Steven Brust - Issola

I felt Teldra all around me, from everywhere—a sort of friendly reserve, giving the gold a reddish tint, and in that mo­ment, I think I discovered her secret, I learned how she could manage to be so friendly to everyone who entered Morrolan’s keep for whatever reason: She liked people. She just plain liked them. It was strange. My grandfather was like that, too, but I couldn’t think of many others. Cawti, perhaps, when she let herself. It was strange, knowing someone like that; I guess it was why I had never been able to understand her, and why I always, even to myself, made ironic remarks about her courtesies, and tried to find hidden motives in everything she did; it is hard to be comfortable around someone who just likes you for no reason, when you’ve always—

No, there wasn’t time for that. I needed to find her—find the center of the Teldra-ness amid all the confusion of gold and movement and corridors whipping past.

I called her name, but got no response, and yet I could feel her presence; her personality, which I’d had so much trouble defining, was overwhelming. But it was static, too: that is, she didn’t seem to be feeling or doing anything, she just was .

As I hunted for her—moving, it seemed, in part because I desired it, and in part pushed along by some power of which I was only dimly aware—I began to notice, here and there, what seemed to be nondescript greyish threads hanging haphazardly among the corridors through which I sped. I grabbed one as I passed; it seemed the right thing to do. The thread came with me easily, and as I held it, Teldra seemed closer—the feeling of her presence stronger. I grabbed another, and another, one of them with my left hand. Okay, here and now, I had two good hands. Why not? Each time I saw a greyish strand hanging from a wall or ceiling, I grabbed it and held it, and if I missed one I reached back without even looking and got it, too. I pulled the threads in and tied them together, holding them.

I was no longer aware of the tingling sensation that had been running up my arm, but now, instead, it seemed as if that entire tingle was filling my body, leaving me feeling strong, alert, even powerful; it was a heady sensation, but not an unpleasant one. I wondered if I should be worried.

“Loiosh, should I be worried?”

There was a long, long moment before he replied, which was unusual, and when the reply came, it was faint and distorted as if from a distance. “I don’t know, Boss. I don’t know where you are, or what you’re doing, or ... everything is heating up here, the Demon Goddess and Sethra and Aliera are ... I’m scared, Boss.”

When your familiar is scared, it’s a good time for you to be scared, too.

But—

I didn’t feel worried. The whole idea of having a familiar is to tell you when to be frightened by something that doesn’t appear frightening—a familiar is your other self that watches to make sure nothing is being done to you while your attention is elsewhere, and this was just such a situation, but my instincts were telling me to push on, to keep searching for Teldra, to keep grabbing at whatever those strands of power were.

If Loiosh had told me to pull out, I would have, but he wasn’t certain, which left me to make the decision. It was close. But one thought just wouldn’t go away: If it were me in there, and Teldra had decided to look for me, she wouldn’t have stopped while there was any hope left.

Okay, the decision was made: Press on.

A famous Iorich once said that the difficult part of being a Justicer was sounding one hundred percent when you felt fifty-one percent. I knew what he meant: I tried to put the doubt behind me so I could continue my psychic, or necromantic, or mystical journey through Spellbreaker, but it wasn’t easy, be­cause doubt is less easily dispelled than illusion, and with doubt come tentative half-measures—and nothing worthwhile has ever been accomplished by tentative half-measures.

There was a keen sense of traveling along with me, almost an ache for Teldra, but it was a distraction—as were my uncer­tainties about whether I was controlling or being controlled by the forces I was playing with, and my knowledge that, while I was sending my consciousness through the links of the strange artifact I called Spellbreaker, all the time the battle was going on around my physical body—but then, there wasn’t a lot I could do to influence that anyway, was there? I couldn’t do them any good, and it was pointless of them to have brought me to this place. If only I had—

If only I had—

Oh.

Maybe you’ve had it all figured out all along and have been waiting for me to catch on—those of you who have been fol­lowing my path, walking beside me through sorceries, deaths, pain, betrayal, and wizardries beyond human comprehension—but believe me it is much easier to figure out when you are sitting back watching it unfold before you than when you have your awareness spinning through strange, mystical corridors while outside of you rages a battle in which the very gods are only holding their own. In any case, it was only at that moment that I understood what I was doing, what I was creating.

Half-remembered conversations, half-heard remarks, bits of folklore, years of observations without comprehension—so the Serioli had simply been telling me the simple, unvarnished truth in the most straightforward way it knew how; and that was why the Goddess had been so ambivalent; and that’s how Pathfinder had saved Aliera’s life—all came together into the explosive epiphany that I had been, all unknowing, doing just exactly what I should be doing.

Yes, now I understood.

And with that understanding came confidence, and with confidence came decision.

Teldra was gone, and yet not gone. She was there, but it was pointless to find her. What mattered were those greyish strands of power. What mattered was completing the transfor­mation, that would save as much of Teldra as could be saved.

Fine, then.

By an act of will I stopped, and I summoned the greyish threads to me until I held all of them in my grasp—an instant it seemed, and I think it was. I wrapped them around my left wrist. The next one, and the next one. I had all the time in the world, so I could be careful and thorough, and I was; as careful as an Issola is of every nuance of tact; as thorough as a jhereg is at extracting every morsel of food from a corpse. I took my time, and did it right: pulling in the tiniest threads and securing them, making sure they were woven so close to me that we could never be separated; there was no longer a Spellbreaker, or a Lady Teldra, or a Morganti dagger, or even a Vlad; we were all some­thing different now. The Jhereg? Heh. Let them come after me with their pathetic Morganti weapons. Just let them.

Almost as an afterthought, I repaired the trivial damage in my left arm, which had been repairing itself anyway. I both knew and felt that what I was wrapping the links around was, in fact, my soul. My conversation with Teldra about the nature of the soul came back to me with a sort of gentle irony; Teldra was like that. My own irony was harsher—maybe she’d exert some influence on me. I didn’t think I’d mind. I wasn’t seeing any­thing anymore, nor was I hearing anything, I was just being, and doing, and then I was done.

I came back to myself, to the real world around me, and found that I was still on one knee, next to Teldra’s lifeless body. She lay with an arm up over her head, her eyes open, glassy, and sightless, her long hair all scattered about. She’d never have permitted her hair to look that way. Her mouth was open a little, in that moronic way you see from time to time on derelicts who gather in the evenings near Barlen’s temple near Malek Circle. It was all wrong on Lady’s Teldra’s face. I looked away, and at what was in my right hand—a long Morganti dagger, with a hilt like a very fine golden chain. It fit my hand like an additional finger, like it should have been there all along, or maybe it had been there all along and I’d never been aware of it.