The mosaic was not complete. Hand-sized holes and gaps were littered with crumbled bits of stone and mortar. And it was not a true mosaic, where the images are created solely from the bits of colored stone. Instead the patterns were etched and painted on larger tiles, which had been broken into tiny fragments and pieced back together again. But spread before us was a story that covered half the floor and that drew me to my knees to examine it.
Set into a background of red and blue were thousands of fragments, none bigger than my thumb, bits of line and color that created a pageant of shapes: men with wings, women with the bodies of horses, children transforming into birds and deer and foxes, life in a forest of towering trees and graceful-columned structures like that in which I knelt. A life of sorcery and mystery. Around the borders were tiles that formed words and symbols, but they could not draw my eye from the pictures. All of the figures had black hair, bronze skin, and slightly angled eyes. Ezzarians. I was drowned in wonder.
Fully half of the images seemed to be a depiction of everyday life. Large and small drawings of every kind of activity were crammed together as if the artist kept remembering more that he wanted to show and squeezed it into a painting that was already complete: eating, sleeping, washing, spinning, growing and harvesting, braiding hair, building houses and temples, playing music. Starting somewhere in the middle just beyond a large gap, the story became more precise. From the left to the right in square after square of carefully constructed evidence, I saw a group of men and women—five of them who were the same from picture to picture—performing some elaborate ritual, with fire and smoke and music, with knives and mirrors. A larger group of men, women, and children stood nearby. All of them were horrifically afraid, their hands gripping each other, their eyes hidden or closed or scarcely daring to watch what was coming to pass. In each succeeding panel of the story, a shape appeared slightly larger than the one before, an ominous smudge that might have been the symbol of storm or plague or any number of terrors. It took form only in the final picture. In that one, the group of five stood before the others, their heads bowed, tears drawn on their cheeks, their hands lifted in a clear display of horror, shame, and fear. And just beyond the two groups the formless mass had become a third group . . . monstrous shapes that had lived in my memory since I was seventeen and first encountered one of them . . . demons, held at bay only by the same knives and mirrors used in the rituals. I could not comprehend all that was before me, but Balthar voiced the conclusion that had formed in my head as I gazed on the creation.
“You see, Warden. We are responsible. With our magics and our wonders, we ourselves created the demons.”
CHAPTER 19
“How could you possibly think such a thing?” Fiona was standing just behind me, yelling at Balthar. “Even if this mess meant anything, it’s not complete. You’ve got holes all over it.”
“Twenty-seven years it’s taken me to get this far, and I don’t know that I can do more. My eyes are not so good as they once were, and the tiles that remain are broken so badly, it’s difficult to see any pattern on them. They were in the water for a while, you see, thrown in the river by those who destroyed the temple. I think the river must have changed course soon after, for few were lost or ruined. But that’s a small part overall. No, it’s all there. Easy to see. Very clear.”
“But you can’t be sure what it means. How could you know?”
“Don’t you see, girl? They came and destroyed the evidence of their own crimes. When they saw what they had unleashed on the world, they could not allow others—ordinary folk—to know. They . . . we . . . had to remedy our mistake. We declared war on our own creation, and we have lived with our guilt every day for a thousand years. And if we think to forget, the gods send us the children to remind us—our own children possessed by the evil we have done. I found the answer.”
“You can’t know all this.”
Fiona’s denial rang hollow. Of course, Balthar was right. The knife in the picture was the image of the knife I used to slay demons. The mirror was oval, the size of a hand. Was the one holding it Luthen himself? And the one singing, was she Ioreth? The origin of the demons was Ezzarian sorcery. There was no denying it.
And the rest of it . . . I brushed my hand across the winged figures and felt the burning in my shoulders, the craving in my belly, the aching emptiness in my chest. What had happened to us? “You’re wrong in at least one thing,” I said, my voice tight with hunger. “The children could not be our punishment. What we suffer is not half of what they must endure, and we don’t even see it, for we kill them or send them away.” I could remember the expression on Blaise’s face as he folded his arms and became the thing that was a part of him. It was not pain or discord, captivity or possession, but purest joy. I could recognize it only because amid the rubble of my life of violence, I had been fortunate enough to experience a few moments of it. Blaise’s stillness was a perfection of peace, of completion that I could not imagine. Only the end he faced was terrible.
