“Because I don’t think that I can escape from this place unless you allow me to.”
“Yes, yes, that may be true,” he replied. Seus looked suddenly suspicious. “Either you are very brave and very honest, or you are lying.”
“It is wrong to lie.”
“Hah! An honest wizard! Hah! I don’t believe it. Are you as innocent as you look?”
“I-I am seventeen,” Tabitha replied.
He looked surprised again. “Well, Tabitha the singer, you have much to learn about the ways of the world. Everything can be changed, even fate, even history. Even the truth.”
Truth and history could be changed? The man was mad. “Some things should never be changed,” she said. “What you have done to Ethea is wrong. You made a mistake to bring her here. You must correct it.”
Ametheus flinched and Tabitha felt that awful adjustment of space again. The Sorcerer drew himself up.
“Now that is the voice of a wizard, full of judgements and rules. I can do whatever I wish!”
“You cannot afford to let the Goddess die. The Lifesong will end forever. Her death will be your death as well as mine.”
“That would please our solitary brother,” he said quietly, as if to himself. Then he snarled. “Why do we need such a song, ruling our forms, dictating its patterns, over and over?”
“Without the Lifesong we shall have a dead world. The world needs its pattern to grow upon.”
“Pattern is Order! The world has never needed order! You’ve been talking to the Goddess, haven’t you? And she just wishes to escape! She’ll tell you anything to extend her life. She told me the same things. Your mistake was to believe them.”
“But the Lifesong is her voice! It is her power that keeps you living! How can you deny your own existence?”
“You think I must release her, so that the song continues? Like the bloody birds. They sing! And they carry their song from generation to generation. There is always an egg somewhere, a new clutch of young birds to carry the song on from the old. So I must kill them. Life keeps on repeating in the same patterns, over and over. Somehow they carry that pattern. They are responsible! When they sing, they reinforce the pattern, but everything dies in the end, they all come upon starvation and sickness and death. Life is a misery, they must see that. Yet they sing! Why do they sing?”
“It is the thread of the Lifesong within them that inspires them to live,” she replied. “It is beauty.”
“That is why it must be ended. There is no beauty. There is no happiness. Only bondage and our Father, who will break us free.”
“How can you expect to find happiness when you are surrounded by the creatures you have created, these tormented souls trapped in bodies they cannot love, in forms which demand violence for survival and can’t speak of their pain.”
“So what? Look at me!” screamed Amyar. “Nobody cares about me.” Tabitha had forgotten he was still there, hidden by the divide in the Sorcerer’s headpiece. He was waiting to overpower his sibling.
“Wait, Amyar!” demanded Seus. “I am not done yet. Quiet! Let us say I release the Goddess, and then you shall sing for me, and do my bidding, yes?”
She hesitated.
“Careful, Seus, she is messing with our head!” warned Amyar.
“Calm down, brother,” responded Seus. “She is making some sense to me, even if you don’t understand.”
“She will trick you!” exclaimed Amyar. “Don’t listen to her! You have forgotten that we drew her here, and you said we need the others to be here first! It is too early. She is trying to trick you!”
“I said that?” Seus looked frustrated.
“She carries their Order-eye!” warned Amyar. “She has a cursed vision of the world.”
“It doesn’t matter what vision she has. What I see is what will be. I am stronger than her.”
“And I say no! Enough! Enough! You are fooled by her beauty. Just bind her, or break her!”
“What you are doing cannot succeed,” Tabitha said. “You have made a big mistake.”
“I will rule the future, not you!” Seus shouted and lunged toward her with an outstretched hand. Tabitha fell back, struck in her chest by the Sorcerer’s repulsion. It felt as if he had gathered gravity and hurled it against her. She flew backward across the room and struck the wall. Her knees went weak, but she did not slide down the wall, rather she was pinned where she stood, pressed back like a leaf in a gale.
