Tides of Darkness

by Judith Tarr

He must not let it crush him. “And you?” he asked Kaptah. “Can you hold on?”

  The priest spread his hands. “Have I a choice?”

  “Keep this place in your heart,” Daros said. “It will strengthen you when nothing else will.”

  Kaptah bowed.

  “Light is strength,” Daros said to them all. “The enemy has a horror of it, is even destroyed by it. In light you can take refuge.”

  “Sometimes I think I’ll forget what light even is,” Nefret said. “We can’t last very long, my lord. This place is too alien to anything we know, except the darkest of dark dreams. If we had a plan—anything to do except wait for the rest of your gods—it would help immensely.”

  “I had thought of that,” Daros said. “You keep the bond with Kaptah—don’t lose it. You others, explore as you can; if you can discover the secrets of this place, we may be able to use them.”

  “And you?” she asked.

  “I will penetrate the lords’ towers, and learn what I can. There may be a way—did you notice the other slaves? Some are warriors. And some, who are closest to the lords, have will, or something like it. If I can find my way among them, gain their trust, learn their secrets—”

  “Alone?”

  “Until my brother mages come,” Daros said, “yes. It won’t be long now.”

  “And then?”

  She was asking all the hard questions. “Then we bring light to the dark land,” he answered her.

  She did not ask him how. Maybe she had had enough of questions.

  Anger made her stronger. Anything that did that, Daros reckoned was worth the price.

  The sixth night promised to be no better than the rest. His magelings gathered in the place of brightness as they had done every night. They fed on sunlight and spoke of small things, things that had nothing to do with the dark world.

  Daros left them to it. He had tried, the past few nights, to dreamwalk into Merian’s presence, but the shadow on this world was too strong. This was the heart of it. It was born in this place, and rolled forth in waves to drown the worlds.

  Khafre and Menkare had explored the citadel as best they could. They had found a warren of guardrooms and slaves’ quarters, and a maze of deep storerooms under armed guard, and stables for the scaled beasts. They had come across nothing of great use. The armories were heavily guarded. The troops in training either fought with blunted or feigned weapons, or performed their exercises under heavy guard and surrendered those weapons when they were done, to be locked away in the armories.

  Daros had yet to penetrate the defenses of the lords’ towers. There were wards as well as guards. Both were vigilant. Once he came close to slipping in behind a lord who was coming out, but the lord’s guards closed in too quickly. Daros barely escaped into a side passage before he was caught.

  That night, the sixth night, he left his magelings to rest in their illusion of light, and went dreamwalking, however futile it might be. The beacon he had set in the Gate was still there; no one had found it, nor had the mages passed it. Time that passed so differently from world to world was not serving him now. Even with the expedients that he had given them, his magelings could not hold for much longer.

  The ways of dream were dark and strange. He wandered through dim and twisting corridors, across landscapes of torment, through a chamber of echoes and weird howling. He dared not venture too far: he could lose his waking self in the darkness, and never return to his body.

  Just before he would have turned back, the faintest of grey glimmers caught the corner of his eye. He drifted toward it. It grew no brighter, but it grew larger. In a little while he saw the Mage’s prison. It was the same as he remembered, round like one of the towers of the dark citadel, and each of its many windows a Gate, but the Mage could pass through none of them.

  Daros stepped through one of the windows onto the dark stone floor. The feather on his breast stirred. It drew him toward the shadowed center.

  The Mage lay there. Its eyes were open, but perhaps they could not close. Its long strange body seemed to have fallen in on itself. Bonds of shadow confined it; it breathed shallowly, its lipless mouth open.

  It was conscious, but that consciousness had retreated far within. Its power raged and surged, bound as it was, compelled by a will outside of its own.

  That will led back in direct line from the prison to the citadel in which Daros’ body lay. It stretched like a cord across the roads of dream, to one of the towers of the citadel, the highest and grimmest and most heavily guarded of them all.

