Daughter of Ancients

Chapter 17

"Are you hungry? Should I call Vanor?" I picked up the book that had slid off my father's lap unopened and set it on the table, then crouched down in front of him in hopes he might look me in the eye and show some spark of life.

"Wine, perhaps. I don't know." He propped an elbow on the arm of his chair and rested his head in his hand. "It's just so difficult. . . ."

I jumped up to pour a glass of wine from the carafe on the sideboard. "We could take a walk if you like. It's a fine afternoon. Have you been out while I was away?"

"I don't remember." He waved away the wine without touching it. "No taste. I told you I don't like it."

On returning from our three weeks in Maroth, I had been eager to hear my father's observations about Na'Cyd, and Cedor's death, and his new attendant, a cheerfully attentive man named Vanor. But, though he insisted he felt no pain, no change, no anything, he could not seem to carry on a conversation for more than three sentences.

"Come on, let's go out. Fresh air will do you good."

I offered him my hand, but he just huddled deeper in his chair. "Leave me alone."

"Father . . ."

"Go on. I just need—" He couldn't finish it. "Come back later."

I threw a blanket around his shoulders and told him I would be in the garden, but would return to eat dinner with him. "Send Vanor if you need me."

Despite his dismissal, I felt guilty at leaving him alone. I didn't know what to do about his condition. I had pressed him to rest and to eat; I had shoved books into his hands and started a hundred games of chess. On the previous day, he complained that I was driving him to distraction and ordered me to leave and not come back until I could sit still.

It was true I had been extraordinarily restless in the two days since our return. D'Sanya was occupied with the hospice: visiting the residents, catching up on business with Na'Cyd and her stewards, and interviewing and welcoming a newcomer. I couldn't settle at anything. Words and images from the past weeks lived more vividly in my thoughts than the food I ate or the roads I traveled. My mind and body were consumed, filled, alight with D'Sanya.

Unable to do anything about either my father or the Lady, I was about to burst.

I pulled the door closed and hurried down the cloistered walk toward the gardens, only to discover Sefaro's daughter sitting on a shady bench where she could observe my father's front door. Another uncomfortable problem.

Since our unpleasant encounter in the hospice library, I had spoken not a word to the woman. Her constant surveillance had kept me on edge—not a bad thing— and I certainly had no right to complain about her violation of my privacy. Any attempt to offer amends for the past was ludicrous. Though I had wished to ease her mind about my intentions, the knowledge that even common courtesies from my lips would rightly disgust her left me tongue-tied. Yet, after the events in Avonar, justice demanded certain acknowledgments, no matter how uncomfortable their delivery made me.

I stopped in front of her bench and extended my palms. "Mistress, please excuse my intrusion. I wanted to thank you for your help in Avonar … on behalf of the Lady. Your bringing help probably saved her life."

Her short hair askew as always, the woman just sat there with her mouth open, looking absolutely astonished. I'd never noticed the dusting of freckles on her nose.

"I didn't tell anyone it was you." I rushed to get everything out before she caught her breath. "Not even Lady D'Sanya. As you didn't give Je'Reint your name, I thought perhaps you preferred to remain anonymous. And I want to thank you for not revealing my father's identity to anyone, despite your reservations about me. To be questioned . . . besieged … to have demands made of him would be very hard right now. He's not well. Not right. I hope … I sincerely hope your father fares better."

Her eyes were the darkest of the Dar'Nethi blues, such a deep midnight shade that only in the brightest sunlight would you see their true color.

I prepared to bolt. She had closed her mouth and now glared at me in her accustomed manner. But at least her first words were quiet. "Some days he is better, some worse. . . ."

Trying to preserve this moment of civility, I bowed and backed away before turning to head down the garden path.

". . . not that you have any right to ask," she called after me, sounding more like herself. "I'm still watching. Don't think I've given it up because I wasn't in Maroth."

Silly that I felt like grinning as I hurried away.

On the fourth day after our return, D'Sanya sent me a message that suggested I stay the night in my father's chambers on the promise of a dawn ride and breakfast with her. I needed no persuasion. But when I arrived at the stables the next morning, a messenger delivered a note asking to postpone our ride until dawn the next day, as she needed more time with the new resident.

