Forgotten Suns (51 page)

The one who had just spoken was younger than the others. He
reminded her of Zhao: earnest and pretty, and near tears with the awfulness of
what the rest wanted to do.

“We don’t have a choice,” one of his elders said. Half her
face was beautiful, as if carved in bronze. The other half was burned away. She
fixed him with one dark eye and one milky white. “This is the penance we pay
for all the worlds that died because our ancestors were not the great saviors
they wanted to be. There is no other way, and no other hope.”

“What hope is that?” the young one cried. “All our
people—not only mages; whole tribes and nations of innocents. They’ll all die,
and worse than die, if we do this. There won’t even be a ghost left to wander
the ruins.”

“We will save as many as we can,” the tallest and darkest of
them said. He was huge, with a beard that spread across his massive chest, and
eyes that held all the sadness in the worlds. The deep rumble of his voice
vibrated in Aisha’s bones. “We will move them beyond gates for as long as gates
are open, which pray the good god will be long enough. No one will stay who has
not chosen to stay.”

The young mage tossed his gold-curled head. “What if it
doesn’t work? What if it’s not enough? What if—”

“We die,” the burned one said. The hand she raised was a
claw, the fingers fused together. “We’ll die if we do nothing. I know which I’d
rather choose.”

The council of mages whirled away. Time speeded up; images
passed by too fast to catch. But Aisha could see the pattern in them all.

The mages of Nevermore dangled themselves as bait for the
eater of souls. They taunted and teased it with their psi that it so well
remembered: darting and out of gates, setting off fireworks of magic on
abandoned worlds, and leaving bits of energy like crumbs along a path. Then,
just as the eater was about to find them, they snatched the bait out of its
jaws. Disappeared. Vanished completely.

But they always left a hint, a clue, a new trail for it to
follow. A trail of gates that led through barren worlds.

Some were left from the old enemy. Some had simply died. The
masters and rulers and educated minds in the web mapped and charted the way.

The burnt mage died on an airless rock that orbited a
near-dead sun. The young one almost escaped—almost made it back alive. But the
eater swallowed him just before he passed the gate. Then it ate the gate.

On Nevermore, most of the ordinary people were gone, taken
away to what their leaders hoped was safety: shifting through gates to worlds that
could support them—empty worlds or worlds with few inhabitants, where they
could make lives for themselves. They had, voluntarily or otherwise, agreed to
a terrible and necessary thing: to forget the world they came from, and even
more terrible, to give up psi if they had it. To make themselves invisible and
inedible to the eater of souls.

Those who had stayed, who were mostly mages, devoted their
lives to removing all evidence of themselves from their world. It took ten
years of Nevermore. Ten years of destroying every image and every hint of the human
creatures who lived there.

Out of that whole world, a few thousand psi masters stayed
to the end. They moved everything they could to the larger of their moons, the
one that was a planet in its own right, with air to breathe and water to
drink—both of which they made better and stronger and more plentiful with psi.

The eater came before they were completely ready. Nevermore
was empty except for the Sleeper in his heavily shielded tower, and a tribe of
warriors born and bred to be nulls, who would wait for him and guard the
planet.

So far the memory or history or whatever it was had been
like a vid. It was vivid and close, but Aisha sat outside of it, watching and
listening.

Now she found herself inside. Living it. She floated in the
mind of one of the masters: born to the arts and the powers, and raised to
fight this most terrible of all enemies.

They called her the ruler of the country in which the
Sleeper slept. She thought of herself as its servant.

Her deepest name, her true name, was Estari. It came with
the memory of a man’s voice, soft and deep, speaking over her head from a
father’s height.

Her mind was as sharp and clear as a castle made of crystal.
Aisha saw and felt the kind of person she was, not only the strength but the
weaknesses that made her moral and fallible. She was strong and skilled, but
she had a temper. She had no patience for people who were slower of mind than
she was, a flaw in her character that caused her no end of trouble.

