by Ann Maxwell
“Kirtn,” she said, reaching out to take his arm, “Look at—” Her voice stopped when her fingers closed around nothing at all. She looked around frantically. “Kirtn? Kirtn!”
Nothing answered her scream.
“Snake!” she cried, combing her fingers frantically through her hair. “Find him with one of your shapes!”
Her fingers came up as empty as her heart. Fssa and Kirtn were gone. She was alone.
XX
For an instant Rheba was paralyzed. Around her was nothing but fire reflected and reinforced by a thousand mirrors. At her feet was the dark face of death. It was Deva all over again, a hell she had revisited too many times in her nightmares. She was a child once more, helpless, her arms and face blistered by the same fires that had consumed her parents before her eyes.
Kirtn had ended that nightmare by running in and sweeping her out of the burning ruins of her childhood. But he was gone now. There was no one to take her out of the smoking ashes of despair. This was a new nightmare, a worse one. A hall of mirrors where only death and a fire dancer were real.
There was nothing to do but dance, alone.
Flames of pure gold swept over her body as she began her dance. Her hair was a seething corona, her hands incandescent with akhenet lines. She took the wild energy of the Redis hall and synchronized it into coherent light. Then she took the light and used it to shatter the illusions reflected endlessly around her.
Mirrored walls and floor shifted, shrank, tilted, trying to turn her weapon against her by changing the angle of the returning energy. Light scattered wildly. Part of her own dance rebounded, burning her. She wished futilely for Kirtn’s sustaining partnership or Fssa’s protective ability to absorb heat, but she had only her fear and her dance.
So she danced while the walls slid closer, the better to turn her own fire against her.
Grimly, she transformed random energy into disciplined fire. She concentrated on a single wall, not caring whether it was real or illusory, certain only that somewhere beyond the mirrors lay a way out. She danced savagely, yet well within her own control. She had not forgotten the zoolipt. She did not want its interference, however well meant. She knew if she stopped dancing the walls would close in and crush her. She doubted that the zoolipt knew it, though.
For that reason she did not try to tap the dissonant core that was the major source of the hall’s power. She had to satisfy the demands of her dance with the energies sleeting freely through the Redis clan building. She was not sure she could control the core if she did tap it. If she could not, she would incinerate the hall and herself with it—unless the zoolipt stopped her dance. And it certainly would stop her if she approached the core as she should, slowly, learning its nature by burning herself when she guessed wrong.
There was only one way she could evade her unwelcome monitor. She could simply grab the core. There would be a single searing instant of holocaust unleashed before the zoolipt could intervene, a dancer burning out of control, burning to ash and gone. Only as a final resort would she crack the core and die, destroying everything within reach of her fire, including Kirtn lost somewhere beyond the mirrors.
Until that moment came she would dance, and hope.
As though at a distance she saw herself a living flame in the center of deadly energies, and the room shrinking around her. In front of her a mirrored surface shattered and smoked blackly. The wall on which the reflective illusion had been based burned with the acrid smell of plastics and the cleaner scent of wood.
Instantly the other mirrors blackened. Whoever controlled the illusions must have realized that the mirrors were aiding her dance. She assumed k’Masei shaped the illusions. It was like a tyrant to use illusions to enslave and kill.
There was a pause, a sense of ingathering like the silence before a storm shifted and attacked from a new quarter. Instinctively she built a defensive cage of energy around herself, for she had no Bre’n to protect her back.
Suddenly a cataract of invisible demand beat on her. Her defensive cage bristled and flamed until she stood like a torch in the center of a starless night. There was no light around her that she had not created, no companionship except her own dance. Part of her mind screamed for her lost Bre’n; but the akhenet part of her coldly ransacked her surroundings for a power source great enough to vaporize illusions.
Her immaterial questing brushed a familiar energy source, a simple electromagnetic generator that powered the Redis food machines. The machines were off, cold, but the generator itself vibrated with life.
She drained it between one breath and the next.
