by Jim Grimsley
“True.” He held the glass to the light. “Though it never works so well for me. It was a worthy time, that time. But long ago, and finished.”
“You need not tell me.”
He set down the glass on a stone table; he watched her tall figure as she turned back from the window, settling onto a couch across from him, her image silhouetted against the night. He said, “You asked me a riddle on the way across the ice.”
“Not a riddle, really. But go on.”
“Now I have one for you.”
She gave him a wary tilt of the head. Had her voice changed as much as her appearance? How could he trust his memory after so long? “Go ahead.”
“How do you know which is a fortress and which a prison?”
At first she simply blinked, then her expression soured a bit. Behind her head a bit of tapestry rigging was rattling against the stone, its eyehook ringing. “Not a very good riddle.”
“No?”
“Really too easy. One would look for the way the guards were facing.”
He was quiet and still—waiting, though in no obtrusive way.
She said, “There need be no nonsense between us, Jessex. Why don’t you say plainly what you mean?”
He spoke carefully, watching wind blow through potted trees on the balcony. “This world is meant as a prison. Not a fortress.”
“Why should this world be meant as either?”
“YY made this place, just as we were always taught. I’ve always known this to be true. But she made nothing else. No other world. She made only this one. Why?”
Her face had suddenly changed, stiffened, as if she were preparing herself for something unpleasant. “Pardon me, child, but who are you to ask?”
How long since anyone called him “child”?
He answered quietly, his posture deferential. She was his teacher, after all. “You know very well who I am. I’m the one who keeps watch at the gate.”
“Do you really think she cares a whit for your gate?”
“I know that she does, without doubt.”
“Why?”
“Because of the kind of creatures it will draw here.”
She stood very still. The night had lightened a bit. At the fireplace, Coromey rolled onto his back and stretched his paws upward.
“Say more.” Her face had become more difficult to see, as if it lay in shadow; she was protecting herself in veils.
He fought an impulse to protect himself in the same way. She was a power of the second rank; he could not defend himself from her in any case. He took a deep breath. “She intends the gate to attract beings like you, Sister, or me.”
“Why would she care to do such a thing?”
He shrugged. “She is who she is. Perhaps she will eat them. Perhaps she’ll imprison them. Perhaps she’ll learn their languages. Maybe some of all. I don’t know.”
She stood and stepped toward him coolly, stopping some distance from him. So far she had not reached any of her Words toward him, but her figure was indistinct, a kind of cloud. “You first had these thoughts when you went into the underworld with the King?”
“Yes. A long time ago. When I went to find him.”
“But you’ve waited a very long time to ask the question.”
“It was not my place to ask.”
“Now it is?”
He nodded, curtly. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“You know very well why, Sister.”
“Still, I want to hear you say.”
Now that the time had come to say the words he felt heaviness in himself, sadness, even an edge of fear. “One of them has come, one of the creatures she’s baiting. He’s an operator of the second order, at least.”
“You know his name?”
“Rao.”
“What language does he speak?”
“No language. He speaks a mathematics. His helpers who speak the Hormling language call it Erlot.” He tried to keep any hint of resentment from his voice, staring at the patterned flower in the carpet beneath his feet. “I’m sure you know this.”
She hesitated so long that he looked at her, in the end. She was watching him. Her face was now clearly visible, her eyes calm. “We only knew his name. You’ve done well to learn the rest.”
He acknowledged this with a bow.
Wind howled in and blew the tapestries, sent sparks from the fire; she moved serenely to close the doors.
“Does YY know more?” Jessex asked.
“We haven’t asked her.”
“Then I need to find her and ask her myself.”
She gave him a long look, neutral in every way, and walked around him to stand at the fireplace. Behind her was a painting of YY walking in Illaeryn in a floating-in-clouds style, all grays and browns. “Why?”
“To learn how to fight him.”
“Why do you think you need to seek her out? If she intends to help you, she’ll simply come to you.”
“When?”
She waited patiently, Coromey rubbing the top of his head against her ankles. The cat-hound paid no attention to the true language she was using. “Do you think to hurry God?”
The heaviness weighed on him again, the knowledge that he had been keeping back through the long, serene journey in the mountains. “I’m a guardian who is failing his task, Sister. My people are dying. Billions of people are dead. She can come to help us and does nothing. Why?”
The look she gave him was nothing like the Sister he remembered. For the first time he could see, could feel, her age, even a trace of her weariness. “Do you really think you’re strong enough to ask her yourself?”
“I have to try.”
Glistering Phaeton
What pleased Vekant most, his precious, puttylike self safely tucked inside the machinery of the Eaten, was that he no longer felt any fear at all. As a human being he had experienced constant apprehension of one sort or another in nearly every social or personal milieu. But no longer. The little that was left of him witnessed all that followed with glee, as if the actions of this altered body were still those of Vekant himself, as if he were the powerful Word-wielder attacking the tower, all his fears shed, all his doubts removed.
The Eaten was in charge now, and all the other cantors across Jharvan answered to him; for Vekant it was as if he were the master himself. They laid waste to every city, flattening the buildings with nuclear fire, killing the humans in waves. Orderly and quick, grid by grid, a plan unfolded. The Hormling died methodically, quickly, and completely.
