Chapter 9 #2
Dahin let out his breath, but it wasn’t a petulant sigh. It was shaky, resigned, reluctant. A pained expression creased his brow. “It’s part of the reason I started to look for the Well in the first place. I’ve been studying the Blessed Writings about the creation of Wells, you may remember.”
No, Kai didn’t remember. Why everyone expected him to recall everything that had ever happened, particularly things that had happened while he wasn’t present, he had no idea.
Dahin forged on, “There were piles of writings about death wells, I’d been going through them for ages. There were indications, theories, that…”
Kai grated out, “Just tell me.”
Dahin hesitated, then his jaw set. “Promise me—”
Before Kai could snap, Tahren said, “Brother. Kai is not negotiating with you. Just tell us.”
Dahin threw a wincing glance at her but didn’t argue. Clearly Tahren had had a talk with him already. Kai wasn’t sure if they had been treating Dahin too gently all this time or not gently enough. He wished he knew how they had come to this pass.
Then Dahin seemed to steel himself and said, “A death well can be destroyed by an Immortal entering it. It’s a clash of two opposing forces. It destroys both.”
Kai was caught so by surprise that he couldn’t do anything but stare at Ziede. She sat up, her brows drawing together as if she couldn’t decide if she was more baffled or more angry. She said, “A sacrifice. You’re talking about a sacrifice.”
Kai didn’t know which question to ask first. “What? How? They feed people into it, that’s why it’s a death well—”
“Yes, people, but only mortals! And they don’t throw them into it, like cordwood into a fire,” Dahin said, frustrated and sounding more like himself. “They feed pain to it, they torture them, let it draw their lives out. Like the scholars you rescued, they were letting them starve first—”
Tahren cut him off with a sharp slash of her hand. If she had been holding a sword she would have stabbed it into the dirt. In a voice of cold anger, she said, “An Immortal. You. You were going to— This is why you wanted to come here alone.”
There was a heartbeat of appalled silence. Tenes got up and walked out of the tent, clearly not wanting to intrude on what had suddenly become a much more private conversation.
Ziede looked horrified. She said, “Oh, Dahin, no.”
Kai burst out, “You were going to jump into the Hierarchs’ Well? For a theory?” He found himself adding, “You didn’t say anything about this in your manuscript.”
“Of course not! I didn’t want anyone to know! And it’s not a theory.” Dahin looked annoyed. “This is how someone could destroy the Well of Thosaren.”
Tahren turned to Dahin, startled. “You want to destroy the Well of Thosaren?”
“Of course not!” Dahin’s pointed exasperation was a relief.
“But it’s the same principle. No one wants to hear it, but the Well of Thosaren and the Well of the Hierarchs are the same in almost every respect.
” Tahren made a faint sound of protest but Dahin ignored her.
“The Well of Thosaren is a Well of nurture, made from centuries of faith and worship. The Well of the Hierarchs is a Well of pain and death that probably only took them a few decades to create, if that! We’re the Blessed because we’re consecrated to the Well as babies; its power can be used for all kinds of incredible things.
They’re consecrated to their Well and it turns them into Hierarchs who can use its power to hollow out other people and turn them into mindless dolls, kill whole cities…
” Dahin huffed a weary breath. “Any Blessed could destroy the Well of Thosaren by entering it and giving it our death. Any Immortal can destroy the Well of the Hierarchs by entering it and giving it their life.”
They were all silent for a time. Tahren shifted uneasily. “How do you know this?”
“Years of study. It’s all there, in the Blessed Scholars’ writings, just not explicitly.” He continued tiredly, “And no, I don’t want to destroy the Well of Thosaren. It’s not the Well that’s the problem, it’s the Patriarchs and the rest of our horrible society.”
Kai wrestled his thoughts back to the matter at hand. “But you came up here to throw yourself in the Well of the Hierarchs to destroy it.”
“Someone had to. And don’t tell me you wouldn’t!
That Tahren and Ziede wouldn’t!” Dahin jumped up, knocked over the stool, righted it with a muttered apology.
“The chance to close it forever? Not have it hanging over our heads, over everything you saved, all those people, everything they’ve grown and built since the war?
You wouldn’t take that chance?” He paced back and forth, frantic to make them understand.
