Winds of Fury (11 page)

An Adept. If he could not
be
one, then he
wanted
one. Actually, he had probably hoped for both, to become an Adept and to control one, or more than one. A suicidally stupid plan, one that Falconsbane would never have tried. Dark Adepts, the only kind Ancar would be likely to attract, were jealous of their powers, unwilling to share them, and would never stop testing any bonds that were put upon them. And when those bonds broke—

—as eventually, Falconsbane would break his—

—then revenge would be swift and certain.

Falconsbane had known of some of Ancar's activities from his spies; he had been interested in the young King purely because the boy was the enemy of those blasted allies of k'Sheyna, the ones with the white horses. He had briefly toyed with the notion of an alliance himself—with him as the superior, of course. He knew that Ancar had longed for Adepts for some time, and it was logical to assume that he had been concentrating on the need for an Adept at the time the Gate began to fold back in on itself.

Falconsbane knew everything there was to know about Gates, except the few secrets that had disappeared with the Mage of Silence. Oh,
him
again. He could make some deductions now, with the information that he had gleaned from his covert listening, that were probably correct. The energies making up Gates were remarkably responsive to
wants
, as Falconsbane had every reason to know now. Especially when those wants were triggered by fear as the Gate began to reach for its creator.

Ancar wanted an Adept, and no doubt wanted one very badly when his spell went awry; as it happened, the Void had one. Falconsbane, still caught in nothingness.

And once the Gate had a goal, it “knew” how to reach that goal, given the strength of Ancar's need.

So, taking Ancar's desire as
destination
, the Gate had stopped folding back upon itself, and had reached out to bring Ancar what he wanted.

Falconsbane wondered, as he had wondered before this, what would have happened if the Void had
not
contained what Ancar had wanted. Possibly the Gate would have completed its attempt to double back, and would have destroyed itself and its creator with it. Well, that would have been entertaining to watch, but it wouldn't have saved Falconsbane.

Possibly Ancar would have thought of some place he considered safe, and it would have read that as a destination, creating the terminus and thus showing Ancar what it was he had
truly
called into being. It was impossible to say, really, and hard thinking made Mornelithe's head hurt.

Ancar's first Gate had collapsed for lack of further energy. And Ancar still was not aware of what he had created.

Falconsbane had no intention of telling him. He intended to keep as many secrets as he could, given the coercive spells that Ancar had layered on him. He was aided by the fact that Ancar was not aware how much Hardornen Falconsbane knew, or that he had a limited ability to read the unguarded thoughts of the servants to increase his vocabulary. As long as he pretended not to understand, it should be possible to keep quite a bit from Ancar.

He stirred restlessly, clenching his jaw in anger. When he had awakened to himself, he had found himself constrained by so many coercive and controlling spells that he could hardly breathe without permission. And for the first time in a very, very long time, Mornelithe Falconsbane found himself trapped and moving only to another's will.

It was not a situation calculated to make him cooperate with his captor and “rescuer.” Not that anything would be, really. Falconsbane was not used to cooperating. Falconsbane was used to giving orders and having them obeyed. Anything less was infuriating.

In his weakened and currently rather confused state, he often lost track of things. At the moment, he was fairly lucid, but he knew that this condition was only temporary. At any moment, he could slip back into dreams and semiconsciousness.

So while he was in brief control of himself, he laid his own set of coercions on his mind, coercions that would negate the effect of any drugs or momentary weaknesses. He would not answer anything except the most direct of questions, and he would answer those as literally and shortly as possible. If asked if he knew who he was, for instance, he would answer “Yes,” and nothing more. If asked if he knew what spell had brought him here, he would also answer “Yes,” with no elaboration. If Ancar wanted information, he would have to extract it, bit by painful bit. And Falconsbane would do his best to confuse the issue, by deliberate misunderstandings.

It would be an exercise in patience, to say the least, to learn anything at all of value.

Let Ancar wear himself out. Meanwhile, Falconsbane would be studying him, his spells, and his situation. Let Ancar continue to believe that he was the Master here. Falconsbane would learn to use Ancar even as Ancar thought he was using Falconsbane. He would not remain this fool's captive for long.

Falconsbane had forgotten more about coercion than this piddling puppy King had learned in his lifetime! It would only take time to undo what had been done, or to work his way around what Ancar had hedged him in with. Falconsbane knew above all that any spell created could be broken, circumvented, or twisted.

Even his own, he remembered with some bitterness.

True unconsciousness rose to take him under a blanket of darkness, even as that last sordid thought cut through his mind.

 

As Falconsbane drifted from pretended slumber into real sleep, An'desha shena Jor'ethan watched from his own starry corner of the Adept's mind.

When Falconsbane's thoughts clouded and drifted into dreams, An'desha opened his shared eyes cautiously, alert to the possibility that such an action might wake Falconsbane again.

But Falconsbane remained asleep, and An'desha reveled in the feeling that his body was his own again—however temporarily that might be. Once Falconsbane woke, he would have to retreat back into the little hidden corner of his mind that Falconsbane did not control, and did not even seem to be aware of. Even his ability to view the world through Falconsbane's senses was limited to the times when the Adept was very preoccupied, or seriously distracted. Any time there was even the slightest possibility that Falconsbane could sense An'desha's presence, An'desha kept himself hidden in the “dark.”

He was not certain why he was still “here.” The little he had read in Falconsbane's memories indicated that whenever the Adept took over one of his descendants' bodies, he utterly destroyed the personality, and possibly even the soul, of that descendant. Yet—this time both had remained. An'desha was still “alive,” if in a severely limited sense, thanks only to his instincts.

Not that I can do much
, he thought with more than a little fear.
And if he ever finds out that I'm still here, he'll squash me like a troublesome insect. He may think he's too weak to do anything, but even now he could destroy me if he wanted to. He'd probably do it just to sharpen his appetite.