… and lest you think this delay is some willful neglect, know that I grieve for every moment we spend apart. The future is mysterious and uncertain, and yet one hope and resolution has fixed itself in my heart. One thing I choose

from the realm of all possibility, my dearest friend, and if I must forego all other pleasure, duty, or destiny to do so, I will have this thing I choose, if you but grant it. Ponder this and bring your heart to our next meeting so you may give me answer.

Lost in a confusion of indefinable hopes, I thought to go riding to sort out what she might possibly mean by such words. Yet when I stopped in to tell my father of my aborted plans, he seemed so happy at the prospect of my company for the day, I could not bring myself to leave again.

His mood was much improved from the previous days, and he seemed more alert, more interested, more his usual self. I chose not to discuss my concerns about Na'Cyd, who had not approached me since our return, or tell of the Zhid attack in Avonar. The omissions made me feel guilty, but I didn't know how well my father's erratic temper might deal with new worries and new secrets. Instead I spent the morning repeating the stories of my visit to Maroth, of how I'd been able to get D'Sanya's Builders to agree on a single vision of the new hospice, and how, despite the Lady's incessant words, we'd never gotten around to anything more substantial in our conversations.

"And she truly had you dancing?" He showed no signs that he had heard any of my story before.

"Night after night. She receives more invitations than she can possibly accept. As she's sworn that I must learn to enjoy company as she does, she made sure that we had some dancing party to attend every night we were in Maroth." Perhaps she had guessed she'd best keep me occupied. If we'd had time alone … if I'd had hands of flesh to touch her with . . .

"A most determined young woman."

"She's nothing like I expected," I said, sudden heat sending me to throw open the windows.

When my father's smirk broke into a chuckle, I suggested, somewhat resentfully, that we play a game of chess. I did not tell him the full contents of D'Sanya's message. But it was good to hear him laugh.

I won the chess game handily. In ordinary times he would have bested me in ten moves, considering the image that ruled my thoughts—D'Sanya's shoulder, left bare by the dark blue gown she had worn on our last evening in Maroth—but he could not seem to strategize more than one move at a time. "Perhaps a walk will clear my head," he said, as if he'd never heard my repeated urging of the past days. "I don't get out enough."

Activity suited me as well, and we left by his back gate, taking a path that led into the wood. Even within the enchanted bounds of the hospice, the grounds were extensive and varied. After a while, the path began to look familiar.

"It's good to see you smile, Gerick. I suppose I shouldn't ask the cause."

I felt the blood rise in my face yet again. "It's nothing. It's just nice to be out." The place should be just ahead.

But I decided I must have been mistaken about our location. The oak in the center of this sunny clearing lay rotting, its ancient trunk split, and its roots exposed nakedly to the sun. This was not the clearing where D'Sanya and I had played hide-and-seek.

Our walk was the kind I liked best, where you didn't need to say much of anything, not because you had nothing to say, but because the other's presence and companionship and shared appreciation of the moment were enough. By the time we wandered back into the hospice garden, I felt a little more rational than I had all week. "I've just time enough to ride down to Gaelie and fetch any letters Paulo's brought from Avonar," I said, calculating that I could be back well before my dawn ride with D'Sanya. "I could take any you've written for Mother, as well. Would you like that?"

"I've nothing to send." Though the day was warm, my father hunched his shoulders and drew his cloak tight as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. "Must you leave again so soon? You've things to do here. You've not tested me since you've come back."

"You've seemed so much better today." At least until that moment. "I hate to keep intruding on you."

"It's why I'm here, Gerick. We have to know. You were away for a long time . . . days . . . weeks . . . And the past few days have been wretched." He shook his head and rubbed his brow tiredly.

"Of course, I'll do whatever you want." I took his arm and turned back toward his apartments, dreading what I might find inside him.

This fretfulness tainted his thoughts—a restlessness, a chafing at confinement. The deadness of his senses was, if anything, more profound. Colors flowed together, one almost indistinguishable from another. I felt no variation in temperature, unable to tell whether we sat by his fire or in his garden. Sounds seemed flat, harmonies impossible to hear, and if his memory spoke true, he could no longer tell the difference between wine and water in his mouth, or bread and paper.

But as I withdrew, I couldn't decide if these were truly changes in him, or if they were the result of my own perverse vision. Only my image of D'Sanya remained fixed, while the rest of the world seemed more distorted by the hour. I said nothing of what I found. "Not much change," I said. Of course it was so. I willed that it be so.

