by Victor Poole
She had been annoyed for most of her life, at the unfairness of everything, but she had mitigated this annoyance to herself. She had told herself that it was no one's particular fault that everything was bad, and that people were clumsy, and stupid, and foolish. She saw the humans around her, and she saw that many of them were too selfish, or too narrow-minded to achieve truly epic evil in and of themselves.
But now that Ajalia saw a target, and an enemy manifested in the body of the ugly black worm, she felt a rage that was like an engulfing storm in her whole being. I am going to destroy you, she thought, and she released all the light that was in the orb of sun that had filled up her whole body. The sunlight spilled out of her; it was as though she had trapped light into a clay vessel, and it was as though she had cracked the vessel open with a hard rock, and the light had leaked out in every direction.
Oh, Ajalia thought, and she saw three things happen, all at the same time. First, the body of the black worm began, with a violent and reaching crash, to explode. The body of the black worm that lay enclosed in the ocean-blue shell began to shiver into clear black rocks, packed hard within the earth, just as the other worm had in the dragon temple, but this time, Ajalia saw also, and this was the second thing, the part of the snake's body that was not encased in blue light was shivering outwards in a tremendous explosion that, she saw, was making the whole earth shiver. An earthquake was shattering apart the sands in the desert. Ajalia was glad now that she had hooked the creature's tail, and drawn it towards her with a violent jerk. She did not know how she had reached all the way across to the real East, but she was sure now that she had not imagined her journey there. Ajalia told herself, and she knew that she was right, that she was not experiencing a metaphorical or symbolic mental journey; she saw the waves of sand cresting up into the air like destructive waves, and she knew that she really had put her mind into the East, and drawn away the tail of the dragon from her master' estate. Ajalia told herself that it was lucky that she had done so; now, as she watched the black worm die, and writhe with increasing violence through the sands of the abandoned desert, she saw that the whole foundation of the earth was shivering into pieces of stone.
She thought at once of Barat, and Darien, and of the other Eastern slaves whom Leed and Philas had told her were journeying back to the East. Ajalia began, quick as thought, to look for them, and she saw them almost at once.
She was glad that Darien was her particular boy, and that he was with the caravan. She was sure that she was able to find the caravan almost instantly because she knew the heart of Darien, and was accustomed to thinking of the shape of his energy. Ajalia thought of a protective white shell, and she made an encasing all around the caravan. She saw a picture of the slaves cower in terror, and the horses rearing at the slashing winds of sand and quaking earth beneath their feet. She formed a white shell, and the earth within the shell began at once to be still. The horses flung their heads, but no longer fought the slaves who held them, and the slaves looked up with terrified wonder at the waves of loose sand that crashed down against the shell of white protection that Ajalia had cast up around them.
This was the third thing that Ajalia saw; she felt, as from a great distance, and she saw, in her own mind, her body within the room of the dragon temple, and her skin was white and red and gold with light. She thought that her body looked like a shell of clay that is bursting from the inside with hot lava. Cracks and seams of hot gold and red light appeared all around the skin of her face, and through her arms, and hands. She could feel, almost behind a curtain of muffling distance, her feet burning, and the joints of her hips rotating slowly, almost as if they were floating in a sea of liquid fire. Ajalia drew a breath; she let go of the picture of the black worm, which was now exploding into stars of white and multicolored lights, and she kept a part of herself protecting the huddle of slaves in the desert, but most of her mind she focused on her body. She wondered if she was dying; she asked herself if this was what dying looking like from the inside, or from the perspective of her mind, and she did not think this was so.
I feel alive, Ajalia told herself, and it was so. The head of the black worm vibrated furiously; the long tail of the dragon contracted, like a drying weed that has been plump with water, and that shrivels in the heat of the sun. The tail of the snake, which had been whipping up the sand in the desert into a whirlwind of sandstorms, shrank into the forest in Slavithe, and darted, like a living thing, up towards the trembling head where Ajalia sat. The body of the worm that had been inside the hard crust of ocean-blue light had already shattered away, all but the head, and the dart-like tail now spun towards the clumsy head.
