The Gates of Night_ The Dreaming Dark - Keith Baker [92]
“What are you waiting for?” Daine said. “Fix him!”
Lei blocked out his voice, forcing all the noise and chaos from her senses. The pattern of Pierce became her world, and she carefully bridged the gaps and wove the strands together. Then it was done. The world came back to her, Daine shouting, Xu’sasar and Kin watching quizzically.
And Pierce sat up. “What happened?” he said. He paused, no doubt listening to his inner voice. “You attacked me,” he said to Lei.
“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I don’t even know how I did it, Pierce. There’s a bond between us. I can feel you.”
“How is this possible?” Pierce said.
Another memory flashed through Lei’s mind: the vision she’d had when she first attacked Pierce, of a series of linked lifewebs, of her parents comparing patterns. “I think Harmattan was right. We are family. I think we were created at the same time, and that this bond … my parents must have done this.”
“This is insane,” Daine said, reaching out and taking her hand. “Lei, I’m sorry. I’m not good with words. None of this has come out the way I want. You’re not a monster. And that’s just it. You’re not … you’re not warforged. You’re human. This woman is playing games with you, like Lakashtai did with me.”
“No, Daine,” Lei said. “Someone’s playing a game with me, but it’s not Thelania. You heard that serpent. I said that I was born in my mother’s womb, and it told me I was wrong. And it showed me the truth.”
“It showed you something,” Daine said. “How do you know it was true?”
“I just do,” Lei said. “It all adds up. That sahuagin, Thaask. Harmattan. The visions from the river. That time I almost died … I could feel my wand of healing, even while I lay dying. I should have been unconscious, but somehow I activated the wand. I brought myself back.”
“You don’t know that.”
Lei looked at her hand. Her little finger, removed by Harmattan in the jungles of Xen’drik. “Give me your dagger,” she said.
“What?”
She reached out and pulled Daine’s dagger from his belt. Before he could stop her, she drew the edge across her palm.
Blood welled from the wound. “See,” Daine said. “Blood. You’re—”
Once again, Lei shut out the sights and sounds around her. This time it wasn’t Pierce she was looking for. This time she looked within. Once she’d had a dream of her mother, in what she now knew to be the hidden workshop in Blacklion. Aleisa had stood over her, studying Lei and comparing her to a pattern she held in her hand. Now Lei reached out for that pattern …
And she found it.
It was like no lifeweb she’d ever seen before. The warforged contained matter in the form of wood and roots, but they were inanimate objects given life through magic. This pattern … the body was flesh and blood, but the magic was still there, spread through every vein and every muscle.
How did this begin? she wondered. I was a child. I grew within the house. Was I born? Or did they make me from raw matter? She remembered the words of her mother, in the final moments of her river-spawned vision: Let my blood flow into you once more.
She studied the pattern more closely. There! It was so small she could hardly see it, but there was the cut on her palm. Concentrating, she sought to restore the design to purity. Repairing such minor damage to Pierce would have been the work of a moment. This was a struggle. The web was stranger than anything she’d every dealt with. Yet slowly, ever so slowly, it came together.
She opened her eyes. “… bleeding,” Daine was saying.
The cut was gone, with only a few drops of blood on her palm to show that she’d ever been injured.
“Lei,” Pierce said. “How did you do that?”
“It’s all true,” she said. “I’m not human.”
The words felt empty. Her anger had faded away, and all she felt was exhaustion. She fell to her knees, wildflowers brushing against her chest.
“I don’t care.” Daine