The Pearl Saga - Mistress of the Pearl Part 54

Krystren smiled, liking Giyan all the more for her keen intelligence. "No. Just as few Ramahan are seers, so few Onnda know what you call sorcery. We are also crifica. But it is not sorcery. We are taught to use our minds in a particular way.""Show me."

Krystren sent out a mind-feeler. At once, she could "see" into Giyan's mind, like peering through a stained-crystal window. She saw the V'ornn child Annon, Giyan's love for him, her mourning.

She said, "We are so sorry about Annon."

"As I am for your brother's death."

"So the connection is two-way."

"I apologize."

Krystren shook her head. "No need. You have taught us a valuable lesson." She sighed. "If it is fate that we should never see Courion again, then so be it. We each chose our fates when we became Onnda."

"These words lack the emotion I saw inside you."

"Now you should apologize."

They listened to the soughing of the wind, but there was scant comfort in the sound. Krystren looked into Giyan's eyes. "It is widely believed that during training Onnda lose all their emotions, that it is better that way, easier to kill. No remorse, no guilt, nothing to mourn."

Giyan gazed back at her in silence.

"Obviously, you know our secret now. We loved Courion. We felt remorse when his lover died in a fall as we were hiking in the caldera of Oppamonifex. We felt guilt when Courion blamed us for Orujo's death. We are sick with mourning at our brother's death." Even then, she could not bring herself to mention how Minnum's death had affected her. That was too private. And, thank Yahe, Giyan had not seen it.

In fact, Giyan had seen it. Though it told her a lot about Krystren's nature, though she rejoiced for Minnum, she was nevertheless aware that she had trespa.s.sed on something profoundly personal. Leaning forward, she put her hand over Krystren's. "There is no shame in this. Quite the opposite."

"Not for Onnda. We were sent here on a secret mission to deliver something of value to Courion. In our heart we thought only to postpone our reunion because we were afraid of confronting him, afraid of his anger, afraid that we would no longer be brother and sister. Instead, we find that he is dead, that we will never know how he felt, whether he forgave us or would have forgiven us. On top of that the Sintire had foreknowledge of our arrival here and are using all their skills to capture us."

Giyan's eyes had closed, and now a s.h.i.+ver ran through her body. "He is here."

"Here, inside the abbey?" Krystren stood in deepest shadow. Giyan's eyes opened. "Here, inside the temple."

Eleana, jammed against the pantry door, had stopped her pounding the moment she heard the eerie screaming from upstairs. She instinctively crouched down, hands over her ears. Her blood curdled. What was happening? She kept dead still, put her ear against the door, listening hard.

Silence. And after a time, the tread of footfalls on the stairway. One set. Only one. Pressed her ear all the harder so that when the footfalls reached the ground floor she could tell by the stride that it wasn't Riane. Too long, long legs a prerequisite, a male. Kurgan.

Coming her way.

Shrank back, turning in the semidarkness, scrabbling at the foodstuffs on the shelves. The pantry was deeper than she had realized, the rear wall hewn out of the bedrock. She pushed the foodstuffs out of the way. She could not now hear the footfalls. Were they still coming her way? Sweat broke out at her hairline, on her upper lip, salt dripped into the corner of her mouth.

Crawling onto the lowest shelf, squeezing all the way into the back, she curled up like a fetus. Moving the foodstuffs back in place in front of her, a wall against the possibility- A screech and she froze. The door opened and light flooded in, did not reach her. Still, she was there, breathing, eyes squeezed shut. If she couldn't see him, he couldn't see her. An instinctual response.

Unbidden, the image of Kurgan bloomed in her mind. She could see him, smell him, feel his hands on her,moving, parting her flesh, and a great sob welled up within her. She bit her lip to keep it bottled up.

Inside her, terror and rage fought a pitched battle.

It was the silence that induced her to open one eye. Through a crack of light in her wall she could see a sliver of face, a dark beard, mustache like the blade of a dagger. Tall. Taller than Kurgan. Who then?

As he turned, she saw the swirl of tattoos across the side of his head. Sarak-konl In one hand he held a small milkwhite wand like a weapon. In his other hand, the banestone. Held it up as if it were a lantern or a torch, moving it here and there in the pantry, apparently to no effect. Eleana knew he was using it to look for her as Kurgan had, but for some reason it was not working for him. He turned and stalked out.

