by Ann Maxwell
Rheba’s eyes itched fiercely but she said nothing. The anger in Kirtn’s voice told her that this was not the time to argue with him, much less try to thwart him.
Fssa was not so used to Bre’ns. “Didn’t i’sNara say that if we used J/taals, every hand on Yhelle would be against us?”
“Do you think we’ll notice the difference?” whistled Kirtn sarcastically.
Fssa flushed shades of darkness and withdrew into Rheba’s comforting hair.
When Kirtn was not looking, she rubbed her eyes. What ever Itch wanted, they were not doing it at the moment. She swore silently and hurried toward the veil, stopping only when Kirtn eased around buildings to check for stray Soldiers of Ecstasy. The way they went was not difficult; as far as she could tell, the illusion of a paved walkway matched the reality beneath her feet. Apparently the Yaocoons did not wrap illusions around their outer holdings as fervently as they did around themselves and their clan hall.
The veil gleamed and sparked fitfully in the distance, looking rather like stripped atoms twisting over a planet’s magnetic poles.
Rheba’s skin prickled as her akhenet lines moved, reflecting the dissonant energies ahead. She was not looking forward to tangling with the veil construct again. She wished that it were dawn, that Yhelle’s sun would rise and pour its silent cataracts of energy over her. But dawn was far away. She would have to face the veil armored only in cloud-thinned moonlight.
There was nothing near the veil, no place to hide. It looked like a trap baited with the hope of escape. With shrinking skin, she approached the end of the walkway.
“Now what?” whistled Fssa, his question as soft as a breath sliding between strands of her hair.
“It’s supposed to be like a showcube,” murmured Rheba, “only instead of pictures from home, the veil shows various clan symbols. When Reality Street comes up, we go through.”
As soon as their presence registered on the veil’s tenuous energies, it shimmered and made a portal. Inside the oval was the image of Ecstasy Stones glittering on a mirrored table. The sight was chillingly beautiful, light in all of its colors flashing and turning, calling to them in the voices of everything they had ever loved or hoped to love.
Rheba’s eyes stopped itching. Coolness flowed like a benediction.
“Redis hall,” said Kirtn hoarsely.
“Itch,” she whispered. “Itch wants us to go there.”
Kirtn’s hand closed bruisingly over her wrist, as though he feared she would leap into the veil. “No.”
She did not move or protest. She, too, was afraid of the alien who communicated with her only in terms of pleasure or pain, an alien who seemed to want her to enter the stronghold of the Tyrant who wielded disillusionment and death against his enemies.
Silently, Bre’n and Senyas waited for the veil’s portal image to shift as it had when they stood on Reality Street, two aliens impatient for their first glimpse of untrammeled illusions. It seemed like a lifetime ago, but it was barely more than a day.
The portal image did not change. Ecstasy Stones called to them, seducing them in tone on tone of rainbow pleasures.
Senyas and Bre’n waited. The image remained the same, stones glittering with promise, chiming with all the possibilities of ecstasy.
“Maybe this is the wrong place to go through,” suggested Rheba, biting her lip when renewed itching attacked the back of her eyes.
Kirtn said nothing.
The veil shimmered and remained unchanged.
Kirtn turned to walk back the way they had come. She turned with him, but could not control the sound that escaped her lips as an agony of fire scraped behind her eyes.
Nor was that the worst of it. Where he and she had walked between buildings there was only darkness now, darkness and the hollow gliding of unfettered wind. She did not want to walk into that emptiness, for she knew in her soul that it had no end.
“No,” she whispered when Kirtn walked forward.
He neither turned nor acknowledged her voice. Fssa’s sensors reeled as the snake probed the nothingness ahead. At that moment, Kirtn staggered. He leaned forward, feeling ahead with his hands as though a wall had sprung up between him and whatever lay beyond his fingertips.
“Either this is a class twelve illusion,” mourned the snake in a minor key, “or what we came through before was a twelve.” He sighed thinly. “Not that it matters. On Yhelle, reality is a matter of opinion.”
