DragonThrone02 The Empire of the Stars

by Alison Baird

  He was not so tall as she had thought—but then, of course, she had grown since last she met him. She let him guide her through the steps of the dance. It was not difficult, merely a question of matching her every motion to his, and it was slower than the set-dancing on Arainia. She could not meet his golden gaze for too long, however, and kept glancing away.

  Suddenly a face in the crowd caught her eye: Syndra’s. The woman was pale and her eyes filled with anger. Ailia gave a gasp.

  “What it is?” Mandrake asked.

  “Lady Syndra,” Ailia said. “She is here?”

  “You’ve nothing to fear from her.”

  “She hates me. You told me as much.”

  “She cannot harm you now.”

  But Ailia stepped back, out of Mandrake’s arms. “Your Highness, I am—rather tired. I think I must rest.”

  “There are seats over there against the wall. Will you sit for a while? And have some refreshment—a glass of wine, perhaps? There are some bottles of excellent vintage, including a hundred-year-old red from the cellars of King Garon VII of Marakor. I was there when the grapes were pressed, and I can vouch that only the finest fruit went into it.” He smiled.

  She shook her head. “Thank you, but I don’t drink wine. I would like to retire to my room, if I may.”

  “Certainly.” It seemed to her that he was slightly displeased, but trying to conceal it under a veil of courtesy. “Until tomorrow night, then.”

  It was a warning that she had not yet won him to her side, and little time now remained to her.

  DAMION STOOD ALONE IN THE DESERT, gazing at the stars.

  The outcome of the raid was appalling, was worse than he had imagined. He had feared that his friends might be killed, but taken captive, taken alive—he knew enough of Zimboura now to realize what that meant. Then today Kiran Jariss had come again, with the news that Khalazar had posted notices throughout Felizia: if Damion, they said, did not surrender as well, his friends would be executed at daybreak.

  There was, he had been advised, no hope of a rescue attempt. The stronghold of Yanuvan was impervious to attack. Only the greatest army could hope to break through—and even Khalazar’s rebel army had been helped by traitorous zealots within the keep. Their own small group of Moharas and Zimbouran insurgents simply had not the strength to mount any assault.

  “It is unfortunate,” Makitu told him, “but we can do nothing.” The Moharas had seen so much death already that they had become almost inured to it. They had received word of Unguru’s loss and the capture of their Zayim with grief and anger, and then they had put their emotions aside and returned to the daily business of living. A hope had been lost, but not all hope, not yet. To Damion, though, the fate awaiting Jomar and Lorelyn was unthinkable.

  He closed his eyes, seeing in his mind the dream he had had the night before.

  In it Ailia had stood before him, clad in a flowing gown so white that it had seemed to shine with its own light: or perhaps it was she who shone. The dream figure both was, and was not, the Ailia he knew: she blazed before him like a star, transcendent, glorified. “You must help me, Damion,” she had implored him, holding out her arms in their long trailing sleeves. “I will do what I must, but I cannot stand alone. Help me!”

  He opened his eyes. The evening star shone above him, pale and solitary: he could still hear Ailia’s forlorn cry as he gazed at it. “I cannot stand alone!” It seemed to ring from one end of the heavens to the other.

  “Damion?”

  He turned to see the shaman standing there. Wakunga’s brow was deeply furrowed. “Why do you stand out here, when all the rest are sleeping?”

  Damion smiled wanly. “You’re not sleeping, Master.”

  “I felt something from you. A strong emotion, filling the Ether. Have you been dreaming?”

  “I’m not certain.” He told the shaman what he had seen and heard in his mind. Dream or vision? It had seemed more like a memory—but of a time that had never been. He had never seen Ailia look as she had in that scene, robed in light. “Perhaps it’s just my fear,” he said as they walked over the dunes. “I’m so afraid for Ailia, and even more for Jomar and Lorelyn. You know that Khalazar has said they will be freed if I surrender myself.”

  “I know.”

  “Why am I so important, Master Wakunga? It’s Jomar who has been the real leader. Why do they want me so much?”

  “Perhaps the answer was in your dream.”

  He saw the beautiful, half-familiar face; heard the pleading words. “You mean it has something to do with Ailia? But what?”

