The Boy
Allystaire wasn’t sure how long he’d lain on the edge of unconsciousness in the total darkness of the room when he was suddenly startled to wakefulness by a quiet but steady voice.
“What were you speaking of while Bhimanzir tested you?”
The voice was soft, a young boy’s voice, or a woman’s, he really couldn’t tell. The sudden intrusion of noise into his aching, pain-wracked senses brought him to full alertness, his tingling wrists training against their chains. “What? Who is there?”
“It annoyed him very much,” the voice went on. Allystaire couldn’t place the accent; it certainly wasn’t Baronial, or Islandman. Keersvast, or Concordat, he thought, but he hadn’t heard much of their tongues. “He was less angry than confused.”
“Well I am glad I can at least do that, whoever you are.”
There was a pause, long enough that Allystaire wondered if the owner of the voice had left, before it went on. “I am Bhimanzir’s student.”
A young sorcerer. Wonderful. “And does he know you are here?”
“I was to observe you while he was gone. Not to speak. I have only just learned the Seeing Dark and it is a test of my mastery, I think.”
“Well, Bhimanzir’s student,” Allystaire said, “what did you think of your master being confused and annoyed?”
“It is better than how he usually is.”
“Oh? How is that?”
“Angry. Demanding. You’re a puzzle he means to unlock, and he prides himself on his cleverness.”
“Do you find him clever?”
Another pause. “No. Powerful and clever are not the same.”
Well. This is something. “No, no they are not. Do you want to know the answer to what I was saying?”
“If I do, and Bhimanzir asks me, he may force me to tell him.”
“Then you will at least have known something he did not. That will make you the clever one.”
There was another pause. “Very well.”
“Whatever your master was doing,” Allystaire said, “it hurt. Yet I have been hurt many times before. More than I can count.”
“Yes,” the boy’s voice replied. “I can see your scars from here. They are quite ugly,” he added, matter-of-factly.
“Well, ugly or not, I know pain. We are old friends, pain and me. Well, acquaintances—I do not mean to say I like them, the aches and bruises, the burning throb, the feeling of a blade on the wrong side of my skin. Yet I do know just about every kind of pain a man can know. Your master was not showing me anything new. I found it helped if I recalled when I had felt whatever he was doing before.”
“The Delvings—at least in the way Bhimanzir was performing them—surely hurt more than any weapon of steel.”
“Mayhap,” Allystaire admitted hoarsely. “There is more to it, I suppose. That counsel I would keep for myself, for now.”
“I see,” the voice said, and Allystaire believed that the boy probably did. “He will not like to hear that.” Another pause, then, “Yet I think I will enjoy telling him, if he asks.”
“What is your name, student?”
“I cannot tell you that.”
“Why not?”
“My master has not given me one yet.”
“I see.” I really don’t, Allystaire thought. “In my experience, the name another man gives you is likely to stick whether you like it or not. Better, perhaps, to claim your own.”
“It is the way of things. I must wait for the name I am given, even if it is given by a clumsy fool.”
“You do not like your master, then?”
There was no answer, and once again, Allystaire was alone in the darkness.
* * *
If he dreamed, the agony he awoke to washed it away. The sorcerer was standing near him once more, illuminating a tiny circle of the room with the ugly red light that leaked from his fingers, that had once again formed a web of threads around Allystaire’s body, from which tendrils dipped into his skin.
His breath was too quickly stolen from him for any kind of a scream, and his lungs began to burn before the web of energy grew quiet; it still hovered over him, but no longer flashed into his skin. The breath he drew was less a deep inhalation than a ragged, inward moan.
“No bravado for that, ah?” The sorcerer chuckled, while Allystaire simply sought to regain control of his breathing. “This must be getting wearying for you.”
“I just lie here,” Allystaire croaked. “You are the one expending all the effort.”
“There is truth in that,” the sorcerer admitted. “And I am no closer to discovering the source of your power. I find no evidence of thaumaturgy, sorcery, witchery, or possession. I run short of ideas to test.”
At that, Allystaire laughed, though it was a dry, dusty chuckle. “You could simply have asked.”
“And why would I expect that you would answer, or answer truthfully?”
“Well, you are right that I might not answer. Yet if I did, it would be the truth.”
The sorcerer came closer, lifting his head to peer at Allystaire, who saw tiny lines and motes of red flickering where Bhimanzir’s eyes must be, under his cowl.
“Well then. I have witnessed, or have reports I have no reason to doubt, attributing powers to you. Unnatural strength, mostly, though some speak of healing and others of being compelled to speak when they would have been silent. Where do these powers come from?”
Allystaire smiled very faintly. “A Goddess.”
There was silence for a moment, then a small sound of indignation from the sorcerer. “And you expect me to believe that?”
“Your belief is irrelevant to me,” Allystaire replied. “I have seen Her, been touched by Her, been called by Her. I know it as I know how to breathe or to sleep. I know that it is a part of me that no amount of pain can make me deny. So go on not believing. When I am given the chance to prove it to you, that will be enough for me.”
“Whether gods, as you mean the word, exist, is something hotly debated among my order. There are those who insist that they do but are at best indifferent, at worst openly hostile to this world. There are others who suggest that they are merely the spirit or the residual energy of the most powerful practitioners of our or some other discipline. I find myself incredulous of the former and inspired by the latter.”
“You talk too much.”
“Suppose that a benevolent god did exist,” the sorcerer went on, as though Allystaire hadn’t spoken. “Why would any being of unimaginable power choose, as its agent, a disgraced minor warlord from this pathetic, fractured hinterland? You tried, briefly, to walk in the world of power. Believe me when I say that power—real power, the kind that moves the world—does not come clad in steel. It has no need of swords, or hammers.”
The sorcerer stepped closer, raised a hand, and let go a shockwave of red power that smacked Allystaire in the face like a blow from a club. His head jerked back against the wooden frame he was bound to, and he gingerly pressed his tongue to his teeth, expecting to find them cracked and broken, and felt mild relief when he realized they were not.
“In short, Allystaire Coldbourne, real power has no need of you.”
Bhimanzir let that statement sink in for a moment, then spoke again. “This conversation has, I believe, illuminated a possibility I had not considered. If a spirit is controlling you, but hiding that very fact within you…yes. But how to unlock it? Or how to turn it…” The sorcerer suddenly hurried out of the room.
In the darkness again, Allystaire let himself wonder, for a moment, what truth might be in the sorcerer’s words. But the thought lasted only a moment, just long enough for the memory of the Goddess’s voice, of Her hand upon his head, of the sound of Her tears at the farmhouse, and his doubt was replaced with a flash of anger and a deep pang of shame.