The Soul Weaver

CHAPTER 8

The bridge parapet was still warm from the queen’s lantern. I sat sideways on the wall, knees drawn up under my gown, eyes growing accustomed to the thick darkness. Though anxious to get back to Gerick and away from this haunted place, I needed to make sure no one lurked nearby, waiting to follow me back to him. Martin had always said that love and honor among royalty was very like their bread, described by the same words, but usually of a very different flavor from that found among the common run of people. Besides, I had a great deal to consider. Somehow I had to convince my husband to aid the man who had burned him to death. Even Karon’s generous spirit might not stretch that far.

All seemed secure. No incongruous shape appeared among the shadows of flora gone wild. No untoward sound intruded on the rustlings of the wind and the occasional hoot of an owl. After perhaps a quarter of an hour, I swung my feet to the ground. As I left the bridge and started up the long path to the road and the gatehouse, I heard footsteps on the gravel path. Enchantment stung my skin like a shower of ice crystals.

“Where is he, Seri?” said a low voice behind my shoulder.

I spun on my heel, thrilled and delighted, certain that the vehemence of my wishing in the last hours had drawn him across D’Arnath’s Bridge to help me solve Leire’s great mystery. But news and greetings died upon my lips when I saw his face and felt the grip on my arm. “Karon, what is it?”

“Where is the boy?” he said. His fingers came near cracking my bones. “Tell me where the deceiver lurks, in what web he hangs waiting to dispense more of his poison. Oh, it was a fine performance. No thespian in any world could fault him. Now the actor is unmasked… but at such cost… ”

“Earth and sky, Karon, what’s happened? Is it Gerick?”

“He is not Gerick!” His lips curled in disgust. “Give him the name of his own choosing: Dieste the Fourth Lord, the Destroyer. No name has ever been more apt.” The night darkened with his anger. His hand quivered, and his eyes sparked gold and blue like a blacksmith’s forge. “Tell me where he is.”

I wrenched my arm from his grasp and stepped backward, moving into the path between him and the gatehouse. “What makes you say such things?”

“The boy is not what you think, Seri. Not what I thought. My healing… your nurturing… our worry and hope and love… all wasted. He remains as he was in Zhev’Na. But tonight he stands within range of my sword, and I must and will destroy him before he can compound his evil.”

“Karon, tell me what you’re talking about.” Panic left my voice ragged, my veins hollow. “Gerick has scarcely been out of my sight for four years. There is no deceit in him. What do you think he’s done?”

“Murder, Seri. Torture and betrayal done at his word as surely as if the bloody implements were yet in his hand. Only six knew of Jayereth’s work. Now she lies dead, her promise, her brilliance, drowned in agony so terrible I cannot think on it. Only six knew of Marcus, Nemyra, and T’Sero and their mission in Zhev’Na, but two days after Jayereth was destroyed, their corpses were returned to Avonar… defiled.” His voice shook. “And the Circle, Avonar’s noblest, most skilled men and women, each one leaving home, husband, wife, children to stand vigil on the borders of the Wastes, awaiting my command, every one of them attacked that same day. No more than fifteen out of two hundred survived. All our preparation… four long years and we were ready to begin, and now it’s all gone, and we’ve no time to start again. Need I tell more? Will you ask me how I can be sure? Must I show you his bloody works as they will ever remain burned into my soul?”

All Karon’s plans for healing the ravages done to his world and mine, all his hopes of rescuing the Dar’Nethi slaves from bondage, everything had been bound up in Jayereth and the Circle and the three who had once been Zhid. But why did he blame Gerick?

“There must be some other explanation. A spy. One of your Counselors suborned… Think! Gerick left Zhev’Na freely, saved our lives. Sword of Annadis defend us, Karon, you’ve linked with his mind repeatedly. How could he have deceived you?”

Karon gripped an outstretched alder bough as if it were the handle to his fury. “I didn’t want to believe it either,” he said, his rage cold and controlled now. “Of course I didn’t. I would sooner have believed that I myself had done it, than it be my son. But on the night I last came to Verdillon, I spoke to the boy alone. He was the fifth I spoke to that day. Each one of the five I told a secret, unknown to anyone but myself, each secret a prize the Lords could not refuse. All false, of course, but of such a nature that I would know if any betrayal was done.”

