“Who are you?” she asked firmly. “Are you going out to Shon or Sumel, or have you come from one of them?” There was no answer. The head remained drooped on the blue gown, and the hands did not stir. Finally Sholia spoke a word of command, and slowly, smoothly, the head rose and the hair fell back. It was a city dweller whose name Sholia did not know, but the face staring back at her bore little resemblance to the smiling mouth and darting eyes she had seen under the trees with her children. Now the mouth was slack and slightly parted, the lips dry from the breath passing evenly over them. The eyes gazed dully ahead, and the large pupils did not respond to the flow of light as Sholia passed a hand in front of them. She repeated her questions, but there was no response. Then she bent and lifted a hand that rested limply in hers. Taking the palm, she pressed the fingers of her own hand against the woman’s pale fingertips.
As she began to feel for the roots of this odd trance she was surrounded by a dense white fog. Streamers of it touched her mind lightly and with a damp coolness. Then she realized that the fog was a dense cloud cover, and she was speeding down through it, for the streamers broke, the fog creamed back over her shoulders, and she found herself high over earth, looking down upon two valleys full of gray light, a serried range of crags between them. Above her the clouds formed a solid, low roof of rain-burdened heaviness untroubled by any breeze. But wind hissed in her ears and pressed steadily against her forehead, for she was flying. The rustle of her wings came to her clearly, and she could feel the ripple of movement under the skin of her back. With the rhythmic flexing of her muscles a sense of fulfillment and contentment warmed her, and she happily scanned the lush green, rolling panorama beneath, glimpsing through the woman’s lazy thoughts a cave mouth set high on a crag, a fire within, and food to prepare. As the woman checked her flight and began to angle down toward the sharp teeth of the range the rain began, cool and gentle, pattering audibly on her wings and striking her face. Sholia watched the country below rise slowly to meet her, and as the horizon became sliced by rock half-hidden in misty cloud a nagging sense of familiarity started in her. She had been here before. She had seen these valleys, not from the air, yet from some high place. As the woman swerved to hover upright and the mountains also suddenly became perpendicular, she found her eyes drawn to one isolated, rough peak thrusting from the earth, slit from the tip to halfway down its broken, sheer slope by a thin, soaring arch now blurred by the quickening rainfall.
Then she knew. Ghaka! She had often stood on the lip of the arch, Ghakazian’s hall behind her and he himself beside her, looking out over the awesome grandeur of Ghaka’s landscape. She did not stay to see more. With heart thudding and the intimation of some terrible mystery churning through her thoughts, she pulled out of the woman, releasing her hand and stepping away from her. The fingers collapsed to swing briefly against the blue gown, and the eyes continued to stare ahead, unblinking. No Sholan has ever been on Ghaka, Sholia pondered furiously, not even in the beginning. There can be no memory of such a visit hidden in any mind under my suns. The Gate of Ghaka is now closed, and Ghaka is a dying world; therefore what I saw, the trance this Sholan is living, belongs to the past, and not to Shol’s past, but to Ghaka’s. She is an alien, a Ghakan on Shol.
Then the truth burst upon her. A Ghakan on Shol in a Sholan body. The mystery of Rilla, the unspoken breath of threat and complicity, resolved into a shape of horror with yet another, darker mystery behind it. Once more Sholia placed herself in the woman’s mind and for a second was standing inside a cave, eyes on the warm flames of a fire while the mouth of the dwelling was obscured by a thrumming pall of water. Then she wrapped her own essence around the woman’s and uttered a firm order. The woman quivered and cried out in pain, but Sholia spoke again, heedless of her outrage, and holding the Sholan’s mind steadily under her control, she forced it back to the Hall of Waiting and faced the woman, whose face had gone suddenly very white and whose lip was now caught between strong teeth.
“Let me go!” she hissed, the eyes no longer blank but full of fear and hatred. “I hurt!”