Panic gripped her. She had thought she was beginning to win Seus’s support but he was attacking her. He stormed across his chamber, his arms raised, debris pulled along in his wake. Suddenly she recognised the moment. The Revelations had shown her this scene, all those weeks ago, in King Mellar’s chamber in Stormhaven. She had stepped into a moment of prophecy. Something strange was happening to reality, with links to the past in the present moment, and links from that past to the present. She had the impression of being at a confluence of causal threads, and that her hand could change the weave.
Yet there was no escaping from the vicious pressure of the Sorcerer and his murderous intent.
Had she ever really escaped the prophecy, or had she just caused it to be? Here things were almost exactly as they had been visualised. It was a sudden thought, a flash, but for an instant she wondered ... If she could visualise her own future well enough, would that be enough to change the present? She wanted to be free.
The sorcerous assault broke off and she toppled forward to the dirty floor.
“Run, girl, run!” cried Seus. “Amyar is taking my mind! He will kill you! Begone!”
But he was already upon her. He reached down with those strong hands and hauled her up by her collar. He drew back a massive fist.
“No Amyar, we can use her!” shouted Seus, out of view. “I see your memories now! We were going to use her! It was my plan!”
Tabitha twisted out of his momentary weakness, breaking his grip and running for the door. Tabitha slowed. She had forgotten. There was no exit. The Sorcerer’s vision of the reality atop the Pillar was stronger than hers.
“Better to kill her!” Amyar howled.
She tried to believe an exit existed, a break in the smooth wall.
There was a door.
There was no door.
There was a door again. She ran for the gap.
She ran into solid rock and struck her face.
Tabitha bounced backward, and fell, disorientated.
The Sorcerer laughed from behind her. “You are ill-equipped to deal with the impossible,” he said, in Seus’s deep voice. “Your kind will always lose when the game is played upon my turf.”
She twisted on the ground, looking up into bloodshot eyes. It was the cruel scarred face of Amyar that regarded her. She had only one last resort. She could name him, as the book had told her. Tabitha hoped that the word of power would inflict a long enough moment of paralysis for her to escape.
“Ametheus!” Tabitha called out. “Ametheus! Ametheus!”
“Damn you!” shouted Amyar. “Damn you, damn you, damn you!”
“The third one will be angered!” exclaimed Seus.
“You have roused our brother,” they chanted in unison. “Ethan awakes.”
The Sorcerer’s body jerked. It jerked again.
Tabitha didn’t wait to watch what happened to him. She turned to the wall again, and willed the door to form—an opening, a hole, a break, anything through which she might escape. She knew the pinnacle of the Pillar was outside, where the wind blew across the naked slab, open to the sky. She could see it in her mind’s eye, so close, but she couldn’t reach it.
Tabitha beat upon the wall with her hands, but the mortar was firm and unmoving. The Sorcerer might have been paralysed for a moment, but so had his vision. His vision was of a chamber without a door, and so it was.
Could she risk singing and using essence in this place? She had to try. If reality really was so fluid around the Sorcerer, she would create her own world, one in which
there was a door to this high chamber. She began to sing her stanza of destruction, to tear a hole in the substance of the wall and convert it to essence. She sang, but her notes came out wrong. The awful arrhythmic beat of Turmodin disrupted her music, and she could find no harmony. Fragmented voices split and rejoined in an incessant cacophony. Metal clanked and groaned. Insects whined. The Lifesong died on her lips.
She hadn’t managed to deal with two of the brothers. How would she survive three? She wanted to melt away and disappear. Tabitha pressed her face to the red-plastered wall, not wanting to see who was waking behind her. She should have listened to the wizards of the Gyre, who had known she could not survive in Turmodin. She had made a terrible mistake, and now, she would die.
“Wh-what has h-h-happened?” asked someone with a quiet, constricted voice.
Too late; no time remained to find an escape. The third brother was conscious.
“Wh-what has changed?” continued the new speaker, his voice a curdled whisper, the voice of a tormented sleeper, slurred and slow. “Oh my b-b-brothers! You are angry w-with each other, aren’t you, y-y-you are d-divided? To s-sleep! You as w-well, b-brother Seus. I w-will enjoy my f-freedom.”
“Beware, there is a wi…” began Seus, his voice fading.
