Carol Berg - THE SOUL WEAVER

I dropped the weapon to the ground as if it were newly drawn from the forge. “Gerick! Your father - Gerick, tell me who you are.”

“Mother? Are you all right?” He stepped closer. I couldn’t see him clearly; the shadows were so very deep, the bushes tangled.

But I already knew I was not in a dream, and I was very much not all right. The pain in my breast was too harsh. A warm flood drenched my tunic, and the circle of trees began to spin. A knife covered in blood… Gerick lowering me gently to the ground, his narrow face rising quickly above me, worried, confused… his lips moving, but I couldn’t hear him for the rushing in my ears…

Then Gerick was gone, and Radele’s calm face hovered over me, washed out and vague like the sun’s disk seen through a fog. Others joined him, too shadowy to see. “Oh, my good lord, he’s killed her!”

I wanted to say I wasn’t dead, but the words lodged somewhere in my chest before leaking away with all the blood. I wanted to say Gerick hadn’t done it, but I didn’t know who had. If I could only remember what Gerick had said to me…

Somewhere in the distance came a howl of grief, but it was much too far away to concern me, and I was much too tired to care what sorrow could be so terrible. So I gave it up and embraced the cold darkness.

Gerick

I knew my mother’s hair should be long, plaited into a shining, loose braid that fell halfway down her back. I knew it in the same way I knew that my father - my real father, the man named Karon - was slender and dark-haired, and had a left wrist that ached whenever the weather was cold. I shouldn’t have known those things. I’d never seen a portrait of my true father nor heard anyone describe how my mother wore her hair before my father was burned to death.

So how could it be that I would hear my mother laughing to herself while riding in a pony cart, and look over to see her, not in her chosen disguise of widow’s cap and purple velvet dress, but with hair braided halfway down her back, wearing a dress of emerald green and a gold locket that I knew had bits of dried rose petals inside it? Or when Prince D’Natheil walked with me in the garden at Verdillon, clasping his hands behind his back and remarking how strange it was to be at Professor Ferrante’s house again, why did I sometimes see a smaller, dark-haired man with high cheekbones who never clasped his hands behind his back, but rather held his left wrist in his right because of the way it had broken and healed crooked? Professor Ferrante’s journal had only confirmed what I already knew about my true father, though I could not say how I knew it.

This was not my imagination. No portrait and no person’s telling could have shown me all I saw and felt and knew in my… visions. I didn’t know what else to call them.

Such experiences were not a normal part of being a sorcerer. I knew that much. I might have believed the Dar’Nethi, Radele, was playing mind games with me, except the visions had started months before he’d come to Verdillon. And too, I didn’t think a Dar’Nethi could put things into my head without me knowing it, except perhaps the Prince - my father - who was exceptionally powerful.

Whatever the cause, I believed the visions were all bound up with the other things going on with me, my dreams and nightmares and all the rest of it. Most days I felt that if I didn’t keep myself buttoned up tight I was going to burst like a rotted cow, strewing every thought, every memory, every wicked, evil thing I’d ever done all over the place, exposed for everyone - my mother, my father, my friends - to see. I told myself I didn’t care what people thought of me, but, of course, I did, and I believed that if I ever lost control of myself, the Lords would find me.

That’s why I didn’t want anyone in my head any more, why I couldn’t let the Prince “help” me get over my nightmares. I had been one of the Lords, living for a few hours as the fourth physical expression of their single malevolent mind, my true identity lost, my soul a pit of corruption. I had been able to feel nothing in those hours, no love, no pain, no horror or disgust or joy. I could have stuck my hands in fire and not breathed a word. I could have crushed an infant under my foot and considered the deed no more than smoke in the wind. All the love and honor in two worlds would have been nothing more to me than dust on my shoe. Power was everything. I was filled with such craving for it that even after four years, to think of it set me trembling.

Only a single thread had bound me to the person I had been - my mother’s voice, telling me the truth of my lost life and those people who had been a part of it. I had held on to her lifeline, and eventually I began to understand how strong it was and how fiercely the Lords fought to snap it by making me kill her. Paulo had convinced me to believe in my mother, and I had let her pull me out.

In the days and weeks that followed my escape from Zhev’Na, my father had linked with my mind and my body, and with power I never imagined a Dar’Nethi could possess, worked to undo the things the Lords had done to me. But he couldn’t touch what remained of my life as a Lord of Zhev’Na. I’d locked those hours away behind a door that even he could not open. If he were ever to see behind it, he would understand what I had been, and if he was the man my mother believed him to be, he’d try to heal that part of me, too. I couldn’t allow that. The festering ran too deep. I would surely die or lose my mind, and most probably he would, too. Dieste the Destroyer was a part of me, and I didn’t believe he could be excised any more than the remnants of the Prince D’Natheil could be separated from the soul that had been my father’s. I had to learn to live with Dieste, to keep that door closed and barred.

There were times when staying in control was easier: when I was studying or working hard or riding with Paulo. There were times when it was more difficult: when I was angry or tired. And there were times when it was almost impossible: when I would touch a sword, or when I tried to work the least bit of sorcery. That’s why I’d had to leave Paulo and Radele to protect my mother from the bandits on our journey. The last place I could afford to be was in the middle of a battle with a sword in my hand, pain and blood everywhere. When I saw people suffering, I remembered the taste of pain and bitterness and despair, and how when I filled the dark places of my soul with those things, I could call down lightning or explore the stars or the depths of the ocean. That’s when I would hear the cunning whispers of the Lords as they searched for me, and I had to work hard to barricade the door. They were very close.

I couldn’t decipher my dreams any more than I could understand my waking visions. The dreams had started just after I left Zhev’Na. When my father had done all the healing he could do - all I could let him do - and I started living again, sleeping and eating and feeling things like a human person, I started dreaming about a barren country with a purple-and-black sky and stars that were green. It wasn’t fearful, just a place. But I dreamed of that same place every night, and that made me curious.

Gradually, over the next year, the dream landscape began to change, so that one night I might see a barren moor, and the next there’d be a track across it, and maybe a scrubby tree or a boulder. Then, on another night, a mound of stones would sit beside the track, or the track would be more like a road or wind up a craggy mountainside. After two years or so, I started seeing the dwarf with one eye and his two companions, just sitting on a boulder, maybe, or a wall, or engaged in some commonplace activity like sharpening a knife or carving wood or mending a shoe.