Stargate (42 page)

Nenan came swiftly, rubbing his shoulder. “I got kicked,” he said ruefully, yet there was a light in his eye. “The other guard is sleeping by the wall. What will happen when they recover, Chilka? Perhaps we should kill them.”

Danarion, still confused, shook his head. “No! It will not matter by then. I only wanted to get inside. By the time the alarm is given and they see that no attack is coming, I will be no threat to them.”

“What of me?” Nenan looked around him uneasily. The courtyard was full of shadows, and the House reared up sheer and jagged from the ground to end in peaks that seemed to climax among the stars. “How long will you stay here? Is it best that I go home?”

Danarion hesitated. “I don't know, Nenan. I may find all my answers here or I may not. It could take a long time. I only know that I must resume my work as slave to Yarne. I wish that you would stay with me. Yarne will give you a bed with me and will not question my motives. You will understand when you see him. He is … strange.”

“If I can be of any use to you, I will stay,” Nenan said simply. “Whatever you are, and I do not entirely believe your stories, I want to be with you, because six years is a long time.”

Danarion impulsively stepped forward and embraced him. “My son,” he said, eyes closed. “Whatever else you believe or choose to disbelieve, you are still my son. Now follow me.” He led the way across the courtyard and around to the side of the House. Here there was a smaller door without guard or lock. Chilka pushed it open and drew Nenan into a dark passage lined with similar doors, but all these were closed and hung with three and four great locks. “The slaves live here,” he said in a low voice. “Every night they must be locked in, or they could simply walk away. Not enough one-minds are trainable as guards. This is my cell. I see they have not yet given it to another.” He pushed open the door, which had been standing ajar, and Nenan followed him in. Chilka closed it behind them. “You may sleep on the bed,” he said. “I will take the floor. I do not tire as you do.”

Nenan looked about. There was no window. The only light came from under the door, and it showed him only a bed and a stool. He went to the bed, conscious all at once of great weariness, and lay down, pulling the one blanket over himself. “I hope Mother is not fretting,” he said drowsily, and Danarion felt an immediate twinge of worry and regret for Lallin. “No, she is not fretting,” he said, and the young man fell instantly asleep.

Danarion stretched out on the floor. For a while he tried to think of Ghakazian and Sholia and the missing Gate, to speculate on who the mysterious Lady of this House might be, but Chilka was bone-weary, and Chilka's memories of this place were too fresh and powerful for him to stand away from them. He found his mind drifting on a sea of half-formed thoughts and the nebulous edges of dreams. The road was empty because of the funeral, he thought lazily. Of course. Lallin, my love, I miss you so much. He slept.

He did not wake until his door flew open, when he sat up with a jerk, his body a mass of odd aches and strains from his climb. Nenan was swinging his legs onto the floor.

“Chilka!” said a man with a red tunic emblazoned with the yellow and black suns. His face had gone livid with shock. “You're dead. They shot you while you ran. I know. The captain told me he shot you dead. What magic is this?”

Chilka grinned at him. “Not dead enough, Sigran. The captain is a bad shot on horseback. I crawled away and licked my wounds and decided to come back and stick my head once more into the two-headed beasts' lair.
The
mountains are harsh masters. I'm tired of running.”

Sigran backed away as Chilka rose and stretched. “Keep away from me! This time we'll make sure! Three escapes means execution, and I will bury you with my own hands. You were dead!”

Chilka yawned. “This is Nenan, my son,” he said. “Nenan dragged me home, and when I decided to come back, he came too. Where is Yarne?”

The man was too shocked to ponder the glib story. At the mention of Yarne's name he slumped. “You're right,” he snarled. “Yarne will never let you be shot. He's with his precious relics.”

“Good. Nenan, stay here until I send for you. Sigran, get the boy some food, and see he is not molested.”

“Who are you to give orders to me, one-mind?” the man blustered, but awe was still in him, and he made no move to stop Chilka as he pushed past him and into the passage.

The House was full of bustling life. Chatter and laughter, the sound of many feet coming and going, sunlight pooling bright through the slit windows, the smell of cooking—it was as if, Danarion thought, two Houses existed in two different dimensions on the same spot, and there was no point of contact between them.

