Consider need, assert ownership, disrupt containment, trigger the destruction . . .
Unsure if we were yet joined, she looked down at the body she had released from D'Sanya's bindings. Infinitely strange to see myself lying there like a dead man who just happened to inhale now and then. Jen wasn't afraid of me any more. But the fighting revolted her.
I tried not to listen to her thoughts, only observe through her eyes and stay afloat in the tides of her emotions, so I would know if she needed me to take a more active role. She laid out her possessions on the worktable and retrieved the tongs and the saw. Fear and dread surged through her as she used the tongs to snatch the oculus from its cabinet. Her skin felt scored by knives. But I felt no faltering of will. She dropped the shining ring on the worktable and began shaping her enchantment. Deliberate. Careful.
Assert ownership . . . Consider the making of the object. . . Consider the reasons for this destruction . . Hurry .. . Careful. . . Make each element of the working complete. Replenish your power. . . .
Trying to control my impatience, I considered the things Jen had done in the desert and at Aimee's house. Her courage and determination humbled me. So many Dar'Nethi feared me, but few with so much reason as this woman. And she had uncovered my own worst fear. I could not rid myself of the image of the Zhid armies in the north and east, marching toward Avonar marshaled by an avantir, answering the call of the Lords. Were the Three truly dead if their desires yet moved their servants . . . their instruments? Destroyer. . . The name had festered in my soul for five years.
Jen fixed a U-shaped clamp from D'Sanya's tools to hold the oculus and took up the metal-cutting saw. The defenses of the oculus battered her with uncertainty and doubt. I offered what confidence and strength I could, and forced her to keep her arm moving though it pained her shoulder. Once the saw had bitten a notch in the smooth ring, I retreated again and allowed her to complete her magical construction, encompassing desire and will and transformation . . . and a resonating grief for the pain and death we would cause. As she reached for power to accomplish it, suppressed sobs shook her slight body.
I stopped her. Let it go, Jen'Larie , I whispered in her mind, trying not to frighten or overwhelm her with the direct contact, trying to mute my urgency and allow her to choose what I was prepared to insist on. Relinquish your enchantment so that I can wield it. Please. This I must do myself .
After all, I was the Destroyer. What was one more holocaust to my account?
To my relief, she did not resist. When I felt her release the solid weight of her enchantment—truly little more than an immensely complex thought bound to a physical object with simple threads of magic—I held it carefully, envisioned its accomplishment, hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling the shattering to come. And then I reached for power. . . .
I thought my soul might be sucked out of Jen's body as the power rushed out of me. The lectorium candles winked out, leaving the swelling oculus as our only illumination, a lurid pulsing red glow. Much more than an enchanted metal ring of the Lords' design, this oculus had been bound with the talent and power of every hospice resident. Bearing the substance of their lives and their sorcery, of their pain and diseases, the device existed with the same formidable presence as a phenomenon of nature—a glacier or a forest or a sea—though tainted always and ever with the most unnatural poison of Zhev'Na.
I fought to slow the rush of power and to focus our enchantment on the weakened structure of the brass cirele. No rough or halting application of power here. Jen grasped the ring, her physical contact allowing me an unhindered path to the oculus, even as it threatened to tear her apart. She trembled, sobbed, and swore, but her small hand did not release the burning ring. I could not help her, for I had to devote every particle of my strength and concentration to control, to ensuring that I drew on everything of myself that I could safely give. Thoughts and memories swept me down and down, faster, tumbling, choking as if I were caught in an avalanche. . . .
"Look deep and search for the truth . …" The man seated in D'Arnath's chair in the center of the council chamber leaned forward, looking at me as he plunged the knife into his own belly. The red stain raced to saturate his white robe. . . .
I wrenched my thoughts away from my father. My mind darted here and there: to riding horses … to the storms of the Bounded . . . backward to my childhood in Leire … to the day my mother came to Comigor, long before I knew she was my mother . . . before Zhev'Na . . .
The voice echoed in the temple of the Lords, with its floors of black ice and its dome of cruel stars. "The cursed D'Natheil. . . who would have thought he would become the second D'Arnath, the Tormentor, the Preserver of Prisons, the enemy of all our works? We'll have his child, Brother Parven . . . the boy already knows he is evil. . . we will keep him alone, teach him our hate, blind him and warp him until he carves out his father's heart. In one stroke he will destroy the Tormentor's Heir and the Tormentor's Bridge . . . he is made for it. . . the universe has brought forth a Destroyer to be our vengeance . …"
No ! Rage and terror yanked me out of the whirlpool of memory. That memory was not mine. Not mine . . . not mine . . . not mine . . . shut it away . . . I am not what they made me … I have chosen. I am not evil. I will not be their instrument ..
I slammed the door on memories. Concentrate. Focus .
The world feels wrong. The avantir sings of war to D 'Sanyo's lions . The oculus pulsed like a diseased heart, refusing to yield. I released my attachment to Jen's vision so I could no longer see the cursed thing. The power rushed out of me . . . leaving me parched. . . .
Hollow. Empty. Why did I care ? Care, like joy and sorrow and worry and honor, was only a word, thin and spidery and gray, unattached to anything of substance. I plummeted into a well of gray. Shrunken and withered, I huddled in its depths. Voices . . . weeping . . . invaded my gray world, one and then another.
"What's happening? Mistress S'Nara is ill."
"Lady, where are you? I feel so strange!"
I tried to ignore them.
"My eyesight fails!"
"What is she doing up there in her house? I heard thunder . . . explosions . . . great sorcery."
"Old Gerard has fallen and cannot rise. Lady! Are you there? Help us!"
I didn't want to hear this. I turned inward.
"Gerick! You must listen to me." Jen's voice, strained and harsh, shouted above the fading clamor. "D'Sanya betrayed these people. She used the Lords' magic to deceive them and rob them of their Way. Don't hide. Listen to them. Embrace them. We're so close: Her enchantment—the oculus—is failing. But you must give just a little more to break it. Don't hold back. For your father, Gerick. Have mercy. Let him die."
Her pleas pulled me out of the dry well. But I refused to think of my father. Rather I returned to thoughts of the Bounded, of the Singlars, of their strange place in the world. What would happen to them if D'Sanya gave this world to the Zhid? What would happen to them if I withered away here in this hole in the desert of spirits? They weren't ready. The power poured out of me. . . .