The Bonds of Blood (38 page)

CHAPTER
TWENTY-NINE

_I
t always came back to
the
dream. What she was, what she had to
do. The dream was a looming presence in her mind, speaking of an
inevitable future event that she could not escape. The fact that it
spoke of something unavoidable made it more horrifying than the
gruesome images it planted in her subconscious mind.

Everything in her life, in the
teachings fed to her by her numerous tutors and the twins that she
lived with, had been preparing her for what she was, had been
leading up to the event the dream spoke of. Not only had they been
a prelude to her present life, but other events she could not
control were what the dream spoke to her of. Events in her life
brought on by the bizarre wyrd she possessed.

It always came back to the dream. That
is what Cianna had come to realize, and that was what she
contemplated on this cold night, staring out at the frost covered
grounds of the Realm Guardian’s Keep high in the Barrier Mountains
of the Realm of Earth.

She shuddered where she sat in her
overstuffed chair looking out the large floor-to-ceiling window
that made up the better portion of one wall. Cianna cared not to
think about the dream now, but its macabre visions swam in her mind
despite her best efforts to evade them. The dream was the reason
for many things in her life; things not inherently caused by it,
but instead that which caused the night terror. The main thing the
dream brought to her now was the inability to find peaceful sleep.
Not only that, but it spoke to her of one other thing: that
inevitable future event that seemed would happen much sooner than
she had expected … she was so young for it …

She ran long fingers through her wavy,
dark brown hair, and felt its silken length tumble around her
elbows. Cianna tried gazing up at the clear, cold stars high in the
black sky in an attempt to halt the memories of the dream. That
worked for only a few minutes before her thoughts turned dark once
more.

The trouble was not in what the dream
meant; she already knew what it was trying to tell her. Cianna knew
what she was. Now she realized it was a hopeless attempt to clear
her mind of what woke her; once she started down this road of her
past there was no focusing her attention on anything else, and the
dream and her past were irrevocably linked.

She turned her gaze away from the sky
that harbored (so the votaries said) the body of the Goddess.
Cianna figured that if the Goddess was truly living up there that
she would feel affronted by the gaze of one such as Cianna turned
upon her. She couldn’t help but feel as though she were lessened in
the Goddess’ eyes, though Natalia swore this was not true. Hers was
a holy gift, the votary had said.

As normal when she thought
of her past, she felt the necromancy swell up inside her, she felt
the wyrd of the dead slipping through the night, through the
darkness, trying to claim her, trying to sway her to Chaos. She
knew that necromancy was not evil, however, and that what tempted
her was something most people would call dalua in normal
circumstances, but for her, she called them wythes. The wythes
wanted her, wanted to use her. She knew now, after much reading,
that her personal struggle all her life would be in resisting, and
not becoming, a liche, for that is what the wythes would make
her—their agent. An agent of Chaos.
A
dalua Necromancer
.

As was normal when she started
remembering her past, visions of her childhood flashed before her
eyes, as if she were reliving them.

Her earliest memory of necromancy did
not happen when she was gifted the wolf pup at five from the twins
elderly sister Grace, but instead a year and a half later when she
was six and the wolf died. She remembered the pain of it now as
clearly as she did then, and tried not to think of how her little
heart had broken as she awkwardly cradled the dead dog in her small
arms.

The humming down her arms was something
new to her, but she had paid little attention to it in her grief.
Without her bidding, she remembered her fingers twitching, almost
as if they were flicking in pain, but the only thing she could feel
was a slight cramping, which made her cry out in another type of
pain.

She had pulled the hunting arrow out of
her dog Altavius with knowledge of healing him that Cianna (at the
age of six) should not have been privy to, but there seemed to be a
deeper knowledge running through her then, an old knowledge, like
the voices of some ancient healer whispering in her ear,
instructing her in what to do. She tossed the arrow aside and
pulled the wolf closer to her, placing her hand on his wound,
trying to stanch the blood.

It was then she felt the fire moving
down her arms, the cold, icy fire that felt as though it both froze
and boiled her blood with tiny prickles along her flesh. She tried
to cry out, but she couldn’t. There was something else coursing
through her, a force that was not her own, something that was using
her body to get back to where it was supposed to (by all rights)
be.

She was ravenous. She could smell the
blood in the air; feel the saliva that scent generated in her
mouth. Cianna felt the need for raw meat, the desire to hamstring a
deer hunted by night.

No matter how long she lived, that
memory of Alt moving through her, using her as a conduit from the
Ever After to his body, would never leave her. Neither would
sensing his hunger, his need, his bloodlust. It was something
Cianna firmly believed that no human, let alone a child, should
ever have to feel, nothing they should ever have to
experience.

Cianna had then felt the fur ripple
under her fingers as the Alt’s spirit slipped from her twitching
fingers into the blood matted hair and then into muscle, on its
quest to wherever a soul was housed in a body. She felt muscle
contract as he came back to life, and before she knew it the wolf
was fighting out of her grasp shocked from what he had seen and
what he was now experiencing. Cianna had never experience being
dead one moment and then living the next, but she suspected it
would be something like waking suddenly from a dream and expecting
to see those dream images before your eyes, and instead only waking
to that which you had known before you were claimed by
sleep.

All she did know was that no sooner was
Altavius out of her loving embrace than she was getting sick all
over a wild rose bush, her body somehow trying to rid itself of the
images Alt moving through her had brought to her senses. It didn’t
help, but once emptying her stomach she had nothing left to deposit
on the roses, and so moved on shaking knees back to where she had
rested before with her dead animal.

