flooded in - someone placed a spell on him.
On his feet, he froze.
Tristan lay bound on a contraption of torture and, as he watched, the contraption shifted its victim into a vertical position. The gagged and blinded man sagged against bindings. Tristan was alone in the glass cage, as bait, as coercion.
He swung around searching for Torrullin and found him turned to stone nearby.
Literally turned to stone.
Torrullin, kneeling and staring at the glass cage, had been enchanted into an immovable statue of speckled rock.
Elianas stumbled forward, hoping it was a likeness to trick him for an unfathomable reason, and fell against the statue. It was warm, the stone was warm. Torrullin had been contained within.
He swung to his feet to stare down, then to study his surroundings cautiously and, finally, to look at the man in the glass cage.
“What the fuck?” he shouted, and did not care how desperate he sounded.
Elianas Danae, nobody truly learns anything in panic, or in employing such language.
Elianas froze again, and gazed around, eyes darting. It was a featureless plain, with only a glass cage and a stone statue to define it; there was no place for the source of the voice to hide, to wait or to spring a trap from.
“What do you want?”
That will be answered in due course. For now you are at liberty to move around, to think, to use magic, to attempt to break Tristan from the glass vessel, to extract Elixir from his stone prison, and to act in any way you see fit.
“Why me?” Elianas breathed. “Why am I left unfettered?”
Unless I misjudge your sense of conscience, Danae, I would think you are likely more ‘fettered’ than your companions are. You are their means to liberty, but there is time enough for those details to surface. Go, walk, move around and determine where your choice lies right now. We shall speak soon.
“Why me?” Elianas shouted, but there was no reply. “Answer me! Why is this for me to do?”
There was no answer
Elianas sank to his knees before Torrullin and put his hands to that warm stone-frozen face. He stared at hooded rock eyes and tried to hear, tried to listen, but Torrullin, the prisoner within, was silent and would remain silent.
“No,” Elianas breathed. “Not this.”
He craned his head back to look at Tristan.
Whatever lay ahead, he realized, would not be pleasant.
He wandered first around the glass cage.
It had roughly the same dimensions of the stone henge, but there similarity ended. The glass was thick and it would take mighty giants with mighty fists to smash through, or a wrecking machine able to destroy skyscrapers. It was too high and too smooth to scale, and there was probably some kind of deterrent device to entering from above … and below. It would be physically impossible to enter given those constraints, and then there was the matter of the glass being entirely seamless; there was no formal entry point either.
He attempted a spell to shatter glass; it did not work. He tried one able to shift huge chunks of rock, but the glass was immune. Sound manipulation had no effect, the vibrations lost in the vastness of their surroundings. He conjured a wrecking machine, then sent it away again in disgust; he had no idea how to operate the device. He attempted delving and met unholy resistance. He flew up and smashed into a force-field overhead. He hung there a while, throwing spell after spell to disable or dismantle it, and was forced to surrender.
All the while Tristan hung in his bindings.
Elianas cursed and walked a distance away, hoping to find clarity or inspiration when viewing a problem from afar, but when he viewed said problem, he found himself so drawn to the statue that was Torrullin, he lost cognizant thought for a time.
Sitting beside the statue, his head sank into his hands. The amber hue behind closed eyelids darkened under the covering of his flesh and then, lo, colours began to flash there, as if he viewed a private waking dream.
He stiffened, and carefully cupped his hands tighter to reduce the remaining light and to intensify colour, and concentrated in that manner, shutting the listener out there from sharing the images behind his lids. He was not a seer and was not much of a prophetic dreamer either, yet he knew this could only be construed as a vision, or someone tried to communicate with him. There was everything to gain in following the images and attempting to understand them.
Elianas lowered his head, ostensibly in helpless weariness, and gave every ounce of his attention to what moved behind his eyelids.
The image that had startled him into an awareness of something beyond the ordinary - a series of flashing colours resolving into a bird in flight - swiftly deserted his view when he concentrated. He saw the glass cage with Tristan an indistinct form trapped inside it, but the glass was not transparent, it was a bizarre rose hue much like the light in Grinwallin’s Crucible Chamber, and inside the air twisted as if currents of vapour moved within.
