Ærinna fixed Vivian with even more loving eyes. ‘Guess I’m here to find out.’
Vivian gave the room full of candles a frustrated look. ‘Prepare to be disappointed, then. Brother Haral and I have already been through the candle thing. I couldn’t manage it the last twenty-two times I tried.’
‘Good thing twenty-three’s your lucky number then,’ said Ærinna, holding her gaze. Vivian stared back. What was the Weaver suggesting?
‘You know why you’re here, Vivian.’ Ærinna pointed at the thousands of lit candles, shining their cold violet light across the circular room. ‘You know what to do.’
As soon as she said it, every candle went off, as though extinguished by an unseen wind. The Round Room was suddenly plunged into a buttery darkness.
‘Go on then. Now turn them back on,’ the voice of the Weaveress cut through the darkness.
‘What, all of them?’
‘All of them.’
‘At the same time?’ Vivian moaned. ‘But I can’t see a bloody thing! How am I to focus—’
‘Brother Haral is a great Weaver, but his method is lacking in one major area,’ Ærinna’s voice emerged from the darkness. ‘In teaching you how to Weave – to bend reality to your inner will – Brother Haral forgot one very important aspect of Weaving.’
‘Which is?’
‘Everyone can Weave, everyone can move the world, but not everyone can Weave in the same way,’ said Ærinna. ‘You’re not a Weaver of material things, Vivian. And someone like Irra Lazuli – who likes to fit everything into boxes, whose world must conform to her own ideal image and by her own written laws – would be the first to forget that reality is not one solid block, but an ocean both fluid and multi-layered. I know of your suspicion, Vivian. I know you have created the belief that odds can be Woven upon; that events can be bent, rewritten, taken back. That seed has taken roots so deeply, so strongly inside your own mind that no one can ever hope to disperse it.’
Vivian patiently waited for the greatest Weaver in Ærria to tell her she was delusional; that odds couldn’t be bent, events couldn’t be changed, and luck was no more than happy coincidence – it was, after all, a ridiculous belief Vivian had created within the walls of Ala Spuria as a simple way of keeping sane – but such words never left Ærinna’s mouth.
‘You are truly a Weaver of Odds; a mistress of the immaterial,’ her voice reached out from the darkness like thunder, making Vivian jump.
‘But these candles are not immaterial,’ Vivian argued. ‘The world is not immaterial.’
‘A world is made of all kinds of things: ideas, feelings, memories...’ said the young Weaveress. ‘There are many kinds of energy at work. Powers. What Brother Haral forgot to tell you – or perhaps, never quite understood himself – is that one can change a whole world by changing its common denominator ; by changing the simplest, truest idea that permeates that world. Can you think of a common denominator for your world, Vivian?’
The words came to Vivian’s lips so readily, they might have been hanging there since the dawn of time.
‘Death,’ she said. ‘Everything comes to an end, doesn’t it?’
‘Death,’ Ærinna repeated. ‘And what is the common denominator of a room full of candles?’
‘ Light, ’ Vivian thought to herself, and before she could even mouth the answer, a blinding light erupted from every direction as every candle in the room was lit as though by an invisible hand.
‘Oh my...’ mumbled Ærinna, her cerulean eyes staring out of the window. It took Vivian a good half-minute before her eyes, so very used to the darkness, had adjusted to the blinding white light of a thousand candles and managed to discern what the Weaveress was looking at.
Vivian lifted herself on the tip of her feet, and peered over the wooden sill of a tall window. In the coppery light of the morning, a sea of golden lights covered the great urb of Lantana like a giant swarm of fireflies, floating atop an orange lake. Her feeble attempt at Weaving had rekindled not only the thousand candles in the Round Room, but every single candle in the city.
‘D-did I do that?’ Vivian asked stupidly.
Ærinna returned her a bright smile. When she spoke next, she sounded like she could have kissed Vivian on both cheeks.
‘Need you still ask? Only in your imagination does a candle burn with a warm, golden flame. We’ve got the Cold Flame in Ærria.’