These joinings were never easy. It took most of an hour to let the insistent hammering of my blood fall silent. Paulo always said it was only right, as "bodies and souls weren't meant to get taken apart and jumbled back together." I couldn't help but agree, especially when I was trying to ease back into my own body and felt the raw abrasion of flesh and bone as my mind reconnected with my own senses.

On this particular day, as I sprawled on his couch trying to remember how to pump air into my lungs and blood into my heart without thinking about it constantly, ray father riffled listlessly through a pile of papers on his desk. "Do you think . . . would you stay a while longer and help me organize the papers Bareil sent from Windham? I need another pair of hands and eyes."

"Of course. Whatever you want." I massaged my temples with fingers that obeyed my wishes only reluctantly.

"Bareil is a dear friend, but rather than getting only the papers I put on the list, the silly fool sent me every scrap of writing in my study. I keep putting off sorting them. It seems such an overwhelming task. But if I could get it done, then perhaps I could move on to something useful. Do some writing. Something."

To hear my father falter in his struggle to keep living distressed and unnerved me. He had always been so sure of himself, so easy and generous with his immense talents, so at peace and good-humored with his limitations. In that moment I began to believe that we were going to lose him, no matter the outcome of this venture. A detestable thought.

I jumped up. "I'll be happy to help. Show me what you want me to do. Anything."

For the next few hours we sorted out the five hundred or so pages of my father's manuscript. Words and phrases kept leaping out of his bold handwriting, snatches of the story he'd set down, the history of his— our—people and their life in the world where we were born. He had taken his own experiences and the stories he'd been told as a child and woven them together with the tales he'd learned from Dar'Nethi Archivists here in Gondai and the written histories of the Four Realms. The narrative was unexpectedly fascinating, and I was soon reading more than sorting.

"So what do you think?" asked my father, noting my distraction. "I wasn't sure you would find the story all that interesting."

"I'd never really understood about the Rebellion, that our problems in the mundane world were our own fault."

Hundreds of years before, the Dar'Nethi Exiles had actually ruled in the Four Realms for a few years, claiming they would bring justice and enlightenment to the kingdoms. But instead they had turned into worse despots than those they had supplanted, using terror and sorcery to bend the people to their will.

"Well, not entirely our fault, of course," said my father, "and it wasn't all of us . . ."

"You give such a different view of the Dar'Nethi," I said after he'd talked for a while. "It's hard to imagine that the Exiles, who came to live the Way so generously and so well in our world, came from this same Gondai."

"You've had no experience of ordinary life among us. How could you appreciate our better parts? And here . . . the long war affected souls as well as talent and power. They'll recover, though. Now the Lords are gone, of course they will. Power and passion . . . the balance of the worlds. Dassine once told me . . ."

Somehow touching on these subjects so close to his heart seemed to stimulate his faculties, so that we conversed as if his torpor had been only my imagination. The afternoon passed quickly into evening and dinner, and by the time I looked up, the sunlight told me it was too late to return to Gaelic So we kept talking about what I'd read, and whether or not the manuscript could ever be safely published in the Four Realms, and about the excerpts he'd prepared as university lectures before he'd fallen ill.

"From a time when I was younger than you, I dreamed of telling the story of my people at the University," he told me, staring at the red wine swirling in his crystal goblet. "I believed that those lecture halls housed the summit of all learning, lacking only the single discipline that was the most important to me—this history that even I knew so little of. Who'd have thought I'd come so close to accomplishing it?"

I knew better than to answer such melancholy with false hope. I wished I could say, "Perhaps you still shall. Perhaps another miracle will occur." It wouldn't. Not this time. I knew that now.

"If only someone could take these notes and do it for you."

A whimsical smile drifted across his tired face, and he settled back in his chair. "I've been wanting to talk to you about that. I stepped over the wall again while you were gone."

"Father!"

"No, you mustn't worry. I've not given up on our investigation … or our agreement. It's just . . . something caught my eye, and I wanted to use a bit of sorcery. To see if I still could. I stayed only long enough to accumulate the power and spend it. A good thing I didn't need much. So I was able to step back before I became a gibbering idiot. Look in the top of that chest. You'll find a bundle wrapped in silk . . . yes, that's it. I've an idea about what to do with it, and I'd like your help . . ."

