“You’re completely blind?” Alaric said.
Kalanath nodded.
No one spoke. Sienne felt numb, her face and hands tingling as if they’d fallen asleep and were just beginning to wake. Finally, Alaric said, “Is this something you can heal, Vaishant?”
Vaishant knelt before Kalanath and thumbed open his left eye, then his right. “I can ask,” he said, “but I do not think this is ordinary blindness. It seems to be a cover to his eyes, which is good because it means the eyes themselves are undamaged.”
“But bad because it’s not something healing can fix,” Alaric said.
Vaishant nodded. He gently pressed Kalanath’s eyes closed and rested his thumbs atop them. He closed his eyes and bowed his head. Silence descended, the only noise the occasional creak of the beams settling more firmly over—Sienne refused to think of it as their tomb, but it was hard to stick to that vow when the place was so quiet, and smelled so strongly of dust.
She took Alaric’s hand again and gripped it tightly, unable to take her eyes from Vaishant and Kalanath. Kalanath sat perfectly still, his legs still crossed beneath him and his hands resting on his knees. He didn’t look at all afraid, and the peacefulness of his countenance touched her heart, easing it somewhat. She couldn’t help feeling guilty over his condition. It had been her suggestion, and even though she’d warned them bad things could happen, she hadn’t expected anything like this.
Vaishant sat back and removed his hands. Kalanath’s eyes opened. Sienne controlled a gasp—his eyes were still filmed over with solid white. “God tells me it is not permanent,” Vaishant said. “She was not specific about how long it will last. But time will cure it.”
“But what if it’s months? Years?” Sienne burst out.
“This is not your fault, Sienne,” Kalanath said, turning his blind head to face her. “I chose this. It is a risk I take for all our sakes.” The faintest smile touched his lips. “I hope we are attacked so I can learn if I remember all I was taught about fighting blind. Though it has been years since I practiced, so maybe I do not want it, after all.”
“I don’t think we should draw any more cards,” Sienne said. “What if it happens again?”
“We still don’t have a way out,” Dianthe said.
“I am not afraid to try,” Vaishant said. He took the cards from where they lay in front of Kalanath, shuffled, and cut the deck.
“Alaric—”
“Vaishant knows what he’s doing, Sienne. Let him take the chance.”
Sienne subsided. Vaishant drew the top card and laid it down on the floor next to the deck. “The Fool,” he said. “I do not know this game. Is it good, or bad?”
“In a hazard reading, it means new beginnings,” Dianthe said. “But it can also mean randomness, the unexpected, depending on the other cards in the reading. I…don’t think it’s bad.”
“Does it do anything?” Kalanath said. He had his head tilted up as if straining to make up for his lack of sight with hearing.
“It hasn’t had an effect yet,” Alaric said. “As far as we’re aware.”
Vaishant rose, taking the Fool card in his hand. “I wonder,” he said, and walked to the doorway. “New beginnings. New journeys. A safe road, perhaps?” He held the card at arm’s length and began circling the room, walking slowly as if taking a bearing with a compass. Sienne and the others watched him in silence. Despair crept over Sienne. They’d taken their best chance and it wasn’t enough. Now Kalanath was blind and they were still trapped.
She cursed Jenani and wished with all her heart she had her spellbook. She still couldn’t ferry everyone, she didn’t have the reserves, but she could ferry most of them, and bring the rest out tomorrow. It would have been a nearly ideal solution if she only had her spellbook. Why did magic have to be so damned hard? If she were capable of memorizing spells…her memory was excellent for languages, but magic was slippery and powerful and no human could keep a spell in memory, or even remember individual syllables, for more than a few seconds. She could barely imagine what it would be like if things were different.
About two-thirds of the way around the room from the collapsed door, Vaishant stopped. “Something is here,” he said, just as the card glowed brilliant scarlet for a few seconds and then faded back to an ordinary card. Everyone but Kalanath came to join him.
“It looks like the rest of the wall,” Perrin said. Sienne had to make herself stop staring at his lips. That effect couldn’t wear off soon enough.
