by Victor Poole
Ajalia looked below this blue layer, and she saw, with a shock of violent disgust and fear, the tail of the second black worm. The worm's tail lay, like a spiraling cord, around the edges of her master's estate. Ajalia saw, or she felt the images press in around her mind, a rim of burning white just against the border of her master's land.
Ajalia was curious about this rim of white. She did not know if she was imagining these pictures, or if she was really seeing parts of her master's land, and the kind of energy that ran below the ground in the earth. She examined the white light, and saw that tiny threads of light ran from the border of white, into the center of the estate. She followed one of these threads of light, and her mind flashed through a series of images that were from all the places within the lands of her master's estate.
Ajalia saw the orchard where she had watched Lim dig up the secret box that had held the golden knife and the papers from Saroyan. She saw her master's pastures, and the herd of Eastern horses that ran there. She saw the first village, and the road that ran along into the deeper rows of housing for her master's extended family. His children lived in the second, inner row of housing. Ajalia followed the thread of white light inward, and she came at last to her master's house. The white thread grew very thin, and Ajalia had to concentrate to see it. She had followed the white line through many walls of the estate, and when her mind followed the thread straight into the back of her master's house, she saw it wind across the floor, and up into a pair of sandaled feet. Ajalia looked up, and saw her master, sitting in his favorite chair, and looking out at the land that stretched out through the open window. Ajalia looked at her master's soul, and she began, for the third time that night, to cry.
THE
BLACK WORM
Her master's soul was crusted over with jewels of white light. A ring of gold lay about his heart, and in his forehead was a blistering ball of the same ocean-blue light that Ajalia had learned to make from the light of the stars and the red-hot gold beneath the earth. Ajalia went back, away from her master, and found the tail of the ugly black worm. Her master, Ajalia saw, was keeping his estate from falling into evil. Her master, she thought, was as good a man as she had thought him.
Ajalia found the buried tail of the black worm, and without thinking first of the wisdom of what she did, she took up a thick band of hot gold, and twisted it around the tail of the black beast. Ajalia held the golden cord just a little away from the tail, so that it did not yet touch the black creature. She found a length of bright red light, and formed it into a sharp spear of energy. She tied the gold cord to the end of the red spear, and then, with the vigor of a farmer slaying a fatted calf, she pierced the red spear straight through the thickest part of the tail, and wound the gold cord around the ugly black body of the worm. The body of the worm, which stretched out southwards from her master's estate, gave a violent twist, and then began to tunnel, with a vigorous shaking, through the earth. Ajalia sent her mind rapidly along with the huge body of the worm, and she cast herself forward, to follow the black form, and to see the head of the worm.
Her mind ran swiftly along the body of the worm, and she saw many different shades and textures of light flashing past where the worm had tunneled deeply under the earth. She thought she saw great waves of an ochre hue, and sweeping eddies of a bucolic teal; she thought that this color of light lay within the heart of the desert that ran in a wide band through the heart of Leopath.
When Ajalia found the head of the worm, she cast her mind upwards, above the earth, to see where she was. She saw the soaring white wall of Slavithe, and a thick wall of trees, and the slim band of white sand that lay between the wall and the forest outside the city. Ajalia saw a curious heap of shadows just beneath the pale sand, and she saw the black worm gaping up, a scarlet tongue licking up out of its opened mouth. The worm looked as though it was attempting to caress the heap of shadows that formed the only remnant of Bain that lived on in the world. She recognized the place; it was the part of the wall where she had walked with the black horse, and where Delmar had destroyed the shadow child, and had sliced, with strings of gold made from his own soul, through the heart of Bain. Ajalia remembered that Coren had been made part of Bain, and again, without thinking, she drew a shaft of pure white sunlight, and blew the remnants of Bain and Coren into smithereens.
