Dancer's Illusion

by Ann Maxwell

  But she had learned something. Though the Ecstasy Stones held her Bre’n, he was not pleased by their embrace.

  She stared at the screen with unblinking eyes, eyes where fire grew with each breath, each heartbeat, energy streaming into her, answering her unconscious demands. Pale-gold flames coursed over her akhenet lines, telling of energy doubled and redoubled and redoubled again, answering silent dancer commands.

  Her hands were gold now, no flesh showing, replete with fire. Yet still she stared at the veil window. If she burned the Redis hall to the last glass tile—

  She jerked her head and cried out as Itch attacked her eyes. “Shut up!” screamed Rheba. “I can’t think with you clawing at my eyes!”

  Itch retreated, but no coolness came. The Ghost was waiting to see where Rheba’s thoughts might lead. The implication was clear. If Rheba’s thoughts went where the Ghost did not want to go, the itching punishment would return.

  Half-wild, Rheba looked at the beautiful hell framed by the veil window. She sensed k’Masei staring at her, wanting to know what she was going to do, but she had no more time to talk to either tyrant or fool. She had to think, and think not as a dancer but as a Senyas engineer.

  She knew her own power. She could transform the Redis building to slag, and the Ecstasy Stones with it; but this was not a Loo dungeon or a Zaarain machine that stood between her and her Bre’n. Think. What would happen to the worshipers when Ecstasy shattered and its shards burned to bitter ash inside their minds? Would the Fourth People die as the Stones died . . . or would something worse happen to the captives of Ecstasy?

  A cool glow of agreement suffused her eyes, telling her what she did not want to know. Something worse would happen to the captives, to Kirtn. It would have been so much easier simply to burn the hall to ash and gone. If she was not allowed to do that, what could she do?

  And what of the Ghost, friend or enemy or both or neither? What could such a being do, a Fifth Person who inhabited some bizarre interface between reality and illusion, part of both and belonging to neither?

  She shook her head, turning her hair into pure flames. She must do something. She must do—what? What could she do?”

  (listen)

  If she could just—

  (listen)

  With an anguished sound, she looked away from the veil window where Kirtn was being cruelly slashed by ecstasy, bleeding until he died. Her hands clenched. Even through fire, she felt sharp edges of crystal cutting between her akhenet lines. She opened her hands. Caged worry stones pooled darkly between lines of fire.

  Why had she taken them out of her pocket?

  (free them)

  The idea came to her like a whisper among raging flames. Before she had time to consider, she began taking back the fragile cage around one of the worry stones. At that instant she realized the whisper had come from behind her eyes. Akhenet lines blazed. Instantly she was wrapped in a defensive cloak of energy that was similar to the glowing cage around the worry stones.

  “What are you. Itch?” she said between her teeth. “Are you one of them after all?”

  No answer came, neither itch nor cool nor that slight sense of waiting she had come to associate with the Ghost’s silent anticipation of the right question.

  “Can’t get to me now, can you?” asked Rheba, triumph burning as brightly as fire in her voice.

  Nothing answered her except k’Masei, his voice strained, fearful. “Where did you get those?” he asked, staring at the worry stones lying darkly within her fire.

  She looked at him with eyes that burned, but he hardly noticed.

  “Are they the same?” he muttered, bending over her hands and peering between pale fire and akhenet lines. “They’re the right sizes. They look the same except for the weird gold lines around them.” Excitement rose in his voice. “Are they?” he demanded of her, touching her and burning himself and not caring. “Are they the ones the Soldiers of Ecstasy took out of here?”

  He was almost shouting at her, more animated than she had ever seen him. “I got them from the ruins of the Liberation clan hall,” she said.

  K’Masei made a long sound of satisfaction. “They’re the same.” He laughed softly. “The same!”

  “What do you know about them?” she demanded, holding a radiant hand beneath his nose. She was almost afraid to hope that she had finally found something she could use to free Kirtn. “Are they a weapon?”

