Daughter of Ancients

Chapter 16

A few days after Eu'Vian's letter, I received a message from V'Rendal saying that the Arcanist Garvй would be able to see me that evening. She warned me yet again that to seek out an Arcanist for minor inquiries was most unwise. She herself had not visited Garvй in many years. But the sight of the poor young Gardener had hardened my resolve.

Garvй's house surprised me. I had assumed that such a powerful sorcerer must have a fine and formidable residence. But the little stone house was squat and ugly, set in the midst of a ruined part of the city, an area of fire-blackened rubble thickly overgrown with weeds that had not been cleaned up since the end of the war. With the Dar'Nethi drifting out of the city, the space wasn't yet needed, and a great many things had higher priority than cleaning up a thousand years of debris. The house seemed to fade in and out of sight in the oncoming dusk.

The man who appeared at the door to answer my knock was as disheveled as his surroundings and almost as dirty. His scholar's ankle-length robe hung open, revealing a baggy shirt and trousers of indeterminate shape. Layers of food, wine, soot, paint, and other unnamable stains prevented one from guessing the original color of any of the garments. The limbs that protruded from this unappetizing garb were stick-thin, and his hacked-off hair resembled nothing so much as a boar's-hair scrubbing brush well past its usable lifetime. I couldn't see his face, as his nose was pressed into a ragged-edged book he held in one hand.

"Well?" I wasn't sure if this greeting was directed at me, at the fat one-eared cat he kicked back into the house when it tried to squeeze between him and the door, or at the tattered volume from which he had not yet removed his eyes.

I reread the slip of paper in my hand to make sure I'd got the location correct. This was the only likely place. "Master Garvй? I am S'Rie. The Archivist V'Rendal has sent me to see you."

"Well?" The low, throaty rumble seemed out of proportion to his slight frame. His eyes had not yet moved from the book.

"Have you a few moments to speak with me about a matter of interest to V'Rendal?"

"It's not hot is it? Won't work when it's hot."

Hot? "Excuse me, I've come to inquire about an enchantment, Master Garvй." I knew I wasn't making a good start, though I felt it would be a lot easier to make sense of things if he would just look at me.

"The sallй that you've brought. V'Rendal always remembers it. It mustn't be hot."

Sallй . . . "Oh, yes, of course!"

I pulled a finger-high, frost-rimed green bottle from my pocket. It almost froze my fingers to touch it. V'Rendal had informed me that Garvй was immoderately fond of sallevichia, a rare, expensive and violently spicy condiment made in the Vale of Nimrolan. Aimee had helped me find some of the stuff to bring him as a consideration. "No. It's still quite cold," I said.

Still without looking up from his book, Garvй snatched the bottle from my hand, whirled about, and disappeared into the house. As he had accepted my gift and had not shut the door, I felt only slightly awkward about following him inside. Although the house seemed quite a bit larger on the inside than it appeared from without, I could scarcely find a path between all the boxes, baskets, and furniture. Chairs and tables had been piled with every sort of item from birdcages to harps, spools of thread and wire to wheelbarrows, and unending stacks of books, reams of paper, and boxes of pens, tools, trinkets, and feathers. The soft blue light of evening through the uncurtained windows kept me from tripping over any of this clutter as I followed the gangly figure through the house.

We emerged in a stifling, brick-floored kitchen that looked as if a whirlwind had recently passed through it. Alongside a huge, soot-blackened baking oven of red brick lay a disarray of dented kettles, spilled flour, and mounds of dubious vegetables. Long worktables had been set around the periphery of the room and piled halfway to the ceiling with more books, broken pots, at least five sleeping cats, bottles, wooden boxes and glass jars of every possible size, and what appeared to be endless piles of scraps: of fabric, metal, glass, leather, rock, leaves, twigs, dirt, paper . . . Yet around and above the disorder hung the savory smell of baking bread. My stomach growled.

By the time I squeezed through the half-blocked doorway, the odd-looking man was pulling a long-handled plank, bearing two perfectly shaped loaves, from his oven. With one elbow he shoved aside enough of the clutter on one of his tables to make a space before tipping the bread off the heat-darkened plank. The bread teetered precariously on the edge of the table before settling down beside the green frosted bottle. Book still firmly in hand, the man snatched a small, chipped crock of butter and set it down beside the hot bread and the bottle of sallevichia.

He pulled two wooden stools up to the table, dislodging the disgruntled feline occupants. "Hurry," he said. Though he had not yet looked at me, I assumed he was speaking to me. I sat on one stool while he plopped himself onto the other.