Kirtn strained, muscles knotting and moving under his copper fur, pouring all of his Bre’n strength into the wall. Nothing moved, at first. Then slowly, gradually, Kirtn gave way. The invisible wall pushed him backward, toward his dancer, toward the Ecstasy Stones shimmering in the veil’s unchanging portal.
Abruptly, he straightened and leaped sideways along the wall. It took no more than a touch to tell him that the wall was in reality a crescent. He and Rheba were caught between its horns. The wall curved toward him, narrowing the space that separated him from his dancer and the veil gleaming behind her.
Gently, inexorably, the crescent contracted, pressing Senyas and Bre’n closer to the portal where Ecstasy Stones waited in deadly multicolored silence.
There was no escape. The veil energies closed over Kirtn and Reba, sucking them into the tyrant k’Masei’s stronghold.
XVIII
There was nothing on the other side of the veil but an uninhabited slidewalk curving toward a distant glow. The Redis clan territory displayed no blatant illusions, no sweeping conceits, no wry deceptions replacing reality.
Not even buildings. The area beyond the veil was so empty that it made Rheba’s skin move and tighten. She had seen places like this before, on Deva, scorched ruins where dancers had not been able to hold at bay the leaping sun. But there were not even ruins in the Redis territory, nothing except the sinuous invitations of the slidewalk.
“I don’t like it,” she said flatly. Her akhenet lines surged in ragged pulses, unsettled by her recent passage through the veil. The slidewalk rippled like a river of pearls waiting to be strung.
Kirtn smiled down at her. “It’s not as bad as it looks, dancer. The Stones . . . I think the Stones aren’t what we were told. They don’t want to hurt us.”
She looked up him with eyes that were cinnamon and skeptical. “How can you tell?”
“Can’t you feel it?” he murmured. “They’re as gentle as a summer dawn. They’re love, not hate.”
She closed her eyes. When they opened again they were gold and more than skeptical. Fear glinted, fear and a dancer’s power gathering. Her hand closed around Kirtn’s wrist. Fear, proximity and love for her Bre’n forged a fragile mindlink between them. For an instant she shared with him echoes of joy and laughter gliding. . . .
But only for an instant. Her touch dimmed the Stones’ allure. The echoes of ecstasy faded. Kirtn shook himself and looked at her with eyes that were caught between regret and fear.
“Psi masters,” Rheba said hoarsely, her fingers hard and trembling around his wrist. “They were in your mind, as Satin was in your mind on Onan. Don’t trust them!”
“At least they weren’t trying to rearrange my brains,” said Kirtn in a tight voice, “or disillusion me.”
Fssa hissed with pleasure. He was all the way out of Rheba’s hair, supported only by a coil around Kirtn’s strong neck. “The Stones are lovely, dancer. Like my Guardians’ dreams of swimming Ssimmi’s molten sky/seas.”
“You too, snake?” she said, both frightened and oddly angry.
“Yesss. But your energies interfere.” He sighed like a child asked to choose between sweets. “If only Kirtn were hotter. Then I could have fire and the Stones, too.”
Rheba frowned. Her akhenet lines quivered and ignited. With an effort, she stilled her fears, murmuring litanies in her mind until her lines faded to whorls of transparent gold.
“Mentor,” she said slowly, carefully, “Don’t trust the Tyrant’s Ecstasy Stones. No one who goes to the Redis hall comes back out. Remember t
hat.”
“I’m trying to,” Kirtn said. Suddenly he buried his hands in her seething hair. “Hold me, dancer,” he whispered. “The Stones are so very beautiful. . . .”
For an instant she stood without moving, lost, for he had always been her strength. Then her arms went around him in a gesture both gentle and fierce. With an instinct far older than her years, she built a network of energy around her Bre’n, pouring herself through him in a sweet rush of fire that even the Ecstasy Stones could not equal.
He shuddered and lifted her off her feet, holding her as though he were afraid it was the last time. Then his mind was free, not even a wisp of alien ecstasy remained; but ecstasy was there, unity of dancer and Bre’n.
Slowly he let her slide down his body to stand again on her own feet. “I’m all right now, dancer. The Stones . . .” Darkness turned uneasily in the depths of his yellow eyes. “They won’t fool me so easily again.”
