Bitter Blood

MYRNIN

The trick to doing the impossible, I've found, is to simply never think past what is at your fingertips. Do the thing in front of you. Then the next. Then the next. In such ways have men built the pyramids, or climbed mountains, or raced to the moon on rockets.

And that is how I had carved, inch by painful inch, the niches for my hands and feet in the stone wal of the oubliette. I did not look up; I did not look down. I looked only at the task before me, and ignored the pain as a side effect. I'd had enough practice at that, certainly.

With enough concentration, the panic attacks faded into a running babble at the back of my mind, like a fast-rushing river that became background noise I didn't feel the need to heed. In a way, it was a comforting sort of distraction. It was a bit like not being alone, even if my only real company was my own horribly distorted, screaming mind.

I found out just how far I'd ascended the hard way, when I lost my concentration, and losing my concentration was not my fault. I was remarkably centered, but when suddenly there was a sensation inside my mind that felt like cold, icy fingers shuffling through my thoughts, and...wel . One does tend to get distracted when something like that happens.

My fingers slipped, then my bare toes, and as I fel -counting the feet on the way down, my goodness, nearly ten steps completed-I saw Claire's face. Just a flash of it, pale and worried. And another face, a woman's, with pale gold hair and light-colored eyes. It was not Amelie, though in some ways the resemblance was there.... It was someone I didn't know.

Someone human. More remarkably, a human whose mental fingerprints were clear on my mind. A seer, a true one, like the girl Miranda-someone who could see the future, but not only that; one who could reach and touch the minds of others. I doubted she had enjoyed the experience any more than I had, but I had the conviction that through her, Claire had been told something of me.

Come for me, I begged her again, just as my fal abruptly ended in ice-cold water, and the even-colder stone beneath. Bones broke, of course. I stayed there, jammed in awkward discomfort at the bottom of hel , until I had enough focus and strength to heal, and then to start considering the climb again.

Claire, I thought. Come for me. Please.

Because the doubt had begun to creep in to inform me that ten feet was barely a beginning, and I had a very, very, very long way to go...and hunger was already nipping my heels. Soon, the clarity and focus I had managed to achieve thus far would be difficult.

And then impossible.

You won't make it, some coldly logical part of me declared, which was just not at allhelpful. I wanted to cut that part of my brain out and leave it floating in the water, but perhaps that might not have been a very sane response.

So I locked the logical part of me up in a prison made of mental bars, focused on the next thing in front of my nose, and began to climb.