Guardians Of The Keep

CHAPTER 9

Karon

The forest was dense, shady, and incredibly green. The bearded mosses hung down and tickled my face as I fought my way through the thick underbrush. No trail lay before me, only a distant speck of light piercing the emerald gloom. My destination… if I could but shove the masses of greenery out of my way, I had no doubt that I could reach the light. Well rested, bursting with strength, I swept aside the verdant obstacles. But as I traversed the forest, the light got no closer and the green faded to gray…

The cool brush of pine boughs hardened into cold, rough stone, the wispy mosses into a white linen sheet and gray wool blankets. Only the light was constant, unwavering. Through the thick glass of my window the sun glared from the eastern sky, demanding that my eyes come open to greet the morning.

Such a strange sensation. How long had it been since my eyes had opened of their own volition, no hand on my shoulder rattling my teeth, no sarcastic taunting? “Must I get my scraping knife? Your limbs have attached themselves to this couch like barnacles to a coastal schooner.” Or, “What dream is this that holds you? You lie here like an empty-headed cat in a sunbeam, dreaming only of your full stomach while two worlds hold their breath, awaiting your pleasure.”

I stretched and sat up. My dream had not lied. I felt rested as I had not in waking memory, and I was ravenously hungry. Had Dassine succumbed to pity at my lamentable state? We had been through five or six sessions in the circle of candles since my collapse in Lady Seriana’s garden on the far side of the Bridge, and from each I had emerged a ragged refugee, taking longer each time to orient myself in the present.

When I was a child in Avonar, the lost Avonar of the mundane world, my brothers and I had a favorite place. A small river tumbled down from the snowfields of Mount Karylis in the summer, clear and icy. At certain places on the forested slopes, the water would be captured by great boulders forming deep clear pools, perfect for swimming. High above one of these pools was a chute of smooth rocks, worn away by a spring that raced down the rocks to join the river. We would slide naked down the chute and fly through the air before plunging into the pool far below. The experience teetered on the glorious edge of terror.

In these latest sessions of reliving my lost memories, I had felt as if I were on that long downward slide again, racing along a path that would soon leave me hanging helplessly in the air, ready to plunge into icy darkness. Whatever awaited me beyond the smooth surface-the enchantments that hid my own life from me-was terrifying, yet I could no more stop myself than I could have checked my careening path down that rocky chute.

Dassine had shown no inclination to let my difficulties slow my progress, and so, on the morning that my eyes opened of themselves, I was immensely curious as to what had caused this change of heart. Our last session had ended in late morning, and I had not dallied before falling into bed. Unless the sun’s course of life had taken as strange a turn as had my own, I had slept the clock around.

I shivered in the unusually cold air and put on my robe, expecting Dassine to burst in on me at any moment, raising his exuberant eyebrows in disdain. The water in my pitcher was frozen solid. Another oddity. My washing water had never been anything but tepid, even on the coldest mornings. Having no implement to crack the ice, I touched it with a bit of magic, only enough to melt the crust, not to make the water warm. Liquidity was sufficient.

Even the use of power was not enough to bring Dassine. The first time I had attempted any magical working in his house-putting out a small fire from a toppled lamp-he had pounced like a fox on a dallying rabbit, berating me for wasting my strength on “frivolities.”

As I stepped through the doorway into Dassine’s lectorium, the air began to vibrate with a high-pitched keening. The old villain had put a ward on my door. Dassine and I would have to talk again about honesty and trust. Annoyed far beyond the irritation of the noise, I searched for some way to quiet the screech, but to my amazement I couldn’t even find the door opening. Filling the space where the doorway should have been was a span of dingy plaster and shelves laden with books and herb canisters and uncounted years’ accumulation of dust and miscellany-all quite substantial. Instinct told me I should experience a “hair-on-end” sensation when encountering such an illusion, but the enchantment was so subtle, I couldn’t sense it at all.

The noise soon died away with nothing to show for it. My wonderment at his skill and annoyance at his cheek were snuffed out by the weight of the silence. “Dassine,” I called quietly. No answer.

Along with his restrictions on use of power, dress, speech, and questioning, Dassine had forbidden me to leave his lectorium unaccompanied. He enjoined me repeatedly not to trespass his limits, saying that if I trusted him in all else, I had to trust that they were necessary. Truly, I hated to cross him, and so I decided to wait before searching further, despite the strangeness of the morning.

The remnants of our last meal sat on the worktable: a basket of bread, now cold and dry, a plate with a few scraps of hardened cheese, not two, but three dirty soup bowls, and two mugs smelling of brandy-“Bareil’s best” Dassine had always called the contents of his green bottle. The candlesticks were still put away, the newest crate of tall beeswax candles unopened on the floor beside them. The chamber seemed no more and no less cluttered than usual. I sat at the table for a while, pushing around a few of the red and green sonquey tiles scattered on the table. Half of the tiles were arranged in a pattern bounded by finger-length silver bars, as if a game had been interrupted.

