by Ann Maxwell
She reached for the veil’s pouring energies, calling them to her in a soundless cataract of demand and response. She burst into flame, streamers of gold and orange and white writhing as she fought to shape energies she had not been meant to touch. Dissonance ripped through her, shaking her to her core.
The fragile cages on the worry stones thinned almost to nonexistence as her energies were disrupted by contact with the veil. A gout of black gushed up her arms, akhenet lines swallowed in a freezing instant, her energy and life pouring into the black stones in her hands.
Her scream could not be heard above the mindless roar of fire. Energy ripped through her and sank into the stones. She was a living conduit, a flesh-and-bone connection burning between unliving veil and unknowable crystals. For an instant she writhed with the passage of energies that would have consumed anyone but a Senyas dancer; and if it lasted more than an instant, it would kill her, too.
She grabbed on to the tatters of her control, took the incoherent energies and hammered them into cages once again. The onslaught of absolute cold stopped immediately. In a reflex as old as her earliest dancer lessons, she threw away all the energy she did not need for caging the worry stones. She had just enough control left to aim the fire at the wall in front of her.
The wall vaporized. Through the gaping, smoking hole she saw the huge room where dazed worshipers stared at a crystal universe that grew more alien and more powerful with each moment.
Lights in the building blinked and died, though she was barely touching the veil now, only a tangential hold, enough to sustain a controlled dance. But the veil was like a living thing, slippery and changing, never the same twice. It cost nearly as much energy to use the veil carefully as it gave her for her dance.
The floor beneath her feet burned with each step, leaving smoking footprints behind her. She did not notice. Nor did she notice the wisps of ash that were the remains of her clothes drifting in her wake. She only sensed a vague relief as her akhenet lines burned bright and free, unfettered by irritating cloth.
The veil calmed, but she did not trust it. Its energies were as treacherous as the Ecstasy Stones waiting ahead. She used the veil only lightly, only when and as she must.
Coolness nudged behind her eyes, urging her attention and her body forward, to the place where the Stones waited, a bright island in a pale sea of faces. With each forward step, moans came from the worshipers, a sound so low it was more like wind than voices.
She turned aside, not for the moans but because she had seen her Bre’n towering over the worshipers to her left. The instant her path turned away from the Stones, the Ghost clawed at her eyes and whispered frantic negatives.
With a twitch of akhenet lines, she pulled a Ghost shield around her and went to Kirtn. She wanted to hold him, to flow against his hard body and match him flesh for flesh; but she saw the swirl of energy between her Bre’n and the Ecstasy Stones and knew that her touch would kill him.
Dancer fire licked out, tracing the bonds between Bre’n and Ecstasy. Fire raced like a whip uncoiling and snapped around a Stone. There was a high, crystal cry, cut off as she made a familiar cage around the Stone.
The Stones struck back, sucking energy out of their worshipers like a dancer taking power from a core. But cores were not alive. They could not scream and writhe and fall forward on dead faces.
She sent out another streamer of fire, surrounding a second Stone, cutting it off from the blinding brightness of the others. The worshipers groaned as the Stones demanded more. People crumbled to the floor like sand sculptures caught by a rising tide.
Kirtn staggered, torn between two kinds of fire. His raw agony was another kind of fire raging through her, tearing apart her mind and her dance. She knew there was no time left to sift cautiously through alien energies and trap Stones one at a time. Too slow. There were too many Stones and they were getting more powerful even as she danced.
They were killing her Bre’n.
(dark stones)
She looked at the entropy pooled blackly in her hands.
(bright stones)
She looked at the blinding crystal island built on the faces of the dead, Kirtn dying—
(now)
All her choices were gone.
She hurled the caged stones toward the glittering island. She had no hope of their going that far, but they flew from her hands as though called. In the instant before the stones fell on the island, she peeled off each golden cage, loosing the compressed blackness inside.
