Pellin leaned forward in expectation. Igesia’s delving would only take a few seconds. Most of Elieve’s memories had been destroyed twice over, and the black scroll of her vault lay near the surface of her mind. But a minute went by with Igesia making no move to break the embrace, and Elieve seemed as content in his arms as in Mark’s.
Finally, at the moment alarm dictated that Pellin order Allta to pull her loose, Igesia’s hands slid from her head to rest on the cloth of her shirt, breaking the delve. “Such a story deserves to be heard more than once,” he said.
“Go to your companion,” he told her, “before he becomes jealous of an old man.” He bussed Elieve on the cheek with a cackle and shooed her away. “Her presence explains much, but not all, my friend. In my contemplation of the desert I have seen hints of the evil power entombed there, the corruption beneath the sand and wind that takes any who let darkness fall upon them. There is knowledge to be gleaned from the absence of life, and my reveries have allowed me to find the edge of its virulence. For years, it has not shifted by so much as a grain of sand. Yet during the storm I beheld a change, like the tiger coiling for the kill, as if the evil in the desert had cause to hope.” He nodded toward Elieve. “There are traces of it in her mind, a suggestion of the deep places of the desert a woman of the north should not have.”
Pellin paused to drink from the waterskin Dukasti had given him and edged toward Igesia. “If you will permit it, Honored One, I would trade awareness with you. There is much you need to know, so much that I’m not confident I could speak it all.”
“And you wish to know what I have discovered of the forbidden desert.” Igesia smiled. “For time out of mind, we have intuitively understood the connection between the Maveth Desert and the Darkwater Forest, even if we have not known the cause.” He lifted his weathered arm, palm forward. Pellin grasped Igesia’s hand in his own.
The Honored One’s eyes leapt toward him and disappeared, and Pellin found himself confronted with the largest river of memories he’d ever seen. Only those of the rest of the Vigil and Custos could compare, but a mind less like the librarian’s would be hard to imagine. Whereas Custos had organized his memories as thoroughly as the library in Bunard, Igesia’s mind scarcely owned any organization at all. As Pellin watched, eddies appeared in the river to cut across the current and then actually ran backward against the flow.
How would he find anything?
“Come, friend,” Igesia’s voice sounded, and Pellin started. “Have you not heard that the children of Aer are like the wind? If you do not learn what you wish to know, it may be that you will learn something better.” The hint of the old man’s cackle surrounded him. With a sigh, Pellin plunged into the river.
The current swept his awareness away as he became Igesia.
He stood on the edge of the forsaken desert, the youngest of the southern Vigil. “It’s beautiful in its desolation,” he said. Qadim, the Honored One, stood at his side and nodded.
“You see well for one so young in the gift. To what would you compare the sword of the desert, Igesia?”
The encompassing sweep of his arm traced a path from horizon to horizon. “Not a sword, Honored One,” he said, “but the headsman’s axe. To let night fall on you in the desert is to place your head on the block.”
“And is that all you see?”
Igesia bowed. “Yes, Honored One. Should I see more?”
By way of response, Qadim placed parchment and charcoal in Igesia’s hands. “There is always more, my son. Draw and learn.”
Time skipped and he stood within a prison on the far eastern edge of the desert, sweating despite the chill of early morning. The man inside the prison no longer raved, but Igesia paused even so. Sana stood at his side, older in the gift by three hundred years. “Your opportunity awaits, Igesia, and I pray you will never have another.”
He swallowed dust. A hundred years in the gift had allowed him to see exactly five instances of those who had slipped through the marauding net of sentinels and spent a night within the borders of the desert. He’d never delved one before. Now he had been deemed experienced enough.
“Come,” Sana said. “The Honored One commands us to take the next step in your education. Touch him as you would any other.”
With a nod he beckoned the condemned man forward to the bars and placed his hand upon the dirt and grime of his wrist. As instructed, he plunged through the man’s memories and emotions, of crimes and kindnesses both real and imagined, until he found the vault. Within the man’s mind it appeared as a scroll written in a language he had never seen.
He paused, remaining in the delve to examine the writing at length. Elongated loops and whorls created a design that might have been written by wind. It tugged at him even as it mocked his ignorance, but his time studying the desolation of the waste had in no way prepared him for this. Foolishly, he had expected some insight into the nature of the vault, but nothing came. Still, the practice of patient observation was too ingrained to forsake. He remained in the delve until Sana, concerned at last, shook him loose.
The prison vanished, and now he stood on the edge of the desert, old and wrinkled as the thirteen bowed to his authority even as they objected to his decision. “Igesia, even the Honored One requires some measure of companionship,” Sadiq said.
“And when I do, Aer will bring you to me. The wind
