Gerick

Something strange was happening in my house. Ever since Mellador had killed that slave to heal my knee, I had taken care of my own injuries. I could ignore scrapes, cuts, and bruises. Even gashes and sprains went away of themselves eventually. But one day a sparring partner got in a lucky slash and gave me a deep cut in the upper arm. I got back to my room before anyone noticed, and dismissed my slaves, saying I was going to practice sorcery for a while. I didn’t want them telling anyone I was injured.

I wished I could use the things Notole had taught me about slowing bleeding or making wounds not hurt, but that is one of the impossible things about sorcery. You can’t lay compulsions on yourself or do yourself an injury with enchantments, but that means you can’t heal yourself either, even if you have the skill for it. So I ripped up a clean towel and tied it about my arm. To get the rag tight enough with only one hand and my mouth was hard. I put on a thick shirt and a dark-colored tunic that wouldn’t show any blood, and hoped my arm would stop hurting and stop bleeding before I gave myself away.

When I came back from my hand combat practice after all that, I felt light-headed, sweating and cold at the same time. The pain in my arm had eased to a dull ache, but the towel and my shirt were soaked with blood. I tried again to tie up the wound, put on a different shirt and tunic, burned the bloody ones, and went to my riding lesson, but I had to cut the lesson short before I fell off the horse. I screamed at my riding master that his lessons were too hard.

I returned to the house just after sunset. All I wanted was to get to my bed, but I kept finding myself in the wrong room. When I finally came to the stairs, I made it only halfway to the first landing before I had to rest. Then I couldn’t seem to get up again. I thought for a bit about calling my slaves back. Sefaro would help. But then I remembered that Sefaro was dead. Dead because of me, like all the others. I couldn’t ask anybody to help me. And I had to be careful or the Lords would know everything; to keep up my barriers took concentration.

In the middle of the night I woke in my bed. Someone was doing something to my arm, and I was afraid that if I opened my eyes, I would meet the eyes of a slave being tied to it. But no rush of power burned my blood and no smirking Mellador showed up in my mind. The person cleaned the wound, put something cool on it, and tied it up tight. Whoever it was dribbled watered wine in my mouth, and I soon fell back to sleep.

The sun was already high when I woke, and my swordmaster had sent three messages asking where I was. But I told Notole that I wanted to work with her that day, that I had questions about making illusions, the most interesting sorcery I had learned so far. She agreed. When she asked why I was so sleepy and inattentive, I told her I’d been having strange dreams again-which I believed I had. But I couldn’t pretend it was dreams when I touched the knotted strip of linen under my shirt. And I couldn’t figure out who could have put it there.

By evening I felt sick again and came near losing my way from the Lords’ house to mine. I went straight to bed without any supper. The person came again that night. The bandage was changed, and cool cloths put on my face, and I was given sweetened wine to drink several times in the night while I drifted in and out of sleep. I kept telling myself I was going to open my eyes to see who it was, but my eyes were too heavy, and I didn’t really want to know. If I found out who it was, I would probably have to do something terrible to them.

Though I still felt weak, I was able to go back to training the next day, and after a few more days had passed, I convinced myself that it had all been my imagination. I must have done the things myself, but because I was feverish, it just seemed to be someone else. But then I started finding things-odd things-left here and there in my rooms.

The first was a small, egg-shaped rock sitting exactly in the center of the table in my sitting room. It was smooth and grayish blue with a clear vein through it. I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten there. I tossed it into the firegrate, but immediately picked it up again and ran my fingers over it. Just a rock. No enchantments attached. But perhaps the Lords had sent it. I threw it onto the bench where I left my grinding stones, oil, and rags for my weapons.

A few days later I found a small chunk of wood just in the same place on my eating table. The wood was dark and hard as iron, and when I looked close I could see crystals inside its seams, almost like the wood had become a stone. No one in Zhev’Na would have remarked it. I wouldn’t have either, except that I hadn’t put it there, and I couldn’t imagine who might have done so. I put it with the rock.

And then I found a nasty-looking pit from a purplish fruit called a darupe on my bed pillows. I didn’t make a connection with the other two things until I picked it up in disgust, ready to throw it into the fire, and it fell apart in my hand. It had been carefully and evenly split in two. The insides of the pit were smooth and deep brown, with dark veins like polished rosewood, and the kernel was a deep, shining red, with swirls of black in it. I tossed the thing onto the bench with the others.

