This time it felt different from any previous visitation. She looked across at the sleeping form of her guardian Shee. Usrua would normally wake at the slightest noise, even a tiny change in the pattern of Mo’s breathing, but she slept on. Mo looked down at her hands, sensing their solidity as she lifted them to brush the skin of her face.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Yes.’
Mo hesitated: ‘Will Magtokk be accompanying me?’
‘I do.’
It was deeply reassuring to know that Magtokk would be with her.
‘No. I am ready.’
She had deliberately avoided discussing her previous journeys in advance with Alan or Kate. This time she wouldn’t even have the opportunity of explaining. She wondered if Alan in particular would disapprove. Alan didn’t want her to take any risks while he placed himself in huge danger and bore huge responsibilities all by himself. But she was no longer the ‘Little Mo’ who had arrived here on Tír those few, eventful years ago. She wasn’t some cosseted female who must be protected at all costs. She had been preparing for this journey since they had first arrived.
Mo climbed to her feet and dressed, as if she were preparing for an ordinary journey into the cold night air. She whispered: ‘Magtokk – are you here with me?’
‘I presume, from what I’ve been told, that we are returning to the labyrinth beneath the Valley of the Pyramids.’
‘Will we need Thesau?’
Mo gripped the Torus with both her hands. She closed her eyes tight. She felt a wave of communication flow around her, like the fluttering of silken wings.
It was the familiar voice – the voice that had addressed her when she had stood on the roof of the Comeragh Mountains, at the very beginning of the adventure. A magical voice, an enchantment . . .
She felt the song rise to her lips from the spirit being within her.
Mira sang, as she had sung that morning on the Comeraghs. There were no words to the song, just the melody of the enchantment. And already she was back, without even noticing the journey, in the Valley of the Pyramids. Only recently, when she had last come to this arid, unsettling valley with its haunted landscape of despoliation and its towers of skulls, she had allowed her fears to overwhelm her. Tonight she no longer feared it. She saw a glow rising like a mist of fireflies up out of the stony floor and recalled the wonder of its cause. She saw the wasp-goblins fluttering out of their stone-capped holes in the ground, their wings catching the starlight. She saw the proliferation of millions, perhaps billions, of glistening filaments, like silken threads, streaming out of the pyramids until they filled the entire valley floor.
She recalled Magtokk’s explanation from the last time she had come here: ‘The eye of the weave is woven from crystals of stardust.’
She looked down and saw, where one would expect shadows, that crystals cast shadows of glowing light on the ground. She remembered Magtokk’s explanation: ‘The weave of nets . . . designed to monitor the cosmos.’
‘Oh, Magtokk – it’s wonderful!’
Still, she welcomed his manifestation, the heavy arm that wrapped itself around her shoulders. His breath was soft against her ear: ‘It is time for you to embrace your destiny.’
‘What is my destiny?’
‘I cannot explain. You must discover it for yourself.’
Mo struggled to swallow the lump in her throat. The Torus was pulsing steadily, powerfully, as if something wonderful was about to happen. In anticipation, Mo wrapped both her hands around it, looking down at the pulses of light illuminating the cradle of her fingers. She couldn’t stop herself shivering in the cold. Her mind was full of black clots, wheeling and changing against a harsh white background. The Akkharu were calling out to one another – and to her.
Magtokk spoke, gently, into her ear: ‘Mind-to-mind from this point on.’
‘Mind-to-mind,’ she whispered back.
They drifted through the underground passageways and caverns, weightless. Crowds lined the byways eager to welcome her. The air was filled with the petals of blossoms and flowers like motes of pollen caught in a glade of sunlight.
Mira accepted showers of kisses on her hands and feet from a flock of tiny creatures that looked like the flower fairies. They were incredibly delicate, and their flesh was semi-transparent with a moiré sheen that made it look like silk.
Mira’s body, back in the tent, took a deep breath. She allowed the breath to drain from her, exhaling not merely from her lungs, but allowing her the resistance, born from her fears, to flow out through every organ and limb.
She felt her senses expand. Her mind delighted in the most intense curiosity, a need to know everything about everything, no matter how trivial as they drifted through the underground labyrinth.
She sensed, without needing to see it, Magtokk’s smile.
Mira noticed that the thoughts of the Akkharu flowed from one to another as they shared experiences.
Mira nodded.
Eternity: Mira held onto that word. She sensed the potency of it and the allusion to her fate.
She was learning, very rapidly, about the blind underground goblin-beings who called themselves the Myrrh. They buzzed by her, aware of, but nevertheless ignoring her presence. The Myrrh darted around in clusters; in groups that had shape and purpose that she now recognised, and with recognition, she understood: their purpose was to protect the Akkharu so the Akkharu could focus on creation. With the delicacy of a spider’s spinneret, the Akkharu wove the weightless crystals of chardizz into beautiful shapes and structures. Underground, the assembled shapes were constrained by their surroundings, but out there in the cool night air of the valley they floated, impervious to gravity, weightless. The skulls of the Myrrh were somewhat insectile in shape, but as large as a human baby’s. There were other wingless forms that were tall and angular, which Mira now understood to be the Myrrh females. They inhabited egg chambers. The flesh of the females was more delicate than the winged males, with distinctly different mouth parts that comprised both vertical and horizontal jaws. These chewed a pulpy mass into honeycombs in alternate bites. The etiolated females had smoky blue eyes. It was these females who cultivated the fungi underground in gloriously colourful mushroom gardens.
