Holder of Lightning (46 page)

They came finally to a set of ornate, twin doors of bronze, the metal cast with curling flourishes and spirals that Jenna knew all too well: the same lines that marked her arm. Máister Cléurach pushed the doors open and beckoned to her to enter.

The room was large, with columns of polished marble in two rows down either side. At the end of the hall was a huge statue, easily twenty feet high, larger than any carving Jenna had ever seen: the figure of a man, elderly yet still vital. He was a seeming giant, his clóca white and flowing as if in some unseen breeze, his skin tanned, the eyes a startling blue under grayish, thin hair. He seemed to look directly at them, his expression solemn yet pleasant. His right arm was raised, the fingers curled into a fist as if he held something, and on the dome above him were painted the hues of the mage-lights, dancing in a black sky dotted with stars. For a moment, Jenna couldn’t breathe, staring at the colossus. “Go on,” Máister Cléurach told her. “Look closer . . .”

Jenna walked down the wide corridor between the columns, her footsteps echoing loudly. The gaze of the statue seemed to follow her, watching her as she approached. It was only when she reached the railing set a few yards before the statue that its regard left her. “Go up to him,” Máister Cléurach said. “Touch him.” She could hear Máis ter Cléurach and O’Deoradháin following behind. She went to the statue, her head reaching only halfway to his knee. She spread her left hand on the leg, expecting to feel cold, painted marble.

The leg was warm, and the flesh seemed to yield under her touch. She drew her hand back with a gasp, half-expecting the giant to be looking down at her with a sardonic grin. “That is the founder of our order and its first Máister—Tadhg O’Coulghan, Holder of Lámh Shábhála and the da of Severii O’Coulghan, who would be the Last Holder.” Jenna could hear amusement in Máister Cléurach’s voice. “And no sculptor carved this image of him. No, the chisel was Lámh Shábhála, the marble the stuff of the mage-lights, and the artist Severii. He made this image of his da with the dying power of the cloch in the last days of the mage-lights.” Máister Cléurach gave a soft laugh. “It startles all the acolytes in the same way, the first time they touch it. The statue has remained warm and soft and lifelike for over seven centuries now.”

“I’ve never seen anything to equal it,” Jenna said. She touched the statue again, wonderingly. The detail was exquisite: the pores of the skin, the fine hair of the legs. She almost expected to feel the pulse of blood under her hand.

“Tadhg saw that the clochs na thintrí were being used primarily as weapons, that the possession and holding of them was the cause of dissent and war and death.” Máister Cléurach continued, his voice reverberating from the dome above them. “He believed that they should be used not as weapons, but as tools. He and a few followers built the White Keep, using the powers of their clochs to create the buildings, erecting in a few years the work it would have taken hundred of laborers and artisans a dozen years or more to create. Yet as the Holder of Lámh Shábhála, he also could sense that the mage-lights were beginning to weaken, that the time was approaching when they would die completely and the power in the clochs would vanish with them. He was right, for that would happen in his son Severii’s holding. Tadhg felt that there must be a repository, a place where knowledge of the clochs and how to use them could be kept alive over the long centuries of their sleeping. That was the public task of the Order—to keep safe the old knowledge, to be the place where the Riocha and others would come to learn the ways of the cloudmage.”

“The Order’s
public
task,” Jenna said, emphasizing the word, and Máister Cléurach nodded as if pleased.

“Aye, and as you suggest, there was also a private task. Tadhg envisioned the Order gathering to it most of the clochs na thintrí after their magic was gone and forgotten. That, he knew, would be impossible at first, but as the years and decades passed and the clochs were given to sons and daughters, and then given to their sons and daughters, they would become pretty jewels, their power forgotten or dismissed. Then, Tadhg believed, they could be bought or acquired in other ways—when a tiarna sent his son or daughter here to be an acolyte of the Order, one condition was that the child be given the family’s Cloch Mór, should they possess one. And if that acolyte took the vows of the Order, then the cloch would be passed on not within the family but into the Order. As Tadhg perceived it, long centuries later when the Filleadh came, it would be those of the Order who held the majority of the Clochs Mór. It would be the Order that created the cloudmages. It would be the Order that ensured that the wars and strife and fighting didn’t happen again. It would be the Order that put together a better world, one where the clochs na thintrí were used not for death and fighting, but for life.”

