Legacy - Lois McMaster Bujold [99]
The malice spatters on Dag’s ground seemed to be shivering in time with the complex ground structure imprisoning the makers, and Dag had a sudden terror that somehow the still-living malice bits lodged within him were what was keeping this thing intact. Would he have to die for it to be broken…? Ah. No. Affinity both had with each other, no question, but his spatters were as formless as a ground reinforcement, if an inverted one that was negative and destructive rather than positive and healing.
Dag struggled to understand what he was sensing. In normal persuasive making, the maker pushed and reinforced ground found within the object, striving to make things more themselves, as in Dag’s old arrowproof coat where the protection of skin became leather became a shield. In healing, ground was gifted freely, unformed, to be turned into the recipient’s ground without resistance. A ground match, such as he had just done for Artin, was a dance in time. The malices’ enslavement of farmer minds, Dag realized suddenly, must also be such a ground dance, if enormously powerful to work so compulsively and at such distances. But it had to be continuously maintained, as he had glimpsed from the inside during this last kill, and the match died when the malice did. It has a limited range, too, he realized, which was why the malice had been forced to move along with its army.
This groundwork, though…had a range of only a hundred paces, but it had most certainly survived its malice maker. Contained, powerful, horrific…familiar. Familiar? So where have I seen anything like this before? What groundwork both survived its maker’s death and retained the nature of its maker, not melding with its recipient, even after it had been released?
Sharing knives do. On a smaller scale, to be sure, but…scarcely less complex. The ground of the consecrated knife was shaped by its maker into an involuted container for the donor’s future death, and that dissolving ground, once received, was held tight. Altered, if with and not against the donor’s will, to something lethal to malices.
Dar must be giving something of himself away with each knife he made, Dag reflected. On some level, folks knew this, which was why they treated their knife makers with such care. How draining was such a making? Again and again and again? Very. No wonder Dar had so little left of himself for any other purpose.
Dag turned his inner eye back upon the malice’s groundwork. This huge, horrific making was involuted and powerful beyond any scope he would ever have. But—beyond his understanding, as well?
The intuitive leap was effortless, like flying in a dream. I see how this may be broken! He grinned and opened his eyes.
Tried to grin. Tried to open his eyes.
Face, eyes, body were gone from him; his mind seemed one with his ground, floating cut off from the outer world. Gray threads wound into him like little searching mouths, like worms, sucking and consuming.
I’m trapped—
Fawn carefully tucked the dozen new beeswax candles that were her share of the afternoon’s making into Dag’s trunk, closed the lid, drifted out under her tent awning, and stared through the trees at the leaden gleam of the lake under the humid sky. She scratched absently at one of the mosquito bites speckling her bare arms, and pawed at a whine near her ear. Yet another reason to miss Dag, silly and selfish though it seemed. She sighed…then tensed.
The heartthrob echo of pain in her left arm and down her side, her constant companion for three days, changed into something racing. A wave of terror swept through her, and she could not tell if the first breath of it was Dag’s or her own, though the panting that followed seemed all hers. The rhythm broke up into something chaotic and uneven; then it muted. No, don’t die—
It didn’t, but neither did it return to its former definition. Absent gods forfend, what was that? She gulped, flipped down her tent flap behind her, and started