by Greg Bear
There had been some peremptory training for Michael that morning—a run with the stick across the fields, while Spart paced him and checked his skin temperature with long, black-nailed fingers. He had thrown a shadow for Coom, skillfully enough to delay her catching him by a few seconds. He had blanked his aura of memory well enough to prevent Spart from in-seeing. All this, as the snowflakes careened slowly down like drunken, frozen dandies, oblivious to the dark emotions around them.
“I’m going to Euterpe,” he told Coom, who squatted outside the Crane Women’s hut, keeping an eye on Biri as she pounded a rock to powder with a harder rock. She nodded.
He left the book in the rafters of his hut. He wasn’t expecting trouble, but if any came, the book wouldn’t help and he didn’t want to lose it or see it damaged.
The road seemed longer, extended by the whiteness. When he came to Euterpe the town was as private and closed-down as a sleeping face. He walked through deserted streets, glancing at brick walls and tile roofs, worn-out wicker baskets piled in a heap, carts carrying buckets of frozen human waste. He saw everything as if for the last time. The sensation of fatedness was strong, emphasized by his numbness.
He took the familiar alley, approached the familiar entrance and stairs and climbed slowly and quietly. He reached for the bag. When he came to the wicker door, now draped with a cloth cover, he held his hand up to knock, then hesitated. He heard voices inside. Helena had a visitor.
He felt, if such a thing was possible, even more more deeply isolated and sick at heart. He pushed the door. It became party to his stealth and opened with only a faint scrape. The voices continued. He pulled aside the curtain to the bedroom, knowing it was wrong to invade someone’s privacy, but feeling his own grievance was stronger.
Savarin and Helena lay on the narrow cot, covered mercifully by a dun-colored blanket. Helena saw him first. Her eyes widened. He lowered the curtain and backed into the front room, pulling the sani from his pocket and laying it on the front table. There was scuffling and creaking behind the curtain, and sounds of clothing hastily being put on. “Stay here,” Helena said. “Don’t come out. I’ll talk to him.”
She emerged from behind the curtain, combing out her hair with her fingers, looking at him sidewise. Her face was white. “Michael,” she said.
“I brought it,” he said, pointing to the wicker table. “What you need. What you wanted.”
“I’m sure you don’t understand,” Helena said, coming closer. “It’s—”
“Please,” he said. “Enough. I’ll go.”
“Let me explain!” The note of desperation held him. “It’s not what any of us wants. Savarin can’t have children. Before he left Earth—”
“Please, enough,” Michael repeated.
“He’s safe, don’t you see? You’re not. You’re not safe. That’s the difference.” She repeated these words a few times, coming slowly closer, holding her hands up. Finally she stopped, hands circling to form small shields. She straggled for something more to say. “We need your help still.”
“You’ve had my help,” he said. “You have the powder. I’ll go now.” As Helena called his name, louder and more frantically, he ran down the stairs and back to the street and out of Euterpe.
He was hardly aware of his running. His long stride carried him without apparent effort. He seemed suspended within his body, isolated from the exertion, his breath smooth, the machine running even better without his interference. He passed a woman clutching a cloak about her head and shoulders.
As if on an endless cycle, he was going to Halftown. The awareness that it was all drawing to a close, that his adventure in the Realm was about to end, was very strong.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Halftown was also quiet in the mid-afternoon snowfall, its half-circle streets covered with shallow drifts. Michael wasn’t thinking clearly and it took several extra minutes for him to find Eleuth’s quarters. He stood outside the door, his mind almost as blank as the fields of snow between Euterpe and Halftown.
As he knocked, it occurred to him that not for an instant did he suspect betrayal behind the door. (Had Helena betrayed him? Or had she just done something which, in his youth, he couldn’t begin to fathom?)
The door opened. Eleuth examined his downcast face and took him by the arm, leading him inside without a word spoken. She sat him on the bunk and took the small stool for her own seat. Several deep, jerking breaths were necessary before Michael could say, “I have to go back now. There’s nothing more I can do here.”
She nodded, then shook her head, and nodded once more. “Do you need my help?” she asked.
“Of course I need your help. I can’t do it myself, or I’d have done it already.”
“Then I’ll help,” she said. “We have to wait until dark, and we can’t do it here. Somebody might see us, or feel what’s happening. Until night, you’ll stay here, have something to eat?”
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“You’ll need all your strength,” she said, pouring him a bowl of stew. After he finished eating, she took the bowl and pulled back the covers on the bunk. He sat down. She adjusted the pillow for him and he lay back with his eyes open. Deliberately, with another breath, he closed them. His face was rigid.
Even when she was sure he was asleep, his face remained stiff. She sat watching him for some time as the snow fell faster outside and the wind rose. Then she went around the room, removing objects from the dresser drawers, from shelves, and from the low table. She assembled the articles in a cloth laid over her lap: white face cream, though it really didn’t matter, she thought; a few twigs from a flowering tree beyond the Blasted Plain; some stones from the Plain itself, dusty to the touch; and the dead green beetle she had summoned from Michael’s neighborhood. When she had pulled in the corners of the cloth and made a bundle by tying them, she sighed deeply, pulled back a few loose strands of hair with both hands, and stared out the window at a white world she doubted she would experience much longer.