“What do you know of it? Nothing.” Balthar shouted so loud that a flock of chittering sparrows rose from the nearby trees in a gray cloud. “The children would have destroyed us. We were right to destroy them first. I hate it, but that was the way it had to be. Our punishment was the necessity to kill them for what we’d done.”
Of course Balthar resented my inference that his theories were incomplete. But he couldn’t know. He had never met Blaise.
While I tried to piece together the mosaic of my experiences, Fiona tried to outshout the old man. She argued all the points of Ezzarian tradition—that the demons were only a force of nature, not evil in themselves, that it was only our gift for sorcery that obligated us to oppose them. Nothing in our writings laid blame upon us. But the very incompleteness of Ezzarian evidence left her hanging; she could not tell another story, for we didn’t have one. So she fell back on telling Balthar about Blaise and Saetha and demanding to know how his theories explained them. Balthar called her a liar and me worse. I couldn’t blame him. If he believed that demon-possessed children could grow up whole and undamaged, then his carefully built accommodation with his own children’s death was shattered. But I had no pity to spare for Balthar.
“You are both fools,” said Fiona furiously, almost stomping her feet on the colored tiles. “You, old man—murderer, slaver—you’ve invented this perversion from your own evil. You’re trying to redeem your sins by pretending there’s something worse. And you”—her glare was hot on my head—“you are rank with corruption. Your sight is clouded by your own impurity. I won’t believe either of you.”
“I do not deny my crimes,” said Balthar, spluttering and stumbling over his words. “But you . . . willfully . . . stupidly blind. It’s just as I expected. Because you didn’t see it first. Because the despised Balthar found it. The mosaic could reveal that the sky is blue, and Ezzarians would deny it. How could I ever have thought to teach any of you anything? If there were harder truths . . . more terrible things to know . . . what would you do then, eh? You would slay me before I had a chance to tell.”
They continued yelling at each other until I wanted to scream at them to take their arguments elsewhere. The answers were floating around in my head, waiting to be captured if I could but find the right hook. If I could just get peace enough to think.
On the upper left of the picture was a small frame depicting a young girl changing into a deer. With only a few strokes of his brush, the artist had etched pain on her face . . . pain that had endured a thousand years to tell me something of truth. About her neck she wore an amulet in the shape of three linked circles that allowed me to identify her in more of the pictures. A woman laid a hand on the girl. Comfort, enchantment . . . whatever it was, it had eased the child’s hurt. As I studied the complex images, I came upon the girl again. Older. Still wearing her amulet. Carrying on the same activities as the others: cooking, reading, writing, weaving. I looked further to see if she appeared again, and I found her repeatedly, sometimes shown as a young woman, sometimes as a deer, sometimes as other creatures, sometimes as a combination of woman and beast—always marked with the three linked circles so I knew it was the same woman. I saw her wed to a young man who took the form of a bird. I saw her give birth to a child.
Excited, I began to ignore the other images drawn and etched on the tiles, hunting the single figure that might tell me more. There, a tiny image out of proportion to those surrounding it. The young woman, half changed into another form, pain and distress etched into her face and body, was giving her child to her husband, and then—it was so difficult to see, for the tile was cracked just beside—the deer was shown inside a rectangular outline. A doorway? I peered closer. The edges of the rectangle were rippled, not straight, and within it were the faint outlines of strangely shaped trees, unknown flowers, all blurred at the edges. It was a portal. The familiar shape emerged from the flat tiles as if an Aife had woven it. Frantically I searched further. I needed to know what happened next. I was almost up to the part about the magic and the demons, and I was afraid that I would find nothing more of ordinary life . . . but there . . . in a series of tiles just before the gap and the square where we met the five sorcerers, there was a small rectangle with the deer inside it. And again. And again, tucked into the corners and backgrounds of every square.