Ajalia had never drawn sunlight into her hands before; she had heard Ocher explain that the witches did so, when they sacrificed boys to turn their souls into their minions, but she had never tried to find sunlight for herself. When she had seen the crimson tongue of the black worm twisting caressingly upwards towards the scrappy pile of Bain that was buried under the sand, she had looked instantly about her, for the brightest and most potent-seeming light, and she had seen glimmers of sunlight clinging yet to the leaves of the trees in the forest. It was still the dark of the night; the sun was far away, but the sunlight from the day before clung, like faceted shimmers of dew, to the leaves and the branches of the trees. Ajalia had gathered these bits of sunlight with one motion of her hand; she was angry, and she was gradually learning that her powers grew exponentially when she was angry. She was angry now that this great black worm of darkness was so close to her; she was furious that the tail of the worm had lain so close against the rim of her master's estate. Ajalia was beginning now to feel that her conflict with the two worms, as brief to her as it had seemed, was very personal. She half expected, when she sent the rod of white sun into the scrap of Bain's remains, and saw them blisteringly obliterated, to find the black worm tunneling at once into the bedroom where her physical body lay.
When Ajalia destroyed the last pieces of Bain, and the scrap of Coren that had been intermingled with the shadow boy's life, the black worm, whose red tongue had been reaching out, and prodding mournfully at the shadows, like a mother bear who guards over the dead body of a cub, drew back. The black worm, when the white light shattered outwards, closed its golden-gleaming eyes of red, and Ajalia saw the whole head of the snake shudder.
She knew suddenly, with a premonition that was so sure that she could have bet her life on the outcome, that the black worm was about to dig away, and to vanish from her into some deep seam of the earth. Ajalia knew in her heart that the worm felt it had met too much danger; she saw in the quiver of the great thick body that the worm was moments away from disappearing. She knew somehow that if the worm left now, and she lost it in the depths of the earth, that she could not track it down again. The worm would retreat to some faraway place, and hide away for ages in some impossible shadow, until Ajalia, and all that she touched, had passed away in death from the earth.
Rage was filling Ajalia, and a blinding white indignation at the hurt this black snake had caused. She could not have said what the worm was, or where it and its now-destroyed companion had come from, but the whole energy of the worm smelled like ancient death and decay. The worms were an old evil, she was sure, and the kind of abuse she had suffered at the hands of her parents, and that Delmar had suffered under his mother and father, were all inheritances, Ajalia thought, of the kind of evil this final black worm represented.
She had drawn into her hands the sunlight from the trees to destroy the shadow scraps of Bain, and the mixture of Coren's soul. She raised her hands now straight into the sky, and as she saw the great worm twist in the earth, and turn away from the place where she had sent out the flash of white, she drew viciously at the golden cord that she had thrust through the tail of the snake.
The black worm had not seemed yet to realize that the attack at its tail, and the burst of sunlight so near its head, had come from the same enemy. Ajalia thought that the black worm seemed almost bored with the spear of red light that she now reeled rapidly towards her. She wondered if her master knew of the black worm, and she thought rather that he did not. She thought that her master ascribed the darkness to some generalized evil, or to darkness in the hearts of men. She did not think that such a man as she had seen her master to be, with encrusted ge
ms of glorious light in his soul, could have lived so near to such a snake, and not have pursued it with the intent to destroy it.
The black worm had turned away by a few feet, and Ajalia had drawn tight back on the cord of gold, far off around the tail, when she imagined all the light in all the stars above shooting, like gleaming strings of lightning, down into her hands. At the same time, she thought of the red-gold lights deep beneath the earth, and she felt a shudder in the rocks beneath her as the violently-warm substance flung itself upwards. She threw all the light from the stars, and all the warm energy from the red-gold lights, in a fiery case around the front part of the body of the black worm. She sent long spears of the power, at intervals, into the body of the snake, piercing it fast, and pinning it in place.