How had he gotten the banestone from Kurgan? What had happened to Riane and Thigpen? She shuddered with an ague of dreadful but unfounded conclusions.

When she was certain she was alone, she raced upstairs, found no one, nothing save Kurgan's ion pistol, which she appropriated. What could have become of Riane-and for that matter, Kurgan? The Sar-akkon! He might have the answer. Following him was far better than any other possibility she could think of. She turned, raced back down the corridor, slid down the bannister to the ground floor, and out the front door.

Since the street was a dead end, there was only one way for the Sarakkon to go. She saw him turning a corner, slowed down by something, possibly an injury to his left side. She tore after him.

In the old days, before the coming of the V'ornn, before the sauro-mician uprising, before everything changed, there had been much blood spilled in the Temple of Flowing Out. Sacrifices of qwawd, gim-nopedes, even cor to propitiate Miina were commonplace, especially during festivals, which in the Ramahan calendar, were legion.

Giyan, her senses open and attuned to the peculiar resonance of the temple itself, was abruptly aware of the blood, as if she had entered a slaughterhouse. And then, as she caught a glimpse of Varda with her Third Eye, she knew her own mental reference for the stench was misplaced. What she was smelling was the whiff of necromancy that surrounded him like a buzzing cloud of bloodflies.

Her vision showed her first that Varda was wearing an articulated metal glove over the hand with the vulnerable black finger. Then it revealed to her the white necromantic eye that Krystren had warned her about. The eye was moving this way and that, independent of his other eye, piercing the gloom like a searchlight. Alarmed, Giyan moved, so that it became aware of her.

It rolled in her direction, and she could see what Krystren never had, that the eye, plucked from the head of his victim at the moment of death, was insubstantial. It had to be; it was dead tissue, and by the immutable laws of the Cosmos dead tissue began after a very short time to decompose. The necrosis was being held in a kind of stasis by the necromancy, and while it gave the dead eye great power, it did so at a cost of tremendous energy. That, too, was an immutable law of the Cosmos. Giyan knew that if she could find a way to increase the load of energy Varda expended to fuel the white eye, she would have a chance to defeat him.

Across the interior of the temple Varda paused. He saw Giyan as if through veils of sand, her image indistinct, inconstant, but undeniably there. He fixed his white eye on her as she slipped behind one pillar, then another, saw her through the porphyry as a shadow, two-dimensional, outlined like an aura. Dimly, he was aware of how much he relied on his necromantic eye. Why shouldn't he? The other archons were covetous of it; it set him apart from them. He had taken an enormous risk in channeling the eye from the newly dead, for in the Korrush where they had begun their study of necromancy in depth, he had heard tales of sorcerers eaten alive by the necrosis of the dead, since an organ torn by necromancy from the dying was infected with the agonized spirit of the victim. For this reason, it had to be handled with the utmost care, and a great deal of energy had to be expended in keeping it functioning. But he had had to do something, for the young archon Haamadi was not like the others. Only the white eye ensured Varda's superiority. Haamadi's una.s.suming persona might fool the others, but Varda saw it for what it really was, understood his ambition to be one archon over all. He had proved remarkably useful in holding the stolenRamahan in thrall and it had been his idea to create a false Dar Sala-at-a male whom the Ramahan would readily follow. He possessed an astonis.h.i.+ng sense of the psychological makeup of others. Yet another reason for Varda to be wary of him. Now, with Caligo gone, it was up to Varda to keep him in his place, to make certain that whoever replaced Caligo as the third archon was Varda's choice.

He returned his furious attention to Giyan. His white eye had been tracking her even as she tried to elude him. It galled him no end that Giyan could move freely about the abbey, while he was confined to those buildings not built atop bourn lines. The Library, which was of intense interest to him, was guarded so thoroughly by power bourns that he had had to use the Sarakkon Ardinals to gather information by proxy.

It was not lost on him that he had found Giyan in the Temple of Flowing Out, one of the few structures in the abbey not built atop a power bourn. So she wanted to engage him, was deluded enough to believe that she could defeat him. Well and good. The Ramahan abhorrence of causing pain and suffering ensured that they had no working knowledge of necromancy. She knew neither its origins nor the extent of its power. Such ignorance would spell her doom.