He had wrought a gift for my mother, and wished to surprise her with it at exactly the right moment. His plan was marvelous, its inherent charm and Tightness dimmed only by the fact that it must come to fruition after he was dead. We spent the next hour deciding how to go about it.

As I was pouring the last of the wine from the flask we'd shared at dinner so we could toast our plotting, we heard a quiet tapping on the door to his private garden. I had closed it earlier when the wind disturbed his papers. But his attendant always came from the public courtyard, never the private garden. Curious and careful, I pulled open the door.

"So you were holed up here. I hoped that might be," said the voice from the moon shadows. "The innkeeper said you'd not slept in the room for two nights running."

"What are you doing here?" I asked, hauling Paulo into the room and quickly closing the door behind him. "My not sleeping at the guesthouse for two nights does not constitute an emergency."

My father dimmed the lamps and made sure the curtains were drawn, then smiled and clasped Paulo's hand. "Gerick doesn't know you've been coming regularly to see me, Paulo. Though it's not your usual time. I thought you were off in Avonar."

"Not a regular visit tonight, my lord." He pushed my hand off his shoulder. "And it wasn't just the empty bed, though if you'd been whacked on the head again by whoever is the mysterious somebody you won't talk about, you might not take it so ill I'd taken note of it." He pulled a folded paper from his shirt and gave it to my father. "I've brought this from Prince Ven'Dar. He said it was important enough to send me right back with it before I'd so much as had a biscuit. That Je'Reint was with him"—Paulo always referred to him as that Je'Reint —"and he was worried as well."

While my father sat in his chair to read the letter, Paulo started casting his eyes about the place in a way no one who knew him could mistake.

"There's half a chicken and some plums left from dinner," I said, "and from the generosity of my heart, I'll sacrifice the last of the wine for you." I handed him my glass, which he drained in one swallow.

"Nub like you got no business drinking too much wine anyways," he said. "Lucky I grabbed a pie at Gaelie. Just need something to tuck around the edges."

"So you've been coming up here while I was gone?" He hadn't mentioned that last time we'd talked. What else had I missed in my distraction with D'Sanya?

"No use staying around Avonar with that Je'Reint in and out of the house every hour of every day. And Master Karon and I . . . we've had some business to see to. He seemed to think no one would notice me coming in or out of here if I was careful."

I waited for him to continue, but clearly no other explanation of their "business" was forthcoming. The chicken and fruit were gone almost as quickly as the wine, and Paulo had stretched out on the floor in front of the fire with his hands under his head and dozed off before my father looked up from the letter. I could tell from my father's troubled expression and his anxious glances at me that I wasn't going to like what he was about to say.

"So what is it? Has Je'Reint decided to reveal all to the Lady? Or perhaps set the Preceptors on me?"

"Another marshaled band of Zhid attacked a town in Astolle Vale," he said, folding the letter and tossing it on the table. "And they've had three independent reports of a massive force in the north. Reliable witnesses. Veterans of the war, who knew what they saw."

My dinner suddenly sat very heavily. "And Ven'Dar wants me to tell him how it's being done."

"Gerick . . ." He rubbed the tips of his fingers over his brow. "The Preceptors are at the end of their patience. They claim they need D'Sanya's power, her own formidable talents joined with the Heir's power that is hers by right, to put a stop to the Zhid rising, and so they're demanding that Ven'Dar abdicate in favor of the Lady D'Sanya now before his time is up."

"He mustn't do that! Not yet. She has secrets. And she isn't ready, even if everything is . . . honest . . . with her. She needs time. I need time. . . ." My words limped off into silence.

My father looked at me thoughtfully, closer than I wished, and I made some halfhearted attempt to put the remnants of Paulo's supper to rights, stacking greasy plates and bowls in the basket we left out for the attendant to take away. I had to explain.

"She wants to get the other hospice built. She's driven to help all these people and hasn't been interested in anything that might slow that down. When the time comes, she won't hesitate to take D'Arnath's chair. She believes it's her responsibility, but just now it's more important to her to . . . get her life in order … to feel right about it . . . find her place . . ." What had she meant in her message about foregoing her destiny?

"What does she say about the raids?"

"She doesn't like to talk about them. She wants to believe the Lords are defeated. She hated them . . . still hates them. She trusts Ven'Dar and Je'Reint."

