I stopped when it became apparent no one was listening to me. Valsoria came closer and laughed up at me. "It won't work, Scion, there's only one way you can save the child and the others, if they're still alive, and you know what that way is."
"And if I refuse?"
"Then your son will suffocate along with his mother, in torment and terror. But don't imagine it will end there, for you'll still be in my hands—and, you know, Tigrallef, this plague really is a tremendous stroke of luck. It seems to me that just now I could order any number of sacrifices to the fire-gods and the people wouldn't think of protesting."
I glared down at her, repelled, wondering how many murders she was prepared to commit in order to shape my will to hers. And this was the woman who wanted to rule the Great Nameless Last, to have the power of life and death over all the known world! I closed my eyes to shut out the hateful sight of her face, while my rage and fear swelled and the mountain trembled. I expected to see the Harashil. Instead, I saw Verolef.
Although he was groping about in what was utter darkness to him, I could see him as clearly as if daylight had pierced the solid flank of the mountainside. There were tears on his cheeks, but I think they were as much from outraged feelings as from fear. He was already coughing. He stumbled on the edge of Calla's now-tattered Sherkint finery, followed it to her body, groped along her body until he found her face, flung himself down on his knees beside her.
"Mother?"
He shook her shoulder pleadingly, then broke off for a fit of coughing so severe I thought his chest would fly apart.
"Mother?"
Calla didn't move, and I wondered with a sorrowing detachment if she were already dead, and Shree also. I could see Verolef was starting to feel the effects of the poisonous vapours; he paused to brush at something invisible on his face, batted at the air, focused on nothingness in the darkness across the chamber and uttered a short sharp cry of defiance. "Go away! Make it go away! Mother!" He threw himself down beside her on the floor and burrowed against her, trembling. His next fit of coughing shook them both.
Command me.
I opened my eyes. There was still that odious confident smile on Valsoria's lips, but I saw shadows moving in the depths of her eyes. Shadows of fear, phantoms of doubt. "Do it now, Scion, before the child dies. Affirm the two are one. The prophecy—"
"The prophecy," I interrupted, in a voice that was strange and sonorous even to myself, "goes beyond anything your mind could encompass, Divinatrix."
"Indeed?" She drew herself up, still smiling, and hurled a few words at me in the old Naarhil tongue, with an air of doing something decisive and unanswerable. I cocked my head, listening; these words meant nothing to me. They glanced off my ears like a hail of spent arrows.
"Divinatrix, is something supposed to happen?"
Valsoria's smile faltered. Shrilly, she cried out the Naarhil phrases again, varying the emphasis. I shook my head at her. Whatever key she was holding, she was trying it in the wrong lock.
"Perhaps," I said to her, "you should have taken better care of those scrolls of yours. Or maybe you should have read the surviving portions more cautiously. What do you think?"
She stared up into my eyes—I have no idea what she saw there, that leached the colour from her face. The next moment she screeched and seized a knife from the scragger beside her, driving it towards my belly. It shivered in her hands into a small cloud of metallic dust.
Command me.
A man's voice now, rather familiar, but I couldn't quite place it until I saw him standing just behind Valsoria. A slightly built young man with a plain pleasant face, mine as it happened, and a scholarly curve to his back and shoulders, as if he spent too much of his time curled around a book or bent over a writing table; the odd part was, he was at least twelve feet tall, and he shone. He stepped forwards as Valsoria backed away from me, her hands in front of her like a shield—for a moment I saw her body outlined within his, and then she was behind him, though I could still see her, as if he were an image reflected on a sheet of crystal glass. Nobody else seemed to notice him.
"We've gone that far already, have we?" I said out loud.
The Harashil nodded and spread its hands in one of my own most characteristic gestures. Command me. The two are one.
"Almost," I said. "Almost. Wait."
Think of the physically impossible: a paper-thin surface of black ice, smooth, level, featureless, scumming the top of a bubbling, surging, seething cauldron of boiling water. That was myself. And the ice was melting.
