Page 23 of Issola

  Aliera didn’t seem too worried—she raised Pathfinder, gave a scream that was so loud I heard it over the roaring, and charged.

  The Jenoine noticed her, flung the Demon Goddess away, and faced Aliera.

  Pathfinder seemed about to take it in the neck, but it held up a hand and, just as before, Pathfinder was held motionless, as was Aliera.

  Evidently, they had succeeded in re-establishing their link with the Sea. I wondered if that meant we could retreat now, call it a lost battle, and go home.

  I guess not.

  Verra jumped on its back, biting and scratching at it like a tag in a brothel who just discovered that someone has borrowed her favorite gown and gotten a wine stain on it.

  The Jenoine spun quickly, striking Aliera with the Demon Goddess’s feet—the whole thing suddenly looked more like a tavern brawl or a scene in a farcical play than an apocalyptic battle between the forces of Good and Evil. Aliera was knocked backward again, while the Goddess fell from its back, landing at its feet, leaving its back to us. There was the perfect backshot I’d been looking for before, but I will confess to you that never for an instant did it occur to me to take it.

  It did occur to someone else, however.

  I felt a pluck at my side, as if a clumsy cutpurse were op­erating against me. I reached down to grab the wrist, forgetting that that hand didn’t work. Before I could do anything else, Teldra was past me, holding the Morganti dagger she had pulled from its sheath at my belt.

  Before it could turn around, Lady Teldra struck it, hard and low in the back.

  No matter how powerful the Jenoine, a Morganti dagger between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp its style.

  I guess it was the surprise, the unexpectedness of the attack that did it, but, of all the sorceries and Great Weapons and gods and dragons and necromancies, it was that attack with that weapon that got through.

  The Jenoine jerked and tensed, spun around, and its face, insofar as I could make out an expression on its alien features, seemed twisted into a grimace.

  For a moment that, in my memory at least, stretches out forever, I felt hope; could it actually be that after Iceflame, Blackwand, and Pathfinder had failed, that thing had succeeded? Teldra had stuck it deep, that was for sure, and maybe, just maybe.

  Time stretched out, and everything took a horribly long time.

  The Jenoine reached behind itself, and when its hand came back into view, it was holding the Morganti dagger, which it neatly and smoothly buried in Lady Teldra’s breast.

  16

  Funereal Customs

  The Jenoine, having destroyed Teldra, turned away; obviously still in pain, and, it seemed to me, maybe even a bit disoriented. Well, I suppose if you’ve just had a powerful Morganti dagger plunged into your vitals, you are permitted a little disorientation. Aliera shook herself and started to stand, the Demon Goddess rose to her knees, Sethra lowered Iceflame and turned toward Teldra. The Necromancer stood there, apparently oblivious. Morrolan remained dead, but not as dead as Teldra was or I felt.

  I was close to her; I took a step and knelt down beside her, suddenly as oblivious as the Necromancer to both my friends and to the Jenoine. The expression on her face was one of mild astonishment. Her eyes were opened, but sightless, vacant; there was nothing there. It was all gone. Teldra was gone.

  The Morganti dagger was deeply buried in her, and still leak­ing blood—with a blade that long, it must be nearly all the way through her.

  I reached for the dagger to draw it out of her, though I knew it was already too late. Maybe I was thinking of saving her, maybe I was planning to attack the Jenoine with it; more likely I was just not thinking.

  It was hard to get a grip on it with Spellbreaker still in my hand; I was unwilling to drop the chain, and I had no other hand to use. I managed to wedge the end of the chain between my palm and the hilt of the blade, and got a sort of weak grip.

  A tingling began to run up my arm, mild but unmistakable. It was different from the tingling I was used to feeling when Spellbreaker intercepted some nasty that was aimed at me—it was sharper, for one thing, and it didn’t stop. I kept hold of the weapon and the chain, and the tingling increased, becoming almost painful.

  “Boss, what is it?”

