Stargate (30 page)

During Danar's hushed winter Janthis took to wandering, skirting the murmurous city, meandering far under the endless haeli forests, where the wind sang in the bare blue branches. He stood and watched the corions pass overhead on their way to their sleeping tunnels in the mountains, hundreds of them beating the sky with the sun flashing on their emerald-green wings, and he thought he could make out Storn in the lead, the Book clasped firmly in its mouth. He climbed into the foothills and sat for hours in the long, bare meadows where in the summer the sheep and goats grazed, his eyes following the pleasing slow sweep of country that dropped to forest and lakes far below, all now softly hazed with the same winter mist that drifted often to diffuse the sunlight.

Winter felt different this year. He had never counted the seasons that he had seen come and go on Danar, for the passing of time meant nothing to him. But now he noted the journey of the sun across the sky from its dawning to its setting. He found himself sensitive to the cycle of wind bringing rain, the cooling of the earth, a frost or two, bright sun, and the warming to rain once more. He began to fancy that the years did not take Danar and the mortals from a beginning to an end but chained them to a wheel that rolled them round and round, crushing them beneath its weight. A vain and foolish fancy, he told himself with irritation. The mortals are born, live, and then die to be taken by the Messengers. It is Danar herself who turns, carrying us with her. Yet he could not shake off the feeling of a closed and sterile circle drawing in on him.

One day he stood at the edge of a lake, his feet submerged in dark water, watching a rainstorm drive into the surface with a furious blind force, and he realized that the mortals were somehow freer than he. It is Danarion and I who go round and round, he thought, imprisoned with Danar's tortuous circling, round and round forever. Everything in the universe turns back on itself but the mortal people. His immortality had never been a burden to him before, he had not thought about it, but now his own time stretched ahead of him and promised only an endless predictability. He is doing this to me, he thought as his untiring legs took him over Danar's winterbound landscape. He seeps in everywhere. As Sholia has gradually become all fear and mortal femininity, as Danarion has slowly come to spend more time with the people of the city, loving them, so I must acknowledge my own partiality for despair. I am older than any other living thing in the universe save the Lawmaker and the Unmaker himself. Surely I may grow weary from time to time.

When spring stirred and the haeli trees unfolded pale blue leaves, he returned to his room in the empty palace. Calling for Shol, he stood before the wall, lost in thoughtful contemplation while the twins burned without variation, and Shol and its companions hung shimmering around them.

The leaves spread full and lost their shine, casting deep, blue-tinged shade for the people who brought food into the forests and spent the days before summer rediscovering the well-known paths through the ocean of yesteryear's leaves. The corions returned, dispersing through city, palace, and forest, and Danar rang again with the music of laughter. But Janthis still stood with eyes and mind focused on Shol. In the end, when high summer hung hot and heavy and the blood-red haeli flowers had long since ceased to shower the earth with perfumed petals, he dismissed the vision and sent for Danarion, walking slowly through his maze of vacant hall until he came to the sun-splashed flags of the terrace and the dazzle of a bird-busy afternoon.

He lowered himself onto the top step and presently saw Danarion emerge from the Time-forest, a young corion perched on his shoulder. The beast was whispering something in his ear, and Janthis saw him smile as he began to mount the stair. He looked up and waved, pausing to set the small animal down. It scuttled to the edge and jumped, spreading its glinting wings and gliding from sight over the motionless fringes of the forest. Janthis felt all at once lonely, the gulf between himself and every other thing an unbridgeable sorrow. But the mood fled, for Danarion smiled a greeting and sank easily beside him.

“There are children and young corions swimming in the lake beyond the west wall of the city,” he said. “So many that it is difficult to tell which is which, and both shriek enough to break a mortal's ear. The little corions look so funny when they are wet and their fur hangs slick and bedraggled. I'm not surprised that the adults stay away from water. They rapidly develop too much dignity.”

Janthis felt a stab of annoyance at Danarion's pointless chatter and with a burst of wild anger suppressed it. “I called you because I want to talk about Ghaka,” he said abruptly.

