The Soul Weaver

CHAPTER 19

The condition of the Singlars nagged at me. I didn’t understand how the storerooms at the Blue Tower had come to be filled with ham, duck sausage, oranges, and silk, while the Singlars had nothing but tappa, mud, and rock. The answer must exist in the garden. I didn’t trust the Source to tell me anything useful, so I decided to do some investigating, putting the question to the Source only if I couldn’t discover the answer on my own.

“I need to understand about the light,” I said one day, as Paulo and I poked around the base of the cliffs near the waterfall and the amethyst cave. “What makes a light so bright that plants can grow inside this place?” And it was only here. No Singlar I’d spoken to, even among those who had traveled widest, knew of anything like this garden elsewhere in the Bounded.

The pale yellow boulders were jumbled and broken around the waterfall and the grotto, the face of the rock less sheer than the rest of the garden perimeter. Innumerable dirt paths squeezed past the rocks, promising to take you higher, only to taper into nothing or end abruptly at a cliff. I climbed back down from the current dead end.

“This whole world is fair odd. I could believe most anything.” Paulo vanished behind a boulder twice my height, then emerged above it, craning his neck upward and snaking his head. “We might try this way. Looks rugged, though.”

I squeezed between the boulder and the cliff, and scrambled up the rocks to stand beside him. It wasn’t exactly a path. More like a flight of granite steps, sized for legs three times the length of mine, with a number of stomach-curdling gaps filled by loose avalanche debris. We started up. Our path held close enough to the falls to keep the rocks treacherously damp.

A quarter of the way to the top of the falls, Paulo sat heavily on a wide boulder. His exaggerated groan bounced off the rocks as he sprawled on his back and flung his arms wide. “Demonfire, but I’m done already. I’ll just wait here for you to scrape me up on your way down.”

No surprise. The way kept getting steeper. Paulo’s stamina was much improved in the last week, but his hands were still bandaged and weak. I’d already had to haul myself over a few of the slabs.

“If I’m passing by too fast on the way down, you might need to stick out your hand and catch me,” I said, peering up into the glare.

By the time I reached the top of the falls, I was climbing rather than walking or scrambling. The effort required all my limbs and all my concentration. And the heat had become murderous. Only the spray from the falls and the eddying air currents set in motion by the massive movement of water kept me from melting into a heap.

Eventually, the steep cleft in the rock led me over the edge of the cliff. I rested for a while on a gentle slope of barren rock that formed both the cliff top and the riverbank, funneling the water over the edge. Before me lay the gut-heaving drop to the colorful blot of the garden. I couldn’t see the roof or sky or whatever it was existed above this odd landscape. Great billows of steam hung over the river as it thundered over the edge of the cliff, causing a hazy glare that obscured the view. The rock underneath me was hot to the touch.

Not much farther. What I was searching for was nearby. My bones told me. My senses and instincts insisted. After the brief rest, I blotted my damp face one more time on my shirt and climbed up and away from the cliff’s side to see what lay beyond the rocky slope. When I reached the summit, my heart almost stopped.

The ridge sloped sharply downward and flattened into a shimmering plain, the shore of an ocean of fire… a sea of sunlight… a rippling expanse of gold that stretched as far as I could see into the uncertain reaches of this strange place. From this gleaming ocean, pillars of shifting light rose into the heights, some gold, some blue-white, some red-orange, ever growing and dissipating like the watery storms and spouts sailors witnessed on mundane oceans. The hazy brilliance threatened to blind me; the heat came near blistering my skin. To stay here long would leave me no strength to go down again.

This marvel, like the moon-door and the garden and the heaving Edge, was no enchantment, but the natural substance of the Bounded. Looking on it left the same warm, satisfied feeling in my belly as a good meal and good wine.

I was not tempted to touch the substance of the sea itself. To stand even so near as I was to the scalding water… fire… whatever it was… was debilitating enough. Yet neither could I retreat. For the great crescent of shoreline that swept alongside the river, where it flowed out of the sea and across the plain to cool and plummet over the edge of the cliff, was not sand, but shingle, great swathes of fist-sized golden rocks abandoned by the sea and the river.

The rocks were the key to life in the Bounded. The sea and the rocks would brighten and fade with the rhythm of the suns that warmed more familiar worlds. I could not explain it any more than I could explain the fickle weather of the Bounded or the green stars or the expanding Edge. I just understood it. If you waited until the rocks began to fade of an evening, you could gather and carry them in your hand or a bag or a cart. If you set them in a pit of sand in a tower, they would glow and nourish a small garden with healthy light.

