The ball of light grew. He held it in his outstretched hands.
He wrapped the light around himself like a cloak.
There were other lights on the sea, columns standing in a circle around him, remaining absolutely still while he rose and fell with the waves. They resolved into beautiful figures, tall men and women in shining cloaks, with starry crowns on their heads. Some of them had four arms. Some had wide, delicate wings. They strode radiant and majestic across the heaving sea, closing in.
Ginna heard their soft voices whispering. He held the light close around him. He thought of Amaedig. He willed her to be at his side.
Hands like feathers were brushing over him, and he was drifting in the light.
Asleep, dreaming in the light.
CHAPTER 10
The Watchers
Kaemen, lord of the darkening world, sat in his throne room, as alone as he ever could be. The Black Lady was asleep. Always, always she stirred in his mind like a horde of rats, whispering, scratching, but now, after long labors and conjurings, after making the bones of The Goddess tremble, she lay dormant, perhaps exhausted in some manner he could never understand. She was still there. He could feel the weight of her within himself, but she was no more than a chill, a faint sense of another presence which he had known since earliest childhood.
Only rarely was she thus, and at those few times his thoughts and his sensations were all his own.
He sat contemplating his triumphs, and he was troubled. As she had promised, he was becoming the master of a whole new kind of world. The force which flowed through her like a raging torrent had swept him along also, and by joining with the inevitable, he would be one of the few creatures of human flesh to retain a place after the change was complete. Even she did not fully understand what was happening, save that like a tide, the new universe was submerging the old.
This much he knew. The knowledge had been with him for a long time. He feared no opposition now, but still he was uneasy.
The boy and the girl had disappeared. There was something magical about the boy, but wholly opposite himself. The idiot Ginna could still make bubbles of light and throw them around, the same as he had when he was a drooling infant. But there was the potential for something more.
Why had they not killed him? He had brought the question up, taking counsel within himself, speaking with the Hag. No, she said. If his role has any meaning, another will fill it after him. Watch and wait. Protect him if you have to. As he was my instrument once, he may become the instrument of someone else. Find out what he is so that he may be combatted.
He had no choice but to obey. So he watched and waited.
While she slept, he entered into his trance, and beheld Ginna in Arshad’s cabin. Sensing a great power there, he had been very careful to remain undetected, interfering not at all. It was like walking on a delicate pane of glass. He had succeeded, and moved with Ginna into that other world, but it was like wading upstream against floodwaters. The very nature of the place repelled him. The strain to remain where he was, let alone advance, became more than he could bear. Just before his consciousness was expelled, he heard the chief of the Tashadim proclaim the boy to be more adept than any other pupil he had ever had. There was a brief chaos of falling, and he awoke on his throne in a sweat, considering the implications of Ginna’s coming to understand and use whatever powers he might possess.
“Great Lady, awake. Help me. Tell me what to do.” He spoke to the empty air, to the shadows, and his voice echoed through die palace. It was useless to try to rouse her. Never had he any control over her, nor could he speak to her when she did not wish to hear.
And so he panicked. Ginna was learning. He was being taught with alarming speed, gaining strength. In a few days, a few hours even—
Therefore he, Kaemen, Guardian of the darkness-cloaked bones of the dead Goddess, took it upon himself to act, to prevent this disastrous state of affairs from continuing.
He had severed the teacher from the student. That the girl Amaedig had survived was sheerest coincidence. That Ginna still lived was not overwhelmingly important as long as the process of learning was interrupted. She would have understood why he had done what he had done—
To reassure himself, he projected his spirit forth once more. Drifting above the midnight world, above the new cities rising without fear of the sun, he had crossed plains and mountains, followed a great river to its source, then another to its mouth. He soared over the sea, entranced by the vast movements of the waves and currents, listening to the wails and cries of the monsters beneath.
His spirit hovered near Ginna, without any attempt to enter his body, watching, gloating as the boy and his companion bobbed up and down in the frigid water.
The words of despair and final surrender had been especially sweet but then something happened. There was light everywhere, columns standing on the waves, then figures. He knew them: Bright Powers, once in balance against the Dark, but now all but banished from the world. Yet here, alone, he was far weaker than their concentrated numbers. He felt himself repelled more firmly than he had been from the cabin of the ship. He reached out, like one drowning, for Ginna’s mind, struggling to get inside, to see with his eyes, to understand what was going on, but he was yanked away and hurled far. There was a flash of all-encompassing light.
He found himself on the floor before his throne, lying in a puddle of vomit. A spasm in his trance had hurled him from the seat, off the dais, to the very spot where he had had the nurse flogged to death.
Everything was a portent. It probably meant something, but he had more pressing things on his mind. He reached out for a third time, seeking merely to find Ginna, not to touch him, and found him not
Always, because their lives were somehow joined, he had been able to locate the one he laughingly called his “brother” and spy on him at any time. Not to find him was like waking up after a calm night’s sleep to discover oneself deaf and blind.