Ghrita, who’d been eyeing Perrin with an avidity that made Sienne uncomfortable, said, “Is there something concealed there?”
Dianthe stepped up and examined the wall. “I don’t think so. It looks like a wall.”
“But I am certain the card indicates that this spot is the beginning,” Vaishant said. “The beginning of our next journey.”
“And the skull said to go through the door,” Dianthe said. “And we have a key.” She stepped back with her hands on her hips, staring at the wall and chewing her bottom lip in thought. “Go through the door…”
“Maybe we need to examine the fallen—” Sienne began.
Dianthe snapped her fingers. “Got it. Perrin, I need your pastels.”
“You may have them with my blessing,” Perrin said, removing the grubby packet and handing it over. Dianthe selected a dark gray stick of pigment and sketched rapidly over the spot Vaishant had indicated, long, straight lines for the verticals, shorter ones for a lintel. In less than a minute, she had drawn a slightly lopsided door, complete with a lock plate and handle. The lock plate bore a very large keyhole, larger than a door that size would typically have.
“See? Walk through the door,” she said.
Alaric rested his hand on the flat surface of the wall, over the handle. “Dianthe,” he began.
Dianthe rolled her eyes. “It’s simple. We’re not at the center of the temple here—”
“How do you know? It is true, but I do not think you see it,” Vaishant said.
“I remembered how many steps we took and which turns went where,” Dianthe said. “This effect is incredible. It’s like the best coffee in the world, injected straight into my veins. Anyway, I know where we are in relation to the temple dome, and the collapse wouldn’t have been even on all sides, which means we’re not evenly covered here. The point being that there are places where there’s going to be less rubble, or none at all. This—” She rapped on the wall as if knocking on a real door—“is the spot where breaking through is easiest.”
“You know that?” Sienne said.
“No, but the card does. And now we have a door. Alaric, use the key.”
Alaric dug in his belt pouch and came out with the key. It looked even smaller than Sienne remembered, small enough that if Dianthe’s keyhole were real, it would disappear inside it. “It’s worth trying,” he said, and pressed the tip of the key to the wall.
It sank into the plaster until the shank disappeared.
Alaric drew in a startled breath. He turned the key to the right. There was a click, faint but still audible in the room’s sudden silence. The wall shimmered, and cracks formed along the lines Dianthe had drawn. With a groan, the door pulled away from the wall and opened inward. Dusty air swirled in from the space beyond.
Sienne went to look past Alaric’s arm. It wasn’t the outdoors, but that would have been too much of a coincidence even for their magic-aided escape. Instead, it opened on a passage clear of rubble that extended into darkness. Sienne sent lights spinning down to where it turned a corner. “It’s empty.”
“Let’s go,” Alaric said. “Vaishant, lead the way.”
Sienne took Kalanath’s arm as he rose, feeling about him for his staff. “How can we help you?” she said. “Should we…I don’t know…lead you? Hold your hand?”
“I must walk in front or I will trip over your heels,” Kalanath said. “If Vaishant tells me directions, I will be fine.”
Sienne had looked in Vaishant’s direction when
Kalanath said his name, so she saw the look that passed over his face when he heard this—a look equal parts yearning and sorrow. She pretended she hadn’t seen anything and guided Kalanath to stand beside Vaishant. Vaishant touched Kalanath’s elbow and turned him to face the right way. “I will say left or right,” he said, “and you will feel with your staff.”
“Thank you,” Kalanath said, and clasped Vaishant’s hand firmly for a moment before switching his staff to his right hand. Sienne made her lights gather around them, and they set off.
It was only her knowledge that the temple dome had collapsed, and that much of the temple was in ruins, that made Sienne so nervous. As far as she could tell, the passages were as safe as ever, still windowless and dark, still patchy with the remnants of paint worn away over the centuries. She stayed close behind Alaric anyway, listening to Vaishant’s murmured instructions to Kalanath.
