by Ian Irvine
Once she had even spoken to Yggur about the Forbidding, for she knew that he had come closer than any to fathoming its essence.
“I don’t know what would happen,” he had said, “nor, I suspect, does anyone else. No one understands the Forbidding. Why did it come about? We don’t know. Did Shuthdar make it deliberately, a last corruption of that most beautiful thing, the golden flute? A last malicious act before he destroyed it and himself? Or did the Forbidding just happen, the balance trying to reassert itself after so long a distortion, and so violent? Or was there another power there at the ending? Rulke was there, Yalkara and Kandor; most of the great of that era. Such an assemblage of strength as has never been seen since. Was the Forbidding a plan, or the failure of one? Did it form at once or slowly crystallize over the following weeks? We do not know, only that when the Faellem and the Charon made to go back to their own worlds, the Way between the Worlds was closed.”
“Did Yalkara have anything to do with it?” Maigraith had asked. “She knew enough to find the flaw in the Forbidding when the time came.”
“I believe that the Forbidding protects us,” said Yggur, “whether it was made for that purpose or not. I do not believe that breaking it will restore the balance that existed before the flute. I think that it will break open all the paths between the worlds. Santhenar will lie naked to the void.
“Our world would be like the village below the dam. When the dam bursts, the village is swept away. If the Forbidding is broken Santhenar will be torn apart, for we have no defense against what is in the void. Perhaps there is no defense. Faelamor trifles with what she does not understand.”
“Smash the Forbidding!” said Maigraith aloud, and the Yggur in her head was gone. “But what of Santhenar? Would you condemn the world that sheltered you so long?”
The firelight turned Faelamor’s cheek to rose, to scarlet. She turned her head to Maigraith, and though her eyes were in shadow, golden specks swam in them, in eyes that were old and deeper than the bottomless sea. Her voice was pitiless.
“When one breaks out of a prison, one does not take care that the gaolers are safe. Santhenar can look to itself. I looked in the Mirror in Katazza and saw what I wanted to see. There is a way. I can break the Forbidding. I will take the Faellem home, even if all else falls into ruin around me. That I have sworn to do. My duty is clear.”
“How will you do that?”
“I dare not tell you, or anyone. Suffice it to say that there are many steps, and much preparation. The first step is done; the instrument is prepared. It is flawed but it will serve. The second—to see the way. That too I have done. In the Mirror I saw Yalkara’s path. But there are many things I must have, and many things I must learn, and so little time. It is a race against Rulke, now that he has shown his hand, for whichever of us is ready first will spoil the plan of the other. And perhaps against Mendark too, if he survived Katazza. On my way back from there I discovered a great danger, something that cannot fall into the hands of the Council, or Rulke either. Perhaps an opportunity. No, I will not even think of that.
“Let’s get to work. The Faellem have let me down. I prayed that I would not have to take this path, but now I must. We must go to far-off places, but there isn’t time. I must make a gate, like to the gate that Tensor made in Katazza. That secret I also had from the Mirror.”
“Make a gate!” exclaimed Maigraith. “Aren’t you Faellem forbidden to use such things?”
“Indeed. Any gate violates the prohibition against devices that we swore to uphold eons ago. To make one is a sin of mortal dimensions, and in using it I will suffer cruelly. But I need one now and will again at the end, wherever the end will be.”
Maigraith knew of the prohibition against the Faellem using devices, but not the moral imperative behind it, or the inevitable punishment. It was not relevant to her, though, since she was not Faellem.
Faelamor returned to her couch, more irritable than ever. Maigraith spent the next few days by herself, exploring the forest until she knew every part of the valley. She loved forests, for that was the world she had grown up in, but this one was dark and damp, always shaded by the high ridges, encouraging her morbid thoughts.
Death was everywhere this year, and never far from Maigraith’s thoughts either. It had been a scarce commodity in Mirrilladell in the long years that she’d lived with the Faellem. They scarcely aged, and only a handful died or were born in the time she was there. They died by accident or injury, or because they had lost the will to keep on, exiled here on Santhenar.
