The Demon Awakens (9 page)

He was lying down; that was the last thought that came to him.

“Blood of Mather,” muttered Tuntun as the elvish caravan started off, Elbryan moving with their line on a floating bed woven of silken strands, feathers, and music.

“You keep saying that,” replied Juraviel. As he spoke, the elf fingered a green stone, serpentine, feeling its subtle vibrations. Normally such trivial magic would prove useless against one as wise as Tuntun, who had seen the birth and death of several centuries, but the female was clearly distracted by her distaste for this night’s work.

“I
shall
keep saying it!” Tuntun insisted, but her bluster was lost in the
whoosh
of a sapling. The agile elf managed to slip her foot out of Elbryan’s belt snare and come dropping back to the ground, though even with her wings fluttering hard, she hit rather unceremoniously.

Her glare at Juraviel was almost threatening as laughter erupted about her. She knew, as did all the gathering, that there was no possible way she could have stumbled into such a coarse trap had not a bit of magic been worked.

It wasn’t hard for Tuntun to guess who bad worked it.

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CHAPTER 8

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The Preparer

The schedule was grueling, designed to find weakness and break those who were not fit for the daily rigors of the Order of St.-Mere-Abelle. For the four chosen Preparers candidates, Avelyn and Quintall, Thagraine and Pellimar—two students from the class of God’s Year 815—life was even more difficult. In addition to their daily duties as first and second-year students at the abbey, they were given the extra chores of preparation for their journey to Pimaninicuit.

After vespers, their classmates knelt to pray for one hour, spent an hour with their letters, then retired early to meditate and sleep, to reinvigorate their bodies for the tasks of the next day.

But after vespers, the four Preparers began a four-hour regimen, each with an appointed master. They studied the Halo, the charts that determined the astronomical data which would indicate the time of the showers. They learned of seamanship, of how to navigate by the stars of the night sky—and of how those stars would change when the ship carrying the monks crossed certain latitudes. They learned how to tie ropes in a variety of ways, knots necessary for the many uses aboard a sailing vessel. They learned sea etiquette, the rules of the wide waters, and they learned, most of all, the properties of the various stones and of how they must prepare the stones immediately after the shower.

For Avelyn, the night lessons were the promise of his greatest aspirations. He was with Master Jojonah most nights, and Avelyn lived up to his reputation as the finest student to enter St.-Mere-Abelle in many decades. After only two weeks, his predictions of astronomical shifts were perfect, and within the first month, he could recite all the known magical stones, from adamite to turquoise, their reputed properties, and the greatest known magical effects which had been brought about by each.

Master Jojonah watched the young brother with mounting pride, and Avelyn recognized that the older man considered him a protégé. There was security in that, Avelyn came to realize, but also responsibility. Some of the other masters, Siherton in particular, watched him closely, very closely, seeking an excuse to berate him. It seemed to Avelyn as if he had fallen into the middle of a running rivalry between the two older men.

That bothered the young monk profoundly. To see such human frailty in the masters of St.-Mere-Abelle touched the very core of Avelyn’s faith. These were men of God, the men closest to God, and such petty actions on their part diminished the very meaning of the Abellican Church. All that should have mattered was the retrieval of the stones. Toward his fellow Preparers, young men he would compete against for the coveted two positions of those who would actually step onto the island of Pimaninicuit, Avelyn felt no rivalry. He exalted in their successes as much as in his own. If they proved the better, he believed, then that was obviously God’s will. The proven better two must go to the island; all that mattered was the success of the journey, the retrieval of God’s highest gift to humanity.

It quickly became apparent to the watching masters that Avelyn Desbris would be one of the two. During the long hours put in at night, not one of the other three came close to him; they were still mired in charting the stars when Avelyn had moved on to the specific humours that caused the “magical” reaction, having already passed through the recognition of the stones by touch as well as sight and the recognition of their potential intensity by their brightness, shape, and hue. After only five weeks of a four-year training program, the first position of Preparer was nearly secured. If Avelyn did not take ill, the competition to go onto the island of Pimaninicuit had been narrowed to three monks fighting for one slot.

