Northlight

by Wheeler, Deborah

  “Terris!”

  I bellowed his name, but no sound came from my mouth. My muscles strained and cramped, and sweat poured down my neck and sides underneath my parka. I felt his unborn screams in my bones, in my heart, tearing at me like bloodbat claws.

  The air was no longer silent, but filled with a throbbing hum. I couldn’t tell where it came from. Not Terris, for no human voice ever made such a sound — droning, whining, rattling the bones in my skull until I expected to feel hot blood spurting from my nose and ears. It built and built until all I thought of was clapping my hands over my head and squeezing my eyes tight shut.

  But I still couldn’t move. I fought just to breathe. My eyes watered in outrage, my knees shook and stuttered. I clamped my teeth together.

  Terris...

  He looked larger to me now, swollen with light and no longer quite human in form. I wondered if he would burst or merely turn into a god.

  If the demon chance were nothing more than a bag of tricks, and the Mother blind and deaf, then why not a god with a human heart? Why not a god who tore up half of Laurea for a sister so long gone he hardly knew her anymore, who begged his enemy’s help to find the truth, who took me into the crucible of my heart and out again, and now stood alone in a cone of fire...

  o0o

  He lifted his arms, as slowly as if they were weighted with lead, or maybe the light had melted his bones. His head sagged back. His knees bent, his body curving backward. He looked about ready to fall.

  I hurled myself forward with all my strength, hard enough to pop a blood vessel. It was tougher than slogging through frozen Kratera Ridge mud or facing a steppe sandstorm, but somehow I managed to break free.

  Staggering, I reached Terris and caught him behind the shoulders before he hit the ground. For a moment his body felt thin, light as a handful of rock-dove feathers. I could have crushed him in my hands without thinking. I was afraid to hold him, but even more afraid to let him drop. Then he was solid flesh again, and damned heavy into the bargain. I set him down on the cold stone with a jolt.

  Lightning arced over us, illuminating the roof of the dome. Sparks like popping embers stung my face. The racket was worse than any storm I’d ever ridden out, enough to make a sandbat deaf — and they don’t even have ears. My head rang with the sound so much that everything looked doubled. I crouched beside Terris, thinking that if one of those flashes of light hit us, we wouldn’t either of us walk out of here.

  Suddenly it was over. The light subsided to a clear soft glow, the din to a few quiet crackles and then silence.

  My eyes darted to the great arching dome above our heads, the walls like alabaster ribbed with bands of gleaming silvery metal. Where they met in the center of the roof, a huge glass bell hung. A tangle of wires and tubes and other, less recognizable things shot forth rhythmic bursts of brilliance. Below the bell, a ball of cold white light, man-high and twice as wide, glowed steadily.

  I wet my lips and slowly straightened up. The floor beneath my boots was pale stone, as smooth and precisely fitted as anything I’d seen in Laureal City. No — not all the stones were the same fine-grained rock. Some were darker, green-gray shot with flecks of gold and edged in shining metal like the ribs of the dome wall. Again I saw the pattern of the dotted double circle. The central light turned the shallow inscriptions into a pattern of jagged shadows. I couldn’t read them.

  Someone built this place. But who? And for what purpose?

  I shook my head, my brains still scrambled from the racket. Terris held on to my arms and clambered to his feet.

  If I still felt half-addled, what must he be feeling? Could anyone go through the heart of the Light and come out sane? What did that matter? I’d left a good part of me back with the bloodbats.

  He stood there so very long, weaving slightly from side to side.

  o0o

  Suddenly he spun around, balanced like a cat, and pointed off into the central brightness. “Look there!”

  I couldn’t see anything, not even the faint, ghostly shapes I made out before.

  “And there! There! The trees, the canyons — Kardith, they’re incredible! Look, look, the desert! Nothing but piles of sand!”

  He went on, oblivious to my silence as he described more marvels — the golden plain with animals as tall as trees, the oceans teeming with silver fish, the deserts of gleaming black glass, the scarlet-hued swamps where snake-necked monsters bellowed beneath a single moon.

