Ametheus backed away and raised his arms. The villagers fled. They faced each other across the dead fire, the Sorcerer and Tabitha, and the world spun around them. Night fell and the stars streaked across the dark sky like windblown tears. The firmament screeched as the Sorcerer pulled Chaos from the cracks in the air. Filaments of flux whipped around him, and his presence exploded. He was a mass of whipping silver tentacles. She gathered more essence, before he could, extending her will desperately beyond him, racing for power. And suddenly she understood.
“Ametheus!”
He jerked, his hands clawed the air, and his power tensed.
“This is wrong. If power is placed uppermost, there will always be battles ... On and on, until one remains. Ametheus! This is the wizard’s way. You are playing their game. You have always been playing their game.”
He was compelled by her naming to listen, for a moment, but his anger was coming, like a storm. The air spat and crackled around him. He was a mass of wildfire, a writhing seething fury of Chaos.
She did not need to defeat him. She would show him another way.
“Ametheus!” she cried again, waking the third brother, holding them all for a final moment before he fell upon her in fury. “Listen now. Listen!” And she sang, giving voice to the music she had used in the forest, the part of the Lifesong that was love.
The song swelled like sunshine in her heart, it made her blood burn like fire; it made her fingers dance. The world quivered with her spirit, and she played, in music. The Sorcerer’s presence disturbed the rhythm, but now it only made it more strangely beautiful, throwing echoes on either side of the melody causing the Lifesong to pulse, pause, shift, backward and forward, the sounds tumbling around the aria like swallows diving through the wind. As she sang, so she was transformed.
Fly with me now, into the night,
Love! Take me from this place;
the vigour of your precious touch
sweeps me with sweet Grace.
See how it brings these mighty wings
that carry me toward the sun?
All of my shadows fall away
as I fly, as I come, undone.
All of the shadows burn away
As we fall, and rise as one.
Singing of love made her feel empty. She couldn’t understand it. She missed Garyll terribly; he had become an ache in her heart. Colours shifted through the Sorcerer’s essence, rainbows that rippled across the silver threads, engaging his silver in a dance with gold, fusing the flux and flax, calming the fury, resolving the imbalance, joining the powers, leaving him wrapped in the fading coppery haze of a fiery love.
“Without love there are no dreams,” she ended. “Without dreams we fall apart at the seams.”
All was quiet.
Ethan was watching her, his single moist eye wobbling in time to his bobbing head, as if following the memory of the Lifesong as it slipped from his mind into his brother Amyar. His mouth a small ‘oh’. His white hair drifted over his face in sad strands.
Tabitha faced him. “If love is placed uppermost, there can be peace. We can live together.”
“That was b-beautiful,” he cried. “It was b-b-beautiful!”
“It is what you will take away from the world, if you let Ethea die.”
“It is not f-fair. You c-c-can’t show me that, a-after all these y-years. You c-can’t! After all they have d-done!”
“I think it is a blend of Order and Chaos.”
“An-nnah was right! It c-can be done. Oh, why did you c-c-come so late?”
“I am not too late, Ethan. I am not too late!”
“Ohh. You are, s-s-singer.” He looked infinitely sad.
“It is not too late to change.”
“It is t-t-too late for m-me.”
“Let go of it, Ethan. Let go of the war against Order.”
“I c-can’t! You are the g-g-guardian of our f-father’s c-coming. He w-will f-f-fight you and end you! Oh, b-brother Seus has s-seen it all! I c-can’t stop it. He faces you t-t-tomorrow.”
Tabitha reeled at the pronouncement. Seus had seen her being killed? “But I do not want to fight you. I want to heal you.”
“Heal m-me? I will n-never be healed. There are th-th-three of me! If you want me to b-become one, which two shall you kill?”
“The…others?”
“Who, me?” demanded Amyar from the front.
“Who, me?” shouted Seus.
She had forgotten they were conscious; she should have known by the way he was stuttering.