“S-s-sleep! Yes. Sleep.”
The Sorcerer shifted his weight behind her. The wind moaned softly by, carrying the cacophony of chaos in random gusts. The Pillar groaned and shuddered. She turned her head slowly, dreading what she would find.
He was close, looking at her from beneath the silk head-covering that he had lifted partially. Clumped strands of white hair obscured much of his pasty face, but one silver-patterned eye stared at her. The Sorcerer’s body was facing the other way; she was looking at the back of his head, yet still it was a face, with a puckered mouth and stub of a nose.
“Who are you?” he demanded. “Why are you here?”
Didn’t he know that already? His gaze was difficult to bear, but she resisted the temptation to look at her feet. It was important to pretend to be calm, or she would become hysterical. “I-I am a singer. My name is Tabitha.”
“Oh. Oh! A new minstrel? You are beautiful, quite beautiful, my brothers have chosen well.” His voice, so stuttered before, had gained clarity, as if he was more directly in the present. He took a step toward her by taking a step backward, and extended an upside-down hand. “I am Ethan.”
“P-pleased to meet you,” Tabitha stammered.
She didn’t extend her hand. She couldn’t touch him; she couldn’t trust the brutality of those rough hands was under control. The Sorcerer dropped his hand, disappointed.
“Were my brothers misbehaving?” he asked. “I have slept too long. I am afraid my sibs are a bit dominant, one of the problems of having shared blood. It’s been a while since I’ve been allowed to be myself. Excuse me if I appear a bit slow.” He cast an eye around the room. “Why were they fighting?” he asked.
He really didn’t remember! Maybe she had a chance. “Amyar wanted to kill me and Seus was trying to stop him.”
“The bloody fool Amyar, he’ll break anything he can get our hands on. Between them they have ruined so much. Talk about a chip on my shoulder; I’ve got a whole head on mine. Amyar just can’t forget the past, it’s all he sees. Damn brute. I’m glad he didn’t kill you, Singer Tabitha. I’m sorry he tried.” Tabitha was surprised by Ethan’s behaviour. Despite his grotesque appearance, he seemed gentle, even polite. His dark singular eye, wet and tearful, wobbled slowly as he watched her. How could there be in one brother such rage, and in the other such meekness?
“You’re all joined, and yet you’re all so ... different,” said Tabitha.
“Of course we are!” Ethan exclaimed. “It wouldn’t do to get right and left mixed up now, would it? We keep a separate house here, or try to. We each have our tasks to perform.”
“What is your task?”
“Me? I see the present. Without Seus I have no magic and without Amyar, no strength.” He leant toward her. “I’d like to talk with you and enjoy my freedom a while, but if you do anything to threaten me I’ll have to wake up my brothers. Understand?”
To hold his gaze steady was like staring closely into a freshly cut onion.
Tabitha nodded. He wanted her promise of fair play. It was probably plain to him that she was some kind of wizard, yet he was still prepared to risk talking to her.
“Your eye!” he exclaimed. “It’s all mixed up, gold and silver, just like the chalice! How did you do that?”
The pain of it throbbed in her head, and the thought of it made her want to cry. “I ... didn’t. Your brother Amyar has just blinded me. I can’t see out of it.”
“Oh dear. Dear oh dear oh dear. What a wonder it would be, if you could see from it. You would see things just as Annah wanted ... Oh well, there’s many things that are a shame in this world, let’s not dwell on them. I am sorry for what he has done to you. Come, join me by the windows, I’d like to talk a while.”
“How come you don’t hate me, like your brother Amyar?”
“While my brothers sleep, their thoughts are hidden from me. I feel only the guilt from the past, without the memories. I feel only a foreboding of the future, without knowing the plans. It’s when we’re awake at the same time that we interfere. They will sleep now, until I grow tired or call to them. I don’t hate you because you haven’t given me reason to hate you yet. Very few people have ever held my gaze. So many people turn away…”
She couldn’t sympathise with him, not when he was the one who had trapped the Goddess, and all the people in the effigy. “Maybe if you didn’t terrify everyone with such awful spells, the world would be kinder to you.”