The black body, and the heavy thick head, which had just prepared itself to launch forward in flight away from Ajalia, froze. She thought that the black worm looked as though it had been frozen in a shimmering sheet of ocean-blue glass. Coils of silver starlight and red-hot gold twisted up and down the body; Ajalia saw that the greater part of the dragon's body was writhing violently in the sands of the desert. She saw that she had pulled the tail of the great beast towards her, and that the black worm no longer lay coiled around the edges of her master's estate. Ajalia breathed in; a part of her mind could feel the cold stone of the floor where her body lay in her room, but the greater portion of her mind was fixed on the massive, struggling snake.
She saw that the snake was about the width of three horses, put side by side in harness. The head of the worm was flat a little, but it did not have the structure or the contours of a snake's skull. The worm's head was clumsy, and thick, as though it had been shaped swiftly out of moderately dry clay. The head and the first stretch of the snake, all the worm's body that lay under the land of the forest and the farms of Slavithe, was coated in the freezing light of ocean blue. Out in the desert beyond, and in the barren lands between Slavithe and the oasis, the worm's body shook and attempted to escape like a possessed thing. Whipping lengths of sand flung up into the sky, with the height of angry waves in a sea storm. Ajalia thought she could hear the whisper and thunk of huge masses of sand falling back to the surface of the desert. She saw that when she had yanked on the golden cord that was threaded around, and pierced through the thick tail of the evil worm, the worm had begun to draw in its tail, and to coil it deep under the earth. Ajalia saw that the snake could thicken its body, to occupy a shorter space, and that it could also lengthen itself to fill vast distances.
The other worm that she had killed had worn two burning red eyes; Ajalia remembered how she had flown into the air, and thrust her knives, coated with ocean-blue light, through the center of the beast's head. She drew now a part of the mixed blue light from the coating that lay all around the worm, and shaped it into a long javelin that seemed to glow with deadly power.
"You can't kill me," the worm said. Its voice was like the rumbling in the earth. Ajalia felt the distant fling and scrape of the great worms' tail, as it agitated the sands of the desert into an enormous sandstorm. "I am the bane of all the earth," the black worm said. "You cannot destroy me, or even make me shrink. I will grow until I have swallowed up all of the earth. You cannot stop me!"
By this time, Ajalia had formed a long, cruel javelin out of the mixed blue lights. The shaft and tip of the javelin were like shining ocean waters, of every color of blue and deep sea green, and they glittered and shimmered like lengths of dragon scales. Ajalia could feel vibrating power in the javelin. She had formed the weapon after the manner that such things were made in the land of Lianks, out in the northern fringe of Leopath. She had been there once, and the guards of the city, and the armies that were held in readiness against the hordes of barbaric people from the snowy lands across the sea, carried such weapons.
Ajalia grasped the blue javelin in her right hand; with her left, she reached up and grasped a cord of the sky. She realized now that she had thrown her body out, as she had done in the forest near the poison tree, when Delmar had first put his soul into her. He had told her then that he had split up the part of himself that did magic, and that he had shared himself with her in a way that would make her able to do magic.
She remembered the way he had spoken to her before that, when Delmar had accompanied her and Philas on the road to Talbos the first time. Delmar had told her then that she had a white brand. He had said, Ajalia remembered, that it was possible that she could do a little magic. She had laughed at him then. Ajalia let go of what part of her mind held on to the physical body she had left behind on the floor of the room in the dragon temple, and she lifted herself up into the sky with one hand. Her spiritual form was light, and easy to lift up. She took hold of one cord, and then let go and quickly grasped another. Her spirit body seemed to float up like a heavy cloud, or like a gathering of moisture in the air.
Ajalia climbed quickly; she told herself that time had slowed. It had yet been only a few moments since she had seen the black worm licking, like a solicitous mother monster, at the scraps of Bain's remains, and since she had destroyed the scraps. She had now frozen the black worm within the glass-like mixture of star and deep earth light, and now she threw herself at the monster's eyes from her place above in the sky.
