The Serpent Mage (22 page)

The chasm appeared to extend in both directions forever. It cut him off from the human murmurings. It even separated him from the distant sensation of Inyas Trai and the Irall.

If he could not cross, then he could do nothing more in the Realm. He retreated from the lip of the precipice and walked back into the forest a safe mile or so, to rethink his plans and see if another way presented itself.

"Why do I feel so
good
?" he asked himself, standing beneath an enormous conifer, at the center of a circle of half-melted snow. "Everything's going wrong…" But he already knew. It was because he was back in the Realm. The Realm had a beauty, even now, that he had deeply missed after returning to Earth. Beauty — and horror and sadness, much more concentrated than on Earth. Every sensation felt here was at once more intense and more stimulating.

The inexplicable horror of Adonna's wife; the surreal nastiness of the Blasted Plain; the ever-changing days and seasons. The lushness of the forest, with its wild orchards. Inyas Trai. The cursed territory of Lin Piao Tai. How would the Sidhe feel, forced to return to Earth after their centuries here?

How could a mage take the demanding variety of Earth and mix it with the intensity of the Realm?

He closed his eyes and spread his palms. He could
see
everything through his skin. The Realm vibrated and sketched itself across his eyelids. He could almost feel its deep structure, catch the secret of Adonna's creation…

"Man-child."

Michael opened his eyes and saw a Sidhe horse approaching him. An image of Tarax — clearly not the Sidhe himself but a shadow — guided the
epon
through the trees with one hand cupped under its chin. The shadow smiled. "Play-acting at magic?"

Michael stumbled over his words and finally, face flushed, just nodded.

"We have an appointment," the shadow said. "You obviously can't make your way across the Realm unaided. Even most Sidhe have difficulty now. Adonna can spare one of its
epon
for your journey. We will meet beneath the Testament of the lrall."

The shadow faded. The horse stood, tail flicking, long foreleg pawing the grass and humus, with its eyes fixed patiently on Michael.

"Hello," Michael said.

The
epon
tossed its head and turned sideways To allow him to mount.

Chapter Twenty-Three

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The Sidhe horse, eyes blank as ice, silver-pearl skin blinding in the diffuse sky-glow, leaped from the crumbling edge with legs extended fore and aft. Michael clung to the mane, his heart racing, and cried out, "
Abana
!"

The chasm, the separated sections of the Realm, the mist of Adonna's creation far below, all skewed and tumbled. The horse screamed and was surrounded by a coma of fire that broke away like shards of glass behind them. The cold was so intense that Michael nearly froze before he could increase his
hyloka
. The horse's lips curled back from its teeth, and its muscles tensed hard as stone between his legs. Michael's head seemed about to explode.

The journey was an agony. It hadn't been this way the last time. The Realm no longer accommodated such rapid travel without protest. They skimmed the ragged, bleeding borders of the Realm and the Earth and a thousand between-worlds. The Realm was an open wound, and the Earth beyond cut deep as a knife, defending itself. Michael could stand no more when the journey ended, and the horse threw him and fell on its side, kicking and shrieking.

He rolled across a flat, abrasive surface and leaped to his feet instinctively, bruised and scraped on his arms and knees but otherwise intact.
That's more like it
. he thought. He had seldom spent more than a few hours uninjured during his last visit to the Realm. The horse, shivering but apparently unhurt, clambered upright and regarded Michael resentfully.

They were on a dark stone road flanked by shiny black pillars, each pillar filled with tiny flaming glints like eyes around a campfire, watching, enjoying his predicament. At the end
of
the road, squatting under the brilliant, hot, milk-white sky like a monstrous gray seed-pod, was the Irall. At the opposite end of the road, behind them now, the color of incandescent marble, was Inyas Trai, the city that the last of the Cledar has designed for the Sidhe ages past.

He was alone on the road. The horse calmed under his caressing hands and allowed him to remount.

Michael's enthusiasm for the Realm had declined considerably. The sky was hotter here, abusive in its brilliance. The Irall stood in sharp contrast, its inward-leaning outer towers rising black as coal from a dome of silky gray. Its black central spire rose to a haloed needle point that could hardly be seen against the dazzling whiteness.

The last time he had entered the Irall, it had been involuntarily, surrounded by Sidhe coursers.

He was not so sure that this time was much different.

Michael stopped the horse and surveyed the land around Inyas Trai and the Irall. The city seemed empty — a quick probe found no sign of Sidhe, Breeds or humans. Perhaps most of them had been evacuated through the customized stepping stones Nikolai had mentioned. Another probe into the Irall itself, cautious and tentative, revealed that it was also deserted.