She burned.
A new figure formed in front of the metal-reinforced wall she was trying to destroy. A man, tall and powerful, more familiar than her own hands. Kirtn. She leaped toward him, incoherent with joy. He laughed and hugged her—
—and she screamed, for there was nothing inside his mind, nothing more to him than the textures of flesh and fur, yellow eyes, and his warm lips speaking Yhelle words she could not understand. Not Kirtn. Illusion.
Yet she could not bring herself to burn it down. She shaped her dance so that deadly fire divided around the false Kirtn. Behind the Bre’n illusion the wall smoldered and smoked, slowly catching fire. Streamers of fire from her reinforced the reluctant flames.
Kirtn’s image expanded suddenly, blocking off the wall. Her dance faltered when his image smoked and burned and screamed Yhelle pleas she could not understand. She closed her eyes and ears and let fire rain down. If the Tyrant k’Masei wanted to protect that wall with Kirtn’s likeness, then she wanted to reduce the wall to a smoking memory.
The screams stopped. She opened her eyes and saw a sheet of fire where the wall had been. The illusion of Kirtn was gone. Automatically she fed the flames, streamers of energy pouring out from her as the wall consumed itself.
She did not know how much longer she could dance before the zoolipt stopped her. The stench of her own hands burning was strong in the air. She knew she should feel pain, but did not. The loss of Kirtn consumed everything else.
The wall trembled, then began to collapse. From behind its rapidly cooling metal skeleton came a scream. A running man crossed the room and dove beneath the surface of a bathing pool. The scream, more than the water, saved his life. She had seen too many Senyasi and Bre’ns burn to death beneath Deva’s unstable sun. Reflexively she called back her fire. In the next instant she cursed herself for being conned by yet another of the Tyrant’s endless illusions.
She was alone in a room full of steam. She waited until the cooler air of the hall took away the hot vapors. Behind her was a passageway lined with scorched, broken shards. Around her a luxurious room emerged from dissipating steam. To her right a man bobbed to the surface of the bathing pool and watched her with more curiosity than fear.
“Where did the Stones find your template?” he asked in Yhelle. When she did not answer, he repeated the question in Universal.
“I’m real,” she said in the same language, “as k’Masei will find out to his grief.”
“You speak Universal! You’re not an illusion!”
Rheba looked at him curiously. “Why does speaking Universal make me real?”
“The Stones only speak Yhelle, so their illusions only speak Yhelle, too.”
The man’s voice was reasonable. It was only his words that did not make sense; Ecstasy Stones did not speak at all. She was about to point out that fact when she remembered how she had recognized that Kirtn was an illusion. He had spoken Yhelle. Her thoughts continued to their inevitable conclusion as she walked toward the man in the pool.
“You’re real, too,” she said.
“Of course,” he said in a startled voice, as though it had never occurred to him that someone might mistake him for an illusion. “Are you finished?”
“Finished?”
“Burning things. I’d like to come out. They never get the water warm enough for me.”
She felt laughter twist in her
throat. With an effort she controlled herself, recognizing the difference between humor and hysteria. “You must be real,” she said in a strangled voice. “You’re crazier than any illusion I’ve seen yet.” Then, realizing that he was still waiting, “Come out. I won’t burn you.”
Shivering, the man walked out of the pool. He was her height, thin, and as pale as every Yhelle she had ever seen shorn of illusionist facade.
He wiped off excess water with his hands, shivering violently. “I don’t suppose you could dry me off without scorching me? Or start a small fire?” he asked in an apologetic tone. “It’s cold with that draft where the wall used to be.”
She reached for a rich robe that was draped over a nearby chair. Her hand went through both robe and chair. She made a startled sound and examined the rest of the room closely. Beneath a thin sheen of illusions, the room was a spartan cell. She looked back toward the shivering man and opened her mouth to ask a hundred questions.