From behind the great double doors, a thin wailing rose and fell, rose again and held for a moment; faded away. That was Verolef. And he was suffering.
I suppose, in the end, Verolef was the raindrop that burst the dam. There was more to it than that, however, much more. I felt at that moment, as never before, the crushing, numbing, tragic, soul-blasting inevitability of it all—as the Harashil had once said, deep on the drowned streets of Iklankish, if you fulfilled a prophecy then willy-nilly you had to live with the consequences; and so, I gathered, did the rest of the world. I took a shallow breath and began.
"The two—"
Another wail from the oracle chamber, the pitiful cry of a child who is discovering that monsters are both real and present. The mob echoed him lustily. There was even some laughter.
"—are—"
Valsoria was still doggedly trying to get me killed. Her voice was shrill, her servants were backing away from me, except for the two who were pinning me to the wall. Tha mountain was still: primed, suspended, waiting. Verolef wept again.
"—one."
We were confounded at first by this double vision: a dizzying view down a long black spangled sweep of space, no beginning, no centre, no end, and at the same time a narrow cone of sight through holes in a box of bone, with a familiar but oddly limited feel to it, not unpleasant, decidedly small.
Then we began to swell with new sensation—on the one hand with blood surgings and breath takings and the smooth push-pull of muscles and the many but not numberless beatings of a heart, on the other hand with a surfeit of days, years, centuries, millennia, backwards and forwards, no beginning, no centre, no end. And then all we wanted to do was to sit down quietly somewhere and put our head in our hands and get used to it all; but when we remembered to look, we saw we were not alone.
Such paltry creatures.
Swarming and screaming, slopping back and forth like maggots in muddy water in a shallow dirty bowl we were tilting in our hand. Bleating meaningless noises, bleeding meaningless blood, thinking meaningless thoughts that scattered in the air like ashes whipped by the wind, ephemeral, trivial, nothing. They were nothing.
Except one.
Yes, we thought, yes, there was something here that was important, some duty we had to carry out. We rubbed our hand against our forehead, trying to remember through all this spinning welter of newness. Among these paltry creatures there was one who had to be saved, for a very good reason which we could not quite recall at this confusing moment, except it had to do with the terms and settlements of that long, ages-long, contract between the Harashil and the race of the Naar, though we were neither Naar nor Harashil now, but something more, and something much stranger.
We remembered. A child of the Naar lineage was in danger, dying—he was behind that eggshell of a stone wall. Very easy. Very easy. We found a fist at the end of an arm—ours, presumably, though we half-thought we might be seeing it from this angle for the very first time—and smashed it through the eggshell wall and the doors as insubstantial as mothwings, and plucked out the Naarling child, who felt warm, which pleased us, because we seemed to remember that this was a satisfactory state of body.
Our own body was becoming easier to use now. We flexed our fingers and brushed the tips of them lightly over the Naarling child's face. He stirred in our arms, which was also good. We had protected our own. We could leave now—there was so much to do, an empire to build, a prophecy to fulfill, a destin
y to consummate. But first—
We looked around in distaste. Noisy, smelly not-Naar vermin infested this place; we remembered these vermin had dared to threaten a child of the Naar, had cried out for his blood and exulted in his terror, and thereby had become fully deserving of what we were about to do to them. We held up our hand. Deep within the earth, far beneath the roots of the mountain, many new rivers of liquid fire began to meander towards the surface.
A stream of not-Naar creatures was struggling to escape this bubble in the rock; we could have dammed it, but we let it flow out through the archway unhindered, except by its own panic. Inside the mountain, outside the mountain, it made no difference. The liquid fires would shortly boil up through vents in the rock and rain from the sky; there would be no escape for these creatures, not for any of them. The Naarling child's distress would be paid for in kind.
There was one who was not trying to escape. Valsoria—the name sprang into our mind surrounded by an aura of special distaste. She had hurt the Naarling child. She was cowering across the platform, trying to press herself into the solid stone, her mouth still gabbling words that were almost right but completely and offensively wrong, words that scratched without effect at the smooth glassy carapace of our will.