Gone.
He rose and left the throne room. The corridors and chambers were utterly dark, thick with slithering spirits. No torch or lantern burned in all the city of Ai Hanlo. Those few inhabitants who had not fled and still survived huddled wretchedly in the gloom. Only he could find his way about He was developing a new sense. He could see without light. The darkness had taken on a kind of texture, dense around solid objects, thin as smoke in mere shadows, forming images in his mind as he passed.
Thus he walked through many deserted hallways. He came to a room in which a certain distinguished lady of the court had spent her last days in madness, where now her skeleton lay twisted among her bedsheets. He entered, took a mirror from her dressing table, and held it before his face. He could perceive the mirror itself all the way down to the pearls around the rim and the ornate silver work on the back, but the glass remained a black oval, without returning the image of his face. Curious, he thought.
The new sense was not like seeing. It was more like projecting his soul across distances and feeling the echo. Like spying on Ginna.
Gone.
He smashed the mirror against the floor. He stirred the glass fragments with his foot, contemplated the skeleton briefly, and returned to the corridor.
He stood on a parapet where astrologers had once stood divining the courses of the stars. There were no stars above him now. Constantly the darkness spread out through the upper spaces, extinguishing them, filling the universe. There was no light on the horizon.
To anyone else, there would have been an endless void beyond the stone railing, but to him with his secret sense, the changing landscape was revealed in all its detail.
He gazed far. He watched mile-long serpents rolling in thunder beneath the sea. And yet Ginna was nowhere to be found.
He leaned over the edge, wondering what it would be like to fling himself into space, to float on the darkness, to let his body soar as his soul did when he projected it, but the darkness itself seemed to come alive and whisper hoarsely and form a barrier a
gainst him.
Her darkness, not his own.
He went back inside and descended many flights of stairs until he came to a room he had once known. He had not been there in years. It was dusty and full of books, most of which he had never opened. His nurses had locked him in there sometimes when he’d misbehaved, telling him to do something useful with his time. Little did they know he liked the place. The mustiness and solitude appealed to him. It had not even the tiniest window, and in those days it had been lighted by a chandelier set with candles. Now it was not lighted at all. He felt the walls. They were firm and smooth as ever. It was truly one of the oldest rooms in all Ai Hanlo, hewn as legends told, out of the living rock of the mountain. He had called it his “tomb” and imagined himself the child-king of some ancient dynasty of an earlier cycle of history, waiting for the time when he would rise up and make all the world tremble beneath his tread.
A game, nothing more. Now the world trembled and bowed to darkness, and it was not a game.
He opened one of the books. His dark sense could discern the writing. This was one of the romances he had found exciting and had genuinely enjoyed as a boy. He used to slip them behind his school books sometimes while his tutors droned away.
It seemed that his few moments of happiness and calm were in this room, this “tomb,” and now they were buried there.
Certainly he knew no peace now.
He ascended the stairs, emerging into a series of courtyards, then a paved lane between the stables and the guard barracks. He came to a gate through which one could pass into the lower city.
Idly, he approached the gate.
But he could not pass. At once he perceived the darkness becoming almost solid, swirling into shapes: huge, pale, rubbery, fleshy things with hunched shoulders and inverted faces bulging out of their chests like the pustules of a disease. Topmost, flaccid lips dripped slime over the upturned nostrils and blind eyes. Membranous wings whirred and flapped. Hard, talon-like claws clicked open and closed.
Behind them crouched something sloping and rounded, but big as a house. Out of it rose a head with a curving beak easily twenty feet long, opened to reveal rows and rows of teeth. The head twitched from side to side, the beak slicing through the air like a sword.
He raised his hands. He called out words of power. He tried to banish them. They would not go. They would not let him pass.
At last he understood that he was a prisoner within the palace as much as he was within his own body, that it was not his power which mastered anything, that he would no more rule the world than the glove on a king’s hand actually holds the scepter.
He wept. He had never been more alone, more utterly afraid. Ginna had disappeared. He, the slave, had acted on his own for the first and probably last time, and botched the task. It was his fault, his poor judgment, his hasty panic.
Within him, the Black Witch began to rouse herself.
CHAPTER 11
The Wood at the World’s End
Dreaming in the light, drifting like the shadow of a cloud, Ginna somehow sensed himself going far, far, in all directions and none, infinitely beyond the ends of the earth and infinitesimally between die angles of space, inside inside, collapsing into a boundless void within himself.
The world was wrenched away. He fell out of darkness, into light, into a place of blue stretching out forever like a flawless daytime sky with no ground beneath it
The gentle hands bore him into the light, into the sun, the blinding center of all. He saw flames against flames, patterns of brilliance, the outline of a rose as huge as the world, burning without being consumed, slowly turning, rising to swallow him up.
Dreaming in the fight—
— his body was nothing but light—
— suddenly dropping into wakefulness out of a higher space, back into material substance, he found himself lying on solid ground. He pressed against it. For a moment it wavered, became like water, but quickly resumed its solidity.