Whatever he was reading must be fascinating, I thought, for he laid the book on the table and kept his head bent over it closely while he grabbed a knife from the table. He sawed one loaf into great hunks, slapped a thick layer of butter on one of them, and dribbled a few drops from my little green bottle on top. Instantly the butter sizzled and gave off a small puff of greenish smoke, and a dark green film formed over the entire chunk of bread. When Garvй crammed this somewhat unappetizing artifact into his mouth and tore off a large bite, his eyes fell shut and his shoulders sagged in pleasure. In only a moment, he picked up his book again and read furiously as he ate the rest of his green-filmed bread.

Only when he had demolished the entire piece did the man afford me a scrap of attention. For one instant, he peered over the top of his book. My stomach lurched inexplicably and I felt a bit wobbly as I glimpsed his face, which made no sense at all. He could have been anywhere from twenty-five to eighty-five, his skin smooth and unmarked except for a web of fine lines at the corners of piercingly intelligent gray eyes. I guessed him close to my own age, mid-forties, and not only did his appearance belie the dry knot of apprehension in my throat, but also he displayed a smile of sublime cheerfulness.

"Well, you must have some! Before the bread cools or you won't get the full effect."

"But I didn't—"

Before my protest had even taken shape, he had already snatched another hunk of bread, slathered it with butter, topped it with the green nastiness, and shoved it into my hand. "Quickly!" All this while his gaze darted back and forth across the pages of the book he'd set on the table.

I looked askance at his offering. All the warnings about the dangers of the Arcanist clamored in my memory. Was it riskier to eat something of his making or to offend his hospitality? Holding the impression of his pleasant face, rather than the unsettling jolt I'd felt at his glance, I took a small bite.

"Sword of Annadis!" I thought the inside of my mouth was dissolving. I blew out a quick breath, terrified to inhale, lest I blister my lungs. Sweat popped out on my forehead. My skin felt as if it were on fire. Sometimes politeness must yield to survival. Yet just as I made ready to spit it out, the taste of the warm bread and melted butter mellowed the fire and blended the spice into the most remarkable combination I have ever encountered: pepper and lemon, sunlight and frostbite, wood smoke and green leaves, seared with the very essence of flame, and everywhere the richness of the butter and the nutty flavor of the chewy bread.

Once I had swallowed and inhaled enough to assure myself that my throat and lungs were not scorched away, I looked doubtfully at the remaining green-glazed bread in my hand. Before I could decide what to do with it, Garvй exploded into laughter, holding his stomach until I thought he was going to fall off his stool. His laughter thrummed in the walls and ceiling. How could so much hilarity come from one so thin?

"Should have known. Should have known." Tears streamed from his eyes. Blotting them with his sleeve, he prepared another small piece of bread. "What a constitution you must have, madam! Should have guessed when you didn't know."

He popped the bite into his mouth, and then shoved a cup of dubious cleanliness and a carafe filled with something dark and foaming across the table, while wiping more tears from his cheeks with the hand that held the book. My head resonated with his booming laughter.

"How could I know V'Rendal would send me one who was not Dar'Nethi?" he said, once he had swallowed his next bite and calmed his laughter enough to put a whole sentence together. "Are you quite well? Uninjured?"

My tongue throbbed, my voice croaked, and my mouth watered excessively. "I've never had anything quite like it."

While I poured the liquid from his carafe and took a grateful drink—beer, it seemed, with a touch of fruit in it—he laid his book on the table again. Still reading, he hacked at the second loaf with his knife, wrapping each piece in brown cloth and throwing it in a basket he had pulled out from under two pots and a skillet.

"Well, of course you haven't! And no Dar'Nethi since the first one who tried to eat sallevichia has either. To ingest it without protection . . . Birds and beasts, I'm surprised you have a tongue left!"

"Protection?" The cool, strong beer was slowly soothing my throat.

"Here. Try this." Without looking, Garvй reached over and passed his bony hand across the green-filmed bread that still sat in my other hand. "Go ahead. I promise it won't hurt."

Tentatively, I raised the piece to my lips and felt a frosty kiss as if I'd just inhaled a huge breath of wintertime. I took a bite of the bread and, though I still tasted the potent fire and marvelous mix of flavors, my tissues remained intact.

"Better, yes?" He didn't look at me for the answer, but busily prepared and ate another piece himself, all the while studying the pages of his book and running the fingers of his left hand over the faint script as if committing the letters to memory.

"Better. But I don't think I'll trade it for strawberries or cheese."

"Not many people savor it as I do. And it is dreadfully expensive, so you're quite well served not to acquire the taste." He popped the cork back into the sallevichia bottle, blew on it, which immediately coated it with frost again, and set it carefully on a high shelf. Settling onto his stool, he quickly became entirely engrossed in his reading, abandoning me like another piece of his furniture.