The work of taking the tower fell to the Eaten and to Vekant, or so it felt to him. The body he shared with the Eaten was crossing the blasted place that had once been the island city of Avatrayn, shattered rubble from temples to Ama and Mur, flattened ruins of public plazas, fires on every side, a sky so filled with smoke and ash there could be no question of day or night. Mantises roamed the streets grazing on corpses, shitting piles of stuff that ate the city into dark ooze. Other creatures were taking shape out of the ooze: rodents with spidery legs; clouds of flies that laid eggs in more of the corpses, the eggs each hatching into a different kind of insect, some burrowing into the ground, some crawling into the ruins, some taking flight. Two-legged rats with long, thin arms skittered through the empty streets. The waves of explosions had destroyed the chill-trees but new ones were sprouting, a dark forest taking shape out of the city, visible on every side. Where the trees met the black ooze the combination made twisted shapes, some of them taking root like plants, sprouting leaves of various kinds, putting out a foul smell.
Ahead, untouched, the tower Cueredon stood amid a small circle of intact buildings at its base.
He was walking through the wreckage of the Fukate Choir, and some of the corpses being gathered into the flanged throats of the mantises and crushed by those lurching constructions, swallowed head-first, were Prin. Some of these were the bodies of people he had known. The thought that some of them were “friends” no longer occurred to him, since that concep
t had been gnawed out of him by the Eater. A small herd of mantises was feeding here, some tearing at the explosion-cooked bodies bit by bit, others taking the body by the head and swallowing it whole, its legs jostling aimlessly, silhouetted against the smoky sky. Wind was coming up, as if a storm was about to blow over them. Vekant felt nothing but a vague satisfaction, watching the destruction. He was riding inside the Eaten and nothing could harm him. Fear was a thing he remembered but no longer felt.
What he could feel was the Eaten, its consciousness flooded with concepts, numbers, curves, knots, cascading patterns repeating themselves endlessly; this rendered into a sound that had no resemblance to any music Vekant had ever heard. If he had still been able to fear anything he would have been afraid of that sound.
The Eaten would not be able simply to approach the tower. From inside, Vekant could understand the creature’s thinking. The creature did not entirely understand how the tower functioned or what needed to happen to bring it down. The tower was being held by inferior operators, but it belonged to an operator of the same order as the Eaten, and therefore the taking of it would require time. The creature had already begun its work, circling the base, trying to find a gate or a door, and at the same time reaching upward, to the top of the tower where the lone Drune, Eshen Arly, and the pair of Prin, Seris Annoy and Faltha Menonomy, were directing its defenses.
The Eaten knew all that Vekant knew about the operators on the summit, along with the little he knew about the tower itself. A tower was a structure that enabled its handler to evoke true language very fast; it was a kind of macro-generator of Words, enabling large-scale feats like weather control and surveillance over large areas. The inner core was lined with runes, written phrases and sentences of the three true languages, the runes as effective as spoken words when evoked, and they could be evoked very quickly by the tower’s handlers. Cueredon’s current handlers were in possession of two of the languages that ruled the tower. The third, the one known only by Great Irion and the Mage Malin, was reserved for their use. No one could gain entry into the tower without taking it from them.
The question was, could Great Irion defend the tower with the Anilyn Gate closed? Vekant, in knowing the question, transmitted its consequent uncertainty to the Eaten, who was very satisfied with the idea of a weakness.
When the work of breaking into Cueredon began, Vekant heard the voice of the Eaten as if it were his own; in fact, it had been his own until only a short while ago. But what the voice was singing, and whether this could be called singing, were not apparent. He had heard some use of Tervan Symmetries that had this quality; the Symmetries were the Tervan way of recording mathematics as music, taught to the Erejhen long ago. The most talented Prin and Drune trained in the Symmetries, and choirs with this training were among the most powerful. This was information that the Eaten had not found useful but that Vekant himself pondered, to the degree that he remembered and understood it, while bathed in the sound of the Eaten’s voice.
The tower being closed, sealed in a way that disguised the entrance, the Eaten circled the base over and over, probing. Vekant’s body, now the property of someone else, had grown a middle set of spindly arms, each ending in a slender hand of two fingers and a thumb; these touched the air as if tasting it as the Eaten canted and listened. To a degree, just as the creature knew what Vekant knew, the opposite was also true, so that Vekant could feel the creature’s puzzlement, which was Vekant’s own puzzlement, at the hiding of the door. Words were strange for the Eaten, it did not entirely know how to digest them; it had more success in absorbing what Vekant knew when he was simply aware of a fact than when he put it into language.
The Eaten rose up in an erect posture, arms out, and suddenly the sound of its voice trebled, grew vast; at the same time, like a concussion from an explosion, something from the tower struck the Eaten and flattened it, pain rushing through Vekant, through the creature. Vekant felt the body reach for breath, nerves afire. It struggled to its feet.
