Stargate (24 page)

The dream smiled. “That is good. Now open the rest of your inner self to me, Melfidor.”

Melfidor hesitated, and the room enclosing his resting body seemed to become very still, as though for a moment night had ceased to move toward morning and the whole of Shol had taken a deep breath. “Why?” he whispered.

“How can you truly see the ground below or hear the sound of wind in your wings or sing my song or feel the exhilaration unless consciousness be joined to flesh essence, imagination? Open. Open!”

Melfidor was reluctant, and yet the desire to see, hear, and feel it all again was overpowering. He turned to the door that sheltered mind and essence behind his consciousness, and the unknown thing from Ghaka rushed after him. Obediently the door swung wide, and Melfidor blinked, coming to himself. The room was still dark, and the quiet of night still shrouded the outside world. He flexed his fingers and began to sit up, and then he felt the thing pounce. With lightning speed it forced its way past his mind, and at the last moment Melfidor screamed, knowing what he had done, the swiftly flowing alien thing within him suffocating him, forcing mind and consciousness back as it filled him. Frantically he strove to slam the door, but it was too late. Darkness deluged him.

Mirak slowly opened his eyes and smiled. He rose from the bed and stood, numb with relief and satisfaction, feeling the blood course through his legs. He lifted his hands and looked at them, admiring the rings on his slim fingers, and then put them to his face, exploring its contours. What color are my eyes? he wondered. He pulled his hair forward, and it shone dully, a dim brown that would take life from the sunlight of day. Then he laughed softly. I am Mirak. I am Melfidor. I am Mirak-Melfidor, Melfidor still, Melfidor also. I know that you lurk within me, Sholan, blind, deaf, and dumb, a barren seed. How good, how good it is to see and breathe, to hear and feel! Come quickly, dawn, so I can be warmed by sun once more! He wanted to run to the window, spring from the casement, and soar free over this unknown world. He flexed his wings but lost his balance, sitting back on the bed with a bump. My wings. Of course they are gone, what else could I expect? For the first time he truly faced the burden of that loss with all it would mean down the long years ahead. He forgot Ghakazian's light promise of power on Ghaka, forgot why he was here in another man's body on an alien world. He sat on the bed and grieved for his freedom, and Melfidor struggled once in his mind and was still.

Shol was a place of haunting and dread that night. In palace and home, out on the windy plains, in ships caught in the lull of windless hours, it changed, and in the morning an alien race greeted the sun with greed appeased. Not all Sholans had been lured into captivity, for the population of Shol was far greater than that of Ghaka. When the families of the city sat down together to eat the early meal, children chattered to parents who remained unusually silent. Lovers stirred drowsily and then drew away from each other, a sudden unfamiliarity rising between them. The nomads led their horses to water, doused the cooking fires, and packed away their gear, though some stood by the river or smoking ashes, heavy-eyed and sluggish, as though the morning had come too soon. On the docks the dawn bustle was strangely cheerless. Fishermen sat in their boats with nets in their hands and did not move. Captains shouted at crews who fumbled at their work in dull perplexity. And in the palace Melfidor, Veltim, Chantis, Fitrec, the men and women who under Sholia held the reins of Shol in their firm hands, slipped from their rooms and wandered the high chambers and sunny balconies, avoiding one another, rediscovering the feel of a crisp winter wind on their skin and the inexpressible comfort of firm floors beneath their feet.

Only Baltor rose with the dawn full of new vigor. He flung wide the windows of his room, singing absently to himself, and when he had eaten, he cloaked himself and went out of the palace, running easily down the terrace stair and crossing the plain to the Towers of Peace. When he reached it, he paused, looking out and down over Shaban, now bathed in warm sunlight. The winter breeze tickled the bells strung from every curling eave, and their music came to him, a constant, pleasing tinkle of tuneless delicacy. Whitecaps raced for the beaches and slapped under the wooden piers of the docks. Up and down the steep, stepped roads the people moved, slow and unhurried, and Baltor saw nothing amiss in a scene he had witnessed thousands of times. He swung the gate wide and passed through.