An endless downward spiral of ice and darkness sucked at her fire, at her mind, at her life. She reached for the chaotic veil energies with every bit of her dancer power. The veil came to her in one blazing instant. She burned savagely, screaming and twisting, consumed. With the last of her control she built a bridge of fire between herself and the alien island. Then she let hell rage through her, a blazing violence of veil energies that forced a melding of black and bright crystals.
Screams beat on her, human and crystalline alike; but she held, ignoring the fire consuming her, refusing to smell her own flesh burning, terrified that the zoolipt would not understand. It was her last gamble, her hope that the zoolipt would know that if she hesitated or turned aside now, she and everyone in the room would die as her parents had died, burned to ash and gone by savage fire.
The universe narrowed to a single arch of fire shaped by dancer imperative. Flesh smoldered between akhenet lines gone wild. Blood ran molten over hot bones. Too much heat, too much power, too much fire for a lone dancer to hold, but there was no choice, no other way but violence and the hot cinders of hope.
Blackness came, an endless rolling thunder, hot not cold. Black fire consuming her. She could not hold any longer but she must hold. She must. Hold.
Let it go, dancer. It’s over. Let the fire go.
Kirtn’s voice in her mind was a sweet, living river pouring through her, ecstasy that created rather than destroyed. She let go of everything, let her dance slide like time racing through cool fingers. . . .
He caught her as she fell to the burning floor.
XXIV
Fssa’s head, incandescent with the wild energies he had absorbed, hovered over Rheba. Her akhenet lines were hot. Lightning raced over them, echoing her speeding, erratic pulse. Her hair seethed and whipped, riding the violent currents of force that still roiled throughout the room. Her half-opened eyes were molten gold. She was barely conscious, still shuddering in the grip of the flames she had called.
“Is she all right?” asked Fssa, concern bright in his whistle.
Kirtn could not answer for a moment. He was holding her, letting the dissonant energies she had gathered drain through him. His flesh convulsed with alien currents. He braced himself and endured as Bre’ns had always endured, lightning rods for dancer energies. By the time most of her excess was spent, he was both appalled and humbled by the unruly forces she had called into herself.
When her akhenet lines no longer surged violently, he let out his breath in relief. The worst was over. Yet it would never really be over, not for him. Now he had one more nightmare to break his sleep; he would never forget the moment he woke from killing Ecstasy and saw his dancer burning out of control. He had tasted her death then, ice and ashes in his mouth. Even now he was afraid to believe she was alive. No dancer had ever burned as she had burned and survived.
“Is she all right?” demanded the snake again in shrill ascending notes.
“I think so,” whistled Kirtn, doubt, disbelief and hope rippling in his reply. His fingertips traced her akhenet lines. He was amazed by their number and complexity, the places new lines had ripped through hot flesh and old lines had thickened, deepened, branched and branched again, channeling fire in elegant arcs and whorls. There was no darkness in her new or old lines, no clotted convolutions where energy could pool murderously. She burned clean and bright beneath his hands.
But he kept smelling scorched fur, though she was no longer hot enough to burn him.
He muttered and ran his hands over his body, wondering where he was burning. He grabbed the Fssireeme coiled beneath his chin. He snatched back his fingers and sought a more gentle hold on the snake. If it were not for the zoolipt’s tireless presence, his neck would be cooked. “You’re too hot, snake,” said Kirtn, gingerly unwrapping Fssa and flipping him into the nearest patch of Rheba’s chaotic hair.
The snake made an embarrassed sound and slipped between the hot, silky strands. Balanced on energies only he understood, he slowly brought his body down to a temperature more compatible with his Fourth People friends.
Rheba’s head turned restlessly. Her eyes opened blind gold. She called Kirtn’s name as she had called it when she thought he was dead, when too much fire poured through her, consuming her. Then she felt his presence surrounding her. Despite the pain tearing her body, she wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in the warm hollow between his chin and shoulder.
“I thought—I thought—” Her arms tightened convulsively. She could not finish, but they were touching, their thoughts clear in each other’s mind.
She thought she had killed him with her uncontrolled fire, a dancer’s most terrible nightmare come true.
