Stone of Tears Read Online Free PDF Page B

knew a Seer by the Stone, but I am old. I have seen such before. That is why you didn’t want me to help you? You fear what the touch might do to me?”
    She gave a weak nod. “But I find I suddenly care to live.”
    Zedd patted her shoulder. “That is what I wanted to know, child. Worry not about me. I am a Wizard of the First Order, not some novice.”
    “First Order?” she whispered, wide-eyed. “I did not know one was left. Please, sir, do not risk yourself on the likes of me.”
    Zedd gave her a smile. “Not much of a risk, only a little pain. And my name is Zedd.”
    She thought a moment, then her free hand clutched his arm. “Zedd … if I am to have a choice … I choose to try for life.”
    Zedd smiled a little and stroked her cold, sweaty, forehead. “Then I promise to give you my most earnest effort.” She nodded as she gripped his arm, gripped her only chance. “Is there anything you can do, Jebra, to hold aside the pain of the visions?”
    She bit her lower lip and shook her head as tears sprang anew. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, barely audible. “Perhaps you shouldn’t …”
    “Hush, child,” he comforted.
    Zedd took a deep breath and laid a hand over the arm that held her guts back. He put the palm of his other hand gently over her eyes. This was not something he could fix from the outside. It had to be repaired from within, with her own mind’s aid. It could kill her. And him.
    He braced himself and released the barrier in his mind. The impact of pain took the wind from his lungs. He didn’t dare to spare the energy to draw a breath. He gritted his teeth and fought it with muscles hardened to stone with the strain. And he hadn’t even touched the pain of the wound yet. He had to deal with the pain of her visions, get past them, before he could cope with that problem.
    Agony sucked his mind into a river of blackness. Specters of her visions swirled past. He could only guess at their meaning, but the pain of their reality was all too vivid. Tears flooded from his tightly closed eyes; his whole body shook as he struggled to fight through the torrent of anguish. He knew he couldn’t allow himself to be pulled along with it, or he would be lost, consumed.
    The emotions of her visions buffeted him as he was swept deeper into her mind. Dark thoughts just beyond the surface of perception clawed at his will, trying to drag him into the depths of hopeless abandon. His own painful memories washed to the surface of his consciousness to join with Jebra’s lifetime of sorrow in a convergence of terrible agony and madness. Only his experience and resolve kept his sanity, his free will, from being pulled into the bottomless waters of bitterness and grief.
    At last, he broke through to the calm, white light at the center of her being. Zedd reveled in the comparatively mild pain of her life threatening wound. Reality could seldom match the imagination, and in the imagination, the pain was real.
    All around the calm center, the cold darkness of eternal night encroached on the waning warmth and light of her life, impatient to shroud forever Jebra’s spirit. Zedd pulled back that shroud, to let the light of his gift warm her spirit with life and vitality. The shadows receded before the power of his Additive Magic.
    The strength of that magic, its exigency for the well-being of life, drew the exposed organs back to where the Creator intended them. Zedd didn’t yet dare to spare anything to block her suffering. Jebra’s back arched. She wailed with the pain of it. He, too, felt her pain. His own abdomen flamed with the same agony she felt. He shook with the searing sharpness of it.
    When the hardest, that which was beyond his comprehension, was finished, he at last spared a portion of the magic to block her pain. Jebra sagged against the floor with a moan of relief. He felt the relief in his own body.
    Directing the flow of magic, Zedd finished the healing. He used his power to pull her wound together,