Stargate (34 page)

At their foot the Unmaker had turned and marshaled all his strength. His own might was like a solid black, jagged iceberg around which his servile dark fire danced. Though he towered high over the whiteness of the thing Sholia had become, she felt nothing. She was consumed, she was one with her sun. She was the fire that burned to light the universe, feeding with magnificent aloofness upon itself yet never diminishing. Apart, sun and sun-lord were as twins. Together, fused into one entity, they were an omnipotent power, filling up the hollows within each other to become perfect.

Behind them the stair broke in two with a sound like a clap of sudden thunder, and the pillars above gave way, but Unmaker and white fire faced each other in silence. The Unmaker reared up, and with a cry he fell upon Sholia. The two fires clashed, and Shol and the empty, tormented sun in the silver sky screamed in agony. The city rocked, toppled, and began to slide toward an ocean that steamed and heaved. A hundred ravines gaped open in the plain, and the exquisite airy bones of the palace melted and fused together. The Unmaker felt as though he also were being shaken apart. Three times he strove to smother the thing that was Sholia and her sun, and three times his black fire shivered and splintered into a thousand shards while pain such as he had never known roared through him and left him shaken and weak. “I made you!” he howled, demented. “I made you!” And though he wanted to smash and maim, tear down, slash open, he knew in an overpowering spasm of hate that Sholia had defeated him.

He turned and strode in the direction of the Gate, but the fire came after him, ripping at his heels, searing his back. Once he looked back and fancied that in the midst of the blinding torrent of energy he saw the outlines of a face he had hoped he would never see again, a face from beyond the universe. Real terror sunk its teeth into his throat, and shrieking, he broke into a run.

Although the Hall of Waiting was on fire, it still stood, for strong magic protected the Gate on every world from all disasters save the word of a sun-lord. The gems and bright scenes that had adorned walls and ceiling had melted and run down to sizzle on the red-hot stone of the floor, and the room was full of fumes and a stinging, sulphurous smoke. Here, before the Gate which framed him with stars and cool darkness, the Unmaker turned for the last time. “I will not give up!” he croaked. “This is not the end!” And Sholia and the sun, drawing to themselves the last of the sun's vitality, saw him as small and far away, and infinitely insignificant.

Will I die also? Sholia thought, but no emotion was attached to the question. Death did not matter, not at all. The Unmaker must be thrust far from Shol, but even that act was seen by her against the backdrop of the unrolling of the whole universe's history, from the moment when the Lawmaker had called the Worldmaker into being and the Worldmaker had entered time. Now she was ready.

For a second they regarded each other, and she spoke to him with the strange, turgid voice of the sun. Go
back to
your
own accursed place, Unmaker,
she said.
Depart from Shol.
She saw the Unmaker lifted from his feet and flung bodily through the Gate. She heard him scream as he fell, and the lintel of the Gate buckled and heaved. But behind the seeing and the hearing was a pain that rushed upon her with the speed of light itself, and her own scream mingled with his as the sun exploded and its light was extinguished forever. Shon and Sumel, sucked into the last conflagration, burned fiercely and then disintegrated.

Sholia found herself on her hands and knees before the Gate, her necklet grasped tightly in her fingers, her hair straggling singed and limp around a face swollen with tears; aching, bruised, and buffeted, but her own face, her own heavy, paining body. The sudden weight of it dragged her down, and she wanted to collapse and lie with eyes closed, to go immediately into the near past and live again and again the few moments when she had been above all, a thing of unparalleled beauty and unconquerable power, but she was too weak to take even that journey. Ponderous with blood and bone, empty of all save her own small thought, she crawled closer to the Gate, summoning her will to send one last call winging out on the frail remnants of her immortality. Come to me quickly, she pleaded to her one remaining sun. My life wanes, yet I ask not for myself but for the closing of the Gate. Still trembling from the force of its companion's dying, it answered her, and its shivering light played shyly around her, beaming through the curling smoke that choked the Hall of Waiting. Sholia could not rise, nor could she find the strength to make the full spell. “I, sun-lord of Shol, order you to close,” she whispered at the Gate through charred lips. “In the name of the Lawmaker I beg!”