She took care to show her people only her most calm and
confident face. Inside, she was terrified. At night, alone in her high and
royal bed, she cried herself to sleep because there was nothing she could do to
save her world or her people.

Rama didn’t cry, that was burned out of him, but like him,
she was full of the sun. She was keyed to it, and it fed her and made her
strong.

She didn’t think she was strong enough. She thought the
Sleeper might be, but she had some gift of prescience, and it warned her not to
disturb him. His time would come.

She wrote down what she knew of that time, in the book that
would go with them on the long chase. Aisha saw her hand with the pen in it, a
sharpened reed, simple and perfect: narrow, long fingers, as dark as Rama’s.
There was a lightning-tree of a scar across the back, from an old accident with
psi and fire-making.

The alarm went off just then. The eater was coming. It had
passed the last gate seeded with sparks of psi—skipping a dozen in between.
Which was not good news for such plan as they had.

They had, by their calculation, a handful of days while the
eater fed, before it came through the gate to Nevermore. The queen—no, empress;
that was the title she held in this world—no longer trusted that. She stood up
in the small crowded workroom, lifted her head and called with all that was in
her, mind and body both.

Everything was as ready as it would be. The last of the
people were safe beyond gates. Everyone who was left had trained specifically
for this—and each of them had some art or craft that they would need if they
survived. Farmers, fisherfolk, artisans. Leaders, too, but even those had
functional skills. Hunters. Smiths. Masters and teachers.

Some of them set wards on the planet. The rest wound the
moon in a web of psi, protecting its atmosphere and preserving its gravity. On
the empress’ command, they launched it through the gate that they had made.

Estari didn’t take part of that great working. She was the
sentinel, the guardian on the mountaintop. She watched, and held on, and
waited.

What she hadn’t told any of the others—though some surely
knew—was that she couldn’t do what she had to do if she rode the moon through
the gate. She stepped out of her workroom onto the plains of Nevermore’s
northern continent, beside the river that flowed past the Sleeper’s tower.

It was tall then, and sharp, black stone polished as smooth
as glass, with a golden sun on the pinnacle. It had no door or window. The only
way in or out was through psi—and it had to be a particular kind, of a
particular genetic heritage.

She had it, but she wasn’t looking to go in. The Sleeper
slept, and dreamed, she hoped, of sanity and peace.

She was all alone in this world except for a handful of
bred-warriors wandering far away, and a herd of antelope grazing farther down
along the river. Some of those had been tame once, but they had already
forgotten.

There was no grief in her. They’d all done what they knew
was necessary. If she succeeded in what she meant to do, the people could come
back. The world would be safe.

