He wanted to tell her again that it was all right, but he couldn’t. All he could do was squeeze her shoulder and smooth the golden ringlets that had come free of their tie.
Oh, Eidon, I don’t want to die! The words burst up into his awareness, the wail of the terrified little boy who still dwelt within him. The boy who was suddenly facing the devastating fact that, after everything he had been through, he was going to die without Eidon, all because of his stupid pride. He would pay finally for his own folly with an eternity spent inHe gritted his teeth and closed his eyes, forcing the thought away, shoving it back down where it came from, turning away from the images his mind seemed all too eager to supply.
Suddenly Carissa hissed and lurched away from him. “Oh, plagues!” she cried. “Cooper! What did he do to Cooper?” She moaned and held herself.
“He must be dead, or he’d be here now.”
“He wouldn’t be able to see through the illusion any more than we can.”
She looked at him over her shoulder.
“He might even have gone for help,” Abramm added.
“How? It’d be a miracle if he found the way back after that maze you led us through.” She shook her head. “I wish now I’d let Rhiad take you. At least you’d be alive.”
Agreement soared in Abramm’s soul. Yes? Perhaps he would’ve found a way of escape. Perhaps he might have—
He snorted. “If not for you, he’d have pumped me full of hockspur and I’d be a mindless puppet. Is that any better than death?” It avoided an immediate entry into Torments, his treacherous mind supplied.
Carissa regarded him soberly for a time, then deflated and settled again beside him. After a few minutes she began to tug and pull at her sash, as if it were bothering her. Then she stopped and looked down, pulling away a charred strip of purple silk and something else-something that took his breath away and made him feel as if he’d walked smack into a stone wall. It was a Star of Life, shining in all its heart-catching glory, dangling from a golden chain that looked somewhat worse for wear. The setting was malformed, as if it had been melted, the nearest links twisted and flattened as if they too had been scorched.
She rolled the sphere between her fingers, its light spearing out between them, its power lancing into his heart. The spore on his arm burst alive, and with it came the familiar headache and nausea. But now, instead of distracting him, the spore’s effects only served to affirm the truth of what they sought to hide. The power of the Terstan star was in direct opposition to that of the spore. And if the spore was of Moroq and Shadow and Evil-and it was-the Star of Life must be of Eidon.
He stared at it, transfixed, catapulted in a single moment from despair to hope. How could it be here? His mind reeled. She had pressured him to leave the Dorsaddi in part because she’d feared he’d convert to their religion. How could she be carrying the very facilitator of that conversion, dangling it tantalizingly in front of his face? Unless she didn’t know.
“Where did you get that?” he asked.
His voice came out so tight and strained, she looked at him in surprise. Realizing immediately that if she had the least idea what this was, what it was doing to him, she might throw it out of the cistern before he could stop her, he forced himself to pull his eyes away from it and relax back against the wall.
“Philip gave it to me,” she said finally, frowning at him with a ghost of suspicion creasing her brow. “Why?”
He shrugged with careful indifference. “Just curious. The Dorsaddi have a whole sect based around an orb like that.”
That seemed to satisfy her. She turned that penetrating gaze back to the stone in her hand. “I think he bought it someplace in Jarnek, but I doubt he knew it was Dorsaddi.”
Not Dorsaddi, Abramm thought wryly. He must have made it for her, and she’s wearing it unheeding.
“It was supposed to protect me from evil,” she said with a laugh.
“Maybe it did.” He had his eyes closed now, had dropped his head back against the rock wall. The stone must have been what enabled her to fight the Command of the choker and to shove Rhiad into the etherworld.
More than that, he knew with a hot, breathtaking certainty that it was no coincidence she had it here now. No coincidence they had been brought here, cut off from everything else, walled away alone.
If he had doubted Eidon’s hand in his life before, he did no longer.
After a long time he heard Carissa yawn beside him, counting his own heartbeats as he listened to her breathing slow and deepen, felt her relax in sleep against him. When he finally opened his eyes again, he was shaking and his arm hurt like wildfire.
