Daughter of Ancients

Chapter 26

Over the next hours, the wound on Gerick's left foot swelled horribly and oozed thick black fluid that smelled like putrefying flesh. He lay in a feverish stupor, and, despite Paulo's application of the healing salves Aimee had sent with us, black streaks stretched up Gerick's leg, farther by the moment. I had seen a number of such wounds … all of them made by blades forged in Zhev'Na.

"You must let me try this," I said to Paulo, once I had regained my composure and a measure of lucid thought. "You're right that I'm not a Healer, and I've little enough power, but an enchantment of purification might help neutralize the poison. By my father's head, I mean him no harm."

"He hates magic being done to him as much as he hates doing it himself. You wouldn't understand."

No, I didn't understand his argument, but I felt the heat of Gerick's fever even from several body-lengths away. "You lived in Zhev'Na, Paulo. You saw the results of Zhid poison. Putrefaction. Sepsis. A mortification of the surrounding flesh that kills more often than not. Purifying such a wound is more likely to help him than easing the pain, and it certainly won't make things worse. He won't ever have to know I did it."

I edged closer, scooting my backside across the sand and gravel, and laid my left hand on Gerick's chest. His heart was fluttering wildly. Calling up the ritual steps my mother had taught me in a childhood when I was forever falling out of trees and tumbling off the rocks behind our house, I reached out for the three purest elements I could find—the starlight, the sharp wind of the heights, the clean strength of this odd fellow Paulo's love for his friend—and I drew them close to hand and wove them together, infusing their essence with the meager scraps of my power. The simple enchantment that my mother had called "hurt's ease" smelled like clean soap and, if I did it right, should settle on the young Lord's swollen left foot like a Healer's balm and a soft bandage.

Paulo didn't stop me as I laid my thumb on the bandaged wound and let my other fingers enfold both thumb and ankle to focus the little spell. "Why is the Lady's enchantment like Zhid poison?" he mumbled as he jabbed at the blazing brush. "Don't make sense."

He had retrieved my cloak along with our packs and laid it over my shoulders. Once my pitiful spellmaking was finished, I pulled the garment tighter and lay down by the fire, only to find myself too uncomfortable and too overwrought to sleep. I lay watching Paulo drip water on Gerick's lips and bathe his friend's face and arms with a grimy rag dampened in the mudhole. Every hour for the rest of the night he repeated his ministrations. Gerick did not wake.

Daylight revealed that our shelter was not truly a cave, but only a shallow concavity scooped out of the gritty red rock by a long-vanished river. A few scrubby plants and a stand of stiff gray grass survived in the old riverbed, thanks to the shade of the overhanging cliff and the sluggish mudholes underneath it. All we could see from our location were the silver sheen of desert daylight and more layered red rock.

While refilling our water flasks from the slow-to-replenish mudhole—a task that looked to occupy the entire day—I spotted something metallic protruding from a notch in the rocks across the riverbed from the overhang. Closer investigation revealed a jumble of metallic rubbish: old nails, rusting harness, bent shields, and broken tools. The scavengers' treasury.

Paulo had not left Gerick's side all night and demonstrated no intention of falling asleep, despite my admonitions and avowals of good intent. He paced; he hammered his hands on the rocks; he fumbled with cooking pots and tack and spent hours grooming the horses we'd tethered where they could crunch the stiff grass. Gerick was never out of his sight.

As Paulo wouldn't allow me to do anything more for his friend, I had little to occupy my time once I had filled the water flasks. Thanks to his skillful manipulation, I could pretty much move my right arm as I wished, but I had him bind it tightly to my chest again to ease the constant ache. My fingers were only gradually regaining sensation. Being one-handed for very long was going to drive me to distraction.

The sleepless night and my aching shoulder made our ration of dried bread and greasy meat, no matter how well preserved, singularly unappetizing. I tried again to sleep, but could not find a comfortable position. Not a wisp of a breeze found a path into the old watercourse. The afternoon was stifling.

Only after the wretched day had long expired did Paulo succumb to exhaustion. His head lay wedged between two rocks—an entirely appropriate place as far as I was concerned—and his long body blocked the way in and out of the sheltering overhang. He would have been more comfortable farther back under the rocks where it was sandier, but I couldn't move him by myself, and I had no heart to wake him.

