Yet it had no life of its own—the life that moved within it was taken from Oldenworld too.
Girls whose faces mirrored the sun, boys whose bodies were lithe; the best examples of beauty he could find. He couldn’t resist their allure, the chance to discover the secret of their form. Like a magpie, he stacked his nest with those attractive treasures, but although they were living when they arrived, they always ended up dead. Their sparkle went out. Then they would be tossed out by newcomers, those who sought to appease him.
Fools! His brothers could not be appeased, not until the wizards were all dead.
Ethan looked down at the ground behind his feet—he had no choice, because his brothers looked up at the stars. Clumps of white hair swirled across his vision like old smoke. It was sad, Ethan thought, nothing lived for long amid the disturbance caused by the Nodes of Chaos. Always, among the slouching columns and crumbling walls, through the flooded basements and the polluted canals, there was fighting, bloodshed, disease, filth and death. Nothing he worked upon could retain life. He could alter their form, over and over, but beings of flesh turned to creatures of wilder forms then became plant-like or wood-textured, until they finally became rocks or a speckled kind of ooze that did not respond.
He would find what it was that made things beautiful. He would. Then he would change them all, and they would be glad. It was worth a few dying to learn that secret. Surely they understood that. They would, the ones who were made beautiful. They would understand it in the end. And while they didn’t understand, it was best for them to stay in the Pillar, and the higher the better, where he could keep an eye on them.
He did what he could for them, but they always died.
And now there was that bird-creature, the goddess, so pitiful in her chains, so strange and beautiful it made his heart ache to look at her, and yet he had to take her to the very brink of despair, or she would not perform her function and call out her enchantment. She wasn’t a wizard, he was all too painfully aware of that. She was a spirit being, she was Life, and he was forcing her to perform a terrible thing. It made Ethan want to throw up, yet his brothers wouldn’t hear any of his pleas—she was a means to an end. She was the means to the End.
It was his Father’s will, and so it would be done. Nothing could stop what they had set in motion.
Ethan was scared. What would become of him, once her song was sung? All life ended? His Father had assured him that it would lead to glory, but when he tried to think about what could lie on the other side of the ending, he just got a headache. It made no sense. If everything was shattered upon the Destroyer’s anvil, where would he and his brothers live? What would living mean, if there was no universe and nothing to experience? That would be the result if the goddess sang her song—the End, the final apocalypse, with only timeless nothingness thereafter. Suddenly it clutched his gut with its thrill. It revealed its promise to him. He was so tired of being here. It would wipe away all of his tears. The End would be his release.
Oh Father, you understand me too well.
He had had no choice in the matter, anyway. Once he had been shown the opportunity, his Father had demanded that it be done, and so he had worked the mighty spell upon the goddess, changing her spirit to flesh, capturing her essence with the aid of the willing clerics. Now she was trapped in her body and she clung to her manacles, watching the bloody waters rise, the poor creature. He was torturing an innocent. Instead of studying beauty, he was breaking it. Again. And if she sang her song, everything would die, even the little forest things.
“Oh, we should not have done it,” complained Ethan.
“Shut up, you!” answered Amyar.
“It is our Father’s will,” added Seus, loftily. “We live to serve him, our power comes from him.”
“I never wanted power,” mumbled Ethan, but the others ignored him.
How had it come to this? What they were doing was worse than what had ever been committed under the name of Order.
“It’s the wizards fault!” Amyar shouted. “If they had let Order die, we wouldn’t have to do this.”
Amyar was right. That was why he had to search for them. If he could gather them all up and crush them in time, maybe his Father would let him release the goddess. Chaos would have no opposition, and there would be no need to destroy this flawed and miserable universe.
Ametheus knew that when the black-faced wizard brought the crown to him, he would have a better grip on them all, but he was impatient, he wanted them ended now. And so he searched the stars, for the trace of their spells, hoping to follow them to their source, to find the location of the Gyre’s keep. He knew they convened somewhere and yet it remained beyond his grasp.
Some were abroad now, he had felt disturbance as the faint trace of Order had cannoned through him, spreading outward, rushing away to the far limits of space. They would pass by again, soon. Maybe he could catch them on the return-stroke.
