The Born Queen - J. Gregory Keyes [155]
“I’m stronger now than I was then.”
“Right,” Stephen said. “As the sedos power waxes. Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Brother Stephen, time is short. Did you find the answers? Did you discover how Virgenya Dare healed the world?”
Stephen laughed.
Pell watched him impassively. That seemed even funnier than the question, and Stephen’s laughter became uncontrollable. Tears sprang into his eyes, and his ribs hurt.
“Come now,” Pell said after a moment.
But that just made it harder to stop.
When, some time later, he was able to talk again, he wiped his eyes. “She didn’t heal it, you old idiot,” he said, fighting the hiccups. “She poisoned it by drawing on the sedos power. When she realized what was happening, she abandoned the high throne of its power and hid it away to try to control the damage.”
“Are you saying there’s nothing to be done? Did Kauron discover nothing?”
“Of course there is something to be done,” Stephen said. “And Choron discovered the best thing of all: himself.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“That’s wonderful,” Stephen said. “Because I love to explain things. It’s my forte, as you must remember from our first meeting. Such a funny trick you played on me, that bit with you pretending to be a simple fratir cutting wood. I didn’t really appreciate it then. I assure you, now I do.”
Pell’s expression grew even more guarded. “What do you have to report, Brother Stephen?”
“Well, first of all, you were completely right about that business about there being no saints, about power being the only reality. It’s true. The sedos power is what holds the world together. It tames and orders the other energies of existence. It keeps everything from rotting into unchecked chaos. And anyone who walks a faneway takes some gift for using that force with him and becomes the conscious agent of that particular energy. But any given faneway allows only limited access to the total possibilities of the sedos—even the greatest ones, such as the one I’ve walked and the one the Fratrex Prismo walks in z’Irbina. And the one you walked in the Iutin Mountains, the faneway of Diuvo.”
“How did you know—?”
“Oh, I can see them all now, like constellations in the sky. That’s one of the particular gifts of Virgenya Dare’s secret faneway.”
“Then you can walk them all?”
“I tried walking one near the Witchhorn,” Stephen said. “It’s not enough. Take my analogy that the faneways are like constellations. Now imagine the night sky is a black board with thousands of small holes drilled in it, and the light shining through those holes from behind is the real source of the sedos power. It’s not all the little holes you want to control; it’s the one light behind them. What we call the Alwalder, I suppose. That’s what I’m after.”
“But why?”
“To save the world. To bring order and balance to its eldritch principalities.”
“I thought you just said the sedos power was the source of all of our problems.”
“The source and the solution. Virgenya Dare never saw that. She imagined the problem would just go away, but it was already too late. Still, she must have had an inkling. She made a shortcut for her descendants.”
“What?”
“Never mind that. See, it’s the lack of control and imprecise vision that’s led us to where we are. If someone—one person, not two, or three, or fifty, but one—could control the source of the sedos power, one person with a clear vision, all of this could be fixed. I’m sure of it.”
“And who will do this fixing? You?”
“Right,” Stephen said. “Without the mistakes of last time. I think I just got frustrated back then. Ruffled some feathers.”
“What are you talking about?” Fratrex Pell asked. “What other time?”
“I told you, already. Choron found himself. I found myself. Me.”
“You’re Choron?” Pell asked incredulously.
“Yes. Or yes and no. Like everything, it’s a little complicated. See, time is a funny thing in the Not World. The man you called Choron and the man you call Stephen are each echo and source of the other, and both were always working toward the promise of the one who will rise when we find the throne.