"And if she were to be convinced that Ven'Dar is not capable of handling the Zhid? What would she do? Where would she start?"

"She doesn't like to run things by herself—detests having to choose between different ways of doing things. It's why she had so much trouble with the Builders in Maroth. One Builder would tell her one thing that made sense, and she'd do it, and then another Builder would tell her another thing. And that made sense, too. But she wasn't even sure enough of her decision to tell the first one she'd changed her mind. She understands this about herself, though, so I believe she'd get people to help her . . . like Ven'Dar and the Preceptors. Take their advice. But she believes .. . she is . . . D'Arnath's daughter, and if she decides she must take his place, she won't shrink from it. That's what I think. But I can't say for sure, of course, or we'd be finished here. I don't know." Could she forgo duty for anyone … for me?

My father nodded and picked up the letter again. "Ven'Dar's best minds, those who've studied the Zhid for their entire lifetimes, cannot explain these attacks. No one can find the villains. Fear is growing. Trade in the remote Vales and the new settlements is grinding to a halt. The recovery and resettlement of the Wastes is paralyzed. If you could come up with anything to help them understand it, you could give the Lady and Ven'Dar—and us—more time."

Time wasn't going to solve anything. Only truth. I had begun to need certainty as I had never needed it my life. "All right. I'll try."

"I know what I'm asking of you, and if there were any other way . . ."

"I said I'll manage."

I didn't dawdle. It wouldn't do to think too much. I set the basket outside the courtyard door, a signal for the attendant not to intrude, locked both sets of doors, and then I shook Paulo, a mug of hot saffria from the pot on the sideboard in hand. "Come on, I need you awake. Drink this."

"What's wrong?" he said, after the saffria and my prodding had him alert again.

"I'm going to try to remember some things. It will be hard, and I'll have to . . . concentrate … on some bad times."

He sat up straighter, no more traces of sleep. "Zhev'Na, then."

"I need you to make sure I don't take too long about it—no more than an hour—and that I'm … all right. . . myself . . . when I get back. It might take both of you. Father, you'll need to look me in the eye and command me to speak my name"—Paulo's eyes widened when I stuffed the handle of the poker in his hand—"and you make sure I answer the right thing. I mean it. Be sure. Don't let me see you before you do it, and don't hold back."

Paulo exhaled sharply as if he had stopped just short of speaking. I felt their dismay. But I didn't want to see it on their faces or give them any opening to argue. So I kept my eyes averted as I propped several big cushions beside the brick hearth step and sat against them on the floor, positioned so the two of them could watch my face. I had to trust them.

I had come to need answers as much as Ven'Dar did. It wasn't any good telling myself I didn't care about Dar'Nethi history past or future. What I had just read and heard that afternoon from my father confirmed everything I had felt since coming to Avonar. I wanted to find something to explain why the world felt wrong and what was happening in the Wastes . . . something that had nothing to do with D'Sanya or me. And I had to find out the truth about her. You will not escape the destiny we designed for you. You are our instrument. . . Had Lord Ziddari said those things to her as well?

And so, on that quiet evening in my father's pleasant sitting room, I closed my eyes and ever so slightly relaxed the guards I had erected against the bitter record of the time I had spent as Dieste the Destroyer, the Fourth Lord of Zhev'Na. Only an hour had passed from the time I had stepped into the Great Oculus, the man-high brass ring that was the focus of the Lords' power, spinning its web of light and shadow in the depths of their fortress, until I had stepped out of it again, my eyes burned away, my soul withered, my mind and being one with the Lords. Scarcely more than a child, in one short hour I had become very old in the ways of evil.

For all these years my father had tried to convince me that the guilt with which I lived was not mine, that because I had been so young and inexperienced, I could actually have done very little evil on my own. But when the memories are a part of you, you cannot easily separate the things you actually did from the things you only remember. And now I needed to reduce this vague barrier even further, to explore that part of myself where I could not distinguish Gerick from Ziddari or Parven or Notуle. The Three. The Four.

As I called on my senses to prod the memories awake, it was as if I entered a long tunnel, and the light that was my current life—the healthy one that my parents and my friend Paulo and my trusting Singlars had so generously returned to me—slipped farther and farther behind me, rapidly dwindling into a pinprick until all I could see was midnight. I remembered midnight. . . .

