Darkness Risen (The Ava'Lonan Herstories Book 4) (3 page)

Then finally she was out. She stumbled into the main
billa’ja’way and released the pent-up energy and her breath at the same time,
dropping and panting in the dust. With the promise of freedom, rational thought
returned, the wrongness, and the dread vanishing like the fog of eve before the
blinking eye. And she cursed at her stupidity, wanting to weep with
frustration. There was no reason for her to have panicked, nor should she have
given in to that panic - such childish behavior could,
would
, get her
caught.

Why, why now, why here of all places?! Why this
time, when such critical information is being given?! What is this inexplicable
sense of wrongness and dread that I am beginning to feel in everything I do and
witness?!
she raged, wracking her brain. It was not the darkness - darkness had long been
her friend and playmate. It was not the silence - though long her enemy, as
long as darkness had been her friend, she had bested silence, learned to make
its ways her own. So what had frightened her so?

She stood and dusted herself off.
Nothing.
Nothing frightened me, nothing at all. What was there to be frightened of?
She had been a fool, and her mother would surely punish her. The fright had
been unreasonable, irrational. The dread was unpredictable, and came when it
would, not just in the billa’ja’ways. The wrongness was everywhere, rearing its
ugly head at any opportunity, perhaps related to but not necessarily coupled
with the dread. It had nothing to do with breaks in her enn hadura training.
The dread had made her doubt her training, perhaps, and doubt was the surest
way of losing the enn hadura’s benefit. She felt confident of herself now, felt
as if she could sit through a hundred such lorns in succession and not even
twitch from a stab in the back. That is, she felt sure until she looked back to
the way leading to the secret lain and contemplated returning to her former
position.
Then the dread...

Silonyi leaned against the wall and thought hard.
Could
it be something in me, some internal fear I have yet to conquer?
It seemed
impossible - she had already conquered all the fears that her mother had wished
her to overcome. No, these maleficent feelings had to have come from some
external source, since they had not always been a part of her. She thought
back, concentrating, tracing back to when it had started. When had the change
come, where had the strangeness all begun? And then she nearly jumped in
surprise.

It had all started the turn that I was caught in
that new rite. The turn that I went to the dungeons.
It
had
to be the fault of the strange rite she had been exposed to, performed by a
prisoner in the dungeons below. Unlike the familiar chi’rita that she knew,
this rite that she realized must be the cause of all her recent troubles used
av’rita
,
the favored mode of rita of the Aba’jae, the impostors, the pretenders to the
High Throne, and to be honest, most of the Realm.
It has to be that rite,
that strange Rite of Solu, and none other, that is causing me to react to
imagined dangers and act as if I am some undisciplined whelp, and not an Heir
of seventeen cycles.
Before the strange rite she had used chi’rita to
access and egress the billa’ja’ways dozens of times since the onset of puberty
and awkwardness. Before the rite she had never once doubted her enn hadura.
Before the rite she had never been distracted by inconsequentials. Before the
rite she had never felt that unabiding sense of wrongness.

But after...
After, things had been different. After,
there had been a change effected in her. She probed the memory, tasting it as
if it had happened just the turn before. She remembered...

...he
lay huddled in on himself, shivering on the straw-covered floor, moaning,
oblivious to all else in his cell of nearly total darkness. The feeble sound
was almost a call, almost like words long moaned and now lacking meaning, just
a refrain.

Silonyi
gazed curiously at him, the first of her mother’s prisoners that she had ever
seen - for most did not remain long enough for Silonyi to view, if they came to
the den’lains at all. Some never made it this far.

“What
is he saying?” she asked one the two warru put to guard him. “What is it he
calls for?”

“Highness,
he calls for the light of Av,” the taller one answered tonelessly.

“And
what would he do if he were given the light of Av?” she asked, glancing at the
row of iron levers set in the wall. These levers controlled the opaque panes
over the windows of the cells. The one inverted lever was obviously the one
that had shut the panes to the lone prisoner’s cell, depriving him of the very
light for which he called.

 “Highness,
he would do what we all do with the light of Av.” Was there just a bit of venom
in the monotone voice? Did this warru judge and disapprove of what was taking
place? Did he presume that she knew and that she mocked the prisoner’s
suffering? Silonyi thought on this as she looked at the quivering man. There
was no discernible mark of abuse on him, no tang of ill health or unsanitary
conditions. He looked well fed and watered, well kept. Yet quite apparently he
was in torment, bereft of something vital. And the guard’s oblique answer gave
no clue to what it might be.

Something,
perhaps the guard’s blankly disapproving manner, or perhaps cold curiosity, a
grim fascination with this immaculate torture, moved Silonyi to a decision.

“Throw
the lever and give him what he wants,” she said, “but only for as long as I
say. When I give word, put it back. I want to see what he does.”

