by Ian Irvine
Karan menaced him with her bucket. Rulke sprang back out of reach, landed off-balance and one foot slipped on the ice. He wavered, flung out his arms for balance, then Karan hurled the heavy container at him. The metal base struck him across nose and eyes, his feet skidded from under him and he hit the floor with a thump that sent luminous shockwaves rolling through the mist.
“Run!” Karan yelled, dashing toward the gate. “Hurry, Llian!”
She had forgotten his sprained ankle and gashed knee. All Llian could manage was a painful hobble, and before he had gone three steps Rulke lurched to his feet. A long gash curved through both eyebrows, weeping blood, and his nose gushed blood onto the ice. Rulke planted his big feet wide, trying to clear his eyes with one hand while the other fist burst brilliant spears of light that carved traces across walls and ceiling. Llian, terrified that Rulke would blast Karan through the wall in his rage, threw himself at the Charon. They crashed onto the ice again.
Karan turned to see where Llian was. He was just a shape in the churning mist, down before Rulke. It looked as if he was swearing allegiance. “What will you not do for your precious Histories?” she screamed, completely losing her presence of mind.
Half-blind, blood pouring into his eyes, Rulke flung his fist out at the plate. The wall beside her dissolved into a ragged hole, then the whole palace thinned to transparency. It was failing!
The pressure of his mind was like a dam bursting above her, making it impossible to think. Madness rolled toward her like a wave driven across the great ocean, swelling until it towered over her, curving over high above, white with foam breaking at the top. Now it thundered down, deluging her, trying to drive her onto reefs of insanity. She tried to fight the panic but it overwhelmed her. As Karan lurched backwards toward the plate, it flared into a corrugated tunnel that shrank away behind her into mist.
The tunnel began to draw her in. Rulke cleared his eyes and knocked Llian out of the way. Only as he went skidding across the floor did Karan understand that Llian had been trying to protect her. In the security of the gate the panic eased and she knew she had made a terrible mistake. Rulke had beaten her—he’d taken her measure very quickly.
“Lliannnnnn!” she screamed, trying to scramble back out. It was too late—the gate was already drawing her away. She leapt up, her arms outstretched like a diver, but it was like trying to jump up an oiled funnel. She was fading, shrinking, being sucked away down the hollow of the gate.
Llian ran toward her, hit a soggy patch of floor and sank into it to the knees. He scratched at the edge. She tried desperately to get back to him but it was too late. Rulke blasted light at the plate again. A line of fire swept through the ceiling, scarred the wall then slashed across the edge of the plate. Air began to hiss out through the roof.
“Back you come!” Rulke roared.
The last thing she saw was Llian scrabbling across the floor on hands and knees. The gate was too far away. Rulke rose over him like a vampire, then the scene was cut off.
Karan was buffeted violently, twisted and hurled about while fireworks flared beneath her eyelids. With a wrench the tunnel began to contract. The air sucked past with a hiss that pulled her hair back toward the Nightland. Karan struggled to remember her destination, Tensor’s gate chamber in the Great Tower. Her eyes began to burn; her ears and nose stung; she could taste blood in the back of her mouth.
She was blind, suffocating! Karan opened her mouth to scream and the air boiled out of her lungs. The tunnel shrank around her tight as a stocking: squeezing, choking. Her chest was so compressed that she could scarcely have taken a breath anyway. Karan felt herself falling into unconsciousness. She tried to focus on Katazza with all her talent. The gate, the gate chamber, she visualized, using the most vivid and terrifying image that she could think of. Remember how Tensor held Llian high as he roared defiance at Rulke!
But the image would not stay in her mind, no matter how she forced. It was as if the gate chamber no longer existed. She riffled through a hundred images of that place but all she could see was Rulke framed by the columns of the pavilion, then its metal dome spinning across the floor. Spinning… spinning… She was losing it. She was dead.
That image must have been just enough to bring the gate back home, for the tunnel pinched off a bubble of itself, spat her against something hard with a crack that she did not hear, and evaporated.
