Kirith Kirin (The City Behind the Stars) (28 page)

You will not find this part of the legend written down anywhere else, since it is my own speculation. At the time of my teaching at Illyn Water I had never heard or read Luthmar; the saga had long since fallen into obscurity. The truth concerning the making of Wyyvisar is known only to the Sisters and those to whom they have revealed it. Wyyvisar has ever since been the province of these Sisters, and hardly anyone who has learned it was not taught by them.

But as I have said before, Wyyvisar is not the only language in which magic can be performed. Cunavastar, who was not allowed to share in the secret of Hidden Speech, derived a magical language of his own.

Of the making of Cunavastar there are no legends, and his birth is remembered only as the first coming of opposition into Arthen. In the poem he is called the Son of Yruminax, the Other Power. References in other songs echo this saying, and he is called, among other things, “Prince of Blasphemies,” “Nemesis,” “Emptiness-Who-Walks,” “Cunctator,” “Lord of Nothing” “Vortice.” But of Yruminax his father we do not speak, nor have we retained any legends about him. Common folks are afraid even to say his name and refer to him as the Nameless, the One-Who-Is-Not. There is only one other reference to Yruminax in “Luthmar”:

He was the husband of YY

An empty face in the bright sky

a prince of air

whose true name is the unknown, whose face is emptiness

whose life is hidden and unspeakable

One day YY will consume him

fire eating air

He is the father of evil and weaklings are his food

So ancient are the oldest texts of Luthmar that we do not know whether the reference to “father of evil” is also a reference to Cunavastar; portions of the text here are missing and no complete version of “Luthmar” survives.

The Cunavastar of legend began his life with good acts, whatever the truth of his birth. It was he who invented the worship of YY. He built the Elder Shrines. Anger overcame him when the Diamysaar refused to teach him Wyyvisar. He comprehended much of their thought without any teaching, and finally began the long process of deriving Ildaruen, the Language of Other Power, which will be used to dismantle all the worlds that exist when the time comes. He taught the process of deriving Words to his son, Falamar, who later shared the secret with the Jisraegen priests, and came to regret it.

Ildaruen is a powerful tongue, with the advantage that one may teach it. Those who make magic in Ildaruen outnumber those who make magic in Wyyvisar for that reason.

The Sisters and I did not discuss what I had learned about them on Mount Diamysaar, except once when I tried to ask a question about it and Commyna cut me off — mildly, without her usual sarcasm — by saying, “Don’t worry about who we are, Jessex. Concentrate on the teaching and everything else will follow.”

Indeed, the knowledge that these three gargantuan women were, or might be, the Diamysaar came too late to strike any permanent awe in me. They remained plainspoken and simple, easy in manner, as if I were their mutual child. When I was with them, whatever the circumstance (and these were often eerie), I never feared them.

Commyna was right about the effect of the new disciplines I began to study. I learned that the mind has deep rivers of memory and sensation whose existence one never suspects. I learned that every moment of my life was stored in memory in perfect detail, that each memory could be recalled in its entirety, as if the past day itself were being recreated. This was not always pleasant; who would choose to relive the whole of his or her past without the ability to change it, witnessing anew its blemishes and scars? Who can look at the faces of the dead as if they were still living and not feel pain? I was young, but even in my brief life there were things I preferred to forget.

I had no way of knowing how long these meditations lasted. For the most part, in such circumstances, time has no meaning, since the trained mind can alter time’s density, making a moment seem like a day, a week, a month. Compared to my hours at the Lake, the intervals when I returned to camp were shadowy and brief, and I walked the torch-lit paths to and from the common tent with the silence of a ghost. My mind was on my teaching, insofar as it was safe for me to think of this teaching away from Illyn Water.

In this way a long time passed, and I became a master of many strange arts. I could speed my heartbeat or slow it, I could control the circulation of blood through my various limbs, I could scan my memory for a particular moment, I could (if I wished) monitor the digestion of my food, the formation of urine or waste. These are functions that the mind does control, whether we are aware of this control or not. By the time the lake women were ready for me to proceed to other studies, I knew myself maybe more thoroughly than I wanted to. Often I found myself dazed by the ceaselessness of these processes, as if my body were a continual jangle.

Vella understood my uneasiness in this regard, and once, near Illyn’s nightfall, while we were drinking the fragrant tea she had brewed, she said to me, “One of the arts you will need to learn soon is the art of forgetting.”

“Pardon me, ma’am? I don’t understand.”

She broke apart one of the sweet white cakes that constituted the mainstay of my diet while I was at the lake. “Now that you know so much about how the mind works, you’ll need to forget it until you need the knowledge. The hidden parts of your mind can go on causing your heart to beat and regulating your breathing without any help from you.”

“I do get dizzy from watching it all sometimes.”

She taught me this lesson herself, and showed me the usefulness of some things I had already learned, including ways to prevent or cure sickness in myself — including the correct method for preventing the fever that had nearly killed me following my first visit to Illyn.