“The zoolipt,” she sighed, seeing his neck heal with each breath he took. And her own skin and bones, less painful every second. “It nearly killed me to take the veil all at once,” she said finally, explaining the currents of pain that still washed through her. “But I was afraid the zoolipt would stop me if I did it slowly. I outsmarted the zoolipt,” she said, smiling through lips that cracked and bled.
Zoolipt laughter, smug and warm, a taste like turquoise on her tongue. Instantly her lips felt better.
Kirtn smiled. “Did you? Or did you just teach it the dancer version of cooperation?”
“What’s that?” she said, licking her lips with a tender, tentative tongue.
“When all else fails,” he said dryly, “burn it to ash and gone.”
A flash of turquoise in her mouth, then the zoolipt curled back upon itself and sank into the tasty pool of her body, leaving behind a healing benediction. She groaned at the pure pleasure of breathing painlessly. At the moment she could forgive the zoolipt anything—even its inability to cure her of Itch.
“Are you happy now, Ghost?” she murmured.
Nothing answered, neither coolness nor itching, not even the sense of anticipation behind her eyes.
“Ghost?” said Kirtn, bending even closer. Her eyes were cinnamon and gold now, more beautiful than he had ever seen them.
She laughed softly, then coughed because her throat was not yet fully healed. “My mind isn’t burned out,” she said in a husky voice. “Itch is a Ghost.”
Kirtn’s slanted eyes narrowed. “A Ghost? A Fifth People?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“K’Masei told me. He’s not what we thought he was.” Her lips trembled. “I hope I didn’t kill him when I burned my way in here.”
“Tell me about your Ghost,” he said quickly, pulling her mind away from the man she might or might not have killed with her dance.
“It had some connection with the Ecstasy Stones, but I don’t know what it was.” She frowned. “Itch isn’t in my mind anymore. I must have done what it wanted.” She sighed and smiled, relieved that the Ghost’s histamine presence was gone. “Thank the Inmost Fire.”
The sound of familiar voices approached. “I told you,” said i’sNara. She leaned heavily against f’lTiri, but she was smiling. “Where there’s smoke there’s Rheba.”
“Are you all right?” asked Rheba slowly. “There was so much fire. . . .”
F’lTiri smiled and managed an illusion of strength. “We’re fine. Whatever you did to the Stones gave back most of what they had taken from us.”
Rheba pulled herself up in Kirtn’s lap and looked over his shoulder. Everywhere around the room, illusionists were slowly getting to their feet, helping their friends carry out the weak and the dead. There were fewer of the latter than she had expected—and more than she wanted to live with. As the Yhelles worked their way around the room, they avoided the scorched mirror table where Ecstasy Stones had been heaped in all their alien brilliance.
“I’m sorry . . .” she murmured, counting motionless bodies with lips that had been peeled raw by fire. Ecstasy had slain most of the dead illusionists, yet she feared she had killed some of them with her violent dance. She had not meant to, but they had died just the same.
I’sNara followed Rheba’s glance, understanding all that the fire dancer had not said. “They aren’t counting the dead,” said i’sNara, pointing to the illusionists who worked to put their world back in order. “They know they had Daemen’s own Luck just to survive the Stones.”
Two illusionists approached, followed by several children. Kirtn recognized Ara. She was holding hands with a man who had i’sNara’s lips and f’lTiri’s knowing eyes. Koro. The younger children ran forward and wrapped themselves around their parents.
Rheba was relieved to see that the children were alive—gaunt, scorched and grubby, but whole. After a few moments they crowded forward eagerly to peer at the furred, muscular man and the strange woman dressed only in radiant akhenet lines.
“Careful,” warned f’lTiri as his youngest reached toward Rheba’s bright hair. “You’ll burn yourself. She’s not an illusion.”
The child, a young girl, looked frankly skeptical. “Maybe. But then what’s that strange-looking thing in her hair?”
Fssa’s sensors wheeled at the child’s blunt question. He was used to Fourth People thinking of him as ugly. It still hurt, though. He retreated behind a curtain of flying hair, concealing himself from childish curiosity.