“I couldn’t tell you. You see why I couldn’t tell you! ”
“No, I don’t!” Kai snapped. “Dahin, if you even think of throwing yourself in that Well—”
Dahin rounded on him. “Who then? Who then if not me—”
“Stop, both of you,” Tahren said, in a voice that expected instant obedience. Kai subsided reluctantly and Dahin sputtered to a halt.
Tahren stood up and strode to the front of the tent, staring unseeing out at the camp, a hand pressed over her mouth.
Kai had reached his limit too. He lay back down on the cot and covered his face with a blanket. I give up, he thought, exhausted with the world. This is the end. I can’t do this anymore.
He heard an uneasy shuffle of feet. Dahin said in a low voice, “Kai, are we still friends?”
“Yes,” Kai said. “Please don’t talk to me right now.”
Sounding weary, Ziede said, “Dahin, come here and sit down.”
For a time, Kai listened to Ziede and Dahin talk quietly. He let their voices blur, not trying to make out individual words.
The obvious solution was that the Witch King should throw himself into the Well. Destroy it, and end his story there. Because the Blessed writings said that would work. Kai wanted to laugh, but his head still hurt too much.
Expositors manipulated power with designs of careful precision, but Witches guided it by instinct and experience, by feel.
This theory … didn’t feel right. All Kai’s years of hard-won knowledge of the give and take of power, the undercurrents of the mortal world and the underearth, said that a Well grown to feed on pain would take all of his, and it would be like throwing lamp oil into a furnace.
The question was, was it worth taking the chance?
We could throw one of Ramad’s Immortal Blessed into the Well, Kai thought to Ziede. It was only partly a bad joke.
She replied silently, Don’t think it didn’t occur to me too. But to give the Well a life, the sacrifice would have to be voluntary.
Kai didn’t often ask himself what Bashasa would have done in this or that situation.
Mostly because he and Bashasa had had very different ways of looking at the world.
He didn’t have to ask himself this time either, because he knew Bashasa, thwarted of throwing himself into the Well by a lack of immortality, would never have let anyone else do it.
He would have looked for another solution until he found one.
After a time of trying not to think about anything, some of the conversation started to penetrate the haze.
“They must still be feeding it or they wouldn’t have captured the scholars…”
“But only after the scholars went to the tor. If they wanted mortals to feed it, why didn’t they attack the camp…”
“Or they didn’t know the camp was here…”
“We know there’s at least one expositor in there. Or more than one. Whoever was living in the burned earthwork…”
“They could all be dead now. Using the Voice in an enclosed space…”
“Kai,” Ziede said, “bear with me for a moment. We know expositors can draw directly from the death wells they create, but the expositors who were consecrated to the Hierarchs’ Well still had to channel through a Hierarch to draw power from it to use the Voice.”
Aware he sounded sullen, even while muffled by the blanket, Kai replied, “That’s the way it works.”
“That’s the way it’s supposed to work.” Ziede was growing impatient. “But they’ve been up here for decades, trying to survive and not making a good job of it, at least from what the scholars have found. They left themselves hardly anything to come back to.”
More life in his voice now, Dahin said, “The original Hierarchs were dead; whoever returned here couldn’t use their Well.
And at that time, the structure over it must have been open.
Like the Summer Halls: open at the top, enclosed around the bottom.
With all the Hierarchs dead and their best weapon useless, they roofed it over, closed it in, disguised it with dirt and grass.
To protect themselves, to keep us from sensing the Well and finding it while they were waiting to make a new Hierarch. ”
Ziede said, “Yes, they were waiting. Why are they still waiting?”
Dahin was hesitant. “The tor. They would have to take it apart, or blow the roof off. Somehow.”
Ziede countered, “What if they can’t? What if there’s not enough of them left to dismantle the tor, and not enough victims for their expositors to make constructs to do it for them?”
Kai pulled the blanket off his head. He saw what she was getting at now. “We’ve been overthinking this.”
“We have indeed.” Ziede’s smile was grim. “Kill anyone inside, and seal the entrance. Tenes could collapse the whole structure, bury the Well, if she had enough time.”
Tahren turned, paced back to stand beside Ziede. She didn’t glance at Dahin, but some of the tension had left her. “We would still have to guard it. We can bury it but not destroy it. Someone could return and dig it out.”
“Guard it forever,” Dahin said softly.
Kai propped himself up on his arms. “It is a nice valley.” They would have to consult Tanis and the others in Avagantrum. Some might be willing to come up here to help.
Then another voice said, “Do you mind if I join you?”
Ilhanrun Highsun stood in the tent opening.