  “I don’t know. There’s something—”

  Spellbreaker stirred in my hand, twisting against the smooth hilt of the dagger. I watched, fascinated, as it twisted and curled up and around, doing its snake imitation. I’d seen it before, at odd moments, and never understood why. Nor did I now; I just watched.

  The links, already small, were becoming even smaller—they shrunk as I watched, which was creepy. At the same time, the end of the chain touched the blade, and then ran up its length in what was almost a caress. The other end, the end I was hold­ing, was almost moving, though at first I didn’t feel it through the tingling that was still running up my arm.

  Spellbreaker’s links kept getting smaller, almost vanishing entirely as distinct links, and it seemed to be getting longer overall. Was it, somehow, trying to rescue Teldra? If it was trying, did it have a chance?

  I watched, fascinated. If the Jenoine had wanted to, it could have crushed my head without really trying, because between the death of Teldra and the strange things Spellbreaker was doing, I had forgotten it was there; but I guess it was distracted by Sethra and Aliera and Verra, the way I was distracted by—

  —The links were entirely gone now, leaving Spellbreaker looking almost like a thin golden rope, and as I watched, it began to wrap itself around the hilt—it really was trying to save Teldra. I realized I was holding my breath.

  It continued slithering around, more snakelike than ever, covering the hilt as if it were a hangersnake trying to strangle it; I had moved my hand to get out of the way, keeping contact with the blade only through the pommel. The tingling continued, and then I realized that the weapon was actually vibrating in Teldra’s breast.

  If there was, as I suspected, some sort of battle going on within the Morganti blade, then continuing to hold it was a bad idea.

  I should let go.

  I really should let go.

  “Boss—”

  “I can’t. I just can’t do it.”

  Well, if I couldn’t get away from the fight, maybe I could help.

  “Boss, do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Not a clue, Loiosh. Be ready to pull me out.”

  “I don’t know if I’ll be able to.”

  “I know.”

  There was a battle raging around me—gods and demigods and wizards and undead battling; but I might just as well have been in my old office, in the quiet space in the basement, where I used to perform witchcraft when I had nothing to worry about except how to find the guy whose leg I wanted to break, or how to get the most out of the new brothel I’d just opened.

  I miss the days when I used to be nostalgic.

  Lady Teldra was inside the dagger, somewhere, somehow, and I was going to go get her or ... well, I was going to go get her.

  I should have been surprised by how easily my awareness entered the chain, but even the action seemed normal, natural, inevitable—sending my consciousness spinning along inside Spellbreaker was the easiest thing in the world, and I could have done it at any time, if I’d ever thought to try. I was moving, flying even, through corridors of gold; endless corridors, with side paths and trails leading everywhere and nowhere, with a warm, almost hot breeze caressing my face.

  I felt Teldra all around me, from everywhere—a sort of friendly reserve, giving the gold a reddish tint, and in that mo­ment, I think I discovered her secret, I learned how she could manage to be so friendly to everyone who entered Morrolan’s keep for whatever reason: She liked people. She just plain liked them. It was strange. My grandfather was like that, too, but I couldn’t think of many others. Cawti, perhaps, when she let herself. It was strange, knowing someone like that; I guess it was why I had never been able to understand her, and why I always,
even to myself, made ironic remarks about her courtesies, and tried to find hidden motives in everything she did; it is hard to be comfortable around someone who just likes you for no reason, when you’ve always—

  No, there wasn’t time for that. I needed to find her—find the center of the Teldra-ness amid all the confusion of gold and movement and corridors whipping past.

  I called her name, but got no response, and yet I could feel her presence; her personality, which I’d had so much trouble defining, was overwhelming. But it was static, too: that is, she didn’t seem to be feeling or doing anything, she just was.

  As I hunted for her—moving, it seemed, in part because I desired it, and in part pushed along by some power of which I was only dimly aware—I began to notice, here and there, what seemed to be nondescript greyish threads hanging haphazardly among the corridors through which I sped. I grabbed one as I passed; it seemed the right thing to do. The thread came with me easily, and as I held it, Teldra seemed closer—the feeling of her presence stronger. I grabbed another, and another, one of them with my left hand. Okay, here and now, I had two good hands. Why not? Each time I saw a greyish strand hanging from a wall or ceiling, I grabbed it and held it, and if I missed one I reached back without even looking and got it, too. I pulled the threads in and tied them together, holding them.