Several weeks passed without anything more out of the ordinary, but then I returned from a long day’s training to find a small, cracked glass dish-a piece of a broken lamp perhaps-filled with sand and sitting on the table by the stool where I always sat to take off my boots. Why would anyone collect sand in a dish? There was enough sand in Ce Uroth to fill every dish in the whole world. But as I pulled off one boot, I found myself staring at the dish. The sand in it had not been scooped up from the ground at random.

It was easy to think of the desert as an endless expanse of red sand and rock, and to believe that any change in its appearance was caused solely by changing light, but there were actually hundreds of shades of red and brown to the land itself. Someone had collected grains of many different colors and laid them in the glass dish in layers, one and then the other, thick and thin, to make a rippling pattern. I had never seen anything like it. I turned it around to examine it from every angle. This wasn’t the Lords’ work.

“Well, young friend, how was your day’s activity?” Darzid walked up behind me and peered over my shoulder at the sand that now lay in a heap on the tiled floor. “What’s this?”

“Boots full of sand.”

“I thought the horse was treating you better these days.” He picked up the dish from the floor.

“Not since Fengara was replaced. I had to change to a new mount because the last one was impossible. And the new one isn’t much better. I still spend more time on the ground than in the saddle.” I let my anger and my bruises fill my mind, while shoving Firebreather and the Leiran boy and mysteries into its farthest corners. Ziddari was curious. I had to be careful.

“Your combat instructors report that you are progressing decently, that you work hard.”

“I don’t know. They don’t tell me of it.”

Darzid tossed the broken glass on the table, and then pulled up a few of the giant cushions that lay about the room, stretched out on them, and began combing his beard with his fingers. That always meant he was going to lecture me. “But Notole is worried about your studies of sorcery.”

“Why? I’ve learned to do a lot of things.”

“Child’s magic. Illusions. Games. You are to be the most powerful sorcerer in the universe. Don’t you think it’s time you moved beyond calling horses and lighting candles?”

“I’ve done bigger things. I caused an avalanche last week. And a few days ago I melted rock into a pool so that a kibbazi fell into it and turned to stone when I let it harden again.”

“Tricks. You must begin to study more serious matters.”

“Notole tried to teach me how to read thoughts. I worked at it, tried it with the guards and with slaves. But it seems like I just get started, and everything closes up where I can’t see any more. I just need to practice.” I threw my boots into the corner of the room and walked over to the table where a cup of steaming cavet was waiting for me. My stockinged feet left a trail of sand across the floor.

“You need power. You know that. It’s not enough that you let your power grow at its own rate. You must aggressively acquire it. The time draws near. Tomas’s spirit and that of your nurse cry out for vengeance. You’ve not forgotten?”

“Of course not.”

“Then you must take the next step. Learn how to take what you need. Just as you use slaves and Zhid to improve your skills for battle, so you must use whatever is required to make yourself ready for the other battle that awaits you. The Dar’Nethi are not what they were, but strong and intricate sorcery is still to be found in Avonar. They will not lie down for you and say, ‘Oh please, lord Prince, enslave us. Allow us to repay a thousand years of brutal oppression.’ Tonight you will go to Notole, and she will begin teaching you about the acquisition of power. You will listen to her.”

“I always listen.” I hated when he talked to me as if I’d never thought of these things myself.

“Good. And you’ll not refuse what she offers.”

“I want to learn everything.”

At least he took me at my word. I suppose he could tell I really meant it. “And so, how is your life here? Do you have everything you desire?”

“The Lords have given me everything.”

“Indeed. We always keep our bargains.”

After I ate and slept for an hour, Notole summoned me to a workroom deep in the Lords’ palace. The chamber was dark, except for two intense green lights-her emerald eyes.

“Sit here,” she said, and a path of green light showed me a backless wooden stool just beside her. “So you’re ready to take the next step, young Lord?”

“I want to learn it all.”

“And there is so much to learn once you have power enough…” She told me all the things I would be able to do once I learned to acquire power beyond what existed in me: read thoughts and induce dreams, lay compulsions that could make a person do anything I wanted, manipulate objects without touching them, and even change the weather. “When you are sixteen or so, young Lord, you will come into your full talent. Sometimes I can see what it will be in a child your age, but you are much too dark and complex. It will be interesting to see what awaits you. But for the war to come, you will not yet be in your prime, so we must develop what skills you have. And first and foremost, you must learn about power.”