  He looked at her with wide dark eyes. Excitement drained out of him. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “All I know is that the Stones didn’t want them around or they wouldn’t have sent them away.” He sighed. “Seeing them here . . . can’t you understand? It’s the first time something has gone wrong for the Stones.”

  Rheba stared at the worry stones in her hands. For a moment she had hoped she had found the answer. Now she would have to defeat the Stones in another way, one at a time, the way she had done in the burning hall outside.

  But there were so many Ecstasy Stones to cage one by one, each sucking away her power. She might do it if the zoolipt did not interfere. Might. It would stop her if she burned too hard, and she would have to burn very hard to cage even a few of those Stones. The zoolipt did not understand that it was better to dance and chance fiery extinction than to live in icy eternity without her Bre’n. . . .

  When she looked up, K’Masei flinched away from her eyes. She hardly noticed. “In the hall,” she said, her voice too cold for a fire dancer, “there’s a dead illusion holding a crystal. Bring the crystal to me.”

  She did not see him go. She stood watching the veil window through the vague flickering that was her defensive shield against Ghosts. Kirtn had not moved since that one tiny instant when blue raced through the room. No one had moved. Nothing looked alive but the eerie glittering crystals heaped on the mirrored table, bizarre pseudolife building an interface between universes that had never been meant to touch.

  Only Rainbow seemed to move. It had become a double strand of uncanny light suspended from Kirtn’s neck. Rainbow scintillated pure colors, but none so primal as the yellow blaze of Bre’n eyes. She had seen that color before, when his mind was poised on the edge of rez, death refined and purified into the color of rage in his eyes.

  She remembered Satin, the deadly psi master who had wanted Kirtn to warm her nights . . . Satin had said that she could kill Kirtn but not control him. What if the Stones were no different? What if Kirtn tore his mind apart fighting against what he could not control while she stood and watched and wondered what a mad triangle of Ghost and zoolipt and fire dancer could do?

  “Here,” said k’Masei, thrusting his hand toward her. “Take it.”

  Slowly her eyes focused on him. He was more pale than before, sweating and trembling. There was a wildness in his eyes like a trapped animal. Like Kirtn. With shaking hands, she put all but one of the worry stones into her pocket before she held out an empty palm to k’Masei. He gave her the Stone hurriedly, snatching back his hand before he burned himself on her skin.

  “They didn’t want me to give that Stone to you,” said k’Masei, sagging against a chair whose illusions of comfort were all but transparent. Fear and triumph fought to control his face. “But I brought it anyway.”

  “Thank you,” she said absently, staring at the two crystals in her hands. One dark, one light, both caged in dancer fire. She thought of the battle in the hall, when she had poured enormous energy into building a cage around an illusion, only to discover that she had trapped an Ecstasy Stone.

  Just one small Stone. So much energy to restrain it. Just one. Unwillingly she measured the heaped brilliance shown by the veil window against the fingernail-sized crystal in her hand. So small. So much effort. There must be a better way to defeat Ecstasy Stones than one by one by one. Perhaps if she knew more about the Stones. . . .

  She stood for a long moment weighing each crystal in her hand, stone and Stone, dark and white, despair and killing Ecstasy. In the end she chose the dark, for despair
was no stranger to someone who had survived Deva’s death.

  “What are you going to do?” asked k’Masei, fear and hope squeezing his voice until barely a whisper was left.

  “The Stones use energy. I’m a dancer. I use energy too.” She looked up, saw that he did not understand. “I’m going to learn what makes these crystals live. I’m going to try to untangle their patterns. Energy. That’s all that life is. Energy.”

  She saw that he still did not understand. Fssa would have; Fssireemes knew energy as well as Senyasi dancers, did. But Fssa was with Kirtn, suspended in killing Ecstasy. And she was here, alone but for a man who was neither tyrant nor quite fool, merely human and very afraid. For a moment she pitied him, knowing what was about to begin.