  The old man said nothing.

  “Lori and Jo—I keep seeing their faces. They’re in Khalazar’s hands, and I can save them.” Damion groaned. “I want to go, Master! To hand myself over, to give them a chance to live.”

  Wakunga looked thoughtful. “You may go,” he said. “There is no reason why you cannot.”

  Damion stared. “But you were against my going before. You said it would bring ruin on us all.”

  The shaman looked up at the sky. “That was when the dragon-sorcerer was here. He has gone now, back to his home in the stars. This path is not the one you would have trodden before.”

  “Then I can help Jo and Lori? And it won’t bring harm to anyone else? How can I be sure?”

  The old shaman faced him. “Why do you not go to the dream plane?”

  “Meditate, you mean?”

  “It is said among my people that when we think ourselves awake, we are in truth asleep,” the shaman said. “And when we fall asleep, we wake to dreams. Rather than wait for a dream to come to you and give you answers, you can seek it out in the place where visions come from.” And with that pronouncement he walked slowly away. Damion stared after the old man’s stooped, shuffling figure. When it had blended into the night, he knelt and began to trace figures in the sand.

  The carvings on the ruined walls in the oasis were a thing of the ancient past. The Moharas of this day and age made all their images in sand, not stone: for sand was by nature evanescent, shifting at every breath of wind, and any images that were drawn in it could not survive to become idols. Never again would their tribal chieftains go to war against one another’s gods. Wakunga had taught Damion how to draw a shamanic circle around himself, each elaborate ring a layer of thoughts, brushing out and covering his footsteps as he went until he arrived at the still center. He drew one now. First came the outermost circle, with its fierce guardians: lions or jackals, or fantastic beasts of one’s own devising. Next a ring of wavy lines created a moat or encircling river. Then the inner wall, with projecting tower shapes to suggest a citadel. Within this lay a ring of blank untouched sand, for tranquility. And finally the smaller circle at the center, in which he sat, legs crossed. As soon as his forefinger completed the circle shape, closing him in, he was aware of an easing of tension. The outside world might spin around him like a storm, but this was its quiet eye. He recalled the star-shaped city of Liamar on the summit of Mount Elendor. Like this circle, he realized, that city had been a mandala, the Temple of Heaven lying at its central point.

  Damion closed his eyes and breathed deeply. There was no ambrosia here to make the passage easier: his mind must find a way into the Ether on its own. For a long time he sat motionless, as the stars slowly turned above him. A Mohara shaman would chant a mantra, over and over, until body and mind were composed. For some reason he found himself thinking of an old poem from his childhood, which he had memorized because it was about a knight:

  My love dwelt in a golden hall

  With many chambers, gemmed and pearled,

  And muraled was each lofty wall

  With wonders of the outer world,

  And gardens grew with flowers fair

  Whose perfume graced the gentle air.

  O house divine! And there each day

  We walked, and in the fragrant bowers

  Did rest to hear the fountains play,

  And while away the dreaming hoursr />
  With sweet embrace and tender gaze:

  Such bliss we knew in kinder days.

  Now he is gone on errantry,

  With mail of steel, and shield and sword,

  Upon a stallion tall rode he

  To take—my love, my gentle lord!—

  The steep path down to shadowed vale

  And groves where paths and courage fail.

  That way is dark and drear and hard

  With peril great for wand’ring knight:

  There serpents grim their caverns guard,

  And couch their coils on jewels bright,

  And cruel enchantress sets her snare

  In guise of maiden passing fair.

  Unto some dark and dismal keep

  Beguiled and led by witchery,

  Shall my dear lord in dungeon deep

  Be bound by chain and iron key?

  A prisoner wan and lost to woe,

  No more his lady’s love to know?

  Or shall he, in some foul worm’s den

  The precious trove of gems behold,

  And so may come to yearn again

  For jeweled wall and tower of gold,

  And to his house upon the hill

  Return, where I await him still?

  It was an old allegory, so the magisters had told him, of the division of soul and mind. The Elei believed that the latter became estranged from the former at the moment of birth, and its journey through the mortal realm in its new armor of living flesh was like the quest of a knight errant through unknown regions. The mind forgot its previous existence in the realm of spirit, leaving the soul there bereft, like an abandoned lover. Only the death of the body reunited them in Heaven.

