The Staff of the Winds (The Wizard of South Corner Book 1) (14 page)

The uninitiated believed that life in the Guild was all action and adventure.  Myths and legends told of lone assassins scaling the sheer cliffs on the north face of Cathardoom to slaughter 50 warriors at the top, or swimming the tigerfish infested rapids of Neromaca with 20 gold bars strapped to their waist.  Yeva heard these stories with amusement and some irritation.  She had seen the north face of Cathardoom, and even in the Realm of Infinite Possibilities it was sheer; far easier to infiltrate the guards from the other side.  And nobody was fool enough to swim the rapids of Neromaca, gold or no gold.

The Guild encouraged these stories that exaggerated their prowess, but in truth most guild members were sold to the wealthy and powerful to serve as protection against other Guild members who had been sold to their rivals.  This meant a life of long hours of highly alert inactivity.  Occasionally an assassin was launched to bring down a rival, but if this were common, all rivalry would have long since been extinguished along with the majority of the most talented and skilled members of the elite.  Knowing this, the elite exercised restraint, unless of course a potential target was seen as sufficiently weak or out of favor.

To maintain the edge on their highly developed skills, Yeva and others like her used the private gymnasium to hone their strength and agility, and to practice their weapons and hand-to-hand skills in a manner that was just short of lethal.  Also common were exercises in infiltration of another’s position out in the world.  By custom and in order to minimize fatalities, the targets of these exercises were always advised ahead of time.  Yeva was among the best at these exercises, having never been caught.

After cooling down from her workout, Yeva showered, ate a light meal in the Guild cafeteria and retired to her room.  She checked her telltales to see that they were undisturbed and barred her door to insure privacy.  The room was small with stone walls and floor.  A brightly colored mat with a fur coverlet was against one wall for sleeping, and small thick rugs and cushions were positioned around the floor for sitting and relaxing. A chest against one wall held Yeva’s clothing and personal possessions, with a basin and pitcher of clean water sitting on top. In a corner stood a tall cabinet that contained some of Yeva’s tools and other surprises. Two gas lamps vented to the outside provided illumination.

Breathing slowly and deeply, Yeva performed a series of stretching exercises and postures designed to relax the body and prepare the mind for meditation. Her muscles still held a slight burn from the work that she had done in the gymnasium, but this routine was designed to speed those poisons from her muscles and to bring her breathing and heart rate under full control.

Fully prepared, Yeva turned the lamps down to their minimum setting and took her position sitting on a thick carpet in the middle of her floor. A long, sinuously curved knife was positioned out of its scabbard within easy reach at her right side. Back straight, legs intertwined, hands laid palm-up against her inner thighs, she closed her eyes and began.

Within a dozen slow breaths, Yeva split off a portion of her awareness that rose slowly above her and gazed calmly about the room and down upon her still body. This sliver of self moved to a position in an upper corner of the room opposite the barred door and was posted as a sentinel for the duration of her meditations. Barred doors after all were only effective against the uninitiated and posed little challenge to accomplished members of the Guild. The ability to separate off a sliver of consciousness had not been part of Guild teaching, and Yeva did not know whether other members posted sentinels in like manner. To ask would have revealed a possible advantage that she would prefer to keep private.

Precautions taken, Yeva moved deeper into the silence, withdrawing all contact from her body and from the linear thought processes of her mind. She did not drift, she knew without thought or plan precisely where she was going and she sped towards her goal (though there was no motion, and no goal). Separated from daily reality, her mind through years of discipline did not struggle, but to maintain its sanity it envisioned a vertical shaft of light tapering down into the unending depths. Around this light she spiraled down ever smaller, ever deeper, leaving the world of her body far behind, penetrating into dimensions of space and time so small, so tightly folded that no trace of them could be found except through the discipline that she now employed.  Yeva could not see herself from this place, but her sentinel was still part of her awareness.

Well established now in the Realm of Infinite Possibilities, Yeva had several options.  All of space and time is connected, though not in the manner that is normally believed.  Not only space, but also time functioned differently here.  By shifting her attention to the “left” in a controlled way, or so she envisioned it, she could move her awareness into the possible futures that branched out from where she currently was—the past was dead in the Realm, or perhaps “completed” would be a better term and was not reviewable here. This technique allowed her to preview possible actions and outcomes that were likely to occur and that she would be witness to over the next day or two. A skilled practitioner could go further forward in time, and Yeva was very skilled, but typically there were several significant and multiple minor branch points during a day, and the possibilities multiplied exponentially as you went forward. Beyond a certain point, the splitting and rejoining of possible futures became too chaotic to follow.

By shifting her attention “downward” (again, a poor analogy of an indescribable process in the Realm), Yeva could enter various possibilities in the current time and space.  The possibility that she had not turned down the flame in the lamps in her room or the possibility that she had not barred her door, or that her cushions were arranged differently, or many other minor variations on the current situation in normal space and time.  These were not imaginary, but rather real places which, by linking through the slice of awareness she had left behind as sentinel, she could physically enter with her body.  While in this alternate reality, her body could do whatever was allowed by the natural laws and conditions of that reality.  For example, if the door was not barred, she could walk across the room, open it and walk through.  At some point, she would have to transfer back to her original space and time in which the door had been barred, but she could be through the door and well down the hall before that happened, and behind her, the door would remain closed and barred just as it had been in her normal space and time.

A third option, and the one most difficult for the practitioner to sustain, was to withdraw connection to any particular place and time and to allow their awareness to drift across the spread of possible current and future events.  As with the other states of awareness, Yeva could access only those current and future places that she would potentially occupy in her normal existence.  She could not witness events in the next kingdom or even the next room, if the probability of her being present at that place and time in her normal world was vanishingly small.

