“Ah, Ven’Dar, I don’t know… ” My throat was raw from the scalding water, my words little more than a rasping whisper.
“Deep breaths, my lord. Count. There are things far worse than the pain your body reports to you. Step in just here where the water is deep, and no ice can cut your skin. Don’t hesitate. Don’t think. Just do it.”
I stepped forward. My nerves exploded in shock as the icy blue waters closed over my head.
“Count, my lord, one, two, three… ”
… four, five, six… I sank into a blue-white sculpture garden, twisted frozen flowers, trees, gargoyles, every fancy of a demented artist who worked in ice rather than stone… twenty-five, twenty-six… Why did they call this one the Pool of Truth? Pool of Ice would be better. Pool of Madness. Pool of Breathless Folly… fifty, fifty-one… My head felt like to split with the cold. I was desperate for breath, my chest rigid, constricted… sixty… impossible…
But as Ven’Dar had warned me, some things are worse than physical pain. Truth lay waiting for me in the frigid depths - the face of every person I had slain, every person I had sent into battle to die, every person I had failed to protect, to save, to heal, all of them depicted in unyielding ice, eyes cold and empty and accusing… Seri’s face was there, so sad and alone, and beside her a newborn infant… Gerick, the child I had abandoned to his fate because I would not compromise my youthful ideals, because I would not fight… And Martin, Tanager, and Julia, our friends who had died for love of me. Dassine and Exeget, Jayereth and Gar’Dena. Gods, there were so many…
Suspended in the frigid water, I drifted from one to the next and touched their cold faces, drowned in guilt and shame and grief. To take life… to be responsible… to throw it away carelessly in anger or vengeance or thoughtless, pious arrogance…
How long I faced my accusers, I could not have said. Long enough that my heart beat with the ponderous pace of a funeral dirge, and the blood in my veins was surely turned to slush. My extremities were dead, my face numb, my heart a lump of ice in my breast. And when the cold and the guilt and the grief became unbearable, and I reached my hand above the surface, I could feel neither the hands that helped me out nor the robe laid over my shoulders. I staggered through the next passage unspeaking, able to walk only from habit rather than from any sensation in legs or feet.
The black waters of the Pool of Darkness lay in perfect stillness, swathed in shadows the diamond-paned lamp could not penetrate. I did not fear it. Darkness was exactly what I wanted. I prayed it would blot out the images of truth frozen into my vision. The water was thick like honey, and I embraced its warmth. It would be easy to make it to the hundred, to force myself to relinquish air and swallow the dark water.
But as I sank into the depths of the pool, I lost myself. Blind in the blackness, I quickly lost track of which way was the surface and which way the bottom. The thick water formed a barrier about me, preventing any part of me from touching any other part. Nor could I feel where the water ended and my skin began. I might have been a loose mind floating in the emptiness of a universe before its creation, alone with myself - both selves - my thoughts and my fear. After a time, set free from any physical containment, thoughts and memories floated away, leaving only fear. And eventually fear, too, dissolved, and nothing at all remained.
Perhaps it was my total emptiness that allowed me to float to the top at last. Gentle hands pulled me out, wrapped me for a moment in dry softness, and led me blind and deaf to the next pool - the Pool of Oblivion. The wrapping was removed again. Warm water swallowed me…
Gray light. A gentle rocking. Soft slurping sounds. Salt on lips and tongue. Throat, nose, eyes stinging…
“Come on, then. Half a day is the most allowed here, and you’re already well beyond.”
I knelt, pressing my head to the cool grit of stone, gagging and coughing weakly on the remnants of the salt water. The robe he laid over my back was damp and chilly now, making me shudder. Lethargy held me to the ground. So much water… such perishing thirst.
Hands grasped one shoulder. “Come, my lord, you mustn’t stop here. It’s farther to go back than to go forward, now. You’ll like this one better - the Pool of Refreshment.”
My companion dragged me to my feet and led me slowly toward the sound of splashing. Dull, mindless, I huddled in my robe, too weak to turn my head as he lit the lamp, illuminating a gigantic cavern with jeweled light. Greens, blues, purple, and silver were reflected from a pool of turbulent water. Water dribbled, dripped, trickled, and splashed on every side: seeping rivulets feeding the pool, a waterfall, its source lost in the heights, a sheer veil of shimmering drops whispering across a wall of green stone. I stood numbly at the pool’s edge, my ears and eyes throbbing painfully with the sounds and colors.
Ven’Dar removed my robe. “Deep breath, my lord. Enjoy yourself.”
He rotated me until my back was to the pool, and then gave me a gentle push. I toppled backward, the shock of the cold water forcing me to inhale just before the water closed over my head.
Through the brittle, shifting surface, I glimpsed a tired smile. “One, two, three… Count, if you remember how.”
Cold. Drifting… seventeen, eighteen… Something tickled my back… my feet. A school of brilliant red-and-orange fish darted past my nose. A warm current bathed my legs and dragged me deeper. The water was so clear… water and light, swirling, teasing, caressing… thirty-one, thirty-two…
Scarcely had the count passed a hundred and my body made the transition to breathing water when I was sucked into the vortex of the waterfall pool and swirled to the blue-green deeps, tumbled past smooth stones of purple and green, a lacework forest of sculpted stone, and a garden of sea flowers… a thousand vivid colors. An eddy tugged at my hair. From a crack in the rocks at the bottom of the pool a small geyser vented a pillar of bubbles that danced around me, as I floated in a hammock woven of lush fronds of water grass. The water that flowed through me bore the tang of new wine and commanded every nerve to wake up and live.
The pool must have extended half a league into the caves. By the time I reached its farthest limit I was swimming on my own, diving deep and rolling over like a dolphin just to feel the flow of the glorious water on my skin. I explored every crevice and eddy as I lazily paddled back to the beginning. There I arched my back and burst through the surface into the cascade, laughing aloud and blowing the water from my mouth in a fountain.
“You’ll have to drag me from this one, my companion,” I said, my voice crackling and strange, brittle like the clank of metal in the air after a storm. “Join me! While away the day.”
Ven’Dar smiled regretfully. “Another day, my lord Prince. Come. Time to press on.”
I practically dragged my weary friend through the passage to the Pool of Memory. “What’s next?”
“Every petitioner I’ve taken through has gotten frisky after the Pool of Refreshment, just when the hours start to weigh on me,” he grumbled as he held the luminant to the diamond-paned lamp. “I would order the pools a different way were I designing them. And I would vent this chamber much better.”
None of the pools had looked so formidable as the Pool of Memory. Thick, yellow-green liquid bubbled in the narrow basin, giving off an acrid yellow smoke that made my eyes water.
“Are you sure of this?” I asked, my exuberance quenched. “Others have entered? Submerged?”