Light of Eidon (Legends of the Guardian-King, Book 1) (13 page)

Saeral turned to him with a sad smile. “You see? It was an illusion.”

Eldrin shook his head. “It seemed so real. And I felt. I felt …”

Odd. He felt odd. Right now. As if somehow he were not really standing
here in this doorway, but was lying on the floor back in Saeral’s chambers
with his shoulders pressed to the carpet. He blinked at the vaulted ceiling in
front of him. A rustle at his side drew his gaze to the dark bird standing there,
watching him. The moment he saw its long-needled beak and searing white
eye, he knew what it was.

With a cry of horror, he wrenched against the hands that held him, tried
to lift his arm to knock the bird away, but someone else was holding down
his wrist. The bird ruffled its feathers, then lifted its beak and plunged it into
his forearm.

At the same moment a hand jerked up his chin and the vision vanished.
The screaming pain in his arm became distant, unimportant. Once more he
stood with Saeral in the underground meditation chamber.

“You can see there is nothing evil here,” Saeral said.

“Yes, Master.”

“It’s just another meditation cubicle, like tens of others.”

“Yes, Master.”

Saeral sighed. “You’ll have to be purged and cleansed of all vestiges of this
evil, you know.”

Eldrin swallowed uneasily. Absently, he massaged his throbbing arm. The
cell seemed to waver around him, the sudden disorientation making him
dizzy.

Saeral’s eyes narrowed. “I can see it’s affecting you even now, trying to
reassert itself. We should go.” He turned and Eldrin backed out of the doorway to let him pass, then stepped down the stair after him.

His arm throbbed again, fire blazing from his wrist to his shoulder. The
room spun and sudden agony wrenched his middle, doubling him over, buckling his knees.

He was on the floor again, pressed to the carpet, the vaulted ceiling whirling overhead, the pain in his wrist like a knife shooting fire into his veins. He
was making strange breathy sobs, writhing against the hands that pinned his
shoulders, arms, and legs.

Oh, Eidon! What is happening? What are they doing to me?

Terror swelled till he thought he would burst with it, feeding off the pain
and nausea and this awful cold heat, spreading now across his chest like an
invading army.

“Don’t fight it, lad.” Saeral’s voice. “Don’t fight it and it’ll go easier.”

“I’ve never seen such a strong reaction,” someone said.

“He wasn’t ready.” Saeral again. “But we had no choice.”

Eldrin’s middle convulsed with terrible pain, and suddenly he was vomiting, vaguely aware of people jumping back, releasing his arms, shoving him
onto his side as he retched and retched and retched forever.

A period of grayness followed, then an eternity of bizarre and awful nightmares, of thrashing on a hard stone bed, falling first into cold, briny depths,
then into the fiery pit of Torments and back to the cold sea again, shivering
and sweating and shivering again.

Time passed. During brief periods of lucidity he found himself lying on a
stone pallet in a small room. A tongue of flame danced in the wall-niche just
beyond his feet. Sometimes the walls were made of stone, sometimes of
shimmering black ice. A man wiped his brow, tended the wound in his wrist,
poured liquid between his lips. Sometimes afterward, his stomach knotted
into painful cramps that spewed out whatever he’d ingested. Other times he
simply fell back into the weird dreamworld of delirium and knew nothing
again.

Occasionally he heard voices.

“Is he going to make it?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are we going to do if he dies? We’ve told everyone he’s in seclusion.”

“We’ll deal with that when and if it happens.”

The light flickered. A door opened and closed. Water trickled between his
lips. The voices returned.

“Should we try the feyna again?”

“No. Sensitized as he is, more spore would only kill him. I’ll just have to
do it the hard way, little by little, step by step, until he gets used to it.”

“But that takes so much out of you. And if he keeps throwing you off…”

“You think he’ll outlast me?”