For a long time nothing happened, and Sholia began to sob, knowing that she was incapable of taking the spell from its solemn beginning. But with a delicate, faint tinkle one and then another tiny silver bell appeared suspended within the Gate, swaying to and fro on an invisible arm, the little clappers tonguing back and forth and filling the ruined Hall of Waiting with sweet, discordant music. The two became twenty, and the twenty multiplied rapidly until uncounted numbers of little bells rang out as though the stars had condensed themselves and their song to fill the Gate. For an age Sholia wept in relief, listening to the voice of Shol as it had been, until one by one the bells fell silent and still, and when the last thin note had ceased to vibrate, they melted cleanly and swiftly to form one glittering, smooth silver wall. The Gate was shut.

Sholia crept slowly to the wall, but when she put out a hand to pull herself upright, it scorched her palm. On hands and knees she struggled to the doors and, finding them cooler, hauled herself to her feet and stood looking out upon Shol. In every direction fire met her gaze. The Towers of Peace had vanished, and she knew that the city was no longer perched on the slope of the cliff, for the convulsed plain was shorter, its new, raw edge visible through the smoke spewing out of the clefts in the mountain. To her left the palace stair lay buried under a rubble of rock, and the entrance to the palace itself was blocked by stone that had come crashing from the heights above. Rivers of lava oozed onto the plain, and apart from the sounds of fire and cracking rock, Shol was silent. Sholia did not allow herself to think of Shon and Sumel, their orchards and the sun-bronzed people. She turned from the desolation around her, away from her palace, away from the Gate, and began to stagger across the plain toward the place where the mountain had sloped down to become forested foothills threaded with rivers. Now the rivers were steam and the foothills a smoldering waste of ash, but beyond them were more valleys, secret places, far from the scene of her agony.

She had taken no more than ten slow steps before a rumble behind her made her turn in time to see a cascade of boulders tear loose from the rock above the door to the Hall of Waiting. When the dust of their passage had cleared, the doorway was no longer there, and the doors themselves had been wrenched from their hinges and buried deep. She looked ahead to the parched devastation on the horizon and back to the place where the Gate now lay hidden in stillness and darkness, and then she flung her necklet to the ground and set out to cross the plain. I am sun-lord no longer, she thought, but it does not matter. I have served my purpose, and Shol does not need me anymore.

Danarion's small wooden house lay on the outskirts of the city. Three haeli trees clustered together at the foot of his garden, casting a blue and dim golden shade over his lawn and shedding rustling rivers of crisp leaves each autumn, and beyond them was his wall, a gate, and the road beyond that. He could have lived in the palace with Janthis, for Danar was his charge by right and its sun had spawned him, but he preferred to be where he could hear the voices of the city by day and see the lights of the surrounding houses flicker through the dark trees by night.

Each morning he would walk across his dew-heavy grass, go out his gate, and follow the road that took him into the city, and he spent his days wandering, talking to whomever he overtook, entering a house whenever there was an invitation, feeling almost unconsciously for any undercurrents of dark change beneath the slow tidal washing of the usual mortal flow and ebb. He found none. In summer the corions would sail over his wall and lie in the shade of his trees, talking lazily together. In the short winter he gathered up the iridescent feathers dropped by the migrating birds, as his neighbors did, and piled them into vases to mingle with his own sunlight and glow through the still nights. He gardened a little, cooked a little for his mortal neighbors, and even learned to spin and weave. He helped to fell trees in the forest that pressed close to the city, and he gave a hand to the people who crafted houses. The world of mortal life fascinated him; it always had, but now he sought its heart out of his own loneliness.

Sometimes he almost succeeded in believing that he could forget the powers dormant within him. Sometimes, when he became involved in a task or sat beside a mortal's hearth with a family gathered around him, he fancied that his blood flowed red instead of golden, that his place was in just such a house with his own wife and children. But in the nights, when his mortals rested, dreaming their dreams, he stood at his windows and watched the calm, motionless shadows lie over his lawn, knowing that he did nothing more than play a game. Time would not receive him as its servant. Try as he might, it continued to bow before him, step reverently around him, set him apart from the people whose homes hugged close to his own.

