Page 83 of Queen Demon
“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 consecratedto 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 andcovered 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.”