But unspoken between them was the question: Was it simple deception the Stones offered, or was it something more?
“Or something less,” said Kirtn wryly, lips half curved, half smiling at his dancer. Patches of copper hair clung to her skin and clothes, held there by her sweat. He brushed futilely at the fine, tiny hairs. “Sorry, dancer. I’ve gone and shed all over you.”
Rheba smiled, but she wanted to cry. “What’s a dancer for if not to help her Bre’n shed?”
Kirtn’s fingers moved as though he would hold her again, sweet fire and energy pouring. Then he closed his eyes and stepped back. She watched, waiting. After a moment he opened his eyes and tried to smile.
“They’re back, dancer. But I know them, now.” He turned to step up on the slidewalk, then looked over his shoulder at her. “You’re more than they could ever be to me.”
“Wait!”
Her voice pulled him back from the slidewalk’s smooth gleam.
“I—we—have to know more about the Stones before we get any closer to them.”
“We know that the closer we get, the more powerful they are,” said Kirtn in Senyas, blunt and sardonic at once.
She took Fssa and put him on the ground. “Put Rainbow around him.” Her voice was strained. Only Kirtn’s vulnerability to the Stones could have driven her to the extreme of requiring communication between Fssireeme and Zaarain construct.
Reluctantly, Kirtn pulled Rainbow off his neck. He knew the cost of the alien conversations for Rheba when she was within their range.
She took the caged Stones out of her pocket and put them close to Rainbow, but not touching. Although she was not sure her energy cages could prevent Rainbow from pirating the stones for its own uses, she hoped to discourage such theft.
“Snake, ask Rainbow if it knows what these stones are, if they can be controlled, if they’re real or illusion, alive or machine, anything that can help us. And,” grimly, “be quick about it.”
She retreated rapidly as Fssa assumed the fungoid shape that he used to communicate with the fragmentary Zaarain construct. There was not time for her to get beyond the reach of the Fssireeme’s savage energies. Nor did she think she should. Fssa, too, was vulnerable to the Ecstasy Stones’ allure.
Kirtn followed her, putting his body between his dancer and the odd pair on the ground. Even dense Bre’n flesh could not deflect the bizarre communication between Fssireeme and Zaarain crystals, but a dance could. His hands slid into place on her shoulders. Flames licked up from her akhenet lines, concealing dancer and Bre’n, disrupting the flow of alien energies.
Still, Fssireeme-Zaarain communication was not painless for her. It never was.
When the dance ended, blood trickled down her lower lip. Kirtn, too, was affected, but not nearly so much as his dancer. What was agony to her was merely discomfort to him.
“Well?” she said, walking back to Fssa. Her voice was thin, her face pale against blazing whorls of akhenet lines.
The snake whistled lyric Bre’n apologies for hurting her.
She brushed them aside as she did the drops of blood on her lips. “Did Rainbow know anything useful for once?” she demanded.
“Rainbow is only fragments,” Fssa reminded her softly.
She groaned. “Useless pile of crystal turds. Doesn’t it know anything at all?”
“Some of the worry stones are Zaarain,” said Fssa in hasty Senyas. “Some aren’t.”
“What are they?”
“Rainbow doesn’t know. Remember, it was knocked to pieces and sold as jewelry across half the galaxy after the Zaarain Cycle ended.”
“So we can assume that the non-Zaarain stones came from a later Cycle,” said Kirtn, picking up Rainbow and replacing it around his neck. The double strand of crystals dimmed as it got farther from the worry stones.
“Yes. Rainbow wants some of them,” added the snake.
Kirtn grunted, remembering Rainbow’s blinding scintillations when it was thrown among Zaarain crystals on Daemen. “I could tell by the glow that it was interested.”
“Which does it want?” said Rheba thoughtfully, looking at the worry stones on the ground.
“The big ones.”
“I should have guessed,” she said with a grimace. “The better to take my head off, I suppose.”
“It’s sorry it hurts you,” the snake whistled miserably.
She sighed, wondering if it was the Zaarain or the Fssireeme that apologized. “Anything else?”
“The non-Zaarain crystals are alive,” whistled the snake.
