The Master

by Louise Cooper

  ‘And you would not experience our world in the vulnerable guise of a human being. You would become a part of Chaos, immortal in your own right. I offer you this in recognition of your courage, and your loyalty to my brother. Such a life is yours, should you wish it.’

  To leave her existence behind, leave humanity behind, and enter the unimaginable realm of Chaos itself … to become immortal, unbound by earthly things, untouched by time or by the prospect of death … Cyllan couldn’t assimilate the gift Yandros proffered; understanding and even imagination failed her.

  But one fact stood out like a clear jewel in the miasma of her confused reactions. If she accepted what Chaos offered, she and Tarod would be together through eternity. If she did not, then she would never see him again.

  Distressed, she turned to the dark figure at her side.

  Man, demon, god, whatever he might be, she loved him more than the world, and she needed his guidance now as never before.

  ‘Tarod, what shall I do?’ Her voice was close to breaking.

  Tarod shook his dark head. ‘I can’t help you, love. I haven’t the right to try to sway you, not in this. But Yandros speaks the truth.’

  His green eyes, so unhuman now, were focused intently on her face. She knew that look so well, and it told her what she had hoped above all else to learn. Without him, there was nothing worth the having.

  She let her fingers close tightly over his, and her amber eyes closed. ‘I’ll come. If Tarod will have me, I’ll come - and gladly.’ She blinked, looked at Yandros again. ‘How can I ever thank you?’

  Yandros made a careless gesture, his face suddenly vulpine. ‘It’s a whim; no more. Chaos has no logic, as you should know. It simply pleases me to please Tarod.’

  Tarod laughed softly. ‘If that’s what you like to believe, Yandros, so be it.’

  Yandros inclined his head in faint self-mockery. ‘And now,’ he said ,‘there is one last matter … ‘ He turned on his heel and faced Keridil Toln.

  Keridil had watched the exchange between the three in numbed stupefaction, unable to move or to react in any way. He comprehended - or thought he comprehended - what Yandros had granted to Cyllan, and the knowledge of it awoke a sore, ravening hurt deep within him. Yandros had proved more merciful than Aeoris - and if the greatest of the Chaos Lords could restore the dead to life once, then surely he might do so again … ?

  Sashka’s face, beautiful as it had been before Tarod wreaked his vengeance, materialised before his inner eye and made the pain worse; he thrust the image away though it took a great effort, and knew when he looked at Yandros again that what he had, for a brief moment, hoped, could never be. And perhaps - though he couldn’t yet acknowledge it - he wouldn’t have wanted it to be …

  Yandros and Tarod were moving towards him. Still Keridil couldn’t quite accept the knowledge that the gods he had worshipped all his life were vanquished, and that these reckless, mercurial and unpredictable entities had taken their place. Chaos had returned … and what future could there be for him now?

  Yandros read his thoughts, and the golden-haired Chaos Lord smiled. ‘The future, High Initiate, is what you will make of it,’ he said, and his silver voice seemed to strike sparks in the depths of Keridil’s being. The world will change. Order no longer rules - but we will be very different masters. We welcome conflict, and if you wish Order to have a role here, to stand against Chaos, it is your privilege to fight for it. Go back to the Star Peninsula, Keridil Toln. That is your rightful place.

  Make what you can of what we have left you. It’s more than you yet realise.’

  Keridil couldn’t answer him. He looked, momentarily, at the cruelly beautiful face, into the changing eyes, then had to look away. Tarod stepped forward.

  ‘Where there is conflict, there can truly be growth and life,’ he said. ‘Understand that, and you’ll understand everything. I believe - ‘ He glanced at Yandros, and a private communication passed between them. ‘I believe that you, above all other mortals, are equal to the tasks ahead, Keridil.’ To the High Initiate’s surprise and confusion he stretched out his left hand and took Keridil’s right in a grip that sent a shock through his arm and into his shoulder. ‘I wish you well, old friend.’

