HM02 House of Moons (14 page)

Her mouth dry, Haemas nodded, knowing she would have found it almost impossible to do Alidale the same service that he was now rendering her.

You must set it so.
Ellirt nudged the last energy pulse into alignment.
Then the next person who touches it with his bare skin will finish the job, albeit unknowingly. Until the pattern is broken, the latteh will have power over its victim, a shocking waste of something that can be put to such good in the right hands.
He hesitated.
Brother Alidale?

Alidale’s bony hand reached out and grasped the crystal. Haemas paled as his eyes glazed and his mental shields faded. A bead of sweat dripped down her neck. She remembered all too well the pain of the latteh as she had felt it before.

Alidale is in no real pain because he knows better than to fight it as you did yesterday.
Ellirt took the crystal back from Alidale’s unresisting hand.
And, frankly, it takes a Talent of Plus-Ten or more to resist it at all. Most people simply lack the strength. The initial shock of contact binds them too quickly to have any independent thought.
He paused, then nudged an energy pulse out of phase.
This is how you break its hold. I had difficulty freeing you because the more you struggle, the stronger its hold grows.

Alidale straightened, his golden eyes aware again, but strained and weary. “We can go through it again, if you would like.”

“No.” Haemas reached out and pressed his long thin fingers between her own. “I could never forget something as important as that, Brother Alidale.”

Then she glanced up to see Master Ellirt smiling at her in his old familiar way.

* * *

Poised at the edge of the icy pond, Diren swore as the terrified gelding’s hoof beats pounded through the forest. He grappled with its terrified mind, but the horse was operating on pure instinct and galloped swiftly out of range, so he turned his attention instead to trying to fend the silsha off. But, even though the beast stood there, less than an arm’s length away, so close he could see the hair bristling across its muscled shoulders, the damned thing had no more mental presence than a cloud. He could find nothing to grasp.

Behind him, the ummit was shifting its hindquarters and generating vague thoughts on the merits of running away. Switching his efforts to restraining it, Diren directed his two captives to dismount, then groped through the drifted leaves with shaking hands, without taking his eyes off the silsha, for his discarded cloak. The girl slid obediently down the ummit’s shaggy side, followed more stiffly by the doddering servant. The movement caught the silsha’s attention and it turned its blazing gaze on them. Encouraged, Diren had the pair approach the massive beast. The old woman walked in jerks like a badly manipulated puppet, her eyes wide and white-rimmed, evidently perceiving her danger somewhere in the back of that dim-witted chierra mind. The girl, however, merely cocked her red-gold head to one side and ambled fearlessly toward the yellow-eyed creature, holding a hand out to it as if it were someone’s pet tree barret.
Yes,
Diren told her,
think how soft that fur must be.

The silsha’s muzzle wrinkled in a hesitant snarl as Kisa climbed over a knobby root. Diren picked his cloak up from the ground and eased it around his shoulders, shivering so hard he could barely breathe. The silsha’s ears flattened as the girl reached out. Diren waited for the rush of its attack so he could leap onto the ummit, but instead the silsha thrust its great head against the girl’s palm, then butted her affectionately, almost knocking her over.

“Soft,” the child murmured. She swept her arms around the huge neck and pressed her cheek against the whiskery black muzzle. Its hot yellow eyes closed in contentment and Diren drew in a shocked breath. Only one person had ever been reputed to have that kind of control over these infernal creatures—Haemas Tal.

He fumbled for the ummit’s trailing reins in the dried grass, but the silsha whirled and sprang at him, snarling and spitting. Diren’s hand jerked away as if he’d touched naked flame. Ears pinned back, the beast settled on its glossy haunches, submitting again to the girl’s caresses. A few feet away, the old servant woman scuttled behind a tree to watch helplessly with terrified eyes.

Diren wet his parched lips. “Kisa,” he said quietly, “tell the silsha to let me go.”

“He doesn’t like you.” She bent her head over its neck so that her red-gold hair trailed over the black fur.

Closing his eyes, Diren strengthened his hold on her mind.
Tell it now!

Kisa screwed her eyes shut, concentrating, then reopened them. “I told him not to hurt you.”

Diren gathered the reins, swung up into the patched saddle, and sawed the ummit’s head around. It plodded reluctantly back the way he had come. The silsha followed.

Tell the bloody thing to stay here!
he ordered Kisa.

She frowned. “He says you must put back what you took.”

Diren glanced at the dripping latteh in his free hand, then thrust it out of sight inside his shirt. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“He says you’re stealing the future.” She walked beside the silsha, her hands smoothing the length of the black creature’s body from the tufted ears to the end of its restless tail.