“Alive? You mean energized?” asked Kirtn, looking at the worry stones with new interest.
“I mean nonmachine life,” said Fssa, switching to unambiguous Senyas.
“Biological life?” said Rheba incredulously, scooping stones and snake off the ground at the same time.
Fssa made a frustrated sound and switched back to Bre’n. Sometimes ambiguities were the essence of truthful communication. “Alive as Rainbow is alive, only more organic. They’re haunted with Fourth People. They’re . . . alive.”
The Bre’n harmonies the snake created said more, telling of growth that was not quite organic nor yet lithic, intelligence that encompassed one more dimension than Fourth People acknowledged, a form of life flickering between the interfaces akhenets called time and death.
Rheba sighed, wondering if she knew more or less about the worry stones than she had before a Fssireeme described the impossible in the voices of Bre’n poetry. “Can they be controlled?” she asked, thinking as much of the Ecstasy Stones as the sullen crystals in her hand.
“Only for a time. As you guessed, their energies build geometrically inside the cage every few minutes. You won’t hold those much longer. They can be neutralized, though.”
“How?”
“Rainbow didn’t know. It only knew that balance must be possible or whatever lives in—or through—the stones would have shattered long ago.”
After a long moment, Rheba jammed the stones deep in her pocket. She looked at the slidewalk, then back at the veil. Though they were still within its field, no portal showed on the veil’s face. It was as though there were no other possible destinations on Serriolia except the Redis clan hall, so no other portal was needed.
Deliberately, she walked toward the blank veil. The air in front of her thickened into a wall. Simultaneously, her eyes itched so badly that she cried out and flung herself backward.
“What’s wrong?” said Kirtn, grabbing her when she would have fallen.
“Itch,” she said succinctly, then shivered when the itch was replaced by coolness and a wisp of something that might have been an apology. “And the veil. Neither one wants me to go away from here. I guess that only leaves the Tyrant and his white-eyed minions.”
And the Ecstasy Stones.
But neither of them said that aloud. It was simply there between them, words shared in the silent depths of their minds.
With an inward shrinking that did not show, Rheba mounted the slidewalk. Kirtn leaped up lightly beside her. Rainbow bounced aga
inst his chest with a flash of crystal faces. She tried not to shudder when she looked at the Zaarain construct. It might have more in common with the Ecstasy Stones than was good for any of them.
“Can we trust it?” she asked tightly, clicking her fingernail against a vivid sapphire stone that rolled in the hollow of Kirtn’s neck.
He took her hand and soothed it with his lips. “Rainbow doesn’t want to hurt us,” he said. “Neither do the Ecstasy Stones.”
“Neither does the zoolipt,” she shot back, “but it nearly got us both killed.”
He sighed because there was no answer to her fears. She could not feel the rising purity of the Stones, ecstasy reflected, born and reborn on a thousand flawless faces . . .
“Mentor!”
Her voice called him out of his waking dream. He smiled sadly, for himself and for the dancer he loved who could not see ecstasy when it was spread out glittering before her.
Kirtn!
Ecstasy winked and sighed and vanished beneath a cataract of dancer fire. He blinked, saw the slidewalk, a nacreous ribbon stretching between emptiness. Ahead, nothing more than a silver-blue glow beckoning.
With an enormous effort he shook off the languid seduction of the Stones. “I’m all right, dancer. They’re very subtle, but I’m on my guard now.”
She said nothing, only looked at his eyes. They were clear and yellow again, no longer glazed with inwardness. Her fingers uncurled from his wrist. Itching assaulted her eyes. Hastily she grabbed his wrist and was rewarded by coolness.
He looked at her, puzzled and amused. “I wasn’t going to run off.”
“I know. Itch just wants us to keep in touch. Literally.”
He whistled to himself, more thoughtful than surprised. “Does that mean you can’t trust me?” he asked in Senyas.
She hesitated, but no messages formed behind her eyes. “I don’t know. Itch isn’t saying anything either way.”
“What about Fssa?”
She felt her hair quickly with her free hand. “Still there. I think as long as he stays in my hair he’ll be immune.”