The
guard’s face did not twist in disgust, his features remaining still, absolutely
expressionless, but his eyes filled with some deathly fire, some inarticulate
rage at her request.

Silonyi
ignored the guard’s judgment, though she was aware of it, for this wuman and
his suffering were nothing to her; there was no mercy in her request, just
perhaps an obscene enthrallment with this other’s plight. Her cruelty could
almost have been of innocence, her callousness almost an act of ignorance - but
for the excesses of the mother. What she had ordered had not been to alleviate
the man’s anguish in any way, but to satisfy her curiosity - and it would
likely as not heighten his anguish, for she had no intention of sparing the
prisoner enough time to completely fill his need. It would probably take
several turns of exposure to Av to assuage whatever his condition was, for he
had been several turns without. This tiny sip of Av would not slake his need’s
thirst.

The
guard hesitated. But the warru was bound by honor, and many heavy rites of
submission, to obey. Any resistance or disobedience on his or any other subject’s
part, and the Queen would know immediately. And though perhaps he would spare
the man the teasing sprinkle of Av which would only redouble his suffering when
it was taken away again, he could no more disobey the Heir than the Queen.

So,
perhaps wishing with all his being that he could have been born to another
Tribe, Silonyi thought with malicious glee, he tripped the lever, causing the
polarizing panes to retract and the full, if late, glory of setting Av to pour
upon the captive.

The
crumpled man responded immediately, gathering the tatters of his strength into
a rite as old as reflex, and as reflexive as breath, like breathing as vital,
and vital for life. Silonyi watched with wide-eyed fascination even though the guards
respectfully turned away. One warru still had his hand on the lever, awaiting
her cruel word. She watched as the man in the den’lain uncoiled like a tight
spring released, shouting words with his mind so that they almost seemed
spoken, flinging his arms wide and the merest twitching of his fingers drumming
out his pay’ta.

The
Rite took shape and shot out like a firebird or an sparrowette of flame to
strike at the great lavender face of Av floating low in a deep aqua sky.
Struck, Av poured forth thick orange and gold radiance that surged into the
cell, and into the prisoner...

And
into Silonyi. And Silonyi, caught in the fringes of the Rite, was washed in the
thickly raining splendor, was swept up into the core of the rite so that she
forgot to give word to shutter the windows. Forgot everything, in fact, as the
beauty of the light dazzled her, filled her to overflowing and then more. It
sculpted all the life around her from itself, the world a shimmering color
negative. Then the rite itself took hold of her, penetrating her stupor. It
seemed to blow her apart, or blow something apart from her, so that she was
boiling in liquid lumen, scalded and melted and reformed, lifted and stabbed to
life and dropped. And something in her mind gave way with the sound of a great,
grating CRACK, like the splintering of shrieking steel or the shattering of
blinding faith, the sundering of some deep bond rooted in immemorial time. Some
tinted veiling was ripped from her eyes. Some shedding dermis was peeled bodily
from her. And thus excised of the still living skin of broken faith that bled
the essence of some long-existing plan undone, the Rite let her go. She dropped
heavily into herself, swaying as her reeling senses attempted to move in
concert with her reeling body. She came back to herself clutching hard and
clinging desperately to the arm of one of the warru. The other warru still held
the lever and awaited her command. The man in the cell was asleep peacefully
for the first time in many turns. But as she focused on the incarcerated man,
something seemed
wrong
with the tableau, as if a film had been drawn over her old vision or else torn
away too soon from vision newborn, warping what she saw or perhaps how she
thought she saw it. She shook her head and looked about as if seeing everything
for the first time, yet seeing it wrong, or seeing it was wrong. She glanced at
the warrus’ faces, which were unreadable un-expressions, only then realizing
that she still held the arm of one of them. She drew herself up and let go,
haughtily gesturing at the other as she turned to leave.

“Shut
it,” she said without a backward glance. “He will have no more.” But she was
fooling no one. She and they both knew that it was too late, that the captive
had gotten what he needed. Her pretense at cruelty now was empty - why lock the
fence when the herd had already flown...?

CHAPTER
II

gliding up with red-gold and silver
limned wings, the light turned...

Grumbling
to herself, Silonyi slowly made her way to her suite of lains, to ready herself
for sleep. That first - shattering - had been the beginning of her doubt, the
advent of the plague of wrongness. Nothing she had done, thought or said since
had been the same.

She reached her suite, the distance traversed
unnoticed in her ponderings. Stepping into the inner lain, Silonyi cast the
dust-soiled bustiere and pec’ta from her and snapped her fingers twice. She did
not yet think about the consequences of her actions. She did not think about
the wrath of her mother. She tried not to think at all.

