The Sigil Blade (18 page)

Chapter 10

Into the Dark

E
dryd arrived at his decision only after extended and unproductive struggles to ease himself to sleep. Though he had not come, as Irial had feared, images of Aed Seoras approaching the cottage, sitting in the open hall, or hovering over him as he lay in bed, assaulted Edryd’s imagination each time he closed his eyes. He was putting Irial and Eithne at risk by staying, and yet he couldn’t just leave either. If he could find a way off of this island, some way to leave safely, doing so now would have consequences, and he would be endangering Irial if he disappeared while under her care.

It was only after settling upon the necessary solution that Edryd relaxed enough to manage an uneasy peace during the few hours that remained before morning. He decided not to tell Irial of his late night determination as they ate a morning meal of porridge. After she left, he waited an hour before he too, took to the road above the house. He was going to speak with Aed Seoras. He would accept the offer to live and train at the estate, receiving instruction in whatever it was Seoras felt he could teach. This, he reasoned, would jeopardize no one but himself, and it would restore some of the respect for himself that he had lost in the process of running from all of his problems.

The cottage soon vanished behind a low hill, and he was no longer feeling as certain about his choice. Each step grew heavier than the one that preceded it. He didn’t want to admit that this had more to do with his fear of Aed Seoras than it did with a reluctance to leave the cottage or the weakened condition into which he fallen. He was growing miserable the more he contemplated things. If he didn’t include the time for which he could not consciously account, he hadn’t been at Irial’s cottage for even two full days, but in that time he had felt something close to happy while living in her home. He was sorry to be leaving.

A lone bright spot lay amidst the jumble of torment. Apprenticing under Aed Seoras was going to make Logaeir very unhappy. Encouraged by this thought, and enjoying the crisp morning air, Edryd came near to smiling as he continued along the road. Eithne had come along, alternating frequently between forging on ahead with seemingly unbounded energy, and then pausing to explore one distraction or another so that Edryd would pass her on his way and would get well ahead.

Back at the cottage, when it had become clear that he intended to leave, Eithne made an effort at denying him permission. Once she understood that he meant to make a trip into town though, she unreluctantly relented, making a rather unconvincing display of exasperation at his stubborn nature. She would come as well just to be safe, she had said, but only to the edge of town. It was as welcome an excuse as she could have hoped for to defy the prohibition against approaching the borders of the town, about which she was more than curious. As they walked, she had been making a pretense at being angry that he was forcing her to break one of Irial’s rules, but Eithne couldn’t seem to remember she was mad unless she knew Edryd was paying attention.

He was cheered by her distracted company during those brief moments when Eithne either caught back up, or he found her waiting for him after he had fallen behind. It barely mattered that she was refusing to speak to him. Rounding a corner, Edryd discovered Eithne cooling her feet in a small stream of water that bounced over scattered stones as it carved its way down a long tapering slope. A view of the town opened up beneath them. The rows of large slate roofed buildings, built along narrow streets contoured in curved shapes that were made necessary by the rolling terrain, appeared small in the distance. Edryd had come this way before, but that had been at night. Now the entire town could be seen in clear detail. The estate, towards which he was now travelling, was set up well above most of the town, and was much closer to where he now stood than to the piers where all of the ships were moored.

“I think this is far enough, you had better go back now,” Edryd said.

Eithne looked up from where she was wading in the stream. “I’ll wait here until you’re done. We can go back together.”

His mood dampened as he struggled to explain that he wouldn’t be coming back. He would be trading her company for that of Aed Seoras. The built-up toll of fatigue from the distance he had travelled along the road hit him. Eithne had set upon the right idea. It would be much more pleasant to spend the afternoon here, wading in the cool water, exploring the stream for a while.

“I won’t be back, not for a few days at least,” he said. “Irial will explain it when you see her.” It was not altogether a lie, just largely one. He wasn’t sure why he hadn’t just told the truth, and he didn’t like the thought that he might be lying simply out of habit.

Eithne wrinkled her nose, shielding her eyes as she stared back at Edryd and into the sun. She accepted his explanation without an argument, which was unusual for her.

“When you get back, I will make you some chicken dumplings,” she promised.

Edryd’s mood, already low, sunk even further. Eithne’s expression of determination, voicing a desire for his approval, was painful for Edryd, and he keenly felt in that moment that he did not want to be a source of disappointment to her. If she would even be disappointed that is. Eithne had made a consistent point of being mainly displeased with him at all times. He couldn’t have a great distance to fall.

Too stubborn to change course, Edryd resolved to follow through with his plan. He parted ways with Eithne and left the road, heading across country in a direct route to the estate.

The first person he met was Giric Tolvanes. He was just inside the gate, coming out of the stables with a small crate that held an assortment of grain filled sacks.

Tolvanes stopped upon sighting him. “Master Edryd,” he managed after collecting himself from the surprise, “it is good to see you are well.”

“I’m sorry for showing up like this,” Edryd said.

“No need to apologize. No need at all. You’re looking….”

The pause made Edryd very aware of how thin he had become. Giric was probably thinking to himself that Edryd was still sick, and perhaps dangerous to those around him.

“You are looking well, Young Master,” Tolvanes said, finishing his thought.

“By well, I suppose that you mean pale and not long returned from the grave.”

“No, not that at all,” Giric replied. “You are a good deal thinner, but that seems to suit you if you don’t mind me saying so. You look more mobile if that makes any sense. Once you get yourself into a regimen, I think you are going to be faster and more agile than you were before.”

Edryd wasn’t enjoying these reassurances. It felt too much like Tolvanes was inspecting a horse and discussing its virtues. Except there were no horses on this property. Men, or more accurately, men with the potential for acts of guided violence, were the products that were developed here. It was no anomaly that Tolvanes should have such a practiced eye with which to evaluate the inventory.