No, no, no. There must be another answer.
When I was just at the point of frustration, I found her again. Greeting her husband and child . . . a visibly older child. She had come back from wherever she had gone beyond the portal. A few more images . . . some in the deer form, some in the human. No other anymore. But she was not mad. Not trapped.
I sighed and sat back on my heels. The image offered no immediate solution. And certainly it could signify a thousand possibilities. But hope. Surely it was hope.
Time had meandered on its way. I had not even noticed that the arguing had stopped. A silent Balthar was messing about with fire and food, while Fiona sat on the floor across the mosaic, her chin on her knees, watching me. “And what do you think you’ve learned from this ridiculous fakery?” she said, in a far more even tone than I would have expected considering her earlier tirade. She seemed tired.
“Nothing but more questions,” I said. “That we created the demons is clear enough, but why do they affect Blaise and his kind so differently than the rest of us? Is it the demon drives them into madness or makes them stay a beast? Or is it that they need . . . something . . . somewhere”—I touched my finger to the image of the woman/deer entering the portal—“that we don’t know how or when or where to give? All I’ve learned is that the shifting is a natural part of them, which one day’s observation could tell anyone. We’re the ones who are broken.”
“You’re as mad as he is.” This time it was a quiet accusation. Almost friendly.
Balthar and Fiona had reached some accommodation, perhaps agreeing that they were both so stubbornly entrenched in their positions that it made no sense to discuss the matter any longer. My own limbs felt like lead, and when the old man brought us hard, dry bread and barley soup, I could not summon the will or the indignation to refuse him. The two of them talked only of mundane things while we ate: of river currents and game and the once-a-year delivery of supplies—the blood price provided by the Derzhi Magicians Guild. They had stepped back from the risky precipice we had trodden that evening, but I could not. My eyes and my thoughts never left the mosaic, tracing the outlines of the figures, trying to probe and penetrate their mystery and the thoughts of those who had created the images. When I had silenced the growling of my belly, I bent over the pictures once more until my eyes blurred and my musings circled upon themselves for the twentieth time. Then I wrapped my cloak about my shoulders and fell asleep, my hand resting on the puzzle.
The dream came again, of course. Even as I lived it repeatedly through the ensuing hours, I held enough conscious thought to wonder if it assaulted me with such intensity because I slept in a place exploding with melydda. I lived and died a hundred times that night, my limbs frozen, my longing unsatisfied, my eyes blinded, my breath choked with horror and darkness as I watched the one in black and silver take command of his legion. But when I woke to the dripping fog of morning, I knew the answer.
“Tell me, old man, what did Pendyrral dream of?” I shook Balthar awake from his mattress of dried leaves. It was difficult to keep from bruising the dazed old man in my anxiety. “And the others who had these encounters—what of them?”
“A castle,” he mumbled. “Pendyrral dreamed of a castle in the snow and how he needed to get inside. Cathor, too— he was one of the others. He wrote it down. Something the same. Odd that it was like. Fellyd disappeared after his encounter. Some said he went north.”
“And there were beings who lived there . . . wraiths . . . beautiful, glorious beings who could not see him?”
“Yes. Yes. Pendyrral described them so.” The old man sat up and scratched his head. “Why?”
Dreams . . . dreams of belonging. The craving to go inside that castle in the frozen wasteland. These rai-kirah had been trying to tell us something, to draw us closer. As my people had always feared, a demon had found a way to penetrate our minds . . . but not to fill it with fear and madness, but with wonder and hunger and the certainty that there were mysteries that we needed to unravel. But why? I could not believe it was only to lure us to destruction.
“Did Pendyrral feel the darkness devour him or did he see the wraiths leaving the castle, riding out to meet someone in the storm? Someone he believed—he knew—was everything of evil, immensely powerful, one whose very touch was destruction?”