Tired, distracted, envisioning our enemies tearing at our heart, I didn’t answer him. And so I failed to note the movement of his hand…
I was changed. Like a storm cloud suddenly bereft of rain and wind or a forest instantly deprived of trees, my life no longer had a purpose, and thus no meaning to be expressed in words. A hand took my arm and propelled me toward the doorway. My feet moved as they were directed.
“I’ll have to put you with the stable boy, Preceptor. I don’t like keeping the two of you together, but someone will need to feed and clean you. I’ll have to dismiss your servants. We can’t have them snooping about. And when the Prince interrogates the boy, I’ll just make sure he has no memory of his cellmate.”
The hand led me down two nights of stairs and through the cellar, unbolted a door, and shoved me into the dark. I tumbled onto a dirt floor as the door closed behind me. Even as I grasped to hold them close, my thoughts detached themselves from the world of order and logic and drifted away.
“Who’s there?” came a drowsy voice from the darkness. “I know someone’s there. May as well answer me… ”
So tired. I curled up on the cool dirt and weariness closed my eyes.
CHAPTER 22
Dull light beams pushed their way through the dusty air from a tiny grate close to the ceiling.
“Oh, cripes!” An outburst of words quite close to my ear. “They’ve done for you like they done for the Lady, haven’t they? Demonfire! A right fine mess we’re in now.”
A freckled face… a worried face, striped by the dusty light-beams… appeared in the air somewhere above me.
Jostling. Sitting upright now.
“Radele brought our breakfast and told me to see that you eat. Very kind he is.”
Bread in my hand.
“Well, come on then. Put it in your mouth.”
Dry… chewy… Teeth and tongue, wits like dung…
“Wasn’t supposed to work out this way. ‘Be fast,’ he says. ‘It’s got to be fast or we’ll all be dead.’ So now he’s out there likely dying, while I’m rotting in a bin of turnips. They’re all going to die if his plan don’t work. What in this cursed world am I to do?”
No cursing! No rotting! Carrots in the bin… turnips… heads and turnips…
A mechanical click… a buckle? a clock? a latch? Disturbs the dancing dust motes…
“Come on, horse boy. Time for you to do your duties as the Prince has commanded you. By rights you should be banished to the Wastes as a traitor, though my father says you’re only a pawn of the Destroyer. He claims that mundanes are incapable of any meaningful act such as treachery. I’ll have to consider that. I think you should be dead.”
Clambering… crowding… bumping. A door slammed. Click. Silence. Colors, impressions, bits and pieces of memories, fragments of music, of song, of stories or poems, showers of words. Words are my life… Drifting, pushing, and crowding one another this way and that, like gnats hovering above a pond. Swirling aimlessly like snowflakes in a circling wind… like dust motes in the light…
Directionless time… fading light… blindness creeping… Fearful blindness… terrible… not that, not that, not that…
Click. Snap. Searing brightness. Air shifting. Stumbling boots. An avalanche of turnips… Sounds, movements, smells… nudging me… wandering…
“Move closer to the pipes, boy. I’ll leave you loose enough you can tend the Preceptor, but we’ll not have you getting away.”
Intrusion. Crowded. Arms… legs… boots… Click. Snap. Darkness. Not blindness. Night. Quiet breathing. Lungs and tongues, inhale… exhale… smothering dark…
“Master Ven’Dar, can you hear me? Here, squeeze my hand if you can understand me.”
A nice hand. A working hand. Scars. Don’t raise your hand to me, young man! So much clutter in my head, ready to fly away… A sister’s ready hand, boxing my ears…
“Ah, curse all sorcery and them as practice it!”
The hand withdrew. Cold bread now. Bread in my mouth. Sour ale. Sleep tugging at my eyelids…
Light and darkness. Crowding, bumping, silence in the light.
Crowding, bumping, companionship in the dark. Hands in the dark. The cycle… whirling past.
“You know, Master” - the spoon popped between my lips yet again - “sometimes the way things happen just turns a man’s head inside out. The first clue I get, and in the same breath I hear it’s no use to us. I’ve been trying and trying to find out what was the list Radele used for the enchantment. Today I heard Radele talking to his Grandpa Ustele, the Preceptor, and at last I hear them talking about a list, and I’m thinking it might be the list as is needed to help the Lady and maybe I could somehow get away and find someone to come help her. But doesn’t the old man say that you’re probably the only one in Avonar as could say the ‘list of all the Dar’Nethi talents’? And your head is about as useful as one of these turnips.”
Drowning!
Figs and pools, pigs and fools…
“Ah, plague on it! Now you’re a mess. How am I supposed to feed you when I’m tethered to this pipe like a donkey? No way I could run off, anyway. Not with this magic they’ve put on me that make my feet like lead. Only reason I can talk is that they’re just not scared of anything in my head. Not like with you and the Lady.”
Dampness… on and under me… earthen floor… soup mud… farmyard mud… stink… of onions and pigs…
“I looked about to see if you might have a bit of writing in the house that might be such a thing as this list, but I’m so ignorant, I couldn’t even tell if it was the right one or not, nor yet what to do with it if I found it.” Cloth blotting. “I’m just not much good to nobody as doesn’t have a mane and a tail, am I?”
The list of talents… the hundred… of all the hundred you received only one… in measure large or small… your gift… to be with you forever… to guide your Way… Ven’Dar yn Cyran, proved a Word Winder this day! Fool of a boy, can’t you feel it? Look what you’ve done… best learn a cast to repair the steps or father will flay you! So difficult to be good at it. You can’t stay at home… not with power like yours… undisciplined whelp… Master Exeget will house you, as well as mentor you… prevent your killing anyone… Exeget, cold as an ice cliff… Be worthy of your people… be worthy of your gift… Truth is the foundation of a Word Winder’s power… Try again… and again… You are the living essence of the Way… Mice scrabbling through the baskets of turnips and onions and carrots. Onions rotting. Men rotting in the desert… dead in the Wastes… turnips and carrots…
Light and darkness. Crowding, bumping, silence in the light.
Crowding, bumping, companionship in the dark. “Can you hear me, Master? The Lady’s fading. Every day I have to see her. For a man to breathe on her would kill her.”
Light and darkness. Click, snap. Breathing in the dark.
A crash. Again. Fist hammering. “Shit, shit, shit! I can’t believe they’d do it! And here I’m stuck in this cursed hole, no better off than I was in Zhev’Na. And you no more help than a two-legged mule.”
Pinching my shoulder. Rattling my teeth. “Listen to me, Master Ven’Dar. We’ve got to help the Lady. Radele is going to kill her before the Prince comes back here. He believes that when the Prince looks in my head, he’ll find out where the young master is. But old Ustele told him that having the Lady around might stop the Prince from killing their son - just knowing what she would say about it if she could talk. The Prince has been in an awful battle, he says, one that’s gone on for days, but he’ll be coming here tomorrow. So we’ve no more time.”
Words tumbling… raindrops… hailstones… avalanche… buried… hurt…
“Do you remember how I told you to think on the talents of the Dar’Nethi? The list? It’s the key to the silencing. I’ve tried talking to the Lady to get her to think on it. But I don’t know if she can hear me or if she knows all of the list, and it has to be every one of the talents, so Radele says. You’ve got to name every one of them in your head, Master.”