Kalanath, after the first minute of tentative feeling-about with his staff, walked as confidently as if he could see, only blundering into walls a few times. It reassured her, made her feel less guilty, though she tried not to think of it as a good thing that Kalanath, of all of them, had been the one struck blind. She’d have preferred it to be Ghrita if she’d been able to choose. It was an ignoble thought that gave her guilty pleasure.
It felt like no time at all before natural light gleamed ahead, and they came out of the passages into the ruined courtyard. Sienne breathed in the smell of sand and hot air and felt she’d never appreciated those smells enough. Alaric took the lead. “We need to get to the horses,” he said. “It’s probably too late, but we have to try.”
“Try what?” Dianthe said.
“You heard what Vaishant saw. Chirantan in flames.” Alaric removed his head scarf from where it hung around his neck and began wrapping it sloppily around his head. He tore it off and started over, more neatly this time. “I don’t think it’s coincidence and I don’t think that’s some future prophecy. Jenani wanted to destroy humans, and it’s not unlikely it would start with one of the oldest cities in the world, and the biggest.”
“It will take us nine days to get there,” Dianthe protested. “I realize this sounds defeatist, but don’t you think he’ll have destroyed it and moved on by then?”
Alaric’s lips thinned in anger. “We have to do something. We can’t race around the world trying to guess where Jenani will go next. We freed him. That makes defeating him our responsibility. Do you have a better option?”
Dianthe shook her head. “I just wish we weren’t so helpless.”
“We’re not helpless. We can’t think like that or we really will have failed.”
Sienne reached to adjust the strap of her spellbook and remembered too late it wasn’t there anymore. She felt so miserable she wanted to cry. “There’s not much I can do against Jenani,” she said.
Perrin swore and reached into his robes. “I have one more blessing,” he said. “A kind of scrying.”
“But that was for the phoenix feather.” Another thing they’d failed at. She was two seconds away from sitting down and bursting into tears, curling up on the sand and lying there until it covered her completely.
“It is not a locator blessing, which would be for a specific object, but a scrying to reveal a location,” Perrin said. “Whatever location I choose. And I think Averran, in his wisdom, chose this blessing deliberately.” He withdrew the paper square from his robe and held it up, murmuring an invocation.
A blue globe that shimmered like water appeared in front of Perrin at chest height. Sienne stepped forward to look at it. Cloudy shapes floated within it, shapes Sienne felt she could almost recognize. Perrin put his hand against the globe, as tenderly as if it were a baby. “Show us Sienne’s spellbook,” he said.
The cloudy shapes firmed, became a view of a city from above. By the bright colors, Sienne recognized Ma’tzehar. The view swooped sickeningly, rotating and pulling away from the city, then diving toward the palace. If this was a bird’s eye view, Sienne wanted never to leave the ground.
The movement slowed, spun once more, and Sienne let out a small scream, because the vision was centered on her spellbook, which lay… “That bastard,” she said. “It dropped it on the temple dome.”
“I imagine Jenani attempted to destroy it and became frustrated when it could not,” Perrin said. “I believe it is…I see it.”
He pointed, and Sienne looked up toward where the temple dome lay collapsed over the building. It took her a moment to pick the outline of her precious book out from the rubble. She held out her hands, and the spellbook flew into them, slapping her palms and making them sting from the force of its flight. She hugged it to herself, then opened to ferry. “I can get some of us to Chirantan,” she said. “But I’ll be useless after that.”
“Can you transport the horses as well?” Vaishant asked.
She’d forgotten the horses. “No. If some of us…but who would stay behind?”
“Let’s see that they’re all right, first,” Alaric said. “We left them with enough food and water for the night, but they’ll need caring for.”
They ran down the long, wide road at the center of Ma’tzehar. Sienne was kicking herself for not having thought of the horses sooner. They’d left them hobbled, for Averran’s sake, helpless to flee if something threatened them. It was small comfort to think she’d have remembered if it had been Spark—or maybe that only made it worse.
