Dawn (21 page)

Tell me first,
he thought.
Tell me why the Elders refuse to see any hope.

Darshall nodded again, and continued. “The pain was beyond compare. We were Mystics without magic. You’ve heard of the witches that still work in the land, mainly in the north? Witches with no magic…false magicians, using potions and chemicala to dupe the ignorant or fool themselves. We were similar, except that our minds were lessened by magic’s loss. Those Mystics who came before us had magic to dwell upon, while we only had its absence. So instead of examining what magic meant we spent our time looking for signs of what it
could
mean. We searched for clues to its reappearance, signs in the stars, the way water ran downhill, the shape of a sand dune after a storm in the Mol’Steria Desert. We sat on the Temple and talked long days into longer nights, many of us secretly harboring jealousy for those Mystics that existed before the Cataclysmic War. We wanted their minds, their thoughts, their lives. We wanted to be able to immerse ourselves in the magic they had access to, view it from inside and out. We wanted our days and nights to be filled with magic, not its ghost.

“And then the wellburr tree…

“It all happened in one night. There were perhaps a hundred Mystics then, and a dozen of us had been chosen to harvest the seeds of a wellburr tree.
That
wellburr tree, in fact…the one you were hiding beneath, watching to see whether I would live or die. So we came here and set about our work.

“This square was not here back then. This was almost two hundred years ago, a little more than a century since the Mages were driven from the land. Much of Hess was still a ruin. The rebuilding began, but here and there remained pockets of destruction, and this square was one of them. There was very little here, only an open area of rubble and crushed buildings. And the stake at its center.

“The stake is what I need to tell you about. It’s what we saw. We were all aware then that these pools of destruction around Hess—untouched since the War, the only things still standing the stakes of wellburr wood buried deep in the ground—marked the scenes of a terror beyond compare. But the truth of it had vanished into the past, melted away with those Shantasi who survived the razing of Hess as they eventually succumbed to age, or disease, or simply lost their desire to live.

“We avoided these places. All of us, not just the new Mystics. We
ignored
them. They stank of age and time gone off, and sometimes things came up out of the ground, sniffed at the air and went back down. We never knew what they were. Occasionally we watched, but we left them to themselves. They never came out, and we never went in, and over time even the wellburr stakes began to rot away.”

Elder Darshall drifted off again, her hand stirring the waters of the fountain as if searching for something beneath its moon-slicked surface.

“Elder Darshall? The wellburr seed?”

She nodded. “The wellburr seed. It showed us. It gave us a glimpse of history. And ever since then, we’ve been trying to forget.

“We all had the same vision. Not only the Mystics whose palms were pricked, but those who were back at the Temple as well, waiting patiently for our return. That has never happened again. It’s as if the Janne our ancestors brought out of Shanti mated with the wellburr trees, and their offspring was this one single vision. A warning? A prophecy? Perhaps both.

“That night, six Mystics threw themselves from the Temple and died on the streets below.

“I was standing close to the trunk over there, and when I felt a seed’s spines enter my palm, everything turned white. For a while it was complete shock. The pain was so deep and sudden that it did not register, and I had time to look around and see the other Mystics around me looking the same way: eyes wide, mouths agape, hands closed around the seeds and dripping blood. I saw their pale faces turn dark as our blood changed and flowed faster. And then the pain surged in, and the world lost all direction.

“The wellburr tree put us there, in that old Mystic’s place. It was showing us the history it had experienced, making us a part of that past so that we understood. That’s why I want you to kill yourself. It’s too terrible. Too awful. And it will all happen again.”

Elder Darshall’s hand stirred the water faster, forming bubbles that burst in the light of the death moon. The fountain pool had turned a dull yellow now that clouds covered the life moon, and the Elder’s skin had taken on a similar hue.

“The stake?” O’Gan said. He was impatient to hear the rest of the story, yet he knew that an Elder should not be rushed. Even with a knife in her gut, this two-hundred-year-old Mystic let time go by at its own pace. “Elder? The stake, the Mystic, the wellburr tree?”

“I want you to kill yourself,” she whispered. And she finished her story.

“HE WAS CAUGHT
by two shades.

“His name was Delgon, and he was helping to organize the defenses on Hess’ western flank. They had been expecting the Mages to send a battalion of their Krote warriors across the Mol’Steria Desert to attack New Shanti, but instead the enemy used their stranglehold on magic to raise sand blights against Hess. The defenders believed they were being hit by a sand storm to begin with, and that’s why Hess fell so quickly. By the time they realized the truth, the sand blights were already taking down buildings and crushing the Shantasi defenses to a pulp.

“Delgon fought on, regrouping close to here with some Shantasi warriors and their own machines of war. But another cloud of sand blights came in across Sordon Sound, picking up water as they came, and by the time they arrived they were so sodden that being caught in the open was like being struck by blocks of rock. The blights would breeze in and strip people to the bone in seconds. Delgon retreated, and was caught not far from here. The shades had been waiting. Immune to the storms, they entered Delgon together and carved their way into his mind.

“He fell, screaming. He watched his warriors rush past him, leaving him for dead, and then a sand blight ambushed them and shredded them within seconds. And then it moved on, ignoring Delgon because he was doomed.

