by Jan Siegel
She pushed aside her treacherous empathy, moving to the balustrade, looking down into the belly of the chamber. The vast floor stretched away below her, perhaps five hundred feet from wall to wall, its mirror-surface reflecting the gold of the ceiling as in a lake. Engraved on it in lines spider-thin yet very clear was a huge mandala enclosing a rayed star or sun, and within that several hieroglyphs or runes whose meaning she did not understand. At the center stood the altar. It was a piece of plain rock, unadorned, smoothed maybe by the sea, its shape irregular; no doubt it had some significance of which she was unaware. Its top was slightly hollow and on it rested a black globe the size of a serpent’s egg. As her gaze reached it she felt its pull, so strongly that her heart thumped and her breath grew short. And suddenly she realized that the golden temple, even the city itself, was little more than a decorative receptacle for this one deadly thing, a glittering corolla around a seed of infinite power. Even as she stared the force emanating from it seemed to intensify, as though responding to the surge within her: the air throbbed with it, and the chamber trembled like a mirage, shivering on the borderline of existence, and only the Stone was real. She groped her way along the gallery until she found a stair, descended in a stumble to ground level. The force compelling her on was so strong she thought she crossed that wide floor in two or three steps. Then the altar was before her, and she had laid her hands on the Lodestone.
It was not a stone, she knew that at once. To call it a stone was merely a title of convenience: it felt and looked a little like stone only because it was harder than hard, heavier than the whole planet, but the heaviness was inside it, not weighing it down but drawing it into itself. It was neither alive nor dead; it had Being without Consciousness, power without purpose. It was a ball of matter so dense there might have been entire worlds crushed within it, and she shuddered at its touch, even as that touch disseminated through her body like the fallout of a shooting star, burning her with a thousand sparks that illumined but did not destroy. Her hands became transparent as the fire in her veins glowed through the filmy layers of her skin. With a fascination beyond horror she saw her bones shining like phosphorus, and the multiple sinews that knotted and bound them rippling like threads of living silk. Then the burning faded, and her hands clouded into normality, and the Lodestone released her, leaving her swaying as if she were faint or drunk. The echo of a door slamming somewhere below barely revived her sense of danger. She half ran, half staggered across the floor to the cloister beneath the gallery and collapsed at the base of a pillar, huddling into the golden shadows.
The woman entered a few minutes later. She walked across the sheer marble with the rustle of soft-shod feet, the fluid pacing of limbs both sinuous and strong. Her beauty was the beauty of the leopardess, a black-and-gold deadliness, yet the poise of her head on the curving slenderness of the neck had an unnatural liquidity, for all its regal arrogance: when the man behind her spoke the turn of her chin was snake-like in its suppleness. Her hair was not stiffened into a horn this time but piled in a thick mass of twists and coils, tiny gems lurking like insects in its inky abundance. Her long veils were yellow as pollen, draped around hip and shoulder and trailing like flowerdust in her wake. Jewelry tinkled faintly as she moved. The girl knew her at once: Zohrâne Goulabey, last scion of the Thirteenth House, High Priestess of the Unknown God, Queen of Atlantis, Empress of the World—or as much of the world as had already been sucked into the far-flung net of the ruling island. Those who had kept count said she was almost a hundred and fifty years old, though her face had a metallic smoothness and her figure retained the gloss of a body in its prime. It was rumored she had poisoned her elder brother when she was only eight to secure the succession, disposing of her father, the Wizard-King Pharouq Goulabey, before she reached twenty. Her mother, the legendary beauty Tamiszandre, had died of a surfeit of griefs not long after. Zohrâne had never been seen to weep. She did not wed, vowing to admit neither man nor child into her heart, that no one might come close enough to kill her. Instead, she surrounded herself with body-slaves, changing them frequently, executing any who roused her to affection. Her advisers hated her only marginally more than she hated them. Studying her, even from a distance, the girl sensed a familiar ugliness exuding from her for all her physical perfection, a rapacious emptiness that would devour life itself to feed its hopeless need. It was something she knew she had encountered before, and the recollection unsettled her, partly because she could not pinpoint its source, but also because of the nebulous fear which accompanied it.
The man who followed Zohrâne was as tall as she and appeared considerably older. His head was shaved; heavy bracelets clasped his biceps, looking more like armor than ornament. His sleek torso was woven with muscle. He must formerly have been extremely handsome, but an accident or infection had crêped and bubbled the skin down one side of his face, and partial healing had caused it to tighten, distorting the symmetry of his features. A latent menace hung round him like a miasma. “They are all here,” he was saying. “I have them in the antechamber. They complain, but in whispers: they fear even the walls may retain their mutterings and replay them to your ear. They have made their own subjection.”
“Of course,” she said. “When I first took power I offered the twelve families a choice: to subject themselves, or to be subjected. There is always a choice. They took the way of pomposity and self-importance, of indolence, cowardice, greed. They thought to cling onto dignity in bending to my will rather than breaking themselves against it. The great houses were shorn of their greatness ages before, little men living on the reputation of the dead. They tell themselves their own interests are best served serving me. That way, they can be comfortable with servitude.”
