Flesh and Spirit Page 22

  “So, can you do it?” Stearc had his hands on his hips.

  “I believe I can, my lord. I suppose you would not consider telling me what I’m looking for or why this is so important?”

  “You’ve no need to know more.” For certain this man had not approved me for the task. Well, let him watch.

  Making a great show, I placed my finger on the mark for this hill, drew it downward toward the abbey, and then across the page till I touched a walking path of the sort oxherds used to lead their beast carts to market or villeins might tread to field or woodland. Following the lines of path and road as far as they would take me, southerly through the fields and easterly into the hills of the valley wall, my finger traced a reasonably direct route to the water symbol. I noted the orange flame mark of Deunor along the way—likely a roadside shrine to the Lightbringer. Three short lines marked a dolmen, and near it lay two small arcs that told of burial mounds. That should give me enough. I closed the book.

  “Will you not speak the invocation, Brother?” Stearc’s skepticism rang clearly.

  “When I used the book before, I always read the spell words silently, my lord. I thought to follow the same practice here…” I paused, all innocence, as if expecting him to contradict me.

  He did not, which confirmed another suspicion. He’d had the book from the abbot—which explained its absence from the library—and he had tried to use it himself without success. Why else would he waste this time on an unlikely prospect such as me?

  “We should be off then,” I said, placing the book into his hands and suppressing a grin, “unless you wish me to go alone and find my way back here to report.”

  “No need for you to return. We’ll know if you succeed.” His great jaw snapped shut. I was dismissed.

  I bowed. “My lord. Gentlemen.”

  As I walked down the path the woman and I had ascended, the three of them stood beside their fire, watching me. I assumed they would follow or ride out to catch me near the end. Or perhaps the thane had his own pureblood or a mage to observe me from a distance or who had set some magical beacon to announce my success. As to what waited at the end, a place no ordinary map could take them, my curiosity outweighed my caution. The abbot did not want me dead.

  At the bottom of the hill I sought southeast, keeping the guide star on my left, and holding a balance between winter sunrise and the mountains of Evanore to the south. I knelt as if to relace my sandal. Touching fingertips to the earth, I spilled but a fragment of magic into the simple seeking, hunting a route to a sheep path and a roadside shrine dedicated to Deunor Lightbringer. A spare image resolved in my head, a simple pattern laid upon the landscape.

  Once sure of my course, I set out across the open country. Even if someone was watching me, I doubted they could hear, so I sang the fifty verses of “The Doxy and the Bandit” as I walked, imagining clasping Corin’s slender waist as I spun her dizzy. Earth’s mother, what was her true name? Why hadn’t I asked?

  Deunor’s shrine was little more than a chipped and gouged body, missing one arm, its head, and privy parts. The stones of the altar had been carted away, and the astelas vines that twined every shrine of the elder gods had been dug up. Country folk thought boiled astelas roots made a man virile. I’d no need for that unless this pestilential drought went on too long and my body forgot its dearest pleasures. Near three months had gone since I’d lain with a woman, and here the night air felt like velvet on my skin. Another brief seeking at the split of a path and I angled northerly again toward the dolmen and burial mounds.

  The table stones and barrows were only dark outlines against the stars to the north. And just beyond them, the track branched three ways instead of the two marked on the map—assuming I had come to the right place so far. Instinct sent me down the southernmost, the oldest branch, judging by the myriad layers of feet that had trod there. As the map had suggested, the path petered out in the slopes of patchy grass and rock at the base of the craggy ridge east of the valley.

  Now came the most difficult part—to find the water source in these trackless hills. A hint as to its nature would have been useful. With no more paths made magic by centuries of feet, and no sure destination, this seeking would require more power.

  I scanned the horizon in a full circle. As far as starlight and good eyesight could tell me, no one watched. Kneeling on the rough ground, I closed my eyes and laid my palms on the earth. The wind blustered over and around me, scouring away the barriers of distraction and wariness, allowing my magic to flow freely. Where is it?