But since Maigraith had come to Meldorin there had been little else but death, and she had played her own stupid part in it. The Aachim were slaughtered within Shazmak and without, and Iagador burned from south to north; from Sith to Thurkad. Countless people were dead and Yggur had caused most of it. Her war-making in Bannador, supposedly for a noble cause, had slain many more.
How many children starved tonight because their fathers had not come back from the war? How many wives wept for their lost menfolk; how many mothers and brothers and fathers wailed for loved ones they would never see again? How many bold young soldiers had come back crippled and embittered to a brief life of pain and poverty? These were questions that Maigraith had never before had to contemplate, but now they wracked her.
Not even in twenty years would the damage be repaired. And what had they fought for? Because one tyrant or another commanded it. Faelamor was the worst of them all.
Someone has to do what is right for the world, Maigraith thought, and if I don’t no one will. I begin to see where my duty lies, and this is one that I owe only to myself: finding fulfilment in what has always been my greatest burden. Well, my training with Faelamor, with Yggur and with Vanhe has given me as many skills as anyone can have for the job. The rest is up to me. When the chance comes I must be ready.
Thereafter Maigraith worked all her waking hours. She wove mats and screens from rushes, sewed them together and braced them with poles until she had a house of sorts, a light but secure shelter, and a hammock to sleep in above the damp. All right for Faelamor to curl up in the fork of a tree but she needed more.
Then she sorted through the round stones in the river bed and occupied herself by making lightglasses. That was a skill that she had learned long ago but not used of late. Each one was different: sometimes she made them of stone, when she could find stone that felt right in her fingers, but more often from mineral. Quartz was easily found but she did not like the brilliant splintery quality it gave to the light. She sometimes used calcite too—it gave out a soft milky light, but did not last long. Topaz was good, though she worked only with crystals she could find herself, and it was rare. Once she had even made a globe from granite—more as a test of her skill than for any need to use it—but the ominous light, welling up out of hundreds of little crystals, clear, pink, milky or black, reminded her of the dark face of the moon. She only used that globe the once.
After a while making globes became too easy, so she amused herself by selecting the least suitable pebbles that she could find, ironstone or basalt, and coaxing them, or on one famous occasion, forcing them to light. She hung up her globes in little woven baskets, so that all the trees around the camp glowed with colored light in the evening, and slowly faded as the night wore on.
But these activities were too routine. She needed work that was so hard that it hurt. Maigraith went back to her regimen, becoming more and more involved in it until it took up most of her free hours. But it was as if she practiced in a void. Though she went through the motions like a machine, body and soul, and even solved another of the Forty-Nine, one of the nested Chrighms, she took no satisfaction from it. She was empty inside. The spark had been lit in her but it just smoldered away, lacking the fuel to burst into fire. Where could she find the strength for that, to free herself from Faelamor’s domination and strike out on her own?
* * *
Some weeks after their arrival, Faelamor suddenly rose from her bower.
/> “Tomorrow we make the gate!”
All that night she sat beside the fire, thinking, occasionally scratching marks in the earth with a stick. Several times Maigraith woke and saw her sitting erect, wide awake but unmoving. Then suddenly it was morning, mist rising all along the river, and Faelamor had gone upstream.
Maigraith followed her to a place where the river narrowed between two hillocks. It was only ten or twelve paces wide here, but deep and very fast. The forest was dense; ancient trees framed the river on either side. Over that narrow place they built a hanging platform from vines hung between two trees, a structure based on three large hammocks slung across each other. This they stabilized with vine ropes tied around the trunks and woven together. Above they made another platform in the same way, fixed the two together with slender upright poles and wove a canopy of reeds over the top. All was tied together, guyed and re-guyed, then the stays loosened to allow for the motion of the trunks in the wind.