  “Run,” she said quietly, speaking through lips where akhenet lines glowed like fine burning wires. “I’ll give you a minute, maybe two,” and she closed her eyes against the sight of Kirtn torn between rez and Ecstasy, for if she looked much longer at her Bre’n she would burn out of control, “but no more; I can’t give you more time than that.” She looked at the failed illusionist with eyes that blazed. “Run!”

  But he still did not understand. He sat, staring at her.

  “They won’t let me,” he said finally.

  She looked at the sullen stone in her hand and thought of the Soldiers of Ecstasy and Redis illusionists who had fallen to a stone smaller than this. “When I release this you’ll die,” she said simply. “I’d work on the Ecstasy Stone first, but I’m afraid the others will use it against me. I’m too close to them to take that chance. Distance matters to them. They couldn’t control Kirtn until he came here.” She turned the full force of her dancer eyes on the slight man who sat watching her. “Run away, k’Masei. There aren’t any illusions left here for you.”

  “Don’t you understand yet?” he said. “I can’t. I’m a prisoner here. Like you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, looking away from the eyes of the man she would probably kill. She would not mean to, but he would die just the same. “I have to know what these crystals are. I don’t know any other way to defeat them. I do know I can’t control the worry stone without burning out every wall in the room. . . .”

  He tried to smile but could not. He understood now. She would burn as she had when his wall melted. Only this time there would be no wall to protect him from her fire.

  She reached for the electromagnetic generator she had used fighting the illusion and his Stone. Energy answered her touch, humming in husky resonance to her need. Apparently she had not damaged the machine when she drained it of power. She hesitated, looking again at the pale illusionist who had the bad luck to be trapped between a dancer and a Bre’n.

  “Get in the pool,” she said pityingly. “When I start to dance—”

  He was moving before she finished. He remembered how he had first seen her, the center of a firestorm that melted steel. He landed in the bathing pool with a splash that sent water curling across the floor, wrapping cool fingers around her bare toes. She hardly noticed, for energy was pouring into her.

  She began to burn.

  XXIII

  The stone lay like a black tear in Rheba’s palm. Slowly, carefully, she thinned the intricate energy barrier that reflected the worry stone’s emanations back on itself. Though she felt nothing to show that the cage was being drawn back into her akhenet lines, k’Masei begin to groan.

  Darkness oozed from the stone, absorbing light so completely it seemed as if there was a hole in her hand leading to absolute emptiness. There was nothing for her to see, no lines of energy for her to unravel and understand. Baffled, she closed her eyes, straining to see the crystal with other senses. All she found was numbing despair welling up, cold to the bottom of the universe.

  The stone ached in her hand, freezing her wrist, sucking light out of her akhenet lines. She took more power from the engine, sending it into overload as it met her demands. She noticed only distantly. Her mind was fastened on the needs of her intricate dance and the heat sink in her palm.

  She probed with immaterial fingers of energy, trying to discover the nature of the worry stone, why it was a hole in the bottom of the universe draining away light and life, a shortcut to entropy’s final triumph.

  Hints of a black network, power flowing, fleeting outlines of entropy. So close, but she could not see. She needed more power, a deeper dance, her Bre’n’s strong presence.

  Fire leaped wildly, upsetting the balance of her dance. She drove all thought of Kirtn from her mind as she had driven all meaning from k’Masei’s cries coming from beyond the flames. She could dance deeply alone. She must, or she would dance alone until the zoolipt let her die.

  Power flowed into her, power drawn from a laboring engine. She sensed the limits of her energy source but could do nothing except hope that she learned what she needed before the engine melted itself into a crude metallic puddle. She had to know what the worry stone’s dark lines were. She had to trace that freezing network drawing warmth downward and the stone expanding blackly, consuming everything . . . hope frozen eternally in crystalline lattices of entropy and despair, burned-out pathways of light and desire, a cold that frozen time itself into motionless.

  The patterns were there, black on black, terrible and clear. She had no words to describe them, but she did not need words. She had her dance.

