Guardians of the Keep: Book Two of the Bridge of D'Arnath (64 page)

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.”

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.

Sometimes I was in Notole’s rooms for hours without even realizing it, for when I went back to my

house, it was already night and I was ravenously hungry, or maybe the sun had come up when I thought it

was only evening. Sometimes I missed my other lessons for days at a time, so that when I went back to

my sword fighting, I was stiff and rusty. I was so busy with Notole and sorcery, I almost forgot about the

odd things I had found.

However, on one afternoon when I came in from sword training, a smooth, flat square of wood lay in

the center of my sitting room table. I sent my slaves to run a bath and set out fresh clothes for me, and

while they were occupied, I picked up the thing. It was smaller than my hand, plain and somewhat crude,

as if cut and shaped with a dull knife. A square of metal had been set into the back of it and polished to a

high sheen, so that I could see myself in it as clearly as a looking glass. Its oddity made me remember the

other things left in my rooms, and I rummaged around on the bench and found the stone and the wood

and the fruit pit with the shining red kernel.

Were the Lords leaving me the things? Perhaps they were a puzzle, and when I figured out the answer

to it, I would be ready for ... something. I had no time to think about it just then, for I was going to

Notole for the rest of the day, so I threw the things in a small box on the table by my bed. When I got

back, I would take another look and try to decipher the riddle.

On my way to the Lords’ house that afternoon, I witnessed a fight in the courtyard between two Zhid.

One of the warriors watching the fight told me the two had hated each other for hundreds of years and

had decided it was time for one of them to die. When I got to Notole’s workroom, I asked her why the