Jenna glanced up again at the statue, at the face of Tadhg, imagining him saying those words. It was easy to visualize that kindly face speaking. The words awakened an echo inside her. Yet . . . “That’s an admirable goal,” she said. “But not an easy one. And ‘better’ for whom? The Riocha? That’s who holds the clochs, that’s who send their children to the Order, so even if the clochs hadn’t been stolen, you’d have been making cloud-mages of Riocha, and war is exactly what they’ve always used them for.”

Máister Cléurach took a long breath yet didn’t answer. “This way,” he said. “There’s more to see.”

They went out from Tadhg’s Hall and back to the corri dor. Máister Cléurach stopped before another door, this one simple, thick wood. “Try to open it,” he said.

Jenna glanced at him, but went to the bronze handle of the door and pushed, then pulled. The door rattled in its frame but wouldn’t open. “It’s locked,” she said.

“Keep trying.”

“Máister,” O’Deoradháin interjected, but Máister Cléurach raised his hand, finger to lips.

“It’s nothing
you
didn’t try, Ennis. Let her.”

Jenna looked at O’Deoradháin; he shrugged. Jenna pushed and pulled again at the door, then again. The third time, there was a
snap
and sudden pain like quick sharp knives ran up her arm. “
Ow!
” she exclaimed, stepping back and shaking her hand, which still tingled.

Máister Cléurach’s expression was solemn, but she thought she saw amusement in his eyes. “Most acolytes try the door at one time or another,” he said. “The truly persistent and curious are the ones who feel it, is that not so, Ennis?”

“Aye, Máister,” O’Deoradháin answered. “ ’Tis.”

Máister Cléurach placed his hand on the door. Jenna heard him start to speak, then he stopped and removed his hand. “You know the word, don’t you, Ennis?”

O’Deoradháin took a step back, his eyes a bit wide. “No, Máister. How would I . . . ?”

Máister Cléurach snorted derisively. “Don’t treat me like a fool, Ennis O’Deoradháin. I’m not as blind as some of you Bráthairs might think.”

With a glance at the old man, O’Deoradháin put his hand against the wooden planks and spoke a soft word that Jenna could not hear. A violet light glimmered around his ringers. The door swung silently open. “The ward was placed on the door by Tadhg himself,” Máister Cléurach said. “And ’tis no less strong now than when
I
was shocked by it, many years ago.” He nodded toward O’Deoradháin. “The opening word is at best an open secret. Only the Máister, the Librarian, and the Keeper are supposed to know it, but acolytes and Bráthairs have sharp ears, and some elders aren’t as careful as they might have been. Eh, Ennis?”

O’Deoradháin blushed and said nothing.

The room they entered was a library, Jenna realized, far bigger than the small chamber in the keep at Lár Bhaile, the interior airy with light from windows in the east and west walls, and filled with three rows of long tables. The smell of musty parchment filled the air, and scrolls sat in wooden notches along the south wall, while the north wall held leather-bound flat volumes. Also along the north wall was a large wooden cabinet. Its doors hung askew, torn from their hinges. An elderly Bráthair sat at a desk at the front of the room, a parchment spread out in front of him. As they entered, he bowed to the Máister and left the room, his right leg dragging the floor as if he could not bend the knee or move the limb easily.

“This room is where the knowledge of the Order is writ ten down and kept,” Máister Cléurach told Jenna. He walked over to the ruined cabinet. Shoving aside the broken doors, he pulled out one of several trays. She could see that the tray was lined with black velvet and separated into several compartments, all of them empty. Jenna heard O’Deoradháin suck in a breath as the Máister displayed the tray to them. “And here . . . Here was where our clochs na thintrí were stored: behind the locked and warded Library door, and the doors of this cabinet were warded with slow magics as well.”

Máister Cléurach dropped the tray onto one of the tables. The sound was loud and startling. “Tadhg O’Coulgh an’s vision was a long one and correct,” he continued. “We
did
acquire many of the Clochs Mór over the centuries, and we kept the knowledge and we held to his dream.” His fist slammed against the table. “And it was all taken away. Stolen just before Tadhg’s future came to fruition.” He glanced at them, his voice bitter, his mouth twisted. “The same acolytes who betrayed us let the invaders into this room, knowing the word as you did, Ennis. Librarian Maher was badly injured resisting the gardai; you noticed that he still hasn’t fully recovered. Keeper Scanlan died of his wounds that night. The acolytes and Bráthairs resisted as well as they could with sword and slow magics, and twelve of them died in the hall outside. The raiders took the clochs, all of them. I suppose I should be grateful that they left the books and scrolls or that they didn’t set fire to the library as they fled. But this . . . this was enough. You’ve seen the consequences.”