Vivian closed her eyes and pictured in her mind’s eye the concept of darkness . She knew it had worked when the insides of her eyes turned from bright red to brown.
She opened her eyes. The fireflies swarming the city were gone. Not a single candle remained lit. The only light inside the Round Room protruded through the tall window, an eyelash of red against the cantaloupe sky.
‘I was right about you. You are very strong in Kaalà. Very strong indeed.’
‘Will you now teach me how to conquer my worst fears?’ said Vivian excitedly, her thoughts on the upcoming Trial of Fears.
’Oh, no, no, no. I’m not here to help you cheat,’ said Ærinna in a dignified voice.
She bent over and began lighting each candle with a swish of her hand, one by one. The skin on her hands looked deformed, as though the Weaveress had once suffered third degree burns.
‘I’m sorry Vivian, but that isn’t my fight, but yours. “ As the Weaver, so is the Thread ”‘, she recited. ‘You can only prove yourself a true Weaver once you have defeated the greatest enemy of them all.’
‘Which is?’
‘Yourself,’ said Ærinna simply. ‘Before you master the Weave, you must master yourself, and you can only master yourself if you have conquered your darkest demons. The biggest fight in life is with yourself.’
Vivian developed a sudden interest in her bitten fingernails. She shuddered to think what kind of demons her anxiety disorder might produce.
‘Right,’ she said feebly.
‘I would, however, advise you not to bring your little friend into the arena,’ she winked. ‘Not for the Trial of Fears, at least. If I were you, I’d save the best for last.’
Vivian’s heart jumped. ‘Y-you know about Kaap?’
‘Come now Vivian, no one can walk on a bridge of air,’ she gave Vivian a pointed look. ‘You needn’t worry, though. My silence is golden. You already know what I told those Scribes –‘, and upon reading the confusion on Vivian’s face, she added, ‘people interested in recording the history of the Weaver Trials.’
‘Thanks. For not giving me away, I mean.’
‘He is a loyal friend, your Hole-in-the-Wall. A being of great power, too. Many will covet his skin – seek to enslave the power of bending reality for their selfish needs. You must protect him, Vivian. He is the very last of his kind.’
‘L-last of his kind? How can you be sure of that?’
‘All Holes-in-the-Wall share a telepathic connection with one another. During the Trial of Paths, I looked inside Kaap’s mind and saw a great loneliness,’ she placed one hand on Vivian’s shoulder. ‘You’re the only family he’s got, Vivian. Better take good care of him.’
‘I will,’ said Vivian, feeling another stab of guilt for having forced Kaap to read Runar’s mind. Her last thought had reminded her of the Gold Mask Man, and Acciper and Bastijaan’s ongoing investigation. She hadn’t asked Ærinna’s opinion. Vivian opened her mouth, but the Weaveress was already showing her to the door.
‘Our next lesson won’t be until after the next Trial,’ said Ærinna, giving Vivian’s shoulder a little squeeze. ‘Unlike Haral, I’m not in the Guild’s good books anymore, and what I’ve just shown you is School-of-Thought-level Weaving. I’ve already broken the law when I saved your life. They’re going to throw me to the crows if they find out I did it again.’
‘I won’t tell anyone what you did,’ Vivian promised her. ‘Not even Kate, or Lucian. I’m going to sa
y I figured this out on my own.’
‘You really are a great person, Vivian,’ said Ærinna in the same honeyed voice that made Vivian blush. ’Now, make sure you wait until you’re completely alone in the room if you wish to practice. Weaving into reality is no walk through the Record Room. That’s why our students of Weaving are learning to do it up there—’, she pointed out of the window at the lonely floating islet that hosted the School of Thought, ‘you could really, really hurt someone.’
‘Got it,’ said Vivian, opening the door and stepping over the threshold, where her escort of gorillas in shiny armour had been waiting for her to come out. ‘Be seeing you, then!’
In the following restings, Vivian enforced her promise to Ærinna by keeping everything that happened in the Round Room to herself. She decided to settle on a version of events that didn’t differ much from her earlier experiences with Brother Haral.
