Guardians of the Keep

by Carol Berg

  A few prisoners growled and strained at their bonds. Some wept. Some just stared at the soldiers and the dead man swinging from the tree. The soldiers lashed the prisoners, especially those who showed their anger, and soon the party was moving down the road again. . . .

  Who were these people? Yet, even as my mind asked the question, I knew the answer. The prisoners cursed in the tongue of Valleor, and the soldiers wore the red dragon of Leire—King Evard’s men. People of my own world! Loathing—huge and powerful and terrible—seethed in their hearts. No Zhid, no Dar’Nethi, not even the Dar’-Nethi slaves could summon half so grand a hate as these soldiers and their captives. . . .

  And it is all yours, whispered Notole through the jewels in my ear. She pulled back the layers of my thoughts, exposing the gaping emptiness inside me. Take it.

  I drank deep. Burning, cutting, drenching, drowning . . . power seeped into my pores and filled my belly and my lungs until I was breathing black fire. It ate its way into my bones. Everything I had ever experienced was made unimportant.

  I could not just call down lightning, I could create it. I could make a thousand warriors turn their swords upon themselves all at once. I could blast the stones of Zhev’Na into rubble and rebuild the fortress according to my whim, a thousand times over if I chose.

  “This is what your father would forbid you,” said Ziddari. His voice rang clear, while visions danced in my head. “This is what D’Arnath and his Heirs have judged too dangerous for us to attempt, because they were too cowardly and too weak to control it. This is the heritage they would deny you. Yet, even this is but a small taste of what is possible. D’Arnath created his enchanted Bridge and swore his oath to bind us, to imprison our skills and our power in his own weak-willed frame. But you, our young Prince, when you come into your power, you will set us free.”

  Power raged within me, stretching and pulling and swelling. Nothing had ever hurt so much; nothing had ever felt so marvelous. I wanted to scream and cry out the wonder of it, but my chest was filled with fire.

  Come with me, said Notole. She touched my hand, and I was released to ride the airs of Gondai beside her. I glimpsed the far boundaries of the Wastes, where the hard red plains yielded to the green softness of Dar’Nethi lands. We journeyed past the work camps and farmsteads of the Drudges, flat, endless fields of no more interest or variation than a Drudge’s mind. We traveled the wild oceans, and I called up winds that flattened trees and storms that made whole islands sink beneath the waves. For hours or days we examined rocky, ice-glazed pinnacles. Then we dived into deep places where bare stones formed natural fortresses far larger than Zhev’Na, where lakes were filled with molten rock, and where grew gigantic beasts with towering fangs and razor claws, who fled in terror at my word.

  Yet this is but the beginning, whispered Parven through the jewels in my ear. Come with me. . . .

  And Parven took me into the mind of a Zhid warrior, not just to read his thoughts or mold his dreams, but to replace his identity with my own. I could feel the heat of the desert sun on my shoulders as I marched onto the training ground. I recognized the faces of my cadre and felt the brush of fear when my commander stared at me with his pale eyes and ordered me to be the first to meet the challenger who waited there. But while I knew and felt these things from the other, it was I who controlled his body and reacted in his place. My hand raised his sword, and my eyes analyzed his opponent’s opening moves for any weakness. My skill directed his combat under the harsh sun, and I felt the hot surge of victory when the sword bit into the slave’s flesh and struck him down. When I tired of the first man and left his body, choosing another to be my host, the first warrior fell dead. I worried that I had made a mistake. No, no, young Lord, whispered Parven. Use them as you wish. Like the rocks and the rats and the dirt beneath your feet, their lives exist only to serve you.

  And now imagine, young Prince, that this was possible in that other place—the place where you fed on passions so much more vivid than our own—the place holy D’Arnath has forbidden us to go. Imagine the variety, the endless wonders that would await us. . . .

  “Enough,” said Ziddari. “Bring him back. We said we would tell him all, and so he must know what it is he chooses.”

