Darkness Risen (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 4) (2 page)

“Doesn’t that defeat the very thing that gave her
this support? Isn’t it possible to do both at the same time without sacrificing
the Face?” Fourth asked, finally giving in to the screaming of her body from the
dull licks of flame spreading through her, and reaching for the pitcher with
the jadine handle. “She has been invaluable, though she has only been in
existence for such a short time. We may need her again.”

“It is not the first time that one of our operatives
has had to fade into obscurity,” the First said, her voice slightly dry with
arid force. The force of her voice was diminished, however, by her hand
reaching next for the gold and jadine pitcher. “The Face has achieved her goal.
She will not even exist in the new age.”

“I do not think we should discard her so lightly,”
the Fifth said calmly, not even a tiny hint of steel from the Sixth glinting
through her velvetly calm, modulated voice. “Perhaps if we take time to
meditate upon the matter?” The Fifth reached for the jadine-handled pitcher.

The Second, Third and Fourth nodded and the First
did not object out loud, though her bearing exuded mild irritation that hid a
deeper contempt. Her present designs obviously did not call for the Public Face
being in potency.

“Let us then give praise to the One Who has guided
and supported us. From this One, we gain our strength. To this One we owe our allegiance.
In silence, we contemplate this One’s grandeur.”

All lapsed into contemplation. A silence almost like
death settled over the cowled figures as each thought deeply of the problem.
The silence replaced the emptiness completely. The Six stilled, became utterly
motionless in introspection, like shrouded joumbi, like waking dead, completing
the image that the hand of the Beloved had touched this place. A slight
disturbance then spoiled the image - the Sixth, the last, reaching for the
jadine-handled pitcher and the antidote that it contained.

the darkness
turned overhead, a menacing, stooping awareness that crawled upon the nerves
and scratched lightly at the back of the neck, a watching, waiting, prowling
weight of oppression...

The darkness pressed in on Silonyi.

The darkness had become oppressive long before this
point, and the dust a nuisance that bordered on detriment, for it tickled her
nose, making her ache with the need to sneeze. The sneeze did not come, but the
threat of it hung over Silonyi like a pall, and with it
something
, some
undefined prickle of mounting dread that also hung over her, distracting her
attention enough so that she missed some of what was said.

She blinked rapidly and consciously willed the
hovering sneeze away as she sat behind the false piece of wall from where she
might faintly see and clearly hear the clandestine lorn. The impending sense of
something
seemed to go with the sneeze, so that she relaxed and refocused
her attention on the Six and what they had to say. Only, a few gran later, the dread
came back again with redoubled force, dragging the sneeze behind it. She cursed
within her thoughts as she invoked her enn hadura training, pulling impulse
awareness away from the nerves in her nose, so that the possibility of a sneeze
was impossible, and the threat of it immaterial.

Her nose went numb and the sneeze went away for
good. She suppressed an urge to sigh, and continued her descrying of the
meeting, not worrying yet about the information she had missed in her battle
with the sneeze.

I’ll find a way to glean that information later
, she thought
decisively. Right now, it was important not to miss anything else. She focused.

As soon as she had become fully engrossed in the Six
again, something bit her in the exact center of her back. Silonyi stiffened,
clenching her jaw.

How are these afflictions getting through my enn
hadura focus?
she wondered angrily. How had the sneeze? Neither of these things should have
affected her, neither should have broken her concentration in the least way.
She should have been able to sit through the entire meeting undisturbed by
physical discomforts real or imagined. Silonyi thought back to the exact moment
when the sneeze had begun to bother her. And she realized that it had come
gradually, insidiously, calmly overriding her enn hadura so that she did not
notice until afterward, until the desire to sneeze. And now this, an irritating
nip in the middle of her back, at just the right spot so that she would not be
able to reach it without some exquisite twisting.

Why hasn’t my enn hadura shielded me from these
things?
Silonyi frowned. Enn hadura was the special art of spying, and she excelled at
it. Was her focus being weakened somehow, by something she had done? The sharp
nip came again, and over and again came the sense of dread. What if other
aspects of her instruction in the art of spying had been corrupted?
What if
I am no longer able to move as silently as I need to, or sit as still as I have
been taught to do, or record words and images as accurately as before? What if
I’m on the verge of being detected?

That thought made her stiffen with fear. Silonyi
listened for a moment. She had missed huge chunks of conversation, and was now
hopelessly lost in what they were saying. She could try to piece together what
was significant about what was being said, but without the information that had
come before the overall understanding was lost.

Nip
. She squirmed and quickly contemplated
her options now over the suddenly loud beating of her heart.

The best thing would be to stay, but if there is
something wrong with me, then perhaps I had better leave and try to explain
later once the ol’bey woman has had a chance to look me over and my enn hadura
teacher has had a chance to retest me and help me readjust for my growth.
For she was
just exiting adolescence, and her enn hadura teacher had had to work extra hard
to train the awkwardness out of her stretching limbs.

She listened to what one of those in the lorn
stated, and the last thing she heard was something about rescinding the
challenge and meditating upon some matter. Then they all sat perfectly still
and did not move or speak.

Silonyi shuddered with dread and indecision. Now,
more than ever, she feared detection. If her enn hadura teachings were failing
her, they would certainly become aware of her presence in this lull of silence.
No, she could not stay. But she could not leave until there was something to
cover the traces of her departure.

Then, like a Goddess-send, one of the figures moved,
reaching for one of the pitchers on the low table. As that last of the cowled
figures drank of the sem’sa in the pitcher of the jadine handle, Silonyi took
the opportunity to escape. She would find out how they decided to rescind the
challenge later. She turned quietly, slowly in the narrow space, moving with
extreme care, holding her guinne and short pec’ta close to her so that they did
not betray any sound of her passing.

