‘You have known him for longer than I,’ he began tentatively. ‘Did he ever show any, er, talent? Any access to the Warrens?’
‘No. None that I know of. Why?’
He frowned in thought. ‘I cannot place it. But I feel a dim aura around him. It is as if he were connected to a Warren, or a source of some sort. It is like a faint scent in the air. One I cannot identify. And he knows things. Things he shouldn’t know.’
‘Oh? Things you do not know, so how could he? Is that what you mean?’
A crooked twitch of a smile from the man. ‘You are too direct, Shimmer.’ He tilted his head as if reconsidering. ‘Still — a blustering reaction could have betrayed the truth. But no. Things he ought not to know.’
‘Such as?’
Again a shrug. ‘Many such instances. Just now, when he remarked that these Worms are far older than D’rek. As soon as he said it I recognized the truth of it. Yet it had never before occurred to me.’
Shimmer grunted, disappointed. She’d hoped for something more. Something pointing to an answer to the mystery that the man had become. ‘He has … changed,’ she remarked, her voice low.
‘Yes. He is now closed to me.’
Closed. Yes. He has walled himself off from the rest of us. Why? What is he afraid of? Or hiding? Or protecting us from?
‘Look there!’ Rutana called, pointing, her voice shrill.
Stone humps stood from the river ahead. As the Serpent drew closer they resolved into statues and architectural features — a bell-shaped stupa, a cyclopean lintel over a submerged entranceway. All were gripped in the fists of trees and hung with flowering lianas. All were eroded to shapeless forms. The statues might have once carried human, or even beast, characteristics. All elements of faces or forms had been scoured away. Time and the relentless probing tendrils and roots of the flowers had ground the rock away as if it were mere sand.
‘We are close,’ Rutana reaffirmed. ‘Very close now.’
Close to what? Shimmer wondered. All I see is a gulf of time. An immensity I cannot even begin to comprehend. Yet is it so? Perhaps it has been only a few brief centuries or decades and that is all that is required to wipe away all remnants and signs of human existence.
Perhaps this is the true lesson Himatan presents here.
* * *
The first hint Pon-lor had that something was going on was when the weasel-thin Thet-mun rushed to Jak’s side and whispered excitedly to him. The column had halted and Pon-lor stood breathing heavily, his legs leaden and aching — he wasn’t used to so much walking. His arms were tied tightly behind his back. His robes now hung from him sodden and torn, no better than rags. At night he was left lying in the rain. For food, scraps were thrown in the dirt before him; so far he’d refused them all.
It was, he decided, the harshest test yet of his Thaumaturg training in the denial and mastering of the demands of the flesh. Should he survive he might even suggest instituting it as a sort of final examination. Any normal man, he knew, would have succumbed long ago: to starvation, exposure, or any one of a number of sicknesses.
Jak snapped out a series of low orders then swaggered over to stand before him. As he always did, he reached up and made a show of running Pon-lor’s jade comb through his long hair. Finishing his ministrations, he knotted the hair through itself then looked him up and down and sniffed his disapproval. ‘You’re a mess, spoiled noble boy,’ he said. ‘Want a drink?’
Pon-lor knew a drink wouldn’t be forthcoming but his ferocious thirst demanded he nod the affirmative. Jak signed for a skin of water. He took a long drink then stoppered it and handed it off, all the while holding his laughing gaze on Pon-lor’s eyes. He edged a half-step closer.
‘I’m going to break you, noble brat,’ he purred, his voice silky with pleasure. ‘In a few days you’ll beg to drink my piss.’
‘I’ve had worse,’ Pon-lor managed to grate, barely.
The youth’s arrogant twist of the lips pulled back into rage and his right arm came up. His fist exploded against the side of Pon-lor’s head and sent him to the ground. Darkness and bursts of light warred in his vision. Myint’s hysterical hyena laugh sounded over him. Her knee pressed into his stomach, cutting off his breath. A gag was wrestled over his mouth. He was dragged through the mud and slammed against a tree. More ropes secured him to it.
When his vision cleared and he shook his loosened hair from before his face the troop had disappeared into the jungle. One guard remained. The least of them, a kid named Heng-lon whose appearance had so far evoked only sympathy from Pon-lor: beneath his bristling brush-cut hair the left side of his skull was flattened and pushed in, the eye on that side stared off permanently to the left, he breathed through his mouth, and he had the mental age of a five-year-old.
The youth clutched his spear in both hands, scanning the jungle, obviously terrified to be alone. Seeing Pon-lor awake he wet his lips and sidled over. Grinning, he set his spear against the tree then fumbled at the ties of his short trousers.
Pon-lor quickly lowered his head. A warm stream hissed against his crown then splashed over his shoulder and down into his lap. The kid giggled. ‘Always wanted to do that,’ he said. ‘No one c’n top this story!’
This is proving quite the test indeed …
I could give you a story no one could top. ‘How my head got to be on this shelf’ perhaps. Or ‘How I lost all my limbs’. But that would be too easy.
Pon-lor struggled instead with keeping his hands, tied behind him, in the meditative position of forefingers touching thumbs.
‘What’cha doin’?’ Heng-lon asked.
Pon-lor looked up, raising his chin and the gag tied there. The youth reached for the gag then stopped, thinking better of it. He took up his spear and backed away. While Pon-lor meditated, the youth set to starting a fire.
It took a great deal of effort to force himself to slow his breathing, but Pon-lor finally managed to isolate all the tension, locate the suppressed rage, and mentally uncoil it to ease his flesh into the requisite degree of relaxation. From this point he was able to concentrate upon separating his spirit — the Nak — from its fleshly housing.
What are they up to out there? Well, we shall soon see.
But he’d forgotten the psychic storm that was Ardata’s aura. The punishing stream snatched him and cast him spinning. He knew he was an instant from wandering lost forever when he remembered his lessons and forced himself to re-imagine his presence not as a solid entity but as downy fluff, as dust, as a handful of drifting motes. Now the storm raged on but passed through him, like wind through a tree.
He searched for Jak and his band of pathetic cast-off bandits.
Before he could track down their auras a blazing presence in the psychic landscape screamed for his attention. For an instant he felt himself shrinking in fear: was this her? The Queen of Monsters herself?
But the essence was entirely different. In fact, it was so entirely different it appeared almost alien. What was this thing? Was it a denizen of this jungle? Yet such awesome power. If he were a candle flame of presence flickering in the half-spirit realm then this thing’s projection here towered as a coruscating sky-high pillar. He dared to drift closer to the presence and cast a greeting.
‘Who are you?’
‘Who are you?’ a voice answered in his consciousness — a child’s voice, unbelievably.
‘What are you?’