And so at last, Ethan reluctantly joined his brothers in their search. It was time to work with magic, or at least, against it. He looked up, through his brothers’ eyes, at the endless stars.
The stars were not eternal, he realised. They, too, would be gone, if the Destroyer had his way.
THE THIRD MOVEMENT
THE TURNING OF THE GYRE
He will chase the gold and find the red
Chase the tail and find the head
Chase the song and find instead
the tangled weaves of magic thread
—Wry Tad Zastor, Prophet
27. A CRACKLING GOOD TIME
“When two people are right, yet neither agree,
then the truth’s of a kind they cannot see.”—Zarost
It was like breathing cold air through every part of her body. Her mind had expanded; she was spread throughout the vast expanse of the universe. Tabitha was everywhere, all at once. Her omnipresence threatened to overwhelm her.
She had been here before. Infinity, Zarost had called it.
Tabitha tried to hold on to her identity, but it was difficult knowing where she ended and anything else began. She was part of everything, and everything was part of her. Shifting currents of energy and matter moved within her, light radiated into darkness, great clouds of pale coloured gas billowed around bright fragments and slowly turning systems collapsed inward to spiralling foci of chaos.
She was far more than she had thought she was.
Somebody tugged at her awareness, but she was too absorbed in her reverie to pay the interruption any heed. Tabitha drifted on a dark star-studded sea, and she could feel everything within her vibrating in a regular rhythmic pulse. A sound flowed in her reverberant veins, carrying strength, carrying vitality. She recognised the exultant chords: the Lifesong. It was immense, it governed so much life.
Suddenly, giant fingers raked over her, as if someone was trying to gather her from the cosmos. She was dragged downward. The harmonious sound of the Lifesong was smothered by a jangling discord. The grip of the giant unseen hand strengthened, and her awareness of the universe and all its immeasurable beauty gave way to the demanding presence that pulled her down. An image formed under the star-scape, as if she was seeing through water and something was rising through it. A figure stood upon a tall, misshapen building, his head bent to his chest, a fringe of white hair hanging down like a beard. He watched her out of a single dark eye set in a pasty white face. His head seemed to be upside down. Was his neck broken? The incongruity of his posture made Tabitha dizzy. He should not be able to see her in that position. It was as if he had a face in the back of his head, and it had been tilted over to reveal that silver-patterned eye. His gnarled, broad-fingered hands clawed the air, and a horrible sensation of raw power wrenched through her.
“Turn away, Tabitha, turn away!” whispered an urgent voice from afar. “Come back to me. Listen. Follow the sound of my words.”
Twardy Zarost, she remembered. He was with her, in infinity.
Below her, the forbidding figure r
oared; his clamorous din threatened to drown out everything else.
“Quick! Follow the patterns!” ordered Zarost. “Keep your sight on the stars.”
But she couldn’t see anything, apart from the entrancing intruder.
She knew who he was—Ametheus, the Sorcerer.
Waves of heat came off him. A crumpling, caving, collapsing feeling engulfed her.
“Tabitha! This way!” Something grasped her from behind.
She felt as if she was being stretched between two opposing forces.
Not a moment too soon, she reached for the Riddler in her thoughts, and as she did so his voice became clearer.
“Spread your mind out, spread out! Don’t allow yourself to become focused on that place. Disperse, reach for the outer limits of infinity. If you are thin he will not find you.”
She tried to release her focus, as Zarost had instructed, but it wasn’t easy because she was scared. Slowly, a cluster of bright stars became visible, superimposed upon the vision of the Sorcerer upon his Pillar, then more stars, and the deepness of space.
“That’s better,” said Zarost. “Now hold on! We shall have to shake him off. This will feel a little strange.”
He guided her away, along a glistening trail of stars. Tabitha was glad Zarost was keeping a firm grip on her awareness, because without him she would have been hopelessly lost. They shifted inward to a particular point, then shot outward again, only to converge in another place. Faster and faster they moved, spanning galaxies the one moment then converging upon a single star in the next, zigzagging through the universe until Tabitha had lost all sense of direction or dimension.
She felt dissolved in the vastness. Tabitha wanted to close her eyes and shut it all out, but she couldn’t, for in this strange dimension she had no eyes to close. She was aware, and that was all.