This particular billa’ja’way was becoming more and
more difficult to navigate as she got older and bigger. The old part of the
palace was positively riddled and rife with these narrow crawl spaces that allowed
one to spy on many of the secret lorn lains. Most had been forgotten from
generation to generation until she had rediscovered them.
Perhaps I will be
able to find another billa’ja’way that comes to this lain, one that is more
accommodating to my growing.
Perhaps that slight feeling of awkwardness was
part of what had broken through her enn hadura, even though it should not have
made a difference.

If there were another such passage, though, she did
not remember it. She had discovered the billa’ja’way system quite by accident. While
playing many cycles before when she was younger, she chanced to hit a secret
lever in one of the lower study lains, a lever that activated an ancient rite. The
rite opened a sliding panel in the one wall without books. As soon as her
mother had heard of the discovery, she set Silonyi to explore as many of the
passage-ways as possible, making charts of where they terminated and which
rooms and corridors they corresponded to in the old palace, T’chi’la. Some of
these ways were blocked off once found, filled in, and otherwise destroyed. But
there were still many points of entry, and as many points of defense and
escape; chutes, trap-doors, hidden cubicles, all could be found in quantities
along the billa’ja’ways. And Silonyi was sure that she knew them all. But her
memory told her that this was the only access way to that particular lain. Her
mother would not be pleased at all by this eve’s outcome of her quiet
observation.

Of course, her mother knew she was spying on this
meeting - it was, in fact, part of her education as Heir. Physical spying of
the secret lorns was impossible because the Palace was impregnable and one
within would not dare to spy - unless one had permission, and one was included
in the protections to ward off such things. And, of course, one had to know the
arts of enn hadura, the ability to observe, undetected, among the powerful and
alert and paranoid. Her mother expected her to spy as a learning experience, and
also as a form of insurance. Because, for all their pretense at anonymity,
Silonyi, too, knew their names and faces. It showed her mother’s trust in her,
but it was also hard, bitter lesson - trust not even those whom one calls
allies.

This was also a test of her aptness at stealth, a
test of the enn hadura, and woe unto Silonyi if she were ever caught. If she
were caught, she would be punished as if she were not authorized to be there,
and she would be dealt with as a spy, avoiding permanent damage and death only
because she was a Tribal Heir. But she and her mother and the Tribe would pay
heavily, though secretly, for her misstep.

But I’ve never been caught, nor even come close
before now.
It was second nature to her to pass unnoticed through the billa’ja’ways by now
- except for her growing. Because of her rapid growth she had begun to resort
to tiny feats of chi’rita to get her in and out of this passage until she went
through full readjustment training - and she had had to learn to make the rites
themselves undetectable too, from all but her mother.

Perhaps that’s why the enn hadura has failed me,
she thought
suddenly
.
The enn hadura was supposed to be purely a physical art,
without the use of ‘rita at all.
I thought I was improving upon it with my
tiny feats of ‘rita, but perhaps I was undoing it instead
.

Perhaps. But when the edge of her pec’ta brushed the
wall and a stray guinne scraped along the low climbing ceiling within her first
five retreating steps, she had no choice but to grab at the sounds with her chi’rita,
stopping the vibrations of air before they could transmit through the wall. No,
she would not get out of here without her chi’rita. Sound beyond the wall had
stopped again. There was no more cover. It was leave now or be detected for
certain. She was dreadfully certain, at that point.

So she drew a deep breath, filling her lungs, held
it and stilled all the air in the passage. She pulled all the energy out of the
very particles, so that it did not even stir at her passing, a gaseous solid. A
cold
, gaseous solid. She moved through the stuff as quickly as she
dared, parting it with her chi’rita like multiple draperies. Time and the
immobilized air seemed to press in on her, a gentle liquid pressure squeezing
her body, making it scream for a new breath. She marshaled herself as best she
could, though, for the main passage was not so very far away, and she had come
this way countless times before. But something felt different this time as the
enn hadura completely deserted her. Something was
wrong
. In the absence
of the security of the enn hadura the dread and the wrongness gripped her with hard,
slimy-frigid fingers. The dread crystallized into panic, an unreasonable panic
of wrongness that was so strong she nearly froze in her tracks as it reared up
and wrapped itself around her throat. She stopped and quaked and tried to calm
herself, tried to call forth her most effective schoolings in discipline.

There is nothing wrong here
, she told
herself sternly. There was no cause for alarm. She did this all the time. There
was no reason to panic.

Her pulse slowed and her non-breathing calmed, for
an instant.

And then the panic jumped on her like a ravenous
joumbi and spurred her heels to flight. It whipped her to a gallop, rode her
like an eve-mare. The dark passage seemed to stretch out infinitely before her
as she loped, the soft-soled sandals she wore slapping noiselessly against the
chilled soles of her feet. This was dangerous, not only because she was running
and holding her breath, but because the chill itself might be detectable to
those beyond in the secret room; not to mention the fact that the chill would
invite illness if she stayed in it too long.

The dark passage way seemed to twist and turn before
her (even though she knew it to be straight as an arrow’s path) and her held
breath rampaged within her, clawing to get out of her lungs with needle-sharp
talons. But she dared not let it out. It might act as a catalyst to the stilled
air, might start it moving again unchecked, with a very audible whoosh. Her
vision grew gray and red around the edges, and her head began to feel light.
And a way of fifty paces became an eve-mare of eternity.