Almost immediately a large tub carved of a single
slab of marble, and polished to a velvet-shine finish, was brought to her by
twelve straining men; these were followed by twenty maids, each carrying
smaller porcelain basins, over which they murmured continuously, keeping the
scented water within the vessels at just the right temperature. With a start,
Silonyi realized that the maids were using av’rita to do so.

The grunting male servants carefully set the tub
down on the floor beyond the carpeting upon which she stood, having a care that
the satin stone was not in the least bit scratched. They had all seen the fate
of her last set of tub-carriers who had been foolish enough to let the tub
slide half a pace across the floor, leaving behind a deep bluish blemish in the
cream floor. Those who had survived chastisement had been put to the unenviable
task of polishing the whole floor down till every trace of the scratch was gone
and the rest of the floor was level to match it. None would make the same
mistake again anytime soon.

The twenty women relieved their basins of the
precious contents but continued to murmur, standing around the tub in a ring;
they would remain thus, keeping the water’s temperature constant throughout the
bath.

Silonyi was preternaturally aware of the av’rita the
women used as two of her bathers came forward to help her step on the back of a
third crouching bather, and then into the tub. The ‘rita buzzed around her like
a stinging insect, until she forced herself to ignore it.

She sat still as her bathers administered to her,
not relaxing fully, though she was not really tense, either. She was rather -
troubled. The sense of wrongness was back again, soft and subtle this time, not
like the clutching fear in the billa’ja’way. But why? What was wrong here?

Surely not a bath
, she almost spoke to the sense
of wrongness, glancing around. This was routine. She demanded baths in this
very tub all the time, had demanded it hundreds of times, sometimes twice a
turn. Why not bathe here, rather than in the bathing pool in its own separate
lain? There was absolutely nothing different about this bath from the one
before it - why should it be wrong now? It was the same, the same low grunts of
the tub carriers, the same susurrating murmur of the warming (av’rita?) rite of
the basin carriers, the same slow, languid movements of the hands of the
bathers...

Everything exactly the same. So why should she feel
any different now about the whole ritual,
which was the same?

Why indeed
, the sense of wrongness seemed to say,
and why indeed can you not just take the few steps to the bathing lain? Or if
even that is too much, just ‘tun there?

“Do we displease you in some way, sweet Heir?” the head
bather asked quietly, and even his voice was modulated to strictly pleasant
tones. If she said yes, she knew that all the bathers, basin carriers and tub
carriers might be instantly put to shameful death or some more unpleasant fate.
Or they might go seeking their deaths to escape that same fate, for displeasing
her. So she, in some fit of mercy or perhaps in response to the wrongness,
shook her head no and tried to relax. Tried to fall into the rhythm of the
familiar, to lose herself in the luxury of the scented oils and bubbles. But
try or not as she might, the something continued to bother her. She said
nothing, did not cut the bath short. Instead she did something she had never
done before: she began to analyze this, one of her favorite pre-slumber rituals.
Every aspect she looked at and turned over every nuance. They finished the
bath, and still she studied the whole thing. Then, like a ray of silent, golden
Av through filmy gray background curtains of noise, she hit upon the wrongness
that plagued her about the bath, or rather what the wrongness might have been
trying to show her.

It’s a bit - excessive
, she admitted.
It was a luxury for luxury’s sake, not because she had done anything to deserve
it, but simply because she could have it so.

This was still another piece of an uncomfortable
trend she was seeing take form within her. Why should trivial things like this
discomfit her? Why should the comfort and well-being of her servants be
significant, or the excesses that she learned from her mother bother her, or
the welfare of the common people interest her, or the secret words in her
mother’s secret meetings send her into paroxysms of panic, or the treatment of
prisoners concern her?

Yes, prisoners.
Him.
This is his doing, curse
him. Him and his strange ‘Rite of Solu.’ All this nonsense began with him.
She knew that this was what the rite was called because she had gone back and
talked to him, to ask him what the Rite was and how it might be reversed. And
after staring hatefully at her for a long time, he had replied that it was the
Rite of Solu and it could not be reversed, and why should she want it to be?

But it had effected some kind of change in her, had
affected her thinking in some way. How? How had the rite changed her? He
called
it the Rite of Solu, but it was not like any Rite of Solu
she
had ever
performed.
Since when does the Rite of Solu make the light of Av pour in
like a cascade of amber, filling one to the brim with light? Since when does it
scorch the soul, and fill the senses with such an awareness of life? Since when
does the Rite of Solu make one sense wrongness in everything one does?

This was not the Rite of Solu she had been taught.

And she had not practiced the Rite she had been
raised to in quite some time either, she realized with a guilty jolt as her
maids and maddi lotioned her and oiled her hair and readied her for sleep. The
new rite she had witnessed from the prisoner was very sustaining, and so much
more - revitalizing than the old one. In a strange way she had liked it better.
But it was affecting the way she saw things, the way she interpreted common
situations.