“You must come to him as nothing,” Trap had said.
He stared at the stone, dangling at the end of the chain now twined between Carissa’s limp fingers, its glow reflecting off the dirt-smudged fabric of her robe, sun-bright in this gloomy cistern.
He was, certainly, nothing. That had been proved over and over. Unworthy, wretched, flawed by an indomitable pride, well beyond hope of ever earning redemption.
He reached toward the dangling stone, extending a tentative finger to its surface. It tingled beneath his touch, and when he drew his finger away, the stone went with it, swelling, elongating, then pinching off to leave a second stone clinging to his fingertip. It balanced there a moment, then rolled, cool and hard and solid, into his palm. Staring into it, he saw something golden a shield?-fixed at its heart, and in that shield he sensed a presence powerful as a storm-tossed sea, yet gentle as the waves lapping around a child at play on shore. Not wrapping around him with confining tentacles as the rhu’ema did, seeking to trap and devour, but waiting patiently for him to come to it.
The man he had seen.
The man … Tersius?
His wrist pained him, sharply, insistently. The old protests shrieked with renewed vigor. How can you think of doing this? You’ll be marked for the rest of your life. Branded again, and worse, you’ll carry a power that will cripple you and drive you mad.
Do you really want that?
The question hung in his mind, and breathless silence pressed upon him. He heard the rush of his own pulse in his ears.
I want … to know Eidon.
Through my Light will I shield and bless you.
He had found a shield in this stone, and without it he was helpless against the Darkness-as all men were helpless, whether they chose to admit it or not.
He swallowed past the constriction in his throat.
Through my Light will you stand against the Shadow.
The orb lay on his palm, a perfect sphere of perfect Light.
Through my Light you will know me …
I have hated you, Lord Eidon. Cursed you, fought you, forsaken you.
Yet I have not forsaken you, Abramm, son of Meren. Will you choose now? Will you take the life I offer you?
Light flared, burning away the cistern’s striated walls and sand and upthrust shards of stone. A man stood before him, dressed in white-Tersius. And somehow Eidon, too, separate yet incomprehensibly one. His face blazed like the sun, impossible to look at, impossible to look away from. His piercing eyes were blue as the vault of heaven, dark as the depths of the sea, bright as all the stars in the sky. They held all wisdom and power and looked into Abramm’s very soul, seeing all that he was, all that he’d done-every last miserable failure in perfect, searing clarity.
Shuddering with awe and self-loathing, he fell to his knees. “My Lord!” he whispered. “I am not worthy.”
“No. But I have paid your debt.” Tersius held out a hand.
Abramm did not move. “I have paid…” Just as Trap had said. But … why?
Those dark, light eyes snared him. He saw again their wisdom and might and keen perception-and something more. Love.
His throat closed as he touched the reality of what that love had done and borne for him. In that moment he felt an echo of the shocking, searing pain of the Shadow’s first touch, the excruciating agony of abandonment, the co
ld, soul-draining desolation of utter aloneness, where pain was the only realityall undeserved, the debt another owed and should have paid.
The debt I owed, Abramm realized. Payment for all the resentment and selfishness and unbelief he had nurtured. For the defiance and the prideful delusion that he’d become a hero because of his own efforts. For all the affronts he’d committed and cultivated against the One who had made him, and loved him, and even now kept him alive. Affronts of graver insult than his small, wormish mind could even begin to grasp.
He shuddered again and dropped his head, choking on his own wretchedness. Shame burned in his heart, and he wanted to fling himself to the ground and crawl away.
`Abramm, take my hand.” The voice was gentle, yet firm, drawing him back out of himself, drawing his eyes up to those of his Lord. “I have paid your debt.”
Hesitantly, Abramm reached out.
Strong fingers wrapped around his own; gentle eyes smiled into his. He felt a rush of joy, and with it a golden fire surged into his palm, up his arm, into his heart. Clean and bright and achingly wonderful, it did not hurt save as deep, deep yearning finally fulfilled.
