Wheel of the Infinite

by Martha Wells

  "None of that means anything."

  "And then Karuda saw the second Wheel."

  Mirak's expression didn't change.

  "Festival Eve, when you didn't give the banquet that you always give for the Equinox. He went to your palace quarters because he thought you should be there when we questioned Marada's servants. He didn't realize that you already knew all there was to know about them." Karuda had only caught a glimpse of the Wheel through a doorway, but it had been enough. In all the confusion that Marada's failure and the death of the body she had possessed must have caused, Mirak hadn't realized the noble had seen the Wheel at all, which was undoubtedly the only reason Karuda was still alive. It also explained how the creature that had tried to attack Maskelle in the palace had gotten in, and where Marada's other companions had hidden.

  Mirak's eyes changed, the dark opacity giving way to something raw and powerful. Something alien, like Marada. His lips moved in a slight smile, and he said, "You shouldn't have come alone."

  He grabbed her throat with snakelike quickness, his grip crushing. Maskelle didn't break eye contact, though she felt the last gasp of air leave her lungs and the pressure on her throat was terrifying. She wrapped her hand around his wrist and reached for the Marai's distant heartbeat. Unexpected strength surged up from it, laced with hot rage and predatory greed. It filled the room like oil poured into a bowl and the lamp flickered, the light taking on an unnatural cast. It was a spirit presence so strong that she felt its breath on the back of her neck. For an instant she thought it was something as alien as the thing that had taken Mirak's soul, something from this dying world, but it was in the bones of the Marai itself. The temple had no defense against it because it was part of it.

  Her hand tightened on Mirak's wrist and he released her, stumbling backward, catching himself awkwardly on the offering stone. Maskelle gasped a breath, managing to stay on her feet only because that power, familiar as her own, willed it.

  "I'm never alone," she said hoarsely, and heard the Adversary in her voice.

  Mirak looked up at her, and she saw in his eyes that he wasn't trapped, like Veran and the unfortunate villagers had been. He wasn't there anymore at all. "You used us!" he spat. "For what? Why? You destroyed your own world."

  Maskelle stared at him, horror growing in the pit of her stomach. He wasn't talking to her. He was talking to the Adversary.

  She was laughing at Mirak without conscious volition. The Adversary had never been much for chat with its prey.

  "Whatever it is, you can't succeed. If you try to stop us again, we'll destroy you," Mirak said desperately.

  The Adversary didn't understand threats; it either killed cleanly or it allowed the prey to live, there was nothing in between. She heard herself say, "You'll be dead."

  Mirak drew a shaking hand across his mouth; the thing inside him had been pretending to be human so long, the gestures came naturally to it. How long? Maskelle wondered. How long had Mirak been dead? Since Marada had come to Duvalpore and been introduced at Court? Or before, and it was actually the knowledge torn from Mirak's unwilling mind that had allowed her to pose as a noblewoman from Garekind. He said, "Is it another bargain? What do you want?" He tried another smile, albeit a desperate one. "You have us at a disadvantage. Ask for anything you want."

  He said a "bargain," Maskelle thought. The shock of it was almost too much. They made a bargain with the Adversary.

  "I don't need you to give me what I want," the Adversary said through her voice.

  Mirak's face worked, from rage to terror and back again. He surged to his feet, coming at her, just as something dropped through the window behind him.

  Maskelle flung herself back against the wall. It was Gisar, grown larger and more horrible, its mottled wooden flesh stretched to cover its new size. Mirak whirled around, faster than a man his age should be capable of, but Gisar was faster still. It ducked a wild blow and seized Mirak's head, snapping his neck.

  It stepped back and let the body drop. A cat with a vermin, Maskelle thought, watching it. A born predator, killing with stark efficiency and not a little glee at its own prowess.

  Mirak twitched, blood bubbling up past his lips, and impossibly managed to wrench his head around to look up at Gisar. "Destroy...you..." it gasped.

  "Try," Gisar said in its hollow wooden voice. It didn't laugh. Dead prey was dull.

