Wheel of the Infinite

by Martha Wells

  Rian stared hard. The shadows had seemed to ripple, as if something moved out there, not far beyond where the priest's barrier lay.

  He took a few cautious steps forward until he met the barrier. After hearing Maskelle's description of it, he had expected a solid invisible wall, but it wasn't that simple. It didn't feel different at all, it was simply a place that it was impossible to walk through unless you followed the directions of the priests. Experimenting with it earlier, he had discovered that if you pushed on it long enough it would start to push you back, but it didn't hurt you. He stopped there, leaning on it, trying to listen for the slight sounds the wind might cover and make shapes out of the darkness.

  "...this way..."

  Rian stepped back, flattening himself down against the stone by instinct though surely whoever was out here couldn't see him either. Catching only snatches of words over the wind, he could tell the voice was a man's, the words Kushorit, but he couldn't recognize the speaker. He heard what might be a reply, garbled by the wind.

  He crept slowly along the wall toward the source of the voices, putting one foot in front of the other with utmost caution. There was no way to tell if the speakers were inside the barrier or out. They could be from the Marai, braver than their fellows and willing to investigate the outside world in the pitch dark, or even a couple of priests performing some sort of task necessary for the barrier, but somehow Rian didn't think so.

  He froze, hearing a clumping sound like heavy footsteps. He thought he could see movement in the darkness, but it was too jerky, too strangely angular. Whatever was out there, it wasn't human. It couldn't be Gisar either; for all that the puppet looked like an abomination, it moved lightly and naturally. And this thing doesn’t jangle, Rian thought. He started forward again.

  He heard a scrabbling, as if clumsy feet tried to find purchase on the dirt and rock along the base of the wall. It's inside the barrier, he realized with a shock, and pushed forward.

  Six paces along the wall he ran into something heavy and sharp-edged, like a man wearing lacquered armor. It was halfway up the wall and he grabbed it, throwing his weight back to haul it down.

  It was strong and clung like a monkey. He clawed at it, trying to find a head or a neck or any other vulnerable spot to injure, but it was armored all over and he couldn't find anything that felt like flesh. It batted at him, then suddenly twisted and kicked, sending him sprawling backward.

  Blinding light suddenly blossomed over the plain. Rian flung up an arm to shield his face, scrambling back against the Marai's wall.

  Spots flared before his eyes, but he made himself look. The light was coming from two swirling clouds that hovered above the ground on the other side of the barrier. They gave off a pearly, iridescent illumination that lit up the plain and cast the low wall into high relief.

  It looked like their hosts had finally come to call. One of the whirlwinds moved forward, and in instinctive fear Rian pushed himself away from it until he felt the wall press into his back. But it stopped abruptly. He watched it try to press forward again, and again it failed. The barrier was holding.

  The two whirlwinds began to move parallel to it, toward the front of the Marai and the corner solar tower. Eddies of that strange phosphorescence broke free with the motion, drifting down to lay in puddles against the stone.

  He remembered the armored thing that had tried to climb the wall and looked wildly for it. It was gone.

  The whirlwinds are a distraction, Rian realized suddenly. So the thing that got in... He pushed away from the wall and ran along it toward the gate, past the glowing clouds. He catapulted himself up the steps and inside so quickly one of the Kushorit guards on sentry there almost took his head off with a bori club and Rastim leapt back with a short hysterical yelp.

  "Sorry," Rian muttered. Leaving the guards staring in alarm at the whirlwinds, he grabbed Rastim's arm and dragged him toward the temple. "What now?" the Ariaden gasped. "What are they? Something to do with Gisar?"

  "Gisar is the least of our problems," Rian told him, breaking into a run once he was sure Rastim was following. "Tell Karuda to meet me where Maskelle is. Something's gotten inside," he called back to him.

  He heard Rastim moan, "Oh, I didn't want to hear that."

  ***

  Sitting in meditative silence in the quiet dimness of the little room they had made for the Celestial One, Maskelle thought she heard someone call her name. She opened her eyes.