At first I had thought the sallevichia was making me dizzy as we conversed, and causing my head to throb so sorely. But when Garvй's attention was diverted, I realized the sensations had more to do with the man himself. Every word he had spoken was like a blast of wind, each sentence the force of a gale. His movements and his speech were immensely larger than his person, so that I didn't like to think what his anger might be like. But I didn't like being ignored.

"Excuse me, Master Garvй, should I come back another time?"

"You're welcome here any time, with or without the sallevichia. I have few . . . very few visitors. Messages arrive at my door, but few bodies. Almost two months I think since the last. Age seems to be making me less capable of civilized behavior rather than more. I'm surprised you weren't warned off."

He turned a page and continued his reading. I would have sworn that the brick floor vibrated when he spoke. I couldn't decide whether to be frightened or angry or insulted at his inattention. I was certainly perplexed, so I decided to try once more. "Sir, I've come to ask you some questions about the Lady D'Sanya. Would you mind very much answering?"

"Not at all. What a lovely young woman she is. Such power! Awesome in magnitude and depth, complex, as if she has taken all the dark and dreadful things that happened to her and wrapped them in her own special brilliance—quite unlike the power of any other Dar'-Nethi I have ever examined. And so much good she has done with it, I hear." He still didn't look up, yet his comments were not the type of distracted mouthings of one wholly focused elsewhere, and his tone was not at all forbidding. "I don't know what questions I could possibly answer about the Lady, but forge ahead as you will."

"V'Rendal has sent me to ask about the enchantment that kept the Lady alive for so very long unaged. V'Rendal says she's never heard of anything quite like it."

"Ah, yes. The Lady's ensorcelment was indeed unusual. True stasis. The body alive, but held in preservation. I've thought about it quite a bit." He turned another page, read for a bit, looked back at the previous page as if to check something. Then he continued his reading . . . and the conversation. "We can delay the disintegration of things that once lived: flowers, fruit, bread, wood. That's easy enough, though we cannot stop their decay entirely. We can send a living being into sleep, shallower or deeper, and prolong it for some fixed time beyond the normal span of sleep or waking. Not indefinitely, though. Sleep rhythms will reassert themselves. We can reduce their needs for food and water, cloud their minds. More difficult, but still possible. They continue to age, however. Slowly, perhaps, like the Zhid. The Lords themselves were near immortal, but they sacrificed much of their human state for it. We've never learned how to prevent aging in a fully human person. To weave all these things together in a single enchantment would require a great deal of power and skill. For the Lords of Zhev'Na, perhaps just possible."

"So you believe what she says about it? And you can make some reasonable guess as to how it was done?"

He dug a pen and inkpot from the debris on his work-table and scratched some notations in the margin of his book. "Oh, yes. I have no doubts as to her tale. But I have not the least desire to know how it was done."

Though his desires were not relevant to my inquiry, the absolute surety of his statement pricked my curiosity. "Why not? As an Arcanist you study complex enchantments, do you not? How can you resist knowing of this one?"

For a brief moment he glanced up from his reading and the force of his full attention was like the pressure of a powerful hand, only released when he turned away again. "Because it is a savage cruelty," he said.

"I don't understand. Certainly to imprison an innocent girl, separating her from family and friends, is terrible and wicked. But the enchantment itself seems no more cruel than sleep."

"But this enchantment was not sleep, madam-who-is-not-Dar'Nethi. One thing I have learned in my years of study is that it is impossible to completely suspend the activity of the mind. No matter how deep the enchantment, no matter how long the span of it, one would retain some awareness of the world beyond oneself. Perhaps the Lords learned to deaden the mind completely. But mercy was not in their nature. No, as long as the body lives, the mind lives. Therein lies the cruelty."

He turned his pages more and more rapidly, his eyes devouring the words. His free hand grabbed a fistful of grapes from a wooden bowl and popped them into his mouth one at a time.

"Do you mean that during that thousand years, the Lady might have been awake … or at least aware of time passing, of her surroundings, of all that had happened or was happening?" The thought of it left me breathless with horror.

Garvй nodded and swallowed a grape. "Not a pleasant consideration, is it? But considering the Lords is never pleasant. They must have set her mind wandering far from where she was, as we do with those poor souls in Feur Desolй, or she could not have survived it so well."

Savage cruelty indeed. Garvй's words bounced off the unpainted walls like pelting hailstones. Indeed all his words seemed to have more substance than those of anyone I'd ever met, and they lingered about his house with all his other scraps, as if you could pull open a drawer in one of his shabby bureaus and have whole conversations fall out.

