Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) (62 page)

And he wondered now, with the cool clarity of hindsight, why he’d ever
felt so compelled to leave. Yes, the rains would make travel impossible for
another month, but what was a month after two years?

Beltha’adi had challenged him, not Trap.

All the hot rage he’d felt for Gillard, all the searing thirst for justice that
had birthed the urgency to get back to Kiriath had somehow vanished. He
was left empty and perplexed, as if the man who’d felt all that and let it dictate his choices was someone else entirely. He rubbed the ovoid scar on
his wrist, feeling a slight twinge. Trap had explained the spore’s function to
him once. He’d not paid much attention because he’d counted it more of the
man’s Terstan babble. Now all he could recall was something about its ability
to affect-even invade-the mind, churning up an inward mist of thoughts
and passions so as to obscure any clear perception of the truth.

The truth that he’d had no business leaving. The truth that under all the
talk and fierce lust for vengeance he’d simply been running away. Yes, part of
him still desired that vengeance. And it appalled him to think of Carissa
caught in the horrible, savage chaos that was almost certain to erupt in Jarnek
this afternoon. But those were not the real reasons he left.

The real reason, the truth he had not wanted to see, was that on some
deep level he’d known that if he did not flee now, he would very shortly be
changed-profoundly and irrevocably. If he did not fill his mind with
thoughts of vengeance and glory and obligation and run away, he would have
to look squarely into the light of the Terstan star, into the credibility of the
Terstan claims—

And perhaps into the face of his own pride.

“You want it to be about you. Your sacrifice, your efforts to make yourself
worthy.”

It was true. And yet it seemed with every decision he’d made, every action
he took, he’d only made himself more unworthy. Almost as if he couldn’t
help himself, almost as if some part of him insisted upon showing him how
weak and helpless he was. Now he was trapped like a fish in a bowl, every
good thing he might have accomplished wrenched from his grasp. He
couldn’t deliver the Dorsaddi, couldn’t deliver Carissa, couldn’t deliver Kir-
iath-couldn’t even deliver himself.

He dropped his head back against the wall and shut his eyes, letting the
shame and self-contempt wash over him in wave after bitter wave. How
ironic, he thought, that I finally see the truth and it’s too late.

A strange sound penetrated his misery. He looked around, frowning, and
when the sound repeated a moment later, he realized it was Carissa. She was
sitting at his side, arms crossed on bent knees, forehead dropped on her arms,
and she was weeping unrestrainedly. After a moment he laid a hand on her
back. “It’s okay, Riss,” he murmured awkwardly. “We’ll be okay.”

The lie lay bitter on his tongue.

She shook her head. “No, we won’t. You were right. I never should’ve
come. Everything I’ve done, every way I’ve tried to help-it’s just made more
trouble for you! If not for me you wouldn’t be here, and now you’re going to
die, and it’s all my fault.”

“Hey, no.” He squeezed her shoulder. “You couldn’t have known who he
was.”

“That’s just it.” She lifted her head, wiped her eyes with a trembling
hand, and looked over her shoulder at him. Her face was swollen and
blotched. “I never trusted him. It’s just … I thought he was the king’s man.”
Her mouth spasmed, and the tears welled again as she turned away from him.
“I was so afraid for you.”

`Afraid for me?”

She wiped her cheeks again. “That you’d … that they’d make you face
Beltha’adi.” Her voice trembled at first, then strengthened as she looked skyward at the churning mists. “Ormah Fah’lon said you’d have to do it. That
even though the Esurhites were afraid, they wouldn’t break rank unless you
stood against him. And then … well, they were all Terstans, and I … I just
wanted to get you away, free again. Free to choose your own life. And all I
did was … oh, Abramm, I am so sorry.”

He pulled her toward him and she came, letting herself be comforted in
his arms. But her words echoed in his mind.

“Choose your own life.”

Choose. He snorted inwardly. Well, I guess I’ve chosen, haven’t I?

He wanted to tell her again that it was all right, but he couldn’t. All he
could do was squeeze her shoulder and smooth the golden ringlets that had
come free of their tie.

