Stargate (2 page)

“All is well, lord. Why should it not be? New homes have been built, for there are many children, and last year a group of the river-dwellers set out on the journey to the other side.”

“On the other side there is less water, smaller trees, more grass, and stronger sunlight. Did you tell them this?”

“I did, but they still wanted to go. They are young, Ixelion, and full of adventure, and the lands on the other side lie virgin, waiting for us to spread over them.”

“I am very glad, Sillix,” Ixelion said with a smile. “In the beginning, when the Worldmaker and I walked here together, he told me how there would be a slow maturing on this world, and much time would pass before the people would multiply. They are ready now to explore and change.”

“It is very good,” Sillix replied, and Ixelion repeated sadly, “Yes. It is very good.”

After a silence during which Sillix again studied his lord, he dropped his gaze and asked in a low voice, “Where is the Worldmaker, Ixelion? Is he still making? Has he left the All? Why does he not come to Ixel anymore?”

Ixelion glanced swiftly at the graceful, bent head, the supple webbed hands pressed against each other. Once he would have told the truth to Sillix. Once he would not have known the difference between truth and untruth, as Sillix still did not know it, but that had been in the times when the Worldmaker still took his place as head of the council, before he became the Unmaker, when there had never been any lies, not in the whole of the All. Even now, Ixelion knew, after so much breaking and disfigurement, the greatest weakness of the sun-people was their difficulty in separating truth from lie. It was becoming clearer to them, but that clarity was itself a small beginning on the path to the black fire. To discern a lie, he thought, we must have some knowledge of what it means to be a liar.

“The Worldmaker is not making anymore,” he replied finally. “He has not left the universe. He may return to Ixel someday.” And all those things are true, Ixelion thought, rising. True and unimaginably terrible. “I will welcome you whenever you wish to speak with me,” he finished. “My halls are not sealed from you.” He lifted the sun-disc from his breast and held it out, and Sillix kissed it. Ixelion embraced him and left, walking back along the beach in the increasing dimness of evening. The rain still fell. He held up his arms to it as he went, and by the time he reached his palace, it was full dark.

The water flowed on through his lofty rooms, now lit by great shafts of yellow light that his sun had left for him. It mingled with the mists gathered high above him, making rainbows in the frothing falls, turning the fountains into jewels that sprayed out like crystal haeli flowers and fell to the floor like dying stars. Ixelion walked beneath them slowly, thinking of his mortals diving deep beneath the warmer ocean on the other side, sitting under the benison of a sun no longer shrouded in fog, placing their feet on dry land. He mounted the stair, circled his pool, and stood for a long while gazing out onto the night. Though he could not see beyond the soft darkness, he knew that forest, marsh, and beach were deserted and his people lay under the water, rocked by the almost imperceptible swells, dreaming the hours away. A kind Time he gave us, Ixelion thought. A sweet, friendly Time. He allowed his mind to range near and far as his eyes gazed unseeingly into the night, but beneath the reveries was the chest, and the box that lay within it. At last he turned his back on the window and went to the corner. Lifting the lid, he drew out the box and carried it into an inner room where sunlight flooded the crystal walls and the only water present trickled in tiny rivulets across the doorway. He sat in his chair, conscious as never before of the busy voice of the palace. The box was fastened with a copper hasp, but it was not locked, and he parted it and lifted the lid. For a second the light in the room dimmed. Ixelion glanced up, startled, his heart all at once thudding against his breast, but soon the warm glow wrapped itself around him again. What makes you think that you are strong enough? something whispered in him. What madness has taken hold of you? He looked down into the box.

Within lay a thick volume, bound in leather and lettered in gold. Ixelion lifted it out and quickly closed the lid, for beneath the book he had glimpsed a dull, metallic glint, and his heart had leaped into his mouth. Not yet, he thought. Not yet? Not ever! I will live on Fallan for a while, and then I will take the thing, untouched, to Janthis. The book was heavy. He ran his hands lovingly and wistfully over the supple binding, the gleaming letters.
The Annals of Fallan,
he read,
Being a History of Fallan and Her Worlds from the Time of Making.
Ixelion opened it, and a wave of vanished laughter and lost innocence, broken dreams and wasted hope rose to him as Falia's spiked red handwriting sprang out at him. She had written in the common tongue as the Law demanded.
Before the beginning was the Lawmaker,
he read.
And the Lawmaker made the Worldmaker and commanded him to make according to his nature. And the Worldmaker made the worlds.
… Ixelion could not go on. He riffled through the pages, aching with sadness. The first chapter was well known to him. The Annals of every system began with the same words, and he did not want to see them again, in Falia's hand, red against the yellow vellum. He sighed and leaned back, closing his eyes and grasping his sun-disc. I will go back, back to the pain of my last visit, he thought dimly, already tranced, the Annals under one limp hand and the box at his feet.

