The Pattern Scars (31 page)

The Otherworld
, I thought, wondering and certain;
it’s here.

The hollow lines led me. I walked more and more quickly because I knew that no more walls would rise before me. Paths in stone, and the one beneath my feet; I was swift and sure, bathed in a light that only my Othereyes could see. I did not think about where the path would end. I was here, rounding corners, taking stairs two at a time, stepping over tumbled rocks and pools of dark, still water. I breathed deeply, and even the dank air seemed Otherlit as it filled me.

And then there was a door.

I stopped before it, my hands still on the lines that had brought me here. The lines that ended here. The door was very tall, unlike the one in the hillside. It was unmarked stone, with a metal ring in its centre. I put both hands on the ring, which was scratchy, ridged with rust. I pulled, expecting it to open just a little—but it swung wide and I stumbled backward.

Four steps rose beyond the door. I went up them slowly, suddenly aware, again, of the noises my feet and breathing made. At the top there was more darkness; the Otherworldly glow had faded, inside and out, and I stood motionless, my arms outstretched.

“Teldaru!” His name echoed; I was listening to its throbbing, thinking of Yigranzi’s waves, when light blazed around me. I dug the palms of my hands against my eyes, rubbing at tears. A very long time seemed to pass before my vision was clear.

Teldaru was sitting on the edge of an enormous stone sarcophagus. Two lanterns burned beside him, and two torches behind him, in wall brackets. The sarcophagus was painted in patterns of scarlet, white and gold, as were the walls that stretched up and up, into a dome that was all gold. I caught glimpses of figures in the paint—Ranior with his hounds behind him, and his army, and his enemies. I did not look at these. I looked at Teldaru, who was leaning forward, his legs swinging like a boy’s.

“Come here.” He sounded like a boy, too; happy, eager. I took two steps over red flagstones. Two steps; I saw a knife in his hand. Bardrem’s knife, so small and simple. I stood still.

“Come
here
, Mistress Reluctant Seer.”

Two more steps; I saw Borl, lying on his side beneath Teldaru’s dangling feet. I waited for him to leap up and snap at me, but he did not.

“Look at you.” Teldaru was smiling. I had forgotten how bright he was, in firelight. “How have I kept myself away from you, all these years? But this is what I needed to do. I needed to be sure that we were both ready.”

I touched him
, I thought as I took another step.
I kissed him, and he was surprised—but now he is above me, watching, and the knife . . .

I glanced again at Borl. I was close now; surely he would growl, at least. I saw his sides rising and falling—only I didn’t: it was something else moving, easing outward, darker and larger than he was.

“What have you done?” I said as Borl’s blood seeped toward my feet. His eyes were half-open and his tongue was lolling, nearly touching the blood. His neck was soaked black, except for the lips of the wound that ran across it. These were a livid, wet pink.

“I have killed him,” Teldaru said in a low, warm voice—a voice for secrets and plans. “As you can see. I have killed him, and now you will bring him back again.”

Borl’s blood was nearly at my feet and I could not move them. “I can’t bring him back,” I said. “It’s impossible.”

Teldaru frowned. “Nola. When have I ever told you to do something impossible?”

“And forbidden,” I said, my voice rising. “Even looking into the Otherworld of an animal is forbidden, just—”

“Just as Otherseeing for a seer is forbidden? Just as using Bloodseeing is forbidden?” He pushed himself off the edge of the sarcophagus and landed lightly on the floor. “Your ‘forbidden’ is not the same as ‘impossible.’ Do not let your fear make you careless in your thinking.”

“I’m not afraid.” And I was not. I did not believe him, and I was not afraid.

He crouched by Borl, balancing away from the blood. He put his hand on the dog’s head and rubbed it so vigorously that it flopped against the stone. “I suppose it would be unreasonable of me to hope that
you
were already bleeding?”

“I’m not,” I said. I was relieved, for a fleeting, deluded moment—and then I looked at the knife.

He shrugged. “A pity. I hate to hurt you.”

“Liar.”

He smiled up at me. “Listen, now. This is how it will go.”

I am alone in thick grey fog. It is in my eyes and nose and between my fingers. I turn myself around and around, or I think I do, since the view does not change.

“I can’t,” I cry. My mouth is full of mud, porridge, sweet rotten fruit, but he hears me somehow.