If not…

~~~

The eater was too vast to see or even really understand.
The best Estari’s senses could give her, even with psi, was the image of an
unimaginably enormous sea creature in a cloud of dark ink, with tentacles
innumerable, and huge eyes full of cold intelligence, and a beak sharpened on
the edges of mortal souls.

She meant to let it eat her, and then, from inside, alter
it. Shift its polarities was as close as Aisha could come to understanding it.
Turn it into its own prey, and trick it into feeding on itself.

She stood alone under the sun that was her father and her
lover and her self. She made herself a beacon. “Come and get me! See, I’m
sweet, I’m strong, I’m everything you hunger for. Come and swallow me!”

It came down out of the sun. It was beautiful and terrible
and absolutely alien. There was nothing human in it at all—until it ate her
whole.

Her body flared to ash, but her spirit held together by pure
indomitable will. The eater staggered, drunk on the splendor of her. She
reached through every part of it, and twisted.

Space warped. Time turned on itself. The eater lunged toward
its own extremities, and swallowed them.

She dared to be glad; to taste a sweetness that was victory.
To think that now, at last, she could let go.

The eater convulsed. She hadn’t gone far enough, or held on
long enough. Nor could she. She’d given all she had. There was nothing left.

Except for one thing. Her plan had failed. The other one,
the one all the mages had shared, was still there. With the last disintegrating
fragments of herself, she turned the eater toward the gate that was almost
shut, and gave it the scent of the mages’ bait.

“She had weakened it just enough,” Umizad said, “that we
were able to stay ahead of it down the track we’d set. We meant to stop at the
stars’ end, but it drove us on—and out and through, into this place beyond all
places that we ever knew. We bound it here, made a cage for it out of the dark
behind the stars. We meant to destroy it, but none of us had the strength,
singly or together. With her we might have. But she was gone.”

They still mourned her, nine hundred of their years later.
That mourning tightened in Aisha’s middle and made her throat ache.

“We were bound here, too,” he said, “out of time and space,
on guard over the captive, with no way to kill it, and no hope of finding our
way home. None of us is strong enough to do either.”

“Do you believe I am?” Rama asked.

“I don’t know,” Umizad said. “I only know what she wrote in
the book she left us. That you would wake, and hunt us beyond the edges of the
world. That you would have dreamed so long that your soul would have been
burned clean, and your heart would be a pure cold thing. Only the pure, she
said, can destroy what we brought here.”

“Pure? Of what? Humanity?”

“I don’t know that, either,” said Umizad. “She had the
malady of seers, which is to speak in riddles.”

“Because sight is never clear,” Rama said. “I am all too
human. I may have dreamed myself to some semblance of sanity, but my flaws have
never changed.”

“Pride and ambition and the conviction that you and only you
are right.”

Rama bent his head. He was almost smiling. “I see what she
tried to do. It wasn’t about strength. It was about focus.”

“Are you saying she lacked it?”

“She had not had six thousand years and one very long night
to concentrate her mind.”

“Can you do what she failed to do?”

“Probably not,” Rama said.

Not only Umizad sagged at that. They all did, even Elti.

That was his revenge for the way they’d treated him. He let
them steep in it for a while. Then he said, “But I will try. I’ll need your
library and your best rememberers. And I will need to be free in this world.”

“Are you bargaining with us?” Elti demanded.

“I don’t bargain,” he said. “That is what I need.”

“And if we won’t give it to you?”

He smiled, sweet and wild and gleefully mad. “I’ll take it.”

She was mad, too, in her way. In all the various ways of the
word.

“You are not our emperor. Do you understand that? You do not rule us. We are
not your subjects.”

“I understand,” he said. “The son of the Sun is dead. I am a
pirate captain from a long-forgotten world, and maybe I can finish what the one
you loved began.”

“I suppose you’ll want to be paid,” said Daiyan. Her tone
was dry and her expression sardonic. For her, Aisha thought, this was as good
as a play on a stage.

“I owe my world a debt,” he said, “for what I almost did to
it. Consider this the payment.”

Daiyan bowed in her cradle. He’d startled her. She could see
him now: not as the monster from the children’s tales, but as a person. The empress’
ancestor, with the same powers and the same bred-in obligations.

“Don’t let him suck you in,” Elti said, sharp and harsh. “He
was the greatest courtesan of his age. He could seduce anyone into anything.”

“Not anyone,” Rama said with a touch of old, old sadness. “Not
quite.”

~~~

Rama brought the shuttle down on the far side of the moon
from the cage that had been built for him. That continent was full of cities,
built along rivers and chains of lakes, with high mountains like a spine down the
middle.

One city was not the largest, but it was the brightest when
Aisha shut her eyes and looked in that other way that was getting easier the
more she did it. It was full of psi masters.

He came down through their layers of defenses, precisely in
the middle of the central square. It was dawn here, the sun still hidden behind
the mountain wall. Swirls of galaxies shone dim in the brightening sky.
Directly above the mountains, the absolute darkness of empty space seemed to
swallow the tops of the peaks.

No welcoming committee waited for them, except for a sleepy
person with a cart full of what looked and smelled like fresh-baked bread. She
stared at the machine and the people who came out of it, transparently thought
about bolting, then got hold of herself.