Faelamor climbed down, frowning at the structure, a basketwork pavilion suspended above the water.
“It will do,” she said finally, “though it is too like the thing that Tensor made for my liking. Yet on the other hand, like calls to like. It will be the easier to open the gate for all that. Had there been more time I might have given it beauty and a better shape but, after all, we are not trying to break into the Nightland. We’re taking a little journey to save time. And because there is no other way in.”
Maigraith remained where she was. “I didn’t realize I had to go too,” she said haltingly.
“What’s the matter? Are you afraid?”
“Of course I’m afraid,” snapped Maigraith. “You taught me that such devices were forbidden.”
“Only to Faellem.”
“I’m still frightened. I saw how tortured Yggur was when he went through one.”
“Bah! You’re far greater than he is. Get up here!”
They took their places on the platform and Faelamor brought forth from her pouch a piece of pale stone. One side had been shaped and polished smooth, while the other had a curved, glassy fracture.
“I brought it from Katazza,” she said. “It was part of Tensor’s gate, broken off when Yggur appeared unexpectedly—or was it Rulke? I can’t remember.”
“Rulke!” said Maigraith, her stomach churning.
Faelamor mistook her. “It doesn’t matter who—all that matters is that it was part of a gate. Like calls to like—I hope it will be enough.”
She moistened the fragment with her tongue and put it down carefully on the platform, resting her bare foot on it. Sending forth her strength, she drew a link between her and Maigraith.
“First we have to see where we’re going.”
“Where are we going?” asked Maigraith, dreading the gate.
Faelamor did not answer. She gestured and the world faded. Fog swirled all around them, then Maigraith saw a stronghold on a barren ridge, just a glimpse through clouds, and a ruined city in the valley below.
“Tar Gaarn!” said Faelamor. The city faded, the fog too, and they were looking into a dark chamber. There were soft lights on brackets on the wall, but it was as if they peered through fog—the mists of time, perhaps. The lights had haloes around them, and rainbow colors. The floor was stone with a silk carpet, and at the further end of the room was a table with a small mirror on it.
The Mirror! Maigraith thought with a shivery thrill. She could never forget how it had felt when first she’d held it in her hands in Fiz Gorgo. How it had seemed to call to her. She ached to hold the Mirror again, to look into it.
“Havissard, in the time of Yalkara!” said Faelamor with an involuntary shudder. “We’re looking into Yalkara’s salon. At least, that’s how I remember it. Hope and pray that my memory of three hundred years ago is enough to find it now, for this is a perilous way to direct a gate.”
Her voice broke. She staggered, snatching at Maigraith’s hand to steady herself. “Help me, Maigraith! We Faellem can use simple devices, though it costs us dear. Hold the image while I seek out for the way. Take it across the link and keep it firmly in your mind. Observe carefully. You may have to do it on the return.”
Maigraith held the image of Yalkara’s salon true while Faelamor did something that her mind could not encompass. Faelamor grunted, apparently satisfied, and did another thing equally incomprehensible. Suddenly a portal blasted open between them. The mist about the platform was buffeted by outrushing air that had a stale, dry smell.
“Keep it true!” Faelamor whispered. “Keep it anchored, else we will never get back. Oh, this is hurting!” She would have fallen had not Maigraith held her up.
Suddenly Maigraith felt dizzy and weak. Faelamor was taking her strength across the link, but it might have been flowing straight down a sink for all the good it did her.
“Stop!” cried Maigraith, clinging to one of the guy ropes. “You’ll kill us both.”
The draining sensation ceased. Faelamor hauled herself upright. Her shirt was dripping with sweat and her face was ghastly. “We’ll have to try another way.” She examined Maigraith. “You’ve changed. You are not what you were before.” She looked uneasy, perhaps realizing that her control was slipping away.