  Images of pools and wells and bubbling springs passed through my mind, but none held for that one moment that proved it true. A little more…

  I laid my forehead on the earth and released another fragment of power, expecting the pattern to resolve as it had earlier. My instincts would tell me the way. But before I knew it, I had pushed up my sleeves, hiked up my gown, and lay prostrate as I had been in the church a few hours earlier, bared arms spread. Instead of masonry and gilding, the dome of stars rose above my head, and beneath me lay the cool damp earth.

  As I inhaled the scent of dirt and rotting grass, the boundaries of stars and flesh and earth dissolved. Worms burrowed beneath me, and ground beetles ticked their wings in their holes. A hare breathed anxiously in its den. Clouds drifted across the patterned stars above me, tickling the wool layers on my back. Far below, water trickled…deep…

  Strip off these prisoning garments…touch skin to earth and air…feel the night’s embrace…reach through the welcoming earth to find the water… Against the urgency of these demands—spoken in the language of mind and flesh and bone—only some remnant thread of present sense kept me clothed. But the rest…

  Reach…feel…embrace. Open your mouth…taste stone and stars…inhale the night…listen… I plunged my hand deep…felt the gritty loam give way…dry sand and pebbles graze my knuckles…until I touched the sweeter moisture…the secret places…the pulsing flow of life that told of moving water, deeper yet.

  A bell pealed in the distance—a sonorous touch of bronze borne on the breeze. I jerked my head off the ground and rose up on my elbows. What had happened here? My heart raced like a fox at the hunt. I shook my head. Sat back on my heels and examined one bare arm to assure myself that it was not covered with dirt or crawling with beetles and worms from plunging it through the earth. Felt a rush of heat across my skin as I realized I was more than halfway roused in altogether unlikely ways, as had happened on the journey back from Elanus. Fires of heaven…chastity was making a madman of me.

  I forced my thoughts back to business. The bell signaled another hour gone. How many since day’s end? I needed to head northeasterly again, for the water that trickled under this spot fed the abbey spring and its source lay in the ridge ahead of me. Though no overlaid image dwelt in the forefront of my mind, my body understood perfectly which way to go now, in the same way my blood knew which direction to flow in my veins. I scrambled to my feet, hurried across the barren field, and pretended I was not shaking.

  The upward path was far too steep for this late of an evening. After so many days of idleness in the abbey, my body protested at the climb. My route had taken me up a treeless jumble of granite that scarred the eastern wall of the valley, a desolate crotch in the otherwise verdant ridge. No direct path. No easy ascent. I scrambled between boulders and across tilted slabs, cursing gowns and cowls and sandals. My sore feet kept skidding out from under me. Every slip meant whacked knees or elbows, abrading the skin through the woolen layers of hose and gown.

  A glance over my shoulder for the tenth time in an hour and I yet spied no one following. I climbed.

  At least another hour had passed, which meant perhaps one more remained until the brothers filed back into the church for Matins. I could just imagine Prior Nemesio’s glee at discovering a novice so ill-behaved as to abandon a penance. Poor Brother Sebastian; my mentor would be beside himself. And even if I broke my word and told them of the evening’s events,
I would never be able to explain why I had taken on such a fool’s errand when the simple truth could have stopped it. The puzzle was just such an intriguing exercise, and Lord Stearc had been so sure I couldn’t solve it.

  At the top of yet another slab, the rocks formed a wide shelf, backed up to a higher cliff. Behind me the valley of Gillarine, shaped by the sinuous hints of silver that were the looping river, stretched southward toward the mountains of Evanore and northward toward the heart of Ardra, Morian, and the distant sea. The abbey church spires rose out of the gently folded land to the southwest.

  I was nearing the end of this journey. Instinct said to go south along the shelf rock and then straight east…which would mean directly into the cliff. I moved slowly, examining the rugged wall as I went, searching for cracks or splits or caves.