He tried not to see the children grow into adults and the adults mature into a strong and vital old age while his reflection in the ruffled pools that lay in the roads after a rain showed him the same face they had given back to him one thousand, six thousand Danar-years ago. He tried to greet the sun as the mortals did, with a cheerful moment of gratitude soon buried under a preoccupation with the business of the day, but dawn after dawn as his brother lipped the horizon his heart leaped within him and he wanted to leave his body and go soaring toward it, to plunge deep into its welcoming embrace, and the frail mirage he had built around him during the previous day vanished and had to be painstakingly erected once more.

He seldom went to the palace, for Janthis had shut himself into his little room and spent the years standing before his walls, calling to him first one lost world and then another or facing the blank solidity of grayness. Danarion dreaded the long walk to the domed council chamber, where the table was mutely laid with a necklet before each empty chair except Sholia's, and only Danar's sun twinkled out in all the solemn silence of the floor which stretched away to the foot of the dais like eternity itself.

Once or twice a year at the time of the seed-fires he went into the Time-forest and sat engulfed in the dry golden leaves which whispered down to rest around him, watching the seeds detach themselves from the trees with tiny explosions and burst into red flames as they whirled to the forest floor. A thin blue smoke like fragrant incense hung between the trees, and Danarion would inhale it and think unwillingly of the members of his kin that he would never see again.

The corions loved the seed-fires. Storn and the other corions stalked the forests, sniffing and watching as though autumn would never come back. Even in the Time-forest Danarion saw them, a deeper, fluid gold amid the light color of the leaves, the shadows slipping over them as they glided out of sight on the periphery of his vision.

He did not know if the years gliding by him so quickly were the peace of a last bastion before the final assault or a prelude to the deeper despair of the winding down of the universe. He only knew, in his more honest moments, that he was a useless anachronism, the last of a unique breed now condemned to exist in a humiliating semblance of contentment, neither mortal nor fully sun-lord, shorn of the weight of the company of his brethren.

His conversations with Janthis were about all the things that had been said and done a million years ago, for the present was an unvarying desert of predictable motion, and the future had ceased to rush toward them when Sholia closed her Gate. But the memories they shared did not draw them together. They reminded them of things that wounded. Janthis suggested that Danar's Gate be closed, but it seemed a pointless, futile gesture and would only serve to sever the mortals on Yantar and Brintar from contact with friends and families on Danar. No Traders came with wares for mortal or corion, and the door of the room containing the Books of Lore remained closed.

Danarion began to be aware of a slight change in the mortals' perception of him as he continued to wander through the city and saw one generation succeed another. In the beginning, in the time when Sholia had closed her own Gate and Danar had become a prisoner of itself, the people had run out to greet him as he passed their houses, touching him with a loving reverence and calling him sun-lord, and he had been unable to move among them and communicate with them for the invisible wall of awe and respect they lived behind. Now he knocked on the doors of their descendants, who called him simply Danarion, inviting him in, offering him food he could not eat and drink he could not swallow, chattering to him as though he were one of them. They no longer gave him his title, although they knew that he was not one of them, that he was different. Their long family memories told them what he was, but with the passing of the centuries the memories, though always vivid and clear, receded and became their history, the true tales of Danar long ago, and the Danarion who smiled at them and shared their fires was no more than a curiosity. The Gate took them to the other planets of their system with smooth efficiency, and they thought no more about the other worlds whose stars hung above them in the night skies than they did of the Gate itself, which had always been there.

He was tempted to erase his own past from his memory, to wipe from himself the times of agony and great power, but often his only companions were the ghosts who crowded him on Ixel, Fallan, Ghaka, and Shol. At first he had visited them out of a need to pretend that nothing had changed. He rode with Falia across Fallan's wide vistas. He stood under Ixel's waterfalls with Ixelion, both of them laughing and gasping as the water pounded against them. But as year succeeded year the past became more distant, and each time he returned to his present, it was like coming home from foreign countries where he had been a stranger.