Ajalia saw the whipping black cord of the tail, and she knew suddenly that the worm was going, in its final moments, to try to kill her, to take her with it into oblivion. Ajalia thought first of throwing herself aside, but then she thought that she would not kill the dragon entirely, if she did so. She was sure that if any part of the black worm remained intact, the black skin would begin again to grow, and within a few generations of evil, the snake would once again be powerful enough to inhabit the stone in the earth, and to wind around the places where good people lived. Ajalia decided that she would not get out of the way. She told herself that she would rather die with the snake, than see it as a tiny, ugly worm, and to know that it would slink away into the shadows, and live to grow again into a monstrosity that would infect the whole earth with evil.
Ajalia called up the gold that was in her physical body, and she made a strong shield out of the gold of her own soul. She recognized the look of the gold; it was the same texture and light as the gold drops that Delmar had called into his hand, when he had sponsored her as a citizen of Slavithe, and the same gold that had rimmed Delmar's tongue, when he had licked at her arms, and opened the old wounds there with magic.
Ajalia had never before called out of herself her own soul; she had promised to sponsor Rane, when she learned how to do this, but he had turned on her, and been destroyed by the white in her soul, before she had done so. She felt a pinching pain within her chest, and in the cavities of her arms, and behind her knees. She felt a kind of aching, sharp needle of agony as she watched dribbles of pure gold assemble, like marching soldiers of dew, and form into a shield before her chest. The rapidly-retracting tail of the shrinking snake slipped like fire towards her, and slapped, with a hiss like fat on a griddle, against the shield of gold she had made for herself.
Ajalia gasped, and was flung at once into her own body in the dragon temple. Before she had finished feeling the filling-up of her muscles and bones, she reached into the earth, and grasped again a cord of deep blue with her fingers. Ajalia turned her mind at once towards the wall, and she saw the place just in time to witness the dragon's shriveled whip of a tail explode in fragments of light, and the head of the worm was burned up completely in the explosion. She saw the orange-gold eyes of the worm blink out, and a great shiver of dark stones coalesce within the sand, like a gorgeous vein of burial stones under the place where she had burned all the remnants of Bain into oblivion.
When Ajalia saw that the dragon was truly gone, and that no scrap of the black skin remained, she cast her mind towards the desert, and saw that the sand that had been flung high into the air had all but drifted back into wild dunes. She retracted the white shell she had made around the Eastern slaves, and then she thought of the white gravel road, and she feared that Darien and Barat would be lost.
Ajalia was sure that the writhing and fighting tail of the dragon had hidden the road beneath mounds of burying sand; she thought that the caravan would be lost, and would never find the buried road at all. She flexed her fingers, and felt the backs of her hands against the cool white stone of the floor where she lay.
Ajalia opened her eyes. She got up, and went to the curtain. She felt enormous aches and pains through her whole body; she thought that the red and gold light that had burned through her flesh had purged away all the death that had seemed to fill her
up for as long as she could remember. Her skin and bones felt painfully alive right now. Ever since Ajalia could remember, since she had been a small child in her father's house, near the meadow and the crossroads, in a small town near the center of Leopath, she had felt as though she were not really alive. She had never felt the same as other people; she saw the folk of the village, and the traders and horses that lived nearby, in the next town over, but she was somehow different to the people there. Even the animals, Ajalia thought, had never seemed to regard her as a person.
The horse traders had come seasonally to the town next to Ajalia's home town, and she had loved to look at the horses when her mother had taken her there shopping, but when the child Ajalia had reached out, and attempted to stroke the noses or the cheeks of the horses, as they stood near the edges of the market stalls, the horses would always fling up their heads, and snort in dismissive alarm, as though they were not afraid of her, but afraid of being touched by her hand.
