The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [112]
The single candle in the tiny room Justen had procured, with two narrow beds not much more than pallets, seemed adequate enough for some reading, and I pulled the black-covered book from my pack.
The introduction was as boring as I remembered. I sighed, then began to leaf through the pages, nodding as I saw that the last half of the book actually dealt with specific topics—aligning metals (whatever that meant), detecting material stresses, weather dynamics and cautions, healing processes, order and heat-based machinery, order and energy generation.
At that point, I wasn’t quite sure whether to start all over at the beginning, or to kick myself. For nearly half a year, I had been carrying at least some of the answers to my own questions in my pack. Of course, that assumed that what was written down made some sort of sense, and that you could actually apply it. But I neither kicked myself nor started at the beginning. Instead, I started on the section on healing, since I wasn’t ready for more boredom.
Not only did the words make sense, but so did the ideas, and I began to understand why what we had done with the countess’s sheep had worked and what Justen had alluded to in his remarks about the importance of the body’s internal order.
“So you finally decided to see if the book made sense?”
I almost jumped off the pallet when the gray wizard opened the door, realizing how late it must be by the fact that the candle was near to guttering out, and how long I must have been poring over the words on healing by the stiffness in my neck.
“You’re that far?”
I shook my head. “Reading about healing…” I confessed.
“You couldn’t take the introduction, I gather?”
“No…I’ve tried three separate times, and after half a year it’s still boring.”
Justen yawned and began to take off his tunic. “Go back to it when you can. I didn’t, and I’m still paying.” He turned his back to me and pulled off his boots. “It’s time to get some sleep.”
I closed the book and began to pull off my own boots.
After the long days of riding, the concentration on the book, and the comfortable bed, I thought I would drop off to sleep. Lying there, exhausted, it shouldn’t have been any trouble at all.
Except…things tingled at the back of my mind. Like why Justen’s explanation for his work didn’t exactly answer all the questions. Then there were Tamra and Krystal. I’d heard about Krystal, yet Tamra should have been the more visible. Somehow, I should have heard something…somehow…from her, or about her.
I couldn’t believe that she had just disappeared, but news didn’t exactly speed from one duchy of Candar to another.
Somewhere I finally fell asleep…looking into the darkness…until I shivered with a deep chill, and tried to turn over. Except I could not move.
White!
A white fog curled around me so tightly that I could neither see nor move. I could not speak—trapped somewhere in nothingness, a nothingness bright enough to burn my thoughts.
You promised…The words echoed without sound through my head, but I could not respond, could not see, twisting as I did within my skull. Yet the person feeling the whiteness was not me, for all the familiarity of the feeling.
Was I dreaming? Or had Justen again enslaved me in that white prison? I couldn’t even see my arms, or move, or even feel whether my muscles would move. Yet I wasn’t in my bed—that I knew.
You promised to show me the way…the way…the way…
In the white fog, that mind-blinding light, were shafts of yellow, red, blue, violet—all spearing me, slashing at one thought, then another.
Then a door closed, and the whiteness was gone.
Sweat poured off my forehead as I sat up in the clean darkness.
“You promised…” The unspoken words echoed in my thoughts, an edge to them that was familiar. But I had never said anything about promises. I hadn’t thought about promises.
Then, I knew why the words were familiar, and my stomach turned. I only hoped that it had been a dream, that Tamra was not trapped in that same kind of whiteness that Justen had shown