He went out into the sunny courtyard, crossed to the big doors which stood open, and entered the hall. Here voices echoed, and feet slapped on the mighty stone stair that lifted dizzily to be lost in the height of the roof. A fire was burning, and though the day was young, petitioners and administrators already jostled around it, gossiping, waiting to see the three judges who ruled Ishban. Chilka named them as he began to mount the stair. Melfidor. Veltim. Fitrec. Ancient and honorable Sholan names, to be carried by foreign scum.

He circled higher, and the babbling crowd in the hall shrank to small, gaily capped heads nodding against one another. The smoke from the fire thinned to a gray haze up here and made him cough. He passed one small door set into the curved wall on his left and then another, his shoulder grazing the stone as he hugged the wall, for though the stair was as wide as his full height, there was no rail on the outer side. At the third door he stopped and knocked and pushed it open.

As he entered, the smoke and the booming echo of voices from below vanished. He shut the door quietly, and the cessation of noise was like a blanket flung over him as he advanced into the room. The silence was more than an absence of sound. It was a climate of deep thought, a cup full of the still, purposeful peace of mental industry. Chilka remembered this and found it natural, but Danarion sensed another quiet here, the passionless enigmas of ancient mysteries, the invisible eddies of the past. Two tall windows looked out upon the winding streets of the city, now full of people hurrying to and fro about the day's business. Flags ripped and fluttered in the wind, carts piled with merchandise rattled over stone, shopkeepers leaned against the lintels of their establishments and gossiped, and almost out of sight a faint white glitter told of the ocean. The walls of the room were lined with waist-high cases, some open, all bathed in sunlight, and light lay also on the smooth stone floor, shafting across the wooden desk piled with paper at which a young man sat, facing the thin windows.

He was slim, with a small waist and delicate shoulders sloping evenly under his white tunic. The skin of his sun-touched face and the graceful hands poised before him was exquisitely fine-grained and so transparent that it had a faint bluish tinge. He turned his head abruptly at the closing of the door, his white-gold hair waving loosely around a smooth neck. His eyes were the pale, brilliant blue of sapphires. He embodies all that I remember of the Shol that once was, Danarion thought in surprise. He is pure Sholan, all white, blue, and gold.

Yarne showed no surprise. “So you came back,” he said, rising, a mild reproach in his light voice. “And looking older and more tired than when you ran away. I suppose they will want to shoot you now. This is your third attempt, you know. But I won't let them. I missed you. Are you ready to go to work this morning? You had better wash your hands, and bring me fresh ink.” When he had finished speaking, he stood perfectly still, one long-fingered hand flat on the desk, a smile on the delicate mouth. The only movement lay in his throat, where the slow, regular flutter of his heartbeat showed against the collar of his tunic. It was as though some contact had been made deep inside him, and he had spoken, and then the contact had been broken, leaving him lifeless and stiff until he might be required to speak or move again. His head was on one side. The smile did not slip.

“I have missed you, too,” Chilka said. “I reached the mountains, Yarne, but I am no longer as willing to endure their hardships as I once was, so I came back.”

Yarne nodded, and the silken hair fell over his shoulders. “I have heard that you encountered more than hardship in the mountains,” he said. “I heard that they had killed you. By sunset the whole city will be talking of the one-mind who came back from the dead. Did you?”

Danarion looked at him in amazement. He might have been asking cheerfully how well his slave had slept. “Yes,” he found himself answering. “I did, in a way.”

“Only in a way? But I understand. I myself am born again every morning. I think of death a great deal, I suppose because my sister and I are immortal and never die. It is like a game to me, imagining what it must be like. The two-minds never die either, but that is different, not true immortality, because they put on the bodies of their sons or daughters. Like giant birds of prey, aren't they, Chilka? But you have the same body, a bit more battered than before. Do the one-minds somehow refresh their essences? Is that what you mean?”

“You are a one-mind yourself,” Chilka retorted. “You were born in the mountains.”

“So they say.” Yarne sat down. “But it is not true. I have no memories of the mountains. I think we will work now.”

“One thing before we do.” Chilka came to the desk and faced again that odd, sudden suspension of vitality in Yarne. “I have brought my son, Nenan, with me. Without your protection he will be sold to someone in the House. Will you take him?”