For many reasons, not the least of which was to savor the moment, he took his time stalking her. She was the one who knew enough about the Skreeling Engine to snuff out the Eye of Ajbal. He was already imagining reaching into her brain to extract all her knowledge, an entire Library's worth. And what was the first thing he would do with his new knowledge? Turn around and wipe out the Sarakkon Ardinals who, already it seemed to him, had an overinflated opinion of themselves. They had been beaten out of the northern continent once before. It would not be so difficult to do that again.

As he narrowed the distance between them, he used his white eye to probe her defenses, to get a sense of the ultimate extent of her power. Already, he knew that she was no ordinary Ramahan konara; she was something special-which would make raiding her brain that much more delicious.

He waited for his moment, waited until she was behind another pillar. Then he shot twin bolts of cold fire from his fingertips, which first bracketed the pillar, then coiled around her and, pulled her tight against the cool, smooth porphyry. With a sudden movement, he squeezed. The coils sliced through the stone pillar in half a dozen places, causing the heavy carved capital and the uppermost section of the pillar to which it was attached to come cras.h.i.+ng down.

Thunder of stone grinding against stone echoed through the temple vaults as Varda sprinted through the choking clouds of dust toward Giyan. As he did so, a shadow dropped from the upper reaches of the architrave where it had secreted itself. Onto his back crashed Krystren.

They fell to the stone floor, gasping and struggling. Varda tried to twist himself onto his back, tried to fix her with his white eye, but he felt the painful clamp of a powerful spell. Giyan, having somehow extricated herself from the falling debris, was trying to overpower him. He was about to laugh at her pathetic attempt to trap him when he caught sight of the crystal dagger in Krystren's fist. With her free hand, she was trying to rip off his metal glove, trying to expose his black finger to the dagger's blade.

Pulling on the glove, he tried to protect his hand, but Giyan kept changing her spells, and he was growing dizzy with trying to counter each one in turn. The glove was more than half-off. In a moment, she would sever his sixth finger, and he would be done for. Where was that Ardinal?

Krystren, fighting with every ounce of her strength to sever Varda's black finger before he could turn his necromantic eye on her, could tell him just where the Ardinal was, because his strong arm was around her throat, his powerful presence behind her, trying to wrench her off Varda. In defense, she bent over double, in offense, she kicked backward. But, improbably, he seemed prepared for this maneuver, and he tightened his grip on her throat, choking off air.

"Don't make us kill you."

The voice, so chillingly familiar, froze her long enough for Varda to break free of her. He chopped down on her wrist, and the crystal dagger went skittering across the floor into shadow.

"It can't be." Her mind a seething mora.s.s of shock and denial.

"Oh, but it is," Orujo Aersthone, her friend, Courion's lover, said. Back from the dead.Eleana was almost overcome by the miasma of stench as she made her way through the underground labyrinth toward Black Farm. After spending a fruitless half hour searching for him, she gave up. The strange wand the Sarakkon had was much on her mind, so she decided to pay another visit to Sagiira. If anyone she knew could tell her what it was and whether it had been used to spirit Riane and Thigpen away, it was the old sauromician. Perhaps he could also tell her where the Sarakkon had gone.

She had first met Sagiira as a small child, taken by her mother into Axis Tyr as cover for a Resistance mission. All had gone well, Eleana enjoying the new sights, sounds, and smells of the big city, until a melee had unexpectedly erupted, at the height of which she and her mother were separated. She was about to launch herself, bravely but foolishly into the midst of the fighting when she had been caught around the waist from behind and dragged out of harm's way-in this case from a broad but potentially lethal swipe of a Khagggun shock-sword.

Over her protests, Sagiira had whisked her away underground to the Black Farm, where she would be safe. The trouble was she hadn't wanted to be safe, she wanted to be with her mother, helping in the struggle against the feared and hated V'ornn. To that end, she had run away almost as soon as he had brought her to his quarters. He had turned his back to make some tea for them, and she had scooted out, only to run into Muzli's gaping jaws. Her yelp of surprise had brought him, not at a run but a slow walk.

He could see that she was petrified, would not take a single step for fear Muzli would chomp down on her leg or some other even more vital part of her.

He had laughed, a clue to Muzli that everything was all right, and the claiwen crept closer the better to nuzzle his snout against her legs. That made her laugh, and so began their friends.h.i.+p.