“You need them,” he reminded her.
“I need their heritage, the power that sleeps inside them. The strength they have become too nervous or too wary to use. They are the descendants of those who first touched the Lodestone and were forever changed by it. Its potence endures, in their blood, in their bones. I will draw it out, bind it together. It will be enough.”
“Are you sure?” The sudden neutrality of his tone betrayed an insidious hope, lurking behind his superficial allegiance. The puckered eyelid gave his sidelong gaze a twist that was coldly malevolent.
“Nothing is sure.” Zohrâne smiled. Beside her, his natural menace was diminished, a weapon as slight as a jeweled paper-knife. “Are you afraid, Ixavo?” They had drawn close to the altar now. “Are you afraid of the Stone?”
“You will destroy it?” His furtive utterance was magnified by the space into an enormous whisper.
“I will remake it.”
“It will resist destruction.”
“All things resist destruction, according to their capacity. Rocks, pebbles, diamonds. Unity is instinctive to being. It doesn’t matter.” She flung the words over her shoulder like scraps to a beggar, turning to face the Lodestone.
“It will hear you.”
“It cannot hear, nor see, nor feel. It is nothing but a lump of crude power. A lump. I hear, and see, and feel. I can break this lump like ordinary rock, and reshape it to my own requirements. I have no fear of a lump, a rock. Have you?” She placed her hand on it, and the girl seemed to see a shudder flow up her arm like a current of hidden flame, jabbing at her brain. She thought: Zohrâne has lived too long in its aura, reached too far into its core. The power has turned her mind. Her reasoning is merely the cunning of madness; she wears her residual sanity like a veil.
Worst of all, she realized, Zohrâne was without fear, and fear is the braking system of intelligence.
“Touch it,” the queen said to Ixavo. “For fifteen years you have been the Guardian. Have you never touched it before? Are you really so weak, so incurious—as stupid as the herd-animals we call citizens? I thought more of you, Ixavo. There were times when I believed you might merit my enmity.”
There was a long pause, a pause with many layers: tension, hesitation, thought.
“I touched it once,” he admitted unwillingly. The watching girl sensed his resistance and the memory of horror. “It burned me. I felt the burning shoot up my arm and melt my face. It was like the fire of the gods. Another time—I might burn away.”
“The gods.” Her contempt was scalding. “What do I care for gods? The Unknown has always been content to remain that way, and as for those petty spirits who call themselves deities, at least here in Atlantis we have had the sense to scorn their worship. The Gift is beyond their fabled powers. I will take that Gift and absorb it so that it cannot be Given again. The so-called gods shall fade to legend in my shadow. I shall cross from world to world, through Death and back, outside the range of any immortal. Godhead will be my stepping stone.”
“What do you want?” he asked slowly. “You rule half the earth. What remains unconquered? An empty desert, a barren mountain range, a few primitive peoples living in caves and mud-huts. Why put yourself to so much trouble to subjugate such as those?”
“You don’t understand.” Once again, she stretched her hand toward the Lodestone, not touching but as if exploring its hidden magnetic field. “I had thought more of your intellect. Ruling is a detail: I want to be. To be last and always, alone and supreme. To have no limits. The whole Atlantean empire is a child’s playground when compared to the measureless realms that lie beyond the Gate. I will not be confined to a solitary planet, a single cosmos, the routine boundaries of life and death. I shall triumph over them all. Ruling is a chore, but triumph is forever sweet.”
“And then?” said Ixavo. “When you have triumphed. What then?” Even at that distance, the girl read the comprehension behind his heavy inscrutability. The queen was mad and he knew she was mad, yet he would do nothing to thwart her. Possibly he feared her too much; possibly he was planning to use her, hoping to reap some profit from the backlash of her rashness.
She did not answer the question; her mental focus had clearly moved on, leaving the subject behind. “It is nearly time,” she said at length. “Are you sure the others will be ready?”
“They will be ready.”
“And the sacrifice?”
“Yes.”
“He must be young and strong. The nymphelin this morning was beautiful, but he walked with a limp. I will not be seen thrusting the city’s rejects at Death’s portal as though in mockery of my own ends. Give me the cream of Atlantean youth. Take the sons and daughters of the twelve families: the power is in them, let me drain it with their blood.”
He did not react: he had evidently been around her too long. He may even have shared her tastes. “That would be . . . unwise, Highness. As I said before, you need their support.”
“For this ceremony only. After that, they will be dross.”
“Then start the ceremony. After that . . .”
But his doubt did not touch her. Her insanity had narrowed and intensified her perception, concentrating it within the parameters of her own ambition. She looked at Ixavo and saw his reservations, schemes, evasions, lies, as if he were a crude, obvious creature whose most secret passions would be too predictable to command her interest. He would follow her, she believed, like a jackal in the hope of carrion, the lesser predator trailing the greater, saving private dissent for private expression. She despised him for that transparency, for the banality of his plotting, for the ease with which she could control him: yet contempt was so much a part of her normal emotional range that she was barely conscious of it anymore. He was a useful tool: the rest was superfluous. She had chosen him because he was the son of an Atlantean commander killed abroad, brought up by the priests of Hex-té in the forbidden city of Qultuum and therefore, despite his questionable religious background, uncommitted to any dissident factions in Atlantis itself. She had seen evidence that he possessed a certain power, but he used it rarely and she had dismissed it as a weaker strain of the Gift, too negligible to signify. Knowing herself all but omnipotent, she included him in her general abhorrence of lesser beings without feeling the need to consider him a threat.