He shivered miserably. In the silence she could hear his teeth chattering. He would not be able to answer her questions until he was warm enough to unlock his jaw. She would have to dry him off despite her tiredness. Dancing alone had drained her of everything except fear for her Bre’n. If she helped the half-mad illusionist, would he help her in return?
“Hold still,” she said, concentrating. She had not had to dry off anyone for a long time. On board the Devalon, the ship’s machinery took care of such things.
The air around the man shimmered and shifted. Flames appeared above his skin and hair, close enough to warm but not to burn. The flames startled him into moving incautiously. He yelped as the fire came too close. Instantly the flames vanished. He waited without moving, but the fire did not reappear.
“Dry enough?” asked Rheba, fighting weakness and the zoolipt’s seductive tugs on her eyelids.
“Thanks,” he said, making a small gesture of embarrassment. He smiled shyly. “This is the first time I’ve been warm since they threw me in here.” He looked beyond her. “Where’s your guide?”
“Dead.”
His face brightened. “How did you do it?” Before she could answer, questions poured out of him. “Don’t you feel any pressure? Don’t you want to go back into the hall? Don’t you see pictures of Ecstasy Stones in your mind? How can you just stand there? Aren’t they calling to you? Don’t you just have to go to them?”
“The Ecstasy Stones don’t affect me,” she said, pushing back a yawn with a half-burned hand that healed even as she noticed it. “Why are you—”
He laughed and clapped his hands, interrupting her. “Another immune! No no, let me talk,” he said quickly, all but babbling with joy. “It’s been so long. You can’t know how lonely it’s been with only my own thin illusions and the Stones’ constant whispering. Do they know you’re here? Oh, that’s what you were fighting, wasn’t it? Don’t worry, pretty stranger.” He began skipping in place, giggling. “They can’t control an immune, no no no, they can’t, no no—”
“That’s enough!” snapped Rheba, corking the man’s bubbling hysteria with a snarl and a warning surge of fire.
“Sorry,” he sighed, chagrin and joy warring on his face.
Another gesture, apology and self-deprecation in a graceful turn of his pale hand. “You just don’t know—”
“—and I don’t care,” interrupted Rheba brutally. All she cared about now was her Bre’n and a Fssireeme more fantastic than any Yhelle illusion. “Do you know a way out of here?”
He tipped his head one way and then another as though seeing her for the first time. “Would I be here if I knew a way out?” he asked gently.
“Is there a way out?” she countered swiftly, realizing her mistake in phrasing her question.
“Oh yes. The Stones always give you a choice.”
“Good,” she said grimly.
“Not really. You don’t know what the choice is.”
“But you’re going to tell me.”
The man tipped his head back, studying a ceiling that was no different from the floor. “You can worship the Stones. Then you won’t want to leave anymore and the problem of choice is solved.”
Rheba grimaced and made a gesture of rejection.
“Or,” continued the man, looking at her with eyes that were green-flecked brown, not white at all, “you can be disillusioned.”
“Worship or disillusionment? Some choice.” She looked back at him with eyes that were more gold with every passing moment. If she were not so tired she would be burning. As it was, tiny flames flickered raggedly over her akhenet lines. “Which did you chose?”
“Neither. I’m immune.” He smiled unhappily. “So they took away my clan instead. I don’t worship and I’m not disillusioned—but I might as well be for all the good I can do against them.”
The room began to turn slowly around her. It was not an illusion. The zoolipt was warning her that she would be better off sitting down. She began to fight, only to be attacked by itching behind her eyes. It seemed that Itch and the zoolipt could collaborate at times. The thought did not comfort her much as she collapsed on the floor’s hard surface.
She pushed herself upright, ignoring the grainy feeling in back of her eyes. She had to get out of here and find Kirtn. The first part of the thought brought a redoubled attack from Itch. The second part, finding Kirtn, brought a bit of relief. Was Itch trying to tell her that getting out of here right away was not the same as getting closer to finding Kirtn?
Blessed coolness. Itch agreed. Rheba groaned with relief.
