trigger a sharper image from the mind seed? Then it came to him.
A net that Zelia was trying to unravel.
Tanju gave a mental nod.
Arvin did as instructed. The net he visualized was made up of strands of every fiber he had ever worked with, from coarse hemp twine to silken threads woven from individual magical hairs, from leather cord to rubbery trollgut. A handful of these strands were green and scaly and writhing with life-the strands of the mind seed, gradually snaking their way into the weave. But the center of the net was still intact, still Arvin’s own. The knots that held it together ranged from simple square knots to the most complicated knot he knew how to tie-the triple rose. The latter-a large, multilooped flowering of twine-was at the very center of his imaginary net, lurking like an ornate spider at the middle of its web.
Arvin did as instructed, teasing one of the strands back… and saw his mother’s face. She was smiling at him, leaning forward to tie a leather thong around his neck-the one that held the bead he’d worn since that day. “Nine lives,” she said with a wink and tousled his hair.
With the memory came an emotion-one of overwhelming grief and loss. “Mother,” he moaned aloud. The strands of thought that led to this memory seemed thin, frayed, ready to snap and recoil.
Tanju gave Arvin’s hand a mental squeeze, steadying him.
Arvin shuddered.
All at once, Arvin felt Tanju withdraw. Relieved, Arvin steadied his breathing and returned to his task. He could do this on his own. He could confront this fear and master it. He loosened the memory knot a little more, forcing himself to revisit the day he’d learned that his mother was dead. Arvin continued reluctantly, like a man probing with his tongue at an aching tooth.
He remembered the words his uncle had spoken when breaking the news of his mother’s death-how he’d callously answered Arvin’s tearful questions about whether her body would be brought back to the city for cremation. “Are you mad, boy?” his uncle had asked scornfully. “She died of plague. Her body will have to be left where it lies. Nobody would be stupid enough to touch it. Besides, you wouldn’t want to see it. She died of the Mussum plague. She’ll be covered in abscesses.”
Arvin hadn’t known what an abscess was. He’d imagined his mother’s skin erupting with maggots. That night, he’d had a nightmare-of his mother’s face, her eyes replaced with two fat, white, squirming things.
It had been more than a tenday before he was able to sleep without the lantern illuminated. Every time his uncle had stormed in and angrily blown it out, Arvin had lain awake in darkness, imagining “abscesses” wiggling under his own skin. He sent his mind deep into that memory, remembering how he had felt to be a small boy lying awake all night long, too terrified to touch his own skin. It was just a nightmare, he told himself. Mother didn’t actually look that way when she died.
No, she would have looked far worse. According to what Arvin had learned over the years since then, the Mussum plague turned the skin green and covered it in terrible boils.
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 all sides.
“Shield is most useful against a mental lash,” he told Arvin, returning to an easy standing position. “The lash cracks harmlessly against it and is unable to tear apart the energies that bind mind and body together. Without the shield, the opponent would become weak and unsteady, unable to coordinate his limbs.”
Once again a memory bubbled unbidden to the surface of Arvin’s mind. Zelia lashed out again and again with her mind, reveling in each strike. It was better than sinking your teeth into flesh-better because the mental lash didn’t use up its venom, but could go on and on…
Arvin shuddered. “Zelia knows that attack, too.”
Tanju nodded. “The third form, Fortress, is also an effective defense against a mental lash,” he continued. “Visualize a tower, erected by your own will.” He dropped into a wide, crouching stance and raised his hands to