  The hand that held his relaxed its grasp, the long, gaunt fingers curling as Tarod withdrew them. He smiled - and for a moment the smile echoed that of the 12-year-old waif who had come, a stranger and an outsider, to the Castle and befriended the son of the High Initiate. It echoed, too, the rebellious, black-haired Initiate who had grown and developed within the Circle; the Adept who, leaving that Circle behind, had wielded a power that smashed the barriers of Time; the demon who had challenged the ultimate, and won. It was the smile of a Lord of Chaos. Keridil watched, unable to speak, as Tarod drew Cyllan to his side and the three faced him. He thought he saw - afterwards he could never be sure, although the image was to haunt his dreams for the rest of his life - a landscape so alien, so indescribable that his mind couldn’t truly register it superimpose itself over the harsh, dead rock of the crater; a place where colour and form and sound clashed and mingled in mad pandemonium. Chaos - Keridil glimpsed it only for an instant; then, with a sound like a vast door being gently closed, the three figures before him were gone.

  He stood still for a very long time. Behind him was the split altar where the casket of Aeoris had stood, but the casket itself had vanished now. All around him lay his companions; Fenar Alacar, Ilyaya Kimi, the old scholar Isyn, two Sisters, his own Adepts: they all slept on, and the silence that had descended on the dead volcano’s crater was almost unbearable. Keridil looked around as though seeking inspiration or comfort from the towering rock walls, but there was nothing. All he saw was the first tell-tale glimmer of light in the sky high above which told him that dawn was starting to touch the eastern horizon. In his present mood, it gave him little solace.

  Someone stirred with a breath no stronger than a zephyr, and he turned to see the High Margrave moving slowly, like one in a trance, shivering as his consciousness rose up through the deep levels of sleep towards morning. Others, too, were showing signs of waking, although the elderly Matriarch still lay motionless, pale, a shrivelled and fragile doll.

  Fenar Alacar’s eyes met Keridil’s, but Keridil couldn’t respond to the mute, bewildered plea that burned in the High Margrave’s stunned stare, and turned away. Perhaps in time he could begin to answer the myriad unspoken questions; but not yet. Not yet.

  So much was gone; so much that he had taken for granted all his life now swept away. And yet Keridil felt an unwarranted sense of release beginning to settle on him, as though a burden of which he’d never been fully aware had been lifted from his shoulders. As yet, it gave him no comfort … but there was a promise in it, echoing the promise of the dawn that crept slowly, quietly across the sky. Whatever the future might hold, he had been granted a chance to live and to rule as his conscience dictated, freed from any unquestioning fealty to Order or to Chaos. And he hoped - believed, he told himself sternly - that he could prove worthy of that responsibility.

  Slowly, Keridil sank to his knees on the hard rock floor. His head bowed as he hunched over his own clasped hands, and he began to pray.

  But he no longer knew which gods to pray to.

  Epilogue If he turned his mind to that dimension, he could see the Castle. Such an old edifice, built by hands that were not quite human, inhabited by ensuing generations, usurped by others whose vulnerability and mortality were painful to behold. Now, the circle had come full turn - or almost.

  The watchers on the heights of the four dizzying spires were at their stations, faces stained by the last gory light of the Sun as it slipped towards the western horizon.

  They were waiting, as they waited each evening, for the supernatural storm that would come wailing out of the North at the moment of Sunset, hurling its chaotic flares of lightning across the heavens while the great, pulsing bands of colour marched inexorably in its wake. They waited for the Warp that h
eralded the night, that spoke of the power of Chaos in their world, and when it came, the rites would be conducted and the supplications made, and the balance would be maintained once more.