After many experiences with the wolf,
it became apparent that he was always going to be with her. The
twins had disposed of him properly thereafter, not allowing the
reanimated animal back into the keep. They had insisted that things
brought back improperly as Alt had been could bring other things
with them. It seemed a soul could bring a wythe back with them, and
that was not something the twins wanted to contend with.

It was at that early age that Cianna
had shared a very philosophical conversation with the sisters, and
they had told her much (most of which she did not understand) about
herself, spirits, wyrd, and why Altavius had come back. Her
philosophical training did not stop there, and she went daily to
the oratory in the keep to visit with the resident votary, Natalia.
Natalia taught her of the Goddess and the Carloso. Cianna learned
much about religion and in her own way became devoutly religious,
though not in the way that most in the Great Realms were. Being a
necromancer—even untrained—gave her inklings into the way of the
spirit that most people, even some votaries, could not fully
grasp.

They had given Alt a proper burning,
releasing his soul to the Goddess, but it seemed there was one
other person he desired to be with. Upon waking from an unpleasant
dream in her seventh year, Cianna was not at all surprised to find
the spirit of the wolf curled up at the foot of her bed, watching
her with its tongue hanging out stupidly, waiting for a petting
that would never again come from physical hands.

It was not long after she started
training with the votary that the twins Sara and Annbell began
teaching her of wyrd. They could not give her specific lessons as
none of them had the same abilities, but they were able to share
with her how their wyrd worked, and the principles on which it
worked.

Schooling for her started later, as
they did not feel as though learning of arithmetic, science, and
history were as important as her ability to read and comprehend
about wyrd. So it was that Cianna learned at a very early age how
to read, and by twelve she was allowed in the libraries of the keep
where she had only minimal problems reading what was
there.

It took her two years before she found
anything there about necromancy, and when she did it became her
newest obsession. The twins left her at it for some time, not
allowing her tutors, the votary, or even themselves to infringe on
her self-teaching. Sara and Annbell placed a lot of worth in
teaching oneself, and they figured that she would come to grips
with what she was better alone than she would with all of them
prodding at her.

Images of a small, dark-haired girl
pouring over musty black tomes made her laugh, and also reminded
her of how shocked she had been when she found that some of the
things which happened to her at such a young age were indeed the
markings of the necromancer, though normally they did not show up
until much later in life.

As funny as the image of her younger
self reading those large books was, the honest truth was that was
where she learned all she presently knew about necromancy. Being
such, those memories were more serious than any she had for that
was where she discovered herself, that is where the real Cianna
came out of hiding, in near darkness as she thought fitting a
necromancer, a creature of death.

Of course, in those years
the twins had talked to her and told Cianna at length what she was,
and how this would change her life. She remembered that she was not
at all worried or scared (
not like these
damn dreams have made me now, how foolish I was
); instead she was eager to come into her own, to have her
power, her wyrd. It was during this second conversation that Cianna
began to understand much of what Sara and Annbell had been trying
to tell her when she first touched her power. Now with a more
mature mind, and after reading much on the subject, Cianna
understood enough to be wary of her wyrd, yet not scared of her
destiny.

It was hard for her to grasp that at
age thirty-one she was just now coming into her wyrd, after growing
up with the sorceress and druid sisters. It was harder still to
think that she should not have been coming into it so
soon.

When the dream started coming to her
during her thirtieth year, Cianna was not at all surprised. All the
books said that when a necromancer was “called,” it was through
these dreams. Normally the dreams would become so bad that the
necromancer would do whatever it instructed just to get the damned
things to stop. So it was that they would begin their pilgrimage to
the Necromancer’s Mosque.

The dreams were coming to her a good
ten years earlier than was normal.

Cianna knew what the dream was telling
her because of the books she had read. Its insistence meant that
soon she would have to leave the keep and venture south to the
Necromancer’s Mosque where her training would take
place.

It wasn’t that she didn’t have some
control over it already, but she hesitated in using it, not knowing
what the outcome would be because of her partial ignorance and fear
of her own abilities. Yet it was only a fool that would say she had
any kind of control over such a gift at all. She knew there were
numerous things that she did not yet understand about her wyrd, and
that was just one of the many reasons she opted not to experiment
with it.

With a sigh Cianna roused herself from
her trance-like state and stretched her back. Contemplating the
past would not move her any closer to the future. She groaned as
she peered over her shoulder, looking at her large, downy bed
draped with thick wool blankets. What she would not give to sink
into those wrappings and sleep soundly. But there was no sound
sleep for her these days, and she suspected there would be no good
sleep until she was on her way to the mosque.

With remorse in her every move, Cianna
pulled herself out of her chair and began to dress.

Even though she preferred wool clothes
in this cold climate, the twins refused to let her look like a bag,
and instead insisted that she embrace fashion as they had by
adopting the newest styles. Cianna was thankful that she had kept a
pair of her old black trousers and tunic stowed away where the
sisters would not find them as a high-collared dress and flared
skirts were not sensible to make a cross-country trip in. It was
this more practical uniform that she put on instead of one of the
more ornamental dresses.

Next to be fastened to her person was
the silver-hilted rapier gifted to her on her twentieth birthday,
and the crossbow given the year after. The bolts for the bow she
kept in a large pouch on the side opposite her blade, and she gazed
upon her imposing image in the mirror as she bound her long, coffee
brown hair in a bun at the back of her head.