Yawgmoth staggered back and caught his breath.
The giant paused. He dragged a bloody hand from the wound. “If I am going to add this sword-toting healer to my five hundred thirty kills, I would like to know his name.”
“I am Yawgmoth. Soon all of you will know that name—will know it and be glad you know it.” He charged the giant, his swords carving separate arcs toward the man. “All but you. You will be dead.” Yawgmoth batted back his foe’s defenses and speared inward. Steel darted tonguelike and tasted the man’s blood again. The sword emerged crimson. “And what underworld king have I the honor of killing?”
Gore draped the man’s teeth as he staggered back, smiling. His underlings sniggered in the shadows.
“King? I am only a gate guard. I am Dorin the Gate Guard.”
As though insulted, Yawgmoth sheathed his swords. “You’re not even that anymore.”
His hand flicked from his belt. A dart leapt through the air. It quivered in Dorin’s forehead. He stood for a moment more, the poison spreading through his brain. That gory grin was his last expression. The man went down like a felled tree.
Yawgmoth calmly walked to the fallen man and stepped onto his back. He turned slowly about. His eyes pinned the others, one by one, to the wall.
“I have more poisoned darts here, enough for five of you. There are also daggers and swords and other devices. Everyone will get his turn. Or, perhaps, you can believe me and conduct me inward.”
An old woman spoke out of the darkness. “Who but a soldier would come looking for the man who stabbed a genius?”
“It no longer matters to you what I am—soldier or healer. It only matters that I turn my attentions on someone else. Do you care if I plan to kill the man? Care instead whether I will first kill you.”
“I’ll take you to him,” said a boy. The voice was shrill and determined—and immediately drowned out by a chorus of objecting adults. They clustered about him, and someone began to drag the protesting child deeper into the caves.
“Away from him!” shouted Yawgmoth. He charged toward the mob. “Anyone near the boy will die.”
Like frightened rats, they scattered back once more. Only the boy was left. His cheeks showed red marks where someone had clamped a hand over his mouth. Fear shone in his wide eyes, but he did not stagger away like the others.
Yawgmoth halted before him and went to one knee. He fixed the child with a piercing stare.
“You know who stabbed the man a year ago in the mana rig?”
The lad nodded.
Yawgmoth extended his hand toward the lad. “Lead me to him.”
The boy led Yawgmoth forward into a low, sloping passage that wound unevenly down into the darkness. The boy was surefooted on those rumpled stones. Yawgmoth was less so. He clung to the child with one hand and held out his powerstone light with the other. The light flickered feebly before them. Behind came the furtive steps of others, following. Here and there, dark archways opened into side chambers. Haunted eyes stared out. Steel glinted. The boy turned down none of these.
Yawgmoth spoke, his voice watery against the stone. “Where are we going? Where is this man?”
The boy answered easily. “He’s in the quarantine cave with the others.”
“Ah. Very good,” Yawgmoth said with a nod. “A quarantine cave.”
“Whenever somebody gets sick, they send him there.”
“To keep it from spreading,” Yawgmoth supplied. “That’s good.”
The boy shook his head. “Still, it’s spreading.”
They reached the base of the winding passage. It opened out on a lofty shelf. Below spread an enormous cavern. It seemed a valley in the world above, its vault dark with night and its base glimmering with tiny fires. All about those fires, faces huddled. Figures slept in cold bundles nearby. There were thousands in that cavern. A few lifted their eyes to see the new arrivals—the tall man and the small boy, their light stabbing uselessly out into the overwhelming darkness.
“This is it?” Yawgmoth asked, stunned.
“Yes,” the boy said. “The quarantine cave.”
“Everyone here has the phthisis—the sickness?”
“Everyone.”
Yawgmoth crouched down beside him, not this time to look him in the eye, but to steady himself, to hide his own eyes from the sight before him.
“He is here—the man who stabbed Glacian? The man from the mana rig?”
The boy’s tone was utterly solemn. “Yes, he is here. His name is Gix.”
