Plague of Spells by Bruce R. Cordell Page B

recognized itself as his working mind. He visualized his thoughts as lines of energy. Normally serene arcs, now they were tangled and disordered. His confusion was a vibrating knot, a nest of snakes, preventing him from achieving clarity. He imagined an unseen force smoothing those lines, untying the knot, releasing the hissing snakes. Slowly, his higher will overcame his body’s adrenal turmoil.
    Tension leaked from his shoulders, and an incipient headache faded.
    Such was the training of Xiang Temple. Like all who graduated from that monastery in Telflamm, Raidon was a master of his own body. His techniques for visualization allowed him to control natural processes within himself normally beyond conscious control.
    He looked deeper, and saw where other lines, the lines representing his wholeness of body, were strained and even broken in the vicinity of his left elbow. He applied his focused clarity to the severed lines. The snapped cords of visualized energy merged, fused, and relaxed.
    The pain in his shoulder faded.
    He could see all the lines representing himself, vibrating with vitality, forming a shape in three directions: breadth, width, and height.
    Furrowing his brow, the monk began tracing his identity lines in the fourth direction, in time. Perhaps he could discover some clue as to what had happened to him.
    An oddity in the wire-frame model of his own body snatched his complete attention. A pulse of a color he couldn’t describe slowly glimmered across his upper torso. Something blue, like the ember of some slumbering fire.
    Raidon opened his eyes and looked down at his chest. His shirt, silk jacket, and overcoat were mere tatters, burned away, revealing a broad tattoo etched into his flesh. Overlapping inscriptions in a lost language, tiny and crabbed, radiated outward from the symbol, like stylized flames drawn around the image of a tree.
    It was the Cerulean Sign from his destroyed amulet—now scribed on him!
    How could that be? He ran a hand across the tattoo. The image possessed a palpable texture on his skin. It was real.
    The vision of his amulet consumed in blue fire assaulted him. He recalled in those final moments how the symbol itself had persisted, as if liberated, while the substance on which it was inscribed dissolved. He had reached toward the crumbling amulet, ached for it… and the Sign had flashed into him. That was the very last thing he recalled, try as he might.
    A tracery of the Cerulean Sign decorated his flesh. Had the reality-smearing blue fire transferred it from his amulet to his body? Why… how? And then, having so marked him, sealed him within a pillar of brittle mineral? It made no sense.
    “Too many unknowns vex me,” he verbalized, then he coughed. His throat was sandpaper, unused to speech. He swallowed, shook his head. Spinning unsupported scenarios based on guesswork would avail him nothing except the creation of unwarranted assumptions. To comprehend what had happened, how he had survived, and how much time had passed since the blue fire storm, he would have to investigate.
    He turned east toward Starmantle and fell into a light run. Unless he was misplaced in space too, it shouldn’t take him too long to reach the port city, or what remained of it in the aftermath of the blue fire. As a monk initiate of Xiang Temple, and exemplar of its code, few things could long eclipse his extravagant martial prowess and conditioning, even long miles of travel. A false comfort? Perhaps.
    The brittle extrusions grew thicker the farther he traveled. Once, he saw a humanoid shape silhouetted in a large, green mineral outcrop. He stopped, thinking perhaps he’d discovered some other prisoner held timeless within, just as he had been.
    It was a woman, but one whose flesh was half burned away. An expression of pure agony made her face a demonic mask. She was completely encased in the extruded, greenish sap.
    If the woman in the amber-like stuff was still alive, but held in a strange