Danarion fell suddenly silent, linked his fingers, and looked at the lacery of carving in the step below him. Grelinador. One of the first to go, he thought, the excited screams of the children fading quickly from his mind, taking with them the happiness of the day. I remember you as a spurt of blue fire. Grelinador the rock-melter. “What about Ghaka?” he asked tersely.

“Tell me now, if you can, what you saw when you sought Ghaka's mortals before the Gate was closed.”

The horror of it came back to Danarion instantly, every detail as clear and terrible as though he stood on the Gate stair once again. “I can if you order it,” he said with difficulty. “But such things are not good to remember in Danar's fragile peace.”

“I do order it. I will tell you why in a moment.”

Again Danarion was silent, struggling to find words that would describe the indescribable for the first time, and there was no gentle way.

“His mortals were all dead, every one of them,” he blurted. “I stood on the Gate stair, and even before I saw the carnage, I could smell it. I came to the foot of the crag and did not walk the road. I crossed the fields, and when I came to the cliffs that bordered the valley, I saw them. Piles, mounds, mountains of mortal flesh broken and jumbled together.” He swallowed and forced himself to go on. “All along the escarpment it was the same. I left that valley and found another, and it too was littered with bodies. I ran to the crags, but the caves were empty, and winged ones lay in shriveled black heaps below. I do not know how he did this terrible thing. Even to speak of it reopens a wound in me that will never heal. So many times I have stood with him here above the stair. I have walked in the past with him many times since his Gate was closed, listening to him speak of Ghaka and her people with such loving pride. He was so strong.”

“Perhaps he was too strong,” Janthis said quietly, “and his strength grew into a need to dominate all around him. The Unmaker fed his strength with power he was unable to refuse, and with the urge to dominate came a blind certainty that he was always in the right, whatever he did. He fell by the Book.”

“We each have a certain goodness that makes us weak,” Danarion replied, his voice steadier. “I can tell you no more, Janthis. Nothing lived on Ghaka but the carrion birds and a few flocks and herds.”

“And Ghakazian.”

Danarion looked up in surprise. “Yes, of course. What terror, to be the only living thing on Ghaka forever.”

“What of the essences, Danarion?”

Danarion froze. Slowly his head came around, and his eyes met Janthis's. “I did not even think of them, I was so burdened,” he said. “I should have felt for them, stood still and quested them.”

“You sensed nothing? No whispers, no shadows, no presences?”

“Nothing at all. Only a vast emptiness, as though the planet herself had suddenly become hollow.”

Only a vast emptiness.
It was an essence from Ghaka, I know!
Sholia had almost shouted at him.
It does not matter,
Ghakazian had said gaily, rudely in the moment before his Gate was closed.
None of it matters in the least. I do not need you anymore.

Janthis felt the golden blood chill in his veins. “Danarion,” he whispered, and the fingers on the sun-ball suddenly loosened and began to tremble. “You did not feel the essences because they were no longer on Ghaka. If they had been there, they would have seen you, come to you, tried to speak with you. But they did not. Before the Gate was closed, Ghakazian sent them out of Ghaka.”

Danarion bit back the questions rising to his tongue and began to think, and before long he knew that Janthis was right. Mortal bodies could not pass the Gate and go into deep space, but essences could. Up until now they had never done so, but Ghakazian had wrenched Ghaka out of the rightness of things. “Why?” he choked, but Janthis was not listening.

“Sholia was right, and I did not listen,” he muttered hoarsely. “I did not listen! They have gone to Shol.” He leaped to his feet, and Danarion rose with him. “How long have I been dreaming, caught in the Unmaker's web of doubt and indecision?” He brought his clenched fists together. “A winter and a spring on Danar. Three years on Shol. Three years … And where is Ghakazian?”

He turned and ran, shouting for Danarion to follow, and together they raced through the entrance hall and along the passages and came at last to the chamber of council. Janthis did not hesitate. He sped across the smooth black floor but suddenly came to a halt. “No,” he breathed, and Danarion glanced down. Two lights twinkled up at them, the last two constellations left unsullied in that long, silent floor, and as they watched one began to flicker. With a cry Janthis launched himself toward the dais, Danarion on his heels. He flung himself up the steps, tore open his door, and fell inside. “Shol!” he shouted to the wall. Obediently the grayness quivered and slid into the center to be replaced by the tunneling blackness of space. “Hurry,” Danarion breathed, and then the suns of Shol were hurtling toward them. All at once they slowed and for just a second appeared as they had always been. But their light soon dimmed as a black-tinged fog swirled around them. It thickened and took on a vast, towering shape that suddenly shrank and vanished into Shol. Danarion found himself gripping Janthis's arm with both hands.

