Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [113]
15
He had floated in an increasingly timeless gray fog, all distinctions fading. It seemed a just consolation that with them faded all fear, want, and pain. But then, inexplicably, something bright and warm troubled his shredding perceptions, as if the north star had torn herself loose from the sky and ventured too near him in naive, luminous, fatal curiosity. Don’t fall, no…stay away, Spark! Longing and horror wrenched him, for to grasp that joy would slay it. Is it my fate to blight all that I love?
But the star fire didn’t touch him. Later, a bolt of new strength shot through him, and for a short time, coherent thought came back. Some other light had fallen into this prison, also known to him…He recognized Hoharie’s intense ground in all its ever-astonishing vigor—so strange that such a spring of strength should dwell in such a slight and unassuming body. But the hope it should have brought him turned to ashes as he took in her anger, horror, and frustration.
I thought sure you’d figure the trick of it from out there, as I could not—I’m the blinder one, I had to look to see it.
And the wailing answer, I had to look to be sure…I had to be certain…oh, Dag, I am so sorry…before the fog blurred all to voiceless sorrow once more.
He raced to make his watch rounds in this brief, stolen respite, to count his company as every captain should. Artin, yes, barely holding on, his ground so drained as to be translucent at the edges; Bryn and Ornig; Mallora; the other Bonemarsh makers. And now Hoharie. He remembered to count himself. Ten, all dying in place. Again he led those who had trusted in him into the boundless dark. At least this time I can’t desert them.
More timelessness. Gray mouths leeched him.
The star fire moved too close again, and he breathed dread like cold mist. But the sky-spark held something else, a faint, familiar chime; her fair light and its wordless song wound together. Their intertwined beauty overthrew his heart. This is surely the magic of the whole wide green world; Lakewalker groundwork has nothing to compare with it…
And then pain and the song pierced him.
He could feel every detail of the roiling ground that stabbed into his thigh: Kauneo’s bone, his own blood of old, the involuted and shaped vessel for mortality that was the gift of the Luthlian knife maker. Spark’s daughter’s death, death without birth, self-making and self-dissolution intermingled in their purest forms.
Too pure. It lay self-contained within the involution, innocent of all taint of desire, motion, and time. It lacks affinity seemed too flat a statement to sum up its aloof stillness. Free of all attachment. Free of all pain.
We give best from abundance. I can share pain.
Flying as never before, he raised his arm by its ground, and his ghost hand—pure ground, piebald with blight and malice spatter—wrapped the hilt and the ground of the hilt. His own old blood gave him entry into the involution; he let his blackened ground trace up its ancient, dried path; catch, hold; and he remembered the night Fawn had woven his wedding cord with bloody fingers, and so drawn her own ground into it. And her wide-open eyes and unguarded offer, later, on another night of ground-weaving, Need blood? As if she would gladly have opened her veins on the spot and poured all that vivid flood into his cupped hands, sparing nothing. As she does now.
Do not waste her gift, old patroller.
His blackened touch seemed a violation, but he twisted the mortal ground between his ghost fingers the way Fawn spun thread. He grinned somewhere inside himself to imagine Dar’s outraged voice, You used a wedding-cord technique on a sharing knife…? The involution uncoiled, giving up its long burden into his hand. Kauneo’s bone cracked joyfully, a sound beneath sound heard not with his ears but in his groundsense, and he knew in that moment that Dar’s theory of how the farmer babe’s death had entered his knife was