The Magic of Recluce - L. E. Modesitt [91]
Then I realized something. The palms and the insides of the fingers of my gloves, except for just the fingertips, had burned away; but there were no burns anywhere on my hands. Nor were there any other burns on my clothes; just a line of charred leather, outlining the missing sections of the gloves. It was a wonder they had stayed on so long. I peeled them off, folded them, and tucked them into my belt.
The afternoon began to grow darker and I glanced overhead, but the clouds were still about the same. The wind was picking up, the way it often did in the late winter afternoons.
“Uhhhhh…” Justen started to shake his head, then stopped as if in pain, as he slowly righted himself.
“Lerris…” he looked back over his shoulder without finishing the sentence for a time. Then he spoke again. “That should be the end of Frven.”
“Frven?”
“That’s what they called it at the end.”
This time I did shiver—shudder would be more like it.
Fairhaven…Frven. The second name should have been familiar from the first. City of the Chaos Council, brought down in a hail of fire more than two centuries earlier. I shuddered again.
“You saw Frven…Fairhaven…before it became the chaos-masters’ city?”
Justen, still looking back, nodded absently. “I was younger then.”
I tried not to shudder a third time. Justen looked about my father’s age, and he had been alive two centuries earlier?
“You helped bring it down?” It was a wild shot, but everything seemed strange.
“Two ma—magicians created another sun, right above the city, so hot it melted everything like candle wax in a furnace.” Justen straightened in the saddle, and I noticed that the arm sheaths had disappeared. “We need to keep moving, since it will be late when we reach the main road.” He shook his head to clear it. “I should say that it already is late.”
“How can it be late afternoon already?”
“That’s a property of Frven. It used to be much worse.”
Justen lifted his canteen and slowly swallowed nearly all the contents.
The brush and trees beside the narrow road were beginning to look more normal, with only traces of the shiny whiteness in their stalks and trunks, but the way still looked deserted.
“Lerris…”
“Yes.”
“You have a problem…a real problem.”
I sighed. Now all I needed was someone else to tell me that I had a problem—a real problem. But what was I to say to a magician?
“Yes.”
“You did two things wrong and one thing right in Frven. You didn’t listen closely enough and paid attention to that soul—I think it was Perditis—and almost let him become real again. That would have raised every magician in Candar against you both, because Perditis would have taken your body and soul. You used your staff for defense. That was right. But then you burned your gloves off to grasp the staff.”
“Why was that wrong? The gloves, I mean.”
“Because you used destruction to enable preservation. That very nearly cost you your soul again, and might have if I had not been able to shield you.”
“Shield me?”
Justen did not answer immediately, but began chewing some travel bread, as if he were starving, while he rode. Finally, he swallowed and spoke again, his voice dimmed by the faint whistle of the wind and the clop, clop of hooves.
“I didn’t intend staying in the second plane nearly that long, but, since I was there, I decided to seal off most of the rest of the lost souls. Should have done that earlier, I suppose, but it’s such work.”
Justen was sounding suspiciously like my relatives, not ever exactly answering anything while blaming me for my failures. On the other hand, I had felt that howler or demon grasping at me, screaming Mine! Besides, where had the day gone? We could not have lost five or six hours on a less than twelve-kay trip on a straight road, narrow though it was.
I sighed again, swaying in the saddle. Riding was still not natural to me, and my legs, though in shape, were still not used to the pony.
“All right. Once again, I seem