Oh, Eidon, I don’t want to die! The words burst up into his awareness, the
wail of the terrified little boy who still dwelt within him. The boy who was
suddenly facing the devastating fact that, after everything he had been
through, he was going to die without Eidon, all because of his stupid pride.
He would pay finally for his own folly with an eternity spent inHe gritted his teeth and closed his eyes, forcing the thought away, shoving
it back down where it came from, turning away from the images his mind
seemed all too eager to supply.

Suddenly Carissa hissed and lurched away from him. “Oh, plagues!” she
cried. “Cooper! What did he do to Cooper?” She moaned and held herself.

“He must be dead, or he’d be here now.”

“He wouldn’t be able to see through the illusion any more than we can.”

She looked at him over her shoulder.

“He might even have gone for help,” Abramm added.

“How? It’d be a miracle if he found the way back after that maze you led
us through.” She shook her head. “I wish now I’d let Rhiad take you. At least
you’d be alive.”

Agreement soared in Abramm’s soul. Yes? Perhaps he would’ve found a
way of escape. Perhaps he might have—

He snorted. “If not for you, he’d have pumped me full of hockspur and
I’d be a mindless puppet. Is that any better than death?” It avoided an immediate entry into Torments, his treacherous mind supplied.

Carissa regarded him soberly for a time, then deflated and settled again
beside him. After a few minutes she began to tug and pull at her sash, as if it
were bothering her. Then she stopped and looked down, pulling away a
charred strip of purple silk and something else-something that took his
breath away and made him feel as if he’d walked smack into a stone wall. It
was a Star of Life, shining in all its heart-catching glory, dangling from a
golden chain that looked somewhat worse for wear. The setting was malformed, as if it had been melted, the nearest links twisted and flattened as if
they too had been scorched.

She rolled the sphere between her fingers, its light spearing out between
them, its power lancing into his heart. The spore on his arm burst alive, and
with it came the familiar headache and nausea. But now, instead of distracting him, the spore’s effects only served to affirm the truth of what they
sought to hide. The power of the Terstan star was in direct opposition to that
of the spore. And if the spore was of Moroq and Shadow and Evil-and it
was-the Star of Life must be of Eidon.

He stared at it, transfixed, catapulted in a single moment from despair to
hope. How could it be here? His mind reeled. She had pressured him to leave
the Dorsaddi in part because she’d feared he’d convert to their religion. How
could she be carrying the very facilitator of that conversion, dangling it tantalizingly in front of his face? Unless she didn’t know.

“Where did you get that?” he asked.

His voice came out so tight and strained, she looked at him in surprise.
Realizing immediately that if she had the least idea what this was, what it was doing to him, she might throw it out of the cistern before he could stop
her, he forced himself to pull his eyes away from it and relax back against the
wall.

“Philip gave it to me,” she said finally, frowning at him with a ghost of
suspicion creasing her brow. “Why?”

He shrugged with careful indifference. “Just curious. The Dorsaddi have
a whole sect based around an orb like that.”

That seemed to satisfy her. She turned that penetrating gaze back to the
stone in her hand. “I think he bought it someplace in Jarnek, but I doubt he
knew it was Dorsaddi.”

Not Dorsaddi, Abramm thought wryly. He must have made it for her, and
she’s wearing it unheeding.

“It was supposed to protect me from evil,” she said with a laugh.

“Maybe it did.” He had his eyes closed now, had dropped his head back
against the rock wall. The stone must have been what enabled her to fight
the Command of the choker and to shove Rhiad into the etherworld.

More than that, he knew with a hot, breathtaking certainty that it was no
coincidence she had it here now. No coincidence they had been brought here,
cut off from everything else, walled away alone.

If he had doubted Eidon’s hand in his life before, he did no longer.

After a long time he heard Carissa yawn beside him, counting his own
heartbeats as he listened to her breathing slow and deepen, felt her relax in
sleep against him. When he finally opened his eyes again, he was shaking and
his arm hurt like wildfire.

“You must come to him as nothing,” Trap had said.