They had to slow to a walk when they left the city, with the soft desert sands shifting uncomfortably if they tried moving faster. Sienne trudged along behind Alaric, wishing she could fly. The spell fly would be faster, and the movement of the air would cool her. It was not quite noon and already the sun was working toward its full blistering heat. When this was over, they could go to Beneddo, which was much cooler even in true summer.
Then Sienne remembered Jenani, its sinister face and mocking smile, and her fantasy evaporated. Even if they could ferry to Chirantan, it wouldn’t be all of them, and Sienne would be helpless to participate in the fight. Worse, suppose they couldn’t fight Jenani at all? It was powerful enough to rebuild a city and make an entire people forget themselves, and though it had said its powers were less without the ring, that might not mean much. What might it be capable of now it was free?
Alaric cursed and broke into a run. Sienne, her heart in her throat, followed him. He crouched and came up with a couple of leather straps. “They’re gone,” he said. “The hobbles look like they just stepped right out of them.”
“You think it was Jenani?” Dianthe said.
“I can’t think of any way they could have freed themselves.” Alaric threw the straps down with some force. “I hope Jenani didn’t kill them.”
“Unlikely,” Ghrita said. “It would have left bodies to taunt us, on the chance we escaped.”
Vaishant, leading Kalanath by the elbow, came up beside them. “Then we need not worry about them,” he said, “and can worry about ourselves.”
“But that leaves us with nothing but what we were carrying,” Dianthe said. “Now I’m mad.”
“Let’s think of it as a blessing in disguise,” Alaric said. “Sienne, how many of us can you get to Chirantan with ferry?”
“Five.”
“But that leaves you incapable of casting spells,” Dianthe said, “and if we’re going to fight Jenani, we’ll almost certainly need you.”
“I have to use ferry regardless,” Sienne said. “We can’t exactly walk back to Chirantan.”
“And who is it will go back?” Vaishant said. “Perhaps Kalanath and I should stay.”
“I am not helpless, though I am blind,” Kalanath insisted.
Ghrita flicked her staff and knocked Kalanath’s staff out from under him, making him stagger until Vaishant bore him up. “You are a liability,” she said. “You stay.”
“Then Sienne, I want you to stay with Vaishant and Kalanath,” Alaric said. “You’ll return here after you take the last of us—”
&nb
sp; “I will not!”
“You’ll be helpless. I can’t fight if I’m worried about what’s happening to you.”
“I can still do things—warn the divines—”
“The city is probably already under attack. They know there’s danger.”
Sienne scowled and turned away. “You can’t force me to go.”
“I shouldn’t have to. You’re not stupid, Sienne. This is the smartest course of action.”
Smartest course. “Dianthe, what do you think we should do?” Sienne asked.
Dianthe frowned. “Why are you asking me? Alaric’s the leader.”
“Because you’re the smartest of us right now. Is there a better plan?”
Dianthe’s eyes went unfocused as she stared into the distance. Her face shifted as she thought. Finally, she shook her head. “If you had transport, obviously that would change things. Even fly wouldn’t make a difference, or at least that’s what you said the last time I brought it up as an option.”
“No, fly is as hard to cast as ferry. And we’d probably be exhausted when we got there.” Sienne kicked the sand, which shifted unsatisfactorily. “Though it might give us an advantage against Jenani. It can probably fly as well as float.”
“How unfortunate that we cannot harness the birds to carry us through the air,” Vaishant said with a smile. His hand was still on Kalanath’s elbow, his vibrant red robe shifting in the desert air like—
Sienne’s breath caught. There was something they could harness. Maybe. And there was no knowing how fast it would go, or if they could even make it work. But it would take no more than an hour to find out, and if it did work—
“Let’s go,” she said. “I have an idea.”
21
“You have got to be kidding,” Alaric said. “There’s no way.”
Sienne pushed one of the floating carpets, which shifted slightly before returning to its original position. “It’s worth trying,” she said. “Dianthe can figure out how to make them fly—”
“Are you sure Dianthe is up to that?” Dianthe said with a laugh. “I’m not sure phenomenal intelligence is useful in situations like this.”
Sands of Memory Page 24
