Venom's Taste - Lisa Smedman [87]
He imagined her covered in pockmarks, like the Pox.
He immediately wrenched his mind away from the image. But after a moment, he forced himself to return to it. His mother was dead-she’d been dead twenty years. By now the marks of plague would be long gone. She’d be a skeleton…
A skeleton lying alone and forgotten, on the plains outside Mussum…
Once again, his mind recoiled. He forced it to return to the thought, to make himself acknowledge the fact that his mother was indeed a corpse. Or perhaps, not even that-her body would have been consumed by time and the elements long ago.
She is dust, he told himself.
The thought comforted him. In his mind, he held the dust that was his mother close to his heart then extended his hand and let it trickle through his fingers to be borne away by the wind. His mother was at peace.
And so, he realized with some surprise, was he.
Tanju must have heard the change in Arvin’s breathing. “Well done,” he said, a hint of awe in his voice. “Perhaps I will be able to teach you something, after all. Are you ready to continue?”
Arvin gave a satisfied smile. “Yes.”
“Good. Then, open your eyes.”
Tanju rose to his feet and gestured for Arvin to do the same. “It’s unlikely that you can learn a form in so short a space of time as a single morning, but I can introduce you to the concept of psionic combat,” Tanju began. “We will begin with the defenses,” he said. “There are five of them, each designed to counter a specific psionic attack but still useful, to a lesser extent, against the other attack forms. It is useful to picture each as a physical posture. This gives the mind something to visualize as it manifests the defense.
“The first form is Empty Mind,” Tanju continued. “It is most useful against a psychic crush. It can be visualized like this.” Raising his hands, Tanju held them on either side of his face, palms toward himself. For a moment he stood utterly still, eyes closed and face turned slightly up to the sunlight that shone down on him through gaps in the ceiling above. Then his hands began to move, sweeping through the air in front of his face as if he were washing it clean.
“The empty mind leaves the opponent with nothing to grip,” Tanju continued. “The mind slips through the fingers of the psychic crush like an eel sliding through the hands of a fisher.”
“Or a rat slipping out of the coils of a snake,” Arvin said as a memory came to him-one of Zelia’s, not his own. Of coiling her thoughts around the mind of a priest who had threatened her, of squeezing his mind until it was limp. When she was finished with him, the priest had been unable to understand even the simplest of symbols for several days. The snake-headed staff that was in his hand had seemed no more than a carved piece of wood…
Arvin shuddered. “Zelia knows the psychic crush attack,” he told Tanju.
The psion lowered his hands. “I suspected that she would. Empty Mind is also the most useful defense against a mind thrust-the attack I used to render you helpless-and against insinuation.”
“What’s insinuation?” Arvin asked.
“An attack form that forces tendrils of destructive energy into the opponent’s mind,” Tanju answered, raising a hand and wiggling his fingers. “They worm their way in deep and sap the mind’s vitality-and with it, the body’s strength. If the insinuation is repeated enough times, the opponent will be debilitated to the point where he cannot lift himself off the floor, let alone mount an attack.”
Tanju settled into a stance like that of a barehanded brawler, feet firmly on the ground and hands balled into fists. “The second defense form is Shield, which can be visualized like this.” He raised his left arm to forehead level, as if shielding his face from a blow and lifted his left leg, twisting it so his shin was parallel with the ground. He stood like this for a moment, perfectly balanced on one foot. Then he spun in place-whipping his body around to present the shield to imaginary opponents closing in from