  I was no longer aware of the tingling sensation that had been running up my arm, but now, instead, it seemed as if that entire tingle was filling my body, leaving me feeling strong, alert, even powerful; it was a heady sensation, but not an unpleasant one. I wondered if I should be worried.

  “Loiosh, should I be worried?”

  There was a long, long moment before he replied, which was unusual, and when the reply came, it was faint and distorted as if from a distance. “I don’t know, Boss. I don’t know where you are, or what you’re doing, or ... everything is heating up here, the Demon Goddess and Sethra and Aliera are ... I’m scared, Boss.”

  When your familiar is scared, it’s a good time for you to be scared, too.

  But—

  I didn’t feel worried. The whole idea of having a familiar is to tell you when to be frightened by something that doesn’t appear frightening—a familiar is your other self that watches to make sure nothing is being done to you while your attention is elsewhere, and this was just such a situation, but my instincts were telling me to push on, to keep searching for Teldra, to keep grabbing at whatever those strands of power were.

  If Loiosh had told me to pull out, I would have, but he wasn’t certain, which left me to make the decision. It was close. But one thought just wouldn’t go away: If it were me in there, and Teldra had decided to look for me, she wouldn’t have stopped while there was any hope left.

  Okay, the decision was made: Press on.

  A famous Iorich once said that the difficult part of being a Justicer was sounding one hundred percent when you felt fifty-one percent. I knew what he meant: I tried to put the doubt behind me so I could continue my psychic, or necromantic, or mystical journey through Spellbreaker, but it wasn’t easy, be­cause doubt is less easily dispelled than illusion, and with doubt come tentative half-measures—and nothing worthwhile has ever been accomplished by tentative half-measures.

  There was a keen sense of traveling along with me, almost an ache for Teldra, but it was a distraction—as were my uncer­tainties about whether I was controlling or being controlled by the forces I was playing with, and my knowledge that, while I was sending my consciousness through the links of the strange artifact I called Spellbreaker, all the time the battle was going on around my physical body—but then, there wasn’t a lot I could do to influence that anyway, was there? I couldn’t do them any good, and it was pointless of them to have brought me to this place. If only I had—

  If only I had—

  Oh.

  Maybe you’ve had it all figured out all along and have been waiting for me to catch on—those of you who have been fol­lowing my path, walking beside me through sorceries, deaths, pain, betrayal, and wizardries beyond human comprehension—but believe me it is much easier to figure out when you are sitting back watching it unfold before you than when you have your awareness spinning through strange, mystical corridors while outside of you rages a battle in which the very gods are only holding their own. In any case, it was only at that moment that I understood what I was doing, what I was creating.

  Half-remembered conversations, half-heard remarks, bits of folklore, years of observations without comprehension—so the Serioli had simply been telling me the simple, unvarnished truth in the most straightforward way it knew how; and that was why the Goddess had been so ambivalent; and that’s how Pathfinder had saved Aliera’s life—all came together into the explosive epiphany that I had been, all unknowing, doing just exactly what I should be doing.

  Yes, now I understood.

  And with that understanding came confidence, and with confidence came decision.

  Teldra was gone, and yet not gone. She was there, but it was pointless to find her. What mattered were those greyish strands of power. What mattered was completing the transfor­mation, that would save as much of Teldra as could be saved.

  Fine, then.

  By an act of will I stopped, and I summoned the greyish threads to me until I held all of them in my grasp—an instant it seemed, and I think it was. I wrapped them around my left wrist. The next one, and the next one. I had all the time in the world, so I could be careful and thorough, and I was; as careful as an Issola is of every nuance of tact; as thorough as a jhereg is at extracting every morsel of food from a corpse. I took my time, and did it right: pulling in the tiniest threads and securing them, making sure they were woven so close to me that we could never be separated; there was no longer a Spellbreaker, or a Lady Teldra, or a Morganti dagger, or even a Vlad; we were all some­thing different now. The Jhereg? Heh. Let them come after me with their pathetic Morganti weapons. Just let them.