I had heard what I'd come for, and I stood up to leave.

"Have you no more questions, my mysterious not-Dar'Nethi?" he asked, even while pulling a second book from a tottering stack of them and opening it in the clear space on his worktable, flicking his eyes back and forth from one to the other.

"I've a thousand other questions," I said. "But it appears I should not bother you with them today."

"I'd like to hear them. It's little disturbance. No one comes here." He glanced up ever so briefly. "You must understand, I cannot hold you in my attention as others do. My control seems to be slipping far too easily of late. But I am listening, and very curious myself as to what brings a lovely not-Dar'Nethi woman of amazing constitution and sensible intelligence to call on someone of my reputation to inquire of D'Arnath's daughter."

I couldn't help but like the strange man, though I was indeed coming to fear the quivering atmosphere surrounding him as I feared nothing else about the Dar'-Nethi world. V'Rendal had warned me that no one knew the limits or the directions of Garvй's power, as by its very nature it crossed the boundaries of all talents and grew as it touched each one. He never expended his own power except when gaining more from other people.

"I am interested in everything about the Lady," I said, settling back on the stool. "Her reappearance after so many years. Her story. The fact that she was in Zhev'Na for so long and appears . . . untainted by it."

"Creatures of the deeps! I know you!" In the space of a heartbeat, I was lifted from my stool and slammed against the wall by an invisible fist, my ribs creaking and groaning with the strain, though Garvй had done nothing but lift his head from his books in surprise and stare intently at my face.

"Ah, sorry . . . sorry . . . Forgive me." He jumped off his perch, dropping his books on the floor and toppling his inkpot, so that my blurring vision saw a great dark blot pooling on the sooty brick floor. But instead of coming to peel me off the wall and check on my state of health, he grabbed an armful of pots and jars and spoons from his shelves, lined them up on yet another worktable, and began to measure and pour ingredients from one to another of them.

Gradually the monstrous unseen hand that pinned me to the wall was released, and I took a deep breath. Ascertaining that my ribs were intact, I returned to my stool and watched him work.

"Sorry"—almost a quarter of an hour had passed— "my Lady Seriana of the world across the Bridge."

"How is it you know me?" My instincts demanded that I be afraid, but for once I didn't believe them. I didn't think he meant me any harm at all, and in fact was doing his best to preclude it. I watched his fingers moving furiously in a frenzy of mixing and stirring and measuring. I wasn't curious about what he was making. I had come to think it didn't matter in the least what he was doing, only that he was doing it.

"I was called in by the late Prince D'Natheil after your injury those many years ago, when you were dying and he brought you to Avonar because he could not heal you. I was unable to help. I never knew you had recovered. We heard . . . well, clearly we heard much that was not true. Prince Ven'Dar has tried to explain to me what went on in those days with D'Natheil and his son and his wife, but I'll confess, I've never really listened."

One hand paused briefly, as if an idea had occurred to him. Then he quickly bent to his work again. "Now, perhaps, I understand. Of course you would be interested to hear of the Lady D'Sanya's return from Zhev'Na because of what happened to your son there. I saw the boy, too, after his capture. I—" He shuddered slightly, and the floor trembled until he found a tarnished brass balance and began weighing miniscule portions of leaves and herbs, wrapping them up in small packets, labeling them, and tossing them into baskets already full of such things. "I created the enchantments with which your son was confined before his execution. So much sorrow. So much pain. To bear such grief . . . And here you are in my house after so many years, asking about the Lady and Zhev'Na, and I will not ask why, for I sense—I know—that if V'Rendal sent you, it is because someone of importance has questions about the Lady. I think it behooves me not to think of it too very much."

"Your discretion is appreciated."

He nodded even while keeping his back to me, his hands moving so quickly as to be almost invisible. "Ask what you will. As I've told you, I believe the Lady's story. She was cruelly used, but she is strong as you are strong, and she survived it as you have survived the injuries done to you and the path of sorrow that is the Way laid down for you."

"Is the Lady an Arcanist? She seems to have so many talents. So much power. I've been curious."

"An Arcanist? No. No. I don't think so. The Lady D'Sanya does one thing at a time and the power is her own. The nature of an Arcanist is to bind many things together: I can take the herbs from a Gardener, infused with the force of his talent, and bind them into a paste to smear on the eyes of a Sea Dweller so that she can permeate it with her own power, so I can then use the paste to penetrate darkness in the way of an Imager, seeing the colors that radiate from the mind of an Artist, so we can understand why his talent has failed him. So am I Healer or Gardener or Sea Dweller or Imager? No. None of these. I only use their talents. The Lady is not one of us."