The impact forced a gasp out of her. Trying to sit up, Karan smacked her head on something hard. She drew in shuddering gasps of air, blinked thick fluid out of her eyes and slowly her sight returned, though it showed nothing recognizable. A trickle of blood came from her nose. Trying to wipe it away, Karan found that she could not move her arm. She brought her other arm up, smearing blood across her face. Turning her head, Karan saw, in dim light, a hard surface curving around her. It was the metal dome of the pavilion—she recognized the shape. The gate had brought her out underneath it.
I wonder how heavy it is. I hope I can lift it off. Feeling around with her free arm, she managed to liberate the other one. She was lying on rubble in a narrow space under about a quarter of the dome. The remainder was squashed flat. Something must have fallen on it since she and Llian had left. She tried to push the dome up but it did not budge. There was no space large enough to crawl through either. She was trapped! She was going to die here. She’d never see Llian again.
Could he have reached the gate after all? Impossible, so quickly had it closed behind her. And that was just as well, for if he had he was surely dead, or abandoned in some place that she could never find. She felt utterly wretched, quite bereft. This was the worst thing she had ever done. A monumental stupidity, an unforgivable betrayal.
To add to her troubles, aftersickness was rising up worse than she’d ever felt it. It pricked her abused body with a thousand spikes of pain, too terrible to fight against. Clearly she was not meant to travel through gates. Her brain throbbed, a migraine sent her blind. Karan curled up on the rubble, surrendered herself to it, and after an eon she slept.
Llian lay frozen, expecting Rulke’s terrible rage to strike him dead. One moment it seemed that he would, then as the sound of the air rushing out through the roof rose to a shriek, Rulke reeled away, ripped the door off and began to mold it with his fingers. He soon had a metallic-looking pancake of soft material that was roughly the area of the construct. Awkwardly lifting it above his head, he spun it on his fingertip until it became a disc then sent it flying upwards. The disc slapped against the ceiling, flattened out and the rush of air ceased.
Rulke hung his head, slipped and began to tremble all over, his movements growing more and more exaggerated. He fell to one knee, recovered, the attack came back, then he staggered off, blood pouring down his face. His foray to the reality of Santhenar, and all that had happened since, had sucked him dry. The door banged. Llian’s eyes followed Rulke through the transparent walls until he disappeared in the thickening mist. Llian was alone once more.
Alone and terrified. Everything had happened so quickly. Karan was gone before he understood what was happening. Why had she been so angry? He replayed the scene in his mind, trying to see what Karan had seen. He saw her screaming at him in terror, accusing him of collaborating with Rulke. That hurt, for though sorely tempted, he had not. How could she have so mistrusted him? It was so unlike her.
Now that Rulke was gone even the temptation was hard to understand. The Zain had succumbed to Rulke once, and look what it had got them. They had been decimated and decimated again, stripped of every possession, banished from beloved Zile and persecuted for twice a thousand years. And still they were stained by the Curse of Rulke, shameful stigmata that marked them to this day. No one on Santhenar knew it better than Llian. Would he sell himself so easily for such a doubtful reward? Llian told himself that he would not, and hoped that he was never tempted.
What was he to do now? Run and hide? What was the point of that, in Rulke’s own realm? He tested the plate but it was as dead as the res
t of the floor now; the gate was closed to him. He tried the door, which opened easily. There was no need for locks here. In fact the walls were now so tenuous that he could probably have walked right through them. He tried the nearest, finding it no firmer than a soap bubble. He went back to the construct. Again, when he tried to touch it his fingers disappeared.
Llian walked around the other side, examining the machine tentatively. It was like no device that he had ever seen, and there was no part of it whose function he could recognize. It did not even touch the floor, this sleek, deadly-looking thing. What purpose did it have? Or was it just a whim, a sculpture made to while away the eternal hours? Merely Rulke’s empty boast?
The day passed. Llian was so parched that he could hardly think straight. He made a half-hearted journey in search of water—Karan had not been away for very long—but found himself in a part of the Nightland where all the spaces were warped horribly. Even seeing through the walls where he wanted to go he could find no way of getting there. He went back to what was now the relative security of the construct room.