Years later, she had killed a Khagggun Third-Marshal who had gotten his nose too close to Sagiira's business, dragging him away with the help of her Resistance cell members, dumping him in the Great Phosphorus Swamp, where doubtless Muzli's distant cousins had made of him a tasty meal.

Eleana, her mind full of the past, found Sagiira's quarters easily enough. Nearing them, she felt a pang of sadness, for no Muzli came stampeding toward her to press his long ugly snout between her legs. She thought of his eyes rolling up in ecstasy as she scratched his scaly hide, his loyal fervor, his undying love for his master. These melancholy thoughts brought her to the open doorway to Sagiira's quarters, but he was not there. Back in the reeking corridor, she accosted an old woman limping by, who told her to look for Sagiira in the infirmary. She was gone before Eleana could ask her where the infirmary was, and three others either did not know the way or gave her faulty directions. At length, she found a small boy to take her hand in his filthy one and lead her through corridor after corridor to a large doorway. There he left her, unwilling himself to enter.

The stench had been bad enough in the corridors, within the room was so unbearable that she was obliged to put the crook of her arm over her nose and mouth in order to keep her stomach from rebelling. She proceeded down a narrow central aisle past four tiers of pallets, two on either side. The infirmary was crowded, and it was not easy looking for him among all the volunteer workers. She had just about given up when she heard her name being called.

She turned and, heart in her throat, saw him not administering to the ill and wounded as she had expected, but lying on a pallet, himself a patient in this dreadful place. At once, she ran to the pallet and knelt beside him, pressed like a dead leaf his crepey hand between hers.

"So good to see you again, my brave one." His voice had a thin, reedy quality that seemed to pierce her to the marrow.

"Sagiira." Peering down at his ashen face. "What has happened to you? Are you ill? I will get you whatever medicine you need."

He shook his head, his hair, damp and lank, lying on the thin pillow like a scatter of bones. "I am ill, but not in the sense you mean. No medicine can help me."

His voice had grown faint, and she leaned closer. As she did so, she noticed a kind of calcification, crystals crusting the corner of his mouth.

"Ah, you see it." His eyes searched her face. "I have been caught, in a manner of speaking, by those who have been searching for me. I have been poisoned by my brethren.""Sauromicians!"

"Yes."

"Dear Sagiira, isn't there anything I can do to help you?"

"Not a thing. Whether I live or die is entirely up to me." He squeezed her hand. "Now tell me why I have the great pleasure of seeing you again."

So she told him about the Sarakkon and the strange silvery wand he carried, what it sounded like and looked like when he turned it on.

"An infinity-blade," he said at once. And began to tremble so badly that Eleana scooped him up in her arms and cradled him. With her sleeve, she wiped the crust off his lips.

"Careful," he said. "Madila in this concentrated form will drive you mad if you ingest it."

She could see more of it on his tongue. In response to her motion, he stuck out his tongue. Ripping off the hem of her sleeve, she took the crystals.

"Wrap that up tightly and don't leave it here," he warned. "Don't worry." She tied off the twist of fabric and slipped it into her pocket. "Now what can you tell me about this infinity-blade?" "Describe the Sarakkon in more detail."

She did as he asked, telling him of the Sarakkon's height, his dark beard, mustache like a dagger's blade, the swirl of tattoos across the side of his head. Sagiira, eyes closed, nodded. His skin so thin, his pulse revealed itself through bulging arteries.

"I have seen him," he said in the dry, papery voice that so frightened her. "He has been in the company of sauromician archons, and will be again." His eyes opened, fixed on Eleana. "I have looked inside his mind. His name is Lujon. His infinity-blade is one of two the Sarakkon possess. They were discovered at the bottom of the Oppamonifex cal-dera-the great volcano on the southern continent. Since found, they have had a storied history-one stolen again, blood spilled, lives lost." He shuddered again. "Too much to take in."

"Don't try," she said, seeing how much it took out of him. "Concentrate on fighting the Madila." She held him tighter. "Sagiira, can you tell me where Lujon is now?"

Sagiira's eyes were closed. Little s.h.i.+vers like the death throes of a bird ran through his body. Eleana held him, said nothing. She concentrated, straining to direct her energies in helping him stave off the pernicious effects of the Madila. He gasped once and was still, the s.h.i.+vers gone. His breathing was shallow but even.

