by Martin Ash
'This is not known to us,' Triune replied. 'Every moment demands effort. Every instant is one of struggle and uncertainty. And we are not strong. Strymnia is diverted just now. She is prevented by her other endeavours from applying all her resources to liberating the beast. That is our greatest defence, but it’s for a limited time. She is essentially far stronger than Triune, and that will continue for as long as Triune is Three and not One.'
Beside Leth stood Orbelon and Shenwolf. Their gaze was likewise on the captive Reach Rider. Issul waited in another chamber with Prince Galry and Jace. She and Leth, with Orbelon's agreement, had felt it unwise and unnecessary to subject the children to the sight of the Reach Rider, for fear that it would terrify them.
Leth, for his part, was outraged and near-speechless, having just been told what the Reach Rider could do were it unleashed upon his land. 'And you have told Issul that you are prepared to release it if Strymnia meets your terms.'
'We seek Union. We seek our Soul.'
Issul had already made plain to him the futility of trying to reason with the three children. She had told Leth, too, that she did not believe that Triune acted with malice. Rather, Triune, even more than Orbelon, was a being whose entire thought processes were simply alien to their own. But appealing to the tri-partite god-children on compassionate grounds was, she believed, a waste of time. Triune had no understanding of such entreaties. She required the return of her Soul, and there was the end of it.
Two Souls! Leth sighed at the impossible burden that had been laid upon him.
'Still, not all is as it was,' said Triune.
'What do you mean?'
'Things are known now that were not known before. And you have been within the Orb and returned. But let us for now consider Strymnia, who hangs behind all of this like a colossal succubus.'
Again and again the Reach Rider was hurling its substanceless substance against the green mesh. It was tireless, barely pausing. Features of a kind formed and were torn apart almost before they were seen. Limbs sprouted and withered; claws grasped and shook the mesh, then melted away; visceral organs evolved, blistered, were blasted apart by some internal force, re-merged into distorted, short-lived demonic faces; a baleful sepia eye glared for an instant at the little party gathered before it, then liquefied. Then the thing was convulsed in another sudden attack upon the mesh, its rage all but palpable. And all of this in total, eerie silence.
Despite himself Leth took an involuntary step back as the mesh bellied dangerously into the chamber.
'Is it Strymnia who is our true enemy?' he asked. 'Strymnia who directs the Karai against Enchantment's Reach; Strymnia who we must defeat? Are we certain of this?'
'We are certain. But you will not destroy her, Leth,' Orbelon cautioned. 'Put such thoughts from your head. I have told you before, as far as you are concerned she is indestructible. Nor do we of Enchantment truly desire the destruction of one of our own, no matter that she pits herself against us. You know the reason for that.'
'Still, she may be overcome.'
'Outwitted, perhaps. Even dissuaded from pursuing her present course.'
'Dissuaded?'
'Were she to understand that we who stand against her are once again as strong as she.'
'But you are not.'
Again, two Souls! Lost, hidden, who knew where? Leth gritted his teeth. To have come so far, through so much, and still be no closer to locating the Soul of the Orb - and now to learn that a second Soul must also be found.
Orbelon shifted. 'No. But perhaps . . .'
He let the thought trail off, but Leth turned on him enquiringly. 'Orbelon?'
'We must talk, Leth.' Orbelon twisted his ragged bulk towards Triune. As one the three children nodded. The air seemed to shift. Leth found his vision blurred. He felt a momentary loss of orientation, then he was with Orbelon in another chamber. Startled, he glanced quickly around him, seeking his bearings. The chamber was near featureless and devoid of furnishings of any kind. A single smooth stone wall encircled the two of them. For an instant Leth was reminded of the vast, towering, distant wall of the Orb that had enclosed the empty blue domain inside the casket, where he had first met with Orbelon and subsequently wandered alone with Galry and Jace. But that wall had moved as he had moved, remaining the same distance from him, no matter how far he travelled. This one, so he judged, was fixed and stable.
