The man nodded, his face hardening with determination.
Dahli moved to the other end of the coffin and looked across it to Rielle. “Begin with changing the pattern of the body. You will need to read my mind so I can instruct you, but not until I say to begin.” He looked down at the hand. His mouth pressed into a line and his brow creased in concentration.
Rielle turned her attention to the casket, searching beyond the ice lid, and found living matter, cool, but warm compared to the ice coffin. Her senses told her it was human, male and young–much younger than she expected.
“Who is this?” she asked.
“A body without a mind,” Dahli replied. “I know nothing more.”
Seeking the young man’s mind, she saw that he was right. It was unshielded, but no thoughts stirred within it.
“Begin,” Dahli said.
Looking up at him, she found his mind open and readable. He was concentrating on the withered hand. To her astonishment, it did not feel like a hand to his senses. It did not feel like a mind either. The skin, bones, muscles and sinew had all been changed to something neither alive nor fully dead, but capable of forming a pattern. A very intricate and extensive pattern.
Dahli now sent magic into that pattern and it shivered along connections too complicated to grasp. As when she had learned pattern shifting, Rielle began to shape magic to hold the pattern, using it to enhance her understanding. All of the magic she had gathered went into it, and she reached out to take in more. The ice world was astonishingly rich in it. She wondered how it had become so. Or had Valhan made it so, somehow?
She lost all perception of time, her full concentration on imprinting the pattern. When the flow of information abruptly ended she swayed, then caught the edge of the coffin to steady herself.
“Now change the body to follow the new pattern,” Dahli instructed.
“Before the mind?” she asked. “Without the right change to the mind, won’t the body revert to its original pattern?”
“Not if we change all of the pattern,” he replied.
The ice chilled her fingers as she sent her mind within. Taking even more magic, she began to alter living matter as she had done when healing the animals and changing parts of her body during Dahli’s lessons. This time she did not tweak what was there but imposed the corresponding pattern from what she’d recorded into magic.
She started with the feet then slowly, steadily, worked her way upwards. When she reached the brain she paused before imprinting it, wondering at what point this mindless person would become Valhan.
It didn’t. It remained an empty vessel. But of course, she thought, this is just his body. Until he has all his memories it will be as mindless as this poor young man. I wonder, was he born that way or suffered an accident of some kind? She looked closer. Mercifully, he was in a state rather like a dreamless sleep.
Confirming that his body was not reverting to the old pattern, she looked up at Dahli.
“Done.”
He nodded, but did not take his eyes from the hand.
“Now for the memories,” he said softly.
Silence followed. Dahli stared at the hand, but all she gained from his mind was confusion and apprehension, and a muddle of disconnected images. Something was not happening as it was supposed to. The others began to exchange glances, and she guessed what they were thinking. Would the resurrection fail halfway through?
At last Dahli looked up at her, then glanced at the others.
“I am meant to begin at the oldest memories,” he explained, “but I can’t isolate them. They are linked to the moment Valhan imprinted all his memories and knowledge into his hand.” He looked at Rielle. “The only way I can see to do this is to simply feed you information as it comes.”
“I’m ready,” she told him.
He drew in a deep breath, closed his eyes and nodded. “Begin reading my mind.”
Once again, images and concepts entered Dahli’s mind. This time she was able to make sense of them. At once she understood why Dahli had been unable to follow Valhan’s instruction. The hand contained a frozen moment in time. Connections flowed outwards from what had been Valhan’s present when he’d created the hand, linking in a tangle that produced every possible route his mind might take to reach a memory. Dahli could not get to the oldest memories without passing the most recent.
Valhan’s plan had been freshest in his thoughts, and as Dahli concentrated on that memory Rielle began to record it with magic. He had taken an enormous risk, trusting an untried, complex resurrection to people who hadn’t even known what they would be asked to do. To Dahli, his most loyal and intelligent follower. To Rielle, whose loyalty was untested but who was the only person who had the strength for the task, since her powers were equal to his.