An awareness allowed to drift in the Realm in this manner tended to be drawn to possible branch points of high importance. Significant insights could thus be gained about the future. A fundamental problem with this process, however, was that because when drifting the visualizations came in an unconnected fashion, it was difficult to know if the time and space she was seeing was on a branch of high probability, or a branch that required so many prior unlikely events that it was itself very unlikely to occur. Also, unless there were significant cues in the vision that established a time period, Yeva could not tell when the events she witnessed were likely to occur. Even with all of this uncertainty, insights gained this way could still be of considerable value. Major events tended to cut across many of the possible time lines, and events that were in the near future had a more orderly or predictable feel to them than those in the distant future.

Yeva began by turning her attention to the “left” to preview the coming day.  This was the normal routine that she followed in order to get advance warning of possible threats to her master, and as usual, the coming day was not without threat.  Down several of the possible time lines, Kadeen’s enemies loosed their restraints and launched attacks of various kinds.  Kadeen was too powerful and had lived too long to not develop some formidable enemies.  Yeva would be prepared in case any of these potential attacks materialized, but she noted that as usual they all appeared to be on low probability paths.

She also noted that Kadeen seemed more agitated than usual down several of the higher probability paths, although she was not able to determine the cause. On one of them, he took his frustration out on her. She saw herself bathed in a lurid green sorcerer’s fire that burned but did not consume her. Her clothing was ashes at her feet, her naked body writhing with the pain, not allowed to drop and curl up on the floor. Sound did not penetrate to the Realm, although thoughts and emotions sometimes bled through if they were strong enough. She could not hear her screams, but it was obvious that she was screaming while the fire burned all around her.

Yeva reviewed the earlier events along this path and was able to determine that the trigger for this torture had occurred when she allowed a messenger from the Great Lord Adham al Dharr to come upon her master without warning him before he reached the door. Normally this would not have raised the Lord Kadeen’s wrath to this level, but coupled with his agitation he had reacted violently after the messenger had departed. Thus identified, this possible future could be easily avoided.

Satisfied that she was prepared for the coming day, Yeva turned her attention to the issue that had so startled her earlier, the words of the Great Lord that one “sealed to the winds” was approaching. With a calm that her waking mind could never have felt Yeva returned to her starting point, and after a short pause, released herself into the tides of time and space.

It required an exceptional level of control to use the Realm in this way. The skills required to reach the Realm of Infinite Possibilities at all were virtually unknown outside of Guild membership. Some sorcerers had a connection to the Realm that manifested itself in visions of prophecy, but these visions were invariably random in nature, not controlled by the prophets themselves. Even within the Guild, the degree of surrender required to cast oneself loose to float freely in the unknowns of time and space was not achievable by the vast majority of the membership. This state required an absolute lack of fear—the utter equanimity that can view one’s own death in the most gruesome of detail with a totally dispassionate interest.

It had taken Yeva years to develop the concentration and mental discipline to reach the Realm reliably, more years to develop the control needed to use the Realm in even its most elementary ways, and further years still to reach the point where she could cast her awareness on the tides without immediately finding herself back in her body struggling to put down a surging flood of trembling anxiety. For nearly four years now, Yeva had the mastery required to drift. For all that time, she had always achieved controlled entry and exit from that state. Always, that is, with the exception of four instances in the past three years all related to one possible future event. In each case she had only managed to glean a brief but overpowering warning: “
An old power approaches—he is sealed to the winds
.”  Until today, in the great audience hall of the Baraduhne, she had had no idea what that warning might mean.

Released to float along the tides of time and space Yeva’s awareness was encased in a gray cotton mist. Images and emotions washed through her, but they were too fleeting and indistinct to resolve. The impression was one of cutting across the flow of events, or intersecting them at an angle, rather than tracking down a line of either time or space.

Slowly, specific events began to coalesce out of the fog, and Yeva was able to resolve them into meaningful experiences.  Yeva allowed them to flow by, maintaining a completely passive indifference.

…

Yeva is in her room in meditation. 
Salanda, a Guild member whom she knows vaguely, enters through her barred door and takes her head with a sword. She dies.

…

She is in Kadeen’s apartments.  Adham al Dharr is leading a tall, pretty young woman with long auburn hair, clothed in a soiled and tattered white shift toward the door.  Yeva has never before met the woman, or seen her in the palace.  Kadeen is glaring hatred at al
Dharr’s back.

…

Yeva is in a place of rolling hills looking out over a battlefield strewn with the bodies of men and gorn. She does not recognize the terrain, but some of the dead men are dressed in the uniform of the Baraduhne infantry. She is in the midst of a small group of soldiers—officers, judging by their demeanor—wearing uniforms that she does not recognize. Nearby is a tall young man not in uniform with his back to her talking to the officer who appears to be in charge.

…

In the great hall of the Baraduhne a tall young man stands before the rune of warding. He holds a staff or rod out before him that emits a glaring white light from the end. A sorcerer faces him from the dais. Yeva is behind the young man, and the sorcerer is in deep shadow. She can not see the face of either man. She wonders how it can be that the young man is dressed as a peasant, not in the robes of a sorcerer or mage.

…

She lies on her side on the floor near the entrance to the palace. A hole is burned through her chest. Her left arm is missing and she cannot feel her legs. Four sorcerers dressed as those from Maragong, the kingdom to the north, stand in the entrance. A sorcerer of the Baraduhne lies on his face nearby, but from her angle she cannot tell who it is. Near him lies a staff that she has never before seen with a brass headpiece shaped like the head of a falcon. As she lies there, her life slowly slipping away with the blood she sees spreading across the floor, the ruby eyes of the headpiece come to life, look into her soul and flare with a brilliant red flash.