'You have been within me, Leth,' Orbelon said. 'And our roles have now become in some part reversed. I have been your teacher and have given you what I knew of your world and mine. Now you have been where I have not. You possess Mystery, Leth. Tell me of my world, then. Tell me of the Orb.'
Leth took a breath. 'I will say in the first instance that it is - it was - a troubled land, bleak and unhappy, a nightmare world in which children may not even hope or dream.' He recoiled from the memory. 'It is populated by desperate, fearful folk who enact rituals shocking and extreme in the belief that their Creator may come and deliver them from their suffering. It is a strange and in many ways a quite terrible place, Orbelon.'
'And I am their Creator.' Orbelon said heavily. He was settling himself cross-legged upon the floor. He motioned for Leth to do the same, and laid his staff across his thighs. 'Do they know it?'
'They believe,' replied Leth. 'Many things. And they know they are created. But of the true nature or identity of their Creator, they are ignorant.'
'It is not so unlike this world, then.'
Leth made no comment.
'Tell me everything, Leth. You must omit nothing. It is vital that I know.'
Leth, seated, bowed his head in recollection. Then he began, at the beginning, the point where he had wandered fearfully with Galry and Jace in the walled blue void. He told of finally, weak and almost starving, seeing the glimmering arch and stepping through to find himself before Summoner and his chanting followers. Leth told how Summoner had presented him with the Sword of the Orb, and then made off; how, at the same moment, Prince Galry and Princess Jace had been abducted. Then he went on to speak of his first encounter with Lakewander in the subterranean chamber of the ools, of her father, Master Protector, and their home, Orbia, whose walls were inhabited by the ghosts of the dead.
'They believed me to be a god, Orbelon. They believed I had come in answer to their prayers, that my coming was pre-ordained. In essence they thought I was you, or your emissary, though they do not know who you are. To their minds I had been among them before, and in their eyes there was no one but I who could save them from the scourge that was destroying their lives. I denied all of this, vehemently. I had come from no 'Godworld'; my arrival among them was sheer happenstance. But they would have nothing of it. I could wield the Sword, which no other could. Hence I was the Saviour they had so long awaited.' Leth shook his head from side to side. 'In the end, though I know in myself that it was not so, they were proven right. I travelled across their world - your world - and I slew the creature that was devouring it and devouring the dreams of children, stealing any future it might have. How can this be, Orbelon? How?'
'We should not look to explain things in ordinary terms,' said Orbelon softly. 'Did I not tell you before, Leth, that for you who have lived your entire life within the Reach the time had come to step over, to enter Mystery? There is much here that even I cannot account for. But continue, Leth. Before analysis, the whole story.'
Leth spoke of his feelings when he had first set eyes upon the bright Orb of the Godworld and the World's Agony in the night sky of the Orb. He described his journey with Lakewander: the Sufferer at the roadside, the Plain of Imprisoned Souls, the End of the World, and his hallucinatory experience on the Shore of Nothing which culminated in his first encounter with the Noeticist, the former 'god' of Enchantment, Urch-Malmain, in the Tower of Glancing Memory.
Orbelon quizzed him here, keen to settle in his own mind all he could regarding Urch-Malmain. Then Leth told of his final nightmare journey into the Death Abyss. He described his descent in the dubious compan
y of Harg, Rasgul and their murderous companions; told of the wolfhearts, the Meadows of Dreaming, the curious death of Cerb Two-Heads. Finally he recounted his experience in the Fortress of the Dark Flame and his battle with the evil Ascaria, the Kancanitrix, who by some indefinable alchemy transformed the thoughts, hopes and dreams of children into a dreadful corruption that devoured Orbelon's World.
'Then she is gone?' enquired Orbelon when Leth had done.
'Aye, she is. Whatever she was, she is that no more.'
'I felt it, I believe. A lightening, as though something dark and unwholesome within me had been removed. And I believed that it was you who had done it.'
'Were you aware of me, Orbelon?'
'In a sense I was. And I strove to make you aware of me.'
