The Door into Chaos (20)

To be able to step into the chaos, I had to let go of my hunger, my thirst, my need, my frustration. I needed to be quiet.

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I needed to be quiet before I could step into the chaos. I had to let go of my hunger, my thirst, my need, my frustration.

I wore my tunic as a kind of headdress, a tent draped over my head and shoulders, to keep as much of my body in shade as possible. The midday sun was implacable, relentless in the thin mountain air. 

With the sun high, I accepted the risk I had been avoiding — I drank from a pool of standing water. If I became sick, so be it. If I didn't drink, I'd die, and I wasn't ready for that. At least it was one distraction I could remove.

I sat carefully on the flattest rock, and looked deep inside myself. 

It helped little that I'd done this before, or succeeded. The comfortable cell was a world away from this bitter wilderness, and I was no longer the same man. 

It would be some time before I knew whether Zhalghumi had severed my connection to the ether completely. 

"Passivity, openness, and faith."

I repeated the words under my breath, chanting them like a drumbeat, drumming them into my brain. 

Physical sensations crowded my awareness. A trickle of sweat running down the small of my back. The press of a stone under my thigh. The throb of my pulse in my ears. 

I passed into a strange state of mind, like I was stretched out from the privations and efforts of the last few days, but also like a dream in which I was still awake. And in the quiet center of the strange dream, I found the door. I stepped through it.

The sensation was nothing like the expansion I felt when using my Art. This was far more subtle. Instead of reaching out with Will, it was more like anchoring myself to the current moment in time and place in the world, and opening myself to what might happen, an openness devoid of any deliberate purpose. 

I had to give the rocks time to notice my existence.

Rocks don't have minds, but they exist even without ether. They consist of molecules, atoms, smaller and more tenuous parts. And no atom is ever completely inert.

Accordingly, I began to feel the stones' notice seeping into me, and my notice into them. Not a vision or any kind of image, as I would have had through the ether, but a sense of connection with my surroundings, and a sure knowledge that I was not alone.

I struggled to hold back my will — its striving would ruin everything. My training balked at all of this wrongness. My instincts revolted. But the wave of rebellion ebbed.

A wave of certainty followed it, replaced it. A rodent, a jird (as I later discovered they were called). A dozen jirds. A whole colony of them. Their tunnels and pathways among and below the rocks. Their awareness of each other, their territorial boundaries, their familial connections, their social interactions — these all linked the colony of jirds into a single community of connections. Once I had one jird, I had all of them.

There was only one possible course of action available to me. Only the deep-seated link to my ancestral Lanstone had any chance of reaching into the heart of a Folly far enough to connect to me. Besides, I'd been dropped here from the sky — I had no mental pathway leading beyond these mountains. No other farsending opportunity existed. I would have to face my brother's wrath and disdain whether I wanted to or not.

I was not ready for it. I'd almost rather throw myself from the southern precipice ....

Now that I had a hold of my connection to the living things around me, I was afraid that any movement would break it. I tried anyway. Carefully, I twitched a finger. Slowly, I lifted my hand from my knee.

The connection held. 

I pushed myself to my feet, and although the connection wavered, it held.

I took a step, then another, and the connection came with me.

Again, I clambered up the treacherous southern ridge, this time while maintaining my connection to the jirds. Soon enough, I stood on the edge of the ridge, with the city in the distance, no longer obscured by mist or cloud.

Below, much closer than the city, the lay of the land spread clearly before me. A ridge here, a scarp there.

This wouldn't be like farsending a few steps across a room, with Mother encouraging me, and the size of the flagstones well known to me. I'd be launching into the unknown, my life staked on my best guess of how far to go. 

Or I could return to Azillan and my brother.

It was no choice at all.

I held tight to my little clutch of mental tethers. I scoured the landscape below, and found a suitable spot. I considered the shape of the land, the sweep of the mountainside, the angle of sun and shadow, and the amount of softness to the edges of landmarks below, and a decision took shape.

I clenched all those little lives and drew out what I needed. I don't know if they became dust or flame, whether they lived or died, and I didn't care.

I took their essence and I farsended. I imagined I heard tiny squeals of anguish.

But then the squeal was my own. I hung in the air for just an instant until gravity had me, and, with twenty yards to go, soon the rocks would have me.

The scream from my lips was a reflex, an autonomous reaction I had no control over. So too was the way I reached for my power, and found it. The Eternal Art had not forsaken me. I was still whole. 

The pain shocked me — I was still within the boundary of the Folly, if closer to its edge, and the use of the Art was excruciating. But it came.

My descent slowed, and my feet alighted on the plain of loose scarp.

The path was open to me, the land broad and gentle, the spires of the city miles away at the horizon, but now all was within reach.

I set off, thinking of Agali, and how I could get back there to find my father's killer.

Before I'd gone too many paces, I got a sense of where I was in the world. Azillan and the Lanstone lay thousands of miles to the west, and Agali lay thousands of miles to the south, so I walked the heartland of the northern continent, far from any ocean.

The next item of my burgeoning awareness was that my brother wasn't at home. Of course he wasn't. He was even further west, in Maynar. Hard at work, no doubt.

Finally, I became aware of Mother, far to the south. Very far to the south. Too far. On the southern continent, where she should not be and should never have been.

Continue reading with Part 21.