  With a word and a touch, Notole brought us back across the blazing noonday desert, past the warriors’ encampments, through the fortress walls and into darkness—utter, complete darkness. I thought for a moment that I’d been left alone in some other place, but I felt the Lords behind me and beside me as they had been. The orb of light had vanished along with the blue circle, yet I could still sense the spinning and feel the cool rush of air on my hot face. I turned to Notole but I couldn’t see her emerald eyes, nor Parven’s amethysts, nor Ziddari’s blood-red rubies. I could see nothing at all.

  “Do not be afraid, young Lord,” said Ziddari. “It is an inevitable effect of your activities—as you have surely guessed from your previous experiences. Your desire has made you accept these limitations. The effects become somewhat more severe as you progress. But you need not worry, because we can provide a remedy.”

  Something was slipped over my head and fitted to my face. I saw flashes of light, which relieved me greatly. When the hands fell away, I could see again, but in a way far different than before. We stood in the throne room, the place where I had spoken to the Lords for the first time. Like the temple, it had a floor of black glass, a ceiling that was an image of the night sky, and tall columns all around. Along one side was a curved dais and on it the human-sized thrones where the Three had sat while I pledged them fealty. Today, the columns and the thrones and everything else in the room seemed angular, as if each curve in their design had been broken into short segments that only approximated its actual shape. The brass ring appeared as a thousand-sided figure, the blue circle in the floor another.

  Slowly I reached for my face, suspecting what I would find, but Notole and Ziddari grabbed my hands before I could do it. “Come with us first.”

  They led me through the twisting passages, and up the curved staircases into the main part of the keep. Seeing the world this way took some getting used to—everything with angled shapes, the edges gleaming with blue-white brilliance though the colors lay flat and dull. But we passed a slave, and in the moment I gazed on him with my false eyes, I knew his name was K’Savan and that he had grown up in a village called Agramante, about fifty leagues from Avonar. He was in the throes of despair. I could have named his cousins to the tenth degree and recited everything K’Savan knew about them. And I could tell that he looked on my masked face with horror and loathing; he would slay me with joy if he were not under the Lords’ compulsion of obedience.

  “You see,” said Ziddari. “Useful, eh?”

  We passed other slaves and Drudges, and nothing about them was hidden from me. When we came to a black door so massive that it would take a troop of warriors to open it, Notole nudged me forward. I swung the door open with a thought, and we walked into the temple of the Lords.

  Something was changed here, too. The false sky hung above us. The black mirrored floor lay beneath our feet. The Three were there, enthroned as before, giant-sized, though lifeless this time, for the Three were also with me, shepherding me toward the far end of the row of statues. Something huge and new sat in the dark beyond Ziddari’s image, covered with a purple drapery.

  My heart pounded and my stomach clenched as Ziddari waved his hand and the drapery fell to the floor. It was me. In the same dull black stone as the other three. Larger than life, so that I could have climbed up and stood in my own hand. I was to be a Lord. They hadn’t lied about it. And while I gazed up at the image of my face, my hand crept to the gold mask I wore and felt the diamonds that looked out from it. “And what must I give up besides my eyes?” I asked, surprised that my voice was steady.

  “Very little that you’ve not already forsworn,” said Ziddari. “Small matters of your past. Your personal quarrels might come to seem trivial beside the grandeur of
possibility. These barriers of thought you have built to keep us out will crumble and fade. Your mind will not be truly separate, but one with ours, and so our joined purposes and desires may loom larger than your own. But your power will be unmatched, and everything you could ever imagine will be yours.”

  “I’ll never use my training in battle, will I?”

  “Not in your own body,” said Parven. “No need to risk such a thing. We’ve made it so that none of the three of us may bear a weapon, and it would be the same with you. No one in any world is a danger to us save one of ourselves. And, as you have seen, we have better ways of enjoying the joys of combat. But we envision you submitting to the discipline of physical training for many years, until you have reached your full growth and have made yourself a skilled body that you are comfortable with. This is for your own safety, as well as the advantage it will give you when commanding armies or using other bodies for your pleasure. The choice is yours, of course.”