Leth nodded to himself. 'I believe I sensed you at times, though to begin with I knew only anger. I could not explain how or why you had put us into your world and abandoned us there. I believed we would perish, or at best be stranded forever, until we died. Yet as the days passed I seemed to become more conscious of your presence, as if you were somewhere beyond, trying to make me aware of you.'
'That is how it was. It was not by my conscious doing that you were cast into my world, but had it not occurred then it is true to say that I could not have gained the knowledge of myself that I now have. Nor would Ascaria have been destroyed. You have brought light to my world, Leth, and to me. Was it then 'accident and chance', or is there some process in place of which even I know nothing? Is there something greater than we, which cast you into the world in order that I might become fully aware of the creation of which I knew so little?'
Leth stared long and hard and the shrouded figure, wondering, by no means for the first time, what lay beneath those concealing rags. 'Is that the purpose of all life, Orbelon? Simply to become aware, to make its Creator aware of what it has unknowingly created?'
'I have no answer,’ Orbelon replied solemnly. ‘But we are linked, Leth, you and I. Very certainly. I believed that might be so when you first came to me. There had been many before you, but when you came it was a time of such extraordinary change. And now you are no longer the baffled student who sits before me. Now you inform me, which is how it should be. It is ironic, but even my enemy, Urch-Malmain, served in his own way to help you. Had he not sent you on where you were reluctant to go, where you believed you had no destiny, Ascaria might yet have destroyed my world.'
'And what then of you, Orbelon?' Leth asked.
'She devoured me from within, you say. Taking the world and leaving nothing in its place. Ultimately, then, she could have been the agent of my destruction, as well as her own. I think that is so; again, I have no sure answer.'
An unsettling thought came to Leth. 'Orbelon, it was the Orbsword that slew Ascaria. It drew her into itself and holds her there now. It is possible, then, that she is not slain but merely imprisoned. Urch-Malmain himself implied that her escape might not be impossible.'
'Where is the Orbsword now?'
'Urch-Malmain took it.'
Orbelon sank into silence. Leth waited uneasily. Presently Orbelon said, 'Ascaria reduced the world to Nothing, you say.'
'A void, an end of all things. I would have said I can think of nothing with which to compare it but . . . such thoughts become absurd. It is incomprehensible, it cannot be grasped or imagined. Even now I feel that what I experienced, or did not experience, has somehow taken a place within me, and I am deeply disquieted by its presence.'
'Then Nothing cannot truly be said to be Nothing,' declared Orbelon. 'It gives us cause for wonder and even fear. It is therefore an agency or energy of some kind. I will reflect upon it, insofar as I can.'
Orbelon began to rise, then stopped. Leth felt himself to be under intense scrutiny. 'Leth, there is a change in you, or about you. I feel that you have brought something with you from my world, I feel it very strongly. Are you aware of anything? Think carefully now.'
'I am not aware of anything,' said Leth curiously, after some consideration.
Orbelon continued to scrutinize him. 'There is something. I am not mistaken. But I will leave it for now. You are weary; you have come a long way. Your wife and children await you. I will reunite you with them now, and you may spend a night together, undisturbed. But think about what I have said. Tomorrow we will speak further, with Triune also. I will say one more thing, though. You are not yet done with Urch-Malmain. He is the key to our future endeavours.'
ii
Night came to Enchantment. Not the night of the formed and realized world, the night that settled upon Enchantment's Reach and the nations of the Mondane, but night of another, incomparable kind. A form of darkness could be said to have stolen across the land, but within it Enchantment came to an ever more eldritch life. The strange and ceaseless shiftings of the air outside the walls of Triune's tower, always visible, ever-changing, ever-becoming, grew brilliant and bedazzling in the strange night. The weird-lights of Enchantment, the true world, the many-named domain, cast out their restless glow like an unfathomable cynosure upon the world, dazzling and mystifying, jealous of the secrets that brewed within them. From far away folk saw and wondered and feared, as they had done since humankind had first learned how to wonder.