Vissyn taught me different arts and sometimes took me riding as relief from the stillness of my other lessons. She could ride in shadow, hidden from mortal sight, and she could multiply a horse’s speed by her craft, something I would learn, she said. When I asked her, innocently, what circle of power she was in, she simply smiled and refused to answer. I had a feeling most of the tricks she showed me were not things I could learn from the sixth level, and I was right. But in her company I saw Cunuduerum again, and we rode to Nevyssan’s Point, the northernmost part of Arthen. Once we rode to the outskirts of Drii, a fair city of three concentric walls high in the mountains, and I watched the Venladrii moving along the cobbled streets, wearing their cloaks of green or silver cloth, speaking in their apocopated language, word flowing into word almost indistinguishably. This was the only time we strayed from Arthen, and Vissyn was careful to keep us hidden.

Once she took me to see Inniscaudra, the Winter House. We did not ride into the vast stone citadel but stopped at the crest of one of the neighboring hills. The House rises from the summit of a crested hill named Vath Invaths, where scented elgerath hangs from tree to tree in sweeping festoons, and in the season when I first saw the place, the vine blooms in explosions of rich color: crimson, azure, saffron and rich violet. Atop all this sits the Winter House, white walls shining, tall turrets reaching higher than the surrounding hillsides and over everything soaring the High Place, Ellebren Tower. The House is broad, its many wings spread across the hilltop, its outermost walls obscuring the lower floors from sight. The deepest parts of Inniscaudra reached to the heart of the earth below, Vissyn told me, and when I asked her what was in those parts, she tossed her golden hair and with glittering eyes described the treasure rooms, the armories, the barracks where an army of many thousands might sleep indoors. This was the House that No Man Built, and in the turreted rooms and all along the grounds had wakened the Forty Thousand long ago, on the first morning of our kind. I had never seen anything bigger than the market-house in Mikinoos or the mill on East River; the sight of this grand sprawling palace took my breath away.

“Have you ever been to the High Place?” I asked.

“No,” Vissyn said, “That wouldn’t be a good thing for me to do.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not a power of this world,” she said. Her expression had suddenly become very serious. “I was once, but not any longer. For me to stand there would be blasphemous, and I would become like Drudaen Keerfax.”

“But you don’t use Ildaruen when you make magic, how could you be evil like him?”

“Don’t misunderstand, Jessex. Neither Wyyvisar nor Ildaruen is good or evil, any more than light or dark is good or evil. There have been good magicians who use Words of either tongue. What has happened to Drudaen is a sickness that comes to the ones who live so long.”

I studied the Tower again, slender and shining, its highest summit crowned with silver, tatters of cloud floating past. Even then I wondered if I would ever stand there. After a moment I asked, “Is Yron a power of this world? Can he stand on the High Place?”

When I watched her for her answer, for the first time I saw doubt in her. She said, after consideration, “We assume so. Otherwise why would he come?”

Why indeed? Shaken by her apparent uncertainty, I asked no more questions that day.

For the most part Vissyn took me on these rides for relief from the rigors of training; the arts in which she was most knowledgeable were related to riding, travel, survival in harsh environments, and transformations, all of which were too advanced for an apprentice of the sixth level. I envied the ease with which she concealed the mechanics of these applications: I never once heard the whispered, telltale Word in my mind, never saw the relevant gesture with which she moved power.

When the Sisters deemed me sufficiently skillful in the control of my own thought, my training turned to other directions.

To reach the Fifth Circle from the Sixth, one must master the deep magics — the dual trance, insinging, power-singing and patterned movements, including movements into spin. My teachings in these arts began without fanfare.

In the deep magics one learns to use the control of the mind one gained in earlier training — to see with the mind alone, to transfer thought, to release memory and, finally, to free portions of the spirit from the body for travel or work on other levels. One can also think of this as compaction, as moving the awareness into a smaller space, in order to draw more energy from it; though in fact what we are speaking of is a smaller duration of time, since awareness exists in time alone. This duality of expansion out of the body and compaction within the body is the crucial difference between applications of the fifth level and those of the lower circles. A magician who can encompass this duality, who can leverage the spirit free of the flesh, can work magic from both levels at the same time — or from three or sometimes four levels — and thus will always have the advantage over the magician who can work only from the body, in the visible world.

The beginning of these arts is the same as the beginning of nearly every part of magic: control of breathing, relaxation and the cleansing of the mind.

I spent uncountable hours gazing into the glowing heart of fire, emptying my mind of thought and letting it remain empty, relaxing control of muscles one by one, while Commyna or Vella monitored my progress, making certain that I did not lose my grip on the involuntary organs. Apprentices who attempt to enter a deep trance-state without supervision have been found dead of the attempt rather often, their hearts stopped cold, their spirits unable to reenter lifeless flesh. I had no desire to take such risks, and the Sisters found me to be cheerfully obedient and very attentive to instruction.

Trance-state is not hard to master. Seeing with the mind is more difficult, and the twin art of compression of the awareness and working out of the body is harder still. I quickly learned to enter trance-state, at first using fire as an aid to concentration, later using small gems for the same purpose, and finally learning to go into trance with no aid at all. At the end of one of these training sessions, I returned to consciousness to find Commyna watching me with a baleful expression, holding in her fingertips the gem I had used as an aid. I asked what was wrong, and she answered with another question. Lifting the gem slightly — a small red stone, set in gold and dangling from a delicate chain — she asked, “What does this remind you of?”

I studied the gem again, and the chain. The stone was pretty, striking fire from sunlight, and the chain seemed well made. “It doesn’t remind me of anything,” but as soon as the words left my mouth the image of another necklace came to me, the one I kept hidden. That stone was the same color as this one, and the stone the same weight.