We stretched out a hand as far as necessary and encircled her waist with our fingers and brought her close to our face. She fell silent for a moment, staring up at us; and then she began to speak again, slowly and clearly. Correctly.
We felt unease. This was not a Will—she was no longer trying to command us. She was trying to save herself. We knew these words well, though we had never heard them spoken. They were our banishment, our death, our annihilation, wrapped up in five short Naarhil quatrains.
She befouled these words by speaking them with her unclean not-Naar mouth, but their power still fell about our shoulders like loops of finespun steel, constraining us, tightening around us; our rising fear of her pushed us to our knees.
She tasted our dread. Her voice grew stronger.
The words spun around us—spun a net, burnished gold, blinding silver, ice-blue steel. Slowly, relentlessly, it settled over us. The second quatrain. The third. The end was approaching, the substance bleeding from us; she began the fourth quatrain—the fifth would finish us. We bellowed with rage and fear.
Triumphantly, at the top of her voice, Valsoria began the fifth quatrain.
And in one corner of the net, a break appeared in the whirling metallic pattern of the colours; we watched it grow. Muddy brown, lichenous green: soft rotten strands that drooped and tore and parted under their own sodden weight—Valsoria had not yet noticed her mistake. The contagion spread from strand to strand, nexus to nexus. The net rotted away. We lifted our head.
Valsoria faltered into silence.
"Almost," we said, and our voice shook the mountain. "Almost, but not quite." Then we squeezed; and when she was empty, we took the loathsome shreds of her and tossed them into the convenient cauldron of boiling rock that separated us from the seething main herd of not-Naar creatures, and watched her fizzle into smoke and steam.
Thus ended the long, patient and somewhat dangerous lineage of the Divinatrixes of Vassashinay. We forgot her at once.
We had an empire to build.
* * *
41
THE PLATFORM WAS empty now except for us and the child; across the cauldron, the nearest tiers of benches were also empty. Screeching masses of the not-Naar were piling up against the far portal, clawing and trampling, fighting each other to get out. Only one head moved against the tide. We focused on that one, out of curiosity and to pass the time until our molten rivers arrived to wash these vermin away. We saw him reach the edge of the seething mass around the portal and push his way into the open, and half-run, half-tumble down the ramp to the foot of the slim stone arch that spanned the boiling cauldron. He was shouting, but our curiosity was not so great yet that we troubled ourself to understand.
He began to cross the bridge, hands and knees clinging to the narrow stone span as the mountain tossed back and forth. We watched with idle interest to see if he would make it across, and once it seemed he wouldn't, lurching sideways until half of him overhung the hungry lava as it extended its hot fingers up to him—but he scrabbled himself back into balance and slid along the bridge on his belly until he collapsed safely on the floor of the platform, almost at our feet.
"Tigrallef, stop it! Stop it! Remember who you are!" He staggered to his feet and grabbed our shoulders and shook us; he shouted into our face.
We were more than a little surprised. How odd this behaviour was! Odd enough so that we thought we'd refrain from pulping him where he stood, for a few moments anyway. He was no danger to us and we wanted to see what he'd do next.
He seemed to grow weary of shouting. He glanced around wildly and stumbled to the hole we'd made in the eggshell wall, the ruin we'd made of the double doors and disappeared into the darkness. A moment later he reappeared dragging something—another of the not-Naar creatures, this one a woman with a bluish face, possibly dead. Then another, a man. The madman from across the bridge shifted frantically from one to the other, slapping their faces and breathing into their mouths, pausing now and then to shout at me some more.
Me?
"Tigrallef! Remember who you are! Try to remember! Tigrallef, help me."
Strange stirrings of familiarity. His name was Chasco, and I—we—knew him from somewhere. The name Tigrallef plucked a string in our memory as well, and though part of us sternly disapproved, the other part insisted on turning the sound over and over, examining its worn edges and its many nicks and scratches until we—I—began to remember. Tigrallef was our name. No. Tigrallef was my name.