On Ixel the sun rose and set, the people swam and fished, and the endless rain fell. But Ixelion was now once again on Fallan, walking toward the deserted sweep of stone stairs that lifted to Falia's palace, high above. It was noon, but the sun's rays lay red and ominous over the treeless, rolling country, sliding stealthily through the bending silver grasses and changing to a dull ocher where they touched the blackened crops rotting in the fields. Furtive shadows moved on the periphery of his vision, and he forced himself to turn his head. A procession of vaguely human shapes was disappearing over the brow of the nearest hill. In their arms and slung over their shoulders, severed limbs gleamed dully like the fat stems of obscene flowers. They did not notice Ixelion, and he averted his gaze and quickened his pace.

As he began to mount the stair he heard a muted roar behind him and turned unwillingly. Fire flicked orange on the unbroken line of the horizon; silhouetted against it horsemen rode to and fro with lances raised, black men on black horses, crying out like hunting animals. Wails and shrieks came faintly on the wind, mixing with the acrid odor of burning, all imbued with the same cold essence of death. He turned back abruptly, stepping carefully where the steps had crumbled or split and grass now tufted, one hand going to the colorless gem hanging on his breast. A sense of oppression came burgeoning out from the palace's great twin arches lost in dimness above him. “I am not a judge, I am a guardian,” he whispered as he passed under them. “I am not a lawmaker but an interpreter.” The hall was deathly silent. Ixelion crossed it, still whispering, fingers tight about the crystal, and by the time he had come to the far end and had passed Falia's stone chair, he knew that he was himself again, armored against the decay around him, invulnerable to any lurking seed of dissolution. He climbed the black-sunk steps behind the chair, and above the first level the halls grew smaller and somehow lighter, as though some vestige of Falia's quicksilver integrity still clung to the walls and lingered in the musty air. He went from room to room, climbing more stairs, searching quickly and methodically. He did not stop and seek an echo of her in his mind. He knew that she would no longer be capable of calling to him.

He finally found her, in the small, octagonal chamber that crowned the myriad tiers of her palace. He stepped through the archway and saw her facing him, sitting motionless in a high-backed wooden chair, her outline black and silver against her sun, which seemed to leer in through the wide stone aperture of the window. Wind stirred her hair and sighed gently in the corners of the naked room. Ixelion looked about him, but there was nothing else to see. A stone floor glimmering gray, stone walls bare of any adornment, the curved vault of the ceiling now rivered in cracks from which dust floated, and Falia in her chair. He went closer. Her hands were folded in her lap, and under them Ixelion could make out a container. Slowly he bent, as from it there rose a perfume, a faint sweetness. It was a large box made of pale-blue wood grained in tiny channels of gold, and under his fingers it was warm. Haeli wood. He remembered then that he had admired it once, long, long ago, and she had told him that Danarion had given it to her after some council meeting on Danar, when he and she had walked together under the blossoming haeli trees. Ixelion squatted before her, lifting one of her limp hands and brushing the cold fingertips with his own.

“Falia,” he ordered quietly, “come here.” She did not move, and he repeated the words slowly, emphatically, still holding her hand. Her feet were covered with a thin film of dust, and dust lay also on her shoulders and her head. “Come,” he said a third time. “Ixelion is here. He wishes to speak with you.” After a long time her hand trembled, and she withdrew it from his grasp. Then she took a deep, uneven breath and blinked. Her head rolled back against the carved support of the chair, her shoulders slumped, and the hand that he had held fluttered anxiously over the box in her lap as though she feared it would no longer be there. Ixelion rose and stood looking down on her, giving her time to take the last steps into the present, and then he spoke. “Falia, get up. Come to the window.”

