179 - Fear is the liar of thought

I took a very deep breath. And another. And another. I willed myself to stay in the circle of my breaths, keeping them very deep.

What stopped me—the death-in-him? The censure of All-Spirit? Knowledge in myself that it would be wrong to constrain him now? Just plain fear? Had it been for good reasons or bad?

He’s right, I told myself. Somehow, he’s right; everything is going as it should. But what was my part in it?

By the law of the land, I should run and tell someone, have the darya semanakraseyeni chase him and restrain him, as I had before. By the law of healing, I should not, because in his moment of truth his fate was where it must be and truly was, in his own hands.

For my own sake, I should, because I would indeed be truth-drugged if he succeeded, and I would reveal I had done nothing that could stop him though he’d told me clearly his intent and I couldn’t tell from his aura that he would not succeed; I’d probably be charged, maybe even for causing his death, based on what he’d said, and be sentenced to exile with safe conduct if I was lucky, without if I was not, in which case I’d end up like Sharaina, a red smear on the courthouse steps.

For his sake, I should not, in case he did not carry it through, so no one need know and he need not be embarrassed; because he was breaking an oath sworn Second Fire come in a court of law, I could see Linasika having him charged again.

For my sake, for his sake, for Yeola-e’s sake, I should, I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t, I should— I took in the breath the Haians call “expansive”—fast and deep almost enough to hurt—then let it out over a count of fifty, forcing calm on my mind.

Of course if you are in indecision for long enough, decision is taken out of your hands. He might be dead already.

I breathed, and I prayed. I am just standing here, instead of acting. Is All-Spirit directing me? Please, All-Spirit, be directing me. Please let this stillness, and my inability to touch his aura, be from an instruction of yours I hear only beneath my conscious mind.

I am not a master, I thought. The face of Renhaer, my master on Haiu Menshir, came suddenly into my mind, with the intricate network of smile-wrinkles on delicate brown skin beside either of his black eyes, and the perpetual gentle grin. “There is no one with a greater gift than yours that I have ever taught, Kinamun,” he told me, the day that I came, unwittingly, to the end of my training. “There is nothing more you can learn by instruction; only by the doing. Go. Choose your work carefully, as it best for the greatest strength to be applied at the point of greatest benefit. You have it in your power to touch history.”

That was only three years ago. I am not him. Learn only by doing, yes, but I haven’t been doing it for that long, I know nothing, really, I have touched history by failing…

It’s fear. It’s emotion, I told myself. I did another expansive breath. Fear is the liar of thought. The thoughts one has when seized in fear are always lies. I must not credit them, however strong the urge. Even the feeling that fear has, like a wall, is a lie; it can be gone fast as a puff of wind on the realization of truth. Something I’d say to reassure those patients who came to me with senseless fears: once upon a time, I was afraid of closed-in spaces. I thought I would be forever; I felt as if it was part of me as much as my hand or my face. But I am no longer. It was gone the moment I learned why it was there.

(The tunnel of the mine falling in around me… my pity, first, for those who died fast, crushed immediately or bleeding from mangled limbs, and then as the stink worsened, the thirst grew desperate and I started seeing and hearing unthinkable things in the perfect darkness and silence… the envy. Six centuries ago. Not now. Now I was in Renhaer’s healing room. That was the past, not part of me.)

When I exposed the roots, I tell them, I killed the vine.

Still, what I feared now was now. He could be lying shattered at the foot of a cliff… or bleeding out from a throat-cut… No, I told myself. Fear is the liar of thought. Even if these things are possible, or even likely, the imaginings come from fear and so are still lies, that I must not base my choices on.

Breathe in acceptance, I told myself. Everything is what it is, and there is no escaping that. Only with full acceptance of what has happened will you be able to bear it; only in that state will it come clear what to do. My emotion was nothing in the face of the greater truth. I parsed it out. It was just emotion, coming from my love for a client, my bond with a person, my knowing what he could be, to the world, if he lived, and my fear for my own fate—all natural things. I set myself free to feel them, but in the awareness that they were nothing but emotions. I stood in his training-room with tears of terror running down my cheeks, and my body trembling all over. When it eased a little, I heard the voice of All-Spirit.

Underneath your fear is your true prognosis. What is it?

“He won’t do it. He’ll choose life.”

All along, you have trusted your own judgment entirely, and rightfully. Why not now?

So I decided. He was on his own.

†

The Hearthstone Independent, a bustling place in summer when travel is good, quiets down in winter. He didn’t tend to have as many guests these days as he’d had before anyway, turning inward as he’d had to. The family’s bedchambers must be alive with children’s noise; the rest of the place was quiet as a tomb, or a museum when it is closed.

I walked down dim corridors, lit only by the Zak glow-globes that never go out, shedding their soft pools of strange cold light. Parts are like a museum; the Clock Room, for instance, is filled with his collection of time-pieces, given him by friends and associates from the time they learned he liked them. In that room, it is never quiet; there is a constant even chorus of clicks, ticks, drips, knocks, chimes, and all manner of other sounds, that gets almost deafening, in different ways, on the Haian aer and then the Arkan bead, most impressive when the two coincide. Time passes very loudly, in the Clock Room, so that you cannot help but be vividly aware of it, to enter a mental state that counts every moment.

I went through the dining hall, with its chandeliers only one-in-twenty-five lit now, dimming the brilliant murals so that they were almost colourless and macabre. From the vaulted ceiling hangs the single-wing in which he descended into Arko for the final battle, his one memento from the Arkan war. It is blue-green with the seven stars like a Yeoli banner, and has the odd hole burned through by sparks from Arko burning that landed on it when he left it on the Marble Palace roof to fight through the corridors; now in the half-light it hung black like a giant straight-winged bat among flickering shadows.

I went upstairs by one of the double marble stairways that frame the painting Honour, by Haiksilias Lizan, which is always kraumak-lit. It depicts the moment in the duel Chevenga fought against Kallijas for Vae Arahi, when he decided to get up and fight on, as his people were demanding, rather than concede, after he’d slipped on a stone and been struck. (Who but he would commission, and then hang where everyone who came into his house would see it, a painting showing him stretched out flat on the ground from a head-blow?)

Your people would demand it again now, I thought. But I’ve taught you to go your own way.

I wondered what time it was.

--