  Mirak went limp. Gisar stood where it was, then suddenly wooden pieces were hitting the stone floor, the head, the arms and legs, the metal wires that held it together. It was ordinary painted wood, from a puppet only a few feet in height. Gisar as he had been, before the curse and the demon.

  Something else stood in its place. It looked like Rian, but Maskelle knew the Adversary by its eyes. In her voice, hoarse but her own once again, she said, "You brought us here." It was too raw a truth to understand. "You did this."

  "To destroy our enemy." It sounded pleased with itself. Maskelle shook her head, baffled and aghast. Had it thought it was doing the right thing? "You're not supposed to think. You're supposed to show the way."

  "This is the way."

  She couldn't fathom it. "You can't make those decisions for us. You're supposed to advise me and—"

  "You weren't there," it shouted at her, suddenly furious.

  "Why did you leave?"

  She stared at it, as it stood there quivering with rage. She said slowly, "You sent me away. I was cursed, because of the vision. The false vision. That you gave me." That you gave me. Ancestors, no wonder you wouldn't...couldn't talk to me. She had heard the whisper of their Voices, but never clearly. Had they tried to warn her? Had the Adversary prevented them, making sure she only knew what it wanted her to know?

  It blinked, the confusion crossing its face all too human. "When was this?"

  "When? You're not supposed to understand time." Her voice broke. It was too much to take in. The Adversary was insane. "What happened to you?"

  "I had to change. I have to change." It looked down at Gisar's pieces and nudged the wooden limbs with a boot. It frowned, biting its lip. "That didn't work out like it was supposed to."

  "What happened to you?" she repeated.

  It showed her. They knew the Adversary was not like the other Ancestors. It hadn't been born, lived, and died as a human before it melded with the Infinite. It was part of the world, possibly older than the world, an integral part of it.

  "All of it," it said, looking at her with familiar eyes. "Including Sakkara and the Aspian Straits."

  Her breath caught. She had told Rian the old story the day they arrived in the city, about the decision by the Voices to prevent the invasion from Sakkara by closing the Aspian Straits. "They changed the world, and it changed you," she said.

  It nodded, looking down at Gisar again. "Pieces."

  Maskelle turned away, leaned unsteadily against the wall. "Don't panic, not yet," she muttered.

  "All right," it agreed helpfully.

  "I was talking to myself." I am not going to scream. She looked back at it, trying to understand. "You bargained with them, told them you'd give them our world, helped them build the second Wheel. Why?"

  "I needed to be here." It looked around and she knew it was seeing through the walls of the temple, out at the city. "There's something I have to do here."

  It said "I." Had she ever heard it call itself "I" before?

  "I need to kill them," it added.

  It wasn't the concept she found horrifying, but the fact that it was the Adversary advocating it. "They're our enemies, but they're still people. You trapped them into this."

  "I need to kill them." The predator again, nothing else.

  "They are people," she insisted desperately.

  It paced toward her, braced one hand on the wall near her head, and leaned close. She could feel the anger radiating from it like heat. It said deliberately, "They aren't my people."

  Maskelle held its eyes, though it was an effort. "The Book of the Adversary says 'Those who ar
e pleased to hurt living beings are to be punished without mercy,'" she quoted. An expression flickered across its face, too quick to read. It said, "We remember." It stepped back from her slowly, then turned and walked away through the outer wall.

  Maskelle stood there, feeling cold, staring at the place where it had vanished. Karuda burst in suddenly, stopping abruptly when he saw Mirak's body. The Temple Master pushed in behind him and came to take her arm.

  Karuda looked at her, aghast. "We couldn't get in. There was a wall, invisible—"

  "It was the Adversary," the Temple Master said quietly. He shook his head and looked away. "It was the first time I'd ever felt it."

  Maskelle nodded. "It was in Gisar." She gripped his arm and straightened up, taking a deep breath. "Did the search parties come back yet?"

  Karuda shook himself slightly, looked at Mirak again. "All but one. Rian's."