  The makeshift curtain over the archway was still closed, the dust caught in the folds undisturbed. The nun who was helping to watch over the old man lay curled asleep in her robe in the corner. Old Mali sat back against the wall, drowsing, but surely close enough to wakefulness to hear someone speak just outside.

  Maskelle looked thoughtfully at the Celestial One's unconscious form, hope stirring. Then she heard it again.

  She came to her feet. This time she recognized the voice. She stepped to the door curtain and drew it back. One lamp burned low in the gallery outside. By its wan light she could see Killia and Doria asleep by the wall, and three of the temple servants on the other side. She could hear nothing but their quiet breathing. Nothing. Not even the priests' chanting. The air felt dead and still, without a whisper of breeze.

  Hah, she thought, lifting a brow. A barrier of power surrounded them, isolating this little part of the temple from the rest of the world. Finally, the attack she had anticipated. At least it was something she could get her teeth into; faceless, formless enemies were impossible to fight.

  Leaving the Celestial One's side would be folly. She stepped back from the doorway to the center of the room. Making her voice mildly inquiring, she said, "Who are you?"

  Old Mali and the nun didn't stir, and she knew something must be keeping them unconscious. Then the curtain stirred and lifted and Maskelle took an involuntary step back.

  It was Marada. She wore court finery, a gold-shot silk robe and pearls braided into her hair. Maskelle knew what ghosts looked like and this wasn't one, but the colors of her costume, her features, seemed just slightly blurred. So it was only the host body Maskelle's bird spirit had killed; Marada, whatever she was, had survived. Keeping her voice mild, Maskelle said, "Marada, how kind of you to visit."

  "I told you that you couldn't stop us." Wearing her odd stiff smile, she stepped further into the room.

  Maskelle reached for the Adversary and felt nothing. It had picked a fine time to desert her.

  Somehow Marada sensed it. She said, "Your spirits can't help you here."

  Maskelle fell back a step, felt her foot knock against the white stone ball where it lay near the Celestial One's pallet. That had been the focus for Marada's power, though the lack of it hadn't seem to hurt her. It was the only weapon Maskelle had. "How did you get here? Did the second Wheel bring you, or did you travel here on your own? You must be capable of it; it's how you got to our world in the first place, isn't it?"

  "I didn't come to answer your questions." Marada flexed her hands and Maskelle remembered the spirit-creature that had strangled Igarin.

  "Let me guess, you came to kill me?"

  Irony touched Marada's opaque eyes. "How did you know?" Maskelle picked up the stone ball. "Are you sure you didn't come for this?"

  Marada's expression didn't change. "That can do nothing to stop me."

  Maskelle tested the weight of it in her hand. "Really?" She took a step forward and swung it at Marada.

  Marada fell back, throwing up an arm to defend herself, but the stone glanced off her head. Maskelle felt her arm jar with the impact. More proof the woman's form was an illusion; whatever Maskelle had struck had been more solid than flesh and possessed of sharp edges.

  Marada shoved her back, sending Maskelle crashing into the wall. She fell and rolled away, her shoulder aching from the force of the impact. She grabbed up the stone again. Marada started forward, reaching for her, and Maskelle leaned back to throw the stone.

  Just before she threw it, she felt the Adver
sary's power touch her. Lightly, as if it wanted to remain unobtrusive. She channeled the force of it into the stone and let it go.

  The stone struck Marada's chest and seemed to pass through her body, striking the wall behind her. Bouncing off the wall with a heavy thump, taking a chunk out of the Temple Dancer carved there, it fell to smash against the floor. Old Mali and the nun sat bolt upright with cries of alarm.

  Maskelle looked up in time to see Marada's form waver and collapse in on itself. She started back as a number of other objects struck the floor with thumps and crashes.

  The nun stared and Old Mali cursed. Maskelle told them, "We were invaded." She edged forward to examine the debris.

  It was nothing but trash: fragments of flat building stones, rocks, shattered remnants of smooth dark-colored pottery. Litter, from that wreck of a city out on the plain, swept together to form a temporary shell for Marada's spirit. Did the woman—if she was a woman—ever have a body of her own? Maskelle wondered. Or was she dead and her spirit lingering, seizing whatever form was available when she needed to be corporeal? Perhaps that was why Maskelle had sensed death in this place. There were still people here, life of a sort, but they were dead, only their spirits left behind.