“You can.” His voice is so clear; I should be able to see him. “His Paths are fresh. Look for them.”

“But I don’t know what to look for—”

A wisp of orange like flame that flutters by me and vanishes.

A flash of yellow.

Red that rises and froths around my knees.

“Colours or shapes, Nola—you’ll see them—weave them together.”

“I don’t know how.”

“You will.”

If it were somewhere I recognized, like the desert of Chenn’s death, the desert I made of Laedon when I undid his Paths—but this place is strange and suffocating, and it throbs with the throbbing of my cut skin, drips with the dripping of my blood, and I cannot concentrate.

Another yellow flicker, this one brighter. I reach with my aching hands and catch the end of it. It is rough, pocked like a tongue. I grip it, even though I do not want to.
Let go
,
I think
; turn away and close your eyes (all of them, real and Other)—because what is he going to do? Kill you too?

But I grasp the colour, and as I do I feel what Teldaru told me I would: a tremor in my veins; a new pulse so strong that I lurch, on the hard, splintered ground. Something flows from me to the yellow, and it is not a flicker, any more—it is a ribbon, slender but solid.

I stoop and run my hand over the red foam. It is real, just as the ribbon is; it gathers in my palm and hardens to the pulse that is mine and more than mine. Other colours, other shapes; I reach for each of them and somehow do not drop the rest. My arms move fast and faster and so do my feet, as if I am dancing. I gather in the vein ribbons and the bone roots and spin and they arc away from me, though I still hold them.

“Nola—good; very good, my love—you are doing it.”

Doing what?
I think. I don’t understand—but my Otherself does. I dance through the pain that blooms in my hands, feet, legs and then all the way into my chest. The ground is no longer hard; it yields beneath me, and the fog lifts, and I see dark earth and a horizon, close and curved. I run toward it. If I run far and swiftly enough I might plummet off an edge.

“
No!
”
he shouts, and he is beside me, matching my stride, reaching for me with huge, crooked hands. I scream at him and at the soft, bright web that I am still weaving, even as I try to escape it. He cannot be in this Otherworld with me. Another impossibility—and yet I suddenly remember when I nearly lost myself in my vision of Chenn. The eagle with the golden head and crimson beak; its wings filling the sky until Yigranzi pulled my Otherself free.
We were together
, I think now, as Teldaru runs beside me.
Yigranzi was with me in that vision and he is with me in this one
. . .
I whirl, or try to, but the pain is too great and he is too close. He wraps his hands around me and we fall.

I was so cold I could not even shiver.

“And now . . . you see.” His voice was thin and halting and close. I opened my eyes. Tried to, thought I had, but saw nothing. Not even grey fog or dancing black shapes. I was completely blind.

“You see . . . the last thing about blood. Two Otherseers together. Both bleeding. Same vision.”

“Impossible,” I wanted to say, one more time, just to make him angry, but my voice did not work either. My sense of touch, at least, seemed to be returning; I had begun to feel the stone beneath me. It was so hard that I nearly forgot the cold.

“You see . . . another thing,” he rasped. I wondered, with a jolt of annoyance that made me feel abruptly alert, why my hearing was the only sense that seemed truly intact. “Why I need you. So much. Remaking is . . . not like unmaking. Gives no strength. Steals it, instead. Took me too long to realize. Now I am certain . . . I need your help. When the time comes.”

I tried to remember how I had felt after I had killed Laedon—whether I had felt strong. I could not. Though I did remember staring down at his twisted body. His bald head and his eyes weeping blood. I wondered suddenly where Teldaru was bleeding now; where he had cut himself, to enter my vision. Probably just a prick on a finger. Something tiny. (He had cut me on the underside of my right arm, which was throbbing—from the wound itself and from the tightness of the cloth he had already managed to bind around it.)

The air seemed to be lightening.
I hope it isn’t
, I thought.
I hope I really am blind and can never do his bidding again.
Only I did not believe this, for as the world did brighten a bit, there was more relief in me than disappointment.

He was silent for a long time. I dozed; he might have, too. I started awake when he spoke, closer than before, in his own smooth, light voice.