“Of course not. But what if he calls upon-“

“He won’t.” There was a pause. When next the voice spoke it was closer,
softer. “Deep down, you see, he really does want what we’re offering. I just
have to make him see it.”

Eldrin turned the words in his mind, a deep concern pressing him to grasp
their significance. But it was too hard. His mind couldn’t follow the thought
long enough, and finally he let it drift away, returning to the familiar gray
void.

Some time later a hand touched him. “Eldrin. Eldrin, attend me.”

Groggily Eldrin turned toward the voice.

Saeral faced him, seated on a three-legged stool beside the low pallet.
Gently he helped Eldrin sit up, smoothed his long hair back over his shoulders, and finally lifted his chin to bring their eyes together. A soft red light
flared from somewhere under Eldrin’s own chin, washing over the beloved
face, filled now with tender compassion, filling him with warmth and wellbeing.

“Master,” he said, his voice faint and rasping from disuse. “It is … good
to see you.”

Saeral smiled. “Come. Let us go outside for a while.” The High Father
helped him to his feet, then led him into a warm summer’s eve on the shore
of Whitehill Lake, where his grogginess fell completely away.

They settled on the sloping grassy bank, wavelets lapping softly at their
feet. A nighthawk swooped down, then up. Fish kissed the water’s surface,
setting off slowly expanding concentric circles. The scent of flowers and grass
sweetened the air. Across the lake a couple walked arm in arm, and nearer a
flock of white geese glided across the glassy water.

Leaning back on both elbows, Eldrin drew in a deep breath of contentment, feeling as if he stood on the threshold of something great and glorious.

“You have trusted me long, Eldrin,” Saeral said from where he lounged at
Eldrin’s left. “Have I ever given you reason not to?”

“No, Master.” He watched three swans glide past, their elegant forms
made double on the still water. Reality and reality’s reflection. It was hard to
tell the difference. The thought seemed to carry great portent.

“I have loved you as your own father did not. You know that.”

“Indeed I do, Master.” A tinge of the old bitterness ruffled his tranquility.

“If only you knew how I ached at the torment you suffered at your
brother’s hands, the injustices you were forced to bear. Your father knew, of
course, but whenever I addressed the matter, he refused to do anything about
it. Said it would make you strong. But it only drove you away.”

“Yes,” Eldrin agreed. The bitterness deepened, sharpened. Old memories,
long repressed, marched through his mind, stirring up old anger and that
deep, burning frustration.

“It’s no wonder you hated him.”

Hated him. Yes.

“Hatred is wrong, of course. It feeds the darkness. But you can have
redress. Eidon is a god of justice. He’s promised he will judge the enemies of
those who serve him.”

An image of Gillard kneeling at Eldrin’s feet superceded those of the past,
intoxicatingly vivid. Eldrin stretched out his hand, touched the fine white
hair on his brother’s head, and felt him flinch. What bitterness must churn
now in that massive chest. He could almost taste the bile rising to the back
of his brother’s throat. To have to kneel and murmur words of submission to
the one he had so long discounted and disdained must be all but choking him.
Perhaps he even felt a measure of fear.

Eldrin smiled. Yes. That was nice. Especially the fear.

“It will happen, Eldrin.” Saeral’s voice came quietly, fervent with conviction. “We can bring it about as surely as we live. Justice can be yours.”

The desire for that reality surged within him. Oh yes, he wanted it. More
than anything in life, he wanted it.

Saeral’s face filled his field of view. Beloved face. Trusted face. The gray
eyes seemed to suck him into them. “Join us, Eldrin. Come to us and know his power. He wants you just as much as you want him. Wants you never to
be spurned and lonely again.”

He felt the master’s nearness-his warmth, the sweet wash of his breath,
the pressure of his arms around his shoulders, embracing him as a father
embraced a son, protecting, guiding, comforting. Eldrin relaxed into it, hungry for that approval and acceptance.

