The Soul Weaver (38 page)

“The answer is already there,” she said to me when I fumed in frustration at some problem. “You have only to uncover it.”

And most of the time it was.

I remembered what the Source had said that first time, about how a stone dreams of the earth of which it is a part and how the rain finds its way to the sea that is its essence, and I came to believe that I was indeed linked to the Bounded in some profound way. The firestorms that damaged us both, the water that healed me, the Source that knew my mind, my instincts and familiarity with the strange land and its people . . . even the geometries of the Blue Tower that satisfied desires I hadn't even known I had . . . my nausea at the unsettled Edge . . . everything I had experienced here witnessed to such a mystery.

And so as the days of waiting passed, the Bounded grew, and I felt useful, and I began to think that once I'd settled my business in the mundane world—my mother and the rest of it—I just might come back and finish what I had begun here.

 

Roxanne became an invaluable assistant in matters of governing, coming up with good ideas about trade laws and judgments and projects. She must have studied every document about philosophy, law, or politics that had ever been written in the Four Realms, and she delighted in quoting them at me, especially when she could trounce one of my ideas. I had never imagined anyone could take pleasure in argument.

She didn't travel the Bounded with Paulo and me. Though she never admitted it, I think it was fear of the firestorms that kept her close to the Blue Tower. The first one had kept her in her bed for almost a week.

When she wasn't helping me in the audience hall or the council chamber, as I had named a large study down the passage from my bedchamber, she was rummaging about the Blue Tower, foraging for furnishings, fabrics she might use for clothing more suited to her tastes, anything to enliven a “house run by male children” as she put it. She had taken over the running of the household, training servants and ordering whatever foods and furnishings she liked from the luxuries found in the storerooms of the Blue Tower, but nowhere else in the city. I was happy to have her deal with those things, as I had more than enough to do, and cared not a whit what we ate or sat on.

That no one could say where the goods in the storerooms came from or how to obtain more when the supplies started getting thin piqued my curiosity, but infuriated Roxanne. She could not abide secrets or mysteries, and took any suggestion that an event was unexplainable in terms of science, economics, or politics as a personal affront. Living in the Bounded, which by its very existence was a mystery beyond her experience, came near driving her to distraction. Even after she'd long given up on science and nature, no day passed on which she failed to look for any small mystery that she could declare solved.

And so she was determined to discover how the Blue Tower was supplied and set out to investigate every part of the place, even the garden. With some misgiving I allowed her to go to the garden, though I forbade her to enter the cave of the Source.

She agreed to my restriction, though not without complaint.

 

“Come on. You must see what I've found.” She was waiting outside my bedchamber, her gold hair in a flurry of curls, her green gown perfect as always.

“Not today.” If it hadn't been the hundredth morning of my waiting, I might have been more interested in her “discovery.”

She stuck to me like a grass burr as I headed down the passage to the stair. “I've been trying to tell you about it for a fortnight, but you're always traveling or too busy. Promise me you'll take just a moment to look.”

“Later. Have you forgotten? This is the day I get my answers, and I'll not wait a moment longer than necessary. I'd have thought you'd be shoving me up these stairs yourself.”

When I reached the stair, she dodged in front of me and backed slowly up the stairway, not allowing me to get past her. “Yes, of course, I want to go back, but I'll never get another chance to solve a mystery like this. Sorcery is against the law in Leire, and my life there is going to be hideously boring. Do you know how annoying it is, always being ignored because you don't have the right private parts, knowing you're going to be married off to someone's idiot son whom you will never love and knowing that the pox-ridden dolt will rule the kingdom that is yours by right?”

“You'll drive the fellow bats and order the Four Realms to your every whim.” It could do worse.

“That's not the same.”

I tried again to push past her, but she flitted from side to side, blocking the way. I was ready to be angry with her, but in her exasperating, teasing way she dangled a glittering object of red and gold in front of my face, snatching it away and hiding it behind her back before I could see it. “You've never told me these important questions of yours. Perchance I've found one of your answers for you. Did you ever think of that? Though because of your insufferable reluctance to speak more than three words at a time and never what you're truly thinking, you'll never admit it, you know very well I'm not a fool. So when I say I've found something of interest to you—even on
this
day—you really ought to listen, don't you think?”

I halted on the stair. “All right, what do you have?” She held up the glittering object again. Her trinket was the ruby-studded key that had hung about the neck of the Guardian.

“Oh. I'd forgotten that.” My first inquiries into its use had been fruitless, and I'd never given it another thought. “Where did it get off to?”

“You threw it on the desk in the Guardian's retiring room, and I didn't think it should be left about to be stolen. You have a lot more faith in the honesty of these Singlars than I do. But I've learned what it's for, and I want you to see. We'll be leaving this world soon, and this is the only truly important thing I've discovered!”

She'd been a great help to me all these weeks, more than I'd had any right to expect. And I had to admit that she'd tweaked my curiosity with the key. I'd already waited a hundred days. An hour more or less could make no difference. “So what does it unlock?” I said.

“I went looking for keyholes everywhere, and there just aren't all that many. But I found one here in the Blue Tower and one in your garden, and this key fits them both. Come on.”

We reached the head of the stair, and she pointed to the notch in the raised center of the yellow stone circle. The ruby-studded key slipped smoothly into the slot.

“Now look at the haft,” said Roxanne, “the way the jewel points to the flowers. I wondered what would happen if I turned the key. Try it.”

I twisted the haft of the key and felt a steady resistance . . . until I'd turned it a quarter of the way around. The teardrop-shaped ruby pointed at a laden grapevine at the bottom of the circle. I turned it again, and then again, feeling the pegged end of the key snick into place at each quarter, leaving the jewel pointed first at the carved wheat sheaves and next at a cluster of leafless trees. But nothing else happened.