For the first time in his life he felt whole.
“You wish to know me, my son. And so you shall.”
The light faded. Abramm still sat in the cistern, the red-and-ochre walls curving around him, Carissa breathing deeply at his side. He stared at his empty palm, then hesitantly fingered back the flaps on the neck slit of his tunic.
Glinting in the flesh over his heart lay a small golden shield.
C H A P T E R
41
He touched a tentative finger to the mark; it felt smooth and hard, slightly tender to the touch. As he rubbed it, Eidon’s Light rippled through himbright, clean, crystal tones that warmed his soul and recalled to mind that wonderful presence.
Eidon.
No question. No doubts, no cold queasiness. This was what he had sought for all his life.
Suddenly he saw the purpose in all that had happened to him. Not only in his having been delivered from Saeral’s plans for possessing him-twicebut all the rest of it: the pain, the grief, the humiliation, and seeming desertions. It had taken no less to shake him loose of his pride, to clear away all the false notions to which he had clung so he could at last see the truth. It was all-and this was the supreme irony-an answer to prayer.
Eidon, please! I want only to know you.
And so you shall.
He stroked the mark again, wonder welling up within him. Had there been an altar at which he could worship, he would have flung himself before it in gratitude. But the altar, it seemed, lay in his soul now, a core of light and life he sensed would demand far more of him than the mere bending of the knee.
An answer to prayer, and much more.
Memories ran through his mind, incidents along every step of this journey he’d made-from the Holy Keep in Springerlan, to the galley ships of Katahn, to the Val’Orda, to this broken cistern deep in the Land of Shadow. He saw, as never before, the hand that had guided his path, protected and preserved him to this moment-not merely so he might know the Almighty, but so he might serve him as well.
He released a long, slow breath as conviction took hold of him.
The White Pretender was Eidon’s creation, not Abramm’s-a beacon of light and hope held out to a people who walked in darkness, inspiring those who longed for freedom and truth, reproaching those who exalted Khrell. From his first day in the Games, the Pretender had ridden the winds of destiny, slaying with ease the man who played the part of invincible Supreme Commander in symbolic affirmation of the dire prophecy that had been shrilled out before the match began.
Coincidence?
Even at the time he had sensed it was not. And though his defiance of Beltha’adi’s claims of divine mandate had sprung more from anger and the pleasure he took in baiting the man than from any loyalty to Eidon, Eidon had used it, fulfilling purposes Abramm hadn’t begun to understand.
Beltha’adi understood, though. Trap might be the Dorsaddi Deliverer, but the Pretender was the wasp that stung the emperor to madness, the person around whom the conflict turned. That was why he had to be slain, publicly if possible, and why Beltha’adi had asked for him rather than the Deliverer. If he learned the man he was to face today was not the one he wanted, it would be a great victory. The Pretender would be called a coward, proving by his flight the truth of Beltha’adi’s claims of invincibility.
Chilled, he sat forward. I have to go back.
Immediately he was beset with memories of all the Terstans he’d seen die in the ring-broken, humiliated, tortured-and of Trap’s assertion to Mephid only this morning that a man did not come to Eidon’s power full able to use it. Even if Abramm took the star today, he’d said, he would in no way be prepared to face Beltha’adi’s magic.
Yet the conviction remained. I must go back and face him.
But if he did, he would surely die.
The conviction only grew stronger.
But what of Carissa? He couldn’t leave her here. She’d have to go with him.
The thought stopped. What was he thinking? Neither of them was going anywhere. My Lord, if you truly do want me to go back, you’re going to have to get me out of this cistern first.
The answer came immediately, so startling, so unbelievably easy that he shouted with excitement and bounded to his feet. Disturbed by his sudden movement, Carissa stirred and moaned, but he had eyes only for the wall in front of him.
“What’s happening?” Carissa’s voice came low and gravelly behind him. “What’s wrong?”
