"I had to let it happen," he'd once told me, "to feel it, not trying to ignore it, but to accept it and embrace it . . . and the terror and despair right alongside. I told myself that this was my life, and if it was to have meaning, then that meaning would only be made manifest by experiencing every part and portion of it, even the very end."
I inhaled the sour air of my silent prison, the stink of my fear. The oculus spun, cooling my sweat. Did I have that kind of strength? Not to fight, not to endure, but to embrace?
Carefully I exhaled, trying to imagine that tiny plume of breath rising through a room of unknown size, leaking through its cracks and pores into the vastness of Gondai's desert. I imagined my mind floating upward with it, and from that lofty height I looked down upon myself and considered all that had happened to me.
The desert wind blew outside this chamber. The flat silver sun wheeled across the flat silver sky. I could not see or hear or feel these things. But I believed them. Accepted them.
The shellstone had crept to the corners of my eyes. Instead of shoving that marrow-deep dread aside, I inhaled and exhaled, breathing my fear, understanding that it was and would ever be a part of me. My only task was to explore it and see what it might reveal about the world. Next, consider thirst. . . .
I worked at this for hours. Eventually I moved— breathed too deep or trembled with fear or thirst or longing—and my visions came ravening. But eventually I fought my way out once more and worked again at experiencing and embracing my life and death, hoping to discover my place in the universe. The exercise gave me some semblance of balance, some semblance of peace to leaven my terror.
Unfortunately, upon each subsequent waking I found it more difficult to maintain my state of quiet, not less. The periods of control grew shorter and shorter, and the potency of my visions seemed multiplied by each respite, so that I worried that my efforts were speeding my inevitable disintegration. But I clung to this semblance of sanity, even when I felt the burning rush that signaled the onset of my dreams. Madness. . . .
As these cycles of unsleep and waking passed, something new began to grow inside me, an immense and subtle potency, half familiar, half strange, that filled the cracks and crevices of my flesh and spirit. After a while its sheer enormity itched my skin and stretched and strummed my idle muscles like harp strings. Power . . .
Delirious with terror, I lay in that everlasting darkness trying not to move for one more heartbeat, trying to delay the inevitable. It might take one hour or one day or one turning of Gondai's moon, but I knew I would soon be quite mad and quite invincible, Dieste the Destroyer, the Fourth and only Lord of Zhev'Na, and I would destroy D'Arnath's Bridge and everything it protected. How would I be able to embrace that?
Chapter 23
Paulo and I had been on the desert road for seven days before he allowed himself to go completely to sleep. As he was so much taller, stronger, and more experienced, it was gratifying that he took my capabilities so seriously. I wasn't bothered by the lack of conversation as the white-tipped mountains and the last pale swathes of green slipped farther beyond the horizon with each day's journey. I already knew he wasn't a particularly talkative person, and I had a lot to think about.
Lady Seriana had agreed to get a letter to my father for me. I didn't want him to worry that I was embarked on a journey of vengeance. Discovery was a far better word. Sometime in the past days I'd begun searching— not willingly, not without diversion, not without error— for truth instead of evidence. Papa would like that. A Speaker lived for truth. But I didn't like changes going on inside me without my direction. I wished I had time to talk to him about them, but time was precious. Paulo and I had set out within a few hours of Lady Seriana's command.
For a thousand years the road to Zhev'Na had been hidden, masked by the power of the Lords so that one could wander the trackless desert for a lifetime without happening upon it. After the fall of the Lords, Geographers had found the remnants of the fortress within a few days. By Paulo's reckoning it should take us a little less than three weeks to get there.
A portal would have been very nice. But, even believing the Lords were dead and their lair in ruins, no one had felt comfortable opening a permanent portal between Avonar and Zhev'Na; a thousand years of terror could not be discounted overnight. And, now that the Zhid were on the attack again, no one would dare risk it, nor would anyone be fool enough to expend so much power on an uncertain mission. Portal-making, while not one of the Hundred Talents, and thus theoretically possible for any Dar'Nethi, was the province of those with exceptional power and a special knack for it, something like those who can mind-speak or those who have a bent for geometry. Aimee had said that the few people she knew who had power enough had already gone off to serve the prince or Je'Reint. So Paulo and I were left to cross the barrens on horseback and on foot.
Had we been on a mere riding adventure, I would have relished the journey. The Wastes were changing. Beyond the last green outpost of the Gardeners, the land remained a desolation of stark red cliffs amid stretches of shifting dunes, dry, cracked lake beds, and a mix of hard-packed dirt and rock. But where once only a few kibbazi and an occasional lizard had survived, we saw numerous hints of renewaclass="underline" a small herd of oryx, pockets of tough grayish grass, an occasional fox. Day after day we saw thornbushes blooming—ordinarily the tiny white flowers were visible only on the one day in five hundred that rain came to the desert. The sun was still voracious, but not as severe as in the days of my captivity. Wispy clouds drifted overhead. The cool of morning lasted a bit longer, and the afternoon heat waned earlier. On one or two days I caught the scent of rain on the evening wind, and saw the gray rain-veils hanging over the horizon behind us. But the moisture did not touch the ground.
Paulo pushed us hard. I knew why. The bloody gloves were very much in my thoughts, too. But finding myself in the desert with five dead horses and a hostile man was not something to anticipate with any pleasure, either. So I kept yelling at him to slow down to spare the beasts.
But I learned very quickly that horses would do whatever Paulo asked of them.
One morning just after sunrise, when the heat was already murderous, and the beasts and I were flagging after a long night's traveling, Paulo stroked his horse's neck and bent forward, whispering something that made the horse lift his head and step smartly up the hard-baked trail. The simple marvel of it made me break our usual silence. "I wish you would tell me whatever you're telling him. I could use a bit of encouragement right now."
"Nothing special. Only things as a horse likes to hear."
I shifted uncomfortably in the saddle. My backside felt like raw meat. Pounded raw meat. "I would think that knowing what a horse likes to hear is fairly special in itself. How did you come by such knowledge?"
"Had it since I can remember."
He wasn't going to make this easy.
"I'm not going to kill him," I said, grimacing as I urged my horse upward until we were alongside him.
"No. You're not."
This was clearly a statement of incontrovertible fact, having nothing to do with my intent. I found that most annoying.
"What if you had evidence that he'd turned—that he was one of the Lords again and you were the only one to prevent him having his way? What would you do then?"
Paulo's glance could have split granite. "I had evidence once. Evidence from my own eyes. If things had been different by five heartbeats, I would have killed him, and you would still be wearing your collar—or you'd be dead. The evidence was wrong. He will never be one of them again. Never. And the one that touches him without his leave—anyone—will pay for it."