“His mind was penetrated and laid open. The shades made it their home, finding life and experience and an existence they had never known…because they were not right. Not only the echoes of souls as yet unborn, these were shades aborted by nature because they were
wrong.
The Mages, of course, had put them to their own use.

“I felt Delgon’s pain, and then time passed and he was in the center of an area of ruins. He was standing with his back against a stake of rough wellburr wood, arms wrenched from their sockets and shoulders dislocated so that his hands met behind the stake. They had been melted together by some blast of unimaginable heat. The flesh had flowed, and on cooling his hands had merged together, the bones fused. The pain from that…Delgon could barely scream. Any movement jarred his hands. His shoulders were on fire.

“He was hungry and thirsty, and he had soiled himself.

“He realized then that the battle had ended. Hess was a ruin around him. The sand blights had gone, leaving behind the remains of a city blasted with the bloody remnants of its previous inhabitants. The ruins were black with dried blood. The sky was clear, and Delgon realized that several days had passed.

“The shades had gone, but they had left something of their eternal damnation inside him.

“Most of all, when he closed his eyes and imagined the scent of the Janne blooms, he knew that magic had left the land.

“I felt Delgon’s terror, and more time passed. His skin was burnt and crisp from long exposure to the sun. His vision was obscured by a gray haze, and he knew that the sunlight was making him blind. The pain in his hands had eased, but his shoulders felt as though someone was keeping a fire alight in them. Each slight movement aggravated the flames. He had slumped to his knees, his chest was tight, his stomach was distended from dehydration and an intense hunger he had never experienced before.

“And then the screaming began. He had believed himself to be alone, but the first cry came from behind him, back toward the heart of the city, and he recognized the voice of another Elder. It was quite obviously mad. Other screams started up then, spreading back and forth across Hess like echoes looking for a home. Delgon added his own voice to the cacophony. It was as if they had all believed themselves to be alone, and now the only way they could communicate was to scream.

“The screaming went on until nightfall, and as the sun went down and dusk hid the worst of the destruction, Delgon wondered again why they had all been left here like this.

“An execution, O’Gan? Or an offering?”

“I have no idea,” O’Gan said. “Something bad.”

“Something bad,” Darshall said, nodding. “Delgon could not sleep. Tiredness swamped him, but the pain kept him awake, and the certainty that something terrible would stalk through the red-strewn streets to eat him. Magic had gone, and he would die.

“So he stayed awake for three more days, watching the sun rise and fall on the screamed agony of the sacrificial Mystics of Hess. It was not until dusk of the fourth day that he realized he was already dead.

“I felt the pain he went through: the pain of being dead. It’s like nothing I’ve ever felt before, and I never, ever want to feel it again. I can barely think about it now…hardly talk about it…but imagine: you feel yourself rotting. You smell the rank stench of your flesh growing bad, your blood hardening in your veins, your eyes being pecked from your skull by birds. You feel the teeth of sand rats as they gnaw at your stomach, opening you up so that they can get at the organs inside. You feel your heart being ripped out…and you feel it being eaten from a hundred steps away, the dozen tiny mouths of a sand rat litter shredding it and fighting over every morsel.

“Then you feel the action of their stomach acids, the pain of being broken down and shit out and lying in the sun to dry…

“Eventually the weight of his torso ruptured the already weakened shoulder sockets and Delgon fell onto his face in the rubble. This was three weeks after the end of the War. The sand rats were shunning him now because he was too far gone even for them. But he felt the pain of decay in every part of his body. His wraith was trapped within a rotting corpse, unable to move, still attached to the land with all his senses even though his eyes were gone.

“He suffered there for a long time. Eventually he came apart, and parts of him went underground. Suddenly possessed of movement, his hands crawled from the weakened elbow sockets and retreated down into the dark, his feet shifted themselves in opposite directions, and still he felt every wound to his body, every rip and tear of flesh, every bone prised from its socket…he felt them all, and his wraith started to wander this place looking for escape. Even if there had been someone to chant it down to the Black, the Mages’ magic had set it adrift and given it its own appalling doom.

“S’Hivez had exacted his own vengeance upon those Mystics who banished him from New Shanti.

“Delgon’s body rotted away, but parts of it remained mummified. They shift here and there, peering aboveground on occasion and showing themselves to anyone who happens to be looking. There was no helping Delgon and the others, so we ordered that these places be paved over and a fountain placed at their centers. Small tribute to such suffering. A paltry symbol.”

She looked up, waved her hand around, dripping water into the dust. “His wraith is here now, and he still suffers the agony of death, and perhaps he always will. And we became the Elder Mystics. We swore that we would keep such unbearable truths to ourselves.”

“WHY?” O’GAN ASKED.
“Why not tell us? Why hide that part of history?”

“We needed Hess to live again. Who would have wanted to dwell in a city haunted by such things?”

“So you’re giving in? Every Elder is giving in just because—”

“Just because?”
Elder Darshall shouted, and the effort clenched her stomach muscles and extended the wound. She winced but continued through the agony, perhaps ashamed at feeling pain from something so negligible. “You have no idea, O’Gan,” she said, shaking her head and at last lifting her hand from the water. She stared at it for a few seconds, perhaps expecting it to be coated in Delgon’s blood. “You cannot imagine the pain…the time…every second an eternity.” She drifted off, still staring at her hand, mumbling something that O’Gan could not make out.