Light, food, a world… I could make that happen.

Sharing the sunrocks and the plants that grew in the garden became my highest priority. If I could accomplish what I intended, every Singlar would be able to use the sunrocks to grow a little garden in the heart of his or her fastness, every one of them slightly different. Names continued to be something special that the Singlars had to get directly from me. I used names to recognize those who changed things for the better and obeyed my laws. But although we made a great ceremony of it - that part was Roxanne’s idea - everyone received the rocks and the plants.

The first supply of sunrocks went to the Rift Cluster. I carried them there myself, excited to tell the bent philosopher of the new things I had seen. So much had happened since I’d sat in his fastness. Weeks had passed. As we traveled through the rain and gloom, I chafed at how Avero’s crude wheeled sledge slowed our progress. When we reached the rift, I left the others behind and hurried down into the dreary cluster. A gaunt young woman with a stunted arm stepped forward in the muddy narrows to greet us. My excitement withered.

“Your leader,” I said, as the cold rain beat down on my head, “the tall Singlar with the bent shoulder… who sings… ”

“To our loss and sorrow, our leader is unbounded, good traveler,” said the woman. “Six wakings before this.”

“Was it a beast… or did he drown…?” But I knew better.

“He weakened greatly in the cold just past,” said the woman, her eyes bright in the torchlight. “But happy was he always, teaching us to endure. He told us that he, a humble Singlar, had supped with the Bounded King, who was traveling his realm in disguise! Is that not a wonder? We hold his thoughts dear, and they warm us more than flame.”

A wonder? I could not answer the woman. Could not look at her. All the bright pleasure of my discovery… my plan… dulled and fell into ash. Why had I not thought to send these people help in the past weeks? Selfish, stupid fool. Paulo had warned me. Too caught up in playing king. In playing god.

The woman stood waiting for me to make sense of the world.

“Grieved… sorrowed… greatly sorrowed am I to hear this,” I said. “I had hoped to give him - Well, we’ve brought things to help you. My companions will show you.”

The woman summoned the rest of the rift dwellers who waited shyly beside their towers in the cold rain. Vroon opened the stone caskets and distributed the sun-rocks, teaching the Singlars how to use them to warm their towers and nurture the tappa roots and other plants Zanore pulled out of our wheeled sledge. I stood in the rain contemplating pride and thoughtlessness and how little difference sorrow or shame makes once a deed is done.

When the lesson was finished, I asked the Singlars to stay one moment before returning to their fastnesses. “Though I neither sought nor wanted the office, and though I’ve neither experience nor wisdom to commend me, it seems I am your king. To your leader” - I nodded to the woman - “I give the name Vanaya, which means wise follower, for I see that she follows in the footsteps of a great leader, her own kind spirit learning from his wisdom and grace. To the one who is gone, I grant the name Daerli, which means farseer in the language of my people. This name will be held in the highest respect in the Bounded forevermore, and his life will serve an example and reminder for us all.”

A reminder for me.

Any surmise that my presence in the Bounded had stopped the firestorms was quickly dispelled. Whatever the cause of the previous cessation, it was done with, for at about the same time I discovered the sunrocks, the storms took up with a virulence and regularity the Singlars had never before experienced. Every two or three days the world fell apart with a bolt of white brilliance, and I retreated into the fastness of myself so I could put it back together again. Paulo said the storms stopped quickly once I got to work, though I seemed to experience their entirety. By the time the fires burned themselves out and I slipped into insensibility, I had long lost all sense of time.

Once I came to expect them, I caught most of the storms early on, so the Bounded suffered little injury or damage. When a particularly violent storm struck one night while I was sleeping, though, it was devastating-fifty towers lost in the Tower City alone, and many more in the smaller clusters throughout the land. Being waked so suddenly made it almost impossible for me to get control. Paulo admitted that I was screaming worse than when I had nightmares at Verdillon by the time I’d stopped the storm. Almost an entire cycle of the light passed before I woke up again.

From that day forward, I posted a guard outside my door whose sole function was to wake me in case of a firestorm. The Singlars considered it the highest honor I could do them, so I kept the position active even after I’d come to sense the storms’ birth in my sleep, like any trained warrior who learns to feel his enemy steal through his dreams. Or maybe I never really slept any more.

