by Carol Berg
“But Gerick was here in Montevial with me. It’s impossible.”
“The Lords never dirty their own hands. They use others: Some are tools who do evils of their own will, some like the Zhid have been transformed, and some” - he almost spat as he said it - “they inhabit. They can abandon their own bodies, insinuate themselves into a man and displace his soul, leaving it a cowering, silent witness to the evils they do. They take on his life as their own, reaping the harvest of his senses so as to savor his fears and pleasures, controlling his movements and deeds for their own purposes. You would think the boy merely asleep. But when our son possessed another’s body and came to the Ravien Bathhouse, ready to destroy Jayereth’s work before it could be used, I was waiting and I recognized him.”
I was fascinated and horrified together. This story could have no relation to the boy I helped with school lessons and comforted when he had nightmares - serious, reserved, unsure of his place in a world he was only beginning to understand. Uneven in temper, yes, but so had I been at sixteen. Yet last night he had slept for the first time in days… weeks… Karon’s cold anger battered me like a storm tide, drowning my feeble protests, choking me with his horror and conviction.
“I wanted to kill him then,” he said, his jaw rigid. “So we are taught in Avonar: Kill the possessed body and you will kill the possessing soul before it can return to its own body. The host is left dead when the Lords are finished with him anyway. But Lord Dieste had chosen his host well, and I hesitated. It was Gar’Dena, you see, that came to the Ravien Bathhouse. No living soul but Gerick knew the hiding place. But Gar’Dena came and spoke the word that was supposed to open Jayereth’s cache, the very word I had told Gerick and no other. Before I could convince myself to slay Gar’Dena’s body, the Destroyer abandoned him and left him dead. Our dear friend, the good and generous man who helped save our lives, plunged a dagger into his own heart.”
“Gar’Dena… no… ”
Karon’s voice was on the verge of breaking, but, instead, he roared and snapped the branch from the alder tree. Launching it into the trees where it crashed to the ground, shredding leaves and twigs on its way, he turned and confronted me again, scarcely containing himself. “This time the Destroyer will not escape me. No matter whose shape he wears, I will close my eyes and see Jayereth’s torment and mad Gar’Dena shedding his own blood, and my sword will find its mark. Do you understand, Seri? He was able to stretch his arm across the Breach. Powers of night, I’ve told him the defenses of Avonar.”
I could not accept it. Gerick had rejected his perverse nurturing in Zhev’Na. He had given up immortality because he would not harm us. “Talk to him, Karon. This is impossible. A mistake. Perhaps it was really Gar’Dena after all… turned Zhid… a vicious trick of the Lords. What of the sixth? You said there were six who knew the secrets. Perhaps that one - ”
“The sixth was you.”
My heart sank like lead in a pool.
Karon gripped my shoulders and glared at me until my head came near cracking. “I say again, Seri, where is he?”
Of course, Karon would recognize Gerick no matter what form he wore. He had shared Gerick’s mind for hours working at his healing. And he was right. There would be no containing one of the Lords outside of death itself. Yet my heart ripped and bled and wept at the vision of Gerick curled up in boyish sleep in this beloved place… and Karon plunging his sword…
As if that very sword had cloven my skull, for one moment a suffocating fury engulfed my mind. My mouth opened to scream with anger that was not my own. And then it was gone, leaving me drained and empty and helpless.
“So he lies in the gatehouse! Oh, powers of night, we are at Windham… ” Karon had stolen my thoughts. His shoulders sagged, as if the fury had left him. He shook his head, closed his eyes, and spoke softly. “Ah, Seri. I am so sorry.”
But then he shoved me aside and ran up the path, sword drawn and death in his stride. Our son’s death.
“Karon, wait!” This could not be happening, not after so much pain and so much hope.
A sliver of yellow moon hung low in the east. I ran for the gatehouse, leaving the broken path and cutting straight across the vast wilderness of Windham’s gardens, stumbling over weeds and rocks in my hurry to reach Gerick before his father could. But I was too tired and too slow, my thoughts shredded like hay under the scythe. In the distance I heard a bellow of rage.