“I wondered,” O’Deoradháin said. “I wondered why there seemed to be so many Clochs Mór with the tuatha. Now I know why. Tiarna Mac Ard and the Rí Gabair, or perhaps the Tanaise Ríg—they must have planned this not long after the mage-lights appeared in Tuath Gabair.”

“Aye,” the Máister nodded. “The clochs are again in the hands of the Riocha, and again they are used for war.”

Máister Cléurach shook himself from reverie, standing again and rubbing fingers through the fringe of unruly white hair. For the first time, the frown lifted from his face, though he did not smile. “I will teach you, Jenna Aoire,” he said. “I will teach you to be the cloudmage who holds Lámh Shábhála.”

“You’d teach a woman?” she asked, remembering the acolytes she’d seen.

“In Tadhg’s time and Severii’s, when the clochs na thintrí were still active, we had female acolytes here, and Siúrs of the Order. Not many, true, but some of the Holders were women—for Lámh Shábhála as well as other clochs, as you must know. Aye, we would teach them. It was only after, when the mage-lights had stopped, that we also stopped accepting women into the Order. So few were sent us then and so few came here on their own . . .” Maister Cleurach shrugged. “Eventually habit or circumstance becomes the rule, and rule tradition. But tradition broken is also soon forgotten.”

His hands seemed old and tired as he picked up the empty tray and slid it back into its place in the cabinet. He pushed the broken doors together. “At least they didn’t get Lámh Shábhála,” he said. “Stay, and I will teach you what is in the books here. You will become a Siúr of the Order.”

“And Lámh Shábhála?” Jenna asked. “The cloch my great-da stole?”

“You’re its Holder and the cloch is yours,” Máister Cléurach replied. “I would be pleased to have the First Holder also be a cloudmage of the Order.” He gave her a rueful smile. “It seems you’ll be the only one.”

Jenna looked at O’Deoradháin, knowing what she wanted to do and wondering if he knew as well. He nodded to her. “Not the only one,” Jenna told the Máister. “Ennis . . . ?”

O’Deoradháin pulled his cloch from under his clóca. The ruby facets gleamed in the light streaming into the library from the windows facing west and the lowering sun. “This isn’t the cloch you sent me to find, Máister,” he said. “But I hold the Cloch Mór that was once held by the Mac Ards of Tuath Gabair.”

“And this . . .” Jenna reached into the pouch at her belt, bringing out the sea-foam green jewel that Tiarna Gairbith had once possessed. “This is another Cloch Mór, though I don’t know its long history.” She placed it on the table in front of Máister Cléurach. “I give it to the Order to do with as you will. Consider it payment for my tuition, and a small compensation for what my great-da took.”

39

Training

I
T was harder than Jenna imagined.

“Maister Cléurach is an excellent mentor,” O’Deorad háin told her the first day. “
If
you can stand him.” That wasn’t an exaggeration. The Máister had an encyclopedic knowledge of the lore of the clochs na thintrí and was seemingly able to call up in his mind the pages of the entire library of the Order, but he was also sometimes impatient with Jenna, who became his only student. He was initially exasperated by the fact that Jenna could neither read nor write. At first he refused to go further until she learned her letters, then a few minutes later reversed himself after finding that Jenna’s memory was quick, facile, and reliable.

“I suppose the Holder of Lámh Shábhála deserves different treatment than a common acolyte,” he said grudgingly. “If you weren’t halfway intelligent, you’d already be dead.” It was as close to a compliment as she was to receive for the next several weeks.

The first day, looking at a scroll filled with the bright, painted images of clochs na thintrí, she let the scroll roll itself up once more and she held up her own cloch to his eyes. “Why didn’t you know for certain that this was Lámh Shábhála, since the first two Máisters of the Order both had held this cloch themselves? For that matter, why didn’t Lámh Shábhála get passed on to each of the Máisters in turn? I don’t understand.”

“You need patience,” he replied. “The answers will come in time, when they will make the most sense to you.”