It began again circling the tower, as close as it could come, nowhere near the stones of the foundation. The sound that raked Vekant’s nerves recommenced, and so did the feeling of a hand constricting them, Vekant inside the Eaten, neither able to breathe; but for a true-language operator this was not much of a challenge—the body was trained to compensate. The pain, though, was never-ending, and Vekant, since he was not in charge, was obliged to feel most of it; even the remainder of Vekant’s own knowledge of true language was useless now that he was never the one in charge of speaking. Prin were strong in groups, sometimes in pairs, never alone.
The thing was patient. It circled the buildings, reached, was pressed back, regrouped, did it all again.
A wind had begun to build. Underfoot, a spongy fungus had begun to overlay the black sludge. The chill-trees were crowding the ruins now, an infant forest, corpse-white branches twisting out of pitch-black trunks. Some were beginning to leaf, papery pale or dark leaves, dripping shapes, or else sharp needles, or fans with jagged edges. Overhead, amid a mix of smoke, ash, fallout, moved the dark shapes of flocks and stingers, rushings of wings, clouds of flies.
He had some capacity for sadness; he could feel its echo as he looked around at what was left of Avatrayn and Citadel. Almost nothing remained intact, not a building standing, hardly three stones together anywhere in sight. Even now as the mantises grazed, they leveled any standing fragment of a building in their path as if by instinct. When he looked farther out, as he could now, easily, he saw the same: the explosions had raised a cloud of dust and debris that blotted out daylight; everywhere was gray sky and pulverized terrain, fires belching more debris into the gray, roads wrecked and ruined, cities unrecognizable, as far as his eye could reach.
Circling, probing, gradually drawing nearer to the base of the tower, the Eaten, at last, laid fingers on the foundation stones, those strange slender digits probing. Another sending from the tower flattened it, pouring such agony through Vekant that he very nearly forced the body to cry out. For a moment he was almost inside himself once more. But the Eaten reasserted itself and fought and after a while was able to move again; it touched the stones, probing deeply, then was flattened by the massive hand again, more agony. How many times?
The forest grew. Packs of man-rats rustled through the new undergrowth. Some kind of spindle-bird appeared, with a long thin beak like the proboscis of a mosquito; now and then it caught a rat and squeezed it in sharp talons, sucking the animal dry. Dragonflies flittered over gray-petaled flowers and round, red-spotted mushrooms. As hours passed, a new landscape appeared, as if its seeds had been planted in the mantis shit, as if the black ooze were a wave of transformation. All the while the wind grew and the heavy sky grew heavier.
The Eaten circled the tower, fought off pain, rose to its feet when knocked flat on its back, struggled against the enemy’s Words. Each time it managed to touch the stones of the tower for a while and each touch gave it more knowledge of the stone. The Eaten was patient. There was a door here, and the creature would find it, only a matter of time.
Conflagration
1. Kitra
The worst of the terror had passed from Kitra and she was trying to control herself, huddled against Figg’s legs and looking out at the devastation along the shores of the Silas. Her heart pounded and her head ached. She was watching Dekkar in loathing, averting her eyes whenever he appeared to be watching.
Stunned, whichever way her thoughts landed, she found no comfort except in the thought of her brother. The priest had told her she would see Binam soon. Only that thought made her want to stay in the boat; the fact that she might be with him soon kept her from screaming and jumping out of the Erra Bel to take her chances in the river.
She was as afraid of Dekkar as she was of anything chasing them. She could only have explained the fear as an instinct—she had never before seen a Prin who did his work so easily. He ought to show more sign of effort after having fought the thing chasing them, after having put fire t
o kilomeasures of riverside. She had watched Prin of all kinds do their jobs at one time or another, but what Dekkar could do was beyond anything she had seen. Her dread of him grew worse as he paced the boat, watching.
Day should have come hours ago but there was very little light; she felt as if a hand were constricting her chest, as if the shadows were closing in on her.
In the forest, the mantis creatures were rampaging and flocks of the shadow birds were diving and looping, visible when they passed close to the boat. The creatures appeared to be attacking the Dirijhi gardens, the cultivated zones at the base of each tree, tended carefully by the syms. These days, many of the gardens had become habitats for toxic or flesh-eating plants or even laboratories for experimental growths of various kinds; the rampaging mantises were carefully avoiding contact with the great trees themselves.
She could see well due to a filmy light that clung to the boat and spread out from it; she realized soon enough that this light was something Dekkar was making, that he was not only watching the riverbanks himself, he was making sure that the others could see, too. For a moment she felt as if he were showing this to her in some particular way, just as he had allowed her to be awake when the others were sleeping, as if she were his witness. He made no sign of this, neither speaking to her nor taking note of her at all, so perhaps the paranoia was only an offshoot of the fear. But she did watch, heart pounding, as the creatures wrecked the Shimmering Garden.
She drew a shivering breath. “There’s some kind of disagreement between the trees and their allies.” She was talking to Figg, who had a hand in her hair to keep her calm.
“Excuse me?”
“Look along the riverbank. The mantises are destroying the gardens.”
“Those are gardens?”
“Yes. They’re cultivated by the trees and the syms.”
“You think it means there’s a problem?”
“The creatures aren’t hurting the trees, see? It’s a demonstration of force.”