“They are my b-brothers!” Ethan cried out. “They have b-been with mm-me since the beginning! And they are all that k-k-keeps Apocalypse from ruling my m-mind. I can escape to my p-p-past, I can ff-flee into the f-future. If you bring us all into the p-p-present, you bring my f-father here. This will h-h-happen soon enough, you f-forget, this is all my f-f-father’s vision. You can d-disagree with me, but you can’t ch-change what I do. ”
“What I did!” argued Amyar, from the front.
“What I shall do!” declared Seus, turning on Tabitha and grasping the air around them with a jerk of intent. Something shifted in the air, it became suddenly warmer, and the night and the village were gone.
_____
An image swirled in the orb overhead, choked with ruddy smoke. She was lying on the floor, stained with ash and blood. A charred log had burnt itself out at Tabitha’s feet, beside the remains of the chicken. The Sorcerer’s chamber was lit by the dull orange glow of imminent sunrise.
Ametheus lay on the floor beside her, unconscious, with a heavy arm across her waist. She didn’t want to disturb him, she didn’t dare to move. She watched the images in the ceiling instead. They were relatively calm, showing a small island filling with ever more clamouring seabirds, a termite mount being rooted up by a lop-eared boar and clusters of brown bison jostling on a migration. Tabitha watched ice break off a high slope, outlined in the first crisp rays of a high-altitude morning. The ice dislodged a ragged line of rocks, which tumbled down the black slope, gathering momentum. And, in the orb beside it, was that monster she had seen before, eyeing her hungrily as it swam downstream.
It sank beneath the surface, becoming a shadowy outline in the green flow. The river passed a muddy spur, where a spindly-legged calf was drinking beside its mother. The mother lowed and ran back from the river, and the youngster froze, uncertain, not old enough to understand the danger.
Tabitha tensed as the shadow rose fast. The monster burst from the river in a white spray, felling the calf with a vicous swipe before dragging it into the shallows, tearing the calf’s head off. The violence of its feeding was awful. It didn’t bite and chew—it ravaged and destroyed its prey. It lifted its head to look at her, as if suddenly aware of her attention and, with blood on its face, blood on its hands, it abandoned the evidence of its wild lust to dive headlong into the river once more where it sank deeper below the polluted waters, out of sight.
Had it been changed by the flux? There was something piercing about its stare, a terrible intelligence. What had it been before it had been changed? The image flickered and was lost. She saw a river. She watched it for some time, tracing its course through heavy forest where trees thrashed in a great wind. Where the river ran over a rocky shelf, it moved strangely. Upstream. The image exploded to light, then became bubbles, shot through with silver tendrils, fibres of flux searching past a frantic paddling hand. A boat high above, on the surface, where the bubbles made circles. More bubbles, and an arm that ended in a stump.
“Garyll!” she shrieked.
Ametheus jerked awake. The images wobbled and changed. He rose to his feet.
It couldn’t be true.
Yet, now that she had seen the image, she knew it might be. Something terrible had happened to Garyll.
Seus stared her down. “What were you doing? You called out to all of us, didn’t you? That’s why I’ve got this splitting bloody headache! Idiot! Are you? Who are you?”
Tabi
tha stared at him, numb with the shock of what she had seen. Did Seus have no memory at all?
“I am the Lifesinger—the apprentice.”
“You are the apprentice! Whose stupid idea was that? I don’t need any snivelling slave getting in the way of my work!”
He had no memory of the night of terror he had put her through. It seemed he saw only the future. Ametheus contemplated a thing with eyes glaring at him from within a glass bottle, a spider, of sorts. “What will I do? I will break the Gyre, yes! The wizards and their Sanctuary ... Sanctuary no more!” He lifted the bottle and the spider scrambled to the end, away from the rough hand.