“How extraordinary!” Yarne said, but again without surprise. “If you one-minds begin to bring your families into voluntary slavery, we shall have an embarrassing situation in Ishban. If I don't take him, he will doubtless be given to Maltor, who burned his father yesterday and, as master of his house, now needs a slave. All right, Chilka. He needn't do anything, but I will let it be known that he is under my cloak. They grumble at me already for treating you more like a brother than a witless slave.” He grasped Chilka's arm, and his touch was cold, but his eyes were full of a timid affection. “They laughed at me each time you ran away,” he said. “They do not dare to do it to my face, but I know. I felt betrayed, yet I do not hate you. I cannot tell you how glad I am that you have come home.”

Chilka recoiled in mingled love and shame, like a man driven to treason against his nation yet seeing clearly the necessity of betrayal, and it was Danarion who bent and kissed the transparent knuckles that lay like white flowers against the grime and roughness of his shirt. He felt a warmth for this youth, who reminded him of the Traders who once used to move between the worlds. Like them he seemed apart from both good and evil, simple and guileless. “I would not willingly cause you grief, my old friend,” he said. “Thank you on behalf of my son. Now I will wash my hands and bring you ink.”

Yarne smiled. Chilka went to a door behind the desk which let onto an anteroom containing a washbasin, jug, and walls lined with cupboards. He washed quickly, took down two small pots, mixed powder, added water, and carried extra pens with him when he went back to Yarne.

“Now bring me the book,” Yarne said. “Set it on the pedestal.”

Chilka went to one of the cases and, lifting the lid, took the book carefully in his hands. His memory of this room, this work, this book had told Danarion nothing unusual. To Chilka the book was simply his master's passion. But Danarion, as he looked down on its thick red cover spidered in gold lettering, felt those memories grow brittle and sift away like pieces of scattered autumn leaves, and for a moment he forgot that he was in Chilka's body. He saw his own golden hands cradling the book, bathing it in light that brought the faded lettering to a brief semblance of life. Again, as when standing in the ruins of the Hall of Waiting, he felt unbearably old. I am more ancient than the stone of this House, he thought, older than the mountains from which it was wrenched. This book, as yet unstained by Sholia's pen, was on Shol before the Worldmaker formed the ocean and set the mountains in their places. The weight of such an unimaginable accumulation of time was suffocating him, pressing above and around him. I am imprisoned in my own immortality while the whole universe has shuddered into other shapes around me, leaving me stranded here in this strange room, on this strange planet that I once dreamed was different. I dreamed I was a sun-lord, one among a thousand bright immortals, that there was war in the heavens, a million million years of slow attrition. Did I dream? There is only this book to link me with my dreams. I am a slave, but to what? To whom?

The Annals of Shol,
he read and turned back the cover.
Before the beginning was the Lawmaker,
he read in Sholia's flowing, sure hand,
and the Lawmaker made the Worldmaker and commanded him to make according to his nature. And the Worldmaker made the worlds
… The shock receded, leaving him shivering. He turned the page hurriedly, clumsily, and it tore with a tiny rasping sound. No spells of protection could last through the eons since her last entry. Yarne gave a cry. “Chilka, what is the matter with you? It is priceless, without value! For Sholia's sake, put it down!” Again the old oath, meaningless now, as much an anachronism as Danarion felt himself to be. Unsteadily he walked to the reading pedestal and set the book upon it. “I have done nothing since you left,” Yarne grumbled quietly. “The slaves work in the strange room in the mountain, but what they uncover simply adds to the mystery.” He had risen and glided to the pedestal, and Chilka knew what he had to do.

He walked to the desk and lowered himself behind it, setting out clean paper, dipping a pen into the ink. “So little progress, though I think about it night and day,” Yarne was whispering half to himself as he gingerly turned the pages. “Legends for the folk historians, myths and stories for the one-minds, death for the two-minds who dare even to begin to believe. And for me a tangle of all three, with no link to the Shol of today, none at all. What do we labor over, Chilka? A clever riddle to hide a truth so terrible that the words could not be set down uncovered? A cipher?” He had found his place. “Are you ready? I forgot to tell you that the diggers in the sand to the east have unearthed a jar, and in it a love poem, or a song. I have not yet decided which it is. I will show it to you later, and you can set my thoughts about it on a separate sheet.” His glittering eyes found the window for a moment. “A hundred years of digging,” he said sadly, “and what do we have? Love poems. A few stories that seem ridiculous, like the one about the four men sitting under a tree like no tree on Shol and touching fingers for a day. No sagas of war, no accounts of strife, yet war there must have been, and
something
fell from the heavens to bury Shaban. If Shaban ever existed.” He sighed and cleared his throat. “Begin.”