“Many things must change. You and Grasni and Selera can no longer be students. You will take your place at my side and I will send the other two away. Find them posts in other royal households. Selera will like that, though she will stamp her feet and cry when I tell her she must go.”

Another silence. I was definitely beginning to see again: stones and muddy colours that hurt my eyes, just as the quiet hurt my ears and the floor hurt my back. Everything too heavy, with too many edges.

“Up now, my sweet.”

His hands were on me, easing, propping, smoothing at my clothes and hair. I managed to wrench an arm away from him and he laughed, said, “Good girl!”

I was sitting against the sarcophagus.
Ranior’s bones
, I thought, and felt no awe or even interest.

“Look,
Mis
tress Nola. See what you’ve done for me.” When I did not move he took my chin in his hand and angled my head down, to what was beside me.

Borl was lying as he had been before. His head was resting near my left hand. He seemed indistinct, outlined in blurry purple, and I strained to make him clearer, even though I did not want to.

“Still can’t see well enough?” Teldaru said. He leaned across my lap and took my hand, stroked the back of it with a fingertip that was more like a needle. “Feel, then.”

Coarse fur with bumpy ribs beneath. Warm fur, warm flesh—but he had only been dead a short time; surely he could still be warm. . . .

His side rose and fell beneath my hand. Once—an imagining, an impossibility—but no, twice, and again. I felt Borl breathe. I heard him too, making wet, wheezing sounds. Had he been making these before, or had the pressure of my hand prompted them? It did not matter. He was breathing.

Teldaru whistled. The same few notes he always used to bring Borl back to his side, or simply to attention; they echoed in the domed chamber and behind my eyes. My vision was much clearer: I saw the clean, pink edges of the dog’s wound meet as he lifted his head, very slowly.

“Good boy,” Teldaru said, and reached out his hand. Borl ignored it. He whimpered. He held his head shakily up. His eyes were brown beneath a gauze of white—rolling, unblinking above the moist red of his tongue. His eyes rolling, wide and blind as Laedon’s.

“Borl!” Teldaru spoke more sharply, and his fingers stiffened into claw shapes. Borl could have shifted his head to the side just a little and touched him. He did not. He lowered his muzzle, instead, down into my upturned hand. He licked my palm in long, rough strokes that did not change, even when Teldaru gave a ragged shout and lurched to his feet. I laughed; when he struck me across the face with the back of his hand I kept laughing. Borl raised his head again and snarled, baring his teeth. By now my laughter was thin and breathless. It ached against my ribs. Teldaru kicked Borl in the side, over and over, and even though the dog whined and thrashed on the floor, he never stopped growling.

Teldaru spun and grasped the lantern. He strode to the stairs that led down to the doorway, where he turned to look back at me. He opened his mouth as if he would say something, but he did not. He gazed at me a moment longer and then he left me alone in the dark.

Only it was not quite dark, and I was not quite alone. Borl wheezed beside me, the whites of his eyes shining in the torchlight that guttered, now, as the flames burned low. I wheezed a little too. Neither of us moved very much. Borl’s paws twitched and I bent my legs up and flat, up and flat. It was all I could do for quite awhile.

Perhaps I should have been frightened, but I was not. I had been earlier, lost in the maze of dead-end corridors, but now I was quite calm, and not because I was numb with shock. I knew, despite horror and revulsion, that I was safe.

Many, many hours must have passed. I imagined the sun setting above the hill, Ranior’s monument a long arm of shadow on the ground. I imagined stars and wind. I slept.

When I woke I could move again, and the torches had gone out. Borl’s head was in my lap. He was no longer wheezing; just panting lightly, as if he were hot. I stretched my arms up and jiggled my legs until he lifted his head.

“Come on, now,” I said. My voice hurt my throat, but mostly because I was desperately thirsty. He whined questioningly. “Up you get. And me too.”

I managed this before he did. My legs buckled and I leaned against the sarcophagus, gripping its top edge so hard that my fingernails bent. When I felt steady I let go and stood with my arms out, like a child balancing upright for the first time. “Up, boy,” I said to Borl. His legs scrabbled and his claws clicked wildly on the stone and he blew his breath out in great, heaving gasps, but he could not rise. “Fine.” I bent carefully and scratched his ears. “You stay there until you’re stronger.” He laid his head back down but his rolling eyes followed the sounds I made.