Sheri Tepper - Wizard’s Eleven

Meantime Silkhands and I awakened Dorn. Having done this once before, I did not need Didir’s help again but was able to Read out the blue of Dorn as though I read a familiar book. Oh, there were surprises, particularly in his youthful memories; and there were terrors as he gained his Talent and learned to use it, but still, what I had known of him was the greater part of him, and he rose at last to greet me by name.

“You do know me,” I mumbled.

“How should I not, Peter? Have I not walked in your head as a farmer walks his fields? Have we not raised up ghosts together?”

“I wasn’t sure you would remember,” I said weakly, remembering myself thinking things I had rather he not know of.

“Why shouldn’t I remember a friend?” he asked me, drawing me into an embrace. I had never felt for Mertyn or for Himaggery what I felt in that instant for Dorn. I had never known Mertyn or Himaggery as I knew Dorn. Perhaps he had shaped some essential growing in me, as a father might shape it in a pawnish boy or a loving thalan who knew his sister’s child from infancy. What he said was true. I remembered him as a friend. He had never had to do me any hurt, not even for my own good, and so there was no taint between us.

Then Dealpas and I awakened Buinel while Silkhands rested and Didir took time to learn all that was happening. I felt her searching mind go forth, seeking Huld, I thought. It was not difficult to raise up Buinel, only boring. In my whole life I was never to meet anyone so relentless in putting down any spontaneous thought or evanescent desire as was Buinel. He wanted rules for everything, and he wanted them graven in bronze or cut into stone so that he could see they were no temporary things. Well, we persevered, Dealpas and I, she with her mouth all twisted up in distaste and some anger still. When we had him fairly roused he became deeply suspicious of us for having wakened him, so we turned him over to Queynt and Dorn. If they could not settle him I cared not whether we got him settled, though I did owe him much for having saved our lives from the Ghoul. Then Silkhands and Didir returned to wake Hafnor, Wafnor, and Tamor, one after another, each time quicker. It was true, with practice the thing became much easier. Wafnor gave me a glad hug, from a distance, his sturdy body creaking as he bent and twisted, trying to free himself in a few short minutes of the stiffness of centuries. Hafnor gave me a teasing wink. If he had had more power, he would have done something silly and boyish, I knew it, but he had to go above to warm himself in the sun. There was no power below except what Shattnir brought down to us from time to time for the work.

Then Silkhands and I were alone once more, only Sorah and Trandilar upon their pedestals. And Barish. I stood there looking down at him, fingering the lone blue in my pocket. Now that I had given up the others, it seemed an evil thing to keep Windlow by me, an evil thing to keep him so imprisoned. He had no body of his own. It had been burned and destroyed in the place of the magicians. Barish had no blue. It had gone into some other body, perhaps, or been destroyed by the machine. Why not put the two together? Then Windlow might at least live again, live long, and be no worse off than he was now. The body would be strange, but surely it was better to visit a strange place than not to live at all. Silkhands and I were alone in the place. The others had all gone above to seek for Huld or plot their strategy or discuss ways in which we might leave the mountaintop without condemning the rest of the world to Huld’s fury.

I called her over and showed her Windlow’s blue in my hand, letting my eyes rove over the body of Barish.

She did as I had done, looking back and forth from one to the other. “Why not,” she said. “Let us do it now before someone comes down and makes some objection.”

“He may only live a little while, to be killed in that battle which is coming,” I warned her.

“He will at least die in reality then,” she said bitterly, “not be lost in some rock crevasse forever, caught in neither living nor death, perhaps in that same terror Thandbar felt.”

I nodded, took Windlow’s blue into my hand and put my arms around her as she laid her hands upon Barish’s head.

Then was maelstrom. Nothing which had gone before had prepared me for it. There was Windlow, surging in my mind like a flood, like a mighty stream pouring over a precipice. There was something else, surging to meet it as the tide meets the outflow of a river, battering waves which meet in foam-flecked flood to crash upon one another, flow around one another, mix together in an inextricable rush and tug and wash. Cities toppled in my head; rivers burst mighty barricades; millennia-old trees fell and splintered. Faces passed as in an endless parade. The sun made a single glittering arc across the sky, flickering between darkness and light as day and night sped past. Then the struggle eased, slowly, and I felt things rise in the flood to heave above the waves, to rock and stabilize themselves upon the flow like boats until all within was liquid and quiet above the steady roll of whatever lay below. Windlow’s blue was gone. Silkhands leaned back within the circle of my arms, exhausted. I heard someone come into the room behind us, recognized Queynt’s step but was too strained to turn to him as he gasped.

The figure before me on the pedestal opened its eyes. Someone behind those eyes smiled into my face and said, “Peter?” Then that same someone — or another — looked across my shoulder and spoke to Queynt. “Vulpas?” I felt myself thrust aside as Vitior Vulpas Queynt moved to

His brother’s side.

His brother.

My friend.

Windlow.

Barish.

The same.

“YOU HAD HIM ALL THE TIME!” Queynt advancing as though to strike me.

A voice from the pedestal, laughing weakly, not Windlow’s voice. Not entirely Windlow’s voice. Pattern and intonation different. Not so peaceful, not so kindly. “Oh, Vulpas. He didn’t know he had me. Poor lad. And he didn’t have much of me, at that, or all of me, depending upon how you look at it. He didn’t know; Windlow didn’t know.”

So that Queynt turned again to that voice which seemed more familiar to him than it did to me. “Windlow?”

A long silence. I looked at the body on the pedestal, close wrapped in its Wizardly robes. It had not moved yet, seemed uncertain whether it could. One hand made a little abortive gesture; a foot twitched. The eyes were puzzled, then clearing, then puzzled once more. When he spoke it was tentatively, slowly, as though he had to consider each word and was even then not certain of it.

“The body they brought for me, Vulpas. The bodies were always supposed to be brain-burned. Plenty of those around. Every Game always left them littered about, weeping women, mothers crying, pathetic bodies, able to walk, breathe, eat — nothing else. They were supposed to bring one like that. So they did; body of a Seer named Windlow. Only it wasn’t brain-dead — maybe half, maybe only stunned, sent deep…

“The machine. It had been acting strangely. Meant to go to the base and get some tech to come back with me and fix it. I didn’t go. Why? Forget why. The time before, the last time I was in this body — the machine didn’t separate me. Not all of me. Most of me was still here, in the body, cold. I dreamed…

“Dreamed I saw Thandbar go out of this place like a wind, like a mist, singing. Dreamed little people came in here, singing. Wanted to say `Help,’ wanted to ask them to find Vulpas, find Riddle. Imprisoned. No movement. No voice…”

“Who was it then, who went out of here?” demanded Queynt. “Who was it Riddle put the blue into? That last time. When you were supposed to meet me?”