He tried to find the direction of the massed human auras again, and when he did. he sensed a great body of water and mountains between. The humans were on the other side of
Nebchat Len
, in the mountains where the Sidhe habitually trained their initiates. Michael received some of the captives' emotions — and made his first good guess as to their number.

There were far more than Euterpe had ever contained; as many as five thousand of them. Some were fearful, others calm and expectant. He did not have time to find the individual auras of people familiar to him — Nikolai or Helena. If he did not take Tarax at his word, perhaps even Kristine waited there.

Michael urged his mount forward into the gate of the Irall, barely wide enough to allow three horses entry abreast. He remembered the cupped dark walls beyond, like a glacial cave suddenly converted to stone. The floor was littered this time not with dried flowers, but with the leavings of panic and flight — shreds of clothing, muddy bare footprints, broken and powerless wicks; not unlike the stairs-of the Tippert Hotel.

The tunnel broadened but remained dark, without its prior greenish luminosity. The walkways to each side were empty; there were no longer enslaved Breeds in the Trail to serve Adonna, or Tarax and the Maln.

The walls spread into an immense chamber, its limits lost in darkness. Where before there had been smoke rising to its heights, now there was simply cold, stale air. The beehive chamber beyond was flooded to the horse's hocks with rusty water, hiding the sunken amphitheater at its center. He rode the horse around the perimeter and into a tunnel carpeted with swaths of electric blue mist. That, at least, was the same; they were nearing the Testament.

Thus far, they had only passed through chambers within the wall of the temple. They emerged from the tunnel into the central hollow of the dome. The air smelled of dust and decay and sour, poisonous blossoms. Yet Michael was not afraid. He had been more nervous meeting the Serpent Mage.

Long minutes passed while they crossed the interior. All around, the blue mist mocked them, rising in animated swirls and snake-like curls, beckoning and striking, reminding Michael of the blueness that had emerged from a single flower to destroy Lin Piao Tai. (Was all magical power simple and interrelated, like combinations of letters in a remarkably small alphabet?)

Finally, before them appeared the stone table flanked by tall stone chairs. No amphitheater crowded with Sidhe appeared out of the mist this time to surround the table, and the chairs were empty.

"Where do I go?" he asked nobody in particular, except perhaps the horse. He patted its shoulder. It glanced back at him, eyes unfathomable but calm, and flared its nostrils. Then it led him past the table, and Michael knew where he was going. The horse would take him to the pit at the center of the Irall.

They were going to the spinning brass cylinder above the mist and beneath the Realm proper.

And so it was.

Down the rocky shaft, past the thick upper layer of rock and the lower layer of blue translucent ice, now cut through with milky fractures, toward the spot of rainbow-colored light and finally out the bottom of the shaft, the horse's hooves straining for solid ground and finding none, its mane and tail streaming, lips revealing tiger teeth biting the empty air ahead —

Under the rugged ice belly of the Realm, above the chaos of the mist —

Toward the spinning brass cylinder, perhaps a mile wide and two long —

And into the hole at the center. The last time, he had been struck unconscious by the errant hoof of a horse. Now he saw it all. And still he was not afraid.

The horse flew him past bent and twisted platforms mounted on girders that vanished into dusty darkness. The cylinder did not seem designed for any practical habitation; it might have suited a community of anchorites, each sitting on a platform separated from the others, contemplating verdigris decay and endless rotation about the hollow axis. Michael probed ranks upon ranks of platforms his dark-adjusted eyes soon saw, half a mile deep to the wall of the cylinder. Each platform was empty, collecting only dust.
Why all this
?

He thought of the graveyard near the opposite end of the cylinder, where thousands of Sidhe and Breed and human skeletons were chained to a free-floating network of brass bars. Had Adonna truly demanded so many sacrifices? Or had the corpses been criminals captured and executed by Tarax?

The horse shuddered, and Michael turned it away from the center as they saw the graveyard ahead, still filled with dust and captive dead. They flew in a spiral around the cluster of bones. He saw the platform from which Tarax had addressed him when Michael had found himself chained among the corpses. The horse stretched and flew around the platform and then moved inward toward the axis again as the graveyard receded into a lattice of brown points.

Repeating journeys. Ringing changes on the same themes.

This time, however, Michael knew he had some measure of control. Tarax needed him — or at least behaved as if Michael was necessary.

The solid, closed end of the cylinder loomed, streaked with black and green stains radiating from the center to the edges. Then a pinprick of light appeared in the center, widening, its edges glowing and sparkling. Beyond, an unknowable distance below — if distance meant anything there — was the mist, chaos and potential, a vortex of pastel rainbow colors run through with painful ambiguities. Michael would not allow himself to turn his head away. He would have to face such —

If he wished to become a mage. Did he? What sort of mage, without the support of the Serpent? Ignorant and weak? A renegade mage. Something young and powerful and unexpected.