If I'd accepted becoming a shaman . . . none of this would have happened
.
There wouldn't even be a Mornelithe Falconsbane, if I hadn't
tried to
call
fire. If
only.

If only . . . easy to say, in retrospect. Half Shin'a'in as he was, would the Plains shaman have even accepted him? There was no telling; the shaman might just as easily have sent him away. Shin'a'in shaman did not practice magic as such—but did they have anything like the fire-calling spell? And if they did, would it have been similar enough to bring Mornelithe out of his limbo? And if it had been—what would have happened then?

If, if, if. Too many “ifs,” and none of them of any use. The past was immutable, the present what it was because of the past. An'desha
had
been gifted with mage-power. He
had
chosen to run away to try to find the Tale'edras and master that magic, rather than become a shaman as the custom of Shin'a'in dictated. He
had
become lost, and he
had
tried to call fire to warm himself the first night he had been on his own. That had been his undoing.

An'desha was a blood-descendant of an Adept called Zendak, who had in turn been the blood-descendant of another and another, tracing their lineage all the way back to the time of the Mage Wars and an Adept called Ma'ar. That Adept had learned a terrible secret; how to defy death by hiding his disembodied self at the moment of his body's death in a pocket of one of the Nether Plains. And Ma'ar had set a trap for every blood-descendant of Adept potential, using the simple fire-spell as the trigger of that trap. A fledgling mage shouldn't know much more than that fire-spell, and so wouldn't be able to effectively defend against the marauder stealing his body.

An'desha, all unknowing and innocent, had called fire. Mornelithe Falconsbane had swarmed up out of his self-imposed limbo to shred An'desha's mind.

But this time, the theft had not taken place completely. An'desha had studied what being a Shin'a'in shaman entailed, and was familiar with some of the ways to control one's own mind. He fled before the Adept's power into a tiny space in his own mind, and had barricaded and camouflaged against the invader. And Falconsbane was completely unaware of that fact.

An'desha had been an unwitting and terrified spectator to far too many of Falconsbane's atrocities—appalled at what was happening, and helpless to do anything about what was being done. And he knew, from stolen glimpses into Falconsbane's thoughts, that the little he had been witness to was only the smallest part of what Falconsbane had done to his victims. His existence had all the qualities of the worst nightmare that anyone could imagine, and more than once he had been tempted to reveal himself, just to end the torment.

But something had always kept him from betraying himself; some hope, however faint, that one day he might, possibly, be able to get his own body back and drive out the interloper. He never gave up on that hope, not even when Falconsbane had changed that body into something An'desha no longer recognized as his.

He had welcomed the embrace of the Void, at least as an end to the madness. He had no more expected release from the Void than Falconsbane had.

He had not been as weakened or as confused as his usurper when that release came, but caution made him very wary of trusting anyone with his secret. He had remained silent and hidden, and that, perhaps, is what had saved him.

The coercions on Falconsbane had not taken hold of
him
, and he had come through the ordeal in far better shape than Falconsbane had. And to his surprise and tentative pleasure, he had discovered that the damage done to Falconsbane had permitted
him
some measure of control again—always provided that he did not try to control something while Falconsbane was using it.

Falconsbane did not seem any more aware of An'desha's presence than he had been before, not even when An'desha, greatly daring, had taken over the body, making it sit up, eat, and even walk, while Falconsbane was “asleep.”

What all this meant, An'desha did not dare to speculate.

But there had been other signs to make him hope, signs and even oblique messages, during the time that Falconsbane had waged war on the Tale'edras.

The Black Riders
. He had known who and what those mysterious entities were, even though Falconsbane had not. When they had appeared, he had nearly been beside himself with excitement. They were as much a message to him—or so he hoped—as they were a distraction to Falconsbane.

And there had even been an earlier sign, at Falconsbane's battle and subsequent escape from the ruins where the gryphons laired.
He
knew why the Kal'enedral had failed to slay Falconsbane, even if no one else did. They had not missed their mark—nor had concerned with sparing the Adept. Their later actions, in the guise of Black Riders, luring Falconsbane into thinking that he was being “courted” by another Adept, only confirmed that.

They
—or rather,
She
, the Star-Eyed, the Warrior—knew that An'desha was still “alive.” She would; very little was lost to the deity of both the Tale'edras and the Shin'a'in, so long as it occurred either on the Plains or in the Pelagirs. When the Black Riders sem the tiny horse and the ring to Falconsbane, An'desha was certain that they were also sending a message to him. The black horse meant that he had not been forgotten, either oy his Goddess or by Her Swordswom. The ring was to remind him that life is a cycle—and the cycle might bring him a chance to get his body and his life back again.

The question was, now that he was far from the lands that he had known, could
they
act this far from the Plains? The Goddess was not known for being able to do much far from the borders of Her own lands. She had limited Her own power, of Her own will, at the beginning of time—as all the Powers had chosen to do, to keep the world from becoming a battleground of conflicting deities. She would not break Her own rules.

And yet . . . and yet . . .

She was clever; She could work around the rules without breaking them. If She chose.

If he proved that he was worthy. That was the other thing to keep in mind; She only helped those who had done
their
part, who had gone to the end of their own abilities, and had no other recourse. If he were to be worthy of Her help, it was up to him to do everything in his power, without waiting for the Star-Eyed to come rescue him.

He would, above all, have to be very. very careful. Just because Falconsbane was damaged now, it did not do to think he would continue to be at a disadvantage. If there was one thing An'desha had learned from watching the Adept, it was this; never underestimate Mornelithe Falconsbane—and always be, not doubly, but
triply
careful whenever doing anything around him.