Warm, bony hands… enfolding…
“I know some of them: Healer, like the Prince, Word Winder, that’s you. Master Gar’Dena, may his name be writ, was a Gem Worker. There’s Builders and Horsemasters that the Prince told me of… but I don’t know the rest. You’ve got to name the whole list to be free.”
Gem Worker… left for dead like turnips left to rot. Hurts! Hurts! Forests rotting… souls… cabbages… black and moldering… soon to be dust, like the Wastes…
Raindrops of words pelting the sea. Tiring. J curled up on the cool dirt. Sleeping… creeping…
“No, Master! You don’t understand. The time! It’s been too long already. Demonfire, I know you can hear me.”
Slap! Stinging blow.
“Come on, sit up again. Think, Master. Radele’s killing the Lady. He’s put another enchantment on her that’s going to make her die if we don’t stop it. Is there a Singer in the list? A Tree… something?” Words hard-edged in the darkness. “You want to save the Prince, you got to save yourself first. I heard Radele sniggering at the Lady, telling her how he’s going to see she don’t save the young master this time. Oh, demonfire, Master Ven’Dar, you’ve got to listen, and you’ve got to think of the list. Right now.”
Hands squeezing cheeks and jaw… trembling now… suddenly cold as a glacier… cold fire…
Singer, Healer, Speaker, Word Winder… Hold yourself together, Ven’Dar. Ven’Dar the Vainglorious. Dam up the ocean and replace it with a water jar. Catch the raindrop words in something where they’ll make a difference.
… Metalwright… Sea Dweller… who battles the tide… Timeless waves… drifting…
No! You can do this. You know the list. Exeget taunted you until you learned them all. Do you need to stand on your head to do it? Say the list. Every name.
Stronger now. Builder, Tree… Delver, of course, Balancer, like the great D’Arnath himself and C’Netra, yammering, beloved C’Netra…
The list grew… The voice in my head… so loud… so hard… What next? Say them!
Gem Worker… Silver Shaper… and next? So hard to remember… leave it go…
No, hold on. How do you remember the names? How were you taught? Probing… digging… holding back the tide of madness. In the order of their discovery: the Hundred Talents. After Silver Shaper comes Horsemaster… You draw them from the depths of your being, not just facts memorized in childhood, but from the essentials of your soul, lived… believed… cherished…
The list grew.
Is that all? There are more, aren’t there? Think… remember…
Ninety and nine have I spoken, from Glass Maker to Storyteller, from Gardener to Navigator, each one a touchstone of our history, a fundamental of our life, like the heart of a mother and the hand of a father that shape the core of the family.
What is the last? Why do some say the list is complete at ninety and nine?
Because the hundredth is the myth… the Soul Weaver…
My eyes blinked open. I was kneeling on the dirt floor of my root cellar, cold as a new-caught fish and stinking like a dead one. No sooner had I voiced the hundredth name than the ocean of confusion had retreated, exposing shape and order like rocks emerged from a receding tide: past, present, future, memory, dream, knowledge, deduction… and dominating all of it, the driving urgency to go to the Lady. She would be in my parlor, sitting by the fire, lost in a sea of light and shadows as I had been. And close beside me in the dark, very close, someone else was breathing.
“I think I’m all right now,” I said, nudging straggling, greasy hair out of my eyes.
How was this possible? I might have thought another Dar’Nethi had spoken in my thoughts, giving me the names and prodding me to attention when I faltered. Yet such a speaking was very different, an intrusion across the barriers of self, instantly recognizable and traceable to the intruder. No one but my sister and I knew of “Ven’Dar the Vainglorious,” the young Word Winder whose first cast had landed so wide of its mark that his elder sister, the humble Balancer, had been forced to make peace with an entire village of infuriated Gardeners standing hip-deep in an ocean of well-intentioned mud. No one but I knew how I used the title so often as a prod to humility. And I’d never told even C’Netra how Exeget had made me stand on my head until I could speak the list. No. Though it was impossible, the words had been mine. But, of course, this lad had urged me to it.
“Thank you,” I said to my companion in the dark cellar, while I rubbed my swirling head and shook the last confusion away. He had fallen so silent while I wrestled with chaos that his dark, still shape might have been nothing but another bag of onions. “You were right. The list was the key. I don’t know how I was able to do it, but you were right.”
“Please, go to her,” he said quietly, demonstrating not the least surprise at my sudden speech. “Hurry.”
“We’ll both go,” I said.
“Can’t. They’ve bound me here and not just with rope. Touching the door latch makes my hand feel as if it’s being torn off. And you’d think my boots had anvils in them instead of feet.”
Stupid that I’d forgotten. I would have sworn he was free, running around me, hounding me like a sheep dog, while he pelted me with words. A foolish image.
“You’ve run into so many disadvantages in your association with us Dar’Nethi that you’ve forgotten the advantages,” I said, as I produced a soft white light from my hand, crawled over his long legs, and grappled with a tangle of pipes and rope I could scarcely reach. With a knife of flame I split the ropes that bound his ankles and wrists, perhaps a little too vigorously, for he yelped. The backs of my own hands felt singed. As he massaged blood back into his fingers, I countered the simple enchantments that kept him from securing his own freedom. “Now we can go.”
“Maybe I should stay here for a while. Distract Radele if he should come to check on us.”
“If what you’ve told me is correct, young Paulo, we need to get the Lady and ourselves out of this house at the first instant. I can handle Radele, as long as you watch my back and yell at me if he should raise his hand again. You’ve no idea how embarrassing this has been - to be caught like a novice. And you’ve no idea how lucky we are that I could come up with the list.” Enunciating the precise words in a mind scarcely capable of thought. Vasrin’s hand, surely.
“Go ahead, then, I’ll follow.”
Coaxing the smooth veneer of a binding spell from the door latch, I allowed my light to die and pulled open the door a crack. A stray beam of lamplight from the cellar stair invaded our dusty den. The faintest of magical feelers sent into the adjacent cellars and up the stairs confirmed that no one lurked anywhere nearby. Evidently our captors were secure in our incapacity. I stepped through the low door into my cluttered storeroom, stretching my cramped legs and stiff back.
Creaky old man. I glanced back to see if my young friend had emerged. Paulo had just stepped out, and when I turned, he threw his hand up before his face, as if to shield his eyes from the brightness, but not before I’d gotten a glimpse of them. Odd… something…
“She’s in your front sitting room,” he said. “They leave her sit up till a serving woman is sent in to her about an hour before midnight.”
“Are you well, son?”
“I’m fine. Lead on. And, Master, Radele said Men’Thor was on his way tonight, so as to be here when the Prince arrived. To be sure of him.”
“I understand. We’ll be quick and quiet.”
With what stealth a not-young man just out of a week’s trance could muster, I led Paulo through the maze of pots and paintings, crates of books, and extra furnishings I’d shoved into my cellars when I ran out of space in the main rooms of my house. We crept up the stairs. Perhaps I needed to hire a Builder to make my stairs less steep, I thought, as we topped the last step and tiptoed into the back passage that serviced the kitchens and the large doors that led to the front of the house. What nonsense comes to mind, even in the midst of great events. Did D’Arnath worry about the steepness of his cellar stairs as he built his Bridge?