Though Gerick's fever yet burned, the sepsis in his foot had not worsened in the past few hours. I kept the water going down him, and soaked the rag in the smallest puddle and laid it on his forehead. With too little to distract me, I thought a great deal about the rescue and about what we had left behind in the ruins. No matter how I tried to convince myself otherwise, no matter how terrified I became at the thought that insisted on planting itself in my head, I could not shake the sense that our work was dangerously unfinished.

On the next morning, while Paulo yet slept, I rummaged through Nim's hoard of metal objects and picked out a shovel and a sword with a broken tip. Then, with much swearing and difficulty, I unstrapped my arm and saddled my horse.

"What do you think you're doing?" A bleary-eyed Paulo stood at the edge of the overhang as I fastened the implements to my saddle. He looked more filthy and bedraggled than threatening—though I would have thought more than twice before challenging him.

"I'm going back to retrieve the oculus. We can't just leave it there where anyone can find it. Innocent people like Nim—I promised to protect her—or others like real Zhid, or the one who put it there . . ."

"Absolutely not. You can't—"

"I'll not bring it anywhere near him." I jerked my head toward Gerick. "I've no desire to participate in your friend's nightmares again. I'll take it down, bury it where no one can find it, and be back by nightfall."

I verified that the two water flasks in my rucksack weren't leaking, crammed an empty bag of thick canvas in beside them, and fixed the pack on my saddle, anxious to get going before he got some notion of stopping me.

"I thought a person couldn't touch the thing," he called after me, stepping out into the sunlight. "I thought it would hurt you. I thought you didn't have power enough to deal with it."

"Then you won't have to worry about me killing him any more, will you?" I yelled back at him.

Neither phantom nor villain came anywhere in sight as I descended the ridge and crossed the searing plain into Zhev'Na. Yet even with no imminent physical threats, I felt jittery and sick as I entered the charred chamber with the rubble-strewn stone block in the center of it. The oculus still spun in the air above the stone table, weaving its horror from the light of my torch. All the bravado I had donned for Paulo evaporated. I had no confidence at all that I could do this.

With only one able arm and no talent to work with, everything took far longer than it should have. I tried every simple unlocking and detaching spell I'd ever heard of to loosen the enchantment that held it suspended, but none of them seemed to work. Finally I climbed onto the table, kicking some of the debris onto the floor. Taking as firm a stance as I could hold, I held the broken sword in my left hand and used my right arm to brace it. Then I stabbed upward to snare the ring, fighting to keep the thing from sweeping me off the table. I held on, and after a few moments, it dropped onto the sword with a clang. I pointed the sword downward and let the ring slide to the floor. Shuddering, I bashed the sword hilt against the shellstone that had already formed a brittle rim around the sole of my boots and jumped down from the slab.

More than ready to bolt, I slipped the oculus into the canvas bag without touching it or even looking at it more than necessary. I didn't start breathing again until I had left the ruin behind, and even then I whined and moaned with each exhalation like an ailing child. No use muffling it. No one was about to hear me. The vile device shredded my spirit like an overseer's lash. Cringing and shuddering in the saddle, I managed to get only halfway up the ridge before I yanked Pesca to a halt in a rubble-strewn clearing. Though still within sight of the ruins, I unstrapped the shovel and began to dig. I had to be rid of the thing. Though I, as every Dar'Nethi, knew the basic steps to destroy an object of enchantment, the power required was well beyond my poor capacity.

Two sweat-soaked hours later the oculus lay buried in a deep hole in the gravelly dirt. Feeling much relieved, I sat on the shield-sized plate of red rock that I had heaved, lurched, shoved, and levered over the spot, and took a few lukewarm sips from my water flask. Suddenly, the rocks beneath my feet shuddered. A few pebbles danced down the cliffs.

Pesca whinnied anxiously. I jumped up and stroked her neck, speaking soothingly as I'd watched Paulo do. After making sure her reins were still wrapped securely around a narrow column of rock, I scrambled up a boulder pile to get a good look at the sky. Desert storms could be fierce, the lightning deadly, and the track across the ridge to where Paulo and Gerick lay was steep and exposed. The desert sky was cloudless, but across the plain a thin column of dark smoke rose over the ruins of Zhev'Na. A broken tower crumbled into dust just as a flash of blue lightning blazed from the heart of the ruin. Moments later another muffled rumble shook the earth again.