‘That’s just it. Nothing happened!’ she told Kate, Lucian and Acciper, ‘I’m beginning to think I don’t have the makings of a Weaver.’
There was, however, a certain weightlessness in Vivian’s gait that made her look like she had swallowed a whole flagon of Featherweight Philtre. It might have been only Vivian’s imagination playing tricks, but sometimes, when Kate and Lucian were also around, she could feel something large rising inside of her, like a mounting feeling of purpose; a supreme moment of destiny that her lack-all-ambition “old self” had previously not experienced.
It was, after all, not every day you found out you had the power to change your reality – to bend it, turn it and twist it at odd angles – only to rearrange it back to your own inner will. The most difficult, she soon found, was keeping everything a secret from Kate, Lucian and, most recently, Acciper Sparrowhawk. The wild lad had developed the annoying routine of climbing the Tower of Lords after sundown, and entering Vivian’s room through the window, which often disrupted her Weaving-into-reality practice sessions.
‘Everything’s a rude mess. What happened here?’
‘Nothing. I’m, err, cleaning my room. Still no progress on Runar?’
Vivian would often spring this question on Acciper hoping to distract him from the evidence of her freshly-acquired Weaving skills.
‘Still stationed in the urb, with his cortege of thousands,’ Acciper often reported on the general movements of the Prince of Fjords. ‘Nothing dodgy just yet.’
‘And Daimey?’
‘Still arranging wedlock. Wedding ceremony set the same day last Weaver Trial ends. Regent wants to save on budget by hosting two celebration banquets in one evening, but don’t mind that. What’s up with you? Kate and Lucian said you been acting odd.’
‘Who, me? No, just worried, is all. About facing my worst fears and all that.’
Keeping to herself that she had mastered a power so great, it could quite possibly move mountains, was costing Vivian every bit of willpower she had. And yet, what if she told her friends she could now Weave-into-reality: could they keep the secret in turn? What if they told someone? Kate and Lucian’s spoken Æurlek was now satisfactory enough to allow them to interact with other Alarians.
Moreover, while Kate and Lucian could visit the Record Room, have a drink at the local pub or even go shopping in Lantana’s old marketplace, Vivian was still very much confined to her tower. It was costing Vivian every ounce of resilience to keep her powers a secret within the small enclosure of her room, but spilling the beans would mean placing an even bigger burden on Kate and Lucian.
With nearly every other thought having the potential to become a living reality, Vivian felt like a twisted, super-powered tower of Æbe’trax – she no longer missed her confiscated Agi Blade – about to unleash the powers of her imagination upon an unsuspecting world.
‘What in sod’s name is happening?’ Kate seemed to ask every time the element of bizarre seemed to disturb the natural order of things. ‘What killed all the candles?’
‘Draft got in,’ Vivian would dart to a nearby window, pretending to fumble about with its hinges.
It soon became a daily struggle just to control the constant stream of haphazard thoughts constantly clouding Vivian’s awareness; thoughts which had developed the nasty habit of randomly sprouting into existence when she least expected. Vivian had never truly realized how many millions of chaotic thoughts passed through her mind at any given time of day or night, until she actively began supressing them. She seemed to have a bit more control over her Weaving powers if she kept silent and focused on mindless tasks, such as helping Kate sort through her supply of herbs.
‘I don’t understand! When you do it, the healing salve cooks just fine, but when I follow the exact same instructions—’ Kate would ramble on for ages, adding another flask of poisonous green fluid to the pile of failed healing brews.
‘It’s your female magnetism, Kate,’ said Lucian, without lifting his eyes off his scroll. ‘It’s interfering with the delicate alchemy of your potions.’
‘Aww, that’s a sweet thing to say Lucian,’ said Kate through a pink blush, before turning to Vivian. ‘You’re the healing Artisan here, Viv. Tell me what I’m doing wrong. Viv? Oi, Viv?’ Kate would wave her hands in front of Vivian’s eyes so often, it became a daily routine. ‘You’re doing the creepy spaced-out silence again!’
‘Sorry...’
