Issola (29 page)

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 absorbed 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.

"Doing all right, chum?"

"Grand, Boss. And Rocza is fine, too. And so are you, by the way, though 1 was worried there for a bit."

"Yeah, me too."

"I think I'm jealous, though."

"Bite me."

He did, but in the nicest possible way.

Sethra knelt next to the Necromancer, who stirred and shook her head as if to clear it - positively the most human thing I had ever seen her do.

"They broke the Necromancer's block, didn't they?"

"Brute force and desperation," said the Demon Goddess in her strange voice, made even stranger by the awful silence. "But for some reason, they released their link to the amorphia."

"So we won?" asked Sethra, sounding surprised.

Verra looked at Morrolan and Teldra lying on the ground, and nodded.

Aliera said, in the strangest voice I'd ever heard from her, "Daddy did it. Daddy took their link from them." Sethra stared at her.

Aliera nodded and said, "I asked him to, and he did." Well, it was nice to know they were doing something while 1

was distracted.

Sethra looked out over the Sea and said, "Adron is out there?"

"Yes. I suspected he would be."

"Conscious? Aware?" said Sethra.

Aliera shrugged. I understood that shrug. "Consciousness" and "awareness" aren't always clear-cut concepts, as I had just learned. There were tears in Aliera's eyes. Well, there was plenty to cry about, I suppose, and there'd be more if we didn't get to work on Morrolan soon. I looked over to where the Jenoine had been, but there was no trace they had ever been there; the gods and even the dragon were gone as well. It was only Sethra and Aliera and the Necromancer and the Goddess and me; and Morrolan and what had been Teldra. Morrolan's sword had returned to his side, still gripped by his dead hand; I'm not sure when that happened.

"We need to get to work on Morrolan," said Aliera, her eyes still glistening. Sethra stood up and nodded to her. "Yes," she said. "And quickly." She looked at Teldra's body, lying on the ground, then at the weapon in my hand, then at me.

"Well done, Vlad," she said.

Aliera, standing dazed and bloody behind her, but with a grim expression on her face, nodded. The Demon Goddess, however, had eyes only for the blade I carried.

Well, who could blame her? "You can put that thing away now," she said at last. I looked into her eyes and chuckled. "Very well, my Goddess."

Verra scowled.

I cleaned her on the Jenoine's body - some customs must be observed, after all - then sheathed her, with some regret, my hand trailing over the smooth, gold hilt that had once been Spellbreaker. I was delighted to discover that sheathing her did not diminish the sense of her personality.

I watched Verra, who was looking back at me, but she had nothing more to say. With an aimless gesture of farewell, she turned into shimmering sparks and was gone. Sethra, meanwhile, had lifted Morrolan in her arms.

"Come, stand next to me," she said.

Aliera looked out over the Sea, I suppose saying farewell to her father. Then Aliera, the Necromancer, and I took positions next to Sethra, and then we were gone from that place, and we were once more in the heart of Dzur Mountain.

17

They laid Morrolan on a couch, and Aliera and the Necromancer began working on him. I watched for a while, then turned to Sethra. "So we won."

She nodded. "Yes, I'd call this a victory. They wanted to establish their own link to amorphia. That is, a permanent link, on our world, with which to challenge us. They failed to do so. And we destroyed two of them, which is no small feat."

"Good."

Sethra shook her head and murmured, "Adron."

"Yes."

"It's hard to believe. Sentience is, well, I don't know."

"Yeah, sentience is a strange thing, isn't it?

She glanced up at me, catching my tone of voice, and said, "I shall miss her."

"Yes," I said. Then, "Did you know?"

Her eyes widened. "You mean, what was going to happen?"

"Yes. Teldra, the weapon - all of it."