In the warm light of morning, Gix and Glacian sat across from each other. Hatred—natural to either man—gashed the air between them. Glacian had immediately recognized the Untouchable who had stabbed and infected him. Gix had immediately recognized the Halcyte he had tried to kill. Given a chance, each man would have repeated that long-ago fight, attempting to end it differently.
Fortunately, Glacian and Gix were too ravaged by phthisis to fight. The hatred they shared was slightly less powerful than the disease they shared. Lesions moved across Glacian’s body in slow swarms. He had not improved in the months since Gix’s arrival. Gix had improved significantly. That was good. He had been little more than a living skeleton when Yawgmoth had found him. The disease united these foes. So too did their hatred of the man who was their healer, captor, and tormentor—their only hope and their likely doom.
Yawgmoth worked with unusual energy this morning. He moved efficiently from his work table to the windowed alcove where he conducted his healing sessions. Every morning after breakfast, the two patients were brought from the infirmary and deposited in the alcove. Throughout the day, Yawgmoth worked on them, teasing away tissue samples, applying salves, insinuating strips of metal beneath the skin, compelling draughts and powders down their throats, recording outcomes and devising new treatments….He worked like an artist in a lofted studio—manic fits of inspiration interspersed with long periods of languid brooding. He paced furiously, improvised implements from cutlery, brewed foul concoctions, and all the while, spoke to his subjects.
“—only substance that has had any real impact on the disease has been powerstone contact, and that impact is negative—” Yawgmoth muttered to himself as he set down a tray of gleaming philters on a small table between his two patients.
They regarded him with narrow-eyed suspicion. Gix, strapped upright in his wheeled chair, stared angrily at him.
“Why these? Why more poison?”
“Because he isn’t trying to cure us,” croaked Glacian. “He’s trying to cure the disease. He cares nothing for our comfort and health, only for our contribution to a cure.”
Yawgmoth blinked mildly at the two men, his thought diverted for a moment.
“But we’re not just test subjects,” Glacian went on. “We’re famous test subjects—the stricken genius and the man who struck him. The whole city watches Yawgmoth. Everyone prays that he succeed. The very council—the body that once expelled him like a rotten hunk of meat—now offers him every aid in his endeavor. They fear they’ve invited civil war again in their midst—some even call for Yawgmoth’s exile—but meanwhile they pray for him and his efforts. He is the sculptor and we the hunks of stone he chisels and cuts.”
A wry smile entered Yawgmoth’s handsome features, and he bowed his head in acknowledgment.
“In fact, the sculptor has a few more cuts to make this morning.”
Both men groaned. Gix hissed an Untouchable vulgarity.
Yawgmoth drew the robe off Gix’s narrow shoulders, exposing a cluster of lesions on the man’s stomach. He produced a scalpel and began deftly nicking the center of each dark spot.
“This morning’s salves must be absorbed directly into the infections.”
“Ah! That stings!” Gix shouted as the first drops struck the oozing wounds. The man struggled against the linen straps that held his arms to the c
hair. “Bastard!”
Yawgmoth placidly continued applying drops. “Yes. That would be the alcohol suspension. It speeds absorption.”
“He adds substances to speed absorption, to decrease viscosity, to stabilize composition, to intensify interactions, but never to dull pain, never to make the unpalatable palatable,” groused Glacian.
Yawgmoth finished with Gix and turned toward Glacian. As he set down one scalpel and picked up another, Yawgmoth’s attention strayed past the windows to the glimmering height of the city. Beyond the dome of the Council Hall, something gleamed brilliantly.
“You’ll get your wish today.” He drew aside Glacian’s robe and began cutting into lesions on his shoulder. “I have an appointment elsewhere today. You’ll both be sleeping through the effects of these salves.”
“Oh, no,” Gix protested. “Not me. Not today. Every time you put me to sleep, I wake up missing another hunk of skin.”
“Shut up,” Glacian advised, hissing as drops soaked into his back. “You can’t refuse. He’ll just inject the stuff and be none too gentle doing it.”