A small wooden cabinet lay toppled on the floor, its painted doors fallen open and several oddments spilled out: a gold ring, a small enameled box holding a set of lignial cards, used for tracing the lines of magical talent through a family, and one other item that fit in no easy classification-a plain circle of dull wood about the size of my palm. Embedded in the wood was a small iron ring, and within the ring was set a highly polished, pyramid-shaped crystal of pure black, its height half the span of my hand. I righted the cabinet and picked up the things, setting them back on the shelves. While mulling what to do next, I idly rubbed a finger on one smooth facet of the shining crystal… and my body vanished, along with the world and everything in it…

I hung in void of pure black midnight, shot with threads of fine silver, as if someone had taken the stars and smeared them across their dark canvas on the day of their creation. So quiet… so still… though beyond the silence rang a faint chime of silver, as if the threads of light were speaking… singing. In the farthest reaches of my vision shimmered a line of light, shifting slowly from serene rose to glittering emerald to deep, rich blue.

“I need to be there, I belong beyond that light. Oh gods, what is this hunger?” My nonexistent eyes burned with tears. My incorporeal hands reached through the darkness toward the light.

How do you measure desire? Those things left behind? To leave this physical being was not an obstacle; I’d grown to no comfort with it. To abandon my work, the memories of two lives so dearly bought in these past months, gave me no pause. The friends and family who populated my past were but ghosts who would be exorcised with the passage of that distant marker-the light that now shot violet, mauve, and purple trailers to either side, up, down, right, left in this directionless universe of darkness… so far away, teasing, tantalizing, luring me from all other concern. My kingdom? “I’m a cripple, half a madman, no matter what Dassine says. Better they find someone whole to lead them.” Like long, thin fingers, the silent bursts of color beckoned.

How do you measure desire? Those things to be endured? The void itself was colder than the winter morning on which I had waked unbidden, but the perimeters of my being burned-not the cold fire of the smeared stars, not the colored fire of the distant aurora, but a conflagration that seared through the barriers of memory… from the boundaries of reason. Roaring, agonizing fire… hot iron about my wrists and ankles eating its way through flesh and bone… I was enveloped in darkness, abandoned in unbounded pain and horror. The tongue I had so carelessly wished away cried out, yet I would endure even this if I could but pass beyond the barrier of light…

Karon, my son, do not… not yet. Come back. From outside the holocaust called a voice so faint… almost unheard against the roar of the fire and my own cries.

Dassine. My mentor, my healer, my jailer. I had to tell him where I was going. If he understood about this hunger, about the beckoning fingers of amber and blue, he wouldn’t hold me. I didn’t belong with Dassine. But he didn’t answer my call, and I could not ignore his summoning. I dropped the crystal, and the world rushed back…

My robe was drenched with sweat. Shaking, chilled, I stepped back from the fallen artifact that lay so innocently on the floor. Once I’d found Dassine, I would come back for it. “Dassine! Are you here?” I called. No answer.

Two doors opened out of the lectorium. One led into the garden, the other to a short flight of steps and the passage that took one into the main part of the rambling house. Taking the second, I wandered down the passageways, peering into the rooms to either side. Dassine was nowhere in the house. I wandered back to the lectorium, stopping in the kitchen long enough to grab a chunk of bread, a slab of ham, and two pears from the larder. As I sat at the worktable and ate the bread and ham, I stared at the odd device that lay on the floor and hovered so disturbingly on the peripheries of my thoughts. What could be the purpose of such a thing?

Karon…

I almost missed it. The call was half audible and half in my mind, and its origin was behind the second door, the door to the garden. Fool! I hadn’t looked there. I yanked the door open. Tangled in his cloak, Dassine lay huddled against the wall, a trail of blood-streaked snow stretching behind him to the garden gate. His lips were blue, and only the barest breath moved his chest and the bloody wound that gaped there.

“Oh, gods, Dassine!” I carried him into the study and laid him on the couch by the cold hearth. With a word and the flick of my fingers, the pile of twigs and ash in the fireplace burst into flames, and I bundled him in everything I could find that might warm him. He shuddered, and his eyes flew open. Blood seeped from his chest. Too much of it.

A knife… I needed a knife and a strip of linen.

“No!” The old man gripped my wrist. “I forbid it! I need to tell you-”

“But I can heal you,” I said. “The power is in me.” Even as I spoke I gathered power… from my fear… from the bitter winter… from the pain and awe and terror of my vision. I just needed to make the link…

“No use. No time.” His voice was harsh and low, broken with strident breaths. “Listen to me. They have the child.”

“What child? Why-?”