He swallowed and pressed his sight to go deeper. There was a wand in the mist, a hand swirling it around, and hand and wand moved the air to obscure Tristan. The rose-hued glass darkened apace. He forced himself in further, only to have everything obscured. Swearing silently, he shifted line of sight to find other images, and they came fast and numerous.
Torrullin, his eyes wide, stark and frozen.
Tristan, blood dripping from cracked lips.
Teighlar, kneeling on the steps leading up to the portico. Teighlar crying.
He saw Quilla, long-time companion to the Enchanter, flying across the skies of Luvanor, his wings fluttering.
Lowen - gods, Lowen. The Xenian was already old in his vision and still beautiful. She wagged her fingers at him across the divides of time, realm and his lack of seer’s talent. Lowen, if he could watch her carefully and for long enough, would have something to share. She, no doubt, had a vision in her time and place, and knew not to doubt it.
After Lowen there came four swift images of flight. Again there was Quilla flying and then a spaceship hurtled silent through a star-speckled vacuum, and shortly after an image of a flock of birds - Ephnor, sentient birds - took on patterns in their particular sky. The fourth image was especially pertinent. Two giant Shadow Wings.
He dropped his hands from his face as the images ceased with Shadow Wings.
Elianas sat for a long time in stillness, deep in thought.
Gradually an aware image emerged - the kind created with intelligent reasoning - and the more he examined what he saw, the more sense it made.
He realized every move and thought in Lethe had an effect on Reaume, therefore on the reality they accepted as home.
Elianas realized something else too, and smiled.
Let the games begin.
He said without bothering to raise his voice, “I am ready to deal.”
A MAN APPEARED on the featureless plain, a fair distance away.
He was more than mere man, but it remained a solid way to describe him. He wandered casually nearer while Elianas awaited his arrival. Elianas prepared for the confrontation by rising to stand behind the statue of Torrullin. He understood Torrullin was in no danger; he and Tristan were the expendable ones.
The man approached and as he did so his features became clear. He was a generic, Elianas saw.
This was a be
ing that had taken on the most normal and regular features of a human to seem less threatening. It meant he could walk where he would not be suspected. He was of average height, which made him shorter than the three men under his control, and average build - muscled, without being the he-man type. He walked with an even gait and was slightly heavy in his steps as if to show he was calm, reasonable, normal. His hair was at shoulder length, and a rich brown, a bit untidy. His eyes were hazel, his mouth friendly with regular lips. No doubt his teeth were white and even, and there were freckles across the bridge of his nose. His hands were large with manicured nails. He wore plain breeches, and a cotton shirt, the sleeves rolled up. A pair of sturdy boots clad his feet.
He came to a halt on the other side of the statue and smiled easily. Indeed, white, even teeth.
Elianas inclined his head. “How am I to address you?”
The man considered. “Call me Ixion.”
In mythology Ixion was regarded as the father of the Centuar, among other things. “Ixion. A strong name.”
“Thank you. Perhaps I should change it; folk are wary of strong names.”
“They denote strong personalities?”
Ixion smiled. “Something like that, but this is not about me, Elianas Danae.”
A rueful twist to the Danae’s mouth. “No, it is about Torrullin.”
“Very good, and faster than anticipated.”
“I had help.”
A tiny hesitation. “The Xenian seer. She is remarkably gifted.”
Elianas shrugged and waited.
Ixion reached out to stroke Torrullin’s stone cheek and then stroked his hair. Elianas shuddered, but bore it in enforced silence.
The man knelt to peer into that stone gaze, and said, “He is strong, he continues to astonish me. Even now he fights to break from the stone. I wonder, though, if he understands his struggles brings earthquakes, tidal waves and avalanches to many vulnerable worlds in Reaume. It is Elixir who struggles hardest. How he tries to deny it.”
Lore of Sanctum Omnibus Page 117