He stared at the stone, dangling at the end of the chain now twined
between Carissa’s limp fingers, its glow reflecting off the dirt-smudged fabric
of her robe, sun-bright in this gloomy cistern.

He was, certainly, nothing. That had been proved over and over. Unworthy, wretched, flawed by an indomitable pride, well beyond hope of ever
earning redemption.

He reached toward the dangling stone, extending a tentative finger to its
surface. It tingled beneath his touch, and when he drew his finger away, the
stone went with it, swelling, elongating, then pinching off to leave a second
stone clinging to his fingertip. It balanced there a moment, then rolled, cool
and hard and solid, into his palm. Staring into it, he saw something golden a shield?-fixed at its heart, and in that shield he sensed a presence powerful
as a storm-tossed sea, yet gentle as the waves lapping around a child at play
on shore. Not wrapping around him with confining tentacles as the rhu’ema
did, seeking to trap and devour, but waiting patiently for him to come to it.

The man he had seen.

The man … Tersius?

His wrist pained him, sharply, insistently. The old protests shrieked with
renewed vigor. How can you think of doing this? You’ll be marked for the rest of
your life. Branded again, and worse, you’ll carry a power that will cripple you
and drive you mad.

Do you really want that?

The question hung in his mind, and breathless silence pressed upon him.
He heard the rush of his own pulse in his ears.

I want … to know Eidon.

Through my Light will I shield and bless you.

He had found a shield in this stone, and without it he was helpless against
the Darkness-as all men were helpless, whether they chose to admit it or
not.

He swallowed past the constriction in his throat.

Through my Light will you stand against the Shadow.

The orb lay on his palm, a perfect sphere of perfect Light.

Through my Light you will know me …

I have hated you, Lord Eidon. Cursed you, fought you, forsaken you.

Yet I have not forsaken you, Abramm, son of Meren. Will you choose now?
Will you take the life I offer you?

Light flared, burning away the cistern’s striated walls and sand and
upthrust shards of stone. A man stood before him, dressed in white-Tersius.
And somehow Eidon, too, separate yet incomprehensibly one. His face blazed
like the sun, impossible to look at, impossible to look away from. His piercing
eyes were blue as the vault of heaven, dark as the depths of the sea, bright as
all the stars in the sky. They held all wisdom and power and looked into
Abramm’s very soul, seeing all that he was, all that he’d done-every last
miserable failure in perfect, searing clarity.

Shuddering with awe and self-loathing, he fell to his knees. “My Lord!”
he whispered. “I am not worthy.”

“No. But I have paid your debt.” Tersius held out a hand.

Abramm did not move. “I have paid…” Just as Trap had said. But …
why?

Those dark, light eyes snared him. He saw again their wisdom and might
and keen perception-and something more. Love.

His throat closed as he touched the reality of what that love had done and
borne for him. In that moment he felt an echo of the shocking, searing pain
of the Shadow’s first touch, the excruciating agony of abandonment, the cold,
soul-draining desolation of utter aloneness, where pain was the only realityall undeserved, the debt another owed and should have paid.

The debt I owed, Abramm realized. Payment for all the resentment and
selfishness and unbelief he had nurtured. For the defiance and the prideful
delusion that he’d become a hero because of his own efforts. For all the
affronts he’d committed and cultivated against the One who had made him,
and loved him, and even now kept him alive. Affronts of graver insult than
his small, wormish mind could even begin to grasp.

He shuddered again and dropped his head, choking on his own wretchedness. Shame burned in his heart, and he wanted to fling himself to the
ground and crawl away.

`Abramm, take my hand.” The voice was gentle, yet firm, drawing him
back out of himself, drawing his eyes up to those of his Lord. “I have paid
your debt.”

Hesitantly, Abramm reached out.

Strong fingers wrapped around his own; gentle eyes smiled into his. He
felt a rush of joy, and with it a golden fire surged into his palm, up his arm,
into his heart. Clean and bright and achingly wonderful, it did not hurt save
as deep, deep yearning finally fulfilled.

For the first time in his life he felt whole.

“You wish to know me, my son. And so you shall.”