With darkness, the snow stopped and the wind died, leaving the Pact Lands in muffled silence. Michael awoke and ate more of the stew while Eleuth painted her face with the white cream. “It reflects the light,” she explained.
The inevitable unreality of everything was coming down on him now in an avalanche. Why should he be dismayed by betrayal? None of these people existed. They were all phantoms; to find his way home, all he had to do was enact some formula which would bring him out of his trance, his waking nightmare.
He forgot all the proofs he had accepted in the past about the Realm’s existence. They were dim, feeble things compared with his present pain. Eleuth tied a blanket-cloak around his neck, in case his discipline slipped in his distraction. Then she took his hand, lifting the bundle in the crook of her arm, and led him into the night. He followed her through the snow without speaking. Her grayish outline advanced into the darkness beyond Halftown and away from the road, the stream, the mound, taking him in a direction he had never gone before.
The grass was frosted with snow that powdered with the brush of their legs and fell on their feet, melting into their cloth shoes until they were soaked. Only hyloka kept their feet from freezing.
When they were far enough away from everything to suit her, she cleared the snow away for him to sit, laid out the cloth and arranged the articles and squatted opposite him. He could barely see her. Only a few stars peeped through rifts in the clouds. The cream on her face glowed slightly and he followed her movements that way.
“You wish to go home,” she said, her tone more stern than he had heard it before.
“Yes,” he said.
“You wish to get there by Sidhe magic.”
“I do.”
“There is some risk. Do you accept that?”
“Yes.” He didn’t much care.
“Do you accept this gift from me, given out of love?”
“I do.” He felt a pressure in his chest. “I appreciate this very much, Eleuth.�
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“How much?” she asked, almost bitter.
He shrugged in the darkness. “I’m not worth much. I don’t know why you feel so strongly toward me.”
“You acknowledge that love?”
“Yes.”
“Do you return it?”
He leaned toward her dim features. “I love you, too,” Michael said. “As a friend. As the only friend I have here. Wherever we are.”
“As a friend, then,” Eleuth said, her tone less astringent. She laid the twigs out on the cloth in a circle, pointing toward the center. Near one of the twigs she laid the beetle. Next to another she placed one of the pebbles. The rest of the pebbles she piled on one corner of the cloth.
“Is that all you need?” Michael asked.
“That, and my training,” Eleuth said. “I’m still not very good.” She stood, took his hand, and made him stand in the middle of the circle of twigs. “For you, I wish I were a full-blooded Sidhe,” Eleuth said, holding out her arms. She assumed the same pose he had seen in the crystal portrait of Nare. “But Lirg’s blood is good and I rely on him, too. Wherever he is now.” She danced lightly around him, spinning from one toe to the next. He turned his head to follow her. “Face straight ahead,” she said.
After a few minutes she stopped, breathing more heavily than when she had begun. “Did the Sidhe pass his test?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Did he take his flesh, drink his blood?”
“I think so.”
“He left the Crane Women this evening,” she said. “He goes to his new home. Perhaps he will see Lirg.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you know what your friends in Euterpe are doing tonight?” she asked.
“No.”
“All the Breeds stay in tonight. We don’t know either, but we have our suspicions.” She resumed the dance, reaching now and then to brush his shoulders with her fingers. “Michael,” she said, her breath harsh, spinning around him. “Look straight ahead. It is time for you to go home… very soon.”
Light sprang up around his feet. He glanced down and saw the twigs burning brightly from the outside in, like multiple fuses.
“Out of love,” Eleuth said. She formed her arms into a circle. Two circles of light leaped from the arcs of her fingers, rose and fell around him, stopping at waist level. The twigs burned to their ends. He stood in the middle of a radiance of fire that rose around his feet but did not burn.
Eleuth stood rigid in front of him, arms held high, breasts pulled taut against her rib cage, stomach flat, heaving. Her hair was disarrayed and her eyes were closed. She twisted her head to one side. “I will guard,” she said. “For as long.
As.
I.
Can.”
Her eyes opened. They were black, rimmed with blazing red. He felt himself falling toward them. His feet lifted from the cloth. The circles tightened around his waist like belts, cinching close. The fire spread to Eleuth, crackling and hissing, searing away the darkness until the land around them was bright as day. When the flames touched her navel, she flinched and screamed.
The fire surrounded her. Arced outward to the snow-covered grass. Melted the snow into steam. Dried the grass and set it ablaze. She twisted in her own fire, mouth open to reveal darkness much deeper than the night. Michael rose toward her and felt the cold electric destruction of the power she had unleashed.
“Please,” she said, barely audible over the crackle and roar. “I will guard. Careful! Out of love—”
She became smaller and darker, twisting in the fire until she receded to a black point.
Michael was no longer on the grassland but high above, looking out across the infinite expanse of the Realm, its forests, plains and mountains laid out beneath him like a topographical relief map. The river snaked far to the northeast through forests, scrub lands, blank desert and swamps. There was a mountain surrounded by a city with walls like a tangle of silvery roots—
And a black, spiky something beyond.