Though the storms terrified her beyond any sorcery or dungeon, Roxanne suggested that I should let some of the storms have their way and maybe they would stop. Paulo urged me to leave the Bounded until they subsided again. I refused both suggestions. Now that the Singlars had sunrocks and gardens, sledges and kilns, I could not allow the destruction, not to mention the loss of life. And, as storms had occurred even before I came to the Bounded, we had no reason to believe they would stop if I left. Besides, I wanted my answers from the Source, and I wanted to leave the Singlars able to take care of themselves so I wouldn’t feel so responsible.

Four or five weeks after the storms had taken up again, a violent firestorm struck on the eve of a long-planned journey to a remote tower cluster. I was insensible for half a day after it. Paulo suggested postponing the trip so I could rest, but I wouldn’t hear of it. We were delivering sunrocks.

We left the Tower City just after the lights came up and were soon walking through sparsely settled countryside. The weather was wild, dense clouds of purple and black surging and boiling across the sky. The wind was blowing a gale, and sleet threatened to remove our skin or at least any prominent features we left exposed.

During our first rest stop, I huddled into the lee of a rock while Paulo, Vroon, and the others ate. Even after the rest period had come and gone, I couldn’t seem to muster the will to move on. My limbs felt like lead.

“They’re eating you up, aren’t they?” Paulo lowered himself to the frozen mud beside me. I hadn’t even heard him coming.

“What do you mean?”

He offered me a piece of sweet tappa bread. I shook my head and burrowed deeper in my cloak as a gust of wind swirled around the rocks.

“That’s what I mean. You haven’t eaten three mouthfuls of anything since the storm yesterday, and I’ll wager I could take you down in three moves as I’ve not been able to do since you were a nub. The princess could take you down with her tongue.”

“I’m just tired. I’ll recover.”

“Not while the storms keep up.”

“I’ll figure out something. It’s only another few weeks till we can leave this cursed place.”

“You won’t last that long. And if some of these oddments that still believe the Guardian was their friend find out you can’t think straight for half a day after a storm, they might come up with some way to do us in.”

We’d had some trouble with some of the old maintainers trying to force Singlars back into their fastnesses, beating them and telling them I was destroying the Source. Most Singlars were still easily intimidated.

“I can’t leave now.”

“Then go back to the Source. Try what it said would help you.”

“Drink from the spring? Not likely. I don’t want to take anything from the Source. You said yourself that you didn’t trust it.”

“I don’t. But I don’t want you dead neither. I want to go back where they make jack and real biscuits, and where I can plant my backside on a piece of horseflesh. If you’re going to be dead, then you might as well be dead from trying to stay alive.”

I didn’t answer him then. I just got to my feet and said, “I’ll be all right. Let’s get moving.”

Three days later another storm struck, worse than the last. Another sevenlight, three more storms, and I couldn’t go up the stairs in the Blue Tower without stopping every third step to rest. I’d lost so much weight, my breeches wouldn’t stay up. I felt as scrawny as Zanore, but Zanore could have tied me in a knot with one hand. My mouth tasted like ash, as if everything inside me had burned up. Paulo kept looking at me, and I knew what he was thinking.

I went to the Source while everyone was asleep. I didn’t take Paulo with me, didn’t tell him or anyone where I was going. I didn’t want anyone seeing how hard it was for me to get up the stairs.

The lamps were down in the tower, so it was night in the garden. But it wasn’t completely dark. Lamps just like the ones in the tower hung on iron posts, scattered throughout the plants and trees, casting a soft yellow glow on the path. The air felt chilly, but that was no surprise. I couldn’t seem to get warm any more.

“Greetings, my king.” The voice washed over and through me when I walked into the cave and dipped my hand in the water. “Too long it’s been since you’ve come here.”

I didn’t waste time. “What did you mean when you said the water from the spring could sustain me through my trials?”

“Just that, my king. The water is of you, and thus will strengthen and nourish you.”

I dabbled my hand in the icy blue-green water. It had no smell, no aura of enchantment. I touched my tongue to a drop and discovered no suspicious taste, no unexpected sensation except for overpowering thirst. No instinct warned me of poison. Having eaten or drunk nothing for many days without threat of imminent nausea, and having scarcely made it down the garden steps without falling on my face, I decided it was worth a try. I scooped up a handful.

“Drink deep, my king. Live.”

And so I did.