  I said nothing. What could I say?

  He stopped, quiet a moment, and said to me in a low voice, “You can’t see them, can you? All the places branching out from this place, all the long green tunnels?”

  I shook my head.

  “The light. Oh gods, the light...” His voice trembled. He covered his face with his hands.

  Part of me wanted to put an arm around his shoulders, but I couldn’t. I mustn’t. This was no child to be sopped off with a morsel of comfort, or a greenie kid who was so scared he almost puked after Montborne’s goons jumped us in camp. This was the man who danced in the norther long-house, danced as if the gods themselves had fired him up. This was the man who stood alone in the heart of the Light.

  ...and who, even more than Pateros, had given me back my life...

  “All the way here I could feel it, calling me...” he whispered. “Changing me. I thought — I don’t know what I thought. I should have known I couldn’t go back.”

  He dropped his hands, looking right through me. His face was drawn, familiar and human with his new beard, his tousled black hair. His eyes shone with a light I’d never seen in them before.

  I shivered and looked away. Something in my face or my silence told him what I saw. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.

  “It doesn’t matter now, does it?” I expected to hear bitterness in his voice, but there was none. He gestured, “Come on...” and he didn’t mean back out again.

  Mother-of-us-all, did he mean for us both to go through the Light?

  “You’re crazy!”

  He explained it all slowly to me, making shapes with his hands. “Look, Kardith, it’s like a house. Different places, like the weirdies on the Ridge, they’re like doors. From here you can go right through them. The green tunnels — like the one Avi fell into — they’re longer, the back way around.”

  He saw all this, the connections, the gates to other places, places I never imagined. Me, all I saw was light and the inside of the dome.

  “I don’t know why I can see them and you can’t,” he said, “maybe for the same reason I can feel the thing in the Starhall.”

  “That’s great,” I said in a shaky voice. “Really great. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “Avi’s green tunnel brought her over fifty miles of badlands. If I can see these doors, I can go through them, too.”

  “You are crazy!”

  “Not crazy enough to go alone.”

  Damn. “Where are we going?”

  “Anywhere you want.”

  I thought of Avi back there in the caldera with Etch and the two northers. If we didn’t come back, they’d have the sense to return to the gatehouse by nightfall. Even without us, Avi would talk Jakon into letting her ride back to Laureal City. Hell, she’d probably talk him into going with her.

  What was important here? Finding Avi, keeping Terris safe from Montborne, getting the dagger back to Esmelda? I didn’t know.

  I slid my long-knife out. “Anywhere but the steppe.”

  He watched me with a strange expression. I wondered for a crazy instant if he could see what I saw, feel what I felt, all those memories. And if he had seen, what did it matter? They were my past, they were what they were. They were not what I was today.

  He turned to the right of the glowing center and pointed. “There.”

  Blindly I followed him, half a step behind. I felt a faint zzzt! like stepping again through a wall of fire, only cool this time. I’d half forgotten that my face was burned and peeling
— it didn’t hurt any more. I blinked in a burst of unnatural brilliant green, and the next step I felt sand beneath my feet and saw jagged black rock in front of us, gleaming wet against the clouded sky and smelling of wild salty fish-stink —

  “Kardith!”

  Terris grabbed the sleeve of my parka and jerked me sideways, just as a wave came crashing over the beach, frothing and swirling around the scattered rocks. It thundered against the black cliffs, but we scrambled high enough on the slanting yellow sand to only get the soles of our boots wet. Drops of spray stung my face. I dashed a few feet up the sand, laughing without meaning to.

  “This — this isn’t the steppe!”

  “No.” He smiled, half sweet, half sad. “It’s a place I’ve always wanted to go to. A place that reminds me of someone I once knew. Selfish of me, but I don’t know how many chances I’ll have to go someplace just because I want to.” He sighed and turned, looking over the heaving green wall of water. “And it looked safe enough.”