Kicking the ummit, Diren rode into the surrounding trees. As if it were his shadow, the silsha glided after him, its restless tail weaving from side to side. He heard it begin to trot and looked back to see the long white fangs gleaming in the forest’s gray half-light.

His heart raced. He stretched his hand out to Kisa.
Hurry!
he said to her.
Come and ride with me.

She darted around the silsha and reached up. He grasped her wrist and swung her onto the ummit, hoping the beast wouldn’t attack him as long as he held her close. Silshas rarely left the cover of the trees. He would just keep the brat with him until he was out of the forest, then get rid of her. As for the sniveling old woman, let the silsha scatter her bones and save him the bother.

Inside his shirt, the chill lump of the latteh crystal pressed into his goose-bumped skin. Tomorrow he would begin again, and if setting this crystal was no different than the previous one, he would again have what he needed to control the Council.

Ignoring the black beast prowling stealthily after him, he began to consider which member of the Council of Twelve would be most beneficial for him to go after first.

* * *

Carrying Enissa on a litter between them, Healers Lising and Nevarr stepped into the Lenhe’ayn portal and in a flash of blue light were gone. Kevisson dug his nails into the dark finished wood. At least Enissa was still alive, although the two Shael’donn healers expressed doubt that she would live out the day.

Their diagnosis had shocked him. Lising had studied Kevisson with those classic gold Kashi eyes as if all of this were his fault. “Her mind’s been blasted,” he’d said, his tone sharp. “Someone obviously tried to kill her.”

The idea was ridiculous, though. He and Enissa and Leric Rald, the Council-appointed caretaker for Lenhe’ayn, had been the only Kashi on the estate last night. Rald was a stiff-necked old codger, but had no reason to hurt Enissa, while Kevisson and Enissa had been working together to clear his name. He had less reason than anyone to do her harm.

“The Council will want to question you,” Lising had said just before they’d picked up the litter to take Enissa back to Shael’donn.

Clearly they meant to blame this on him, along with everything else. He had to find out what had happened this morning. Enissa must have been searching Myriel’s chambers, but who had been in there with her?

Back at the main house, he searched every hall and room, questioning the servants as he came upon them. Few of them had seen Enissa, but, of the ones who had, all agreed she had been looking for Dorria, the old nursemaid to the Lenhe children—and no one had seen Dorria all day.

Finally, without waiting for Leric Rald’s permission, Kevisson dispatched every servant on the place to find the old chierra woman. Dorria now held the answer to not just one but two secrets: What had really happened to Myriel Lenhe, and who had attacked Enissa Saxbury?

He had to have those answers, no matter what the cost.

AS MASTER ELLIRT
watched, Haemas’s hand hovered above the latteh lying in the middle of the table, but she couldn’t make herself touch the innocuous-looking crystal with her bare skin. She drew a shallow, shaky breath. Ellirt’s workroom was dim and stuffy; she felt closed in, threatened. Gooseflesh crawled up her arms. She rubbed her perspiring palms on the borrowed white robes and resisted the urge to bolt from the room out into the clean afternoon sun.

“Let’s try again.” Ellirt placed a steadying hand on the nape of her neck and brushed her mind with his, offering strength and compassion. She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, savoring his familiar mental presence. She would have known him this way anywhere, at any time. She relaxed her shields and let his calm assurance wash through her.

When her breathing had slowed and the sick churning in her stomach faded, she steeled herself and managed this time to rest her fingertips on the latteh’s surface. It felt smooth and cool, altogether unremarkable, no more frightening to touch than an ilsera crystal. She hesitantly extended her mind, sensing first the enormous reservoir of power confined within it, then the tiny individual flickers of green energy pulsing randomly through the matrix like slim green fish darting in a pond. It was these “fish” that she had to coax into the pattern for healing.

—or to bind another’s will, the back of her mind whispered.

But she would not think about that. Reaching for the energy pulses, she herded them with her mind as Ellirt had demonstrated, nudging them one by one into the pattern that would generate healing energies. Even as the subtle harmonic built, though, she found the process unsettling, as if she were rearranging the living energies of a person’s mind.

She turned to the remaining stray pulses, but they were maddeningly elusive, and, in her efforts to bind them into the power lattice, she had to shut out her sensory impression of first the room and then Ellirt. Up close, the greenness had a tantalizing quality, almost a familiarity, as if she had known something very like it in some other place and time. She strained closer, then closer still, and suddenly found herself immersed in a cool electric emerald greenness that cut off all other sensation. Startled, Haemas groped for awareness of her body, but there was only cool green fire flickering all around her, like lightning in some unimaginable, silent storm, beautiful and disturbing.

Out of the seeming chaos, something seemed to notice her, something
curious
, as if the latteh were alive in some sense. She wanted to know more, but had set no controls for her breathing and heart rate and needed to regain touch with her body. She pushed hard in a random direction and felt the greenness give. She exerted more pressure and found herself able to feel her fingers and toes, the perspiration drying on her skin, Ellirt’s grip on her shoulders.