“You see, apprentice, the eight of the Gyre had me fooled for ages. Two cubed is eight! The number of building is eight! There are eight colours in the spectrum, if you count the purple! Eight notes in an octave! Eight legs on the spider. Eight! Eight! Eight! Balanced, stable and undying, but I’ve worked out how to kill it!” He smashed the bottle suddenly on the bench. The spider scuttled from the wreckage, but Ametheus caught it by one leg, reaching to where it would be. “It’s the legs,” he said, flicking the spider down roughly, breaking the leg off at the joint in so doing. “They’re the easy bits to get at, and on their own they are weak.” He caught the spider again, snapped a leg and set the spider loose. It scuttled as fast as ever, with the broken leg drawn up to its body. “If you break off the legs,” he said, breaking another two, “it’s a simple thing.” The wounded spider changed its tactics. It sat, waving its remaining legs frantically about, searching for the hunter it could not escape from. “In the end, all it can do is watch the hammer fall.” Before Tabitha could move beyond her horror, Seus had gripped his heavy mallet and brought it swinging down among the shards of glass and spider legs. “The Gyre exists in too many dimensions,” he declared. He turned the mallet to reveal the squashed spider—an outline of colour and splayed legs.
“See? Two dimensions. Now, because I am in three, I can pick the legs off at my leisure.” He lifted a leg with his dirty fingernail and popped it into his mouth as if it was a delicacy. He was dreadful, killing purely for experimentation, for explanation. It might just be a spider, but it had been a living spider. Tabitha felt no less sorrow for the small thing, dead.
“See you, these slivers each have a wizard,” Seus announced, waving at the bench with his mallet.
There were small panels of mirror-glass on his bench, jagged-edged, arranged in a loose fan. In each, an image was reflected, but when she looked to the roof she couldn’t see the corresponding image in the bulbous nodes of chaos. The reflections were from another place, another world. Then she saw a face she knew, a man fighting for his life against an onslaught of Chaos, his hat clinging to his head as he danced against the silver death. Zarost!
The wizards of the Gyre lay before her. There were only four mirror shards. Either that meant he hadn’t caught them all, or worse, he had. Tabitha wished Ethan would return. Even Amyar would be better than Seus. Amyar was violent and domineering, but he had reasons to be angry and frustrated. Seus was too deeply advanced in his own psychosis. He was going to break the mirror shards! Maybe if she got him to think about something else for long enough, he would forget his current intention. Maybe she could trick him.
“When will Ethan come back?” she asked.
“Why should that matter to you?”
“He summoned me,” she lied. “I am really his apprentice. I wanted to ask him some things.”
Seus did not look pleased.
“Understand this ... We are one. You apprentice to him, you serve me as well. Ethan will not wake until I decide to sleep. I hold the blood in my head, I am in command.”
“Amyar is responsible for your memory, isn’t he? What if there is something that requires his attention. What do you do then?”
“There is little that is more important than my work, when I am awake. He steals enough of my time when he is dominant.”
“Are you never awake at the same time?”
“Yes, and then we fight, unless Ethan is there as well.”
“Ethan is the leader among you,” she said, beginning to understand.
“You shouldn’t wish for him. The longer he stays conscious, the closer the Apocalypse comes.”
Seus turned back to the shards, exposing the back of his head. The fabric had slid down again to cover the troubled face.
“When does Ethan awaken again?”
The triple head whirled, Seus stared her down with eyes like chips of blue stone. “Why are you so keen to awaken the others!” he snarled. “Learn from me, and learn well. My touch does the most to bring the correction this world needs. Ethan spends all his life in slumber. Leave him be!”
He seemed almost afraid of his sibling, far more so than he was of Amyar.
“Everything must change!” he declared.
“If everything needs to change, who changes you?”
“I… I don’t need to change!” he cried out. “I…” But he didn’t continue. He gripped her close, inspecting her with his icy glare. “I know this face! Brother Ethan was lying, thinking to fool me with the tale of an apprentice. I know you! You are the L-l-lifesinger. Ulaäan ma maar! I face you tomorrow!” he looked out the window. “I face you today!”
Then, in the distance, a faint singing voice came on the wind, faint but persuasive. Tabitha knew at once who it was. Ethea.