The other man's name was Shree. The woman was called Calla.
We crossed the platform in a stride. The three figures sprawled there seemed at the same time to be seen from close up and from a point far above the floor, as if we couldn't quite decide how tall we were. We watched them tumble sideways as the mountain shuddered. Our streams of vengeance were very close now, we could sense the heat of them building up under the stone floor, feel the mountain's agony as it strove to accommodate a dozen raging torrents in a few narrow fumaroles. We felt a surprising twinge of regret that these three would die with the others, but they were not-Naar, and we could see no reason to protect them, even if we did know their names.
"My lord Tigrallef—stop! Remember Sher! Remember Sher!"
Sher? Of course we remembered Sher. Clearly. We had destroyed Sher by water, as we had destroyed Itsant and Baul; whereas Fathan we had destroyed by fire, and Khamanthana, and Myr, and Nkalvi, and Vizzath once before, as we would now destroy this upstart shadow of Vizzath by fire. Why should we remember Sher in particular?
But part of us was trying very hard to remember. Part of us had stumbled on to a hard little kernel of guilt and revulsion, and was encouraging it to grow. The anguished not-Naar screaming echoed off the high shadowed ceiling of the amphitheatre, and also off a great green slab of water that overhung a terrified city; the sea boiled over Iklankish. We remembered.
So many deaths.
Not-Naar deaths.
But so many.
Yes indeed. And more blood today.
Perhaps . . .
A great white-hot gout of magma spewed from the pit, splashed the ceiling, pattered down again as a lethal shower of rain. The bridge was gone. Chasco glanced at the disappearance of this escape route and shrugged. He went back to breathing into Shree's mouth and was rewarded suddenly by a cough and a feeble stirring. Shree tried to sit up but fell back again, gasping, staring at Chasco. Then he reached up and grabbed Chasco's throat. He didn't seem to notice us, nor the rumbling of the ground.
"Bastard," he croaked. "Tig and I saw you sail off without us?"
Chasco easily brushed his hand away. "I ran into trouble—too many people wanted that boat. There was a mob waiting for me on the beach in Tig's cove, so I found a safer mooring, an
d came back to fetch you."
We continued to watch and listen, finding this exchange curiously gripping.
Shree stared at Chasco a little longer, then collapsed again with his eyes closed. His skin was pale, like parchment. "Of course you came back, because here you are. I thought—never mind what I thought. But Tig had more faith. I was ready to kill you." He paused, still with his eyes closed. "Where is Tig?"
Chasco shot a desperate glance over his shoulder at us—me—and said nothing. We said nothing either. Shree groaned and put his arm over his eyes, and after a moment he said, "What about Calla?"
"I was too late for her. I think she's dead."
Dead, dead, dead. The word drummed against the walls. At that point, we lost interest in Shree and Chasco's conversation. We were distressed.
I was distressed.
No!
But she is not-Naar.
No!
She means nothing.
No!
Dead, dead, dead. So many deaths.
"No," I whispered.
Yes. Sher by water, Vizzath by fire. More blood today, and tomorrow we begin the Great Nameless Last.
"No! No! No more!"
Suddenly the first massive surge of molten rock tested the roots of the mountain; in the dire agitation of the ground, a score or more of the mob that still clamoured around the archway lost their footing and tumbled down the ramps, some almost to the lip of the lava pit. One unfortunate woman hit the parapet hard enough to be bounced over it and dropped shrieking towards the liquid fire. Without thinking I shot my hand out, a long long way, and caught her well above the bubbling surface; and lifted her back over the parapet, and gently deposited her, still breathing, midway up the ramp.
We protested: Not-Naar. But our chief sensation was glad surprise—it seemed the power and the will could war with each other, and the will had at least an even chance of winning if it took the power by surprise. Struck by this, and ignoring many internal impulses, we dropped to our knees and laid the Naarling child tenderly on the floor beside his mother.
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 32