In these latest sessions of reliving my lost memories, I had felt as if I were on that long downward slide again, racing along a path that would soon leave me hanging helplessly in the air, ready to plunge into icy darkness. Whatever awaited me beyond the smooth surface-the enchantments that hid my own life from me-was terrifying, yet I could no more stop myself than I could have checked my careening path down that rocky chute.
Dassine had shown no inclination to let my difficulties slow my progress, and so, on the morning that my eyes opened of themselves, I was immensely curious as to what had caused this change of heart. Our last session had ended in late morning, and I had not dallied before falling into bed. Unless the sun’s course of life had taken as strange a turn as had my own, I had slept the clock around.
I shivered in the unusually cold air and put on my robe, expecting Dassine to burst in on me at any moment, raising his exuberant eyebrows in disdain. The water in my pitcher was frozen solid. Another oddity. My washing water had never been anything but tepid, even on the coldest mornings. Having no implement to crack the ice, I touched it with a bit of magic, only enough to melt the crust, not to make the water warm. Liquidity was sufficient.
Even the use of power was not enough to bring Dassine. The first time I had attempted any magical working in his house-putting out a small fire from a toppled lamp-he had pounced like a fox on a dallying rabbit, berating me for wasting my strength on “frivolities.”
As I stepped through the doorway into Dassine’s lectorium, the air began to vibrate with a high-pitched keening. The old villain had put a ward on my door. Dassine and I would have to talk again about honesty and trust. Annoyed far beyond the irritation of the noise, I searched for some way to quiet the screech, but to my amazement I couldn’t even find the door opening. Filling the space where the doorway should have been was a span of dingy plaster and shelves laden with books and herb canisters and uncounted years’ accumulation of dust and miscellany-all quite substantial. Instinct told me I should experience a “hair-on-end” sensation when encountering such an illusion, but the enchantment was so subtle, I couldn’t sense it at all.
The noise soon died away with nothing to show for it. My wonderment at his skill and annoyance at his cheek were snuffed out by the weight of the silence. “Dassine,” I called quietly. No answer.
Along with his restrictions on use of power, dress, speech, and questioning, Dassine had forbidden me to leave his lectorium unaccompanied. He enjoined me repeatedly not to trespass his limits, saying that if I trusted him in all else, I had to trust that they were necessary. Truly, I hated to cross him, and so I decided to wait before searching further, despite the strangeness of the morning.
The remnants of our last meal sat on the worktable: a basket of bread, now cold and dry, a plate with a few scraps of hardened cheese, not two, but three dirty soup bowls, and two mugs smelling of brandy-“Bareil’s best” Dassine had always called the contents of his green bottle. The candlesticks were still put away, the newest crate of tall beeswax candles unopened on the floor beside them. The chamber seemed no more and no less cluttered than usual. I sat at the table for a while, pushing around a few of the red and green sonquey tiles scattered on the table. Half of the tiles were arranged in a pattern bounded by finger-length silver bars, as if a game had been interrupted.
A small wooden cabinet lay toppled on the floor, its painted doors fallen open and several oddments spilled out: a gold ring, a small enameled box holding a set of lignial cards, used for tracing the lines of magical talent through a family, and one other item that fit in no easy classification-a plain circle of dull wood about the size of my palm. Embedded in the wood was a small iron ring, and within the ring was set a highly polished, pyramid-shaped crystal of pure black, its height half the span of my hand. I righted the cabinet and picked up the things, setting them back on the shelves. While mulling what to do next, I idly rubbed a finger on one smooth facet of the shining crystal… and my body vanished, along with the world and everything in it…
I hung in void of pure black midnight, shot with threads of fine silver, as if someone had taken the stars and smeared them across their dark canvas on the day of their creation. So quiet… so still… though beyond the silence rang a faint chime of silver, as if the threads of light were speaking… singing. In the farthest reaches of my vision shimmered a line of light, shifting slowly from serene rose to glittering emerald to deep, rich blue.
“I need to be there, I belong beyond that light. Oh gods, what is this hunger?” My nonexistent eyes burned with tears. My incorporeal hands reached through the darkness toward the light.
How do you measure desire? Those things left behind? To leave this physical being was not an obstacle; I’d grown to no comfort with it. To abandon my work, the memories of two lives so dearly bought in these past months, gave me no pause. The friends and family who populated my past were but ghosts who would be exorcised with the passage of that distant marker-the light that now shot violet, mauve, and purple trailers to either side, up, down, right, left in this directionless universe of darkness… so far away, teasing, tantalizing, luring me from all other concern. My kingdom? “I’m a cripple, half a madman, no matter what Dassine says. Better they find someone whole to lead them.” Like long, thin fingers, the silent bursts of color beckoned.
How do you measure desire? Those things to be endured? The void itself was colder than the winter morning on which I had waked unbidden, but the perimeters of my being burned-not the cold fire of the smeared stars, not the colored fire of the distant aurora, but a conflagration that seared through the barriers of memory… from the boundaries of reason. Roaring, agonizing fire… hot iron about my wrists and ankles eating its way through flesh and bone… I was enveloped in darkness, abandoned in unbounded pain and horror. The tongue I had so carelessly wished away cried out, yet I would endure even this if I could but pass beyond the barrier of light…
Karon, my son, do not… not yet. Come back. From outside the holocaust called a voice so faint… almost unheard against the roar of the fire and my own cries.
Dassine. My mentor, my healer, my jailer. I had to tell him where I was going. If he understood about this hunger, about the beckoning fingers of amber and blue, he wouldn’t hold me. I didn’t belong with Dassine. But he didn’t answer my call, and I could not ignore his summoning. I dropped the crystal, and the world rushed back…
My robe was drenched with sweat. Shaking, chilled, I stepped back from the fallen artifact that lay so innocently on the floor. Once I’d found Dassine, I would come back for it. “Dassine! Are you here?” I called. No answer.
Two doors opened out of the lectorium. One led into the garden, the other to a short flight of steps and the passage that took one into the main part of the rambling house. Taking the second, I wandered down the passageways, peering into the rooms to either side. Dassine was nowhere in the house. I wandered back to the lectorium, stopping in the kitchen long enough to grab a chunk of bread, a slab of ham, and two pears from the larder. As I sat at the worktable and ate the bread and ham, I stared at the odd device that lay on the floor and hovered so disturbingly on the peripheries of my thoughts. What could be the purpose of such a thing?
Karon…
I almost missed it. The call was half audible and half in my mind, and its origin was behind the second door, the door to the garden. Fool! I hadn’t looked there. I yanked the door open. Tangled in his cloak, Dassine lay huddled against the wall, a trail of blood-streaked snow stretching behind him to the garden gate. His lips were blue, and only the barest breath moved his chest and the bloody wound that gaped there.