  “And what if I refuse your offer?”

  “You will still be the Heir of D’Arnath, a friend and ally of the Lords. You may live out your limited span of years here, or make your home elsewhere if you wish. But we will expect you to aid us in our war as you have sworn upon your life and honor to do.”

  “But the secret of the oculus . . .”

  “. . . is only for the Lords of Zhev’Na and will be revealed only when you join us.” Ziddari held my chin in his hand and nodded his head toward my statue. “You were born to be one of us. I believe you know this to be true.”

  “We are old and fixed in our ways. Your youth delights us,” said Notole, smiling and stroking my hair. “When you have lived your first thousand years, you will understand.”

  “It gives us great pleasure to teach you,” said Parven, laying his hand on my shoulder.

  “Do I have to decide now?”

  “In five days, you come of age,” said Notole. “At first hour of that day you will be anointed Heir of D’Arnath. If you choose to become one of us, we must prepare you in the hour between mid-watch and the anointing. You will have no second chance. This decision is for all time.”

  “I understand.”

  “For now, we will take you back to your rooms and let you sleep. When you wake, this taste of your future will be but a memory, and all will be as it was. Look well upon the face of the world and see what matches the possibilities that are open to you.”

  They took the mask away, and Ziddari led me back to my rooms and settled me in my chair. We ordered food. I was hungry, though indeed a lead weight sat in my stomach as I sat there blind.

  “Are you wearing Darzid’s face now?” I asked Ziddari as we ate.

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you live in the other world? Why did you work for mundanes . . . a common soldier when you were a Lord of Zhev’Na?”

  He laughed. “That’s a long tale, and over the next hundreds of years I’ll tell you the whole of it. In brief, one of us had to follow the Dar’Nethi J’Ettanne across the Bridge to protect our interests. Too late I discovered that, over a long period of time, the mundane world corrupts and confuses the memory of those born in this one. I suffered that indignity just as J’Ettanne and his Dar’Nethi did. Worse, in many ways. A wretched, despicable world is the land of your birth. As to why the task fell to me, rather than Notole or Parven . . . let’s just say I lost the toss.” More hatred than humor colored Ziddari’s laugh.

  I was sorry I had asked him any questions. I wanted him to go. I had to think—a great deal. Five days to decide whether I wanted to live forever and have all the power I could ever want, or if I wanted to live out a human life span, risking an early death like Papa who was only thirty-seven when he was struck down by the Prince D’Natheil. And what would I use to fill the emptiness inside me—the “fairy dance” of the Dar’Nethi? I didn’t even know how to begin. It disgusted me to think of following the practices of the coward D’Arnath, of the murderer D’Natheil. Or would I gain power as did the Zhid—squeezing the life from rocks or rats or slaves? I could not have come all this way for that. No, there was really no choice to be made.

  But if I were to leave myself behind five days from this—I wasn’t stupid enough to think it was only “bits of my past” that would be lost—I didn’t want to do it with unanswered questions. So I told Darzid I wasn’t hungry any more, only tired.

  “Then I’ll leave you. Sleep well, my young Lord.” He laid a hand on my head as he said it, and my limbs suddenly felt like iron weights had been attached to them. As he stood up and walked across the floor, I huddled in my chair, trying not to shiver. I was so cold . . . it must be night. I fought his sleep spell, because I knew that when I woke I wouldn’t have the power to do what I wanted, only my own weak talents.

  Slowly I let my mind steal through my house, and I touched a slave named Ben’Sidhe. He knew nothing of strange articles left in the young Lord’s rooms. Another slave, Mar’Devi—the one who bathed me—was filled with shame, not because of the task itself, but because he felt so degraded by it. He believed he should accept his lot with better grace when so many of his brothers and sisters were bound so much more cruelly. He knew nothing of stones or wood or the stars of Leire. One after the other I probed each slave that lived in my house. None of them had taken care of my wounded arm, and none knew of the mysterious gifts left for me to find.