She gathered the box to her breast and rose stiffly, turning to face him, and even in the brooding dimness he could see the glow of a happier, more innocent time dying slowly behind her green eyes, struggling against this day, this hour.

“Ixelion,” she said, “how dark it is! Is it night?” As she looked at him the gentle fire went out of her face, and her eyes widened. “No, no,” she whispered. “Not yet. I must rest a little more. I am weary.”

He took her arm and drew her to the window. “Look down,” he commanded harshly, “and see what you have done.” His grip tightened, and reluctantly she put one hand upon the stone casing and leaned out, the other hand still clutching the fragrant box. Far below, down on the floor of the world, the dreary land stretched away into an infinity of cold dimness. The sky was so dark that the stars shone faintly, their light stronger than the frail rays of the exhausted sun. Ixelion knew that if he had led her to the opposite window, he could have shown her the devastation of her warring mortals: fire devouring the pastures and murder, suspicion, and despair stalking unchallenged among the armies. But here there was peace of a kind, unquestioning, accepting, the peace of defeat. For a long time she looked and then she drew back. “I did not do this,” she said. “How can you accuse me of such a thing? I am not like Kallar or Mallan. I did not surrender to black fire, I did not bow.”

“But neither did you fight. You went away, Falia, you retreated into your mind. You did not even send us word, and we did not suspect. Where have you been?”

She put a hand over her eyes. “I have been walking alone on the hills, under my sun, in the time before the Worldmaker shaped mortal men.” The hand passed over her face and fell once more to the box. “Ah, Ixelion! How much simpler existence was then, when the worlds were whole, when he loved what he had made. …”

“Hush!” he said sharply. “Not here.”

She smiled painfully, and Ixelion noticed that in the short time they had been speaking tiny lines had begun to inch through the skin that since the beginning had been smooth and beautiful. The silver hair now had a metallic dullness, the long neck held a hint of slackness about the jaw, and around the grass-green eyes and the soft mouth the flesh had begun to pouch. He resisted the urge to step away from her and glanced out at her sun. She followed his gaze and then abruptly sat again in the chair, cradling the box.

“Tell me, Ixelion,” she said haltingly, “what year is it?”

He was glad that he stood behind her. “I do not know,” he replied steadily. “How did you allow this to happen to you? How long has it been since you looked out?”

She answered him in a low, hurried voice, her eyes on the stone wall in front of her. “I don't know. Perhaps two hundred years of mortal time have passed since the Trader came through the Gate and sought audience with me. He said he dealt in woods and fruits and had brought tree seeds for us, but also that he had run from Tran with a great and dangerous treasure to place in my keeping.”

“Tran!” Ixelion exclaimed. “But the Gate on Tran was closed a millennium ago!”

She nodded. “I know. I was there, we all were, when Tranin went down into black fire. I should have been suspicious of the Trader. I should have ordered him to carry the treasure to the council. But I was proud, and secure in the knowledge of my safety. Let the others fall, I told myself. I, Falia, am incorruptible! I took it from his hands and was seized with the desire to keep it for my own. That overwhelming greed should have warned me that the Unmaker was breathing through my Gate, but I was oblivious to all save the feel of the thing under my fingers. The Trader laughed at me and went away, leaving me with it. I took one look and knew what it was. I was afraid for the first time in my life, and my sun felt my fear and quivered in the sky.” She rose suddenly and cast the box to the floor. “Cursed be the Unmaker and his selfishness and his hatred! Cursed be the Trader, whose heart was as black as his scarf!” She wrestled with herself, both hands now tight about her necklet. “I should have carried the thing to Danar and given it to Janthis as soon as I recognized it, but instead I came up here and looked at it. The more I looked, the more afraid I became. I fled often into the times when the suns and we were new, and though each time I came back, I was tainted, and Fallan began to slide away from me. The people from my other planets began to complain of the riders, saying that I favored them and gave them everything and that they would not share because I did not order it. There was thieving and murder, but because I have no authority, I could not judge. They demanded new laws, but what right do we have to make laws? I did not fight. I did not seek help from the council, because I knew that Janthis would order the closing of my Gate. I sealed my hall and came up here and went away. That is all!”