The hour had come. I was to go to the Lords in their temple. Smokes . . . fumes . . . the stench of burning slaves . . . burning Dar'Nethi . . . drifted through my windows. . . .

Pleasure seeped through me, prickling my skin like a feather. Smell is the most vivid of the senses, the most evocative of memory … of obscene pleasure. I remembered the day of my change. . . .

I/we stood inside the whirling oculus, my body on fire with the joining, with the tearing down of my mind's walls, with the infusion of darkness like acid in my veins, with the impossible bloating of my power. As my human eyes were torn away, our heightened senses encompassed all of Ce Uroth: the sounds of battle and torment, the feel of the lash on recalcitrant flesh, and the smells. . . .

Call them what you will. The smells of Zhev'Na are the savory incense of victory: the fragrance of the slave pens where D'Arnath's grovelers lie rotting in their own filth . . . the sweet perfumes of blood and putrid, broken flesh after a battle exercise . . . the exudation of fear that flows with the sweat of the damned—the Zhid, the Drudges, the Dar'Nethi, all who stand in subservience to us. The smells hang thick on the hot desert air. A heady brew. Taste it! Let the stench fill our nostrils, seep into our pores, for this is our desire, and nothing . . . nothing . . . will stand in its way.

Pleasure . . . such groaning, writhing pleasure in the scent.

The withered hand caressed my mind. Welcome to your

new life, Dieste. Survey your/our domain through the cold, blue-white gems that perfect your sight. See the camps of the soulless ones as far as these immortal eyes can travel, leagues upon leagues beyond the horizon, tents fluttering in the hot wind like the wings of locusts, swarms ready to descend upon the fields of Avonar and devour them. What delight it is to turn a weakling into a perfect warrior —to rip away his soul and eat it, to lick the blood from his cringing flesh, to crush the softness and hear his screams fade into whimpers of helplessness, to grind the bones of his life under your foot, and build them up again into a creature of your own design. To see a man turned, so that a flick of your thoughts will cause him to mutilate his wife of fifty years, or to whisper commands that force a woman to strangle her newborn infant and relish her infamy. What can compare with power over the souls of your enemy ?

Push harder. Keep looking. What do you seek here in the pleasures of the past?

In the tents are the thousands of our commanders, each one a weapon to be controlled, each one ready to lead his troops into battle to devour the soft lands, to wrest the final victory from the blight of dead D'Arnath's grip. The war plans are drawn . . . centuries in the making. The circle of D'Arnath's control has grown steadily smaller and soon it will be obliterated. The power is at hand. The boy/I, our Fourth, will bring the power, for he is D'Natheil's spawn, Lord of Avonar and all Gondai, Lord of Chaos. He/I will fit the key in the slot and unlock the fountain of discord that wilt be our feast, that we may take our fill of the horrors we feed on, so that our will may be unleashed upon every world. . . .

Further. Deeper. Go back before the hours of our joining. Parven of the amethyst eyes sits his black stone chair in the Hall of Thrones, the shapeless stars cold in the void overhead. Without voice, he speaks, and I remember. . . .

Today's assault… the Dinaje Cliffs, the last stronghold of the Dar'Nethi's western penetration. Take the cliffs and they have no shelter, no refuge. On the dune seas we can

pick them off at leisure . . . the bodies sun and desert do not devour first. The decisions have been made, the warnings sent, the avantir made ready . …"

The avantir . . . remember . . . broad as a tabletop, a bronze mime of the land from mountain to watercourse, from plain to pebble. . . . How is it used to touch the thousands … to direct the commanders? I remember a battle morn. …

So which of us shall play the music of the avantir this day? Sister Notуle? No? Well, indeed you will have occupation enough with the storm —a charming notion to complicate a battle. You, Brother Ziddari, are you ready to play your own sweet music of war after so long away? I'll guide you . . . the plan is set . . . just touch the device here and here. . . . We'll bring the boy here soon enough and teach him how to play. He's done well in the desert. Charmingly cruel. Now, brother, draw the power through the Great Eye and into the avantir, so it echoes in the Vault of the Skull. . . .

The avantir was so clean . . . requiring inordinate power, of course, but making it so easy to bring death in a thousand forms. Always precise as I/we wished.

Now to the other matter . . . D'Arnath and his child.

. . . D'Arnath the Tormenter . . . the Imprisoner . . . the Unjust. . . vengeance everlasting . . .