The daytime training was not as easy or as inspiring for Avelyn. He found the many prayer rituals boring, even trite, in light of the revelations he was finding every night. The candle ceremonies, the water bucket lines, the stone carriers bringing material to the newest sections of the abbey, the gift of the class of God’s Year 816, simply did not measure up against the mysteries of the God-given stones. Worst of all, and most intense of all, was the physical training. From sunrise to noon each day, with only an hour break—half for a meal and half for a prayer—the students assembled in a courtyard for a lesson in the martial arts or ran barefoot along the rough walls of the abbey or swam in the frigid waters of All Saints Bay. For months they learned to fall and roll; they hardened their bodies by slapping, slapping, slapping one another until their skin grew less sensitive. They walked through attack and defense routines, slowly, endlessly, building in their sore muscles memories of the moves. For the first year, they would study barehanded techniques, punching and grappling. After that, the monks would move on to weapon mastery. And through it all, bare-handed and with weapons, they would square off against each other, pounding on each other relentlessly. Physical perfection was the goal; it was said that a monk of St.-Mere-Abelle could outfight any man alive, and the masters seemed determined to keep that reputation intact.

Avelyn was not the worst of his class, but he was certainly not near the best: Quintall. The short, stocky man went at the martial training as eagerly as Avelyn went at the nighttime studies. As the year progressed, as Avelyn further separated himself from the other three candidate Preparers, he came to dread his daytime matches against any of them, particularly Quintall. There was supposed to be no anger toward an opponent, only respect and mutual learning, but Quintall growled whenever the masters paired him against Avelyn.

Avelyn understood the man’s motives. Quintall was carrying over the nighttime rivalry. He could not beat Avelyn at the Ring Stone studies, but he gained a measure of superiority during the day. In most of the maneuvers, the monks were supposed to pull their punches, but Quintall often blasted the breath from Avelyn; there was no striking above the shoulders allowed, but more than once, Quintall knifed a “serpent hand” across Avelyn’s throat, dropping him to his knees, gasping for breath.

“Is this how you plan to get to the island?” Avelyn quietly asked after one such mishap. The slips had become too common; Avelyn honestly believed Quintall meant to eliminate the competition.

The look the stocky man gave him in reply did little to allay the monk’s mounting suspicions. Quintall’s grin was certainly as far from Godlike as anything Avelyn had ever seen, and the fact that their training with weapons, where wounds could easily become more severe, was not far away, brought goose bumps to the scholarly young man.

What bothered Avelyn even more was that if he could recognize what was going on here, then so could the masters, who watched every move of every student so closely. The Order of St.-Mere-Abelle took its physical training seriously; perhaps Avelyn was expected to defend himself against such tactics. Perhaps this training was not so far removed from the nighttime training, which Avelyn considered more important. If he couldn’t survive in the courtyard of the abbey, after all, what chance did he have on the high and wild seas?

He watched Quintall walk away from him, his stride so confident, even cocky. Avelyn folded his hands and bowed his head, closed his eyes and began to plot his defense for the next time he and Quintall were paired.

All the troubles of the day were lost each night when Avelyn went to his true work, usually under the tutelage of Master Jojonah. Sometimes that work entailed exhaustive study, reading text after text and reciting procedures so many times in rapid succession that Avelyn would often continue reciting them after he had gone to sleep. Other nights Avelyn and Master Jojonah would simply spend on the roof, huddled against a chill ocean breeze with no fire between them. They would sit and stare at the stars. An occasional question might pass between them, but otherwise their vigil would be as silent as it was dark. Master Jojonah’s instructions were vague at best, but Avelyn came to understand them in his heart. He was to watch the night sky, to learn every twinkle of light, to become so familiar with the visible stars that he would not only know their given names but also might create pet names of his own for them.

Avelyn loved those nights. He felt so close to God, to his dead mother, to all humanity, living and dead. He felt a part of the larger and higher truths, a oneness with the Universe.

But the quiet awe of stargazing placed a distant second on Avelyn’s preferred list of duties. His real zest and heart came shining through on those nights he and Master Jojonah worked with the stones. There were nearly fifty different types at the abbey, each with its own particular properties, and each individual stone with its own particular intensity. Some stones had multiple uses—hematite, for example, could be used for simple out-of-body experiences, for possession of another’s body, for domination of another’s spirit, and also to heal another’s physical wounds.

Avelyn knew all the uses of all the stones, and gradually he was coming to sensitize his fingers to the magical humours within any stone he touched. Handed two similar stones, Avelyn could quickly discern which was the stronger.