After several minutes had passed, one of the twin suns began to swell. Slowly its size increased, and as it grew the light seemed to fade so that they were looking at a dull white, round heart beating against the universe. Shol and its sisters had begun to acquire the black rims Janthis knew so despairingly well. The rings deepened, took on a malevolent substance, and licked out with black tongues to encompass the suns, but suddenly the swollen sun began to shudder. For one wild moment it shook, dragging Shol and the other planets with them, back and forth, and before Danarion could blink, the pale, huge sun exploded. Shards of brilliant light rushed toward the two of them, and Danarion screamed and covered his eyes.

The sun had vanished as though it had never been, and the other twin fought to regain its place, its light flaring, dying, and flaring again. With a cry of anguish Danarion pointed. Of the worlds only Shol was left, teetering but steadying rapidly, one tiny pinprick of reflected light, and Sumel and Shon were no more.

But something else galvanized Janthis. He stepped closer to the wall. The rim of black fire had gone. A mist of grayness hung about Shol and did not disperse, but the roiling, curling fingers of death were no longer there. “Bring the Gate to view,” he commanded, his voice trembling, and Shol's remaining sun rolled toward them, filled the wall, and slid past to bring Shol into their vision. Although the mist obscured it as it seemed to come closer, they quickly passed through it, and the square outline of the Gate hung before them.

But it was not as they remembered it. Its blackened lintels were twisted as though they had been taken by a giant hand and wrenched. Beyond, in the Hall of Waiting, a fume of black smoke billowed. Danarion moved back, but Janthis, tall and intent, stood his ground. In the Hall Sholia was on her hands and knees, her face upraised, tears pouring down cheeks smeared in grime. In one bleeding hand, pressed to the cracked and heaving tiles, was her necklet, broken and seared by fire, one of its sun-discs dead. Her singed hair hung tattered on her shoulders. She was speaking, sobbing, her mouth making words they could not hear, and then they could not see her, for the maimed Gate began to fill with tiny silver bells that rocked to and fro as they burst into being. Before long there was nothing to look at but bells, ringing out over the universe, and then there was nothing to see at all, for the bells melted into one another, their voices stilled. The Gate of Shol was closed with a sheet of solid, glittering silver.

“Enough!” Janthis whispered, and instantly the wall was a solid gray blindness. “I have done this,” he said. “It is my fault. Gone, all of them, and I did not do what I should have, I refused to recognize the truth.”

Danarion left him. He walked slowly through the council chamber, scarcely knowing what he was doing or where he was going until he found himself out under the hot sun, standing high on the terrace, the row of regal corions at his back. His pained eyes swept the healthy, light-licked reaches of the forest. Above it the tips of the city spires could be seen, giving back a dazzle that played genially and eagerly around them, and the first faint breeze of late afternoon was a stirring of fragrant air in his nostrils. I am the only sun-lord left, was the sole thought in his mind, and he could not form another.

Dawn was a flush of warm pink against the rim of the world when Sholia stepped from the Hall of Waiting and lingered for a moment, the safety of the Gate behind her, Shol's hostile, withdrawn presence tempered by the stillness of sunrise. She stood and let all anger and disappointment die, thinking of Chilorn and the mystery of the Book, while first one sun and then the other, much farther away, lifted into the sky. When their light had turned from scarlet to gold and had merged into one sparkling bright nimbus, she left the path leading across the plain to the upper city and came to the foot of her own wide stair. She mounted slowly, hearing the morning bustle on the Towers of Peace come to her faintly as the night watchers left their posts to the guardians of the day, and by the time she walked in under the cold shadows that still hung about the entrance chamber, she had almost convinced herself that Janthis had been right. Nothing ailed in Shol but she herself.