"Miffed, are you?" I said.

But my bravado was only skin-deep. I slid down the boulder pile and drew Pesca into a deeper notch in the rocks, huddling there until the tremors had ceased. Only after making sure the sky over Zhev'Na had cleared did I ride up and over the ridge. By the time I got back to the ancient riverbed, the shadows were long and my hands had finally stopped shaking.

"Well?" said Paulo, after giving me a decent time to flop on the ground, pour the brackish dregs from my water flask on my head, and let the throbbing in my shoulder ease.

"The device is safer than it was," I said. I curled up on one side and supported my arm on my rucksack, despairing of finding any position that was comfortable. "Hidden. No one's going to happen onto it by chance." No one who could cause minor earthquakes with her anger.

"Where is it?"

I glanced over at the sleeping man behind him. "You don't need to know that."

Trust wasn't any easier for me than for Paulo.

By the third day in the dry riverbed, I was getting anxious. We needed to be on our way back to Avonar while we still had food and water. The vision of the city's fall festered in my heart the way Gerick's wounds inflamed his flesh, and I would not rest until I saw the city again, walls intact.

Our patient continued to sleep like the dead. Neither dressing his injuries nor pouring water down his throat prompted him to open his eyes. I couldn't blame him for that. He wasn't going to wake a happy man. Assuming he ever woke. Paulo refused to talk about that possibility.

If we couldn't rouse him soon, though, he was going to starve. Taking him away from the oculus had surely broken the heavy enchantments intended to keep him living without nourishment, but the only thing I could get down him was tiny portions of bread, soaked in our gritty water until they became almost liquid. Thus I was delighted when Nim and Rab arrived near midday with three large bundles of brush to burn, a stone crock of reasonably fresh goat's milk, and the slightly ripe haunch of an oryx.

Relieved to see that Paulo and I were still intact after spending two days with a demon, the ragged scavengers decided to stay for a while. They squatted in the shade, picking their teeth with long splinters, and watched me set the oryx haunch to boiling in a large pot I borrowed from their metal cache. They must have pulled the splinters from the charred beams of Zhev'Na, for their activity gave them slightly dusky smiles as I thanked them again for their hospitality. The old man, Rab, never said a word, but he pulled up a few of the spiky gray plants growing near his bare feet and gave them to me, gesturing at the boiling pot. The root smelled a bit like moldy onions . . . very like Rab, I realized. I smiled at the toothless man, peeled the sandy outer layers from the plants, and slipped the things surreptitiously into my pocket.

While the oryx meat slowly disintegrated into a strong-smelling broth, I soaked a bit of bread in the milk and spooned it down Gerick's throat. Perhaps the milk and the meat broth would give him strength to travel if we could ever get his eyes open.

Evening brought encouraging signs. Gerick's skin had cooled, and Paulo had drained his suppurating wound without sending the fever shooting skyward again. Once he had the foot bound up in our last clean bandages, Paulo sat for a moment, his head drooping, his hands dangling in his lap. He hadn't slept since I'd gone for the oculus. "Might you … I hate to ask it. . . but could you see to his hands? I'm swiped."

"Of course I will. And I'll wake you if there's any change."

I was proud that I resisted any sarcasm in my agreement. But then, he likely wouldn't have noticed. He was asleep before I finished speaking.

The red-gold light faded, and the wind picked up, skirling sand through the rock gorges. Nim and Rab had slept the hot afternoon away, and scurried off as soon as the sun set. I sat by my little thornbush fire steeping a few eutonia leaves, hoping the tart, bracing tea would keep me awake and perhaps reduce the swelling in my shoulder. All the digging and rock-moving to bury the oculus had set my own healing back several days.

"Thank you."

I jumped, almost upsetting my little pot, when the soft voice came from the shadows.

"Heaven's lights," I said quietly. "You scared me out of a year's growth. How are you feeling?"

"Empty. Stiff. Damp. Alive."

With no small trepidation, I cast a faint handlight and peered across the rock floor to the pallet of sand and blankets where our patient had managed to raise himself on his elbows. His skin color was definitely improved-no longer graveyard white—and to my intense relief, his eye color had reverted to a deep brown, and only in the part of his eyes where there should be color. The ugly mark on his forehead where I had taken out the smallest of the barbed spikes was only a greenish bruise with a ragged black line through it.