"Boarding a s.h.i.+p named Omaline." Dry lips moving in a whisper against her c.o.c.ked ear. "They are preparing to set sail. Go there. Quick as you can."

"I don't want to leave you."

He smiled, his eyes pale and watery. "My brave one, you have quite literally lifted me from my deathbed. Now go. They are bound for the island of Suspended Skull. I see that your friend Riane will be there presently." He grasped her wrist with his long, bony fingers. "You must be there to warn her.

Though there seem to be power bourns beneath Suspended Skull, that is an illusion. One of many in and around the island. In fact, it is the only place on Kundala where no power bourns exist at all."

Sagiira watched Eleana vanish down the crowded corridor before he raised himself up. He moved easily, without real effort. He went to the door of the infirmary to make certain she had left. No one paid him any attention. Returning to the mean room, he lifted the rug, opened the trapdoor beneath. Levering himself into the blackness, he held out his hand. In it, appeared an orb of light that burned cool and steady. By its light, another figure could be discerned, gagged and cruelly bound with ion whips. As the eerie glow advanced on the filthy, emaciated creature, his features became plain. In every detail, they were identical to the Sagiira who held the cold light in his palm.

"It has not been easy keeping you alive," the impostor said to the real Sagiira. "How many times have you tried to kill yourself during the eighteen months I have kept you incarcerated. I have lost count."

Sagiira cringed away from the cold light, averted his face, covered his nearly hairless head with grimy fingers.

"You do not react well to pain, do you, dear Sagiira?" The impostor put his hand on Sagiira's head in a gesture of absolute possession. "At least, not the sort at my disposal."Sagiira's eyes got big around, and the bony shoulders began to shake.

The impostor nodded. "As you have intuited, time to extract more knowledge."

Sometime later, the being known to Eleana as Sagiira emerged from the prison he had in secret fas.h.i.+oned for the real Sagiira. He emerged into the corridor, heading in the opposite direction Eleana had taken. He was soon out of the Black Farm and, by a hidden stairway known only to him, ascended out of the reeking bowels of Axis Tyr. By the time he had reached the outer gates of the Temple of Mnemonics he had resumed his real shape.

"Nith Immmon," one of the Gyrgon guards said as he pa.s.sed into the first antechamber. "It is good to have you back."

The sudden appearance of the Ardinal, a Sarakkon that Krystren clearly knew, gave Giyan a choice: continue to engage Varda in their psychic duel or go after the crystal dagger. Having learned from Krystren its power, she whirled and threw herself into the shadows where it had vanished.

Unfortunately, Varda had the same idea. They collided, fetching up against the ornately sculpted plinth of a column. The moment she touched him, she saw the Ramahan being herded into the death pit, being told to drink the potion laced with toxic Madila, the psychotic fury unleashed by the drug. Saw all this through Varda's eyes, filtered by his brain so that she felt what he had, the almost s.e.xual excitement at the nearness of death-so many deaths at once, such a rush of energy released!-positively giddy with it.

They had not known which way to turn first when the moment came upon them-pom, pom, pom-like shots fired in a string, the deaths coming fast now, too fast to keep track of or to make use of, but, oh, the ecstasy of the long-drawn-out moment, the intense s.h.i.+ver of delight it delivered to him!

Giyan, horrified, recoiled from the contact, and in that instant Varda gathered the dagger to him, kissed it like a long-lost child at the spot where handle and guards crossed, and jabbed it at her stomach.

The blade slid through her first, hastily erected defensive spell, in the process bringing her pain. As cold fire swept up her arm, the stench of rotting corpses, decaying flesh, the miasma of the open grave, a.s.saulted her. The point of the dagger pierced her robes, but as she was rolling away, the edge tore through the silk and nothing more.

What was it about the dagger? Giyan asked herself as Varda pursued her. She needed an answer, knew she would not be able to defeat him without it. She raised her forearm, a clumsy gesture, the blade scoring her skin, drawing blood. The pain all but made her faint. It had attacked all her nerve endings at once, producing a pain cascade that in someone not similarly trained would have shorted out the nerve circuits, causing instant unconsciousness. Giyan, prepared for this eventuality, had cast a series of defensive spells one inside the other to keep herself safe. Wise that she had done so, for the pain cascade burst through the first three spells, was slowed by the fourth and was, at last, stopped by the fifth.

