Laurell Hamilton - Nightseer

“Whoever said it was a simple locking spell?” At the puzzled look on his face, she decided to elaborate. Keleios had no desire for the young man to try the pouch and be killed. Fidelis the Witch would be angry. It was considered very impolite to kill someone’s journeyman. “The pouch is easily opened, but if any but my hand open it... Let us say that it is an unpleasant way to die.”

“You did not make this.”

“No, but the guardian spell was worked into it at its making. So it can’t be dispelled or disarmed. It is one with the substance of the pouch.”

“There is always a way to undo a spell; that is a law of magic.”

“I didn’t say there wasn’t.”

He held the pouch awkwardly.

Keleios could read his thoughts on his face, but she knew how to make sure there wasn’t an accident. “Eduard the Witch, I charge you not to open that pouch. To do so is death, so I have spoken, and now my guilt is ended.”

“There really is a death spell on here, isn’t there?”

“Have you ever known me to bluff?”

He shook his head and held the pouch carefully between three fingers.

Keleios was satisfied. Her weapons were safe, and she would not be explaining to Fidelis why her journeyman had been eaten.

She chose a door and pushed it open. The air was cool and dry. Through the room’s only window the last rays of an orange sunset were dying. The dreaming rooms kept to a different time than the outside world.

The night blackness of Astrantha had been left behind. Some said the windows reflected dreams, but Keleios did not think so. There were many theories, but Keleios did not believe any of them. No one remembered why the builders had even given windows to the tower. It was a mystery, and that was enough. The light faded, dying in golden oblongs on the floor.

There was a rich smell through the window, like honeysuckle or the jasmine in the greenhouses, yet that wasn’t it either. It was sweet and rich, and made her think of magic and hidden places. Keleios had smelled it many times but had yet to see the flower that gave off such perfume.

Dreamers were advised not to look out the windows. Keleios often did, just a glance. She had become almost familiar with the alien stars that glittered so brightly and the calls of birds that never saw Astrantha.

Tonight the dream fought for attention, and Keleios did not go to the window. The tower’s magic was already beginning to work upon her. Keleios belonged to the tower until her prophecy came.

Without sight she would have known where she was. The tower of prophecy was a slow ponderous building of spells, stone by stone, death by death, prophecy by prophecy, for this tower had been one of the first built. In those long-ago days the golden Astranthians had served fiercer gods. They had killed to aid their magic; blood had gone into the tower. Dreams, especially the dreams, reflected that.

The room held only a narrow bed, a small table, a dark lamp, and a carved stone basin full of water.

Darkness had fallen on the land of the window. A velvet blackness swallowed the dreaming room.

Flint and tinder were near at hand. Perhaps through the heavy air she could have thrown a spell to light the lamp, but it was not always wise to flaunt magic in the tower. Keleios had no real need of light. She still felt attracted to it like a frightened child cheers at the dancing flames. She was Keleios Incantare, called Nightseer, and true need for light was a thing of the past.

Keleios stripped off her tunic and boots. The boots were soft brown hide with hardened soles, an elfish thing. She hated the clopping noise the new wooden heels made. Most of the hunters and scouts still wore the soft boots. Elfish boots were highly prized, and she had watched her Wrythian cousins make them. Even a human could make them, if he knew the techniques, but Keleios, like all Wrythians, enjoyed keeping a secret.

She undid the single braid that held her hair back. It came free in a wavy mass, and she ran her fingers through it briefly.

Keleios slipped between the sheets and almost immediately felt the tower’s need. She lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling, trying to fight the pull of sleep. The magic was too strong. Her eyelids began to close; the need for sleep was a terribly physical thing. She fought it until she was nauseous and her head ached. Sleep pulled her under and the sickness vanished.

Images flashed in her mind: vivid colors, feelings, dreams demanding that she enter, but they were old dreams, memories of people long gone. Keleios evaded them with long-practiced ease. It was her own dream that she had come to find, not someone else’s outdated prophecy.

The true dream that she had come to find began quietly with memories like all dreams. Master Poula, teacher of herbs and prophecy at the school, was walking down the hallway that led across the front of the keep. And in the way of dreams the figure changed to other faces that Keleios knew. It was Alys, the school’s youngest prophet, whom Keleios comforted when she cried from homesickness. It was apprentice Melandra, she with the scarred face and the timid heart. Keleios had more or less adopted the frightened girl, the younger sister that Keleios had never had. Keleios knew that someday Melandra would be a great enchanter, but Melandra did not know it yet. Face after face flowed through the dream, all walking down the hall toward the windows that looked out over the courtyard. The fear began.

It gripped her chest until she fought to breathe at all. It was Belor, her friend since childhood and the keep’s greatest illusionist, who turned to the windows. One window was filled with darkness. A silver light that wasn’t light shone round the blackness.

“No!” Keleios fought the dream. Against all her training, she tried to change the dream, but prophecy cannot be changed. Belor could not step into the darkness, for if he did, he would die. It was Feltan, the peasant child Keleios herself had brought to the keep for training, who fell through the window into the dark, his small body swept away.

Something else was in the darkness, someone standing. Fidelis the Witch, teacher of herbs and illusion at the school, and follower of the dark gods, stood wrapped in black. A bloody dagger slipped from her hand and fell winking in the dark like a fading star. The walls of the keep stood in the dark, and someone walked atop them, a tall woman dressed in grey. Keleios knew who would turn to face her. Harque strode the walls of the school. That wall began to crumble. Harque turned her back and threw her hands skyward. When she turned to face Keleios again it was Fidelis who stood on the crumbling wall. The wall blew inward, spraying rock into the growing darkness. The dream faded.

Chaos came.

Keleios found herself in a place she had never dreamt of, never imagined. She was surrounded by nothing, and something. Colors half-sensed wove through shades of grey. Forms twisted into shapes that could only be half-remembered. She was standing, but there was nothing to stand on, nothing to hold to, nothing. Keleios screamed and fell to her knees, covering her eyes. If this had been a dream, she might have been unable to move, but it was not a dream.

She knelt, screaming until her throat burned and her voice sounded ragged. Tears were streaming down her face, and she had not even known she was crying.

There was a whisper of sound, but Keleios did not search for it. She pressed the palms of her hands against her eyes until white flowers exploded against her closed lids. The whisper became a word, then another. The sound was as if many sighs had been sewn together into one voice, the faintest of sounds, the barest of humanity left in it.

“A prophet, a prophet, look upon us, prophet. See what you shall become.”