"Well, you look a thousand times better, and if we can get a little more food down you, maybe we can fill you up again. You lost a lot of blood, and who knows how long it's been since you've eaten anything substantial."

Neither food nor water would cure the worst of his emptiness. But no one was going to be able to do anything about that part of it.

He eased himself the rest of the way to sitting, stretched out his neck and shoulders, and then shifted around and slumped against the rock wall as if the small movements had exhausted him. "How long has it been?"

"Four days since we brought you out."

"Since the day I was . . . taken."

"Almost four weeks."

"Earth and sky . . ." He closed his eyes, and for a few moments I thought he'd fallen asleep. But after a time he opened them again, and peered at the motionless body sprawled on the ground on the other side of me. "Is Paulo all right? He's not—"

"Just worn out." I stretched my hand toward Paulo, hesitating. "I ought to rouse him. I promised to if you woke."

"No! Don't. I don't think I'll be awake long."

"Well, then. You must drink, and you ought to eat something if you can."

I lurched to my feet with only a small grunt of discomfort and grabbed a waterskin.

"You shouldn't—"

"You have to drink," I said, stuffing the pouch in his hands. "Sorry the water's a bit gritty."

He drank long and gratefully.

"So what do you think? Can you stay awake long enough to get some broth down? It's already made. It would only take a short while to warm it."

"You don't have—"

"Vasrin's hand, I know I don't have to do it! But if I were to come up with something, could you eat it?" Were there two more exasperating men in the universe than these?

"That would be very kind."

Stiff. Formal. But on the whole, things could be far more awkward, considering our several encounters of the months just past. I had whacked him on the head, come a hair's breadth from killing him, and pried relentlessly into his private affairs. He had avoided me like a disease for half the summer, and then he had done . . . whatever it was he did when I was stranded on D'Sanya's roof, an incident that still sat in my stomach like undigested meat.

As I busied myself heating up the broth we had stored in a clay jar, I wished I'd gone ahead and waked Paulo. He could occupy his friend so the man would stop looking at me. What did you talk about with someone you'd just rescued from an eternity of horror?

"Why?" Gerick's quiet question was such a perfect echo of my thoughts that at first I didn't even realize the source. But a glance his way confirmed the depth of his interest in my answer.

Fundamentally, I was still without an adequate answer—certainly without any explanation I was going to voice to him . So I handed him the mug of broth and said the first likely thing that came to mind. "Your mother is very persuasive."

His face, so determined in its sobriety, broke into a soft smile at that, eyes brightening with amusement and affection. "I've noticed that myself," he said. The smile fell away quickly, and he dropped his gaze to his cup.

He said nothing more, and drank perhaps half the broth before his eyelids drooped and I had to rescue the cup to keep it from spilling onto his blankets. As well as I could manage with one hand, I eased him down onto his back again, and then resumed my tea-making, as tired and relieved as if I'd just survived a battle.

Only later, as I cleaned and dressed the wounds on his hands, did the thought occur that those very hands had sealed my slave collar.

Disgusted, nauseated, I tied up the bandage, then went out into the ancient riverbed and used every paltry bit of power I could summon to shatter a brittle shelf of rock high on the cliff. The sharp bits rained on my back—an unfortunate miscalculation.

". . . all bloody hell, thinking she's played me for a fool and done for you after all. I can't figure the woman. Not a bit. Gutsy, I'll say, though. Smart. It's a good thing for you I didn't leave her in the desert any of the fifty different times I thought of it."

"Don't ask me to explain her. I resign from all investigations for any matter whatsoever."

The quiet voices drifted over my head along with the odors of burning thornbush and scorched barley. Though my mouth was full of grit, my eyes stung with the acrid smoke, and my shoulder throbbed unmercifully, I wasn't about to give away the fact that I was awake. There was always a possibility of hearing something interesting when people thought you were asleep—an annoying childhood habit I had perfected while in captivity. And too, these two were friends and deserved some time together without an interloper or the immediate business of the day to disturb them. I shifted ever so slightly so that both of my ears were exposed.

"And she really got you over a horse, up the Vale to the hospice, and tied to a tree without you getting loose? Damn, she's such a scrap of a thing."

"I don't think I'm cut out to deal with women. Especially ones who don't think well of me."