Maigraith laughed. A tiny fire had begun to flicker inside her; she was burning up with joy. “In Thurkad I was forced to become a leader—to command and see people obey instantly. It broke the mold that you made me in. That experience has changed me forever. Remember that, the next time you try to control me. Your time is ending but mine has barely begun.”
“You haven’t seen a fraction of my weapons!” Faelamor snapped, then decided not to press it. “Let’s get on. Here, put your foot on the stone.”
Maigraith slid her foot underneath Faelamor’s smaller one, feeling the smooth fracture against the ball of her foot. Faelamor’s foot was trembling. Maigraith had not seen her under such strain since they had recovered from the Conclave.
“Are you all right?”
“Forbidden deed!” Faelamor whispered. “I will pay for this.” She made a working with her hands. “I’ll have to practice a few times, to get used to the gate and sense the place out.”
“Sense what?”
“The defenses of Havissard. We’re going to the place where Yalkara defeated me, and where she fled from.”
She tried again and again, but it didn’t seem to be working. “I can see where I want to be but I can’t get to it. Space is all warped there. I’m too weak.”
As she tried again, her knees buckled and Maigraith barely stopped her from tumbling into the river.
“No good,” Faelamor gasped, clinging to Maigraith as the platform rocked. “Another attempt and I won’t have the strength left to use the gate. I’ll have to risk it with the image I have.”
“Give it to me,” said Maigraith, afraid for them both. “Show me how you control the gate.”
“You’re not ready for it!”
“You’re right! I’m not. But I’m more ready than you are, and I don’t want to die because you can’t do it.” Maigraith had recovered quickly, and the more Faelamor struggled, the better she felt. “Show me how you seek the destination out, and exactly where you are trying to get to.”
Realizing that there was no option, Faelamor did so. The images pulsed across the link. Maigraith sought out the destination and there it was, Havissard, as steady as the earth. But it was enclosed in a great transparent cyst.
“It’s protected!” said Maigraith, puzzled. “But… I think I can see a way in.”
Faelamor shivered at Maigraith’s confidence. She would have to be taken down later. But all that mattered now was to get there.
“Ready?”
Though Maigraith still did not want to go through the gate, she reveled in the expectation of Havissard. Her biggest worry was Faelamor’s state of mind.
She opened the gate. “Shall I go through?”
“No!” cried Faelamor in alarm. It was almost as if she cared. “I mu
st go first to fix the other end. This is the most dangerous time, particularly for me.”
She stepped into the gate and vanished. The platform lurched wildly. Maigraith fell to one knee, almost losing contact with the stone. She could feel that it was a hazardous crossing, and briefly contemplated breaking the anchor while Faelamor was in transit. That would resolve all her troubles. No, that was a coward’s way. Then Faelamor was across. Maigraith held the path focused, restrained the wavering and the pinching out, then at last it firmed from the other end and Faelamor’s voice, distorted to a whispery croak by the link, called her through.
Maigraith resisted the call for a long moment. After what had happened to Yggur she was afraid of the gate. But Havissard was insistent. She stepped into the portal, hesitated, half-in and half-out, feeling pulled in two different directions. One pull became stronger than the other—it dragged her in. Her entrails twisted themselves in knots, then she emerged head first in a black room, banging her head.
She lay there, her head throbbing. There was dust in her mouth; she could smell it in every breath. A globe glimmered, the swirling motes slowly settled and she saw that they were in the room that Faelamor had visualized. It looked exactly the same, save for the dust, but there was no Mirror of Aachan on the table.
“Havissard!” said Faelamor again, this time in a gasping breath. All the rose had gone out of her face. She looked old and pallid. “That was harder than I thought. The gate came up against Yalkara’s defenses; I almost lost it. Almost lost us both.” Her eyes showed dismay at the danger unrecognized. “No one has been here since the time of Yalkara. Her defenses have never faltered, though what they defend is beyond guessing.” She sat down on the floor and sank her head on her knees.
I thought it was me, Maigraith thought, reminded of her impulse to break the anchor while Faelamor was in transit.