  Drudges were so dull and stupid, I might have skipped examining them, except that I was enjoying myself; stealing thoughts was so easy now. My mind picked at one of them and then another. Astonishing that Drudges were the cousins of the people I had touched in the other world. I laid them open and found nothing—no spirit, no intelligence, no desire for anything better—until I touched the one who hovered in the shadows beyond the stair, one who stood there shocked and horrified to see me blind, left in my chair by a man she despised.

  She tried to close her mind to me. Too late.

  I tried to close my own mind to the Lords. Too late. I was scarcely awake, lulled into carelessness. “Seri!” I jumped to my feet.

  Vainly I tried to find my way to her, crashing into the table and then the bed, trying to draw an outline of my room in my head so I wouldn’t kill myself trying to get to her—to tell her I knew what she had been doing—to ask her all the questions that blossomed inside me like fire-works at a jongler fair. But even as I floundered in the dark, the Lords descended on me.

  The woman! He has discovered the woman in Zhev’Na! How is . . .

  . . . it possible? Inconceivable! Dangerous!

  Young Lord, beware. She serves the master of deceivers. We’re sending warriors to protect you.

  Ziddari, get back to the boy! The tigress is ready to pounce. Such danger to our young friend . . . our plans . . .

  With their shouting and jostling in my head, I hung onto the bedpost, shaking with the effort of staying awake and splitting my thoughts into those the Lords could know, and those I needed to keep private. “Seri! Run! They know you’re here.” I couldn’t have explained why those words burst out of me. “Hurry . . . to the stables . . . hide there.”

  But she didn’t run. I felt her arms wrap around me, and her wet cheek pressed to my face. “I would not trade this moment for a thousand years of safety.” She brushed her fingers over my eyes. “Hold fast, Gerick. Look deep inside. You are strong and beautiful and good, and you know what is important. You are not what you believe. Don’t let them convince you.”

  Boots pounded on the stair. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve got to—”

  “Do whatever you have to do.”

  I took her arm, and as gently as I could, I twisted it behind her. Then I let a surge of anger drown everything else that was in my head. I had to protect her. And the only way to do so was to turn her over to the Lords. Any other course would have been far more dangerous for both of us.

  “Young Lord!”

  “I’ve got her. She was sneaking up on me. I was practicing reading thoughts while I went to
sleep, and I found her.”

  “Lady Seriana,” said Ziddari—Darzid, of course. I could feel it in his voice. She didn’t know Darzid was one of the Three. He never came to my house as Ziddari, never let slaves or Drudges see his true form. “A pleasure, and considerable surprise, to see you again. But you have certainly come down in the world. I wouldn’t think of Drudges as your sort at all. They can hardly provide the intellectual stimulation to which you have been accustomed.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “What did you plan to do here, lady? Steal away a sleeping boy? Persuade him that you are a caring mother? Convince him to abandon his destiny? A powerful thing is vengeance, is it not, young Lord? So powerful it can make a woman destroy her child’s future because he’s sworn a blood oath to destroy her dead lover’s kingdom. Ugly, ugly.”

  “Only one person in this room would I destroy, but it is not Gerick. I’ve seen what you’re trying to do with him. . . .” I thought I had felt anger before. But my mother’s fury made even the power of the Lords seem small.

  Darzid didn’t hear it, of course, and I began to understand why they hated her so much. They didn’t understand her. “You underestimate the lad, my lady. We’ve done nothing but allow him to develop his true nature. He knows that and accepts it. Now, the young Lord needs to sleep. You’ll have plenty of time to explain yourself . . . how you got here and who your allies are.”

  Sometimes the Lords really thought I was stupid. They would learn. “Remember, she’s mine,” I said, as I stumbled over to my bed and threw myself on it. “I’ve sworn an oath, and I’ll not have her taken from me. Perhaps I’ll have a chance for personal vengeance after all.”