“I can see the slit,” he cried, moving toward it. More precisely he saw where the wall shimmered and wobbled, betraying the illusion’s presence. When he put a hand on it, it felt as solid as ever on first brush. Pressing harder, though, his fingers sank into it.
“You can?” His words had taken time to penetrate his sister’s sleep-fog, but now excitement flooded her voice as she leaped up beside him. “Is it fading, then?”
She touched the wall, then turned to him, flushed and eager. Her eyes fell at once on the shieldmark, gleaming between the edges of his tunic. They fixed there, round and wide as the eager flush drained off into whiteness. “Holy Haverall!” she whispered. “What have you done?” Her eyes climbed to meet his own. “What have you done, Abramm?”
“What I should have done a long time ago.”
She staggered back from him, then collapsed onto the sand before he could catch her, staring again at the mark on his chest and shaking her head. Tears glittered in her eyes. “How could you? How could you have done this?”
He crouched before her and seized her hands, but she jerked them away. “Riss, you don’t understand. It’s not at all as we’ve been taught. It really is the mark of Eidon.”
She just kept staring at it, shaking her head as the tears rolled down her cheeks. “You’ve ruined everything.”
“No, I haven’t. This isn’t like what it was with the Mataio. This is truth. It’s what I’ve looked for all my life.”
She didn’t seem to be listening, or if she was, she didn’t believe him. Words, he realized, were not going to reach her. Maybe actions would.
He stood and turned back to the wall. Trap had pulled him through two similar illusions outside Xorofin. Could he pull Carissa through this one now? He was new to this power. What if he lacked the strength or wit or whatever it took to get her through with him? What if he pulled her right into the stone? For that matter, what if he lacked the strength to get through all by himself, let alone with her?
He had to believe that wouldn’t happen. But perhaps he ought to test it first.
He pushed his fingers into the rock again, drew them out, took a deep breath, and plunged forward. As before, it was just like walking through a screen of cold lard.
The slit stood empty and silent on the other side. As he suspected, the illusion worked both ways. Cooper wouldn’t have known they were trapped or what h
ad happened. But it looked like he’d gone back for help in any case. Abramm’s sword, which Rhiad had earlier pitched away, gleamed in the shadow along the wall, and he stooped to pick it up. Then, with one more glance around, he pushed back into the cistern.
He expected Carissa to be suitably impressed by his seemingly miraculous feat and hopefully a little more receptive to the change in him. But she sat with knees drawn up, arms folded upon them, forehead braced on arms. She didn’t appear to know he’d even left. Her shoulders heaved and her breath sobbed, and suddenly it annoyed him.
“Oh, stop,” he snapped, sliding the blade back into its scabbard. “It’s not as if I’ve died.”
“It is as far as I’m concerned,” she said to her lap.
“You know nothing about it. And everything you think you know is wrong.”
Her head snapped up, her gaze glaring into his. “I saw the sarotis in Ray’s eyes, Abramm. I saw his madness.”
He grimaced, then said firmly, “The sarotis is not inevitable. Meridon’s worn the shield nearly all his life, and there’s no sarotis in his eyes. Nor is he mad.”
“He’s facing Beltha’adi in single combat.”
“But not because he’s mad. Now, come on. Let’s get out of here.” He held out a hand.
She stared at him, clearly confused.
“I told you,” he said. “I can see the opening.”
Her eyes flicked to the wall, which he knew had not changed in the slightest for her. They came back to him, her brow narrowing. When still she did not move he huffed his irritation and stepped toward her, hauling her to her feet.
“I’ll pull you through,” he said. “It’ll feel strange for a moment, like you can’t do it, but just bear with it and you’ll be all right.”
Before she had time to protest, he tightened his grip on her and strode through the illusion.
As they stepped into the slit, she uttered a small, tight “Oh” and nothing more. He let her go, and she turned to stare back at what to her would appear to be a solid wall. The look of astonished wonder on her face at least partially offset her earlier reproach, though he doubted it would change her attitude much. It hadn’t changed his.