  But why did he think of this allegory now?

  He sat motionless, centering himself within his own inner stillness until the outer world was banished from his thoughts—until thought itself was banished, and he drifted in a void where his consciousness was strangely altered, neither waking nor dreaming, yet somehow still aware. Aware of the dark inward abyss, of his own slow gentle breathing, and of something beyond these that was neither sound nor image but the constant flow and surge of some vast incomprehensible Power . . .

  . . . There was a glitter of many rainbow facets in the darkness. It was the Star Stone: Ailia’s talisman. It glowed before him with its mysterious luminosity, calling out to him.

  “A thousand hues, one shining light. The many are One, and the One many . . .”

  The figure of a bird arose from the Stone, as if hatching out of a radiant egg: a great bird of light that flew through the darkness, illuminating it. As it drew nearer he saw that it was made up of the flying forms of myriads of other smaller fowls, from doves to eagles, pheasants to cranes. They cried aloud in human voices as they flew in their bird-shaped flock, saying: “The Elmir! Who will show to us the Elmir, the Bird of Heaven?”

  “You are the Elmir,” he called back. “You are yourselves that which you seek.”

  “The many are One, and the One many!” they cried with a single voice.

  The golden radiance brightened, and the thousands of winged shapes merged once more into the great bird of fire. But then the light seemed to be dimmed and tainted. As he watched in horror, the Elmir faltered in its flight. There was a serpent, a writhing coiling thing as black as night wound about its body. And the Elmir struck at the serpent with beak and claws, and the serpent buried its fangs in the Elmir’s breast, until it seemed that the two would plummet through the darkness and perish together.

  “No!” he urged the bird of light. “You must live! You cannot be overcome!”

  The fiery eye of the bird turned to him, and he was dazzled by it as if by the orb of the sun. But he saw in it an appeal before the bird sank out of sight.

  “Yes—I will help, if I can. Show me what I must do!” The cry came from his heart, from the very deeps of his being. And from the darkness came an answering cry, like the call of a wild bird in some desolate place far from hope or comfort: “Akkar!”

  The vision was gone. Damion came back to himself again, blinked, stared about him at the moon-silvered sand. “Akkar,” he whispered.

  The god-ever-returning. The old god of the Mohara myths, who died in the autumn to the sorrow of his consort Nayah: her tears were the winter rains, and in the spring she brought Akkar back to life again. So Kiran Jariss had told him, and the shaman also. “Each year the goddess goes down into the underworld, to bring forth her lost love,” Wakunga had said. A fertility myth, Damion thought. There were many like it in pagan traditions around the world. As the sky goddess descends to the underworld to seek her lost consort, so the spring rain descends and seeps beneath the earth. As she frees him from death’s dungeon and brings him back into the light of day again, so the seed is released from its husk and comes forth as a flowering plant: that was the basis of all these old tales.

  But a myth was no mere fancy or fable: it was a living, potent thing, a part of the world of mind blending with that of matter, the dream realm acting upon the real. And now it had become his reality, and there was no escape. Every step he took, no matter in what direction, led him on to the same necessary destiny.

  The bird of Heaven had shown him his path.

  After Akkar dies, the sky goddess Nayah descends and weeps for him. The Morning Star’s daughter also must descend to the earth and restore it to life and peace for the prophecy to be fulfilled . . . The myth-strands woven by the ancients had intertwined in this place, and held in their invisible mesh a possible future. As he pondered this he glimpsed, in a sudden burst of illumination, the shape that future must take. A place awaited Ailia here. She would command the hearts of Zimboura, Mohara, Shurka, and make them one. She would become in their eyes the avatar of their most revered deity, forever thrusting aside the God-king and his cult. But Damion must first prepare the way for her. Khalazar would kill him if he turned himself in. He might kill Jomar and Lorelyn also, choosing not to honor the pact. But the myth was powerful, the myth was stronger than Khalazar—or death. Death would not destroy it, but reaffirm it. To these people he would become a living avatar—just as Ailia had been for the people of Arainia.

