Carol Berg - THE SOUL WEAVER

Karon made no move to stop what was happening. Gerick lifted his hands to the orb, and the manacles snapped and fell away. He kicked the broken shackles from his ankles, then took another deep, shaking breath. “I’ve been powerless too long,” he said. He looked as fragile as winter moonlight. Yet with a flick of his index finger Karon’s sword flew out of his hand, clattering against the far wall. “No need for ugly blades. My execution has been stayed.”

“And so you show yourself at last, Dieste,” said Karon. “All pretense stripped away. Radele didn’t know that his maneuvering was unnecessary. You would have done everything he wanted without the oculus. You were looking for a way to go back all the time, weren’t you? Is that why you carried this with you from one world to the next, awaiting the opportunity to make amends to your fellows, once you’d done all the damage you could do?”

From a leather bag at his waist, Karon pulled something that flashed gold in the strange light. He threw it onto the platform in front of Gerick. Gerick turned deathly white, then slowly extended his hand and picked up his mask, the Lords’ gold mask with the diamond eyes that had been molded to his flesh when he became Dieste the Destroyer.

I wanted to scream. What was Karon doing? I was not wrong about Gerick. I was not. Why would Karon drive him back to the horror he had rejected?

Karon did not take his eyes from Gerick. He didn’t even blink.

“I hunger!” cried my son, a spasm racking his slender frame, drawn from the very depths of despair. “Notole, help me! Ziddari… Parven… join with me… fill me!”

As his white fingers gripped the mask and lifted it to his face, he groaned with the animal hunger of a starving man who sees his first bread. Lust distorted his features, as his eyes darkened until they became pits of unending blackness. A blast of winter cut through my flesh, infusing me with the revolting pleasure of the Lords. They had him.

“Gerick! Dearest child, don’t do it!” The cry burst from my lips and heart and soul all at once. “I know your true heart! You do not belong with the Lords!”

Gerick paused, and Karon moved at last, not with any weapon, but only his hand, holding it out where Gerick could not fail to see. “Come into me, my son,” he said softly. “My dear and beloved son.”

For one brief instant Gerick’s bottomless eyes met my own and then shifted, coming to rest on his father. The world, the stars, the mighty universe held its breath along with me. And then Gerick reached for Karon’s outstretched hand.

At their touch, thunder shook the foundations of Avonar. The Lords’ unholy pleasure, their depraved satisfaction and unmuted lust were shattered by shock and dismay, as first Gerick and then Karon collapsed to the unyielding gray stone. For one instant, a hellish symphony of pain and terror and screeching disbelief rattled my bones…

… and then absolute silence fell upon the world.

As the light of the spinning orb winked out, I glimpsed the oculus and the gold mask fallen to the floor, sagging into a pool of molten metal, the two diamonds floating in it like sparkling eggs. Gerick lay crumpled on the stone platform. Karon sprawled across the edge of it, one hand still clasped in Gerick’s. In my husband’s other hand lay a small pyramid of polished black - Dassine’s crystal where Karon’s soul had been bound for ten dark years, the stone that held his long-postponed death.

I sank to my knees beside the two of them, and in the darkness that fell on me like a woolen blanket came a soft breath on my wet cheeks, an invisible touch that bore a lifetime of love and reassurance. Karon had taken Gerick to the only place he could be free of the Lords, a bittersweet gift from father to son, swift passage beyond the Verges to L’Tiere, the following life.

And what of the Lords?

Paulo brought the light. I sat on the stone platform where Karon and Gerick lay pale and still, feeling them grow cold even as I willed them not. Roxanne sat beside me, her head on my breast, weeping silently. As I stroked her hair, a certain calm settled over me, even as my own tears flowed unchecked.

“I had to go all the way back to the first guardroom to find this,” said Paulo, setting a small, sputtering torch in a bracket on the wall, revealing the devastation around us in ghastly clarity. “Nobody was about. Don’t understand it.” He gazed down at Gerick. His voice was husky. “I guess he’s free of ‘em now. Don’t seem fair. The Singlars are going to be torn up real bad.”

“I don’t think Karon was able to save them,” I said. “If Gerick was right, then they’re all destroyed.”

“The Bounded may be gone, ma’am… I don’t know. But the Singlars are safe… well, as safe as anyone could be in Valleor.”

“You did it,” said Roxanne, lifting her head. “Just as we planned.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

“Paulo took the Singlars out of the Bounded,” said Roxanne. “We planned it before we came here, gathering all the Singlars we could find into the Tower City and telling them to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. If it looked as if Gerick were going to die without a… solution… Paulo was to go back to the Bounded and take them out. Gerick believed that as long as he was alive the Singlars should be able to move through the passage up near this sheepherder’s place in northern Valleor.”

“You really did such a thing?” I said to Paulo.

He nodded. “After the Prince sent you away the other night, knowing he had to kill the young master.” Tears filled Paulo’s eyes. “They both knew it. So they sent me back. Wasn’t nothing I could do here.”

I gathered Paulo into my arms, and we both wept for a while.

Roxanne decided when it had been enough. “Don’t you think we should tell someone what’s happened? They need to know about the Prince and all. And if I’m to get back home to see to the Singlars… ”

“I’ll go,” said Paulo, dabbing his face with his sleeve. “Nothing better to be at.”

Paulo returned to the dungeon inside the hour. He had found a troop of terrified warriors at the far end of the passage and asked to be taken to the Preceptors. “They stayed back from me, like maybe they wasn’t sure whether I might be one of the Lords myself,” he reported.

But whatever the warriors had thought, they had taken Paulo to the council chamber where Mem’Tara and Ce’Aret were standing watch on Ven’Dar. “I told them what happened as best I could, and they said to come right back and tell you not to touch nor move anything, and not to let nobody come here. Wait for them, they said.”

The wait was not long. Ce’Aret arrived first. The old woman knelt alongside Karon and laid her hand on his forehead, closing her eyes. I could tell by her slow rocking when she began to grieve. After a while, she stood up and nodded her head to me. “The Prince’s lady… here. Alive. Your presence tells me that the mysteries I feel and see are a more complex weaving of joy and sorrow than imagining can tell.” Her withered hand gently stroked Karon’s hair. “It will take a very long time indeed to take in this sorrow.”

“Yes.” The world, the conversation, the stone, and the torchlight might have been illusion. I could not feel any of them.

“And the prisoner… the Fourth… lies dead as well… ”

I nodded, and she shook her head sadly. “A Soul Weaver, the Prince told me. Corrupted before we could know him.” She paused for a while, as if to ponder her own assessment. “I’ve no wish to intrude on your grieving, lady, but as you well know, these events are of such significance to our world… and your own, as well… I must summon the others.”