Deeper. Not the man himself, but his child . . . the girl . . .

. . . Could we have but made him immortal, so he could know his pain forever . . .

. . . He knew, brother . . . his petty triumphs were never more than ash in his mouth . . .

. . . Even when he dwells in the realms of death, the King of Pride shall feel our victory . . . such hatred as we bear cannot be bounded . . . to rape his world is to rape his child . . . to use his child, to ravage her, is to ravage him . . . destroy him. . . .

Time . . . time . . . hurry . . . What did I/we do with her? Think of the girl . . . the captive … go back, if you must … all the way back to the beginning. . . .

We have her! The pride of this king's blood is too stout a liquor for his children's veins . . . it makes them fools. Thou art wise, O King, to keep thy sons close. . . . But this soft one will rend thy heart and mind and soul. Keep her safe, Brother Ziddari . . . for now. If he refuses to bargain, then we shall force her to live under the knife. . . .

. . . Damnable insolent man . . . if he will not give, then we must raise the wager to induce him. . . .

We flaunt her.. . bargain her… but the proud bastard will not bend. . . .

Everlasting be thy torment, King of Deserts, Prince of Rubble, Sovereign of Corpses! So be it! We will degrade thy innocent. . . use her talents . . . break her. . . destroy her . . . but thou shalt take no comfort from her death. We will bury her, but she will yet live, undying for as long as we breathe the air of this prisoning world you have left us. We shall unmake her and remake her in our image, our daughter, not thine. Woe and ruin will be thine only grandchildren. If knowledge could stretch to five thousand years, thou wouldst know she was yet in our hands . . . our undying captive, subject to our whim . . . Before and after thy death, even until the world's ending, thou shalt curse the day she was conceived for the reiving of her. . . .

"Come back. Leave it, son. It's been far too long. Can you hear me?"

The voice grated at my ears like a buzzing mosquito, and I slapped it away, cursing the interruption. My hand met solid flesh. "How dare you interfere with me?" I roared. "You will be a smear on the face of the deep!"

Lamplight pierced the darkness, glaring in my face. On the floor by my feet sprawled a man grimacing, a rapidly darkening bruise on his forehead. But his eyes did not leave my face. "What is your name?" he said. "Speak your name."

"My name …" I was trembling, my body clenched into such a knot that my teeth ground against each other, and my skin felt like to rip. Easy to see why my fist throbbed. The room wavered and shifted. … No black glass floor … no columns of ice . . . no man-high torches . . . just soft chairs, green carpet on a tile floor, a brick hearth with its spitting fire, and an injured man….

"Demonfire, Father!" I uncurled myself and started to get up.

"Answer him!" Paulo stood beside me, something . . . a poker . . . raised over my head. "Say it."

I held up my hands. "Gerick … of course, my name is Gerick." And as I said it, the world settled a little further into its more familiar pattern.

My father's head sagged to the floor.

"Stars of night, Father! Forgive me."

Paulo heaved a sigh, threw down his poker, and together we lifted my father into his chair. I was not much help, as I could not stop shaking. "I'm sorry. Your head … we need something. . . . Gods, I'm sorry." My tongue fumbled at finding the right words.

"A little bruise is no matter," he murmured. "But you … we were afraid we were losing you. Almost an hour we yelled and shook you. You were scarcely breathing. I thought you were going to burst."

"I'm all right." I sank to the floor at his feet, trying to regulate my breathing and slow my heart.

Paulo poured wine for my father. "Do you want something?" he asked me. "Ale? Saffria?"

I shook my head. Nothing would taste proper or settle for a while. I just wanted to get this over with. "There was a place in Zhev'Na called the Vault of the Skull…"

The Vault was a stone chamber buried under the fortress, I told them. It lay close to the Chamber of the Oculus, where they kept the Great Eye, the largest of the spinning brass rings. In the vault were kept the Lords' greatest artifacts of power: the three smaller versions of the oculus, one for each of the Lords, a large bronze map of Gondai called an avantir, and the gold and brass earrings. Every Zhid wore an earring, its sharp spike thrust through the earlobe and locked securely on the other side. I had worn one from the day I pledged my childish fealty to the Lords, though mine, of course, had been unique. Jewels of ruby, emerald, and amethyst linked me directly, constantly, to the minds of the Lords until the day I became one with them.