“Oh, stars of night… ” It was hard not to drain the basin dry. Pure, clean, clear, the water stung each of my senses awake. After I had drunk all I could hold, I sagged against the cave wall and slipped down to the floor, feeling the ash that clogged my veins and lungs washed away. I did not sleep, but by the time the lamps faded and the sunrocks began to glow, I could think clearly again. I must have been perilously close to the end. The Source did not speak again that night.

From then on I went to the Source after every storm. Each time I dipped my hand in the water, the voice would greet me. “Welcome, my king. I rejoice in your life. How may I serve you this day?”

“Will you answer my question?”

“Not yet. The time of your understanding is not come. But I would talk with you about many other things.”

“Then I’ll just drink the water and be on my way.”

“Ah, you are hard! I must find something to tease you into talking with me. I’ve waited so long for your company.”

“Tell me what I want to know.”

“You should expand the realm of those things you want to know. Your wisdom is lacking in many areas.”

It became a game of sorts between us.

“Tell me, O voice of the water bowl, have you a name?” I said one day, as I sat watching the torchlight sparkle on the surface of the spring while the water did its work in me.

“I am the first root of the Bounded. It is perhaps not an elegant name. Not easy on the tongue.”

“It seems strange to call you Source. It’s not a proper name. I could call you Root, I suppose.”

“As you wish - and I could call you boy, instead of king, for at the root of your being is a youth of sixteen, though you bear the burdens of a king.”

Gradually we did move on to matters of more substance in our conversations. I began to talk of problems brought to me by the Singlars, of difficulties caused by the changes I’d made, and of freedoms I’d given them. I asked about the roving bands of monstrous creatures that I knew were sentient beings who threatened outlying fastnesses, and what to do about the Singlars who were afraid to leave their towers to join in the awakening life of the city. I began to think of the Source as a friend who spoke to me as an elder sister might. She never told me what to do, but led me through my thinking, asking questions and encouraging me to draw on everything I’d learned: from books, from watching my father and mother - both my true parents and those who had raised me - even from my time with the Lords, though neither the Source nor I ever mentioned them by name. I refused to sully the beauty of that cave with the ugliness of my past.

“The answer is already there,” she said to me when I fumed in frustration at some problem. “You have only to uncover it.”

And most of the time it was.

I remembered what the Source had said that first time, about how a stone dreams of the earth of which it is a part and how the rain finds its way to the sea that is its essence, and I came to believe that I was indeed linked to the Bounded in some profound way. The firestorms that damaged us both, the water that healed me, the Source that knew my mind, my instincts and familiarity with the strange land and its people… even the geometries of the Blue Tower that satisfied desires I hadn’t even known I had… my nausea at the unsettled Edge… everything I had experienced here witnessed to such a mystery.

And so as the days of waiting passed, the Bounded grew, and I felt useful, and I began to think that once I’d settled my business in the mundane world - my mother and the rest of it - I just might come back and finish what I had begun here.

Roxanne became an invaluable assistant in matters of governing, coming up with good ideas about trade laws and judgments and projects. She must have studied every document about philosophy, law, or politics that had ever been written in the Four Realms, and she delighted in quoting them at me, especially when she could trounce one of my ideas. I had never imagined anyone could take pleasure in argument.

She didn’t travel the Bounded with Paulo and me. Though she never admitted it, I think it was fear of the firestorms that kept her close to the Blue Tower. The first one had kept her in her bed for almost a week.

When she wasn’t helping me in the audience hall or the council chamber, as I had named a large study down the passage from my bedchamber, she was rummaging about the Blue Tower, foraging for furnishings, fabrics she might use for clothing more suited to her tastes, anything to enliven a “house run by male children” as she put it. She had taken over the running of the household, training servants and ordering whatever foods and furnishings she liked from the luxuries found in the storerooms of the Blue Tower, but nowhere else in the city. I was happy to have her deal with those things, as I had more than enough to do, and cared not a whit what we ate or sat on.

That no one could say where the goods in the storerooms came from or how to obtain more when the supplies started getting thin piqued my curiosity, but infuriated Roxanne. She could not abide secrets or mysteries, and took any suggestion that an event was unexplainable in terms of science, economics, or politics as a personal affront. Living in the Bounded, which by its very existence was a mystery beyond her experience, came near driving her to distraction. Even after she’d long given up on science and nature, no day passed on which she failed to look for any small mystery that she could declare solved.

And so she was determined to discover how the Blue Tower was supplied and set out to investigate every part of the place, even the garden. With some misgiving I allowed her to go to the garden, though I forbade her to enter the cave of the Source.