“Oh! I see your anger,” Ethan said. “Please, don’t direct it at me, my brothers did it! They always do it! They brought the ruin, they wield the magic.”
“Your magic,” Tabitha persisted. She thought of the wildfire webs, spitting Chaos down upon the world.
“No! I hate magic. Magic gives men too much power. They believe they are greater than others, they do strange things, but Seus says that the only way to fight magic is with magic. I have to agree with him. How else could it be done? That’s why there must be wildfire, to stop the magic. The wizards began it, by developing Order. We must end it, in Chaos.”
“But what good shall come from that if life cannot continue!” Tabitha blurted. “The Goddess will die if you don’t release her, and what can come after without her song? Nothing!”
Ethan looked sad. “The Goddess? What else can I do? My father has commanded it. I can’t make a difference.”
“Your father?” Tabitha asked.
“He sees the world through me. I am cursed with his eye.”
“What? Your eye is…”
“Yes, the eye of the Apocalypse. He could see you now, if he chose to look.”
Tabitha took a step backward. She understood how it was possible that Ametheus had trapped the Goddess, why he committed such atrocities—the son of the prime God, the son of the Apocalypse? The warnings in the book had been real. She had begun to think Ethan was the least threatening of the three. It was not true at all. He was the greatest danger. He was watching her with his silver-patterned eye.
“You are more than you appear to be, Singer Tabitha. What do you care about the Goddess?”
“She is my inspiration.”
“So you are very much like me, then. You are a sorcerer.”
Tabitha couldn’t answer, because he was right. He drew his power from Apocalypse, her source was Ethea. They were both Sorcerers, yet he had the upper hand. He had captured her source, and he could break everything with the power he wielded. She could not save Ethea unless she convinced him of her value, yet without the Lifesong the world would end in utter desolation.
Ethan looked sad. “You wish to save her from death?”
“Yes.”
“That is only possible if you sing the song she will not sing. My father
must be brought into this world. The way to a new world is through Apocalypse.” His voice altered, as if he spoke from far away. “Everything shall be destroyed and everything shall be made again.”
“If you destroy the only one who can bring life again, then that is a lie.”
“If I bring life to the only one who can destroy it completely, then it is not,” Ethan retorted. “Just because you cannot conceive of an existence without life doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Seus says that life is just one kind of existence, a passing phase. There are other states of awareness, other forms. This world must end.”
“But you are condemning everything by summoning the Apocalypse! Why do you want to bring him into this world?”
Ethan gave her a haunted look. “Because I must be sure everything else dies when I do. There must be no chance that Order will be rebuilt from the ashes.”
_____
“How much farther do we have to go?” Bevn asked, again.
The sun was warm, too warm. The air was sticky. It seemed to Bevn they had been in the stinking bog lands forever. He had seen an abandoned city of broken glass where the light had pierced his mind, he had seen places where terrifying creatures fed upon each other, but the bog lands were the worst, for here in the heat and filth, the ground itself seemed to be alive. It bubbled, burped and shifted underfoot, as if he was being led across a crusty skin. He was certain he was going to stumble into a festering sore in the land and plunge into some foetid liquid horror below.
“I don’t know, fool!” Saladon replied. “It could take us another day, it could take another month. Everything depends on finding the Gate! We couldn’t walk to Turmodin if we tried from this side, there’s too much growing land around it, too much sea.”
“Sea? What is that?” asked Gabrielle.
“Think of it as a very large lake.”
Saladon led them up an incline, where the fruits were dark and heavy on the low trees. Bevn knew he wasn’t to touch them. They were all toxic, poisonous or hallucinogenic, like the fungus that squelched underfoot. The air was thick with insects, ones that whined incessantly and bit Bevn all the time. Often they drew blood. Saladon didn’t seem to care, for the insects didn’t come near him. Those that tried, burned, the moment they touched his body. Bevn didn’t have any protection from the cruel interest of his tormentors, and he was miserable, sick and afraid.
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 68