Right then, in the middle of satisfying her curiosity about the Myrrh, Mira was startled to discover that they were also telepath
ic. She listened to their conversations, which involved, for the most part, a communication of needs and urges, the organisation within a group mind. Then she discovered a commonality that startled her out of her reverie. They were communicating the direction and pace of a single invader, whose passage was noted and spread throughout the common mind. She discovered the name of the invader, and with it their name for her: Star Weaver.
He said:
Was this what she was doing? Was she a magician weaving a new spell?
How curious that she should be discovering more about herself by applying her new, insatiable curiosity about others.
The female Myrrh chewed on root fibres to make bedding and clothes for the young, which were incredibly ugly in their nakedness. They cannibalised their own dead. In this way all was recycled, the dead continuing to contribute to the living. In such an ungiving landscape nothing was wasted. The Myrrh saw the Akkharu as deities working amongst them. In the giant caverns they venerated grottoes of Akkharu skulls, thus the construction of the pyramids above ground was a religious instinct and a veneration.
Mira and Magtokk had descended into the deepest layers of the labyrinth, where the metamorphosing black clots filled one’s mind, and the Akkharu laboured over the chardizz crystals.
To Mira, the notion of a dream stealer was frightening. It reminded her of the ravenous monsters that had preyed upon them as they had approached the Witch’s Tower of Bones.
Magtokk’s words stunned her. These black crystals were linked right back to the forces of creation? How could this be true? How could they be so important?
She was entering the strange, enchanting cavern she likened to a hall of mirrors and she had the same impression of it that she had experienced on her last visit to the labyrinth: it was as if her spirit were passing through veil after veil of twinkling barriers, but this time, her senses were no longer clouded with fear. Mira realised that the barriers were stages of transformation; and it was she who was transforming. With every transformation, she felt increasingly powerful as she gained understanding that was profound, electrifying and disturbing at once.
Mo had to focus on what Magtokk was explaining. She remembered his caution: do not allow yourself to be overwhelmed.
Even with her eyes tightly closed, Mira was temporally blinded by the blaze of white light as they entered a new chamber, where the filaments all converged into a dome that blazed with light, like the surface of the sun.
Mo was giddy with excitement as she saw the starry beings who called themselves True Believers emerge from the blazing floor. They flowed into her, and yet again, just as she had encountered in the hall of mirrors, the communion felt strangely natural and empowering.
As her eyes and senses became more accustomed to the proximity of Dromenon, it no longer felt threatening or alien to her. She whirled around and around, examining the chamber’s vast stellate composition, its ceiling of intricate cones through which the weave rose towards the valley floor.
Mira heard the song of the Akkharu, and the blueprint of the song took shape from the metamorphosing black shapes. As if taken up in a dance of magic, the Akkharu began to shape gossamer structures from the crystals with their elongated teeth and claws. On and on they spun the magical weave, so the filaments soared all around them until she and Magtokk found themselves at the centre within a bubble of filaments. This coalesced with other bubbles until a glistening spindle shape was made. The spindle established contact with the meniscus of Dromenon and then it began to move through it, trailing a passage of light that was still connected to the filaments of stardust covering the valley floor.
The girl Mo had not been ready for it then: but the new woman, Mira, was ready for it now.
Mira thrilled with the wonder of it.
She heard a song – a very beautiful song. She realised that it was her own song, but it was being returned to her on the lips of something that could not be human. It was that same voice that had called her on the summit of the mountain. She heard its enchanted whisper beckon her, mind-to-mind . . .
Looming Questions
‘I beg the counsel of my
Lord and Master.’ The Preceptress’ face was a mask of agitation, her voice drowned out by another thunderous cannonade from the massed fleet, which had mysteriously recovered from the earlier oceanic conflagration. ‘I beg and beg and yet He ignores my pleas.’
Snakoil Kawkaw bowed to hide his sneer. How soothing to witness her disarray, her dress rent from her agitation, her dirt-encrusted feet bare. Now, in the moment his ears were still ringing from the thunder of the cannons, he took comfort in the thought that her desperation might imply a golden opportunity for him.
‘His venerated city is burning. Doesn’t He care that the situation has become desperate – grievous!’ she said.
‘A dreadful dilemma, indeed, beloved Mistress.’
She whirled in a fury. ‘Would you mock me?’
‘Would I be so devoid of pity?’
‘Pity? Is pity what you would offer me, you snivelling cur? When I can see how gleeful you are at my despair.’
‘Noble Lady—’
‘Shut your snout, you stinking bear.’
He had to bury a wide grin – a toothsome bear grin – by looking at the floor. ‘Perhaps I should go back out? See if I can find some useful morsel of information?’
‘So you can gloat over the appalling spectacle of the ruined city? Is that your perfidious intention?’
He didn’t need to lift his gaze to know that she would be caressing her dagger – hoping for a sign. Oh, sweet fate! Kawkaw was attuned to his new opportunity.
‘Go on! Get out of here! Take your rancorous stink out of my nostrils, you loathsome fish gutter.’
He threw on his sealskin, and slipped a dagger into the deep pocket under his surviving left arm. But even as he slouched out through the entrance slit, her contempt trailed him into the din of battle.
‘You scum! When my Master wins this war, as He most assuredly will, He will cleanse this world of you fish gutters.’ Even as she spoke, the Preceptress’ face changed. Her lips twisted into a scowl of pleasure as if she were savouring this picture.
What had changed? Had she received a message from her master? He couldn’t help but notice how her left hand – the hand that held the dagger – was trembling. But was it trembling with panic or excitement?
The Return of the Arinn Page 31
