Free Touch of the Demon by Diana Rowland Page B

which is Elinor.” I realized he was referring to yesterday when he revealed the statue to me. “This is no different.”
    Of course,
I realized.
I
didn’t have a panic attack. It was that damn Elinor’s freakout.
    “Your fear today was acute and so interwoven you could not distinguish yourself from Elinor,” Mzatal continued. “Call up the image of Vsuhl again. Call up that which makes you tremble. Trace the sigil, breathe, and seek the boundary between you and the fear. Then expand until it is all of you and none of her.”
    I met his eyes for several heartbeats as I struggled to fathom whether this was some new game or trickery of his. He returned my gaze evenly, and I finally gave up and did my best to follow his instructions. Closing my eyes, I began the careful breathing and visualized the sigil. Sweat broke out on my upper lip as I cautiously probed the memory, but gradually I could view it without the irrational reaction.
    I opened my eyes to see Mzatal watching me closely. “Practice this regularly,” he said in a tone that left no doubt that he was accustomed to being obeyed. “Panic
will
destroy you if you do not learn to defuse it efficiently and expeditiously.”
    He turned and walked away. “If you have not yet taken in the view from the west tower,” he said without glancing back or breaking stride, “ask Safar to take you. It is not to be missed, and we depart on the morrow.”
    I stared after him. Practice regularly and see the sights? Amazingly, I managed to bite down on the urge to shout after him, “Does this mean you’re not going to kill me in the morning?” Instead, I turned to Safar: “I guess we’re going to the west tower.”

Chapter 6
    Safar stood, snorted, and bounded down the corridor. At the end he turned back to me and bared his teeth. “Come!”
    I smiled and trotted after him, down the central corridor of the west wing and then up a broad spiral stair in the west tower. I knew this stair, or at least Elinor did, but the eerie familiarity surged when we reached the seventh floor, where the chamber spanned the entire floor of the tower with huge windows all around. Eleven of them. I turned slowly, taking it in. Easels. Tables with paints, brushes, and a host of things I couldn’t identify. A bench with hammers, mallets, and a variety of chisels. A single wooden stool, unadorned and well-worn.
    Several sculptures lay toppled to the floor, broken, and at the base of one wall lay a dusty heap of shredded paintings. The stone above the heap bore a splodge of crimson paint, as though splattered from a container thrown with force. My gut wrenched at the wanton destruction of brilliance.
    “Who destroyed all this?”
    “Szerain.”
    My twisting anguish deepened. “Why?”
    “After the cataclysm, after the last of the humans died, Szerain started to sculpt and paint but finished nothing. What he began, he destroyed. In time, he did not begin.”
    A deep sadness tightened my chest. I crouched and picked up a severed stone hand. Slender fingers. A woman. The dream image rose of a shattered statue of Elinor, and I wondered if there was a connection. And if there was, what did that mean? The statues were broken
after
Elinor diedso it couldn’t be her memory. My breath caught, and cold sank into my bones. From the floor in front of me, the half shattered face of a man stared in horror, mouth twisted in a scream.
    I looked around, really seeing the fragments now. Each was as exquisitely crafted as any of the statues in the palace, but every face and twisted limb was the shard of a horrific story. I gingerly placed the hand back on the floor and stood, feeling as though I trespassed on someone else’s nightmare. I backed toward the stairs, scrubbing my hands on my jeans. “Let’s go.”
    Safar huffed and bounded up the next curve. I followed, glancing back once at the testament of pain. Was this why I’d never seen Ryan show any sort of artistic ability? Did this agony still grip