Roxanne pulled the key from the hole, but she didn't seem disappointed. “Go ahead and open the way as usual. You'll see.”

I ran my fingers around the circle, and when the wall dissolved and the passage appeared, we stepped through it and, shortly after, onto the gallery.

It was winter. Snow lay in thick mounds on the shrubs and terraces, and the barren trees cracked in the cold. Thick gray clouds obscured the clifftops. Across the expanse of the winter garden, the frozen waterfall hung suspended between the false heavens and the mysterious earth. The air was so quiet, I could hear my own breath freezing.

“Isn't it a marvel?” said the princess. “Each of the four positions of the lock changes the season. I've not determined if it's the same place, only transformed, or another place altogether. But come, you have to see the rest of it. The winter garden has the most intriguing secret.”

Powdery snow spilled over the tops of my boots as Roxanne led me down the steps and along the winding path that was little more than a smooth depression scooped in the thick mantle of snow. She hurried past the towering icefall, through the grove, and into the cave of the Source. “I know you told me not to risk entering the cave, but after you got so friendly with the Source, I thought it couldn't matter. I was careful never to touch the water or anything, but I found the second keyhole inside. If you're angry with me, that's too bad, but this is really marvelous.”

I wasn't angry with her, only impatient. Being so close to the Source reminded me of how close I was to the answers I cared about. “Just hurry,” I said.

The crystals in the cave were not amethyst, but jet and silver. Roxanne crouched down beside the basin and pointed to a notched carving in the rock at its base. “Here's the second keyhole. Watch what happens. . . .”

She inserted the key in the slot. “You just have to wait a few moments. You'll be able to provide the Singlars with everything they need after you've gone . . . solve so many problems . . .”

But I wasn't listening to the princess any longer. I cared nothing for comforts or furnishings, linens or exotic foods. I cared nothing for Roxanne or the Singlars. The answer was so close; I could feel it in the winter garden, brooding, rumbling in the depths of the stone. The hair on my neck rose, and my stomach constricted, and my ears roared with my own blood, drowning out every other consideration, and if anyone had asked me why I was suddenly so afraid, I couldn't have told them.

I plunged my hand into the icy water. It was thick, as if on the verge of freezing, and I lost all feeling in my fingers in the instant I touched it.

“A hundredlight has passed, my king. How quickly have the hours flown.” The soft voice of the first root of the Bounded crackled in the frosty air like breaking glass.

“So it
is
you.” What had I expected?

“Of course. There is only one root, one Source, but the key allows you to explore many of its aspects.”

“So the garden still lives beneath all this? We've not changed it, killed it somehow by using the key?”

“Winter is but another expression of life. No less worthy than its more embracing fellows. My winter aspect is perhaps a bit more dangerous than the others. Would that you had chosen it on a different day.”

“Why more dangerous?”

“It is the quietest, the deepest buried, the most private. We do not always like what we see when we explore our most hidden places or what we hear when the world falls silent.”

“I don't want philosophy today. I want my answers.”

Roxanne stood with her arms crossed, tapping her foot. “Sometimes it takes a little while.”

“Have you not found your place here in the Bounded?” The voice of the Source stayed pleasant and even. “If you would but wait a little longer . . . finish the work you've begun. Your people need you. Your life is here. Stay in the Bounded and be at peace.”

“The firestorms are hardly peaceful. They almost killed me.”

“But you've made an accommodation. You protect your people and renew yourself. You are not the same person you were when you walked into your dream. It is no matter what the origin of the storms.”

“No more delays,” I said. “I accepted your word and made the best of my waiting, but I must finish the journey that brought me here.”

“As you wish, my king. Ask as you will.”

“I want to know the identity of the person who stabbed my mother and betrayed my father's secrets.”

“Have you not guessed it, my lord?” Her voice was quiet, gentle, and relentless in its truth. “Look into your own most hidden places. Open your eyes. Can you not see?”

“No.” But there were no surprises for me in the Bounded, and even as I said the word, the bitter chill of the winter garden settled over my spirit.

“There, you see?” interrupted Roxanne, who had paid no mind to the Source. “You can ask for anything you want—a bolt of red silk or an ivory hairbrush or a cask of sparkling wine—and you'll find it in the Blue Tower storerooms when you go back. Isn't it odd the way the ring catches the light as it spins?”

And even as the back wall of the cave dissolved into blackness and revealed the spinning brass ring, I remembered despair.

The ring was taller than I, and as it whirled about its axis, numbing my cheeks with the frigid air, it snatched the light of the torches and the sparkling reflections of ice and silver and jet, and it wove them into an orb of gray light. An oculus . . . just as I had seen them and used them in the fortress of Zhev'Na . . . just like the one spinning in the Lords' temple on the day I traded my eyes and my soul for power and immortality.

Roxanne stood at my shoulder. I needed to warn her. But I couldn't take my eyes from the oculus, and the hunger grew in me like the storm clouds that raced to devour the skies of the Bounded. It was danger unimaginable for me to stay so near an implement of power . . . an implement of temptation. But I could not . . . would not . . . run from the truth, and I would not believe it until the words were spoken.

“Tell me the name of the betrayer and assassin,” I said. Even then I knew the two were one and the same.

“But, my—”

“Tell me!” I roared the command, trying to drown out the thunder of my desire, and the wailing of my fear, and the hollow empty silence within me.

“Oh, my gracious king . . . it was you.”

 

It was in the fourth month of the war in the Wastes that I received news of a half-dead lunatic found wandering at the fringes of the desert. He was not Dar'Nethi, the panting messenger reported as he drained a waterskin and flattened himself in the shadows of his horse to find a moment's relief from the voracious sun. Nor was he Zhid.