In the chamber where Leth and Issul lay the living darkness had been partially dimmed by drapes hung across the windows. Even so, the air still seethed with a subdued turbulence of colour, and the rustle and crackle of its restless mutating was audible at some level throughout the night. It was as though a multitude of industrious insects hauled parched leaves over earth and burrowed constantly into soft, slipping sand.
Leth and Issul, together again at last, were constrained in their love-making. They loved with all the ardour and tenderness that had been held in abeyance during their time apart, and yet they loved with control, their ecstasies intense but barely breathed, their cries muted, gently muffled by each other's hands and lips, for on the other side of the room their two children slept.
Their loving was no less passionate for that. They drew out their pleasures, each upon the other, for the longest time, both of them experts, knowing one another's preferences and desires through long practice. They delighted in each other, astonished by the heights they reached, laughing near-silently in the blissful delirium of their union and the renewed avowal of their love.
When they were spent they lay together, holding each other, still exploring with fingertips, delighting in the touch, the tastes, the smells of their bodies. And then, for the first time since their reunion, they told each other in hushed voices everything that had happened during their enforced separation.
As Issul told her tale Leth felt the distant undercurrents of anger that she had held so much from him. 'You should have confided in me from the beginning, Iss. About the Child. You should have told me when it was born, no matter what you felt at the time. And certainly, when the news came from Ohirbe, there is no question. I should have been informed.'
She felt a sharp inward pang. 'I know it, and I knew it then, and yet at the time, I couldn't. Just as you could not tell me of Orbelon. I understand now why you could not, but at the time it was as though you had constructed a chamber in your heart which I was not permitted to enter.'
Leth nodded to himself, considering, then said, 'Were you mistreated during your time as a prisoner of the Karai?'
'In their terms, no, though I would not choose to undergo the experience again.' She smiled wryly to herself. 'I learned much about washing dishes and mending clothes.'
'You were very brave, Iss.'
'I owe a great deal to others. Alone I stood no chance.' She told him of her journey back to Enchantment's Reach, and her subsequent departure yet again, with Orbelon, bound for Enchantment. She came to the grullag ambush and her capture by Commander Gordallith's men. And she felt her heart begin to stir when she spoke of Shenwolf. She recalled her fury when she believed he had betrayed her, though she made little reference to how confused and deeply, bitt
erly hurt she had felt at that apparent betrayal. She told of her relief when he had rescued her, her ongoing suspicion and the subsequent discovery of his lost past.
'Then he is Urch-Malmain's man? He is of Orbelon's world?' enquired Leth.
'We can scarcely doubt it.'
'Yet you trust him?'
'I go only by the evidence of his conduct. But I am aware, as is he, that within him there lies an unknown which could yet be detrimental to us.'
Leth nodded to himself. 'He is devoted to you, I agree.'
Issul felt her cheeks grow warm. 'And to you, Leth.'
'Maybe so, but it is another kind of loyalty he gives to you. I see it in his eyes. He is in love with you, Iss. Don't you know it?'
She caught her breath. 'Is it so obvious?'
'Written large.'
'Yet he may be my killer.'
'Do you love him?'
She heard the tension in Leth's voice. 'He has proven himself to be a good friend, Leth.'
'There is a bond between you.'
'In the time we have been together we have become close. I feel for him, and fear for him too. And in my loneliest, most desperate moments, when I believed I might never see you or Galry or Jace again . . . ' She shook her head. 'Nothing happened, Leth. Nor could it. Not ever. You know I love you, only you.' She hugged him fiercely, kissing him again and again 'Only you, my love. Forever, only you.'
'It is strange,' said Leth presently. 'Something about him nags at me. I cannot identify the feeling, nor can I place him. But he is familiar, and with what you have told me of him now it makes me wonder the more.'
He lay for some time thinking about it, lazily stroking her hair, until Issul said, 'Now it's your turn, Leth. I want to know everything that befell you in Orbelon's World.'
Leth told her, just as he had told Orbelon. But he lingered when it came to his account of Lakewander. There was much here that he needed to clarify for himself. 'She believed me a god, Iss, as did her people. A god whose coming was prophecied, who would save her people, and whose child she should bear.'