“You shut up!” Gix spat. “You’re as much a prisoner as I am. At least I act like a prisoner, not a lapdog.”
“You act like a savage, an outcast.”
“That’s what I am!”
“—a ceremony today I am required to attend—” Yawgmoth mused absently as he finished with Glacian’s shoulder. His patients were in a full-out verbal brawl now. He seemed to hear none of it. He set aside the philters and drew steaming liquid from a cup into a bladder. Fitting a hollow needle into the end of the bladder, he stuck Gix’s hip. “—and it will take a few hours before the salves have run their course. It would be painful, were you not asleep, and I’ll be back before you awaken.”
The Untouchable’s insults slurred away into nonsense. He went silent and slumped forward in his seat.
Yawgmoth looked with satisfaction at the stooped figure. He turned, steaming cup in one hand and needle bladder in the other.
“Do you need an injection, or will you drink for yourself?”
“Give it to me,” Glacian hissed, extending a hand toward the cup. “Haven’t you cut me enough already?” He grabbed the cup and dashed its steamy contents into his mouth. The taste of the stuff was horrible, and it burned the tongue.
Yawgmoth watched his patient’s throat move. “I’ve got to get ready.” He set the empty cup on a nearby table and withdrew to his private chambers.
By the time he returned, dressed in finery provided to him by Rebbec, Yawgmoth found Glacian slumped over, a line of drool from his lower lip to his lap. Nodding in satisfaction, Yawgmoth stared down at the sleeping man.
“They’re launching the foundation of the Thran Temple today. I wouldn’t want you anywhere near so many powerstones. I’ll tell your wife you were too sick to attend.”
* * *
—
When Yawgmoth was gone, Glacian sat upright and stared after him. “Too sick to attend,” he growled. The steaming sedative soaked into the cushion of his wheeled chair. “Too sick.”
It would be difficult to make his way down those sloping stairs and around the corner to the door, but Glacian was determined. He would reach the street and call for aid. He couldn’t bear to ride in a powerstone-driven sedan chair, but he would reach the heights somehow. He would see his wife’s triumph. He would see the vast plane of stones she had assembled, stones Glacian had created.
“I’ll be the one beside Rebbec today, not that damned Yawgmoth.”
* * *
—
Yawgmoth stepped into the sedan chair outside his door. He’d grown skilled in the operation of the craft—had become a true Halcyte. In the seven other Thran city-states, sedan chairs were extravagances. In Halcyon, the skies hummed day and night with them. They were symbols of the future—the perfect marriage of Glacian’s technical innovations and Rebbec’s fanciful designs. Joined, their talents created devices that literally ascended.
Yawgmoth slipped his hand beneath the control stone. The sedan chair lifted from the tiled portico. It edged out over the rooftop of Yawgmoth’s apartment building and soared over the infirmary. It lay on the seventh of Halcyon’s eight terraces—“a place of illness and disease cannot reside at the highest pinnacle of the city,” Rebbec had once said. The grandest buildings towered on the eighth terrace, above. Yawgmoth’s sedan chair whirled up the cliff wall toward it.
This was the safest way for Yawgmoth to travel. The streets were unfriendly to him. Most citizens distrusted or even feared the ex-exile. The Halcyte guard harassed him. The Council of Elders entertained motions to have him banished anew. As always, Yawgmoth could count only on himself. This was little matter. He was the most reliable person he knew.
He flew over noble houses done in the old style—massive and multicolored, with ornate minarets, balconies, and facades. Beyond loomed the great gray dome of the Council Hall and the grim Hall of Judgment. These edifices and the temples that sided them were from a later period. In place of onion domes and round fancy, the state houses and temples had an angular severity—white stone pointing skyward. This district ran to the sheer edge of the basalt extrusion. Some of the farthest buildings even hung out over the fifteen-hundred-foot drop. For half a century, there had been no room for new building.