“I was hoping to discuss something with Seoras,” Edryd said, cutting short the unsolicited appraisal of his health that Tolvanes seemed ready to expand upon.

“He’s in an outbuilding back behind the stables,” said Tolvanes, who had begun to put down the crate, intending to lead Edryd to Seoras. Edryd waved him off.

“I can find it,” Edryd said.

Looking uncertain, but not displeased, Tolvanes shifted the crate in his arms. “You will come and see me when you’re done?” he asked.

“We should have time to talk,” Edryd agreed.

Seoras was alone in the outbuilding. Eyes closed, with his face hardened in an image of deep concentration, Seoras sat with his legs folded on top of a collection stacked fieldstone, the relocated remnants of a wall that had been torn down somewhere on the property. Aed Seoras’s eyes remained closed, with his focus unbroken by the sounds Edryd made as he entered. At a point not far past the threshold of the building, Edryd crossed some unseen boundary. Edryd’s heart quickened and he felt fractionally lighter than he should have, even accounting for what he had lost during his illness. More than that, Edryd was undeniably aware of a subtle imbalance, and a sort of unnatural displacement in the area around Aed Seoras.

What Edryd hadn’t noticed, was a single stone, resting unaided in the air above the ground in the center of the room. Edryd saw this impossible object, only after hearing a loud penetrating crack that warned him of the danger, and then only for the briefest of moments.  This threatening sound was produced in correlation with the appearance of a sudden fracture in the stone block, which preceded a subsequent explosion in which the stone disappeared, disintegrating into a cloud of dust and chalk. Edryd had managed to turn and shield his eyes in time, but the exposed side of his face stung where it had been impacted by granules of stone, and he choked and coughed on bits of dust that had gotten inside his mouth. The odd sensation of displacement was gone, replaced for a moment by a rapidly diminishing tremor. Edryd perceived it as a tension breaking and then imperfectly seeking to return to a state of balance.

Before Edryd could react, before he could give a voice to the obvious questions racing through his head, Seoras spoke. “Did you feel it?” he asked as he brushed away a thin layer of chalk that had come to rest in his dark strands of hair.

“Feel? You must mean did I see! You… you were holding that stone up in the air, and then you shattered it into dust. What in the three realms did you do?”

“I’m not sure,” Seoras admitted. “Lifting an object is fairly simple, but crushing it with such force, it isn’t something I have done before nor is it something I could repeat again.”

Edryd was not sure what he should find harder to believe: that lifting a stone through the air was trivial, or that the explosion had been a fluke. “You didn’t crush it, you blew it apart,” Edryd corrected.

“No, I crushed the stone, and when I let go it rebounded,” Seoras explained. “I did not intend it, but that is what happened.”

Edryd didn’t understand the distinction. It also wasn’t the first time Seoras had inflicted an injury, this time a minor one thankfully, and gone on to claim that it had been inadvertent. Edryd’s knees buckled, and he came to rest, more falling than deliberately seating himself, down upon a wood crate across from the pile of fieldstone. Still very weak, and nowhere near recovered from his illness, he had lost the strength to keep himself standing.

“It confirms what I suspected,” Seoras continued. “You are very much attuned to the æther.”

“The what?”

“Sorcerers called it that. Sigil knights didn’t speak of it, but if ever they did, they called it the dark. The Ancients, who first discovered it, and built the bridges between worlds, called it the barrier, or more properly the continuum.”

Edryd had no idea what Seoras was talking about. He would have suspected that Seoras didn’t really know either, but the smattering of powdered rock that blanketed every part of the room offered credible evidence to the contrary.

“Some men can shape it through force of will alone,” Seoras continued. “Sigil knights devoted their lives to becoming spiritually attuned. Sorcerers experimented endlessly on it, devouring and hoarding whatever arcane knowledge they could pry loose in order to bend it to their will. The starting points and the ends differed, but at the core, the means were always the same.”

“I don’t understand any of this,” Edryd said. And for the most part he didn’t. He knew the story of the rise of the Sigil Order of old. They fought devastating wars to eradicate the immortal sorcerers who had dominated and defined the last great age. Those wars, the memory of which survived now more as myth and legend than actual history, belonged to another time. The rest of it, especially the parts about barriers and bridges, the æther or the dark, was mostly foreign to Edryd. The talk of starting and end points and methods or means seemed like nothing more than cryptic nonsense.

“You don’t need to understand any of that, not at this stage of your training. What is important is that you understand your connection to the dark. All men, all physical things for that matter, are connected to it, and we displace it through the actions we take. Through it, everything that exists in this world, and in all others, interacts. When you entered, I was shaping. It intensified when you approached because you became a focus that amplified the strength of the distortion that I was already actively creating. That is what you felt when you came near.”

Seoras was throwing a lot out at once and making too many assumptions. Edryd did not recall ever having said he had felt anything. He had not agreed to accept training either, or at least he had not verbally expressed that decision yet. Edryd stiffened. Could Seoras have known his thoughts? It sounded absurd, and Edryd was not willing to accept that such a thing was even possible, but he had just finished watching the man lift a rock in the air and completely destroy it, so he couldn’t be quite so quick to dismiss the notion either.

“I never said I felt anything,” Edryd said.

“You did feel something,” Seoras insisted.

“I felt the shards of rock flying at my face, but apart from that, unless you are saying that you can read me, and know my thoughts, you cannot tell me what I did or did not feel.”

“It is supposed to be possible, but no, that isn’t something I know how to do,” Seoras replied. “But, on a very good day, I can sometimes send a thought or an emotion, if the target is receptive enough.”