Ajalia had not climbed very high up; she was perhaps ten feet up in the air when she stopped, and flung herself straight at the monster, her javelin directed at its closest ugly eye. The other black worm's eyes had been a burning, hellish red, but these creature's eyes had a golden and orange tint, like the top part of flames that lick above the reddish coals.
Ajalia felt a shudder of power, and a shock of crackling light in the javelin, when the tip of it passed into the creature's orange-gold eye. She thought for a moment that the javelin would not be able to pass through; she thought that this inability of the weapon to pierce showed her weakness, or her doubt. She pictured to herself the javelin passing straight through the second black worm's head, and with a hiss, like hot metal being thrust down into water, the blue javelin sank into the worm's eye, and passed through his head.
Ajalia had lost a little of her momentum, and she crawled into the worm's head after the javelin, clutching tightly to it with both hands. The hole in the creature's eye was like a small rent in a thin curtain; once the hole was made, Ajalia could force her way into the rent, and it expanded with the feeling of tearing tissue paper.
Ajalia did not know why the worm was so fragile; she got into its head, and she looked around. Like the other worm, this one seemed to be composed of millions of fragments of compacted white and colored light, as though the ugly snake had swallowed up all manner of people, and of energies, and driven them down into themselves until they shone like refracted diamonds.
Ajalia was sitting right inside the creature's head; she could feel, as at a distance, the worm's hate for her, and also its lust to kill and destroy. At the echo of these sensations, a roil of anger and disgust rose up in Ajalia; she wanted to destroy this thing, and every piece of its black body she wanted to see exploded into such fragments of infinitesimal dust that no trace of the evil worm would ever be found. Ajalia found within herself a hard knot of white anger; she did not know what this was. She did not know if it was herself, or if it was a thing she had made without thinking.
The use of magic, and the manipulation of the lights in the earth, was becoming instinctual to Ajalia. She was beginning to work with the lights without seeing exactly what she did. She saw now this knot of brilliant white, and it was like the sunlight she had gathered in an instant from the leaves of the trees in the forest, and yet she could not have said where this white sunlight had come from.
She thought that her body was beginning to work magic without her mind catching up to what she was doing. She thought about this for a few seconds, and the fact that she was still a little reluctant to admit the reality, and the extent of the magic, made her think that if she was angry enough to split herself into pieces, a spiritual and a
physical half, and that if she was upset enough to do this, it was also possible that she was angry enough to work magic without her own knowledge or consent. She felt as though she were becoming disparate pieces; one part of her was made up of her conscious mind, and she had thought, previous to this, that this conscious mind was her real self. Now, as she sat within the worm, and watched the knot of white sunlight growing brighter and more powerful, she found herself compelled to admit that there was another part of her, or perhaps, she reflected, more than one part. Apparently, Ajalia reflected, as she watched the knot of light grow brighter, and then spill outside the edges of her spirit body, she had powers that she had not acknowledged. She told herself, as the white light crept outwards, in a great shining orb, and as it touched against the inner edges of the black worm's skin, that if she would accept the fact of the magic, and, she told herself, if she would become willing to call herself the sky angel, she would be able to work this powerful magic with her conscious mind.
Curiosity got the better of Ajalia's reluctance, and she murmured to herself, "I am the sky angel."
She felt her lips moving, back in the dragon temple, but simultaneously, as she inhabited her spirit body, she felt the knot of light grow swiftly outward, until it was as large as her body. Heat and flashes of power radiated all throughout her muscles and bones; she felt as though she was growing a sun in her heart. Her whole body seemed to shimmer, her spirit body, she thought, and she thought then of her physical body which lay still on the floor of the dragon temple.
For a moment she doubted, and the great black worm gave a shiver, and the blue ocean shell that held the evil thing captive cracked. Ajalia heard the shattering crack, and she knew what it was. Rage crested up in her heart again, anger against all the injustices she had witnessed in her life.