The girl, immobile in her inadequate hiding-place, caught a fleeting glimpse of Zohrâne’s mind, a chink of awareness opening unwanted in her thoughts, and shrank from its total lack of humanity. The ceremony was plainly due to start any minute and she knew she ought to leave, or at least remove herself from the participants’ line of vision. But although the Guardian departed Zohrâne remained, standing by the altar and gazing at the Lodestone as though wrapped in a trance of gloating. Her hands roamed over it in a caress without actual contact, framing its outline in her gestures; a secret smile curved her closed lips. Almost she seemed to make love to the Stone: though she did not touch it again her gestures were sensual, even lascivious, while her expression misted into a half-drowned look bordering on ecstasy. The watching girl thought with a curious detachment: She is going to destroy it because she thinks that is the way to absolute domination. Like a besotted man strangling the paramour who teases and torments him, believing thus to possess her utterly. But afterward the beloved has gone beyond possession, and all he has is remembrance. Maybe this is what I am supposed to prevent. But she had no idea what to do, or how, and she sensed instinctively that it was too soon, her moment was not yet. For now she must observe and be unobserved. And despite, or perhaps because of its effect on her, that strange bonding with an ultimate power source, she felt that it would be better destroyed. It was too strong, too hypnotic, too terrifyingly purposeless to be left among greedy, desperate mortals: the very lust of it was a corruption. Broken, its power would disseminate, maybe vanish altogether. Let Zohrâne shatter it—if she could.
Minutes later, the queen fell back from the altar, her rapture fading into the steely stillness which was the essence of her beauty. She drew her veils around her, encasing herself in a skin of yellow gossamer, revealing details of her anatomy formerly blurred, and walked swiftly toward the side door where she had come in. The girl got to her feet and began to run through the cloister, back to the stairs leading up to the gallery. She was farther from it than she had realized; commune with the Lodestone must have disorientated her. A priest coming through the main entrance saw the flicker of movement and shouted for the guards. There were too many within call. She saw she was cut off, doubled back, and within seconds was writhing in the grip of strong arms sheathed in leather and bronze. She ceased to struggle when she saw it was no use, standing very still, staring stonily at her captors. “What do you want done with him?” asked the captain.
“Her,” said the priest. “Take a closer look. Ixavo will want to examine her, but not now. There isn’t time. Throw her in the cell with the other. I have to start the drum.”
They took her away, holding her firmly but not painfully, evidently confident she could not escape. Down a gloomy stair, and into the convoluted passages beneath the temple. The drum began while they were on the stair, the same sound she had heard at the inn but far louder, a deep rhythmic boom that made the walls vibrate. Even the soldiers were disturbed by it. It was a noise that got inside a person’s head and pounded against the sides of the skull, a noise that loosened the very ligaments binding the joints together. When her teeth stopped shaking the girl found herself being thrust through a low door into darkness. The door closed behind her, sliding into its familiar groove with the thud of stone settling on stone. Bolts scraped; a key clicked and rattled. Then silence, the dense, furry, clinging silence of warm stale air in a small space, torn with the harsh rasp of her own breathing. She sat down slowly on what felt like solid rock, leaning against the wall. She could see nothing but the blotches of residual light on her retina dwindling into a void. As her panting eased she heard the soft hiss duplicated, somewhere close by, an echo in an echoless room. The hairs rose on her neck. Then she remembered. The other, the priest had said. “Hello?” she whispered. In the dark, she found it automatic to whisper. “Are you there?”
“Of course,” said the dark, prosaically. “Where would I go?” It had a reassuring
ly normal voice, cool but not cruel, its sarcasm as gentle as a feather-edged knife. Her fright gradually lessened.
“Who are you?”
“Myself.” There was laughter in the answer, and certainty. “Strangers first. Who are you?”
“You’re a stranger too.”
“Not as strange as you.”
“How do you know?” she demanded, mildly indignant.
“I saw you—briefly—when they pushed you in here. And earlier. Outside. You’re no Atlantean. Your skin is fair and your eyes are pale and your hair is the color of dying leaves. You’re a girl by the walk and the voice, although your body looks like it isn’t quite sure yet. I don’t recognize your accent. So who are you?”
The beggar, she thought, annoyed with herself for not catching on sooner. Curiously, his uncomplimentary words did not trouble her. She was concentrating on her own identity: even as she reached for it, it seemed to fragment, dream interfacing with reality, pieces of her self floating away leaving gaps filled with unfocused memory. “My name is Fernani,” she said, but she wasn’t certain. Somehow, it didn’t sound quite right. “Some people call me Fern.” That was better. Fern belonged to her: it fitted like a well-worn glove.