Until Rebbec and Glacian. Their Thran Temple would not rest on the ground but float above it. Its foundations would lie not in shakable bedrock but in unshakable geometry. No one had ever thought to build on ideals instead of realities. The vision for the temple had been Rebbec’s. The innovation to make it real—that was Glacian’s.
Today, the floating foundations of that temple would be launched.
Yawgmoth’s sedan chair topped the looming wall of the amphitheater, and he glimpsed beyond it the foundation of the Thran Temple. For lack of room, it had been constructed on its side, a wall in the center of Council Boulevard. It seemed a huge window of stained glass, tens of thousands of large powerstones fitted tightly together. The near face of that towering wall was smooth and seamless. The far side was toothy with jutting crystals. Morning sunlight struck the foundation and broke into myriad rainbows.
A huge crowd had gathered. Their uplifted faces were painted in gleaming light. It seemed the whole city was there. All wore finery worthy of their future temple. The crowd thronged Council Boulevard and spilled out on five cross streets. Sedan chairs parked atop any available flat spot. Guards prevented folk from landing on rooftops. The nearest available spot lay crowded blocks distant.
“No time to land,” Yawgmoth observed. He guided the sedan chair to hover above the tiled roof of an old temple.
Someone ascended the vast gray dome of the Council Hall. A set of broad stone stairs spiraled to the peak of the dome, where a spire gave a view of the whole world. With solemn tread, the figure rose to that high spot and stood, casting a shadow on the foundation wall beyond. It was more than a shadow—morning light streamed past the figure, bearing its image into the powerstones. There, in myriad refraction, the figure took form, no longer garbed in flesh but now in light. It was the most glorious vision Yawgmoth had ever seen.
“Rebbec,” he whispered breathlessly.
She had not merely ascended but transcended. She seemed an angel, a god, gleaming there—a colossus of light projected by the foundation. She smiled.
The city cheered. The sound was like the breath of a titan awakening.
Yawgmoth’s shout was as loud as the rest.
Rebbec spoke. The powerstones sewn into her cloak carried her voice throughout the city.
“Welcome, Halcyon,” she said simply.
Another roar erupted.
Rebbec waited for it to cease. Her calm eyes and patient lips, her keen focus—none of them and all of them at once brought the crowd to a hushed silence.
“I stand here upon the
dome of the Council Hall, the highest point of our city. This is the pinnacle of our past. It is the farthest that we could rise as creatures who walk upon the ground. Today, the pinnacle of our past will become the threshold to our future.
“The Thran Temple. You have all heard these words. Now let me tell you what they mean. Unlike the temples of the past, this building will not block light from us but bring light to us. It will not merely direct our eyes upward but will also elevate us. It will not set our minds on gods above us but will gather our own images and project them outward upon our city, upon the clouds, upon the very moon and stars. The Thran Temple will not be founded on the weighty world but on the bright firmament.
“Since the start of our great empire, we Thran have sought to rise from contingency and chaos into the perfect heavens. Today, we take the first step.” She gestured down to the base of the foundation.
There, crews of artificers released chains from massive anchors sunk in the basalt. Slowly, with a terrific silence, the wall of crystal began to rise into the air.
“The foundation knows its place. It longs to hang where the temple will be. Its very structure is attuned to its correct position. Never will it fall from the sky. Never will it cease to shine upon us a vision of our transcended selves.”
The wall lifted magnificently upward. The light-image of Rebbec shifted and danced away in a brilliant spectacle. The foundation glowed blindingly, like ocean waves in sunlight. As it pulled free of the crowd, their finery swam with a spectrum of color. They were cast in the angelic image of Rebbec. The old gray Council Hall was changed also. Leaves of radiance rioted across stately columns and staid pilasters. Tall windows became gleaming waterfalls. The Council Hall dome, once gray stone beneath the beaming sky, became a vast and shifting cloud. The whole upper city was transfigured.
Yawgmoth had never imagined such beauty. Among lepers and lizard men, he had come to believe that humans were no more than a precarious pile of spurting organs and brittle bones. Now he glimpsed something more—something glorious. He glimpsed the destiny of a nation.
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