And then he smelled the roasting grain, felt the cold pressure close about
him, felt that now familiar tendril touch his mind. Again he recoiled in
instinctive revulsion. But not so violently as before, for he still held to that
vision of the promise it had offered.

The pressure tightened around his flesh, and the tendril began to penetrate, worming slowly, carefully into his soul. Awash with an intensifying
sense of safety and comfort, dazzled by a renewal of that vision of justice, for
a moment he tolerated it.

But only a moment. As before, his aversion kindled swiftly, fueling a wild
burst of claustrophobia, desperate to rid himself of this grasping, clinging
thing. He jerked away, and his soul convulsed in a frantic cry for help.

Eidon, I know this isn’t you! Help me! Deliver me!

A flash of white enveloped him, and for the briefest of moments there
was pain, an alien rage, a sense of ravening hunger prowling the borders of
his soul. The breath crushed out of him; fire and ice rolled through him.
Reality writhed and bucked. Then he lay again on the stone pallet in his small
cell-limp, gasping, and blessedly alone.

Eldrin awakened from what seemed to be his first normal period of sleep
in a long, long time. For once his head was clear, his ears weren’t ringing, and
he could actually string more than two thoughts together at a time. Even so,
staring at the black glass-slag walls of the small, windowless room in which
he lay, he could not at first imagine where he was.

Some sort of meditation cell, he guessed. In the lower levels of the Keep
from the look of the walls. This obsidian slag must be the reality, then, not
the stone and mortar Saeral had tried to—

Saeral.

It all came back in an instant, tumbling through him in a chaotic wave,
devoid of order or logic-the disembodied voices, the struggle in the High
Father’s chambers, the black cell with its bizarre niche, the pain in his wrist,
the cold, grasping presence wrapping around his soul … The memory roared
through him, pounding away the bulwarks of denial and leaving in its wake
the gut-wrenching acceptance of truth: Saeral had been using him. From the
beginning, he’d been nothing but a pawn, the puppet by which Saeral meant
to grab the Crown. All the affectionate pats, the sly, twinkling winks, the
words of praise and comfort and approval, the expressions of piety-all false,
the snares by which the prey was caught.

He stared at the ceiling’s red-lit surface, and something broke inside him.
His throat tightened and tears blurred his vision, trickled down the sides of
his face.

He had believed Saeral understood him, that he was the only one besides Carissa who knew how much Gillard’s abuse had tormented him, the only
one who could see his humiliating inaptitude for soldiering and accept it,
encouraging Eldrin to accept it as well and focusing on his strengths instead:
academics, religion, the arts. Many a winter day they had passed by the fire,
discussing the relative merits of the latest play or the technique of some old
master of painting. Sometimes they argued theology or matched wits at the
game of uurka or harmonized in duets of lirret and pipe.

He had accorded Saeral the love and respect he had not been able to give
his own father, trusting him, emulating him, revering him. It was Saeral who
had planted and nurtured the desire to take holy vows, Saeral who had convinced him he was not like the other Kalladornes, was not meant for a life of
violence but rather one of righteousness and purity.

And it was all a lie.

A sound in the hallway brought him back to the present, and he remembered that he was a prisoner. He ran through his most recent memories again,
hoping desperately they were more nightmare than real. That bird, driving
its beak into his forearm—

He sat up, sick with horror as his fingertips danced over the raised ovoid
scar just above his left wrist, a scar that had not been there before. A moment
later he discovered the amulet at his throat, the woven metal strands of its
neckpiece pressing tightly against his skin. He fumbled for a clasp but found
nothing, as if the thing had been fused by magic around his neck. It was stout
enough it wouldn’t be pulled off with bare hands.

Another memory goaded his rising fear. That cold, alien presence that was
the real Saeral. It must be one of Moroq’s rhu’ema, though how it had penetrated to the highest level of Mataian service, Eldrin could not begin to
imagine. Nor did he try. What mattered now was that the thing was here, and
it wanted his soul and body for its own.