I remembered Gerick listening intently in Verdillon’s garden. Arms folded. Expression unreadable… as it was so often. No, I won’t believe it.

“Four traps remain unsprung, their mythical prizes unclaimed. The fifth was ingenious, I think.” His hollow laugh was worse than his rage. “I told him that Jayereth had left transcripts of her work hidden in an abandoned bathhouse in Lyrrathe Vale. I said that the secret of nullifying mordemar had not died with her, but would remain hidden there until I named her successor, telling him that he needed to know these things in case anything happened to me. Then, I set a watch on the bathhouse. I willed the cache to remain untouched, Seri. I prayed to be left with unfathomable mystery, rather than unimaginable betrayal, and on each day that passed, I gave thanks. But yesterday I named the Alchemist Mem’Tara to the Preceptorate, saying she would take up Jayereth’s work. And last night, the fifth trap was sprung.”

“But Gerick was here in Montevial with me. It’s impossible.”

“The Lords never dirty their own hands. They use others: Some are tools who do evils of their own will, some like the Zhid have been transformed, and some” - he almost spat as he said it - “they inhabit. They can abandon their own bodies, insinuate themselves into a man and displace his soul, leaving it a cowering, silent witness to the evils they do. They take on his life as their own, reaping the harvest of his senses so as to savor his fears and pleasures, controlling his movements and deeds for their own purposes. You would think the boy merely asleep. But when our son possessed another’s body and came to the Ravien Bathhouse, ready to destroy Jayereth’s work before it could be used, I was waiting and I recognized him.”

I was fascinated and horrified together. This story could have no relation to the boy I helped with school lessons and comforted when he had nightmares - serious, reserved, unsure of his place in a world he was only beginning to understand. Uneven in temper, yes, but so had I been at sixteen. Yet last night he had slept for the first time in days… weeks… Karon’s cold anger battered me like a storm tide, drowning my feeble protests, choking me with his horror and conviction.

“I wanted to kill him then,” he said, his jaw rigid. “So we are taught in Avonar: Kill the possessed body and you will kill the possessing soul before it can return to its own body. The host is left dead when the Lords are finished with him anyway. But Lord Dieste had chosen his host well, and I hesitated. It was Gar’Dena, you see, that came to the Ravien Bathhouse. No living soul but Gerick knew the hiding place. But Gar’Dena came and spoke the word that was supposed to open Jayereth’s cache, the very word I had told Gerick and no other. Before I could convince myself to slay Gar’Dena’s body, the Destroyer abandoned him and left him dead. Our dear friend, the good and generous man who helped save our lives, plunged a dagger into his own heart.”

“Gar’Dena… no… ”

Karon’s voice was on the verge of breaking, but, instead, he roared and snapped the branch from the alder tree. Launching it into the trees where it crashed to the ground, shredding leaves and twigs on its way, he turned and confronted me again, scarcely containing himself. “This time the Destroyer will not escape me. No matter whose shape he wears, I will close my eyes and see Jayereth’s torment and mad Gar’Dena shedding his own blood, and my sword will find its mark. Do you understand, Seri? He was able to stretch his arm across the Breach. Powers of night, I’ve told him the defenses of Avonar.”

I could not accept it. Gerick had rejected his perverse nurturing in Zhev’Na. He had given up immortality because he would not harm us. “Talk to him, Karon. This is impossible. A mistake. Perhaps it was really Gar’Dena after all… turned Zhid… a vicious trick of the Lords. What of the sixth? You said there were six who knew the secrets. Perhaps that one - ”

“The sixth was you.”

My heart sank like lead in a pool.

Karon gripped my shoulders and glared at me until my head came near cracking. “I say again, Seri, where is he?”

Of course, Karon would recognize Gerick no matter what form he wore. He had shared Gerick’s mind for hours working at his healing. And he was right. There would be no containing one of the Lords outside of death itself. Yet my heart ripped and bled and wept at the vision of Gerick curled up in boyish sleep in this beloved place… and Karon plunging his sword…

As if that very sword had cloven my skull, for one moment a suffocating fury engulfed my mind. My mouth opened to scream with anger that was not my own. And then it was gone, leaving me drained and empty and helpless.