But in the Vault of the Skull were hundreds of the common ones: the gold that were given to the commanders, and the brass for the ordinary warriors. Everyone had seen the earrings worn by the Zhid, but no one in Avonar could have known they were linked to the Lords through the avantir, a broad, cast-bronze map of Gondai that was played by the Lords as a musician might play his harp.

Paulo had brought a damp towel for my father to hold on his forehead. Regrettably, I had no scrap of sorcery left in me to chill the thing and help keep down the swelling.

My father leaned forward in his chair. "So they used the oculus to gather the power, focus and enlarge it, and then used the power to manipulate this avantir."

"That's right," I said. "Everything necessary for the Zhid to know would be communicated from an avantir through the earrings: the battle plan, the tactics, who should be taken prisoner, who was to be turned. Everything."

My father grimaced as he shifted the wet towel. "But we always examined the earrings when we took prisoners and never found the slightest enchantment on them. We thought them only a talisman, like a battle flag or a badge on a tunic."

"There would have been no trace," I said, shivering. Paulo grabbed a blanket and threw it over my shoulders. I felt no warmth from the fire. "As soon as a warrior was captured, the connection to the avantir was severed. It's why you could never learn anything valuable from a captive Zhid. They really didn't know much of anything. Only the Lords and their generals knew."

"And when we destroyed the Lords . . ."

". . . all connections would have been severed. The oculus that Radele used to control me—Notole 's—was destroyed at the same time. Mother saw it happen. Witnesses have told Ven'Dar that the fortress crumbled at the same moment. The temple, the statues, the Great Oculus . . . supposedly all the magical artifacts were destroyed along with it. That makes sense. The statues and the Great Oculus could not have outlasted the Lords. Their substance was so intimately bound with the Lords' existence."

The black stone statues of the enthroned Lords had been so large three men could have stood in the carved palm of Ziddari's hand. I could still feel what it was like to inhabit the one made to my likeness . . . the huge, heavy, solid sensation, as if my bones were granite, my flesh impenetrable. The sense of permanence … of power …

When my nails bit into my flesh, I forced my fists to unclench.

"So what does it mean that these things are happening?" said my father, watching me. Worried.

I could not stop trembling, nor could all the wine in Avonar have diluted the foul taste in my mouth. "They had three avantirs, Parven's the master. At least one of them must have survived, and someone out there knows what it is and has power enough to use it. You have to understand—that would be a great deal of power, equivalent to that the Lords derived from using the Great Oculus."

"Earth and sky!" My father stared at me. Paulo's eyes were on me, too.

"It's not me doing it this time," I said, smiling at them. A weak effort it seemed, as their shocked expressions didn't change. "I promise. And it's not D'Sanya. I went looking for the answer to her, too …"

At every echo of D'Arnath's name, I had been filled with hatred so bitter I could have clawed the sun from the sky. The Lords would have eaten the king's flesh if they could have gotten their hands on him. By the time I was one with them, the malevolence that filled their minds at the mention of him left no room for other thoughts.

". . . and so I had to go back to the beginning to remember the story," I said. "When D'Arnath's warnings were proven right on the night of the Catastrophe, the Lords focused all their fury and frustration on him, and when the king set himself and his heirs the sworn duty to stand between them and the power they craved—the hunger for power made insatiable by their workings—they swore everlasting revenge. And so they set out to trap one of his children."

I closed my eyes and allowed myself to believe. "Every element of D'Sanya's story was confirmed. Her year of safety while they tried to bargain her. The two years of abuse and degradation …"

She had told me only part. They had treated her like an animal, using every humiliation a depraved mind could think of, every demeaning task, constant taunting … in a systematic attempt to destroy her identity … to destroy her soul. That she had survived with so much human feeling … so much compassion … such appreciation for beauty … and any power at all… was a wonder beyond telling.

". . . and then they buried her in a stone chamber and did not let her die, planning to wake her every few years, allow her to remember who and where she was, and force her to do whatever they desired before burying her again. They wanted D'Arnath to go to his death knowing that his child would live forever in torment. Father, she was their prisoner. . . ."

Their prisoner, not their pupil, not one of them like me. I hoped, beyond anything I had ever hoped, that I remembered truth.

"And what of the thousand years since? Did they carry out that plan?"

"That … I don't know … I presume they did. You woke me up."