  The overhead sun shone hot, but the breeze curling around my knees was cold and damp. I yanked at the ties of my parka with my free hand, and suddenly I felt very, very scared.

  “You could go anywhere — anywhere!” I screamed at him. “You could be ten places at once! You could hide where no one would ever find you. You could jump in, cut anyone’s throat — Montborne’s maybe, Jakon’s — who’d ever know? You could turn the whole crotting world upside down — make yourself Guardian of all Harth, anything you wanted! Who could stop you? You could — ”

  “Stop it!”

  I shut up, my face as scalding hot as if he’d slapped me. He was shaking and red-faced, just as scared as I was and twice as pissed.

  “Stop it. This thing that’s happened to me is no magic trick, no blessing of the gods. It’s a curse,” he spit out the word, “that’s what it is, a damned curse!”

  “What do you mean, curse? How can such power be a curse?”

  “You don’t understand. Power has been shoved down my throat since I can remember, and nobody — least of all Esme — ever asked me if I wanted it. I could have been Guardian of Laurea — all I had to do was be my mother’s heir. She’s sitting in the Guardian’s seat right now, and the minute I show up...”

  He lifted one arm half in appeal, half in surrender.

  “And all my dreams — no, not dreams, they’re true, the things I see, the people, the times, the places. All that would be gone. I’d be just like her, don’t you see?”

  I started shaking, thinking of Terris just like her.

  “But now — I can see all of Harth, places I never imagined! I can touch them, taste them, brighter than any dream. And because I can do all that, I have to go back, I have to take up that power.”

  “Why, if you hate it so much?”

  “Montborne’s still out there, him and his poisoned daggers. And Esme, doing the wrong things for the right reasons. I have no choice, don’t you see? It no longer matters what I want. And...” He paused, his brow furrowing. His voice dropped, so soft I hardly heard the words above the rattle and crash of the waves. “And now I know what the Starhall thing is.”

  What Starhall thing? Another Northlight?

  I felt the sadness in him, but I couldn’t understand it. He must be crazy after all. Such a gift he had, even if he used it for some wishcrap altruistic purpose and nothing else. To see the green tunnel connections, to travel along them — to places like this wave-whipped beach — how could it be anything but a gift?

  But for him it wasn’t. I could see that, even if I couldn’t understand why. For him that was a loss that could never be made up.

  That I understood.

  Chapter 33

  We climbed the craggy black rocks, found a few broken shells, pink and curly-edged, and sat watching a giant sea beast blow spume into the air some miles offshore. I stretched my arms wide, taking in the smell and feel of this place.

  Sitting at my side, Terris drew a pattern in a pocket of sand blown up on the rock. Over and over again he traced the doubled circle, jabbing his finger into the single dot at its center. I watched him, caught by the rhythm of his movements.

  “What did you see,” he asked softly, “back there in the Light?”

  I sat very still. Breathed. Wrestled with old ghosts. Lost. Breathed again. Knew I couldn’t lie to him.

  “I saw the day I should have died,” I said, not sure if my words came as a whisper or a sob. I looked up and met those rainwater eyes. “I saw my son.”

  Until that moment, no one else in Laurea knew I’d borne a child. No wonder I couldn’t cry for all those years. How could I grieve for a loss I couldn’t name, not even to myself?

  He nodded. “A personal memory, activated by the gate mechanism. And I — ” he went on, “I saw something I could not possibly remember, something that happened hundreds — no, thousands of years before I was born, as clear and bright as if it were today.”

  My heart closed, tight as a fist, around the memory. “What did you see?”

  “I saw the last time the Starhall gate was used, how it became what it is now.”

  I shivered, wanting nothing to do with Starhall secrets, gates or otherwise. My own visions were nightmare enough for one lifetime.

  He reached out and grabbed my wrist, as if he didn’t care how dangerous that could be. But his words — and the fire behind them — held me fast. “You don’t understand! It was all there in the Archives, buried in the coded logs. Once we remembered why we built the gates — one in Laureal City and one here in the north. Once we knew what lay on the other side and why we came here. Not everyone had the secret, of course, just the most elite of the gaea-priests. Guardians they were called, real Guardians, not political figureheads. Gatekeepers.”

