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.”
All Dar’Nethi were born with the power for sorcery. It was a part of us, Notole said, just like our ability to think or to speak or to read. And just like those things, it required only a little teaching to be able to use it. But to work any significant sorcery, one needed more power than what just happened to be inside you.
The Dar’Nethi increased their power using their experiences as they went about their lives, by observing and thinking and holding on to the images and feelings. “The fairy dance,” Notole called it. “They are so limited in their vision, they let the most magnificent of all gifts wither from boredom, tiptoeing through the universe like children at a glassmaker’s shop afraid to touch anything. But you, my young Prince, can dismiss their foolish limitations. Look beyond yourself, and you can have all the power you wish in an instant. Here, take this stone”-she set an ordinary piece of the red desert rock in my hand-“and look on it. Consider it. Focus your inner eye on this worthless piece of nothing, and seek out its true parts in your mind, the essence that makes it a stone rather than a tree or a frog.”
She guided me through the jewels in my ear, helping me to think of the stone and the gritty sand that made it… and before very long, I felt a small, pulsing heaviness-not in my hand-but in my mind where I held the image of the stone.
“Now take that weight… that morsel of life’s essence that exists in this worthless stone… and draw it into yourself… into that place we have visited before where your power lies, that you can shape to your will.”
I did as she said and felt much like I did after drinking cavet in the morning, a little bit stronger, a little bit more awake. And then I lifted my left hand, as she directed me, and thought about light… and a flame shot from the end of my fingers. It lasted only for a moment, but I had never made anything so bright. And it had never been so easy.
“There, you see, young Lord? This is only the beginning.”
“More. I want to do more, Notole.” The excitement of it had me ready to burst. All the things I could do…
She laughed. “And so we shall, but we are going to need a new stone.”
I looked in my hand, and indeed the red stone had crumbled to dust. “No one will care,” I said. “It was only a stone.”
“Exactly so.” She laughed again and gave me another stone.
Notole taught me many things in that dark room. Some were interesting and useful, and some were unpleasant, and some were vile and wicked. “… but necessary to know, for your enemies will stop at nothing to destroy you. You must be ready for them. Sometimes even your allies will be distasteful to you, and you must know how to control them. Your power is everything. Once you rule as you are meant to do, you can afford to pick and choose your ways of dealing with your enemies… and your friends.”
We spent days and days working on how to build power-from rocks, from broken pots and cups and paper and yarn, from objects of all kinds. Then she brought in plants and small trees and mice and kibbazi, and I learned that the power you could take from things that lived was much stronger than what you got from rocks and pots and wood. Nothing much was left of the things when we were through with them. It was a good way to make use of things that were worthless or ugly or broken.