She agreed to my restriction, though not without complaint.

“Come on. You must see what I’ve found.” She was waiting outside my bedchamber, her gold hair in a flurry of curls, her green gown perfect as always.

“Not today.” If it hadn’t been the hundredth morning of my waiting, I might have been more interested in her “discovery.”

She stuck to me like a grass burr as I headed down the passage to the stair. “I’ve been trying to tell you about it for a fortnight, but you’re always traveling or too busy. Promise me you’ll take just a moment to look.”

“Later. Have you forgotten? This is the day I get my answers, and I’ll not wait a moment longer than necessary. I’d have thought you’d be shoving me up these stairs yourself.”

When I reached the stair, she dodged in front of me and backed slowly up the stairway, not allowing me to get past her. “Yes, of course, I want to go back, but I’ll never get another chance to solve a mystery like this. Sorcery is against the law in Leire, and my life there is going to be hideously boring. Do you know how annoying it is, always being ignored because you don’t have the right private parts, knowing you’re going to be married off to someone’s idiot son whom you will never love and knowing that the pox-ridden dolt will rule the kingdom that is yours by right?”

“You’ll drive the fellow bats and order the Four Realms to your every whim.” It could do worse.

“That’s not the same.”

I tried again to push past her, but she flitted from side to side, blocking the way. I was ready to be angry with her, but in her exasperating, teasing way she dangled a glittering object of red and gold in front of my face, snatching it away and hiding it behind her back before I could see it. “You’ve never told me these important questions of yours. Perchance I’ve found one of your answers for you. Did you ever think of that? Though because of your insufferable reluctance to speak more than three words at a time and never what you’re truly thinking, you’ll never admit it, you know very well I’m not a fool. So when I say I’ve found something of interest to you - even on this day - you really ought to listen, don’t you think?”

I halted on the stair. “All right, what do you have?”

She held up the glittering object again. Her trinket was the ruby-studded key that had hung about the neck of the Guardian.

“Oh. I’d forgotten that.” My first inquiries into its use had been fruitless, and I’d never given it another thought. “Where did it get off to?”

“You threw it on the desk in the Guardian’s retiring room, and I didn’t think it should be left about to be stolen. You have a lot more faith in the honesty of these Singlars than I do. But I’ve learned what it’s for, and I want you to see. We’ll be leaving this world soon, and this is the only truly important thing I’ve discovered!”

She’d been a great help to me all these weeks, more than I’d had any right to expect. And I had to admit that she’d tweaked my curiosity with the key. I’d already waited a hundred days. An hour more or less could make no difference. “So what does it unlock?” I said.

“I went looking for keyholes everywhere, and there just aren’t all that many. But I found one here in the Blue Tower and one in your garden, and this key fits them both. Come on.”

We reached the head of the stair, and she pointed to the notch in the raised center of the yellow stone circle. The ruby-studded key slipped smoothly into the slot.

“Now look at the haft,” said Roxanne, “the way the jewel points to the flowers. I wondered what would happen if I turned the key. Try it.”

I twisted the haft of the key and felt a steady resistance… until I’d turned it a quarter of the way around. The teardrop-shaped ruby pointed at a laden grapevine at the bottom of the circle. I turned it again, and then again, feeling the pegged end of the key snick into place at each quarter, leaving the jewel pointed first at the carved wheat sheaves and next at a cluster of leafless trees. But nothing else happened.

Roxanne pulled the key from the hole, but she didn’t seem disappointed. “Go ahead and open the way as usual. You’ll see.”

I ran my fingers around the circle, and when the wall dissolved and the passage appeared, we stepped through it and, shortly after, onto the gallery.

It was winter. Snow lay in thick mounds on the shrubs and terraces, and the barren trees cracked in the cold. Thick gray clouds obscured the clifftops. Across the expanse of the winter garden, the frozen waterfall hung suspended between the false heavens and the mysterious earth. The air was so quiet, I could hear my own breath freezing.

“Isn’t it a marvel?” said the princess. “Each of the four positions of the lock changes the season. I’ve not determined if it’s the same place, only transformed, or another place altogether. But come, you have to see the rest of it. The winter garden has the most intriguing secret.”

