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made it onboard a jump and a half ahead of the kashiks. Never saw him again.
Sad. After that I came back to Jade Halimm, apprenticed myself to a potter and
settled into clay and contentment.
By the time they sailed from Halonetts, beginning the last leg of the journey
to Kukurul, Ahzurdan was sweat-ing and nightmare-ridden, trying to fight his
desire for dreamsmoke. He wallowed in despair;
he d thought hav-ing the demonic Brann around would somehow cure him of this
need, but she grated on his nerves so much she was driving him to the dreams
to escape her. In spite of this, he couldn t stay away from her.
She listened with such totality it made a kind of magic. He was uneasy under
this intense scrutiny, he rebelled against it now and then, but it was also
extraor-dinarily seductive. He began to need her ear worse than his drug; they
broke for meals and sleep, but he came drifting back as soon as he could, and,
after a few hes-itations, was lost once more in his memories. Bit by bit he
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began telling her things he d made himself forget, things about growing up
torn between a father who wanted him to join his older half brothers in the
business and a mother whose scorn of business was profound, who d been sold
into marriage to pay the debts of her family (a minor branch of the ancient
and noble Amara Sept). Tadar
Chandro s son bought her to gain greater prestige among the powers of
Bandrabahr, got a son on her, then proceeded to ignore her. She hated him for
taking her, she loathed his touch, she hated him almost as much for leaving
her alone, for his insulting lack of interest in her person or her sex. But
she knew better than to release any of her venom beyond the walls of her
husband s compound, he wouldn t need much ex-cuse to repudiate her, since he d
already got all the good out of her he was going to get, no, she saved her
dia-tribes for her son s ears.
 I was the sixth son, Ahzurdan said,  ten years younger than Shuj who was
youngest before me. He took pleasure in tormenting me, I don t know why. On my
twelfth birthday my father gave me a sailboat as he had all his other sons on
their twelves. A few days later I was going to take it out on the river when
I met Shuj coming from the boathouse. When I went inside. I saw he d slashed
my sail and beat a hole in the side of the boat. I went pelting after him, I
don t think I d ever been so angry. I was going to, I don t know what I was
going to do, I was too hot to think. I caught up with him near the stables, I
yelled at him
I don t know what and I called up fire and nearly incinerated him. What saved
him was fear. Mine. There was this ball of flame licking around my hands; it
didn t hurt me, but it scared the fury out of me. I jerked my arms up and
threw it into the clouds where it fried a few unfortunate birds before it
faded away. After that Shuj and all the others stayed as far away from me as
they could ....
Tadar was frightened and disgusted; a practical man, he wanted nothing to do
with such things. For years he d been crushed beneath the weight of a
vital charis-matic father who had a good-natured
contempt for him, but after Chandro s death, he set about consolidating the
business, then he cautiously increased it; he hated the sea, was desperately
seasick even on river packets, but was shrewd enough to pick capable
shipmasters, pay them well and give them an interest in each cargo. As the
years passed, he prospered enormously until he was close to being the richest
Phras in Bandrabahr. He spent a month ignoring his youngest son s pecularities
and snarling at his other sons when they tried to complain (they had uneasy
memories of tormenting a spoiled del-icate boy and didn t want Ahzurdan in the
same room with them), but two things forced him to act. The ser-vants were
talking and his customers were nervous.
And Zuhra Ahzurdan s mother had sent to her family for ad-vice (which
infuriated Tadar, principally because they acted without consulting him and
he saw that as another of the many snubs he d endured from them); they
lo-cated a master sorceror who was willing to take on an-other
apprentice and informed Tadar they were sending him around three days hence,
he should be prepared to receive him and pay the bonding fee.
For Ahzurdan, during those last months at home, it was as if he had a skin
full of writhing, struggling eels that threatened to burst through, destroying
him and everything around him. Before the day he nearly bar-bequed his
brother, he d had nightmares, day terrors and surges of heat through his body;
he shifted unpre-dictably from gloom to elation, he fought to control a rage
that could be triggered by a careless word, dust on his books, a dog nosing
him, any small thing. After that day, his mood swings grew wilder and fire
came to him without warning; he would be reaching for something and
fingerlength flames would race up his arms. The night before the sorceror was
due, his bed curtains caught fire while he was asleep, nearly burnt the house
down; one of the dogs smelled smoke and howled the family awake; they put the
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fire out. It didn t hurt him, but it terrified everyone else.
For Tadar, that was end; he formally renounced his son; Ahzurdan was, after
all, only a sixth son and one who had proved himself worthless. His mother
wept, but didn t try to hold him. He was happy enough to get away from [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]