“So he lies in the gatehouse! Oh, powers of night, we are at Windham… ” Karon had stolen my thoughts. His shoulders sagged, as if the fury had left him. He shook his head, closed his eyes, and spoke softly. “Ah, Seri. I am so sorry.”

But then he shoved me aside and ran up the path, sword drawn and death in his stride. Our son’s death.

“Karon, wait!” This could not be happening, not after so much pain and so much hope.

A sliver of yellow moon hung low in the east. I ran for the gatehouse, leaving the broken path and cutting straight across the vast wilderness of Windham’s gardens, stumbling over weeds and rocks in my hurry to reach Gerick before his father could. But I was too tired and too slow, my thoughts shredded like hay under the scythe. In the distance I heard a bellow of rage.

“Karon, no!” I screamed, running onward, ducking tree branches that seemed to get thicker and lower the farther I ran. “Gerick, run!”

A musty cellar gaped before me, its floor a mat of rotted leaves, bare roots crumbling its walls, its wooden doors rotted away. I teetered on the edge, then backed away and forced my way through a bramble thicket that tore at my clothes and my arms.

Odd, tittering laughter burst out somewhere to my right. “Who’s there?”

How could anyone laugh? The incongruity brought me to a halt. Was this a dream, my own nightmare, peopled by shades of princes and queens and houses and gardens, stories that made no sense, Gerick a murderous deceiver, Karon, my gentle Healer, in this bloodthirsty rage? A dream, that had to be it.

I pushed through a wall of sprangling lilac bushes. In the center of a circle of alders stood four men. I called them men. No other name that might serve came to mind. One of the four was incredibly thin, his naked, sinewy body colored the pure black of ebony. His hair was silver, his huge eyes burning amber like fireflies in the summer garden. He was half again as tall as the tallest man I had ever seen. The second man was as broad as three blacksmiths together. His skin brown and leathery, his hair red tufts springing from an oddly rounded skull, and he was badly stooped, his hands almost dragging the weedy ground. The third was a bearded man no taller than my waist, perfectly formed except for the skin grown over one eye socket. The three of them were exactly as the queen had described them to me, exactly as the terrified citizens of the Four Realms had described them to Maceron. They were laughing, as I could see by the greenish light of a lamp carried by the leathery man. The fourth person stood with his back to me.

“Who are you?” I said. “What are you doing here? Sword of Annadis! Tell me this is a dream.”

The odd trio greeted me with more hilarity. In a burst of green light the three men vanished, leaving only their laughter and their fourth companion behind. He whirled about, squinting as he peered into the darkness. Gerick.

I wanted to touch him, to reassure myself that he was my son whose pain I could ease. I wanted to tell him I still had faith in him and that I knew these accusations were all a mistake. But he stayed back, his wary eyes fixed on my hands, and I realized that in my fear and confusion I had snatched my knife from its sheath.

I dropped the weapon to the ground as if it were newly drawn from the forge. “Gerick! Your father - Gerick, tell me who you are.”

“Mother? Are you all right?” He stepped closer. I couldn’t see him clearly; the shadows were so very deep, the bushes tangled.

But I already knew I was not in a dream, and I was very much not all right. The pain in my breast was too harsh. A warm flood drenched my tunic, and the circle of trees began to spin. A knife covered in blood… Gerick lowering me gently to the ground, his narrow face rising quickly above me, worried, confused… his lips moving, but I couldn’t hear him for the rushing in my ears…

Then Gerick was gone, and Radele’s calm face hovered over me, washed out and vague like the sun’s disk seen through a fog. Others joined him, too shadowy to see. “Oh, my good lord, he’s killed her!”

I wanted to say I wasn’t dead, but the words lodged somewhere in my chest before leaking away with all the blood. I wanted to say Gerick hadn’t done it, but I didn’t know who had. If I could only remember what Gerick had said to me…

Somewhere in the distance came a howl of grief, but it was much too far away to concern me, and I was much too tired to care what sorrow could be so terrible. So I gave it up and embraced the cold darkness.