“No time… everything is changed. Your only task… find the child. Save him. Only one… only one can help…” His words came ragged… desperate… “Bareil… your guide…”

“Who’s done this to you?” I would not listen to words that rang so of finality. “Tell me who.” And when I knew, that one would die.

“No, no, fool! Leave it be. If they take… boy to Zhev’Na, then… oh, curse it all… no time… the only way…” He faltered, choking as blood bubbled out of the corner of his mouth. I thought he was gone, but he snarled and forced the words past his clenched jaw. “If they take the boy to Zhev’Na, give yourself… to the Preceptorate.”

“But-”

“Go defenseless. Tell them… ready to be examined. Let it play out. The only way. The only way…” His cold hand touched my face tenderly, his voice sunk to a ferocious whisper, his eyes boring holes in my own. “Dearest son, do not use the crystal. Not until you are whole, and you have the boy. Promise me.”

“Dassine-”

“Promise me!” he bellowed, grabbing my robe and raising himself off the cushions.

“Yes, yes, I promise.”

He jerked his head and sagged onto the cushions, his eyelids heavy, the grip on my robe relaxing. I did not beg or argue or rage about how little I understood. He had no strength to remedy my ignorance. But his finger fluttered against my arm, and I bent close to hear him. With a sighing breath, he whispered, “Trust me.” And then he breathed no more.

My friend, my mentor, my keeper. Without thought of Bridge or worlds or any of the larger consequences of his passing, I held the old man in my arms until the sun was high. Though keeping vigil with the dead for half a day was the Dar’Nethi custom, love, not custom, compelled me to stay with him. Dassine had willingly forfeited every last drop of his life’s essence to give me his instruction. No Healer could bring him back before he crossed the Verges.

Eventually, I laid Dassine in his garden, hacking at the frozen ground until my arms could scarcely raise pick or shovel. When I was done, I sat beside the grave, sweat and anger hardening into ice. I tried to recall everything he’d said, while trying to ignore how empty the world had become.

It is said that those who live long in close companionship come to anticipate each other’s words and actions, and even that one of the pair comes to resemble the other in physical appearance. If such were true, then surely when I next looked in a glass, I would see wild, gray-streaked eyebrows sprouting from my face. Only now did I realize how closely bound our minds had been. Lacking his abundant presence, my thoughts felt thin and watery. Whatever else I retrieved of the years still missing, I vowed to learn someday how we had become so close.

So what to do? Nothing made sense. I could believe Dassine’s last words were the product of delirium had it been anyone but Dassine who voiced them. A mysterious child to be saved from someone I didn’t know. Someone named Bareil to guide me. No doubt that I needed help, but who was Bareil and where was he to be found? I had heard his name before… yes, the brandy. “Bareil’s best.” Dassine had spoken as if I should know him, but I’d met no one in Avonar save the Preceptors, the six…

No… a seventh person had been in that room when I met the Preceptors-a Dulcé. So perhaps he didn’t mean an ordinary guide, but a madrissé. With their strange intellectual limitations, Dulcé on their own did not figure in the equations of power in Gondai. But a Dulcé could give a Dar’Nethi a significant advantage in life’s games by placing his immense capacity for knowledge at that person’s service. When a Dulcé bound himself in this rare and privileged relationship, he was called a madrissé, one whose knowledge and insights could guide the Dar’Nethi in decision-making. Bareil was likely Dassine’s madrissé. He would have been the other presence I had felt in Dassine’s house, the note-taker, the user of the third bowl, the one who would drink brandy with Dassine while I was enraptured with candlelight and the past. He could hold a number of answers, if only I could find him. To imagine it was a comfort.

In the matter of the crystal, I had to follow Dassine’s judgment. From the corner of my mind where I had pushed the unsettling experience, the fingers of light beckoned dangerously, causing my blood to churn. When I was whole, Dassine had said, implying that such was still possible. The crystal, whatever it was, would have to wait. I had promised him.

As for his command to give myself to the Preceptorate, I was confounded. For how many days had Dassine fumed about my offer to be examined, warning me to stay away from the Preceptors’ multitudinous deceptions? Now he told me that circumstance might demand I surrender to the Preceptorate while yet incomplete. Defenseless… helpless. The world would surely crack at their first probe, and they would judge me mad… or Zhid. Was that what he wanted? If not for his last words, I would have dismissed it entirely. Trust, in this matter, was very difficult.

“I thank you for my life, old man,” I said, as I took my leave of the snowy garden. “But I mislike being a pawn in a dead man’s game. However will I hold you to account for it?”

I returned to the silent house warily. The house would surely have formidable wards, the masterful illusion that hid my room but one example. But Dassine’s enemies would themselves be formidable, and they would know that Dassine was severely weakened if not dead. As I was so unsure of my own strength, it seemed sensible to take whatever might be useful and leave Dassine’s house as quickly as possible. Then I could watch and confront the murderers on my own terms. Not friendly terms.