Quickly, she cast another as reserve.

By the feral grin on his face it was clear that Varda was pleased with her loss of blood. In an odd way, so was Giyan, for at the instant the blade sliced through her skin her Sight had given her a clear picture of the crystal used for the blade. It was white quartz, mined in the northernmost reaches of the Korrush, a stark landscape, where bleak foothills rose toward the rugged, snow-shrouded spires of the Djenn Marre. The dagger was shaped crudely, possibly by Varda himself. But there all resemblance to a traditional weapon ended, for it had been exposed to necromantic forces, wrapped in glistening strands of intestine, pulled still pulsing during the victim's death throes. It had been immersed in warm heart blood while Varda chanted over it, invoking the spirits of the newly dead, coercing them while they were vulnerable to incarcerate themselves inside the crystal, forced to lend it their unwilling energy.

In fact, she now had some of that energy inside her, and she was using First-Gate Correspondence to release it into its const.i.tuent parts. The resulting warmth flowed through her, first healing her wound, then arming her against Varda's next a.s.sault. He feinted left, drove right. With a shallow sweep of the dagger, he slit open her belly from one side to another. No blood flowed, however. The incision closed itself almost immediately, the two flaps of flesh mes.h.i.+ng, remerging into one.Seeing that happen, Varda slipped the dagger into the belt at his left hip and fixed her with his white necromantic eye. Giyan, caught in the unholy gaze, could not look away; nor could she even blink. She felt the full force of the archon's power concentrated in that gaze, felt the loosed spirits inside her quail and gibber incoherently, felt his exhilaration in rea.s.serting control over them.

And that was when she saw what she had to do. The black finger, the necromantic eye, these were only outward manifestations of a power that had a fixed place in the Cosmos. It was Varda's obsession with controlling as much spirit force as he could that defined him. It was what had made him order the ma.s.sed deaths of the Ramahan, why he had insisted on the alliance with the Sarakkon who could enter the Abbey of Five Pivots at will without worrying about the power bourns.

The eye that held her was powerful, but not as much as he believed. But Giyan, mindful of who Varda was beneath his archon's persona, fell back, allowed him to believe that she was entirely paralyzed. He struck her, and again, put his hands on either side of her head so that she could not turn away. On top of her, he partook of the contours of her body with rough mouth and even rougher hands. His eye bored into hers until Giyan did feel the dread paralysis begin to seep through all her defenses. It was time, and she knew it. He was close enough, reveling on the brink of victory. She could feel his ardor, feel him swollen, and she spread her thighs just enough to get his attention.

At the same time, she slipped her hand to his left hip, drew the dagger out of his belt. She held it firmly in her hand, for one thrust was all she would get, turned it just so, slamming it at the perfect angle against the fluted column. The tip sheared off and at once she felt the quick beat of the imprisoned spirits and she drove the blade, shattered point first, into Varda's white necromantic eye.

He reared up, bellowed terribly. He twisted this way and that, flailing, scratching, biting. Through all of that she did not let go of the hilt, but rather twisted it until the blade was plunged to its limit, piercing straight through his eye socket, releasing all the pent-up spirit energy into his brain. His body thrashed, green fire crackled, arcing off him. He screamed, and the green fire flared up and burned her, but still she held on while he thrashed and moaned and tried his best to kill her. But the spirit energy was moving the crystal blade through his brain, slicing and rending, and at last the green fire winked out, and his body lay still. Silence from his mind. And then a rus.h.i.+ng as of wind in a tunnel pa.s.sed by Giyan's right ear.

Whispered in ghostly chorus, "Thank you."

Orujo, taking full advantage of the shock of surprise, drew Krystren out of the temple. Rain obscured the dull sky, turned the surrounding buildings to vague, bulky shapes hunkered on their calcined haunches. When the smell of the ground and the foliage began to revive her, Orujo struck her again, driving a knuckle into the soft indentation behind the orbital bone, and she collapsed in his arms.

In the middle of the garden the fitful wind showered them with brief gusts of rain. He held her tight, and she did not attempt to break away.

"You're dead," she whispered.

He laughed. "Apparently not."