"Ouch! Damnable, useless . . ." Tin pots and spoons clanked untidily. "I don't know how she keeps this stuff from burning. Here, take the part that's not black. Tomorrow you can cook."

"It's fine. Don't worry. I could eat a raw kibbazi."

Thoughts of breakfast set my own stomach rumbling, and I considered sitting up.

"So . . . the other one . . . how did the Lady find out about you?"

The morning's easy humor fled as quickly as the morning chill. I held still.

"Stars of night, Paulo, I'd decided to tell her who I was. I thought . . . well, after what I had learned that night when I looked into the past, I convinced myself she was innocent. I wanted to believe it. Things had changed . . . were changing . . . between us, and I couldn't lie to her any more. So I went to her house and knocked on the door of her lectorium, and she opened it with an oculus in her hand. I swear, if there were a god of dunces, I would be his most exemplary servant."

He paused for so long, I thought he had said all he was going to. But I felt more than heard him inhale and breathe out again slowly, as a warrior does when trying to ease the pain of a battle wound. "She tried to pass it off as something new. Something innocent . . ."

He told Paulo of his brief struggle with the Lady, and the long, dreadful hours that followed, ending with him bolted to a slab of shellstone, forbidden to sleep. And he told of the ordeal of the past weeks as he had feared he was going mad and of his horror that he might become what others named him. What I had named him.

If I hadn't already learned how close these two were, that morning would have taught me. Constrained by philosophy and custom that forbade us to measure our fellows by which of the Hundred Talents they bore or the strength of power they could bring to their gifts, we Dar-'Nethi spoke very little of sorcery. And we certainly did not dwell on our personal lacks or our feelings about them, unless we were talking with someone closer than kin. Gerick did not detail the torments D'Sanya had inflicted on him in her hospice workshop, but he was astonishingly frank about his humiliation at being so speedily and so roundly overcome, and about his terror as he lay helpless to avert his own disintegration.

"… The worst point was when I felt the power growing," he said, "this huge, overwhelming, monstrous disease inside me . . . and I knew it was the same vile thing I'd grown when Notуle and I worked with the oculus in Zhev'Na. But this time, instead of feeling horrid, the power felt . . . right. Even when I was twelve, I loathed their power at the same time I craved it. But now I lay there knowing I was going mad and knowing the consequences if I did, yet feeling as if I was whole for the first time in my life. If I hadn't discovered that I could expend some of it by manipulating my visions, I would have used it to get free . . . focused it through the oculus . . . used the damnable device . . . and that would have been the end of me. Earth and sky, Paulo, I was so close—"

"But you didn't."

"Not yet. But I'm still not safe. . . ."

He paused, and I tugged the corner of the blanket slightly to uncover one eye.

He had stretched his bandaged hands out in front of him. They were trembling, and he glared at them as if they were diseased. "I feel like a siege cannon with the fuse burning."

He was afraid of sorcery. I could not have been more surprised if someone had snatched me out of my own skin and set me down in an entirely new Jen. It had never occurred to me that a Lord of Zhev'Na could be afraid of anything, much less his own past or his own power. To look at him, ragged and filthy, unexceptional in size, picking up his spoon and gratefully devouring our daily slop of porridge as if it were sweet cream, having just heard him say he'd come a finger's breadth from retaking his place as a Lord . . .

I deliberately shifted weight onto my shoulder just so the sharp little warning would ensure I was awake.

Jen'Larie yna Sefaro, incapable ex-slave, involved in matters of such universal consequence . . . The thought came near choking me. Vasrin Shaper must find great humor in implausibility and incongruity. Yet, somehow, listening to Gerick's admission of his own fears and incapacities led me to analyze his experiences with more clarity than I'd been able to thus far.

He was probably right about the oculus having a particular hold on him. The Lords had deliberately molded him to be susceptible to its lure. I had been an unwilling witness to that. But about sorcery and power … he didn't have the least idea what he was talking about. Truth lay right in front of him, as bald as the rock, truth that must set our course over the next hours. He couldn't see it. And it seemed I was the only person available to do something about that. I just wasn't sure how to broach the subject.

Feeling a bit resentful, I threw off my blanket, sat up, and sniffed the dry air. "Is it truly impossible for a man to cook a meal without charring it beyond recognition?"