Something dry rustled beneath him as he stirred. Dead leaves.
The air was pleasantly cool. A light breeze brought the scents of damp earth, moss, flowers, of a living world.
He opened his eyes and was blinded by the light, but slowly his vision adjusted. He saw the leaf-covered ground stretching away from him, brown and gently rolling. Above, tall columns resolved themselves into the trunks of trees. He was in a forest, the first he had ever seen in daylight.
Or was it daylight? As he watched, the leaves began to glow one by one, flooding the place with gentle green light. Among them whites and yellows sparkled. He sat up, turned, and saw that in one direction the very air was aglow, as if the sun rested on the forest floor a short distance off.
Around him were wisps and motes of light in the comers of his vision. He could almost see their shapes, but when he looked on them directly, they were gone. He knew them to be the Powers.
And the Powers whispered within his mind, It is time. She is risen from the dead. Come.
He got to his feet and followed them as if in a dream, and he was dimly aware of Amaedig at his side, as bedazzled as he. They held hands as they walked, but spoke not, for no word may be uttered in so rare a dream.
The Powers rushed by them like zephyrs.
He took all this to be a final vision, some last refuge invented by his dying mind as he sank drowning into the sea, but he tried to put that thought aside and lose himself in it, indeed to find final refuge. But the details were too realistic. His clothing was still wet. He was cold, but the air was warming him. He smelled of salt water. Amaedig’s hand in his was no illusion.
Thus they went slowly, quietly, as the Bright Powers gathered about them and their light dispelled the light of the trees, and the Powers took on definite shapes, becoming stately lords and ladies, winged, clad in gowns of scarlet and azure, bedecked with crowns so splendidly jeweled they became halos of light
She is risen.
They came to a clearing and gathered in a circle, In the midst of them the earth opened up, revealing a pit filled with golden vapor, the surface of which lay so still, so seemingly solid it resembled nothing more than some kind of soft, beautiful cloth.
The Powers raised trumpets to their lips and blew a blast, but the sound was feint and faraway to Ginna, almost beyond the range of his hearing.
She is risen, came their litany. Behold, out of death she comes into life, out of darkness into light.
And the golden mist parted and vanished away, and standing on solid ground in the middle of the circle, was the figure of a girl child dressed all in flowing green. She held a scepter of green jade carven in the likeness of a dragon holding a glowing yellow ball in its teeth.
One look to her face was enough to tell she was no child, this being of magic, ageless and untouched by time.
“Come forward,” she said to Ginna and Amaedig. As she spoke the Powers lost their shapes and began to disperse, becoming a faint cloud-ring of light.
Ginna, leading Amaedig, stepped gingerly forward, afraid the ground would give way beneath his step.
“You have nothing to fear.”
“Who... are you?”
“You possessed the power to come to me and you came, and still you do not know? Who else? I am Assiré Naydata Kamatharé.”
He looked at her blankly. An expression of dismay came over her face, and for the first time she seemed human, even though she was an adult or more than an adult in a child’s body. All the while Amaedig stared like one bewitched and helpless.
“You mean my name is unknown to you?” the stranger said.
He could find no words.
“You haven’t lost your voice, have you?”
“Yes—I mean no... I mean, I am sorry, but—”
“You mean that you are confused,” she laughed. “Well you might be, considering. I have watched your progress. My servants have told me much, also.”
“I am Ginna. This is Amaedig.”
“You are the one who is to come. You a
re the great counterweight I am sure of it Therefore you should know me. I am called the Mother of light”
He hung his head. “Great Lady, I am sorry, but I do not know you.”
“It would seem that your education is sadly deficient, or else men have forgotten much since last I walked on Earth.”
“Are we—where are we? I mean, are we spirits now, in the place where the dead go? Is—is, Tharanodeth here? Can I see him?”
“So many questions at once—”
Amaedig let out a grunt as words formed in her throat, but fell back on one another in confusion. After a gasping pause, she was able to blurt out, “Are you a goddess?”
“My dear,” said the diminutive lady, “there was only one goddess, The Goddess. I am not The Goddess. She was my daughter.”
The words struck Ginna like a physical blow. He leapt back, let out a startled shriek and tried to run—now he was sure this was some kind of dream, nightmare, that he was going mad—and stumbled and fell over Amaedig, who had feinted dead away.
“I see a lot has to be explained,” said Assiré Naydata Kamathar, the Mother of Light.
* * * *
She came to him again in mid-day, when the light was generally diffused throughout the forest She was no child then, but older, a young woman, even though mere hours had passed. Her voice deeper, her manner stately and grave.
“I suppose I am the lady you were sent to seek,” she said. “Your teacher called me what he did to confuse your enemy, but indeed, by the practitioners of the hidden arts I am called the Lady of the Grove and the Fountain. We stand in the grove. Come, I’ll show you the fountain.”
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