  Because Daros was in dream and not in flesh, he could swim along that cord as if the dark had been water and not lightless air. It undulated a little in the currents of worlds; magic pulsed through it, seeping into him, making him subtly stronger.

  It slid through a high slitted window of the tower. Windows, thought Daros, in that place without light: everywhere else in the citadel were shafts to let in air, but no windows. Only here.

  He made himself as invisible as he could, mingling his awareness with that of the Mage and letting the cord draw him through the window into …

  Light?

  It was dim. In any world lit by a sun, it would have been the deepest of twilight. But here it was dazzlingly bright. It bathed the body of a man who sat upright in a tall chair. The room about him was full of a myriad things: a great thick-legged table, smaller chairs, stools, boxes and shelves and bins of books in numerous shapes and forms—startling in the dark; proof indeed that these lords could see. Directly in front of the man, on the table, whirred and spun a thing of metal.

  The light came from this, and so did the darkness. It spun them both out of the cord that came from the Mage. The light dissipated here. The darkness spread. Some of it streamed back down the cord to bind the Mage ever more tightly. The rest spread like black water through all the worlds.

  The man looked like the other lords that Daros had seen. He was older, perhaps; his beard was shot with white. He had an air about him that Daros had seen in men of great power: the surety that when he commanded, men obeyed.

  As Daros drifted, insubstantial, in the air, another man entered the room. He shielded his eyes with a dark cloth, which concealed most of his face, but he also was of the kin and kind of the lords of this citadel.

  The man in the chair rose. The spinning thing faltered. The other man slid into the chair, and the whirring resumed, spinning darkness, dissipating light.

  Daros followed the first man as he made his way slowly, stumbling with weariness, out of that enigmatic place. He recovered a little strength as he went. His steps steadied; his shoulders straightened. He descended a long stair with no nobler purpose, maybe, than to find a bed and fall into it.

  But when he reached the landing, a man met him. “Trouble?” said the lord from the tower.

  “Yes,” said the other.

  The first man sighed gustily. “Lead me,” he said.

  Daros knew that hall. He had seen it before, where the dark lords gathered. There were only three there now, waiting for the lord from the tower. A small figure knelt before them.

  Daros nearly shocked himself out of the dream. It was Kaptah. He had been stripped of the dark robe that all slaves wore. There were bruises on his body, and his eyes were blackened and swollen—he still had them, for what good they would do in the dark.

  The lord from the tower circled him slowly. He was tightly bound, his arms drawn cruelly behind his back, and his spine arched just short of breaking. He could not move, but he managed to radiate defiance.

  “He was found among the least of the slaves,” one of the lords said, “caught wandering apart from his company, spying near the storehouses in the city of the newest slaves.”

  The lord from the tower brushed a hand over Kaptah’s eyes. “He has not been rendered fit to serve us. How is that? Who allowed it?”

  “He was found,” the other replied. “He came in from one of the worlds that we harvest. The rest who came with him are as fit as a
ny other. It’s only this one.”

  “Make him fit,” said the lord from the tower, “and then feed him to the nightwalkers. Unless there is a reason why you trouble me with this?”

  “There is a reason,” said one of the two who had been silent. He aimed a blow at Kaptah’s head.

  Kaptah did not mean to respond as he did: Daros could see that. But his shields had been wrought too well. The blow did not strike flesh. There was a flash of sudden light and a sharp scent of lightning. The lords recoiled. Kaptah’s captors were less dismayed than the lord from the tower, and swifter to cover their eyes.

  The lord from the tower hissed. His eyes had squeezed shut; tears of pain ran down his cheeks. “Another one of those? But that world is free of them. We were assured of that.”

  “It seems the assurances were false,” said the man who had struck Kaptah. His face was tight with pain; his hand trembled in spasms.

  “Pity,” said the lord from the tower. “That world was useful. Now we have no choice but to offer it in sacrifice to the dark, and find another both rich and untainted.”