“Who are you?” Sholia demanded, and the woman squirmed, the hands clenched into fists. “Answer me!”
“Release me,” the other begged through gritted teeth. “I am in agony, sun-lord.”
“I will burn away all memory unless you answer me,” Sholia said levelly, the sun-discs blazing white and searing hot. “I will make a shell of you, an unfilled emptiness. How did you come to Shol?”
Sweat stood out on the woman’s face, dampening her hair, but even as she tightened her grip on the foreign essence within this lissome body Sholia felt a tremor of craft and slyness ripple through it.
“If you torment me further,” the voice grated back, “I will tear into her essence. You are forbidden to harm your mortals in any way, I know that, Sholia, so let me go!”
A fierce wrath fumed up in Sholia, driving out every hesitation, and she drew herself up in a burst of energy. “You dare to speak to me in that way!” she shouted, the deep, vibrant tones booming to the ceiling. “The Law gives me all power over you, for you are on Shol without leave.” She flung out her arms, and light exploded from her fingertips and splintered with a roar against the far walls. “I will consume you, Ghakan, I will plant a fire of torture in you that will never go out!” Her body had thinned and now poured heat and sun fire into the room. Her face had lost the softness of a mortal woman’s and had become all bright bones under a skin like a molded sheet of incandescence, all fiery eyes.
The woman screamed and fell back, scrabbling against the side of the Gate, one hand shielding her face, but the Ghakan who squirmed in the sun-lord’s grip was desperate. “Harm her and you will fall! You will fall!” it wailed shrilly.
Sholia paused. You will fall. Yes, it is true, she thought, the anger giving place to an anguished defeat. And if I fall, Shol is finished. “I will rip you from her body,” she yelled in frustration, but already her hold had loosened, and the Ghakan turned and leered at her.
“You cannot take me from this body without killing,” it sneered. “Kill her, take me from her, destroy me, then what will you do with her naked essence? Tell it how sorry you are?”
Sholia released the brutal fingers of her mind, and she heard the Ghakan essence laughing as it ran back behind the Sholan’s.
The woman put both hands to her face and turned confused eyes to Sholia. “Sun-lord?” she whispered. Her hands fell, and she smiled faintly. “Oh, I remember now. I was going to Sumel for a little while. Why was I going there?”
“Go back to the city, go home,” Sholia answered wearily. “The night is almost spent, and you need rest.”
The woman turned obediently to the outer door, but not without a wistful glance through the Gate where the stars wheeled and flamed. “I was going somewhere,” she ended lamely. “I do not want to rest. I do not like to dream anymore.” Then she was gone, head hanging.
Sholia did not wait. Stepping up onto the Gate’s narrow floor, she ran three steps and fell into the corridor shouting to Danar’s sun to carry her. She emerged from Danar’s airy Gate tunnel and paused for a moment. Dusk was deepening into a warm twilight. The haeli forest lifted its branches under the weight of a calm gloom. Resolutely, stilling the fever of haste in her feet, she took the stone walkway which brought her to the middle of the stair and climbed quickly. She reached the marbled flagstones of the cloister and, nodding to the immobile corions, went inside.
The passages were quiet. She paced them steadily and came at last to the chamber where only two systems pricked in the black immensity of the polished floor, Shol and Danar, winking up at her with a gallant courage as she crossed under the high dome. She ran lightly up onto the dais, swept past the dull gleam of the sun hanging on the wall, and knocked on Janthis’s small door.
He opened immediately and welcomed her courteously, yet behind the soft words she sensed surprise. She did not consider how her fire still rippled, agitated, beneath her skin, and the
furious burning in her eyes that had been lit by anger was still not subdued by the hard quelling of it. Janthis followed her into the room.
“Well, Sholia,” he said as she turned to face him. “Why have you come to Danar?”
She did not hesitate. “Shol is slipping from my grasp,” she snapped. “I don’t know how or why. You must help me quickly.”