Rummaging about the kitchen, I located a capacious rucksack. Careful not to touch the black crystal itself, I wrapped the unsettling artifact in a small towel and stuffed it into the bottom of the bag. I didn’t question the motive that made me make sure of it before anything else. Next I searched the room for something I knew would never be far from Dassine’s hand. Indeed, the small leather case sat on the shelf by the door. Inside it lay an exquisitely sharp, palm-length knife with a curved blade-a Healer’s knife- and in a separate compartment, a narrow strip of linen, scarcely less fine than a spider’s web. For a moment I felt almost whole. I put the case in the pack.

Next went in the flask of “Bareil’s best” and the two pears I had not eaten earlier. From the larder I grabbed enough food for at least a day-a considerable amount since I was still ravenous. Clothes were more difficult. Dassine had given me nothing but the white wool robe. Citizens of Avonar who specialized in the study of sorcery wore traditional scholars’ garb-loose robes and sandals or slippers. Warriors, tradesmen, those who tended gardens and fields, the Dulcé, and most others wore garments more like those to which I was accustomed: shirts or tunics, breeches, leggings, and boots. I didn’t wish to proclaim myself a scholar-far from it. But I was more than two heads taller than Dassine. His more ordinary garments would do nothing to make me inconspicuous. Clothing would have to wait.

Money would be useful, but I had no idea where any might be. Masses of notes and manuscripts cluttered the house, some relevant to my situation, I had no doubt, but I’d no time to sort through them. Perhaps this Bareil would know what was valuable, if I could find him.

The instincts and habits I had so recently redeveloped from my memories of hiding from the law prodded me to move, to get away from the place my enemies expected me to be. My teeth were on edge, and despite the paltry supplies in the pack, I was ready to bolt.

But just as I hefted the pack, quiet footsteps sounded in the passageway from the house. I flattened myself to the wall beside the doorway, realizing at the same time that I had forgotten to acquire a most important piece of equipment-a weapon. I-Karon-had never carried a weapon, yet my hand demanded a blade. The Healer’s knife was too small, and it was unthinkable to use an instrument designed for healing to harm another person.

But I was out of time. The sneaking villain tiptoed down the lectorium steps. I glimpsed a dagger in a bloody hand. Stupid brute. I grabbed his wrist and dragged him off balance. Remembering Dassine and the jagged wound in his chest, I was not gentle. I wrapped one arm about his neck and twisted his arm behind his back until his weapon clattered to the floor.

“Did you think to finish your work or simply add another to your tally?” I growled in his ear. Tightening my grip on his throat, I snatched the dagger from the floor, vowing to rip him open the same way he had murdered Dassine.

“Help Master Dassine… please.” The man, small and light, went limp in my arms. An amateur’s ploy. He deserved to die. But even as I poised the dagger at his belly, I noted the color of his skin… a creamy brown like strong tea with milk in it. Slender oval face. Dark eyes the shape of almonds. A Dulcé… I lowered the knife and shifted him in my arms. Black, straight hair cut short around his ears. A trim beard. An ageless face, his lips mortally pale.

Holy gods, he was the one, the seventh person in the room with the Preceptors! And his slight body was bleeding from no less than ten stab wounds. Whoever had taken a blade to him had wanted to make sure. I laid him on the couch still wet with Dassine’s blood, grabbed the leather case from the pack, and pulled out the knife and the strip of linen.

No sorcery can blunt the pain of a Healer’s knife. To cut your own flesh and mingle your blood with that of your patient is the only truly effective way to unleash your Healer’s power. And pain is part of the working every bit as much as the words that open your mind to the light of the universe, as much as the gathering of power that lies hidden in the recesses of your being, as much as the smell of blood. Pain opens the door to the heightened senses needed for putting right what is wrong, a connection that binds Healer to patient more intimately than any strip of white linen.

The first time I had drawn a knife across my arm, on the day when I was desperate to save my dying brother and did not know I was a Healer, I had tried to ignore the hurt, to link myself with Christophe’s broken body unscathed by my own senses. Surely a true Healer would be inured to pain, I thought, fearing that the tears that threatened and the cry that escaped me on that day were signs that I was nothing of what I needed to be. I struggled for so long that my brother’s soul almost fled beyond the Verges before I could see the truth-that his senses were blocked to me as long as were my own. When the insight came and I released my control… only then did I share the realm of the other, allowed to see the shattered bones, feel the torn tissue, and hear the ragged heartbeat that had to be put right. There was no getting used to it, even after so many years. The magnificence of the whole more than compensates-a thousandfold is not too large a reckoning-but it is a truth that experienced Healers do not cry out, yet neither do they smile as they begin their work.