  Sound from outside washed over her like a wave as whatever barrier Marada had placed around the room faded away with her death. Maskelle heard the low murmur of chanting and a babble of frightened voices, then Rian burst through the curtain, stopping abruptly when he saw the collection of debris on the floor.

  "Marada," she told him. She lifted a twisted piece of the strange blue-tinged metal. "Her spirit was using this mess, working it like that demon worked Gisar."

  Rian looked over the odd fragments, dismissed them with an annoyed shake of his head. He said, "Gisar got out. It led me straight to the place where this thing got through the barrier. And there's something else—"

  Karuda shouldered his way through the others outside, casting a puzzled glance down at Marada's remnants as he pushed his way in. "You'd better come," he told Maskelle, looking a little startled at being inside the enemy's headquarters. "There's something outside."

  ***

  Maskelle made it to the first solar tower and careened up the stairs, Rian and Karuda beside her. She was breathing hard when she reached the top and pushed past a group of guards to see the Temple Master, Mirak, and the Celestial Emperor standing on the gallery, looking out toward the captive whirlwinds that hovered just on the other side of the barrier. A furious wind tore at their clothes and hair, keening among the openings in the tower above them. Past them she could see movement in the deep well of shadow on the plain.

  At first she thought it was people, a large number of them, moving out there in the dark beyond the wall. But the movement was abrupt and inhuman. More of them, she thought. Creatures—constructions, perhaps, like Marada had been.

  She stepped forward and leaned on the balustrade, reaching for the Adversary. It was slow to respond, and she prayed it wasn't losing whatever hold kept it here with them. It was their only hope.

  "Are they people?" the Temple Master whispered.

  "No," Maskelle said, almost as softly. "They can get past the barrier. One already did."

  Raith was staring at her. He turned back to look out at the dark. "They must know we mean to destroy their Wheel," he muttered.

  "A traitor," Mirak said grimly. "We know the creatures can take human shape, imprison human souls. There's one here, with us."

  Maskelle shook her head, frowning. Something wrong there. "Gisar, the demon has escaped. It's too much of a coincidence. It could have warned them." She saw Rian's sharp glance, but he said nothing. If by some trick of the Ancestors, Gisar was helping them, she didn't want to reveal it just yet.

  "How?" Mirak asked sharply.

  Raith spared a moment to give the Chancellor an annoyed look. "The same way a human traitor would have."

  Maskelle stopped listening to them. She could feel the Adversary's presence now, hear its voice in her head though the words came too quickly to follow. She closed her eyes and felt it fill the space around her. Whatever those creatures were, they had been dead a long time. She felt a flash of contempt, bitter and hot, and wondered where it came from. Not from the Adversary, surely. She must have felt the emotion herself, and it was reflecting back to her from their tenuous connection to the Infinite.

  She blinked and opened her eyes. She was sitting on the floor of the gallery, Rian supporting her. The Temple Master knelt in front of her, chafing her wrists. The Throne, Mirak, and the guards had left. The night was silent again; the howl of the whirlwinds and the creatures on the plain were gone. "What..."

  "It's all right," the Temple Master told her. He didn't look as if it was all right. He looked as if he had seen something that had horrified him.

  Rian helped her to her feet and she looked for the creatures. The whirlwinds had vanished, and there was no more movement out past the wall. She said, "They left?"

  "They died," Rian told her. As she steadied herself on the balustrade, he pointed. She squinted, trying to see, and finally made out still shapes lying on the stone.

  "The Adversary?" the Temple Master asked.

  Maskelle nodded weakly.

  "I didn't know it could do that," Rian said, sounding impressed.

  Chapter Fifteen

  As soon as the cavelike darkness began to lighten to grey, Maskelle went to the south gate in the outer wall and through the barrier with Rian and Rastim. After the attack last night, the priests had altered their chant slightly, just enough to change two vital steps of the path through the barrier. It would be changed again tonight, as darkness fell, and again every night they spent here.