He looked at her reflectively for a time and then responded, “Tell me.”
She did so rapidly, putting together all the hints that had curled just out of reach of her consciousness, and she did not falter until she spoke of the woman by the Gate. Then her hands touched each other in a gesture he had come to recognize as uniquely hers. “It was an essence from Ghaka, I know. I flew the valleys, I saw the slit darkness of Ghakazian’s door!” Agitation caused her to turn and pace to the wide bay window, and she stood gazing down into the sun-ball where it lay black and inert on the sill. “I cannot take the thread of that essence and feel my way from Shol to Ghaka. How did it come to Shol, and why? I almost lost myself, Janthis, I almost forced the essence into oblivion because of my fear and anger.”
Fear, Janthis thought. It is always Sholia who must be fed courage with stirring words. It has made her vulnerable, eaten away at her strength. Has it eaten into her mind, also? Is she slipping into the fire by her own eagerness to hold it at bay? He walked to her and, taking her shoulders, led her to one of the gray, unadorned walls.
“You say that some of your mortals, perhaps all of them, have become hosts for Ghakans torn from their bodies,” he said. “Let us look at Shol.”
Something in his tone caused her anger to flare anew, but now it was tinged with the confusions of doubt and self-distrust. “You do not believe me!” she said incredulously, but he only put a finger to his lips.
“Watch,” he ordered and touched the wall. “Shol,” he said, and immediately the gray began to soften and run into the center as though the wall were being drained of color, leaving a velvet blackness in its place so thick and real that Sholia felt she might step through it into a new and undiscovered corridor of space. The grayness spidered toward the center, shrank, and was gone, leaving the whole wall a yawning gap leading to nothingness. Then, at the center, a light grew, was flung outward, expanded until another was spawned behind it, and another. They hurtled toward the room, filling the wall with a sizzling fire that reflected white on the faces of the two immortals, then were cut apart on the edge of the wall and vanished. Sholia felt as though she were being catapulted down a long, star-lined tunnel, but as she began to lean into it Janthis gently pulled her back and kept his hand on her arm. “Do you recognize the constellations?” he murmured. “The wall is a mirror that hangs outside the universe.” He began to name them as they raced toward him, flowered, and broke apart. The momentum began to slow. The stars rolled soberly toward Sholia until they stopped and hung shimmering, and after an astounded second she cried out, “My suns!”
He nodded. “And there is Shol, with Shon and Sumel, like three crystal beads strung on an invisible necklace. Have you ever seen anything so lovely, Sholia?”
“My suns,” she said again, but this time the words were a fluted breath of air.
Janthis beckoned. “Closer,” he commanded, and the twins and their planets grew until they filled all the wall and their light threatened to spill out into the room. For a long time he stood very still, gazing intently at what the mirror showed him, his hand leaving Sholia and tracing an absent pattern on his chin, but she did not notice, so absorbed was she in her worlds, which hung clean and beautiful, the gems of the universe. Then abruptly Janthis made a gesture as though flinging something at the mirror, and the picture snuffed out instantaneously to leave the plain gray wall and a light in the room that seemed dismal and thin to both of them.
Sholia exclaimed in dismay, and he came closer to her, forcing her to lift her eyes to his. “Now,” he chided. “I saw no blemish on your suns, no fading of their light, no haze of entrapment around them. Did you?”
“No,” she answered reluctantly.
“They shine out as steadily as ever. Shol is still whole.”
“But that is because I am still whole!” she almost shouted, drawing away from him. “The suns will show nothing until I go down, and I am slipping, Janthis, I feel, I know it. My mortals have been conquered, and I cannot remain as I am!” His calm pity infuriated her, and in desperation she smote her hands together. “Ghakazian was right! You are helpless, you will do nothing!”
