Robert Hughes - The Prophet of Lamath

“J-j-just me—” Rosha whispered quickly.

“Well, warn me next time,” she snapped. The loudness of her voice surprised her.

Pelmen warned her again, “Quietly, Bronwynn!” Unfortunately, she had so unnerved herself that she couldn’t remember any snappy replies. Instead, she jerked free from Rosha and walked, hands outstretched before her, in the direction of the black shape she knew was Pelmen. Rosha followed closely behind her. As they neared the magician, each imagined the dark shape was moving his hands before him. Then they realized that he was indeed, and that an orange glow was forming two feet from his face, at eye level.

Soon it was a ball, and Pelmen caused it to rise above his head. “Look around. Gather all the firewood you can find and place it directly under this light—and please do it quickly!” The young people moved off to obey, Rosha vigorously, Bronwynn reluctantly. The powershaper knelt on the ground and closed his eyes. While sustaining the fireball in midair, he concentrated most of his power elsewhere. By the time he opened his eyes, the boy and girl had returned, and Rosha was building a cone of small logs below the fireball. The girl sat and watched him, her face drawn, her eyes heavy.

“Very good,” Pelmen announced loudly, and both looked up at him, surprised. He had been kneeling for half an hour, and Bronwynn had assumed he was sleeping. “How about a little fire?” he murmured, waving his hand. They all watched as the fireball dropped onto the carefully stacked wood. It burst almost immediately into a nice little blaze, and Pelmen smiled at Bronwynn. “Now that was easy enough, wasn’t it?”

“For you maybe.” She shrugged. “You didn’t have to carry the wood.” She wrapped her fur cloak around her, and moved as close to the fire as she could stand. The night had turned cold. Pelmen shook his head, and he and Rosha moved swiftly to put up the tent. It was a fine shelter, made of that costly fish-satin acquired with such effort by divers in a land so far away no one included it when the world was discussed. Packets of food were broken open and shared out. Bronwynn wolfed hers down without a complaint about its quality.

Once wanned and fed, the little group felt their spirits improve considerably. Pelmen began to tell stories that set Rosha to giggling, and Bronwynn relaxed and dreamed of other places. After a time the conversation between sorcerer and fledgling warrior took on a more serious tone.

“I don’t know what the relationship is,” Pelmen said. “I only know there are powers, and then there is the Power.

Powers one may shape, if one has the gift. But the Power seems to work on men as a magician works on the wind and fire.”

“The P-p-p-power is greater than m-men, then,” Rosha concluded, taking a bite of a crust of bread.

“Perhaps—if you say that which controls is more powerful than the object it controls. But it isn’t always so, you know. I can shape the wind and yet it can still blow out of my control and possibly harm me. I am not greater than the wind—I don’t compare myself with it. Perhaps I shouldn’t compare myself to the Power, either. I may sometime find ways of controlling even that.” Rosha raised an eyebrow in comment. “And yet,” Pelmen continued, as the boy had expected he would, “perhaps I tease myself when I say that. The wind may blow me, but it has no soul. The Power—” Rosha looked surprised. “The P-p-power has a s-ssoul?” Pelmen smiled. “A bad word, maybe. The Power has conscious being, something the powers lack.”

“B-but how did you f-f-find it?” Pelmen chuckled. “I didn’t. It found me.”

“Where?”

“In this forest.”

“B-b-but—didn’t your ab-ability find you in this fforest,too?”

“Yes, in a way. But my ability I wished for. I did not wish for the Power to control me.”

“C-could it be that the P-p-power gave you the ability?”

“I suppose—”

“Or that you c-could ask the Power to c-control you, and that it would?”

“I don’t know,” Pelmen said, truly surprised at the depth of the young man’s thinking. “I don’t know if I could enter that state by trying—”

“Don’t try!”

Rosha said, pushing his jaws together fiercely to form the words. “If you are n-not in control, then we m-may fall into d-danger!”

“You’re right, of course. I won’t. But I need to warn you, Rosha. The deeper we travel into this great forest, the more chance that this Power will take me. It is a risk we run—” Rosha snorted derisively.

“Why did you do that?” Rosha struggled to answer. “M-my father said ‘Let it b-be his risk, for he s-s-somehow is p-p-pulled to it. You ca-can’t stop him, but d-do d-d-defend him.’” Rosha looked almost angry.

Pelmen reflected a moment. “Your father knows me well,” he said finally. “Rosha, I do not know as yet what I shall become in Lamath. I found a book there, once. Your father will say it drove me slightly mad—or else he’ll argue I’d’

grown overfond of magic and drove myself insane, and that the book became the fetish of my insanity. Tell me, truthfully. Did he tell you he thinks the powers have possessed me?” Rosha nodded, then stammered forcefully,

“What if this P-p-power that p-pulls you so is evil? What then?” Pelmen was quiet for a moment. When he began again, his voice seemed to come from far away. “Some years ago, I was worn out by my powers. I used them so fiercely for so long in those wars of confederation you’ve heard so much about that I was exhausted. I came back to the North Fir—not to experiment with new forms of shaping, but just to be cradled in the birthplace of the old. I went deep, my friend, toward Lamath, and every step I took I became more convinced something there had summoned me. Somewhere between here and there it seized me, Rosha. A Power, but not one formed and sent after me by an enemy sorcerer. This was a Power drawn from earth and water, not from the fire and the wind. Fire and wind are fleeting, my friend. This Power rooted me to the ground I walked on. History, Rosha! It seized me and shook me with the nature of history, and left me dazed and dizzy—but with a new curiosity. Where did we come from, and when, and why, and what value is there in a day?” Rosha stared across the campfire at the shaper, his eyes wide. He blinked, and would have answered, but Pelmen held up a hand, stopping him. “That was when I realized that this Power had being—why should history be important to a soulless force? You may listen to the wind—hear it? It rocks the trees gently or shakes them, according to its mood. The sound is so meaningless—it’s empty. It passes and leaves nothing behind. Or the fire, crackling, throwing itself up into the air—” Rosha’s eyes followed the sparks as they struggled upward, only to die away. “—and dying.

Leaving nothing behind but ashes. But this, Rosha—” Pelmen now grabbed a handful of dirt. “This has history. As you do. You’re not a wind any more than I am. You are Rosha, the treasure of Dorlyth, who was the treasure of his own father Karis.”

“B-b-but what…” The boy let his words trail off. He didn’t really know even the right questions to ask, so strange was all of this.

“I went to Lamath, Rosha. I became a monk of the Dragonfaith, a participant in the cult of the Dragon.” Rosha reeled back. “M-my father never—”

“Your father never knew. He thought I was wandering through the woods, feeding off nuts and berries. But I was searching for that history in the earth, scratching the soil with a rake day after day, just looking. And in the dead of night in a cavern beneath my monastery, I found a book. The Power seized me again, then.

Rosha, I swear I didn’t dream it! Through the weeks that followed I searched other books in the monastery library, finding finally a grammar in characters resembling those in the pages of my strange and attractive volume. And I learned how to translate those runes.”