  He had an odd affection for the grim black Castle. It held recollections which amused him to contemplate; in the confines of its walls he had learned a great deal, suffered a great deal, and finally had regained the memory of his own true nature. He had, too, encountered the human soul for whom he had been prepared to sacrifice everything …

  At his side she moved, and he felt her smile. Here, in the realm beyond human understanding but which now was her own, she chose to adopt the guise of a pale-haired woman, solemn-faced, amber-eyed, only the shimmering stuff of Chaos that clothed her slim frame belying the illusion of humanity. She chose the image because she knew it pleased him; he turned towards her and adopted a form that complemented hers, black hair tangling with her white-gold, green eyes regarding her affectionately as he drew her to him and held her close.

  Somewhere in the distance a voice sang an awful harmony; he frowned, and the sound changed to a pure, shivering note that reminded him, pleasurably, of the brindle-furred sea creatures he had once known, and who had served Chaos well.

  The blood-red Sun was slipping into the sea far beyond the Castle stack, and he felt in his veins the first pre-echoes of the coming Warp. The storm was his blood, his sinew; he exerted a little of his will and felt the power rise, sweeping and screaming over the sea towards the land. And as it came roiling towards the Castle he saw, as he had seen before, a solitary figure at a high window facing out to the darkening North. A man who, once, had been his friend.

  He called himself High Initiate because the title was an old and noble one; and, more than any of his peers Tarod believed, he was deserving of it. He no longer wore a badge of rank because the old sigil of Order had lost its significance and he could not bring himself to wear the emblem of Chaos. Perhaps one day that would change; but it didn’t truly matter. The balance was restored, and Keridil was free to choose his loyalties as he pleased.

  The memories which had drawn Tarod to the Castle caused his thoughts to dwell on the figure at the window.

  He remembered what it was to be mortal, and a stirring of pity for the man with his drawn face and haunted eyes beneath the tawny hair moved him. Keridil had learned what it was to betray and be betrayed, and the lesson had changed and hardened him. He had looked on the faces of the gods of Order and the gods of Chaos, and knew that neither could prosper without the other. He had lost the woman he loved, and in losing her his eyes had been opened to her true nature, so that while he grieved for her he was nonetheless painfully aware of how she had duped and almost corrupted him. He had seen the death of the old Matriarch, whose frailty had succumbed during that last monstrous encounter with Chaos on the White Isle, and with her had gone the last bastion of the old, rigid ways. The Lady Fayalana Impridor, who had in surprise and trepidation put on the mantle of Matriarch when the ailing Kael Amion declared herself unequal to the task, was young enough not to be touched by her predecessor’s inflexibility. And Fenar Alacar, 19 now and deeply sobered by his recent experiences, deferred to the High Initiate and was striving to learn wisdom.

  The world was at peace; perhaps more at peace than it had been in the memory of any of its inhabitants. It wouldn’t last - Chaos thrived on conflict, and even now Tarod’s mind was roused by the anticipation of the next confrontation with the Lords of Order. It would come; the balance had been set and must be maintained, but it would be constantly challenged, and he and his brethren would relish their joy when that ancient battle was enacted yet again. But the pivot of that conflict, the final axis about which its outcome would revolve, lay in the hands of the fallible mortals who for centuries had worshipped Order, and who now found themselves released from its strictures and free to choose their own way.

  How they would choose, neither Tarod nor Yandros nor any of the entities that served them in the Chaos realm could tell; invincibility was not omniscience, and besides, uncertainty added spice to the future. But whatever his path, Tarod thought with a faint stirring of affection, Keridil had shown, at the last, that he could withstand the challenge of his new role. There would be change; for there must be change. And Keridil, he believed, would prove a worthy instigator.

  Fingers brushed lightly against him, and colours that vibrated far beyond the visible spectrum shimmered about the figure of the woman at his side. Tarod smiled, and the tiny microcosm that was the Star Peninsula and the world it ruled quivered away into the stuff of memory. He rose, holding out a graceful hand to her; white fingers curled about his and together they moved away from the watching place. For a moment two pulsing columns of radiance took their place; then they too merged back into the swirling mists of Chaos from which they had formed. Somewhere, laughter that was almost but not quite human rang sweetly; then the two figures were gone, leaving a brief-lived but profound stillness in their wake.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14