“Are you all right?” asked the man, bending over her, but cautiously. She was still radiating heat from her strenuous solo dance.
“All right,” she sighed. “Tired.”
“Oh, then you’d better rest. You won’t be able to steal the Stones unless you’re strong and alert.”
“Steal the Stones?” she asked, feeling like a wan echo of the illusionist.
“Of course.” Then, anxiously, “Isn’t that why you’re here? To steal the Ecstasy Stones for the Libs?”
“No, I—” A savage attack of itching doubled her over, clawing at her eyes. “Stop!” she cried.
Itch stopped.
The man waited, his expression that of mingled curiosity and fear. “You aren’t here to steal the Ecstasy Stones?” he asked, disappointment clear in his voice.
She sensed Itch poised behind her eyes, waiting to strike. “I didn’t think that was why I came here,” said Rheba cautiously, speaking more to Itch than to illusionist, “but I’m willing to negotiate. I want my Bre’n—and my friends—alive and free.”
Itch made no move to disagree.
The man, who knew nothing of what lay behind her eyes, asked, “Did your friends go to the Stones?”
“I think so. As soon as I let go of Kirtn, he ran away. He must have taken Fssa with him, or else the snake followed. As for i’sNara and f’lTiri . . . they came to steal the Stones.”
“Were they immune?”
“I doubt it.”
The man made a sad gesture. “Then they won’t be back. None of them. What the Stones seduce, they keep. If you want your friends back, you’ll have to break the Stones’ power by stealing some. Individually, they’re not nearly as strong as they are collectively.”
Rheba remembered the single Ecstasy Stone she had inadvertently caged in the hall. She looked at the man in sudden speculation. His eyes had not changed, still brown flecked with green, not white. His own eyes, not Stones’ reflections. Yet—"Who are you? How do you know so much about the Stones?'
“Oh,” he made one of the self-deprecating gestures that she was coming to associate with him, “I’m the master snatcher who brought the Stones together.”
“You? But I thought k’Masei the Tyrant was the one who gathered all the Ecstasy Stones.”
He smiled lopsidedly. “That’s me. But my name is k’Masei the Fool.”
XXI
Rheba’s glowing lines dimmed and sputtered out from sheer sur
prise. She could not believe that the modest, gently crazy illusionist in front of her was the fearsome man known as k’Masei the Tyrant.
“You?” she said weakly, looking at his odd eyes and rumpled hair and trying not to laugh. “Tyrant?”
“Is that really what they call me now?” he asked in a sorrowful voice. “That’s even worse than being called a fool. What else do they say about me?”
“I was told,” she said carefully, “that you were the Liberation clan’s master snatcher.”
He smiled wistfully. “I was.”
“I was also told that you were a traitor to your clan.” Her voice was even, her eyes intent. “I was told that you took the Libs’ best Ecstasy Stones and gave them to the Redis.”
K’Masei sighed. “The Libs still don’t understand, do they?”
“They never will,” she said bluntly. “They’re dead.”
He winced. When his expression smoothed again, he looked older. “I—” He cleared his throat and began again. “There are some things you should know if you’re going to try to steal Ecstasy Stones. You are going to try, aren’t you?”
“I don’t have much choice, do I?” muttered Rheba. Her lips thinned to a line as she thought of Itch’s torments. It was better than thinking about Kirtn, caught and held by forces she did not understand. Anything was better than thinking about that, even Itch. “I’ll do whatever I can to free my Bre’n,” she said. Her voice was calm but her akhenet lines pulsed, telling of dancer agitation.
“What’s a Bre’n?”
She opened her mouth but no easy words of explanation came. Finally she said simply, “A man.”
“Slave?”
“My Bre’n, but not my slave. Just as I’m his dancer.” She looked at the massed, intricate lines of power swirling up from her fingertips to her shoulders. “He’s as much a part of me as my arms. More. If you cut off my arms I’d still live.”
“Then I can’t talk you out of going after the Stones?”