"Then what, Master Garvй? We must understand her before she takes the throne of Avonar, and how is it possible to understand a Dar'Nethi without understanding her talent? Your tradition says it is rude and unworthy to ask the question, as the qualities of the soul are so much more important. Yet I have never met a Dar'Nethi whose soul was not shaped by the gift born in him: the talent that guides his fingers and the power he brings to serve it."

Garvй's hands slowed, and I felt the shifting of the air, the chest-crushing pressure that was his notice. Only when he forced his hands busy again and started speaking was I able to breathe without conscious effort. "You have seen us at our best and worst, my lady, and at many levels in between, I suspect, and of course you are correct. We profess that we see beyond our talents, but we cannot. As for the Lady, I do not know. I might have thought her a Word Winder, but even in my brief examination I noted that she uses words carelessly—and far too many of them. I would guess she is something like a Devisor, one who creates physical objects to accomplish certain tasks. It is why she can do some things that seem like healing, yet not everything, and things that seem like a Gardener, but not everything. You understand? A Word Winder creates enchantments from the power of words, a Devisor from the physical properties of nature. She makes things to carry her power—a little portion of herself contained in each one."

"I see. Yes, I've been told she carried protective 'devices' that she made with her mentor in his workshop."

"She spoke of a mentor?"

"Yes. A man named L'Clavor."

There are moments between sleep and waking when you feel a slightly nauseating sense of falling, as if you go in and out of time and the body can barely manage it. Whenever I managed to distract Garvй with something unexpected, the room wavered a bit.

"L'Clavor!" Rapidly Garvй pushed his mixing aside and set up a brass oil burner on the workbench. Into a flat copper dish he spilled the contents of one after another of the little twists of brown paper he had tossed in his baskets, and then he set the dish on the burner and hovered over it, stirring the contents rapidly with a copper spoon while dribbling in a thin stream of oil from a glass cruet. "Odd I had not heard this from the earlier investigations. You're sure of your source?"

"Absolutely sure."

"The name answers your question, my lady. L'Clavor was the most famous Metalwright in all of our history."

"A Metalwright . . ."

"Yes. The Lady would be able to create devices of silver, gold, and such to carry the mark of her power. And because she was mentored by L'Clavor, who developed the technique, she would be able to link her devices with each other to make even more intricate enchantments."

I puzzled over this revelation, as Garvй bustled about with his never-ending activities. It seemed so incongruous—totally unexpected. I had always thought of the Lady as being involved in the more nature-oriented talents, like Healer or Gardener, or the more abstract ones like Balancer or Speaker, but never as one who could shape metal into jewelry or teapots or door locks, weaving her enchantments into them.

I was ready to ask more, but Garvй had set down the cruet and was attempting to read while stirring his nasty-smelling concoction over the burner. He'd already come near setting his book afire at least twice as colored flames shot upward from the contents of the copper pan. Though his voice held calm and steady, his hands were trembling. "Madam, it has been a delight, and I would take great pleasure if you were to grace my home again, but for now … I think it would be best if you were to leave. And I would recommend you be quick about it."

"As you wish. Thank you, Master Garvй. I'll think on—"

"Go now!"

I ran. As I darted through the cramped rooms, the floor shook. Several boxes tumbled from their piles, and a basket of pinecones toppled into the pathway. I bent to pick them up but thought better of it when the shaking grew worse and I could scarcely keep my feet under me. I ran out the front door, and from behind me came a noisy rumble in the earth and a clamor of falling metal and breaking glass. Red smoke puffed from the chimney and the door.

When the shaking ended and silence fell, I considered going back into the house to see if Garvй had survived. But from the dust-filled darkness behind the doors and windows, I heard a huge, groaning sigh. Perhaps my absence might be of more help than my inquiries.

I pulled up the hood of my cloak and walked the streets of Avonar for hours, twisting my mind into knots with everything I'd heard from Eu'Vian, from poor mad J'Savan, and from the gently violent Garvй. I could make no sense, no connection, though I knew it was there for me to find.

Exhausted, I touched the bellpull hanging by Aimee's front door—a white cord with a simple ring of brass at the end—and the ring began to spin slowly, catching the brilliant gleam of the small white lights that blossomed in Avonar's streets at night like stars fallen to earth. The movement caught my eye and focused my distracted thoughts upon it as I listened to the silvery jangle of the bell. Then, in an instant, it was as if my own small earthquake shook the pieces until they fit together. I knew what D'Sanya had buried in the rootling grove, and what J'Savan had found there when he dug to see what was killing his precious trees—the burning eye in the desert. Oh, holy gods . . . Gerick . . .