Powdery snow spilled over the tops of my boots as Roxanne led me down the steps and along the winding path that was little more than a smooth depression scooped in the thick mantle of snow. She hurried past the towering icefall, through the grove, and into the cave of the Source. “I know you told me not to risk entering the cave, but after you got so friendly with the Source, I thought it couldn’t matter. I was careful never to touch the water or anything, but I found the second keyhole inside. If you’re angry with me, that’s too bad, but this is really marvelous.”

I wasn’t angry with her, only impatient. Being so close to the Source reminded me of how close I was to the answers I cared about. “Just hurry,” I said.

The crystals in the cave were not amethyst, but jet and silver. Roxanne crouched down beside the basin and pointed to a notched carving in the rock at its base. “Here’s the second keyhole. Watch what happens…”

She inserted the key in the slot. “You just have to wait a few moments. You’ll be able to provide the Singlars with everything they need after you’ve gone… solve so many problems… ”

But I wasn’t listening to the princess any longer. I cared nothing for comforts or furnishings, linens or exotic foods. I cared nothing for Roxanne or the Singlars. The answer was so close; I could feel it in the winter garden, brooding, rumbling in the depths of the stone. The hair on my neck rose, and my stomach constricted, and my ears roared with my own blood, drowning out every other consideration, and if anyone had asked me why I was suddenly so afraid, I couldn’t have told them.

I plunged my hand into the icy water. It was thick, as if on the verge of freezing, and I lost all feeling in my fingers in the instant I touched it.

“A hundredlight has passed, my king. How quickly have the hours flown.” The soft voice of the first root of the Bounded crackled in the frosty air like breaking glass.

“So it is you.” What had I expected?

“Of course. There is only one root, one Source, but the key allows you to explore many of its aspects.”

“So the garden still lives beneath all this? We’ve not changed it, killed it somehow by using the key?”

“Winter is but another expression of life. No less worthy than its more embracing fellows. My winter aspect is perhaps a bit more dangerous than the others. Would that you had chosen it on a different day.”

“Why more dangerous?”

“It is the quietest, the deepest buried, the most private. We do not always like what we see when we explore our most hidden places or what we hear when the world falls silent.”

“I don’t want philosophy today. I want my answers.”

Roxanne stood with her arms crossed, tapping her foot. “Sometimes it takes a little while.”

“Have you not found your place here in the Bounded?” The voice of the Source stayed pleasant and even. “If you would but wait a little longer… finish the work you’ve begun. Your people need you. Your life is here. Stay in the Bounded and be at peace.”

“The firestorms are hardly peaceful. They almost killed me.”

“But you’ve made an accommodation. You protect your people and renew yourself. You are not the same person you were when you walked into your dream. It is no matter what the origin of the storms.”

“No more delays,” I said. “I accepted your word and made the best of my waiting, but I must finish the journey that brought me here.”

“As you wish, my king. Ask as you will.”

“I want to know the identity of the person who stabbed my mother and betrayed my father’s secrets.”

“Have you not guessed it, my lord?” Her voice was quiet, gentle, and relentless in its truth. “Look into your own most hidden places. Open your eyes. Can you not see?”

“No.” But there were no surprises for me in the Bounded, and even as I said the word, the bitter chill of the winter garden settled over my spirit.

“There, you see?” interrupted Roxanne, who had paid no mind to the Source. “You can ask for anything you want - a bolt of red silk or an ivory hairbrush or a cask of sparkling wine - and you’ll find it in the Blue Tower storerooms when you go back. Isn’t it odd the way the ring catches the light as it spins?”

And even as the back wall of the cave dissolved into blackness and revealed the spinning brass ring, I remembered despair.

The ring was taller than I, and as it whirled about its axis, numbing my cheeks with the frigid air, it snatched the light of the torches and the sparkling reflections of ice and silver and jet, and it wove them into an orb of gray light. An oculus… just as I had seen them and used them in the fortress of Zhev’Na… just like the one spinning in the Lords’ temple on the day I traded my eyes and my soul for power and immortality.

Roxanne stood at my shoulder. I needed to warn her. But I couldn’t take my eyes from the oculus, and the hunger grew in me like the storm clouds that raced to devour the skies of the Bounded. It was danger unimaginable for me to stay so near an implement of power… an implement of temptation. But I could not… would not… run from the truth, and I would not believe it until the words were spoken.

“Tell me the name of the betrayer and assassin,” I said. Even then I knew the two were one and the same.

“But, my - ”

“Tell me!” I roared the command, trying to drown out the thunder of my desire, and the wailing of my fear, and the hollow empty silence within me.

“Oh, my gracious king… it was you.”