  Almost as an afterthought, I repaired the trivial damage in my left arm, which had been repairing itself anyway. I both knew and felt that what I was wrapping the links around was, in fact, my soul. My conversation with Teldra about the nature of the soul came back to me with a sort of gentle irony; Teldra was like that. My own irony was harsher—maybe she’d exert some influence on me. I didn’t think I’d mind. I wasn’t seeing any­thing anymore, nor was I hearing anything, I was just being, and doing, and then I was done.

  I came back to myself, to the real world around me, and found that I was still on one knee, next to Teldra’s lifeless body. She lay with an arm up over her head, her eyes open, glassy, and sightless, her long hair all scattered about. She’d never have permitted her hair to look that way. Her mouth was open a little, in that moronic way you see from time to time on derelicts who gather in the evenings near Barlen’s temple near Malek Circle. It was all wrong on Lady’s Teldra’s face. I looked away, and at what was in my right hand—a long Morganti dagger, with a hilt like a very fine golden chain. It fit my hand like an additional finger, like it should have been there all along, or maybe it had been there all along and I’d never been aware of it.

  It?

  Her. It was, after all, Lady Teldra.

  I stood up and faced the Jenoine, which was moving at an impossible speed, fending off attacks from Sethra and Aliera and Verra—Aliera had some blood on her, and seemed both dazed and determined; the Goddess had grown larger, and her eyes flashed with hate. Sethra, like the Necromancer, who still hadn’t moved, had no expression on her face at all, but moved in and out, looking for openings in the Jenoine’s defenses—which were, in fact, rather formidable: there were lines of power flowing from its fingers, which formed glittering patterns in the air that left no room for anything to get past, but through which it could strike at will, lines that I knew must have been there all along, but which I could now see for the first time. Lines keeping Path­finder and Iceflame, and Verra with the power she embodied just by being who she was, completely abs
orbed in coping, be­cause to do otherwise would court destruction of those who wielded the Great Weapons, and permitting the wielder to be destroyed was something a Great Weapon would not permit, because beyond any practical considerations—far, far stronger than any practical considerations—there were bonds of love: Pathfinder loved Aliera, Iceflame loved Sethra. Blackwand loved Morrolan.

  And Lady Teldra loved me.

  The defenses the Jenoine had formed were, as I said, for­midable, but the defenses were also, at the same time, laughable. Of course Iceflame and Pathfinder and Blackwand would be stopped by them; powerful as those weapons were, they had not been made for this. As I attacked the Jenoine’s defensive spells I felt the same tingling I used to feel when Spellbreaker used to intercept something aimed at me. I cut through them as if they were paper.

  The Jenoine felt its defenses fail. It turned around and, quick as a striking Issola, I thrust Lady Teldra up under its chin and into its head.

  It roared and spasmed as if every muscle in its body had contracted at once, and then I felt rather than saw Iceflame and Pathfinder join the party, and a sense of power, energy, and well-being flooded through me, and I understood the reason for that now, too.

  It collapsed into a heap at my feet; I felt as if I could take on all the Jenoine in the universe with one hand tied behind me. I heard myself laughing as I turned to face the remaining two, but at that moment, the Necromancer gave a cry and fell to her knees, and, just that quickly, they were gone, leaving only half the gods in the world, one very large dragon, and our little group standing on the spot of Adron’s Disaster, next to Mor­rolan, who was dead, and his seneschal, who was more than dead.

  Or perhaps less than dead.

  The sudden silence was shattering; I basked in it, feeling as if I could emit sparks, and would if I weren’t careful for those around me. It was so quiet, I could hear my companions breathing; I realized then that the Sea made no sound, not even ocean-type sounds.