There he stayed for hours more, hours that were damnably hungry and thirsty. He would have eaten the ice on the floor but it was covered in frozen blood. Eventually he found a small clean patch, cracked it with his boot heel and held the shards in his mouth until they melted. The water tasted like metal.
Llian grew drowsy but did not dare to go near Rulke’s bedroom. In another room he found a cupboard that was large enough to lie on and less frigid than the floor. There he spent many uncomfortable hours, half-dozing, until finally he realized that fear and hunger had taken away any further chance of sleep. He wandered the halls of the Nightland, looking in every doorway and every cupboard, noting everything down for his tale, but found nothing to eat or to drink.
Eventually Rulke returned, carrying a covered tray. It could not be said that Llian was glad to see him, but at least it gave some certainty to his existence. The Charon had changed into robes of sable silk and looked rested, though the long crescent-shaped gash that passed through both eyebrows was bruised and swollen. He put the tray down on a marble pedestal. Llian’s eyes followed it lustfully, almost drooling.
Rulke smiled. “Are you hungry? Well, give me what I want and you shall eat. Ah, but I underestimated your little friend again. My time here must have weakened me more than I thought. It is a thousand years since anyone injured me, and no one has ever done it twice.”
Llian swallowed, tearing his eyes away from the tray.
“In any event, you are no use to me here.” Rulke walked off a few paces, musing audibly, presumably meaning Llian to hear his thoughts. “But back there with your friends you might be a great help to me. They trust you.”
“What’s happened to Karan?” Llian asked.
“That may end up my biggest blunder of all,” he said soberly. “I need her, desperately.”
“What’s the matter?” cried Llian, alarmed by the tone of his voice.
“I don’t know where she is. I would have warned her about the gate but she took me by surprise.”
“What do you mean, warned?” Llian grabbed him by the sleeve. “What’s happened to her?”
“The Nightland is failing and it makes the gate somewhat… quixotic. And your friends in Katazza haven’t helped. Look at it.” Rulke waved his hand and projected on the mist Llian saw a field of rubble, above which soared the broken stumps of the Great Tower.
“The gate sent her there?” Llian’s voice rose to a scream. He groped around blindly. Had Rulke not caught him he would have fallen. He struggled to get away. “I’ve got to go back.”
Rulke held him effortlessly. “She may have gone there. You can’t always tell with gates.”
“Send me back,” Llian shouted, whacking at Rulke with his fists.
Rulke caught his hands. “I might, once you give me what I want. Presently I don’t have the strength.”
“What… happened?” Llian asked listlessly, giving up the unequal struggle.
“In Katazza? I’d say your friends took too much power out of the rift and it brought the whole tower down.”
“Then they’re all dead!”
“I wouldn’t be too sure about that, chronicler. My enemies are tough, wily. However, that’s all I saw, and without opening the gate and going through it, I can’t tell you any more.”
He waved his hand again. “This charm requires you to answer me truthfully. Tell me your story, Llian.”
Though he wondered if he might not be betraying his friends, Llian could not prevent himself from answering. He told Rulke his whole history, beginning with his childhood in arid Jepperand, where he had been so different from the other children.
“Jepperand!” exclaimed Rulke. “You’re Zain!”
“Yes, I am,” said Llian, wondering what use Rulke would make of this information.
“Why didn’t my Ghâshâd tell me? And no ordinary Zain either. It starts to fall into place. Go on.”
Llian spoke of his misery at being sent across half the world to the College of the Histories when he was only twelve, of gradually rising above the ostracism due to a foreigner and a Zain, and suddenly bursting out in that creative explosion that led to his first great telling four years ago, and then to the greater sensation, his triumph at the Graduation Telling last summer when he had told his new version of the Tale of the Forbidding and been awarded the honor of master chronicler.
And all the while, Rulke was watching him with those extraordinary eyes, staring as if trying to look into his head. Llian’s Zain origins had come as a shock to him.