“I cannot force you to see clearly through your wandering imagination!” he snapped back, exasperated. “You say Ghakazian was right, yet where is he now? Mired in his delusions behind a closed Gate. I was given life long before any sun-lord, Sholia. I wandered the universe with the Worldmaker. I knew him. Why can’t you listen, and trust me?”
Perhaps you love him too well,” she swiftly came back at him, disappointment flooding in to damp down the fires of momentary rebellion and another shard of terror piercing her. “Perhaps you are not willing to throw everything you are able against him. I bring you evil news, and you turn me away!”
He sighed and went to her, taking both shaking hands in his own. “Your life is ruled by fear,” he said soothingly. “It has been so for generations. Now consider. Is it possible that the Unmaker is attacking you with all his subtlety? Suppose that through your Gate he has sent a message to your imagination, stirring it further with a great illusion?”
The hands resting in his became suddenly still. “You think that he invites me to believe that my mortals are beyond saving? That I see and feel only the extensions of an idea I have conjured myself?”
“It is possible, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said after a while. “It is. But I do not believe it so.”
“You must stand firm. He wants Shol more than anything else, and he will worm his way into your world by any means he can,” Janthis said, and Sholia was shocked at the bitterness that crisped his words and cooled his fingers. “He is unable to breach a Gate himself until the forerunners of his power have done their work and broken a world, and too often you forget that those mind-swaying pinpricks of his can easily be repulsed if only you will say a simple no to them. Ah, Sholia,” he went on, “you know all these things. Why do you keep running to Danar like a frightened child?”
“Because I am a frightened child,” she responded in a low voice, withdrawing her fingers. “I am his child. I am lonely. I miss Ixelion and Falia, but Ghakazian most of all. You, me, and Danarion are the only ones left, but we find no comfort in one another anymore. Come to Shol, Janthis, I beg you! Judge these things for yourself, and then tell me that I dream on the edge of the abyss!”
“I will not come and so add fuel to the fire of defeat already burning in you, Sholia. Stop behaving like a cringing mortal woman in fear of her life. You are not mortal. Take up your immortality. Use the powers that are yours to maintain a world that even Ghakazian used to call the crown of the universe.”
She drew herself up, words of pleading and abasement on her lips, the prospect of returning to Shol alone so devastating that she was tempted to kneel before Janthis and beg him to let her stay on Danar, but she did not. Instead she brushed by him and stalked to the door.
“You and he,” she said contemptuously. “You complement each other. You are in league with him, aren’t you, Janthis? The link forged between you in the beginning has never been broken. No one aided Falia. No one cared to wonder at Ixelion’s distress until it was too late. Why is it always too late, Janthis? He has picked us off one by one, and when Danarion and I are destroyed, then you and he will be free to divide the universe between you.”
“The sun-lords fell by their own choice,” he answered mildly. “What would you have had me do? Close all the Gates in the beginning in the belief that none of you were worth trusting? Have you forgotten the Lawmaker, to whom the universe belongs?”
“I have not forgotten him,” she ended with a wounded pride, “
but he has forgotten me. I am sorry, Janthis. You are wrong and I am right, and Shol will be the price of your foolishness.” She swung the door open with a crash that echoed to the jeweled roof of the dome and was gone.
Very well, she thought enraged as she strode the vacant, placid corridors. I will go home. I will tear apart every mortal and toss every Ghakan essence out through the Gate, and when I have purged Shol, I will close the Gate myself. I will put the Law aside and use every power I have to create a new Shol. It is not possible that on a world as thickly populated as mine there are not some Sholans left untainted. They and I will rebuild together, and the Unmaker will be shut out forever. So will Danarion, another thought rebuked, and you will never walk these halls again.
She groaned and came to a halt, the new determination evaporating with her despairing anger at Janthis. She could not think. I belong here, not on Shol. A world is for mortals. Let them make or break as they choose, I ought not to be responsible. I am a sister of the suns, I do not understand the earth. But of course Janthis would chase me away.
Stargate Page 22