He shook his head slowly and grinned. His every thought betrayed how foolish he truly was.

The hole stopped growing, its edges solidifying into fresh-polished brass, as if a giant drill bit had recently pushed through. Two figures floated at the center. Michael recognized Tarax. Beside him was a Sidhe female, tall and slender. The horse shivered and accelerated, neck muscles writhing.

From a hundred yards, Michael could see Tarax's patient, weary face surrounded by a drift of fine white hair. He wore the same robe he had worn when he had last sent Michael into the mist to meet Adonna: gray stripes floating above black fabric, intertwining to form knot-like designs.

You don't even have the necessary clothes to be a mage
, Michael admonished himself. Tarax observed the faint smile on his lips. The horse turned and slowed barely five yards from the Sidhe father and daughter. They all might as well have drifted in emptiness above the mist; without looking back or toward the distant reflecting edges of the hole, the only sign of the cylinder's presence was a sensation of vast silent motion.

"You've matured, man-child," Tarax said. "You're no longer a mere tool, an aimed weapon."

Michael examined the daughter. Her face was sternly beautiful, in the way he had never quite grown used to among the Sidhe; long, sharply cut, with large pale eyes and dark red hair. He could not tell how old she was; her figure betrayed some maturity, but was by no means voluptuous. She wore a white blouse with the sleeves rolled and tied back above her elbows, and knee-cut riding pants. Her boots were long and black and came to mid-calf. Her gaze was steady and calm. Beyond the Sidhe resemblance, Michael could detect neither Tarax's nor any other heritage in her; she could even have passed as a Breed. She was taller than Michael by three or four inches, if height could be judged in the weightlessness above the mist.

He thought of walking beside her on an Earth boulevard, through a human crowd. She would pass — but barely.

"I'm puzzled," Michael said. "This is your daughter?"

Tarax nodded. He had not even bothered to probe Michael, nor had Michael tried with him. Mutual respect. "Her name is Shiafa." That, Michael knew, would be the extent of the introductions. "What puzzles you, Man-child?"

"The last time we met, you wanted me dead. You were very disappointed when Adonna spared me."

"I was even more disappointed to learn you had survived your encounter with the Isomage."

"Yes. Well, you saved my life, and now you bring me here on one of Adonna's horses — which I presume I will not be arrested for stealing — and treat me with civility and even respect, though you keep calling me Man-child."

"My apologies. All humans are children to me. Shiafa is a child, and she is three times older than you, by Earth time."

Michael shrugged. "All right. I don't understand why your attitude toward me has changed."

"Sidhe take advantage of fortune and misfortune alike. My misfortune — that you have survived and matured — is also my daughter's fortune, for the Crane Women are gone—"

"Dead?"

There was a hint of the old Tarax in the Sidhe's long, patient silence and slow blink. "They are gone," he repeated, "and my daughter needs to be trained. Only you can pass along the discipline of the Crane Women."

"What about Biridashwa — Biri? He was trained by the Crane Women."

"He is a Sidhe. You are a Breed. It is necessary that Breeds train."

"Why?" Michael asked.

Shiafa had hardly moved during this exchange. Now she pushed away from Tarax and, without a word, mounted behind Michael.

"There is subtlety in Breed discipline," Tarax said. "That subtlety is necessary for an initiate to the Maln." Michael sensed this was not the complete truth.

"Is there still a priesthood? I've heard Adonna is dead and the Councils are dissolved."

"Adonna is dead," Tarax said. "The creation is sundered and will soon die. But there is still need for a priesthood. Train my daughter, and you will learn where the Isomage keeps your woman."

"What will I teach her?" Michael asked, looking back over his shoulder at Shiafa.

But Tarax was already fading. The Sidhe's black robes smeared like paint in water. His face and hands and feet lengthened into blurred lines. A billow of mist flashed and danced around him, and he was gone.

"I will be first priestess to the new mage," Shiafa said, her voice husky and musical and enchanting. "My father." She gripped Michael's hips with her long-fingered hands. "You will train me on Earth—"

"I'll train you where 1 damn well please," Michael said, reacting with anger to his arousal at her touch. "Whatever I'm going to teach you, I'll start in the Realm. We have work to do."

The new mage
. Michael brought the horse around and urged it back along the cylinder's length.

"Our first job is to undo all your father and the Sidhe have done with humans in the Realm," he said. "If you refuse to help, then I'll cut you loose here and you can return to Tarax."

"I will help," Shiafa said without inflection. Michael glanced back at her with some surprise. Her eyes were closed to slits. "You are the master of discipline. But we will not have much time. My father will dissolve the Realm any day now."