Llian told the Tale of the Forbidding too, and all about the mysterious murder of the crippled girl that had led to his downfall, and the suspicion that had aroused. Someone had crept into Shuthdar’s ruined tower unseen and done foul murder. Why, but to cover something up?
“Ah!” said Rulke, his Charon eyes looking through Llian back to that time. “Well told, chronicler! I remember seeing the poor girl’s body, though I never knew it was murder. Go on with your own story.”
Llian briefly told the events since he’d left the college, including his shameful collaboration with Tensor. How weak I am, he thought. Emmant had a power over me, Tensor a greater power. Now Rulke does just what he wants with me. But at the same time, Llian knew that he wanted to answer Rulke, and to question him. There was so much to learn. “Rulke—” he began.
“Enough!” Rulke said abruptly. “I’ve got to know what you are.”
Taking Llian by the shoulder in one refractory hand, with the other Rulke tipped his chin up. Their eyes came together and locked. Llian’s head spun, his mind drifted and he was lost. He felt disembodied, no more than a spirit hovering high up in the mist.
Looking down at his boneless flesh he saw Rulke’s hands pass over his face. The thick fingers appeared to press down through his skull just as Llian’s own hands had gone through the construct. That was not possible: it must be a hallucination. The fingers roused his brains about, flipping the hemispheres from hand to hand, a sensation that was a cross between a tickle and a sneeze. Rulke’s voice spoke to him—commands that might have been in a foreign tongue, for he did not understand a syllable. Finally the fingers withdrew from his head as slowly as they had gone, tugging at the brains as if attached by threads.
The hallucination ended and Llian was back in his body, his brain swarming like an ant city, but ants whose innumerable feet had trod in acid. He saw Rulke stagger back, but after that Llian lost consciousness.
12
* * *
UNDER THE RUINS
Karan woke in darkness. She shouted until she was hoarse and after that rapped on the dome for hours, hoping that the company would still be here. Even hoping, bitter irony, that Tensor could reopen the gate for her. But the hours tolled by like funeral bells and, finally, her knuckles bruised and raw, Karan had to stop.
Distantly she heard a roaring sound, then the sound of little stones rattling on the rubble above her.
She caught a whiff of pungent gas. It was so hot! Karan realized that she was sweating, her shirt sodden where she pressed against the metal. That was strange, for Katazza was a cool place, high in the mountains. There came another earth trembler and rubble scraped against the dome above her. Something shifted underneath, separating the stones slightly. Suddenly she felt panicky with claustrophobia and began banging her head against the dome, harder and harder, until one blow hurt so much that it brought her to her senses.
A sulphurous stench drifted up through the cracks. Light began to grow around her—another day. She must have slept again. Karan probed at the rubble under her. Perhaps she could shift some of it.
She picked out the smaller pieces of stone, one by one, stacking them up in the empty part of her prison until it was nearly full. Her excavations exposed a larger piece of stone sitting over a gap between other blocks. If she could lift it there might be a way out. As she slid her fingers down beside the stone the tower shook again and the rubble shifted. Karan snatched her hands out.
The rumbling died away. She tried again. This time the stone moved, though not enough. In the dim light she studied the matrix of rock. If she could get this piece out, the space would be big enough to squeeze head and shoulders in. Did she dare? What if the rubble moved? It would be a miserable way to die, trapped by the head. Well, she was going to die if she stayed here, anyway.
Panic rose up again. She forced her fingers down into the rubble until they bled, gripped the stone and heaved. It moved slightly then stuck. She shook it, feeling her fingernails breaking. The tower trembled again, but this time she used the shuddering of the rubble to ease the stone past the others. With a mighty effort, up it came, revealing a larger space underneath.
Taking a deep breath, Karan looked down. It was light enough to see a network of spaces below, though no way to tell if they went anywhere. Putting her head right in, she rotated her shoulders into the gap and peered round the edge. The earth quivered a long way away. Grit sifted down into her eyes. Karan blinked it out, trying not to panic. The direction she was looking was choked up.