“Karon, no!” I screamed, running onward, ducking tree branches that seemed to get thicker and lower the farther I ran. “Gerick, run!”
A musty cellar gaped before me, its floor a mat of rotted leaves, bare roots crumbling its walls, its wooden doors rotted away. I teetered on the edge, then backed away and forced my way through a bramble thicket that tore at my clothes and my arms.
Odd, tittering laughter burst out somewhere to my right. “Who’s there?”
How could anyone laugh? The incongruity brought me to a halt. Was this a dream, my own nightmare, peopled by shades of princes and queens and houses and gardens, stories that made no sense, Gerick a murderous deceiver, Karon, my gentle Healer, in this bloodthirsty rage? A dream, that had to be it.
I pushed through a wall of sprangling lilac bushes. In the center of a circle of alders stood four men. I called them men. No other name that might serve came to mind. One of the four was incredibly thin, his naked, sinewy body colored the pure black of ebony. His hair was silver, his huge eyes burning amber like fireflies in the summer garden. He was half again as tall as the tallest man I had ever seen. The second man was as broad as three blacksmiths together. His skin brown and leathery, his hair red tufts springing from an oddly rounded skull, and he was badly stooped, his hands almost dragging the weedy ground. The third was a bearded man no taller than my waist, perfectly formed except for the skin grown over one eye socket. The three of them were exactly as the queen had described them to me, exactly as the terrified citizens of the Four Realms had described them to Maceron. They were laughing, as I could see by the greenish light of a lamp carried by the leathery man. The fourth person stood with his back to me.
“Who are you?” I said. “What are you doing here? Sword of Annadis! Tell me this is a dream.”
The odd trio greeted me with more hilarity. In a burst of green light the three men vanished, leaving only their laughter and their fourth companion behind. He whirled about, squinting as he peered into the darkness. Gerick.
I wanted to touch him, to reassure myself that he was my son whose pain I could ease. I wanted to tell him I still had faith in him and that I knew these accusations were all a mistake. But he stayed back, his wary eyes fixed on my hands, and I realized that in my fear and confusion I had snatched my knife from its sheath.
I dropped the weapon to the ground as if it were newly drawn from the forge. “Gerick! Your father - Gerick, tell me who you are.”
“Mother? Are you all right?” He stepped closer. I couldn’t see him clearly; the shadows were so very deep, the bushes tangled.
But I already knew I was not in a dream, and I was very much not all right. The pain in my breast was too harsh. A warm flood drenched my tunic, and the circle of trees began to spin. A knife covered in blood… Gerick lowering me gently to the ground, his narrow face rising quickly above me, worried, confused… his lips moving, but I couldn’t hear him for the rushing in my ears…
Then Gerick was gone, and Radele’s calm face hovered over me, washed out and vague like the sun’s disk seen through a fog. Others joined him, too shadowy to see. “Oh, my good lord, he’s killed her!”
I wanted to say I wasn’t dead, but the words lodged somewhere in my chest before leaking away with all the blood. I wanted to say Gerick hadn’t done it, but I didn’t know who had. If I could only remember what Gerick had said to me…
Somewhere in the distance came a howl of grief, but it was much too far away to concern me, and I was much too tired to care what sorrow could be so terrible. So I gave it up and embraced the cold darkness.
CHAPTER 9
Gerick
I knew my mother’s hair should be long, plaited into a shining, loose braid that fell halfway down her back. I knew it in the same way I knew that my father - my real father, the man named Karon - was slender and dark-haired, and had a left wrist that ached whenever the weather was cold. I shouldn’t have known those things. I’d never seen a portrait of my true father nor heard anyone describe how my mother wore her hair before my father was burned to death.