Baltor was untouched. Tagar had drifted into his room and had hovered over him for a long time, watching the face whose lines so nearly resembled his own. The black and silver hair had been spread wide on the pillow; the open, unseeing eyes were blank. With a mounting sorrow that numbed his need for flesh, Tagar knew that he was looking at himself as he had been on Ghaka, old and full of good knowledge, wise in the ways of mortals, ready to face the Messenger without rancor or regrets. He thought of this man's children, and their children. He thought of Natil and the quiet loveliness of Rintar. The more he pondered, the more reluctant he became to tear apart this life, so rich in living. If I do not enter this man, I shall never again feel fire or sun or walk the valleys of Shol as I did on Ghaka. But he could not. He stayed beside Baltor for the rest of the night, his misery growing, and when dawn changed the darkness to paleness, he turned and fled. Down through the morning-drowsy, empty chambers, through the entrance hall, out upon the terrace he glided, a howl of agony, and before the sun rimmed the horizon, he had vanished into the lonely shadows of Shol's mountains.

I will do anything to keep this, Mirak thought, looking out from a balcony cut high in the side of the mountain, an empty room behind him and the eyes of Melfidor scanning the brown plain below. If there is to be war, then I will fight as Ghakazian wished, but I will never give up my body again. It did not disturb him, whose keen Ghaka-sight had been able to recognize the quick dart of a field mouse from far above the level of the crag peaks, that he could not discern what manner of animal ran through the brittle grass a mile below. Already his essence was fusing with Melfidor's body, each penetrating the other, each taking color and direction from the other. Mirak's unconscious self was at work in Melfidor's memory and thoughts, selecting for itself a personality and the invisible fleshing of a foreign past. I am a shipbuilder. I like to sail and fish. I am the sun-lord's confidant. Emotions came with this shaping of a new man, but many of them were so alien to Mirak's essence that he shied away from them. A vision of paper and black ink spread out under his hands brought a wave of satisfaction, a pleasure of the mind that Mirak could not understand. The flood of worship spilling over his whole being at the thought of Sholia was easier to comprehend, but Mirak could not separate it from his own fearful scrabbling at the feet of Ghakazian's manipulative power, and the pure glow of Melfidor's reverence became ringed with a groveling, sick humility. Mirak had no feeling at all for water, but while Melfidor's love of the ocean tired him, he was able to blend it with his similar delight in the equally vast sweep of his own element, the sky, though that, too, was reduced by the memory of his last flaming fall. He pulled faces out of Melfidor's thoughts, put names to them, but could not untangle the complex auras around each one. He fingered Melfidor's long memory, the thread of kin-thoughts, and found there a people whose very atmosphere, the dreams they had conjured, the things they had done were offensive in their otherness.

Finally he reached for the hour of Melfidor's death, but a new and terrible thought stopped him. What will happen to me when Melfidor goes to the Gate? When I must flee his body and leave both his essence and his body to the Messenger that will come for him? Must I find another host, a Sholan who is strange to me, and discover and knit all over again?

Suddenly he realized that in the blind intensity of his thoughts he had mounted the railing of the balcony and was standing on its frail rim, leaning against the stone side. Horrified, he jumped backward. I must never forget that I have no wings, he thought, his heart scudding. Perhaps it would be safer to close myself off from Melfidor, let him live again without knowledge of me. I can watch him and learn, I can nestle in his mind while his consciousness goes through the days and nights. Yes, I will do that. I will relinquish his senses until I become accustomed to the prison of the earth, for if I do not, I could kill him or make his sun-lord suspicious when she returns. Mirak's gaze turned inward. He opened the door to Melfidor's consciousness, knowing that, in letting him in, Melfidor had relinquished authority over himself and would withdraw again when ordered to do so.

Melfidor caught the balcony rail in both hands and looked about him, bewildered. Why did I come up here? he thought. Is Sholia back? I don't remember rising this morning. It's cold, being so high. For a moment he stayed there, his head aching, feeling sad and very tired for no reason he could find. His attention was distracted by a flock of birds arrowing noisily up from the misty plain beneath. Darting and whistling, they drew nearer. He shuddered and stepped back from the rail, turning to the little door behind him.