This reaction of the horses had hurt and confused Ajalia for a very long time; she had practiced on the horses that lived in a field near her home, and when she had been about ten or eleven, she had learned to keep away the darkness that always seemed to surge around her like a cloak.
She knew now that her father had infested her with shadows; these shadows, she thought, must have been what the horses objected to, because she could look back at the time she had spent hanging on the fence of the meadow, and consciously pushing back the darkness, and hiding it in her heart. The horses had not liked her much better, but they had stood and submitted their faces to be stroked by her.
When Ajalia had stolen the chestnut mare, and turned away from home, the mare had seemed to shiver away from Ajalia's legs. Ajalia had ridden the horse all right, and the mare had tolerated her seat and directions, but Ajalia had known, with a sorrowful twist in her heart, that the mare did not like her very much. As Ajalia had grown older, she had grown much more sophisticated in her ability to conceal the death that lay always in and around her heart. She had compacted the shadows, and made of them a reverse of what the black worm had shown itself to be. The black worm had taken light, and color, and smashed the pieces of light up so small that they could be coated in shadow, and made to appear wholly black. Ajalia had taken the shadows and the darkness that her family had inflicted upon her, and she had tucked it and folded it up until it lay in a corner of her being, and then she had seeded false life all around the black shadow, to make it seem only like a dark twist in her personality, or like a quirk of her being.
Ajalia remembered now what Bain had told her, when he had haunted her in the dragon temple. The scene came back to her as she stood in the open balcony, and looked out towards the wall, and the desert that lay beyond. She had finished putting Lilleth's body into the garbage pit, and she had just wiped all the blood from the steps and stones of the dragon temple hall, when Bain had come back to tease her again. She remembered how the shadow child had appeared suddenly. He had told her then that his body was dead, and that his spirit lived on. Ajalia, he had said, suffered from the opposite complaint. Bain had told her that her body was alive, but that her spirit was dead.
Ajalia felt now as though the burning fire in her body had resuscitated her spirit; she thought that killing the great black worm had created an excess of energy and heat, and that this overspill of potential life had bled into her soul, and reanimated it. She could not remember a time in her life that she had felt so full of life, of being. Her arms and legs felt solid, and her face, when she turned it into the cold night air, felt the pinch of the breeze against her cheeks. Ajalia felt as though she had been experiencing life at a distance for her whole period of existence; she felt the sting of the chilly air, and the press of the hard stones below her feet, and everything around her was solid, and real, and inescapably wonderful. Ajalia took a deep breath, and thought again of the caravan, and of the white gravel road that she was sure was buried away. She thought hesitantly of the lights beneath the earth, and of the coils of light above in the sky.
Ajalia was reluctant to leave her body again so soon; she was afraid that if she left her physical body behind, something would happen to the marvelous sensations she was feeling just now. She did not want her soul to disconnect from her body again. She determined to try to rescue the road from beneath the sands without leaving her body, and she put her hands on the balcony railing, and closed her eyes. She kept much of her attention fixed on the sensation of the stone beneath her fingers, and she rubbed her thumbs along the smooth white stone.
Ajalia imagined the gravel road that ran from the gates of Slavithe through the forest, and through the fields and orchards that ran through the farmlands of Slavithe. She dipped her mind beneath the road, and saw there the same curious silvery-blue color that she had found before in the quarries, and that she had twisted around the lights in her ankles. It was the light from the previous sky angel, that had been left in the rocks of the quarry, and that Ajalia had put through the lighted columns in the hall of the dragon temple, and the light there had faded. It was the same light she had threaded throughout the walls and ceilings of the dragon temple, to keep them from crumbling, when the first black worm had appeared, and challenged her.