So how could it be that I would hear my mother laughing to herself while riding in a pony cart, and look over to see her, not in her chosen disguise of widow’s cap and purple velvet dress, but with hair braided halfway down her back, wearing a dress of emerald green and a gold locket that I knew had bits of dried rose petals inside it? Or when Prince D’Natheil walked with me in the garden at Verdillon, clasping his hands behind his back and remarking how strange it was to be at Professor Ferrante’s house again, why did I sometimes see a smaller, dark-haired man with high cheekbones who never clasped his hands behind his back, but rather held his left wrist in his right because of the way it had broken and healed crooked? Professor Ferrante’s journal had only confirmed what I already knew about my true father, though I could not say how I knew it.
This was not my imagination. No portrait and no person’s telling could have shown me all I saw and felt and knew in my… visions. I didn’t know what else to call them.
Such experiences were not a normal part of being a sorcerer. I knew that much. I might have believed the Dar’Nethi, Radele, was playing mind games with me, except the visions had started months before he’d come to Verdillon. And too, I didn’t think a Dar’Nethi could put things into my head without me knowing it, except perhaps the Prince - my father - who was exceptionally powerful.
Whatever the cause, I believed the visions were all bound up with the other things going on with me, my dreams and nightmares and all the rest of it. Most days I felt that if I didn’t keep myself buttoned up tight I was going to burst like a rotted cow, strewing every thought, every memory, every wicked, evil thing I’d ever done all over the place, exposed for everyone - my mother, my father, my friends - to see. I told myself I didn’t care what people thought of me, but, of course, I did, and I believed that if I ever lost control of myself, the Lords would find me.
That’s why I didn’t want anyone in my head any more, why I couldn’t let the Prince “help” me get over my nightmares. I had been one of the Lords, living for a few hours as the fourth physical expression of their single malevolent mind, my true identity lost, my soul a pit of corruption. I had been able to feel nothing in those hours, no love, no pain, no horror or disgust or joy. I could have stuck my hands in fire and not breathed a word. I could have crushed an infant under my foot and considered the deed no more than smoke in the wind. All the love and honor in two worlds would have been nothing more to me than dust on my shoe. Power was everything. I was filled with such craving for it that even after four years, to think of it set me trembling.
Only a single thread had bound me to the person I had been - my mother’s voice, telling me the truth of my lost life and those people who had been a part of it. I had held on to her lifeline, and eventually I began to understand how strong it was and how fiercely the Lords fought to snap it by making me kill her. Paulo had convinced me to believe in my mother, and I had let her pull me out.
In the days and weeks that followed my escape from Zhev’Na, my father had linked with my mind and my body, and with power I never imagined a Dar’Nethi could possess, worked to undo the things the Lords had done to me. But he couldn’t touch what remained of my life as a Lord of Zhev’Na. I’d locked those hours away behind a door that even he could not open. If he were ever to see behind it, he would understand what I had been, and if he was the man my mother believed him to be, he’d try to heal that part of me, too. I couldn’t allow that. The festering ran too deep. I would surely die or lose my mind, and most probably he would, too. Dieste the Destroyer was a part of me, and I didn’t believe he could be excised any more than the remnants of the Prince D’Natheil could be separated from the soul that had been my father’s. I had to learn to live with Dieste, to keep that door closed and barred.
There were times when staying in control was easier: when I was studying or working hard or riding with Paulo. There were times when it was more difficult: when I was angry or tired. And there were times when it was almost impossible: when I would touch a sword, or when I tried to work the least bit of sorcery. That’s why I’d had to leave Paulo and Radele to protect my mother from the bandits on our journey. The last place I could afford to be was in the middle of a battle with a sword in my hand, pain and blood everywhere. When I saw people suffering, I remembered the taste of pain and bitterness and despair, and how when I filled the dark places of my soul with those things, I could call down lightning or explore the stars or the depths of the ocean. That’s when I would hear the cunning whispers of the Lords as they searched for me, and I had to work hard to barricade the door. They were very close.
I couldn’t decipher my dreams any more than I could understand my waking visions. The dreams had started just after I left Zhev’Na. When my father had done all the healing he could do - all I could let him do - and I started living again, sleeping and eating and feeling things like a human person, I started dreaming about a barren country with a purple-and-black sky and stars that were green. It wasn’t fearful, just a place. But I dreamed of that same place every night, and that made me curious.
