“A child in the womb, a voice from the tomb, a generation of gloom if you serve not your doom.”
This time Torio heard the words he spoke-yet it was as if they were spoken by someone else. He had no idea where that doggerel verse came from, or what it meant.
“Interesting,” said Master Clement. “What about Decius?”
This time Torio was silent. When no involuntary words came, he said, “I guess I don’t know.”
“Probably because the boy has not yet done enough in life to establish a direction. Or to attract the notice of the gods, as some men would put it. At the present time, nothing in his life is fated.”
Melissa protested, “Then you are saying that the gods will send me to Madura whether I want to go or not?”
Lenardo held out his right arm, displaying the dragon’s-head brand. “In the days of the white wolf and the red dragon, there will be peace throughout the land. I had never heard that prophecy, Melissa, nor did I know of Aradia and the white wolf that is her symbol before I came to these lands-and yet she and I together are making that prophecy come true.”
“And when the moon devoured the sun last year, Tiberium fell, as it was foretold,” Master Clement added.
“But we had that one wrong,” Torio said eagerly. “It wasn’t the eclipse. It was when the failed Readers on the Path of the Dark Moon turned against the Emperor, whose symbol was the sun!”
“Misinterpretation is precisely why this gift is so dangerous, son,” explained Master Clement. “Look at the damage we did trying to prevent that prophecy from coming true.”
“The point,” put in Lenardo, “is that the prophecies do come true, no matter how we try to prevent them.
Melissa, my limited experience suggests that you would do better to take your journey to Madura with Zanos than to tempt fate by refusing. Your destiny appears to be to become a great healer. If that is so, then you will never be satisfied until you go and learn those techniques the Maduran sorcerers have to offer.”
” If they will teach you,” said Zanos when Melissa and Torio approached him about joining his expedition.
“The stories are contradictory,” he explained, “and yet Astra’s powers say the people who tell them to us are speaking the truth-or what they think is the truth. The Madura I remember was a peaceful land ruled by Master Sorcerers who kept the weather moderate, so that ours was a garden isle. Now, I’m told, they ignore the people’s needs, and the climate has become so cold that the whole land is frozen and nothing grows.”
“And the healers?” asked Melissa.
They had found Zanos alone in the suite of rooms he shared with his wife Astra, in the guest house reserved for Lilith and her retinue. Zanos still looked very much the gladiator, a huge, strongly muscled man who rarely stayed still for more than a few minutes at a time. His head was crowned with flaming red hair, and he raked it back with his fingers as he paced the room which seemed too small to contain his restless bulk.
“I don’t know what’s happened to the healers,” he told them. “At one time they were supposed to be the greatest in the world-but now I hear they have gone too far, usurping the powers of the gods. First it was restoring life to the dead. Then metamorphosing men into animals. My friends, ever since I left Tiberium I have been inquiring about Madura-and these are the stories I’ve been told.
“What I have pieced together tells me only one thing for certain: the rulers of Madura have stopped making their people their first priority. Now they live to pursue the limits of their powers… while their people live in fear. In fact, the slavers tell me Madurans go eagerly aboard their ships, willing to grasp at any chance to escape.”
“Yet you still want to go there?” asked Torio.
“It was my home,” Zanos replied. “I cannot rest until I know if my brother survived the raid in which I was taken. And… I must know whether Madura could still be my home. All my life I have dreamed of returning. I cannot simply forget that dream; I must know whether my fate lies in Madura.”
Melissa looked at Torio, but he said nothing. When they left Zanos, she asked, “Why didn’t you tell him what you prophesied?”
“Because nothing I could say would stop him from going. He has a legitimate quest, Melissa- what if he does find his brother living miserably under this new rule? Perhaps he can bring him back here, to live in the lands he and Astra will rule.”
“And?” she persisted.
“And… you must go to Madura. Better with a well-equipped expedition of Readers and Adepts than in some way we might regret. Besides, if these things I say prove true, then Zanos will have to return safely-and therefore so will you and I.”
Once it was decided on, plans for the expedition moved quickly-but it was only a minor concern of the Readers and Adepts who had gathered in Zendi.
In the past year, Lenardo and Aradia had had to put down an attempted takeover of their new government by what was left of the Aventine army, and put an end to the corrupt practices of Readers who had been a small but powerful core within the Aventine Empire. Their leaders might have died in the earthquake that toppled Tiberium, but having once broken their Reader’s Oaths they went right on Reading people’s private affairs and using what they discovered to extort money or favors.
Ultimately, Lenardo had had no choice but to make examples of the worst of them in a public execution.
The others were scattered to menial positions in Academies now governed by Master Readers who had sworn loyalty to their vows a second time, under Oath of Truth before Lenardo and Master Clement.
Lenardo’s increased powers meant that not even the most powerful Master Reader could lie to him, but it was Master Clement the other Readers trusted. Despite his protests that Lenardo had the greatest Reading powers ever known, Clement was elected Master of Masters, head of the Council of Master Readers. That, to Torio’s mind, was the best decision they had made in years.
Now that the upper ranks of Readers could be trusted once again, they were able to determine how best to use the lesser Readers on the Path of the Dark Moon. Most of those who had not been involved in the attack on Tiberium had simply continued with their assignments as scouts, messengers, midwives, and general finders of things lost.
There were thousands of such people, willing to accept the rule of the new Council of Masters- but there were also hundreds who now knew that they possessed minor Adept powers as well as their small Reading ability. Most of those who had joined in the group-mind that took on a life of its own to destroy Tiberium had spent the year since coping with guilt.
Not only corrupt senators had died, but innocent men as well; not only Master Portia and other Master Readers who had lent their powers to politicians and criminals, but other Readers who had honestly done nothing but obey the Masters to whom they had sworn loyalty; not only the tyrannical royal family, but also hundreds of soldiers who had been doing nothing but their duty, and equal numbers of ordinary Aventine citizens out to watch the Emperor review his troops.
The belief that misusing one’s powers weakened them was such a basic tenet of Academy teaching that many of the minor Readers in that destructive group-mind found themselves mind-blind afterward. That was a normal temporary effect of using Adept power, but for these Readers it continued, because they believed themselves no longer worthy to be Readers at all.
Within the past year, many had been brought gently back to their original small powers, and some were brave enough to experiment with Adept powers for healing or other positive purpose. But others had given up, and were trying to find a place for themselves as ordinary people with no special powers at all.
Because of the widespread corruption and rebellion in what had been the Aventine Empire, the savage alliance had allowed little movement across the old border. After a year of savage rule little different for most people from what they had experienced under the Emperor, it was time to allow more freedom to travel.