  “Pateros was called Gatekeeper,” I said. “I remember that from the funeral.”

  “But no one remembered why, not even him — not even Esme!” His eyes blazed, fire and steel. I didn’t flinch. “No matter what happens to me now — you must remember. Promise me! Promise me you’ll remember!”

  I gulped. “Remember what?”

  “That the gate exists! Why we came through, why we must guard it!” He relaxed a fraction, let me go. “I saw three of them standing in front of a wall of shimmery stuff. The old one was working some kind of machinery, like we saw in the Northlight dome. The strong one was guiding the apprentice, I think. I saw something clearing in the bright mist. It makes sense there would be three at a time — the old wise one, the one at the peak of his strength, the young one just learning to control the gate mechanism. I think he must have been keyed into it stepwise, gradually like I was to the Starhall. But this time something went wrong — maybe the door that separates here from there was weakened. Maybe — I don’t know.”

  He broke off, staring out over the rolling waves. I waited, counting the heartbeats. “And then?”

  “Something — I saw something — as big as a Laurean house, round like a mushroom, the color of blood — ” He shivered. “At first I thought it was alive. So did the apprentice. Then the old one said no, it was a pyro — a something. A weapon.”

  My jaw dropped open and I no longer felt the crisp sea breeze tugging at my hair. “A weapon?” My hand went automatically to the hilt of my long-knife.

  “I didn’t believe it either. But then...it rushed the gate from the other side. Everything it touched — ground, trees, stone — turned to smoke. The edges of the gate began to smolder. I could smell the stench. My eyes burned with it. The Guardians — the two older ones — began rushing around, trying to close the gate. I don’t know if it was too late or the weapon-thing too strong...Kardith, it started to come through!”

  “But they did stop it?” I leaned forward, caught. “They must have.”

  “Yes, but they were standing too close,” he said, shaking his head. “The explosion caught them just before the gate closed. The bright place was gone; only brick remained. Brick and the gate apparatus. The apprentice was still
alive.”

  “I hope he smashed the Mother-damned thing!” I cried. I hadn’t realized I too was trembling, as terrified of this awful thing as I was of any ranting gaea-priest.

  “It would have been made to withstand tampering. And he was young, so he might not have learned how to turn it off. So he would have done the only thing he could do. He walled it up, did his best to make sure no one else ever dug it up. And never passed on the knowledge of what it was, why it was built, why it must be guarded.”

  “And is that so bad? To forget?”

  “Maybe,” he said, studying me. “For some. But you won’t forget.”

  “I don’t understand what this is all about. Gates, weapons, machines. Besides, it happened a long time ago. As far as I can see, there are no more things on the other side, just waiting to come through.” I got to my feet, brushing sand from my pants. It was hard to feel gloomy with the fresh sea-tang in my face. “You say it’s important to remember, fine. I said I would. But I intend to have you around to do the remembering for both of us.”

  A nasty thought nibbled at the back of my mind. “Has it occurred to you, the tweak you’re putting yourself in if you let anybody else know you can do this thing? You may give a shit about how you use it, but there are some very nasty people out there who won’t. And you — or anyone you care about — could be a target for them.”

  “Who else knows? There’s my sister,” he counted off on his fingers like a kid, “and Jakon and Grissem. Etch. Nobody I don’t trust.”

  “There’s me.”

  “You, you’re the one who thinks of these things for me.”

  o0o

  I held my breath as we stepped through, expecting an instant of sizzle, a flash of green and then the frozen white of the caldera. Instead, heat swept over me, laden with the pungent, familiar smell of ripe palm-cactus fruit. I blinked, gasping. My eyes raced over the reddish dunes, softly curved like a woman’s thigh. My knife was in my hand, my legs tensed for action, my breath searing my throat.