A connection suddenly joined in her mind. If most of
the Realm used av’rita, did that mean that they practiced the Rite of Solu
using av’rita too, the way the prisoner had done? Did everyone but she and her
mother’s court practice it that way?

“Thendaji,” she said, and the maddi she had called
jumped, startled by her voice, and perhaps fearful, too, for the Heir rarely
spoke to her maids, and then usually in displeasure when she did.

“Highness?” she answered softly, holding the soft
brush away from the princess’s hair in case that was what might have given
offense.

“How do you practice the Rite of Solu?” Silonyi
asked.

Thendaji’s mouth dropped open, and she blinked in
confusion, partly because she did not seem to be in trouble, and partly from
the nature of the question. For the Rite of Solu was a private thing, an
individual’s communion with the Supreme One, and frankly, it was the height of
rudeness and offense to ask such questions of one’s practice of the Rite.
However, taking offense and refusing to answer was the surest way of making
sure that she never had the opportunity to practice it again. So she chose the
offensive over offense.

“Highness - I practice it the way I was taught. To
make the pay’ta interweave one’s name with the name of the Supreme One and
receive the blessing of Av.”

“Using av’rita,” Silonyi qualified.

Thendaji blinked again, and words escaped her
tongue, “Is there aught else to use, Highness?” Whereupon she quickly clapped
her hand to her mouth, but the princess did not seem to notice her discourtesy.

“And everyone does it in this way?”

“Yes, Highness,” the frazzled maddi answered
faintly. “As well as I know.”

Then I must find out
, Silonyi thought
to herself, taking no note of the querulous glances that passed around her,
why
I learned it differently.

But before that, what am I going to tell my mother
about this eve? How do I explain my actions?
She contemplated this as she lay
upon her pallet and her maddi took their leave. She was still thinking about it
when sleep tiptoed in and blew gently upon her eyes.

the darkness
turned about the silence, both laughing at the emptiness that, itself turned...

The focus of the Six was palpable, their combined
presences and attention tangibly concentrated on the center of the low table.
Then the intensity of the Sixth lightened just the tiniest bit, for just a
moment’s moment, as if some breath of cold and motionless air or some soundless
pattering of feet to the pang of some nameless panic had distracted her from
somewhere beyond the wall. Her attention turned as another would turn her head,
but came back almost immediately. None of the others seemed to know or even
notice. The Sixth stilled her perception again, joining the rest in unmoving
contemplation. For a quarter of a san’chron they sat thus.

Then, almost as if on cue, the Fifth moved, placing
her hand upon the table to draw the regard of the others.

“What if the Public Face were to, to all appearances,
change sides?” she said quietly. “At the Heir’s return, let the Public Face
rescind the challenge, yes, and beg forgiveness and renounce all doubts and
aspersions cast on the Heir. Let the Public Face sing her praises to all that
will listen. Be the first to congratulate her and the last to criticize. But
always be ready to suggest, to gently correct, to subtly guide. And let the
Face become the Heir’s unspoken advisor, her strongest advocate, and let that
core of supporters be the backing of the Face, so that when she succors the
Heir, they do, too. Subtly it will be a cut to the High Queen’s power, since
they support the Face, who has spoken out against the High Queen’s ascension -
but she cannot object, for they will support her Heir. Through that, make it
seem that the Queens are once again united, most endorsing the High Queen and
others actively supporting the Heir when she comes to power. Make them the
first among the Heir’s advocates, so that it seems that she has already begun
to be accepted as our next leader. Let them uphold her the highest. And then,
when we call on the Face to pull back - so do they, and the support that the
Heir counts on because of them will not be there. If we can get the Heir to
become dependent upon us, and that core group above all others, we will hold
the keystone that would undo the power of the High Throne exactly when we need
it.”

The others murmured in appreciative respect and
acceptance. It was a brilliant strategy that had real possibilities -
if
the Face could win her way into the Heir’s good graces that way. Even the First
could not refute its appeal. It was obvious, though, that this suggestion had
been thought out before-hand. And not necessarily by the Fifth.

“There are two holes in that plan,” the First said,
though. “One is our unknown opposition. If the Heir has that support, too, then
our group will not be as effective. It will then become a priority to uncover
this group and undermine them in some way, discredit them in her eyes.” Her
hood dipped forward. “That will take time and effort better sent in other
pursuits. The other is getting the Heir to become so reliant upon the Face and
her supporters. When she finds out that it was the Face who challenged her,
that possibility becomes more than highly improbable.”

“Not quite so, Sister,” the Fifth said with a mildly
felt smile. “The first has been accomplished, in no small part already. And the
second more likely than you might think.”

“How so?” the Second asked, her interest covered by
a tone of slight curiosity.