Ison of the Isles

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

  Abruptly he turned and opened the door for her, then led her down the hall to the next room. He took a key from his pocket and opened the door. “Go in,” he said.

  She had expected him to follow her in, but he didn’t. He closed the door behind her and turned the lock between them. Apparently, this was a scene he did not want to witness.

  The room was on a corner of the building with windows facing south and west, lit now by the setting sun. Down the coast, beyond the black mass of Thimish, a piled-up rumple of clouds glowed magenta. She stood by the door, and watched the form silhouetted against the western sky.

  He was standing pressed against the window, palms outstretched, as if he might merge with the glass and, like it, welcome in the fading light.

  “Goth,” Spaeth said. He did not move.

  “Goth!” She crossed the room to look into his face.

  The sight shocked her. He was emaciated, and his hair had thinned to a mere wisp on his skull. He looked like an ancient relic, so fragile a touch might dissolve him into dust.

  His sunken eyes were open, the pupils dilated so wide there was almost no iris left. A radiant smile was on his face. He reached out to cup a sunbeam in his hands. The light gathered there till it formed a tiny sunball. He lifted it to his face to smell it, like a flower. His cradled hands glowed, translucent; the grey filigree of bone showed clearly. Then, with a quick motion, he tossed the light into the air; it flew upward and dissolved.

  Spaeth reached out to touch his face, saying his name again. There was no recognition in his eyes.

  “It’s all so little,” he whispered. “Such a great heap of little things.”

  She barely existed for him any more. Tears stung her eyes: he was her first, most precious love. All that had happened, all the time they had been apart, seemed to have disappeared, leaving her like a child again. She put her arms around him and drew him close, very gentle, for it seemed like his bones might snap with a careless touch. For a moment she feared that the pain of her need would harm him.

  Hesitantly, uncertainly, his arms closed around her. “Spaeth?” he said. “Is it you?”

  “Yes, it’s me,” she said.

  “I was very far away.”

  “I could tell.”

  “I can’t stay with you long. I am almost free.”

  She drew back to look at him. His face looked like a translucent shell before a bright flame inside him. “Free?” she said. “You want to be free of me?”

  He drew in a quick breath. “I have hurt you,” he said. “I am sorry.” But even as he looked at her, the focus of his eyes shifted, and she sensed he was looking at something else, something brighter and more absorbing than she. “I won’t be parted from you, you know,” he said. “I will be with you. I will be with all my bandhotai—closer to them than ever. No barriers, Spaeth—none at all!” He smiled with a bright elation.

  Something was using him as fuel. Spaeth realized that this was what Talley had intended her to see. “What has happened to you, Goth?” she said.

  He struggled to concentrate on putting it in words. “You know how many people I have loved in my life. I cherished them each for their own pasts, their own pains. That was what blinded me. It was really the same thing I loved in all of them. But in people the good is finite, bounded by their individuality. There is an infinite aspect of that good. It is immense. Touching it is like being bandhota to all the world. All of it, Spaeth! The trees, the seas, the air. All the thorny people, all their conflicts and confusion. I feel as if my blood has rained over the Isles.”

  The euphoria made him seem almost more than human for a moment, then left him drained. He wavered, and she caught him. Carefully she led him to a chair, where he sank exhausted. As his head lolled back she glimpsed something on his limp arm and pushed back his sleeve. The skin was pockmarked with tiny cuts, and there were four fresh slivers of achra under his skin. Horrified, she checked his other arm. There were three more slivers in it. There was enough drug in him to kill two people.

  She sat back on her heels, staring at him. She had been given an explanation that explained nothing.

  It was laughably easy to destroy him, Admiral Talley had said. So this was what he had meant. She saw now that there was a door leading into the adjoining chamber, Talley’s chamber. She crossed the room to try it, but it was locked. When she turned back, Goth’s eyes were open, following her wearily. This time he looked barely lucid.

  “Admiral Talley did this to you, didn’t he?” Spaeth said.

  Goth smiled faintly. “He comes through that door to watch me, and lecture me. Not long ago he threatened to take the achra away, but he knows by now it would kill me. I have escaped him, you see.” He looked a little pleased with himself.

  Spaeth felt a dark, consuming rage. A rage at the universe that such people as Corbin Talley should be permitted to exist. She came back to Goth’s side. “I will find a way to punish him,” she said.

  He scarcely seemed to hear. He was still staring at the door, his smile gone. “He has been my hardest test,” he said. He closed his eyes and drew an uneven breath. “How I longed to cure him! But it would have captured me again, snared me in individual love.”

  “Love!” Spaeth nearly spat the word. “How could you love a man like that?” Her rage now encompassed Goth as well. He was as weak as ever.

  “Oh, it’s very easy,” he said. “Wait until you see him.”

  “I have seen him. He makes me feel unclean.”

  Goth searched her face. “Didn’t you see the pain in him?”

  “It doesn’t matter. We’re in an Inning world now,” she said. “There is no balance here; mora is unravelling before them. Dhota has no power for them, or meaning.”