“She sings!” exclaimed Seus. “It has begun!”
He left her then and strode across to the distant windows. “Wake up, my brothers, wake up!” he crowed.
He took the mallet and shattered an orb overhead. Something almost liquid dropped to the floor, something which altered the light, a translucent space. He stepped into that space and was gone.
Tabitha raced across the room. She looked out and saw the scene at the sacrifice, far, far below. Little figures clustered like insects upon a sticky treasure; they filled the land around the great figure of the Wicker Man. The colossus stood facing her like a fighter waiting for a bell. The fires had been stoked and their flames danced like occult beacons in the rising, swirling smoke. Birds shot by, kites and gulls, eagles and doves, hawks, finches, vultures and geese, thrown forward on the raging wind. It seemed as if all the birds in the world had come to circle around the Goddess in her pool, a mad spiral of witnesses. As Tabitha sent her senses ahead, the sounds came to her: a raging chant, off-key, rough and guttural, and the clashing of metal, and a stomp, stomp, stomp that pulsed through the ground. Horns blared like the screams of an angry animal. And, through it all, priests chanted in some ancient language, creating a thread of arcane guidance.
Ethea!
She ran to the bench, where the shards of mirror-glass lay. Which one was Twardy Zarost? She couldn’t see him in any of them, only swirling Chaos. She gathered all four of them then she stepped into the space Ametheus had used.
It didn’t work. She remained in the chamber. She would have to make her own way down to the pool. In the distance, she could hear the voice of Ethea, lilting in a mournful melody.
Oh no, oh no, oh no! She was going to sing the Destroyer into being.
And, something terrible had happened to Garyll.
Tabitha ran from the chamber, out the arched door, across the tilted slab, into the sinuous passage leading down, down, into Chaos and the end of the world. She desperately wished Garyll was there. She needed his conviction—she needed his strength. She wished for Ashley. She wished for Twardy Zarost—anyone who could help her.
But she was alone against her fears.
41. CONVERGING ON CHAOS
“Life is a race against time, with a trend:
Time cheats more as you approach the end.”—Zarost
A crack shot through his world and Zarost turned not an instant too soon. The air split beside his face and again at his back, leaving him standing in a narrow strip. On either hand there was now darkness, a void which he could not cross with his awareness, an end. He was in a collapsing world.
>
He was crippled with uncertainty. The whole scene might exist only because the Sorcerer had enchanted him and he could not tell illusion from reality. Then again, he could be wrong and this could be real.
Zarost faced the narrow flames. A sharp retort sounded behind him. The sand and sky fell away.
He could not reach infinity, he could not transfer away because he could not become big enough; he could not stretch far enough. His body was trapped in a shrinking space; his world was too small.
What if he made himself incredibly small, he wondered? He might reach a limit of physical impossibility, when the cells of his body could no longer become denser, but if he drew his attention down into the tiniest point, and left his body unchanged, would his body become the relative infinity? It would be the opposite of Transference, a reflection of one of the great paradoxes of magic.
A reflected paradox. Would that be a truth, or an absurdity?
He would call it Inference, he decided—if it worked.
The crack which split his failing world ran straight for his forehead. He dropped, watching his toes, which was all that he could see. By the choke of a mustard smoke, this was becoming a bad joke! He remained crouched, because he could not stand. He breathed out and closed his eyes. He thought of his heart beating within him. He became the heart, then the blood within his heart, then a warm ring-like red cell floating in an endless warm fluid. Deeper, deeper, and smaller he took his awareness. Zarost sensed nothing except tumbling cycles of energy bound in strange patterns. On the fringe of his mind, his body seemed to rush outward as he rushed in.
Deeper, deeper still. A shivering shimmer of hazy light, one curled streak. A point.
His destination would be unknown. He hoped that something, somehow, would provide the bridge to anchor him in place and time. It was a little hope. Then again, he’d never been one to scorn little hopes.
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 71