Ghakazian watched the Gate until the violet birds had fluttered to immobility and the stars had been blotted out, then turned and made his way down the short Gate tunnel, now thick with a stygian blackness. So it has happened to me, he thought. My Gate is closed. I am immured on Ghaka, and I am alone. He was calm, almost detached as he came to the mouth of the cave and stood slowly surveying his world. But this time they were wrong. This time they have closed a Gate against the only aid capable of halting the All's descent into the bowels of black fire. The time draws in on me, and I must swiftly learn how to shake myself free of Ghaka. It will come, I know it will. I have been obedient to the Book, laying myself beneath its discipline, and the last venture must follow.

Ghaka was silent below him. He judged it to be about noon, but time meant nothing on the stricken planet. No eyes glanced to the sun, no feet carried strong bodies to the white cottages to break the fast of the morning. Even the flocks had scattered, leaving the burned grass of the valleys and wandering toward the mountains, driven by the stench of death hanging like an invisible miasma to where the high winds could not reach. The sun bulged purple in a black sky and cast dark shadows on the ground.

Ghakazian, about to launch himself forth, paused with one hand on the rock arching low over him. For a long time he studied the sun. How many years are left to you and thus to me also? he wondered. Are you diseased with an illness that is eating you away, or simply wounded, unable to recover yet not sliding into death? He did not bother to probe it. My essence lives as long as you survive he said to it but more to himself, and once my essence has found another body on Shol I am safe until that time.

He pushed himself away from the rock wall, but as he did so he heard his hand click and scrabble against the stone. Startled, he brought his fingers up before his face. Curved dirty-yellow talons fanned out under his gaze, and the skin of his hands was leathery to the touch. He turned the fingers this way and that, then bent to examine his feet. The same cruel claws gripped the lip of the cave mouth. Angrily he tried to wrench them off, but they would not come, and the first pain of his life shot up his leg. Slowly he twisted them again, exploring the sensation. I hurt, he thought, appalled. How can that be? My immortality lifts me far above all mortal hazard. Very well. I am diminished but not powerless. I will go on.

He fell out of the cave mouth, opened his wings, and began the long flight to his home, beating steadily and surely between the peaks, whose feet drowned in shadow. He could not see what lay in that shadow, but he knew. The updraughts from the valley floors were warm and stronger than he had ever known them to be, though he had flown this way countless times. As he went he glanced into each cave, thinking that they looked like sockets from which the eyes had been violently wrenched, and saw how the black blood that had trickled down the face of the crags had dried indelibly. He missed none of them, a ruthless pride sweet within him. He came at last to his funnel, dark now without the obliging obedience of his sun, and folding his wings, he dropped inside.

“I must begin at once,” he said aloud. “I must have courage, I must not flinch. This night must find me on Shol.” He settled himself on the ledge and brooded in the darkness. But what of the Gate? Now that it is closed, how can even my essence leave this place? He drew out from his memory every bright scene he had witnessed while reading the Book to assure himself that he had been proceeding correctly, and once more he saw himself crouching behind the shrubs that lined the terrace of Sholia's palace, watching as the Unmaker talked to her. I must trust and obey the Book, he concluded, and first I must shed my body. The rest will follow, providing I do not turn aside. He leaned out over the airs that stirred around him, rising from the silent depths below. He imagined the bottom of the funnel, far beneath the level of the earth outside. He saw it as a bed of pointed rocks never blunted by the passage of wind and weather, black with moisture that trickled in a thin stream to drip into caverns even deeper. He refused to feel fear, to place himself on a level with Mirak. He brought his wings forward and wrapped his arms around them, holding them tightly before him, and then he jumped.

He pulled his wings closer to his waist and closed his eyes. Down he fell, turning slowly, the wind of his passage screaming in his ears and buffeting hot against his body. He no longer knew where the ledge was, or where the mountain's teeth waited to bite into him. He brushed against rock. It grazed his arm, and he loosened his grip on his wings for just a moment, a reflex of preservation, but it was enough. Of their own accord the wings flapped back and spread, and he found himself hovering in tight darkness, rock enclosing him. Without thought, gasping and trembling, he shot upward, reached the ledge, and hurtled through the arch into the wide coolness of his hall. Not that way, he thought frantically. Out under the sky.