  The sentries on the gate watched them curiously, the older one pointing out to Rian that they couldn't cover them while they were outside the barrier. Maskelle didn't think that would be a problem; their opponents had shown no inclination to attack during the day.

  The sky was still heavily clouded, but the air was warmer and smelled faintly of smoke. Despite the dimness of the morning light she could already see that the dark plumes over the distant mountains were larger.

  The bodies of the creatures who had tried to attack still littered the ground outside the wall, but as Rian kicked one over Maskelle saw that, like Marada's remnants, they weren't bodies at all. Rocks, fragments of carved stone, smashed pieces of dark-colored pottery clung together in a roughly man-shaped form. It didn't seem to have a head, but then Maskelle supposed whoever had created it hadn't thought the creature needed one.

  Rastim stared. "That's all that's left?"

  Maskelle shook her head slightly. "That's all there ever was."

  "Something just put them together out of whatever was lying around and sent them after us?" Rastim said in wonder, looking around at the debris. "Like puppets." He shivered in disgust. He was taking Gisar's activities very much to heart, and seemed to think that he and the other Ariaden were somehow responsible for the trouble it was causing. Maskelle didn't have the time to sit down and convince him it wasn't true, that no one could have anticipated any of this, especially not the bizarre change in Gisar's demon.

  Even the Adversary hadn't been able to warn her; at least, not in a way she could understand.

  "Like that armor in the Palace," Rian said, poking at the remains of the creature again. He sat on his heels to turn the pieces over. "Like Gisar. Or what it changed Gisar into."

  Maskelle pushed her hair back and let her breath out wearily. Her skin was gritty with the wind-blown dust. "It would help if we knew if it led you to the spot where Marada was coming through the barrier by accident or design. And how Marada learned the way through at all." Gisar had been seen throughout the night in the outer court and the third gallery, sometimes as close as the lower level of the second gallery. It had hurt no one so far, only appearing long enough to make people chase it. Maskelle had been awake all night, bracing for a possible second attack from outside and trying to get
the Adversary's help to track down their resident demon, but the Infinite had been unresponsive. Rian looked weary too; she knew he had gotten only an hour or so of sleep, sitting up against the wall outside the room where the Celestial One lay. He was as determined to catch Gisar as she was.

  "I'm sure I heard another voice," he said. He shook his head, still staring down at the litter, though she could tell his thoughts weren't on it. "I think she knew the way through because someone told her. Which means they know our plans."

  Maskelle nodded grimly. They were still going to send out the search parties. There was nothing else they could do.

  Rastim had moved over to the other heaps of debris that lay nearby, picking through the remains. Maskelle saw Karuda and a few guardsmen come out of the gate, make their way through the barrier, and stare around at the "bodies" of the creatures.

  Rian got to his feet and absently rubbed his hands on his pants. "You can't go out with a search party," he told Maskelle.

  Rastim looked up, his expression intent. Maskelle stared from one man to the other. "Oh, so you two decided this?"

  Rastim scratched his head and looked away. Rian sighed and stared up at the dark cloudy sky. "Yes, that's it. While we were tearing the place apart looking for a demon puppet, we've been plotting against you."

  She rubbed her forehead tiredly. "That's not exactly what I meant."

  "You can't go with us. All the priests are keeping the barrier up. If Gisar goes after the Voices, or the Celestial One, or the Wheel—"

  "I know," she said sharply. "I know."

  "I'm going," Rastim said conversationally. He stood, looking off at the buildings to the south, their spires and domes wreathed in mist. "Which direction are we taking? I think—"

  Rian stared at him. "Who are you talking to?"

  Ignoring that, Maskelle asked the Ariaden, "Are you sure you want to do this?"

  Rastim tucked his thumbs in his belt uneasily. "I talked it over with the others and we're all going out, except for Mali and the girls." He told Rian, "I'm going with you." With a shrug he added, "It stands to reason. We're not needed here. And we want to pull our weight. Especially after the...Gisar incident."