Gradually, over the next year, the dream landscape began to change, so that one night I might see a barren moor, and the next there’d be a track across it, and maybe a scrubby tree or a boulder. Then, on another night, a mound of stones would sit beside the track, or the track would be more like a road or wind up a craggy mountainside. After two years or so, I started seeing the dwarf with one eye and his two companions, just sitting on a boulder, maybe, or a wall, or engaged in some commonplace activity like sharpening a knife or carving wood or mending a shoe.
Of course those weren’t the dreams that had me waking up the household like some bawling infant frightened of bears or snakes. The nightmares had to do with the Lords: waking up blind and knowing I could only see by putting on the gold mask with the diamond eyes the Lords had given me, or feeling myself trapped alive inside the giant stone statue the Lords had made of me, or discovering my mother injured and bending over to taste her blood, feeling the hunger for power devour me.
Though my entire life had been shaped by D’Arnath’s Bridge, I had never seen it. Back when I was a child and Ziddari had carried me across, I had been in a stupor from his enchantments. But after the Prince shared his secrets with me that night at Verdillon, and said for the thousandth time how much he hoped I would come to Avonar before too long, my curiosity got the best of me. No matter what the Prince had in mind, I did not intend ever to live in Avonar. The thought of sitting in D’Arnath’s palace and ruling the Dar’Nethi turned my stomach. Therefore, I thought I’d take the opportunity to get a look just that once.
A terrible mistake. The journey had been interesting, just as I told my mother, but I had never felt so out of place and so exposed, as if from the moment we set foot on the Bridge my flesh was torn open and my bare bones showing. And from the night I’d come back, my dreams of the dwarf and his world had become nightmares, too.
The terror would always begin with the dream world falling to pieces like a puzzle knocked off a table. The dwarf might be on one fragment, waving his hands at me in a panic, and the road might be broken up across a few others, and a mountain on another, and in between all the pieces blazed searing white fire. The fire burned up the fragments of the dreamscape like dry leaves, and, all the while, I felt like I was being burned up right along with them. When I woke, I felt hollow and dry, as if the white fire had scorched out everything inside me.
If the dreams had burned out the dark places behind the do
or, it might have been all right. But, instead, they left me wanting to open that door and escape into the cold and the dark. I don’t know whether it was the white fire or the cold dark that made me scream the most. Walking D’Arnath’s cursed Bridge had twisted my mind worse than it was already, and I didn’t know what I was going to do about it.
Then we traveled to Prydina, and a half-drunk sheep-herder described the dwarf and the dream world. I’d told Paulo about them, and how I thought they were real, but I never expected anyone else to know about them. I almost took off right then to go see the place where the sheepherder’s son had disappeared, thinking that if I saw it, maybe I could rid myself of the dreams or at least learn what they meant. But I couldn’t leave my mother until I knew she’d be safe.
My mother had no idea how fiercely the Lords hated her. The only reason she’d lived for one moment after they discovered her in Zhev’Na was their conviction that I would kill her and thus make my corruption complete. What worried - frightened - them most about my mother was that they didn’t understand her at all, how someone with no touch of magical power could oppose them so successfully. They hated her after the affair of the Gate, when they chased her and the Prince to the Bridge. Instead of laughing as D’Arnath’s last Heir doomed his world, they saw the Bridge strengthened, the Gates opened, and their nasty plan come to nothing.
But that disappointment was minute compared to what they felt when I followed her into the Prince’s portal and left Zhev’Na. They were a finger’s breadth from everything they had ever wanted, complete victory, utter control over the worlds. If I had become both the Heir of D’Arnath and a Lord of Zhev’Na, the Lords and I could have destroyed D’Arnath’s Bridge with one thought, breaking the balance the Dar’Nethi believed it preserved between Gondai and the mundane world. Then we would have set our enchanted brass ring - the big one called the Great Oculus - to spinning, and used it to feed forever on the chaos we made. No one in any world would have been able to stand against us.