  Maskelle swore and ran her hands through her hair. Rian found it. I knew he would. Damn it! "Keep everyone inside the Marai." She looked at the Temple Master. "Tell Vigar to give me until dark, then initiate the Rite. I'll destroy the second Wheel."

  "You know where it is?" Karuda stared at her. "How could you?"

  She nodded. "You told me." At his blank expression she explained, "This is still our world. The second Wheel was in Mirak's quarters at the palace. That's straight out the south gate of the Marai to the Baran Dir, then west. It's still there."

  Someone called out from down in the court. Maskelle stepped back out from the gallery and saw it was the nun Tiar. She waved her arms excitedly and called again, "Revered, the Celestial One is waking! He lives!"

  Maskelle pushed past a startled Karuda and the Temple Master and ran for the stairs. When she reached the room where the Celestial One had lain so quietly, she found most of the nuns dancing about in joy outside. She pulled the curtain aside and saw Mali kneeling by the old man, bathing his face with a cloth. Maskelle could see from here that he was breathing.

  She knelt beside him, thankful for this one thing. The old man's face was sallow and pinched, but he was alive.

  "Does this have something to do with...what happened up there?" the Temple Master asked her. He had followed her into the room, though Karuda had stayed outside.

  She nodded. "Oh, yes." The Adversary doesn’t need me to stay at the temple anymore, so it releases the Celestial One. It thinks its plans are too far advanced for me to stop. She buried her face in her hands, hoping the Temple Master would mistake it for a gesture of profound relief at the Celestial One's return.

  ***

  Karuda argued, but Maskelle insisted, and told him that the Adversary would not let anything happen to her. She didn't know if that was still true or not. There was nothing in the Koshan wisdom to say what happened when a spirit went mad. But she couldn't afford to bring anyone with her. Anyone outside the boundary of the Marai risked being left behind when their Rite was initiated. If the Adversary allowed them to initiate it at all.

  She set out from the south gate of the Marai, carrying nothing but her staff. Firac and Killia were the only ones to see her off, as all the Koshans were scrambling to prepare for the Rite. She didn't look back at their anxious faces as she wove her way through the protective barriers; she knew they were afraid for Rastim.

  Maskelle was afraid for all of them.

  The velvet purples and greys of the clouds were growing darker as she walked over the dusty stone in the shadows of the ruined city. She hoped she had judged the time right. The buildings rose high around her, blotting out much of the sky. The yawning entrances to some were dark, but there were others she could just catch glimpses of from between the dark grey mottled walls, lit by the dancing red-and-yellow light of those eternally burning fires. The dry air was unpleasantly sharp with the tang of smoke. She had left the Temple Master to explain to Raith about Mirak; she wasn't sure how he would take it. The truth was that the Adversary had killed a foreign creature from this world. Mirak himself had likely been dead for months.

  The path she followed wasn't a straight one. The line between the Marai and where the Baran Dir had stood was occasionally blocked by buildings, some of them very odd shapes indeed. She circled around one of the large bowl-shaped ones to find a tight group of five large circular pillars, stretching high up into the sky, all connected by open bridges, with what looked like balconies fringing the tops. It must have been a beautiful city once, strange and wonderful instead of strange and dead. They must have had art and philosophy and religion; how they had come to this, she couldn't understand.

  During the meditation rings, Koshans had to walk Kushor-At and Kushor-An's power pathways by counting paces. Not being able to follow a straight line made it awkward, but Maskelle only had to find the approximate location of the Baran Dir, not its exact boundary. She reached what she was sure was the right place, now occupied by a bowl-shaped depression in the stone lined with rows of stone benches or steps that must have once been a theater or some sort of assembly area, and turned west.

  From this angle Maskelle could see the top of a structure larger than the others, a dome with spires to either side of it. If she was judging the distance correctly, it was standing approximately where the Celestial Home should be. There were fires lit in the tops of those needlelike towers that glowed in the dusk, and she could see a haze of light around the dome, as though there were more fires burning below. She walked between the two low square buildings that blocked the rest of her view, and found herself standing at the top of a long avenue that led to the base of the dome. There were lit windows, bands of them, around the dome, and an open archway in the bottom that glowed from within. The building seemed to dominate this whole section of the city. Rian's group had gone to the south. They would have found this place. Well, that answers that question, she thought.