“Is Fssa all right?” asked Rheba, searching through her hair for the shy Fssireeme. “My dance didn’t hurt him?”
“He’s fine,” said Kirtn. “It would take a nova to light up his thick hide.”
Her fingers found Fssa’s supple body. “You’re beautiful, snake,” she whispered, knowing his vanity had been scraped by the girl’s question. “Even more beautiful than Rainbow,” she added when the snake still did not surface out of the depths of her hair.
Fssa’s head poked out as though to check her words against Rainbow’s multicolored reality. “It’s gone!” whistled Fssa shrilly.
Rheba stared at Kirtn’s chest. The Zaarain construct was no longer hanging around his neck. She felt Fssa begin the transformation that would let him probe the electromagnetic spectrum until he found his odd friend. She gritted her teeth in anticipation of the headache the snake’s search would cause.
“Where’s Rainbow?” she asked Kirtn quickly.
Kirtn looked down at his chest. Nothing decorated it but random patches of burned fur.
At the same instant, a terrible suspicion came to Kirtn and Rheba. As one, they looked toward the mirrored table where Ecstasy had held sway over a race of illusionists. The table was canted to one side. Some Stones were scattered randomly across the floor. Others had somehow managed to form a loose pile. In the center of that pile lay a double-stranded crystal necklace that flashed with every color Fourth People could see.
She shook Fssa out of his mushroom shape and pointed toward the pile of Ecstasy Stones.
“How did Rainbow get over there?” asked Fssa.
“I don’t know,” said Kirtn, pulling Rheba to her feet. He looked at her. “Do you want to know badly enough to have Fssa ask?”
“No,” she said curtly. “Even the thought of Fssireeme-Zaarain communication makes my skull shrink.”
Fssa twisted in silent protest, an act of astonishing restraint for the endlessly verbal snake.
Rheba walked up to the fallen Ecstasy Stones more confidently than Kirtn or the illusionists who followed her. Unlike them, she knew what the crystals had been and what they no longer were. Entropy had balanced ecstatic creation. The crystals were no longer dangerous—as long as the illusionists had the sense to keep t
hem separated.
She and Kirtn stood quietly, staring down at the pile of crystals. Minor good wishes emanated from the Stones, wan reflections of former Ecstasy. For the moment, the Stones were as drained as the humans. It was not the crystals, however, that worried Rheba.
“It’s bigger,” she said, her voice as grim as her flattened lips.
“What?” said Kirtn.
“Rainbow is bigger. That rapacious Zaarain construct has swiped some Ecstasy Stones.”
Kirtn frowned and wished he could deny it, but he could not. There was no doubt that Rainbow was bigger than it had been. There was also no doubt where the increase had come from.
“That’s the end,” said Rheba flatly. “It might have been a Zaarain library once, but all that’s left of it is a thief and ripping headaches for me. Rainbow doesn’t go back on board the Devalon.”
Fssa made a distressed sound. He whistled urgently from his hiding place in her hair. “A few Ecstasy Stones won’t hurt you. Rainbow has them fully tuned and integrated into itself. Nothing bad will happen. You only need to worry if you get too many Ecstasy Stones together. If we take some away, we’re doing the Yhelles a favor.”
Before she could speak, more arguments tumbled out of the Fssireeme’s many-mouthed body. “Rainbow doesn’t mean to hurt you. It’s just rebuilding itself, trying to remember its past. It gets so lonely with no one to talk to. I’m the only one who understands it. Please, dancer, please . . .?”
Fssa’s chorus of emotion-drenched Bre’n whistles defeated her. She groaned and gave in as she always had given in to the snake’s musical pleas for his odd friend. At least the silly Fssireeme had not fallen in love with a histamine Ghost.
She snatched up Rainbow and yanked it over Kirtn’s head. With small, musical sounds, the Zaarain construct settled itself on Kirtn’s chest.
“What about the rest of them?” said Kirtn, looking distrustfully at the remaining Stones. “They’re exhausted now, but—”
“Exactly,” said a voice from behind them.
Rheba spun around. “K’Masei! You’re alive!”
