Jean Lorrah - Wulfston's odyssey

He looked at Tadisha, seeing hope and fear mingled in her eyes. Norgu, his ward? To accept the task of teaching him to act responsibly?

But if he refused, he lost Tadisha!

“I… cannot guarantee the result,” he said finally, “but I will accept the task, Queen Ashuru. I will do my best to turn Norgu into a capable, responsible adult.”

Ashuru smiled. Tadisha absolutely glowed. Kamas grinned at him.

Then Ashuru stood, holding out her arms. “Then welcome to our family, son!”

There were hugs all around. Kamas said, “I’ve always wanted a brother! But by taking Tadisha away, you’re certainly giving me a job.”

“Want to trade?” he suggested. “You take Norgu, and I’ll take the Karili.”

Kamas laughed. “No, I think I got the better bargain.”

“You’re wrong,” Wulfston replied, standing now with his arm around Tadisha’s waist, “no matter what she costs, Tadisha is the best bargain of all!”

He left Tadisha and her family to make wedding plans, and went to tell Lenardo.

“I wondered how long it would take the two of you to figure out that you were meant for one another,”

Lenardo told him with a grin. “Congratulations! I needed some good news.”

“Why? Is there something wrong that I don’t know about?”

“We’ve hit a block in the reintegration of Z’Nelia and Chulaika. Z’Nelia is hiding something behind a barrier so strong that to break it would be to destroy her mind, and probably Chulaika’s as well.”

“What can you do?” Wulfston asked.

“I don’t know. In my training at Gaeta I Read a patient with a similar block. He had been there for months, in a coma, just like Chulaika. The Healers could not get through it. And while I was still there the man died; his body just wasted away because we could not reunite his mind to it.”

“And you didn’t have Adepts to strengthen his body. At least Aradia and I were able to keep Nerius alive until you came to help us rid his brain of that tumor we could not Read. Is there any way I can help you with Chulaika, Lenardo?”

“I don’t see how,” the Master Reader replied. “But it cant hurt your training as a Reader to get more experience, so why don’t you join us in the rapport tomorrow?” He laughed. “Your Reader’s training is all upside-down, Wulfston! We’ve never worked on the most basic lessons, and you’ve plunged right into healing sick minds.”

“Well, I’ll leave Norgu’s mind to you, if you don’t mind,” Wulfston told him. “But yes, I’d like to Read what you do to try to help Chulaika.”

So the next day Wulfston joined Lenardo in the rapport. Ashuru was content to beg off, as she had a royal wedding to plan.

Wulfston didn’t know quite what he expected, but it wasn’t the calm, peaceful emptiness he found when he followed Lenardo into the mental landscape now inhabited by Chulaika/Z’Nelia. There was no volcano now; no battling figures wrestled to the death. Instead, there was something like a long, empty corridor, featureless, disappearing into nothingness in the distance.

Slowly, Wulfston became aware that the disorientation he felt came from the fact that there were really two corridors occupying the same space, not quite overlapping perfectly. In the physical world, that would make no sense. Here, he understood that the corridors were the twin sisters’ lives from past to future, merging together to form one personality that would not be either of them, but a new person formed from all the past experiences of both.

This time he and Lenardo did not take shape; they did not participate, but merely observed. Their point of view shifted down endless miles of corridor, so much the same that they might as well have stayed still, until finally the two corridors began to separate. Here there were colors and sounds, then shapes.

“Here the integration ends,” Lenardo told him. “There is a memory here that Z’Nelia refuses to share, and until she does, the integration cannot be completed.”

Wulfston “looked” around. It wasn’t seeing, though; it was Reading, that sensing different from his other senses that he was becoming pleasantly accustomed to. He discovered where the separation began, explored along the spectrum from integrated new personality through mingled strands of Z’Nelia and Chulaika, to where it was only Z’Nelia-and within that area a perfectly literal “mental block”-a mind barrier so solid that it might as well be a physical wall of steel!

“What in the world could she have to hide behind that?” he wondered-

And knew the answer!

The block remained. He did not penetrate it.

Yet he knew , as plainly as if it were his own memory, what Z’Nelia was hiding.-no, was being forced to hide!

The memory was from the time Z’Nelia had almost died, after she saved Johara by loosing the volcano, and then was struck down by the Savishnon spy. Her spirit had wandered the planes of existence between life and death, perhaps seeking the plane of the dead, unable to find it because her body was still infused with her indomitable will to live.

But of those memories only one was blocked, a memory of terror, of fleeing, lost, from one plane to another until she encountered-

Pure evil!

A mind even more warped and twisted than her own, a figure of female depravity, ancient and withered, kept alive by secret, forbidden methods. A spider hidden deep within the web that spread throughout an empire, carrying her poisons ever outward to maintain her power- until one man discovered her evil, and brought about her destruction.

She refused to die! She escaped the plane of the dead, and waited impatiently. Eventually fate brought her Z’Nelia, her instrument of revenge!

“Blessed gods!”

Lenardo tore himself and Wulfston out of the rapport with such violence that the pain was almost physical.

One moment Wulfston was in Z’Nelia’s memory, face to face with the gaunt figure of evil, and the next, senses reeling, he was sitting cross-legged on the floor of Chulaika’s tower chamber, gasping for breath as if the exertion had been physical.

“What-? Lenardo, who was that?”

But the Master Reader had closed his mind.

“Lenardo! Who was that?!”

Lenardo looked up, his face drained of color. “Portia,” he replied.

“Portia? The old Master of Masters? But how could she hide such evil from Master Readers?”

“She didn’t hide it from us all,” Lenardo reminded him. He shook his head, as if trying to clear it of Portias mental touch. “Wulfston-”

“You are the man who stopped her,’ said Wulfston. “Your kidnapping was her revenge.”

“No.” Lenardo shook his head. “It was Z’Nelia she controlled, not Chulaika. It’s much more complicated than-” His eyes widened in horror. “Aradia! Wulfston, you and I are her first line of protection. Our child!”

“Go pack whatever you need for travel,” said Wulfston, getting to his feet. “I’ll tell Tadisha and Ashuru.

We must leave at once.”

“Your wedding,” Lenardo reminded him.

“I don’t need a wedding, only a marriage. Move !”

Lenardo climbed to his feet, staring at the still form of Chulaika on the bed. “Wulfston… how did you get through that barrier Portia placed in Z’Nelia’s mind, when a Master Reader could not?”

“It wasn’t Reading,” Wulfston explained. “I just… knew, the way I knew Chulaika was somehow connected to me the first time I saw her. Barak says I have the Grioka’s talent.”

Lenardo nodded. “Thank you. Go on, now. Tell Tadisha. I’ll find the Night Queen crew.”

It took three days of preparation before they could leave. Wulfston and Tadisha were married in the Shangonu temple, with considerable ceremony despite the hurried plans.