Jojonah nodded on each occasion as if expecting that of any student, but in truth the master was again amazed by the young man’s prowess. There were in the abbey no more than four other monks, three of them masters and one Father Abbot Markwart himself, who could so distinguish magical intensity, and that fact had been the determining factor in Dalebert Markwart’s ascension to the highest rank, for his chief rival could not determine magical intensity in individual stones.

And here before Jojonah’s astonished eyes was a young novice, a man of only twenty winters, performing feats that would tax the Father Abbot of St.-Mere-Abelle to the very limits of his powers!

“The night is cloudy,” Avelyn dared to note, one dreary and cold November evening as he followed Master Jojonah up the winding staircase of a tower, toward the perch where they would normally sit and study the stars.

Master Jojonah kept quiet and continued on his way, and Avelyn knew better than to press the point.

Avelyn was even more surprised, when he came to the tower top, to find Master Siherton and the Father Abbot waiting for them. Siherton held a small diamond, and from it came enough light for Avelyn to discern the man’s features clearly. The young man bowed low and kept his gaze on the floor stones even when he straightened, focusing his attention on the joints among the rocks, each black line seeming so distinct in the harsh diamond light. He had been in St.-Mere-Abelle for several months and had only gazed upon Father Abbot Markwart a handful of times, usually at vespers, when the older leader would sometimes come forth and oversee the celebration.

The three older men moved to the edge of the tower and talked among themselves. Avelyn tried hard not to eavesdrop, but he did catch snatches of the conversation, mostly Siherton complaining vigorously that this was against strict procedure. “This is neither a requirement nor a sensible test for any first-year student,” the tall and hawkish master argued.

“Not a test, but a show,” Jojonah argued, unintentionally lifting his voice.

“A show-off, more likely,” sneered Siherton. “The place has already been secured,” he went on. “Why must you press on with it?”

Jojonah stamped his foot and pointed an accusing finger at Siherton; Avelyn was quick to look away from that uncomfortable sight. How it bothered him to see masters bickering! Particularly when he realized that they were arguing over him!

Now Avelyn began to recite his evening prayers so that he might hear no more. He did catch one reference by Master Jojonah to the morning routine, something about its being too dangerous.

Finally, Father Abbot Markwart halted the conversation with an upraised hand. He led the two masters back to Avelyn and bade the young man to look up at him. “It is unusual,” he said calmly. “And know you, Masters Siherton and Jojonah, that it is neither a test nor a show and irrelevant to the decisions to be made concerning Pimaninicuit. Suffice it to say that it is for my pleasure, for my curiosity.”

He focused on Avelyn then, his face serene, comforting. “I have heard much about you, my son,” he said quietly. “Your progress has been monumental in Master Jojonah’s estimation.”

Avelyn was too awestruck to beam.

“You have used the stones?”

It took a long moment for Avelyn even to register the question. He nodded dumbly.

“You have walked high with hematite, so says Master Jojonah,” Abbot Markwart went on. “And you have lit the hearths of many rooms with the small celestite crystals.”

Avelyn nodded again. “The greatest was the hematite,” he managed to say.

The Father Abbot smiled gently. “Satisfy my curiosity,” he bade Avelyn. He held out his left hand and opened it to show Avelyn three stones: malachite, ringed with various shades of green; shining, polished amber; and a silvery piece of chrysotile, the largest of the three resembling a sheet of straight bars, long and narrow lying side by side.

“Do you know them?” Markwart asked.

Avelyn sorted them out in his mind. He did indeed know the magical properties of these three, though those properties seemed oddly disparate for Father Abbot Markwart to be presenting them together. He nodded.

Markwart handed him the stones. “Do you feel their intensity?” he asked, looking hard into Avelyn’s eyes. He needed to know the truth, Avelyn realized. Markwart needed to be absolutely certain.

Avelyn fell into the stones, closed his eyes, and passed the items one at a time into his free hand that he might weigh their magical strength. He opened his eyes a moment later, staring hard, at the Father Abbot, and nodded again.

“Why must we use such a combination?” Master Jojonah dared to interrupt.

Father Abbot Markwart, his eyes glowing fiercely in the diamond light, waved a hand to silence the master. Nonetheless, Jojonah began to protest again, but Markwart cut him short.

“I warned you of the conditions!” the old Father Abbot growled.