"Not at all. What a lovely young woman she is. Such power! Awesome in magnitude and depth, complex, as if she has taken all the dark and dreadful things that happened to her and wrapped them in her own special brilliance—quite unlike the power of any other Dar'-Nethi I have ever examined. And so much good she has done with it, I hear." He still didn't look up, yet his comments were not the type of distracted mouthings of one wholly focused elsewhere, and his tone was not at all forbidding. "I don't know what questions I could possibly answer about the Lady, but forge ahead as you will."
"V'Rendal has sent me to ask about the enchantment that kept the Lady alive for so very long unaged. V'Rendal says she's never heard of anything quite like it."
"Ah, yes. The Lady's ensorcelment was indeed unusual. True stasis. The body alive, but held in preservation. I've thought about it quite a bit." He turned another page, read for a bit, looked back at the previous page as if to check something. Then he continued his reading . . . and the conversation. "We can delay the disintegration of things that once lived: flowers, fruit, bread, wood. That's easy enough, though we cannot stop their decay entirely. We can send a living being into sleep, shallower or deeper, and prolong it for some fixed time beyond the normal span of sleep or waking. Not indefinitely, though. Sleep rhythms will reassert themselves. We can reduce their needs for food and water, cloud their minds. More difficult, but still possible. They continue to age, however. Slowly, perhaps, like the Zhid. The Lords themselves were near immortal, but they sacrificed much of their human state for it. We've never learned how to prevent aging in a fully human person. To weave all these things together in a single enchantment would require a great deal of power and skill. For the Lords of Zhev'Na, perhaps just possible."
"So you believe what she says about it? And you can make some reasonable guess as to how it was done?"
He dug a pen and inkpot from the debris on his work-table and scratched some notations in the margin of his book. "Oh, yes. I have no doubts as to her tale. But I have not the least desire to know how it was done."
Though his desires were not relevant to my inquiry, the absolute surety of his statement pricked my curiosity. "Why not? As an Arcanist you study complex enchantments, do you not? How can you resist knowing of this one?"
For a brief moment he glanced up from his reading and the force of his full attention was like the pressure of a powerful hand, only released when he turned away again. "Because it is a savage cruelty," he said.
"I don't understand. Certainly to imprison an innocent girl, separating her from family and friends, is terrible and wicked. But the enchantment itself seems no more cruel than sleep."
"But this enchantment was not sleep, madam-who-is-not-Dar'Nethi. One thing I have learned in my years of study is that it is impossible to completely suspend the activity of the mind. No matter how deep the enchantment, no matter how long the span of it, one would retain some awareness of the world beyond oneself. Perhaps the Lords learned to deaden the mind completely. But mercy was not in their nature. No, as long as the body lives, the mind lives. Therein lies the cruelty."
He turned his pages more and more rapidly, his eyes devouring the words. His free hand grabbed a fistful of grapes from a wooden bowl and popped them into his mouth one at a time.
"Do you mean that during that thousand years, the Lady might have been awake … or at least aware of time passing, of her surroundings, of all that had happened or was happening?" The thought of it left me breathless with horror.
Garvй nodded and swallowed a grape. "Not a pleasant consideration, is it? But considering the Lords is never pleasant. They must have set her mind wandering far from where she was, as we do with those poor souls in Feur Desolй, or she could not have survived it so well."
Savage cruelty indeed. Garvй's words bounced off the unpainted walls like pelting hailstones. Indeed all his words seemed to have more substance than those of anyone I'd ever met, and they lingered about his house with all his other scraps, as if you could pull open a drawer in one of his shabby bureaus and have whole conversations fall out.
I had heard what I'd come for, and I stood up to leave.
"Have you no more questions, my mysterious not-Dar'Nethi?" he asked, even while pulling a second book from a tottering stack of them and opening it in the clear space on his worktable, flicking his eyes back and forth from one to the other.
"I've a thousand other questions," I said. "But it appears I should not bother you with them today."
"I'd like to hear them. It's little disturbance. No one comes here." He glanced up ever so briefly. "You must understand, I cannot hold you in my attention as others do. My control seems to be slipping far too easily of late. But I am listening, and very curious myself as to what brings a lovely not-Dar'Nethi woman of amazing constitution and sensible intelligence to call on someone of my reputation to inquire of D'Arnath's daughter."
I couldn't help but like the strange man, though I was indeed coming to fear the quivering atmosphere surrounding him as I feared nothing else about the Dar'-Nethi world. V'Rendal had warned me that no one knew the limits or the directions of Garvй's power, as by its very nature it crossed the boundaries of all talents and grew as it touched each one. He never expended his own power except when gaining more from other people.
"I am interested in everything about the Lady," I said, settling back on the stool. "Her reappearance after so many years. Her story. The fact that she was in Zhev'Na for so long and appears . . . untainted by it."
"Creatures of the deeps! I know you!" In the space of a heartbeat, I was lifted from my stool and slammed against the wall by an invisible fist, my ribs creaking and groaning with the strain, though Garvй had done nothing but lift his head from his books in surprise and stare intently at my face.
"Ah, sorry . . . sorry . . . Forgive me." He jumped off his perch, dropping his books on the floor and toppling his inkpot, so that my blurring vision saw a great dark blot pooling on the sooty brick floor. But instead of coming to peel me off the wall and check on my state of health, he grabbed an armful of pots and jars and spoons from his shelves, lined them up on yet another worktable, and began to measure and pour ingredients from one to another of them.
Gradually the monstrous unseen hand that pinned me to the wall was released, and I took a deep breath. Ascertaining that my ribs were intact, I returned to my stool and watched him work.
"Sorry"—almost a quarter of an hour had passed— "my Lady Seriana of the world across the Bridge."
"How is it you know me?" My instincts demanded that I be afraid, but for once I didn't believe them. I didn't think he meant me any harm at all, and in fact was doing his best to preclude it. I watched his fingers moving furiously in a frenzy of mixing and stirring and measuring. I wasn't curious about what he was making. I had come to think it didn't matter in the least what he was doing, only that he was doing it.
"I was called in by the late Prince D'Natheil after your injury those many years ago, when you were dying and he brought you to Avonar because he could not heal you. I was unable to help. I never knew you had recovered. We heard . . . well, clearly we heard much that was not true. Prince Ven'Dar has tried to explain to me what went on in those days with D'Natheil and his son and his wife, but I'll confess, I've never really listened."
One hand paused briefly, as if an idea had occurred to him. Then he quickly bent to his work again. "Now, perhaps, I understand. Of course you would be interested to hear of the Lady D'Sanya's return from Zhev'Na because of what happened to your son there. I saw the boy, too, after his capture. I—" He shuddered slightly, and the floor trembled until he found a tarnished brass balance and began weighing miniscule portions of leaves and herbs, wrapping them up in small packets, labeling them, and tossing them into baskets already full of such things. "I created the enchantments with which your son was confined before his execution. So much sorrow. So much pain. To bear such grief . . . And here you are in my house after so many years, asking about the Lady and Zhev'Na, and I will not ask why, for I sense—I know—that if V'Rendal sent you, it is because someone of importance has questions about the Lady. I think it behooves me not to think of it too very much."