  “That … is another matter,” said the man who had struck Kaptah. “Our advance has halted.”

  The lord from the tower rounded on him. “It has done what?”

  “We are halted,” the other said with a goodly degree of courage.

  “And how may that be?”

  “There is a world,” the first of Kaptah’s captors said. “All Gates lead there—even those we would divert elsewhere, when we pass through them, we find ourselves there. It’s foul with lightmagic; reeks of it. Our warriors need cleansing after every raid.”

  “Then,” said the lord from the tower with a snap of impatience, “why have you not destroyed it?”

  “We can’t,” said the lord who had struck Kaptah. “We have tried. It’s walled and guarded. We can pierce it; strip storehouses, take slaves. But no Gate will open beyond it.”

  “Maybe it’s the end,” said the first lord: “the last world, the world that the gods will take, and so swallow all that is.”

  “It is not,” the lord from the tower said. “That end is still far away. I have a suspicion …” But he did not go on. He bent over Kaptah. Quite without warning, and quite without mercy, he snapped the priest’s neck.

  Kaptah’s shields had risen, but not fast enough. They crackled about the lord’s hands. He hissed but held his ground. Kaptah dropped, limp. He was dead before he struck the floor.

  “Watch for others like this one,” the lord said. “Destroy them when you find them. As for this other trouble, let me rest a little. Then call the conclave.”

  The other three bowed. Two of them took up Kaptah’s body to dispose of it. The third ran the errand that the greater lord had commanded of him.

  Daros hung in the air of that hall, with no more substance to him than if he had been air itself. He had had no strength, no capacity to act, when the third of his magelings died through his fault—because he had brought them here, and they were not strong enough, and so they broke and were betrayed. Only three were left, and no sign of the mages from his own world.

  He saw the darkness beneath him, the depths of despair. The light he had given his magelings was not enough. He was a greater mage than any of them, and because of that, his weakness as well as his strength was greater.

  He could not be weak now. He could not falter even in the slightest. These men without magic somehow had mastered a greater working than any mages of any world had ever ventured.

  It was something to do with the thing of metal and glass that spun light and dark, and the lord who called this conclave. The Mage was a key, but there was more. He must know more. He must—

  “My lord. My lord Re-Horus!”

  Daros plummeted into his body. Shapes were stirring about him, slaves rising, shuffling toward the dining-hall. The guards were watching—more closely than before? He could not tell.

  Menkare caught his eye. There were questions there, a myriad of them, but none of them could escape, not now. Daros looked away—guiltily, he supposed.

  Far above them in the tower, the conclave was coming together. Daros had to be there. Somehow, if he could find a corner to hide in, he must dreamwalk again. Or—

  He was to labor in the kitchens this lightless day, in the drudgery of grinding grain and baking bread. As soon as he could, he found occasion to be sent to the storerooms for another basket of grain. But when he left the kitchens, he went not down but up.

  He risked much—too much, maybe. But he could not stop himself. He must know what was said in conclave.

  The Mage’s feather stirred under his robe. It was whispering, speaking words he could almost understand. He closed his hand about it. It tugged, drawing him onward.

  He was mad enough, and desperate enough, to do as it bade him. He was less than a shadow, no more than a shifting of air in those silent halls. He passed as he had in dream, but his body was solid about his consciousness. The well of his magery was deep, and brimming full.

  It was the Mage leading him, taking him by ways he had not gone before, deep into the citadel. First he went down, into deserted passages and dusty stairs; then he began to ascend. The way was long, the darkness suffocating. Mage-sight showed nothing but blank walls and empty corridors.

  There were wards, but the Mage had wrought them. They let him pass unharmed. His thighs were aching, his lungs burning, when he came to the end of that endless stair. The door yielded to his touch, sliding almost soundlessly into the wall.