You must be more careful.
His relief washed over her.
You stopped breathing for a moment there.

Leaving the half-assembled healing pattern, Haemas fully withdrew her awareness back into her body, feeling again the rasp of breath in her chest, the flutter of her eyelids. Her hands shook as she opened her eyes and gazed up at the old man’s seamed face. “Where do these crystals come from?”

Ellirt pulled out a chair and sat beside her. “From the Lowlands, of course. There’s no record of them ever being found anywhere else, and they have been exceedingly scarce now for generations.”

A feeling nagged at the back of her mind, something she ought to remember. “Where in the Lowlands?”

“Only one kind of place, actually.” He sighed and locked his hands over his paunch. “I wish it were otherwise. They can do so much good in the right hands, but they’re only found in a certain sort of pool in the deep forest.”

Glimpsing an image in his mind, she finally made the connection—the strange, cool beauty, the emerald greenness, the potent psionic power. She leaned over the table and examined the crystal. “Small, spring-fed pools edged with white stone?”

“Yes.” His forehead furrowed. “They’re not common and the locations have all been mapped for hundreds of years now.”

“But—” Her throat was suddenly closed and dry. “Master Ellirt, surely you know those pools were made by the ilseri?”

“The Old People?” His eyes crinkled into a net of sun-wrinkles as he suppressed a laugh. “They’re just a myth. No one has ever actually seen one. Personally, I’ve always thought they were a story made up by the first settlers on Desalaya to frighten children.”

Haemas picked up the dull-green, irregularly faceted crystal, feeling the half-assembled harmonic within. “The Old People are real.” She focused her awareness on the remaining unbound flickers of energy as they skittered here and there in much the same way that thoughts darted through a human mind. She shuddered and turned back to Master Ellirt. “The ilseri taught me the secret of the temporal pathways.” She held the latteh out to him. “I’d swear this crystal is alive. I can feel it. And if they’re found only in the pools, they must have some connection to the ilseri.”

“Alive?” His white brows knotted as he accepted the latteh from her hands. “How can that be?”

“I don’t know.” She stood, a range of possibilities crowding into her mind. “But I must go back to my own timeline and ask the ilseri what they know about this. If these crystals are alive and aware, then it’s wrong for you to use them.”

“I agree it’s wrong to use them to bind another’s will.” He laid the crystal on the table between them. “But what about healing? How could it be wrong to save lives?”

“I’m not sure.” She felt as if she were poised on the edge of a yawning precipice, looking straight down. “I only know that I must find out.”

* * *

The answer was the same everywhere Kevisson turned: Dorria was nowhere to be found. Finally he stopped a strapping servant girl on her way to beat the rugs and made her take him to Dorria’s room, a small chamber adjacent to the Lenhe children’s bedrooms.

The room was sparsely furnished, with only a table, a chest, and a narrow shelf-bed covered with a faded-blue ebari-wool blanket. The unbleached muslin curtains were drawn and silence lay around him, thick as fog. He picked up the neatly arranged items from a low worktable in the corner: a worn wooden hairbrush with a few wiry gray hairs caught in the bristles, an embroidered child’s nightgown in need of mending, a simple necklace made of braided leather straps. He fingered each one until he had a better sense of who this old woman was and what her mind would feel like if he met it again in the gray betweenness of Search.

It helped, of course, that he had talked to her several times about Myriel, and had even spoken directly into her mind when she was overweary. He selected the hairbrush for his focus finally, getting his strongest sense of her when he touched it.

Glancing around the small room, he decided this place would do as well as any other and stretched out on the still made up bed built into the corner. Holding the brush loosely in his hand, he conjured up the old woman’s image in his mind. She was chierra, of course, dark-complected, brown-eyed, five-fingered ... simple and honest ... her shoulders bent with grief ...

He began to count his breaths, letting the rasp of the wool blanket against his skin fade away, and then the afternoon light dancing on his eyelids, centering down, focusing on an old, stooped chierra woman whose life had crumbled around her in the space of the last few days ... who had lost both the woman and the boy for whom she had cared since the hour of their births.

Sometime after he entered the gray betweenness, he sensed the muted glow of her chierra mind. She was fairly close, two to three hours away, perhaps a bit more. He saw her crouched against the twisted trunk of a winterberry, mud-spattered, her skirts torn. She was alone, terrified, dazed, and exhausted, her lined face wet with tears.