  A short distance away an oddly shaped shadow detached itself from the wall. “Iero’s grace, Brother Valen, how was your evening’s walk? Not too troubling, I hope, despite its unsettling beginning?”

  Fear burgeoned and stilled quickly. No matter that the only light was the dome of stars. I could mistake neither the pale gleam of hairless scalp nor the dark brow line nor the cool presence, spiced and warmed by good humor.

  “Brother Gildas, the spider who sits in the web of all Gillarine’s mysteries. Of course, you would be here.” Would I ever learn to think? Of course, they’d have someone waiting at the end. They were testing me.

  “I knew you would enjoy this puzzle,” he said cheerfully, “being a man of puzzles as you are.”

  “You’re all right…healing?” Only days had passed since his encounter with Sila Diaglou’s whip.

  “Thanks to you, I live. My scabs and bruises do but remind me—deservedly so—of my shame at falling victim so easily. So, can you finish this?”

  I stepped toward him deliberately, continuing my examination of the wall. “Here.” A darker line creased the shadowed cliff halfway between us, a seam in the rock wider than first glance showed, a high-walled passage that sliced directly into the cliff.

  I led, forcing myself to keep breathing until both the slotlike passage and my search ended. The cliff walls opened into a small grotto—a well of starlight, the circle of sky above it reflected perfectly in a glass-still pool, incised in stone.

  As I paused in the doorway where the walls of the notch flared into the encircling stone, a movement atop the cliffs snared my gaze. Something bright. Something blue. But staring until my eyes felt raw revealed naught but stars. Perhaps one had slipped from its place and streaked toward the earth. A warning of evil times, diviners said.

  Brother Gildas had joined me and stood at my shoulder. “Powers of night, you’ve done it,” he said softly. Wondering. “Ah, Valen, there is more to you than people think.”

  He stepped past me and spun in place, scanning walls and cliff tops before walking to the rim of the pool. Even as he knelt and reached out to touch the water, I wanted him to stop. No sensible argument came to my lips, only that this was no common pool to be used in common ways. Something slept here. Power? Spirit? The generous earth itself? “Brother, wait—”

  Too late. The rippling rings moved outward, marring its perfection. Gildas downed the water from his cupped hands and looked up at me, smiling. “Come, have a drink. You’ve earned it.”

  Foolish. Nothing had happened. Clearly he sensed nothing out of the ordinary.

  “I don’t drink water,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. He’d think me mad if I told what I felt here. “Don’t trust it. And unless you can dispense me from my penance, I must get back to the church.”

  In fact, I could not have stepped within that grot were he fallen in the pool and drowning. Smell, taste, hearing, sight…my senses, of a sudden, quivered on the brink of explosion. My heart swelled with songs just beyond hearing, with words beyond knowing, with the desolation of a homely street where every door is locked to you or of winter sunset in the wild, when no hearth, no word, no welcome awaits. One step past the doorway and surely I would be flat on the granite, my skull cracked, my heart riven, as if I’d walked into the cloister garth fifty times over. Yet the sorrow that permeated these stones surpassed what a murdered youth of sixteen years could possibly know. This sleeper was not Brother Horach.

  Gildas sighed and wiped his hand on his cowl. “I suppose you’re right. We’ve a distance to go yet before we can each put our secrets to rest. But you ought to come see the water. It’s so deep. So lovely. So pure.”

  I dragged my gaze from the pool, shivering as if I’d plunged my whole body into its frigid depths. Oh, yes, I knew that water was cold. I did not have to see the frost crystals that rimed the pool’s edge to know. So little sunlight here. The encircling walls so like a prison cell.

  “Are you well, Valen?”