The gravel road was threaded all through with this silvery-blue light. The threads of light looked like long threads of a warp that formed the basis of a weave of cloth; twisted through these silvery-blue threads were endless tiny cords of all different colors of light. Ajalia followed the road until she reached the desert; the sand lay over the surface of the road some distance out from the last fields. Ajalia saw that the white road ran along, surrounded on either side by the thick orange and gold sand, for about fifty yards, and then the white road vanished beneath a vast dune of the sand.
Settling her fingers tightly around the balcony with her left hand, and wiggling her toes against the cool floor of the balcony, Ajalia picked up the long skinny weave of light beneath the road, and shook it.
A tiny tremor shook through the sand just above the road, but the heavy masses of sand that lay in heaps above did not move. Ajalia creased the corners of her mouth, and yanked hard on the woven lights. The lights shifted a little, as though they were a cord that ran beneath a large boulder far away. Ajalia settled her feet against the white stone of the balcony, and she lifted her left hand away from the railing, which was blue in the light of the moon.
Ajalia put both hands around the woven lights beneath the road, and she imagined herself lifting the road high up, above her head. The heaps of sand over the road began, slowly, to shift away. Ajalia frowned. Her eyes were still closed. She reached into the sky, and got great clumps of the cords of light that spun through the air. She pictured these clumps of light forming quickly into wings, and, her shoulders shivering in anticipation, she fastened the ends of the wings around her bones and back. Her scapulae tickled when she spun the ends of the blue wings around them, and her spine itched at the touch of the wings of light. Ajalia felt a strong burning sensation deep in her bones when she twisted the cords of light hard within her body. She drove the wings down hard, and her body shot up, away from the balcony, and into the sky.
Ajalia heard a shout; she opened her eyes, and looked down. Delmar was on the roof. She saw that he had just put his hands on the railing that ran around the edges of the roof, and that he had meant to climb down to the balcony. She turned her attention back to the woven lights of the road, and again grasped the lights in both of her hands. She was about twenty feet above the roof of the dragon temple now; Ajalia drove the blue wings down again, and rose up like a rocket into the sky. The woven lights of the road were clasped hard in her fingers, and the weave grew hot against her skin, as though the road was fighting against the weight of the sand, and dragging against her fingers. Ajalia did not want to fly out over the desert; she wanted to talk to Delmar. She tightened her grip, and once more drove the blue wings down.
Ajalia felt as though she were about to scrape
against the clouds. With a groan that she felt rather than heard, she tore up the graveled road from beneath the sand; she saw that the road itself did not move, but she could feel huge piles of sand flying away from it, as if they had been swept to either side by a great gust of torrential wind. In a moment, Ajalia felt the woven lights in her hands grown lighter, and then they were still. She looked along the whole line of the woven lights, and saw that they stretched, in an unrealistically straight line, right to the edge of the vast pool that formed the centerpiece of the oasis that was the central hub of Leopath. Ajalia put down the weave of the road, and she looked along the whole line of the white gravel.
She had often wondered, when the caravan had first been travelling along the almost ridiculously well-maintained gravel road, how it had been built, and what had kept it from being buried under long drifts of sand. The gravel was impossibly pure; near the very edge of the road, the white dust beneath the gravel mixed a little with the rich golden and orange sand, but in the rest of the road, not so much as a speck of orange sand had been mingled with the white gravel. Ajalia had ignored this strange phenomenon for the most part, but now she remembered how odd it had seemed to her, and how she had imagined hundreds of workers laboring over the road. She had wondered how the foundation for the road had been laid so straight, and in the midst of so much sand, but now she saw that the road floated on a bed of woven lights, and that the energy of those lights created a firm bottom for the crushed marble that formed the road.
Great hills and dunes now lay at either side of the road; Ajalia saw, at one place, a strong wind plowing through heaps of sand, and blowing a large dune across the white gravel road, and she fixed her attention on the road, to see what would happen there. The wind blew the sand, and the sand fell against the white gravel surface, and then bounced and slipped to the other side of the white ribbon of crushed stone.