  Energy flowed between dancer and crystal, energy that began to melt the engine’s heart with too-great demands. But the dance must go on. The white building lights dimmed, then went black. Rheba noticed the change only remotely. She was the hot core of fire, needing no illumination but her own.

  The worry stone glimmered darkly on her incandescent palm. The stone was uncaged, yet no longer overpowering, exuding only melancholy rather than unbridled entropy. She could cage it again with a casual thought, gold veins braiding over blackness; but she did not. It had taught her what she needed to know, the crystal’s indescribable melding of mind and energy and time. There was no need to cage the crystal again, damming and geometrically increasing energies she could neither name nor control.

  She looked at her left hand, where the dead illusion’s Ecstasy Stone waited to be examined in a holocaust of dancer fire. The Stone was . . . changed. The veil of dancer light that had caged it was gone. The Stone’s polished crystal faces beamed benignly, winking and whispering of her beauty. She was reflected in all the Stone’s faces, her smile outshining their crystal brilliance.

  Nowhere could she see the annihilating perfection that was the essence of Ecstasy Stones.

  She put stone and Stone side by side in her hand. They were no longer absolute black and terrible light. They were simply rare crystals whose changing bright and dark faces had a symmetry that was reassuring rather than frightening.

  (balanced)

  Her head jerked as the whisper caressed the back of her eyelids. Her Ghost shield was gone, consumed by the far greater energies that had poured through her.

  (others)

  The Ghost’s sigh was reluctant, but not as reluctant as Rheba’s hands digging the other worry stones out of her pocket. They were utterly black beneath their fragile cages of dancer fire; and with each second the stones would get blacker, colder, deeper, the quintessence of entropy growing in her hands.

  She stared in horrified fascination. She knew that if she released the stones now even she would not be immune to their power. Yet she had no other weapon to use against the massed Ecstasy Stones.

  “Where are the Stones, Itch?” she murmured. But even as she asked, she sensed a subliminal pull, a mindless calling that came through the wall where the veil window displayed the agonized face of her Bre’n. “That close?”

  Coolness in her mind.

  For a moment longer she hesitated, considering whether or not to build another Ghost shield.

  (please)

  A sense of more than one voice, a chorus of pleas asking, promising, reassuring her that she did not need a shield.
<
br />   Blue rippled across the veil window like a soundless cry. Close to the mirrored table two worshipers twisted and fell forward, their boneless attitudes telling of death more clearly than any words could.

  (hurry)

  She did not need the spectral whispers to know that the Ecstasy Stones were forcing the issue. Even as her hair began to lift, seeking other energies to draw on, the faceted universe the Stones were building blurred. When it was clear again, it was somehow larger. And three more people lay dead.

  She reached for the electromagnetic engine, but nothing answered. It was as dead as the worshipers who had lived too long at the focal point of Ecstasy.

  She sensed another source of power, one she had hoped to avoid. The veil. Its energies were incompatible with dancer rhythms but very powerful. She needed that power. Without it her dance would end before it began and Kirtn would be frozen forever, caught between conflicting universes.

  For a moment she gathered her dance, shaping and strengthening it for the violence to come. She could not ease up to the veil, courting its partnership in choreographed moves of advance, touch and retreat. She would have to attack, tearing the veil’s power out of accustomed pathways and sucking it into her own akhenet lines in one terrible instant.

  It was the most dangerous way for a dancer to deal with asynchronous energy, but it was the only way she could evade the zoolipt’s jealous guardianship of her body. Once she was in the throes of violent dance, even the zoolipt would know that stopping the dance would kill her more quickly and surely than any veil energy could.

  She braced herself with feet wide apart, hands together and cupped around black stones. She knew it was pointless to try to find an easy passage to the Stones’ presence. Their illusions had the force of reality; they could fool her endlessly. She would have to call down fire and walk toward them on feet that scorched glass tiles, fire dancer burning alive.