  She had finally roused him to full attention. “No, Spaeth!” he said. “Dhota does have power over the Innings. Its power may be different for them than for us. There is no telling how it will manifest itself in the Inning mind. But dhota will emerge again, just as powerful, though transformed. It is the solution.”

  He had exhausted himself again, and fell back in the chair. Spaeth sat watching him. By now, the western sky was flaming carnelian and rose. The colours played on his ruined face, giving it a false glow of health. He was using up his physical being fast. Her anger transmuted into sharp grief, she knelt beside his chair and put her arms around him, resting her head on his shoulder. She wanted to stay that way forever.

  A shudder passed through his frame. “No,” he whispered, barely audible. “Don’t call me back. I can almost see it.”

  She forced herself to draw away from him. His eyes were closed, though she could see them moving under the lids. His breathing was fast and shallow. The light was growing on his face.

  His eyes snapped open; the dilated pupils made them look almost black. He turned to the window, where the horizon glowed bright with the dying sun. “Look at it!” he said, transfixed by the sight.

  “Yes,” Spaeth said. “Sunset.”

  Goth struggled from his chair and approached the window as if something wondrous lay out there. He pressed a hand against the pane. “You see? You see?” he said.

  “See what?”

  “The world out there. The whole world is permeated with love.”

  The edge of the sun touched the sea. Excitedly, Goth fumbled at the fastenings of the robe he wore. It dropped around his feet and he stood naked, a mere skeleton, outlined against the window. He pressed against the glass as when Spaeth had first entered.

  The sunlight shone through him as through frosted glass; Spaeth could see his bones, and all the milky membranes of his body. As the light fell on him the obstructions in his body seemed to react. One by one they dissolved into clear water, till at last he was transparent as glass, a mere medium of light.

  The sun sank below the horizon, and suddenly
Goth was there again, opaque as before. He staggered back, then collapsed onto the carpet. When Spaeth got to him he was unconscious. She put an arm under his shoulders and found he was light as a wickerwork image of a man. She picked him up and took him to the bed. He did not stir as she spread blankets over him.

  He was far away from her now, she knew. Either lost in drugged delusion or—or what? She was still wondering what she had witnessed when she looked up and found Corbin Talley standing in the doorway that led to his chamber, watching her.

  When Spaeth did not speak, he looked at Goth and said in a metallic voice, “He is dying.”

  She wondered if he had come to enjoy the sight of her pain. She resolved not to let him see it.

  “Let me stay with him,” she said.

  “You can do nothing.”

  “I can make sure he doesn’t die among enemies.”

  In another person she might have thought the glance he gave her was resentment. But then he shrugged and came forward. “Very well.” He held out a small bottle filled with white slivers. “Let him have this when he wakes.”

  She looked at the bottle with hatred, then up at him. Their eyes clashed.

  “He’ll die if he doesn’t have it,” Talley said.

  “He’ll die if he does.”

  “Yes. He will die, regardless.” His voice was strictly controlled, but there was a complex undertone in it—a trace of helpless outrage? Was he capable of regret for something that had gotten beyond his control?

  Reluctantly, Spaeth took the bottle and placed it on the stand beside the bed. She looked back, expecting Talley to be smiling in triumph at having gotten her complicity. But he was not even looking at her. He was staring down at Goth as if something in him were being slowly impaled.

  He turned away before Spaeth had more than a glance; but it left her shaken. She had to clench her control tight to keep from calling him back as he left the room, locking the door behind him. She looked down at Goth. There was a slight smile on his face, as if, from wherever he was, he had witnessed what had just happened.

  *

  It was late night when sounds from the next room told her that the Admiral had returned. She sat waiting, watching the door, expecting him. But the sounds died away, and she realized he was not going to come.

  She rose and went soundlessly to the door. She laid her ear against the wood, but heard nothing. Carefully she tried the knob, but the door was locked.

  She stood in the dark room, and every word Goth had said was vivid in her mind. How I longed to cure him! Didn’t you see his pain? Dhota is the solution.

  Goth was deluded, she thought. And yet, as the thought he had placed in her mind crystallized, the tug of instinct grew strong. The answer was so close. Only a locked door away.

  She faced the door, trying to still her mind. It was a locked door in this circle, but it could not be in all.

  For a long time she thought her mind was too present to let her enter another circle; she needed some dreamweed. All she had was a nonsense phrase Goth had taught her once; she repeated it over and over to herself, like a chant.

  The world slowed. She let herself sink deeper. The chant was spinning in her head, growing, surrounding her. For an instant the carpet felt wet under her feet; then it was just carpet again. She rode her own breath like a wave, then dove.

  Something brushed her face. She opened her eyes to a nightlit jungle, dense with foliage. A tiny, coral-eyed snake dripped from a branch above her; she pulled back and found that her limbs were twined round with creepers and vines. She tugged to get free. The creepers broke with little popping sounds, then the stubs snaked forward to wrap around her again. She had to move. Her feet splashed in black water that sent up a vegetable stench.

  Where was the doorway? The sweating undergrowth blocked her sight in every direction. She heard a rustle behind her, and whipped around. Two predatory eyes glowed through the forest.

  Then she saw the doorway, a threshold of teeth with ivory fangs on either side. She gathered her mind, stepped between the teeth, and dropped like a stone back into her own circle.