  Ailia . . . He thought of her now as he had last seen her at Melnemeron, her large soft eyes full of concern for him. Ailia, forgive me, he said silently, gazing up at the Evenstar where it shone in the clear evening sky. I love you, and it is for you that I do this . . .

  He felt, or seemed to feel, the presence of innumerable invisible beings about him—angelic presences, elusive, hovering, ministering. Almost he imagined that he could see them as bright, shining figures that surrounded him, soothing and encouraging him. He was awed, and yet also sensed a curious kinship with these invisible guardians, as though he and they were of one kind. It was as if the vision had unlocked a door at the back of his mind, which he had not known was there. Through that door came power, and more besides: the knowledge that he was a divine being. For was that not what a human being was—a spirit clothed and masked in flesh? The body was not all, it was but the outer garment. He knew his true, essential self as a core of imperishable fire.

  Khalazar could not destroy that self, any more than he could extinguish the stars in the sky. He had not the power.

  Damion rose in one swift decisive motion. The yearned-for answer had come to him, even as the shaman had known it would: he knew now what it was that he must do. He strode forward, and left the circle to the wind and sand.

  19

  Parry and Feint

  WITH THE PASSING OF HER SECOND DAY in the Forbidden Palace, Ailia felt her anxiety begin to turn into fear. Mandrake, for his part, betrayed no sign of worry or impatience. He remained courteous and attentive, his treatment of Ailia that of a host indulging an honored guest. He showed her around the castle, and told her all its history, and took her for long walks in the pleasure gardens of the inner ward. “You are not a prisoner here,” he said, and it was true. She could go where she willed, keep what
hours she pleased, have for her meals any delicacy she might desire. There were no state functions or ceremonies, no government documents to study and sign, no councils to attend. The burden of leadership, and the need to earn all that she was given, had been lifted from her: she had all the pleasures of a royal life with none of its onerous duties. A bookshelf appeared in her apartment, laden with volumes of alien scholarship, of history, of poetry. When she mentioned an interest in painting, she found a set of brushes and paints set out for her the next time she went to her room. Entertainments of various kinds were held for her, concerts and magical displays. During one of the latter, the many-colored lights that she had observed before were made to play about the towers of the keep and hang like ghostly lamps in the boughs of the trees within the ward. They were, as she had suspected, ethereal manifestations.

  “They are harmless,” said Mandrake. “These will o’ the wisps are akin to eidolons, but so weak they cannot assume material forms, and so they remain mere masses of quintessence. The Nemerei, as you know, summon them as lights to see by, though the Loänei used them as prodigies to fill their subjects with fear and awe. There is an undersea palace of adamant in the deep waters off the coast, where once a Dragon King made his dwelling, and before him the Archons who built it. There Loänei have lived in concealment for many centuries. That is why the dragon lanterns that your friend saw arose from the ocean depths. My people wished to remind those on land that the Loänei realm would one day be re-established. That has now come to pass. But do not fear: as long as I reign I will not allow them to enslave the humans as they once did.”

  Ailia spent much of her time in the palace library, where she had leave to read any book that caught her eye. In addition to its many volumes of long-lost literature and lore there was a large section on black magic: shelves of dark-bound books that she carefully avoided, recalling how Mandrake himself had first fallen from grace. He laughed at her concerns. “There is no peril in knowledge, Princess,” he rebuked her. “Only in ignorance.” But many other works she read with eagerness: histories written by explorers and settlers of other worlds, tales of wars and great deeds in ancient times. Sometimes Mandrake joined her in the library, pointing out volumes that might interest her—he had of course read them all himself—and he spoke to her of the worlds he had visited, and people he had encountered there. He had known many historical figures of Mera and Arainia—figures that to her were mere names in history lessons—and had a disconcerting habit of referring to them as if they were people he had met in the street just the other day. “Oh, Ingard the Bold,” he would say, “he was bold all right, and skilled with a sword. He was also loud, unkempt, and often boorish in his ways. He was raised by wolves, after all . . .” Or: “I told Valivar IX that Zimboura would never conquer Maurainia, but he insisted on conducting his forays,” or, “I see you are reading Bendulus. He never could get his facts straight. He once told me, with a perfectly straight face, that an adder will lie with one ear to the ground, listening for the footsteps of its prey, while stopping up the other ear with its tail.”