Relieved that she didn’t seem to be injured, Kevisson wove a silvery thread of contact between her and himself, then reluctantly left her in the cold shade of the leafless trees and began to return through the grayness back to his body. After what could have been minutes or hours, he pried his weighted eyelids apart and gazed blearily around the cheerless room. The back of his head ached and his mouth was numb. He sat up and massaged his stiff neck. Enissa had warned him against exerting himself mentally while he was still recovering, but it couldn’t be helped. The thin gray light slanting in from the tiny high-set window was failing and he cursed silently. He needed to replenish the energy that he’d just expended, but the day was almost gone.

He decided to scrounge some of the spicebread he’d smelled baking earlier and eat as he rode. He thrust the hairbrush inside his shirt and slipped through the halls toward the Lenhe kitchens, feeling a sense of urgency. Whatever turn of events had stranded the old servant out in the middle of the forest, he had sensed that she was still quite afraid.

* * *

After pursuing the stampeding gelding carrying his sword all the way to the edge of the forest, Diren finally sat back in the ummit’s saddle and conceded defeat. Evidently the damned horse had headed straight back to the Lenhe barns. No doubt, in the present state of confusion there, a stable hand would unsaddle it and store the sword. The worst that could happen was that it might come into Leric Rald’s possession. He would have to try to retrieve it later, when everything else had been settled.

At least the silsha had faded back into the underbrush as he’d neared civilization. Diren squinted over Kisa’s head toward Lenhe’ayn, then kneed the ummit back under the cover of the forest. The crystal shifted inside his clammy shirt and, even though he was shivering, a smile tugged at his lips; swords were nothing against a latteh. A blade only commanded the body and depended on the strength and speed of a man’s arm, but a latteh overwhelmed the mind, no matter what the degree of one’s Talent.

When they had gone far enough, he reined in the ummit and swung his silent passenger down to the ground, mentally directing her to sit beneath a forked tree. Damn, he told himself, but it was wearying to have to control her for so long. That dive into the pool had drained his energy, and fighting the cold required even more. He had nothing left to spare. Without looking at him, Kisa sank to the leaf-covered ground and locked her arms around her skinny knees, her eyes hooded and distant.

Dismounting as well, Diren tied the weary ummit’s reins around a low-hanging branch, then shivered as the winter wind shrilled through the trees. His damp shirt and leggings clung to his body. The lengthening shadows now stretched across the forest floor, chill and dark blue; it was getting late, but not late enough. He couldn’t risk using the Lenhe portal until later when everyone was asleep.

Kisa curled against the tree’s trunk, her compressed lips tinged with blue. At his directive, she had come into the forest without winter gear of any sort. Turning his back on her drawn face, he gathered dead wood and built a small fire, running through the old Kashi ritual to generate the initial spark. As soon as the flames caught, he cast about the immediate area and piled up more kindling until he had enough for several hours. Then he squatted on the upwind side of the fire and stretched his hands to the yellow flames, letting the crackling warmth drive away the last of chill moisture in his damp clothes.

The crystal pressed against his ribs as he shifted his weight. Which member of the Council of Twelve should he go to first? Which one would prove the key to controlling all the rest? Should he try Seffram Senn or Himret Rald or perhaps even that oh-so-proper lump of respectability, the old Tal himself? Provided he picked correctly, the first Council member to fall under his control would unravel all the rest. The Highlands would fall into his lap like a ripe fruit.

A snarl rattled the impenetrable darkness beyond the fire. Seizing a piece of wood, Diren thrust the heavy branch into the red heart of the flames until it blazed, then held it high over his head. Not more than ten feet away, the calculating yellow eyes of the silsha glittered as it sank to a crouch, its midnight coat one with the shadows.

“Tell the bloody thing to get back!” he snapped at Kisa, but the child frowned and turned her face away. After lurching to his feet, Diren rounded the fire and snagged her arm with his free hand. Her eyes came alive and he felt her mind writhe free of his mental grasp.

“Don’t touch me!” She twisted and sank her teeth into his hand.

Without thinking, he hurled her to the frozen ground at his feet. She lay there, one arm thrown limply above her head like the rag dolls that Axia had played with long ago. The rumble of another snarl startled him—this one from behind, though, not in front. Whirling, he saw a second silsha weaving through the tangle of trees and underbrush, and on its left a third, and a fourth, all gliding toward him like elegant black shadows cast by something unseen. Fear shriveled his stomach. Silshas were supposed to be solitary animals. He’d never heard of them hunting in packs.

He nudged the motionless child with his foot, but Kisa’s mind was silent now, blank as a wiped-off slate. He knelt and dragged her closer, seeing then the purpling knot on her forehead. The silshas growled a throaty warning and his hand flinched back. The relentless beasts paced toward him, their muscles tensed and ready, making no more sound in the dried leaves than ghosts. Diren seized a second burning brand out of the fire and held it aloft with his bitten hand, feeling the wind whip the flames high above his head.