  She landed with a thud on her knees. She was in a short passageway with the locked door at her back. A faint light filtered in from the room ahead, and for a moment she thought Admiral Talley was still awake. But as she listened, scarcely daring to breathe, not a sound came from the room. Cautiously she crept forward.

  It was a curiously spartan room for the commander of all Inning forces in the Forsakens: a bed, a washstand, a desk, and a table where a dim oil lamp glowed. She wondered what sorts of ghosts the light was meant to keep away.

  He was lying on his back, the sheet pushed restlessly down. His head was turned to one side and his right arm was raised as if to ward off a blow. His face had an expression of strain even in sleep.

  Spaeth crossed silently to the washstand. There she found all she needed: a razor, a basin, and a white cravat. Without a sound she sliced open a vein and let the blood drip into the basin. When she had enough, she bandaged her arm with the cravat, pulling it tight with her teeth.

  She brought the basin to his bedside and knelt there, trying to calm her nerves. Looking down on him as he slept, she knew he would prefer her to slit his throat with the razor than to do what she intended.

  She dipped her fingers into the blood and, barely breathing, let three drops fall on his temple. The muscles around his eyes contracted slightly, and for a desperate moment she thought he was going to wake. She waited, but nothing more happened. Slowly she let more drops fall, this time below his ear; then on his exposed throat, then on his chest above his heart.

  As the blood turned clear and soaked in, she felt his mind drift free of its moorings, relaxed and open. Spaeth had never entered a sleeping mind before; no moral dhotamar would. She made her own mind float, infinitely light, then settled with a mere feather’s touch upon him.

  Even asleep, even with the blood, he tensed when her mind touched his. She rested there, radiating calm and quiet, till his guard slowly relaxed. Her instinct had been right; awake, he would have resisted this strongly.

  She sent his conscious mind deeper and deeper into sleep. His muscles relaxed and his breathing slowed; he had been semi-alert even in slumber. When there was no longer danger of him waking, Spaeth dipped her hand in the blood again and rubbed it on his temples, throat, and wrists. His breathing changed, and she stopped for a moment to sink his mind even deeper into unconsciousness.

  She stood then to gather her energy. She was already tired, and the hard part lay ahead. She looked down at his pale body lying there, completely vulnerable, and a thrill of anticipation passed through her. She could not yet see where his wounds were lodged, as she had in Harg; in the dim lamplight his body was perfect, untouched.

  Softly, with enormous care, she sat down beside him on the bed. His heart was speeding up, as if some part of him sensed his danger. She rested a hand on his chest, over the heart, to calm it. The feel of his skin increased her yearning to such a pitch that she could wait no longer.

  She merged into his sleeping mind as if she were a dream. It was a strange landscape she found there: cold and unyielding to her exploring touch. His conscious mind was an abstract construction, scarcely even connected to his body. There was no entry there for her. She turned away from it, searching for a way further in.

  Everything around her was paved over with discipline. She ran her hand lightly up his thigh, hoping it would soften his mind to her; but he only tensed like a steel trap, denying himself pleasure, controlling his instinct.

  She rested inside him then, searching for any flaw, any crack in his sterile perfection. She noticed Goth’s presence, surrounded by a hard unfeeling shell. And yet there were fresh scars around it. As she began to blend with that portion of him, an aspect of Corbin Talley was suddenly with her, as if to bar her way. She
put her arms around him and they sank together into his past.

  It rushed into her so suddenly, and so painfully, that every muscle in her went rigid and her mouth opened in a soundless cry. Talley was struggling in her arms, trying to escape; she held him there, forcing him to stay and feel it all.

  They were in a new landscape now, one he had barred off and buried. Here he was not the brittle, flawless man he had constructed. He was a child, thirteen years old, proud and intensely private, consigned into a world whose coarseness and brutality was unimaginable to his parents. Nor had they ever suspected, since shame had kept him silent. He had endured months of terror and despair until he had realized he was only going to survive if he made himself harder and more malicious, colder and more cunning than anyone around him.

  His body was stiff in her arms. She pressed him close against her, and stroked his sweaty back to calm him. His body no longer seemed perfect. Everywhere there were wounds, hidden in deep recesses, pooling like blood inside him. He was mutilated, shattered—yet somehow miraculously knit back together in the shape of a man.

  She led him back into his past. The memories were excruciatingly vivid. She stood in his young body, in a bare room. He despised the man standing over him—an officer, but a corrupt creature with an appetite for sadism. Corbin had vowed not to let the man see him bend in any way. He was silent as two older boys fastened him face down on the wooden block, and silent as the cane came down with a crack against his buttocks. Spaeth jerked as it bit into her skin, stunning the breath out of her. Still he was silent as the cane came down harder and harder. The tears were running down Spaeth’s face, but not his. Ten times the cane fell. The pain was intense. Fifteen times. His torturer was not pausing. He realized then that it would just go on and on till he wept and begged. And not a soul in the world would care. Something in him broke then, and he sobbed and debased himself, until the man was satisfied that his pride was broken. Afterwards, the pain of the beating went away, but his loathing for his own abject surrender stayed.