Kate and Lucian had taken Vivian’s general lack of action and extended periods of silence as a sign of complete indifference towards the Second Trial.
‘It’s like you’re not even trying to prepare for it!’ Kate often accused her. ‘Have you given any bit of thought about what you may be facing? What your worst fears might be? For the love of sod, the competition is tomorrow and you haven’t even decided which item to bring!’
‘That’s because I’m not bringing anything this time around,’ Vivian accidentally admitted, to Kate and Lucian’s noisy demurral that Vivian Amberville had developed a rather ill-fitting, squeaky wheel to what the general human would call “common sense”.
‘Take Kaap, at least. He can turn into anything,’ Lucian suggested, an idea which Kate quickly fixated on.
‘Yes, take Kaap. He’s going to protect you, Viv,’ she continued, pleadingly.
‘Ærinna reckons I should save Kaap for the last trial.’
‘So take him both times—’
‘You know the rules, Kate. One different item per Trial. I can only bring Kaap once.’
The night before the Second Trial, Vivian slept badly, waking up a few times in the night to check how much sand was in the Triglas and whether it had jiggled or wobbled without her taking notice. The white dwarf, Jaari, had already coloured the firmament in its usual bluish-white tint, which Vivian knew it would change into a coppery shade of orange as soon as its larger brother, Ikko, would emerge from below the horizon and warm the world.
Kaap was curled up at her feet, his yellow eyes like a chameleon now closed, his dwarfish head sticking out from under the blanket. For a while, Vivian watched his little chest move up and down, wondering to herself whether she was really doing the right thing by leaving him behind. Before she could stop it, she felt the cold grip of anxiety lodging into her throat and pressing onto her windpipe.
Determined to prevent a full-blown panic attack, Vivian got out of bed, gently so as not to disturb Kaap, and got dressed in semi-darkness. Once she was fully-dressed, she resumed to changing the colour of her clothes from black to orange and back to black again – a Weaving exercise she sometimes used to distract herself from thinking about her anxiety – until she heard a key unlocking a door, and her escort of five guards invited her out.
Once more, Vivian was led through the heart of Mount Ra’nun and into a small antechamber, where Ærinna carefully searched Vivian for possible forbidden or illegal objects, yet seeing as she had nothing to declare this time around, Vivian was almost instantly cleared for the arena.
Just
like the last time, Vivian had to wait a few minutes on the outer rim of the Pentahedron for the current participant to complete or fail their test before an audience of half-a-million and the scrutiny of a small group of orange-robed figures – the Guild of Weavers – the acting jury of the Weaver Trials.
Tatee, the large boy with a tall forehead Vivian had befriended a few days back, was presently in the arena, levitating above his head something that looked like it had crawled out of a horror film. Before Vivian’s eyes could settle on what the monstrous abomination even looked like, it exploded into a million pieces, covering everyone in the front seats in chunks of putrid flesh.
In the sound of frenzied applause, Tatee bowed low to every corner of clapping public, before a messy-haired Acciper Sparrowhawk marched in and escorted the boy out through the same way Vivian had come in. As he passed Vivian by, Acciper bent to her ear and softly whispered “ good luck! ” before the audience erupted into another fit of applause and a buoying voice called Vivian forward.
‘...with each woven Thread, every Weaver weaves a little bit of themselves into the Great Weave of Things,’ spoke Brother Haral, his lofty voice magnified by an enormous horn, propped against a pedestal. ‘As the Weaver, so is the Thread... for a Weaver’s dreams may become someone’s reality... and a Weaver’s fears... someone’s nightmares—’
After Haral’s particularly long-winded speech about a Weaver only being as good as their imagination and as bad as their worst fears, a mousy-haired Weaver approached Vivian and fitted a small tear-shaped crystal onto her forehead – Vivian had to bite her tongue to stop herself from exclaiming “Tear of the Goddess!”. The Weaver tossed Vivian one last look of encouragement, before re-joining his orange-cloaked colleagues in the jury box, where Brother Haral brought the large animal horn to his mouth and called out “ Begin! ”.
Vivian Amberville - The Weaver of Odds Page 33