  ***

  Someone was lightly slapping his face. It didn't do anything for his headache. Without opening his eyes, Rian swung a fist by instinct, felt a connect and heard a yelp. The yelp sounded a lot like Rastim.

  Holding his aching head, Rian managed to sit up. Rastim was sprawled a few feet away, rubbing his jaw and glaring. The Ariaden muttered, "Well, thank you very much."

  Rian lifted his head. They were outside, on a stone surface set about a Kushorit house's height off the ground. Looming over them was one of the domed buildings from the city. But the stone was lighter in color and the windows were square and undamaged. He stared around, knowing it was impossible. The sky overhead was blue, cloudless. The air felt cool and dry. He had lost his siri, though he didn't suppose it would do him any good here. "How did..."

  "We're not actually here," Rastim said nervously. He looked around and took a deep breath. "When we fell, we were in a large chamber, with the floor all rubble, and a sort of cloudy mist hanging in the air. Then this started to happen."

  "It's an illusion." Rian rubbed his eyes. This actually made him feel a little better. At least he knew he wasn't crazy. "Did you keep track of which direction the door was in?"

  "Ah, no." Rastirn sighed and wiped dirt and sweat off his brow. "I thought I was, then things seemed to turn around and—" He shrugged, looking weary. "I'm not much use."

  Rian shook his head, instantly regretting it when a wave of nausea almost overcame him. He pressed his hands against his eyes until it subsided, then said, "No, they must have done that on purpose, to confuse you."

  "They." Rastim looked around again, his expression uneasy. "They're here, aren't they? All around us."

  Rian nodded. "They must be." He shifted to the edge to look down. He thought he could manage the drop without a broken leg, but he wasn't sure Rastim could. "Wait, you said when you first woke up we were in a room surrounded by rubble?" He tapped the stone of the platform. "Was this here?"

  "No, we were on the floor, such as it was." Rastim's worried expression turned thoughtful. "You mean, you think we can just walk out?"

  Rian looked down again. He had heard about illusions that killed you an
yway, even if they weren't real, but he didn't think they had any choice. "If we—"

  Rastim drew a startled breath, pointing at the other side of the platform. The air was thickening there, colors growing out of nothing, swirling into an almost familiar pattern. Rian passed a hand over his eyes, but the distortion in the air didn't vanish. "Uh-oh," he muttered.

  Rastim scrambled hastily back, moving as close to the edge as he dared. "It's one of them," he whispered. "Like those giant whirlwinds."

  Rian warily watched the thing. "I don't think so." The colors were the colors of the Wheel of the Infinite, brilliant and alive and constantly shifting. That was what was familiar; it made no sense at all, but his eyes insisted he saw the Wheel, though he couldn't pick out any individual shapes or symbols in the growing mass. Then the colors swirled into a pattern that resembled a face. The form coalesced suddenly and Rian swore and looked away, blinking hard. Rastim clapped a hand over his eyes.

  Rian tried to make himself look at it, but he couldn't. Impossibly, he knew what this thing was. It was the original of the demon faces carved above Kushorit doorways, the thing that lived in the killing birds that were one of its symbols.

  The words Don’t leave this place hung in the air, but Rian knew he didn't hear them spoken aloud.

  "It talked," Rastim whispered.

  "I know," Rian said through gritted teeth. "I think it's the Adversary."

  Images came then: the platform and death just beyond. The illusion was to confuse, to make them leave this protected spot, to expose them to the danger all around.

  "That's good, isn't it?" Rastim asked hopefully. When Rian didn't answer, he persisted, "It's warning us. That means it's here to help us, doesn't it?"

  Help us, or keep us alive long enough to be bait in a trap. Rian wasn't sure what had sparked that thought, but he knew it was his own, and not something from the creature confronting them. What was it doing here anyway, in the middle of their enemies? "Are you evil?" Rian asked it. Rastim gasped and elbowed him and Rian motioned him to be silent.