  He was in the highest tower, as he had known he would be. This door opened on a small gallery, hardly more than a niche. The hall of the conclave lay beyond it.

  They had gathered but not begun. He counted a score of them in that great empty space, dwarfed by the vaulting. They reminded him somewhat poignantly of the priests of the dark on his own world, in the castle of the secret, which he had destroyed. But those had been the last feeble remnants of a forgotten order. These were commanders of an army that had driven the dark across the worlds.

  They were all of the same race and kin, and no doubt the same world—this one, he could suppose. While they waited for the greater lord, they spoke softly among themselves. Daros stretched his ears to hear.

  Most of what they spoke of was remarkably ordinary. They spoke of wars, of course; of the management of estates; of rebellious offspring and difficult servants. They did not speak of wives, or of women at all, which was odd. Did they have no women? How then did they get children?

  That thought begged him to pursue it, but two men near him were conversing of something that caught his attention. “The captive,” one said. “I hear it’s weakening. It’s not feeding Mother Night as strongly as before.”

  “And I hear,” said the other, “that it’s stronger; that it’s working its way free. The high ones are working harder to keep it bound.”

  “It’s dying, I heard—freeing itself the only way anything can. The high ones are working harder because there’s less power to work with. And there’s a rumor—a whisper—that we may have found the End.”

  “I don’t believe that,” the first man said. “Something’s blocking us. We’re going to break that block soon.”

  “Now that is true,” said the second with a gusting sigh. “We should never have given so many worlds to Mother Night—arrogant of us, to think that there would only be more, and the more we destroyed, the more we would find.”

  “But isn’t that the point?”

  A third man had come up beside them. He was younger than they; his beard was soft and rather sparse. But perhaps because of that youth, he had a harder, wilder look to him. “Isn’t that what we’re for? Haven’t we sworn ourselves from the first origin of our people, to the service of the Night? Isn’t it our dearest ambition to render all that is into darkness and silence?”

  The others greeted him with a mingling of wariness and faint contempt. He was young, their tone said, and reckless, and none too wise. “Indeed,
” the second man said, “that is our purpose before the Mother. But while the flesh constrains us, we must have means to live: air to breathe, food to eat, slaves to serve us. Do you, like a child, believe that this world exists by itself? That it sustains us in blessed darkness without need of intervention?”

  “Of course not!” the boy said irritably. “I know that this foul flesh needs the fruits of light to live—that the air of this world would bleed away without certain expedients. But if the End has come, shouldn’t we be rejoicing? Why are you conducting yourselves as if this were a disaster?”

  “Because,” the first man said with conspicuous patience, “the wall we’ve met is not the End. Something is barring the way. Our source of power is willing itself to death. And our slave-worlds are now too few to feed us all.”

  “Are they?” said the boy. “Well then, cull the slaves. The fewer we have to feed, the more there is for us.”

  “We need them,” said the second man. “Without them we have no food, no weapons, no armor, and no war. The last culling—of both worlds and bodies—was meant to leave room for new and fresher ones. Instead, we ran headlong into a wall.”

  “So break the wall,” the boy said.

  His elders growled to themselves and walked pointedly away from him.

  He stood forsaken. For an instant Daros thought he caught a flicker of hesitation. Then the boy bared his teeth. “Aren’t we strong enough to break down a simple wall? Are we not the destroyers of worlds?”

  They did not pause or respond. He aimed a slap of laughter at their backs. “Cowards! Mother Night has opened her arms, and you’re too craven to embrace her.”

  “Better craven than dead in the light,” one of his elders said as he departed.

  TWENTY-NINE

  THE LORD OF THE TOWER CAME LATE TO HIS OWN CONCLAVE. HE did not look as if he had rested; his face was haggard, his shoulders bowed with the weight of worlds.

  Others followed him into the hall. If the lords who waited had the look of warriors, these made Daros think of priests. They carried themselves differently; there was a subtle tension between them and the rest.