  Pressing my back and the back of my head against the wall of the passage, I closed my eyes. As if all at once, the activity of the night took its toll: scrapes and bruises, blistered feet, overstretched shoulders. The few quellae back to Gillarine might have been the road to heaven that practors and hierarchs told us was nigh impossible. And something else…deep inside my gut…a knot of fire. Blessed Deunor, no! With all that had happened…this new life…I’d scarce given it a thought. A night bird’s screech near ripped my ears. “Must get back,” I said. “The time…”

  I fled, scrabbling back down the ridge, bumping, sliding, scraping on the rocks. More was wrong than mystic pools and overzealous bodyguards and wild chases through the night. The scalding in my gut did not cool. How long had it been? Five days since my investiture. Twelve…thirteen before that to Black Night, and one more…holy gods, nineteen days…and the last interval had been twenty-one.

  The trek back to the abbey devolved into nightmare, my need quickly overshadowing the mysteries of the night. The garden maze, the green pouch tucked away under the rocks, the fragrant contents…Great Iero, let no one have found it. Let the Matins bell not ring until I am whole again. I had no idea how I was to manage it, but my growing frenzy to have the blood-spelled nivat in my hand…on my tongue…in my veins…permitted no logic or forethought.

  Though as fit as any of the younger monks, Gildas could scarce keep up with me. “What’s wrong, Brother? One would think the Adversary dogged your back. Would we all had such long legs as yours to devour a quellé so swiftly.”

  “I’ve been too long distracted from my prayers,” I said. “And I’d rather not have occasion to visit the prior’s prison cell. Though Father Abbot sent me on this mad venture, I’ve seen enough to know he’ll not shield me from punishment.”

  I could not speak after that. My cramping legs and back threatened to seize if I slowed. By the time we reached the footbridge and the abbey wall, the threads of fire encompassed every part and portion of my body. The starlight scalded my eyes. I drew my cloak across my face, for the wind felt like a flayer’s knife.

  Brother Gildas unlatched the iron herdsman’s gate, but laid a hand on my arm before I could rush through. It was all I could do not to cry out, for his touch felt like a gatzé’s fiery kiss even through the woolen layers. “He’ll not punish you, Valen. Tonight’s exercise was of great importance—Iero’s work. You performed better than any of us could hope. You will reap answers to the questions that tease you.”

  Sadly, his concerned kindness could not soothe me. “I must…clean myself…before going to the church. Excuse me, Brother.” The mere effort of speaking caused spasms in my face and neck. I pulled away and ran across the field, past the church, and into the garden.

  Where…where…? Beside the statue of Karus as the Shepherd…Divine Karus…good Iero…Kemen, Lord of Sky and Storm, help me. I dropped to my knees and scrabbled in the pile of rocks beside the statue’s base, frantic when I found only dirt. I had used my bent to create a void hole to hide my contraband packet here on the night I’d come from Elanus. Had I forgotten so much of magic that I had displaced or vanished them by mistake? I dug deeper until my fingers felt the cloth roll.
Using my shoulder to wipe the sweat from my eyes, I rummaged inside the packet and grasped the little bag. I almost wept in thanksgiving.

  I shoved dirt and rocks into some semblance of their usual aspect, tucked the green bag into my trews, and raced through the gardens past the lay brothers’ reach. Though desperate, I dared not cross the cloister garth, but rather sped down the west cloister and around the south in front of the kitchen and refectory, cursing the waning hour. At every moment I expected to hear the bells.

  The trough ran around three sides of the lavatorium, angled slightly so the water would flow left to right. Each of the six shallow bays on each wall formed a semicircular shelf behind the trough, and from the center of each bay protruded a lead conduit that spilled water into the trough. I chose the bay nearest the cloister to take advantage of what little light the night provided. I removed my cowl and laid it on the shelf, as if preparing to clean it. Then I fumbled the green pouch out from under my gown and spilled half my remaining nivat onto the wide outer lip of the trough.

  Everything took too long. The seeds were old and tough; I chipped another shard from my precious mirror fragment, using it to crush them on the stone. My fingers were cold and clumsy. I dropped the needle and had to scrabble on the stone floor to find it. It was near impossible to grasp the linen thread, and when at last the mixture of blood and nivat sizzled, I had to fumble with the glass to find an angle where I could see the vapors.