To the north he saw a broad lake glowing cobalt in the night—Nebchat Len, possibly. Beyond the lake stretched more forest, and beyond that massive jagged mountains. Looking down, he saw the Pact Lands mounted in the middle of the Blasted Plain, a yellow-green circle surrounded by warm, forbidding orange-tinted darkness. This darkness seemed to writhe, rise up to grab him. Then everything writhed—and vanished.
He could have been suspended in nothingness for all eternity. The sensation of time left him. In the void was a flicker of light, somewhere above where his head had been. He was aware of a canopy of leaves, then of something beneath his feet, hard and gray. His circle of vision expanded. His head filled with rushing blood, and the sensation of weight returned.
Michael closed his eyes and rubbed them. The rush of exultation was dizzying. He wanted to jump, to shout. He glanced at his wrist to see what time it was—what time the trance had come to an end. But his watch was missing. He still wore the clothes Helena had scrounged for him; his feet were still shod in cloth.
A flicker of fire played around his ankles. He stared down at the fire, watching it brighten, fade and brighten again. Suddenly it flared up around his calves until it obscured the sidewalk. Tendrils rushed to wrap his wrists like shackles and crawl up his chest like serpents.
“No!” he protested. “NO!”
He doubled up as if kicked in the stomach. Curled, he flew backwards into darkness, winding along a jagged reverse course and surrounded by a comet’s tail of fire.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Michael lay on his stomach, gravel and dirt pressed to his face. His legs sprawled across dry grass. He opened his eyes to the twilight and saw dark bushes with greasy green-black leaves. Rolling on his back, he encountered a featureless gray-blue sky, low and oppressive. A few muddy stars glistened wetly in the expanse.
Something rustled nearby. The path on which he lay crossed a yard of sickly grass and ended at a red brick porch. Dull orange paper lanterns hung on the trellis arbor rising over the porch.
He got to his knees. The rustling became louder. He stood, turned and flinched from the touch of dry, cold fingers against his face.
The figure in the flounced dress was less than a yard away, arm bent at two crazy angles and pointing toward him. The shadow of the wide-brim hat still obscured the features, but Michael was more certain than ever that it was a woman, caught between the Realm and the Earth, probably as crazy as Lamia. He wondered what he had to fear from her.
She advanced, lurching as if one leg were shorter than the other, or improperly jointed. The sleeved arm stretched out again and Michael smelled dust, mildew, something metallic. He backed away several steps. He had been home—
You are home.
The voice, soft as the still twilight air, reached around his ears and touched the back of his head. You are home. He focused on the fingers of the hand. They were thin, colorless; they could have been twigs wrapped in strips of coarse cardboard. They flexed against each other with the sound of rustling leaves.
Beyond the guardian was the gate leading to the alley. He looked over his shoulder for the merest instant, trying to see if he could go back through the house—reverse his course—but there she was, barring the way. When he wasn’t watching she could move with incredible speed. He faced her and slowly backed toward the gate.
Stay. Images of incredible luxury, voluptuousness. Gardens filled with flowers and thick vegetables, luscious ripe berries studding intense green bushes. Tomatoes red as arterial blood.
If he stared at her—she was gaining on him, lurching—she might catch him. Already her hands were reaching out, her fingers rustling in anticipation. If he turned to run for the gate she might leap quick as darkness and have him anyway.
She played him like a fish on a line. He was trapped, no way out this time. There was only one way for the trance to end—in her garden, caught between the projected paradise and the dry, somber twilight reality.
Reality. As r
eal a doom as any.
Still, he had learned a lot since he had last encountered her. There might be one way to elude her.
He searched for the hidden impulse, found it feeble but present. Between the Realm and Earth it would work only intermittently, weakly. Still, he had no choice but to try. He threw a shadow.
The gate seemed an incredible distance away—only a few yards. Behind he heard drapes of fabric rustle frantically, sensed the arms closing around something, passing through empty air. The guardian screed like a bat or a falcon.
He ran down the alley. Sixth gate on the left. But he no longer had the key! He couldn’t open the lock, couldn’t pass through. He felt rather than heard his pursuer leaping after like a wave of foul dead air.
At the locked sixth gate, he did not hesitate. He ran to the seventh, some yards farther, and found it without a lock. He jerked it open, making the rusty hinges and spring scream.
The guardian’s hand grasped his shoulder and flung him back as if he were made of paper. He toppled and slid across the pavement, rebounding from the brick wall opposite. The gate slowly closed, its spring softly singing. He knew he would never have time to open it again if it latched.
He would never reach it, anyway.
But the guardian held back, rocking on hidden limbs like a nightmare toy, a puppet pulled by idiots.
He pushed against the wall with arms and shoulders, leaping, using all his new prowess to make it through the gate. The gate clanged shut behind him.
Michael stood in a long, narrow lot, bordered on all sides by low red brick walls. Some distance away over the end wall he could see the outline of the rear of Lamia’s house, the Isomage’s mined mansion.
Perhaps the sixth gate wasn’t the only way.
Bordering the path that led to a gate in the distant second wall were two continuous trellises, thickly wrapped in dead brown ivy. He hurried between them.