“Now we are ready to transfer,” whispered Zarost, his thoughts echoing through her. “To the Sanctuary!”
As the thread of her consciousness drew tight, so she became aware of where she was being guided to. Somewhere in a desert—a tiered stronghold, surrounded with arching loops of clear force, layered magical shields.
With a sudden jolt, she was in her body again.
She gasped and staggered, using a wall to steady herself—a deep blue marble wall that had not been there a moment before. Great columns of braided metal threads rose around her, supporting a high detailed ceiling crisscrossed with arcs of gold and strange symbols.
The Riddler let go of her shoulder and spun away, hopping from one foot to the other across the white rough-tiled floor. “Who-ho-ho! That was close, by djinimy djin, closer than a hair! I did not expect him to be able to find us in infinity! The Sorcerer, lurking in the crossing point!” He turned toward her. “Forgive me, Tabitha, that must have seemed too fast, but I couldn’t risk him following us, finding us at last.”
Tabitha was too stunned to answer. She had been everywhere, and now she was—somewhere. The sudden shift from energy to matter took some getting used to. She had been moving so quickly, racing; now she was perfectly still. She felt displaced.
This was the Gyre Sanctuary? Unfamiliar objects covered most of the floor, and metal panels holding moving inscriptions ran along one wall. There was no dust, the air was clear and dry, and light seemed to drift through the room of its own accord, for there were no windows or obvious light sources.
Zarost was looking at her and grinning from ear to ear. “Ah, but your attention is so strong!” he exclaimed. “I had to fight to lead our movement during the Transference. You have developed, my young wizard of Eyri. You don’t realise how compelling your presence has become.”
“I don’t feel very powerful,” Tabitha replied. She felt more confused than ever.
“Don’t worry, most of the Gyre members don’t fully understand infinity. We use the knowledge of it, but we don’t truly understand it. It’s a paradox, and you can never get to the bottom of a paradox. You’ll get used to it, with time. Think of infinity as a big idea you can bounce off.”
Tabitha settled for just trying to adjust to where she was. Did the room really exist? An awesome silence surrounded her.
“W-what is this place?” she whispered.
“This is the lowest level of the Sanctuary, the Reliceum. We’ll not be disturbed here. I wanted you to have a few moments to adjust to being here, before we meet the others. I’m expecting it’ll be quite rowdy, quite rowdy indeed. They’ll be a little surprised, and they hate surprises. Oh how they hate them!”
As Twardy was speaking, something moved on the far side of the room. A tall sculpture of glass, a great swan, spread its translucent wings. It scooped its neck, twisted its head then settled, only to begin its sequence again. Its many parts moved soundlessly. Beside it, a coloured ball spun rhythmically above a golden sphere. A suit of plated armour rested on a stand, and a glistening robe hung on a frame to its right, balanced above their reflections on the dark polished floor.
“The weaker armour’s on the left,” Zarost commented, seeing where she was looking. “It doesn’t look like it, but the robe has Moralese higfibre in the weft. It’s an Order-forged composite that will turn blades, and bows, even a strike from a lightning-rod. But it has become a deadly garment now that there’s wildfire around—it soaks up the flux as fast as the dead wizard who’s wearing it and lights up like a beck-beacon. At least it’s a quick way to go. A bit…dramatic.”
An angular sphere with dials upon its surface hung on a cable, motionless. A rack of slender instruments glinted in a circular recess. A collection of banded rods balanced in a neat triangular stack. There were a great many things Tabitha couldn’t identify, shapes of smooth material, bulbous items with jewel-like skins, oblate screens of etched glass, things that were unidentifiable in the distance.
“Everything you see comes from Oldenworld,” Twardy explained. “No, not the Oldenworld you have experienced, not the Lûk-downs or the savage forest or empty wastes, oh no, this all comes from an earlier time, when Order was at its height and the Three Kingdoms ruled the lowlands. These are the products of genius and industry, the most significant inventions of the Ordered civilisation. Or at least, the ones they could save. These things are kept in the hope that they can be returned to the world when the time is right, when Order can reform. When Chaos is ended.”
Twardy snorted then, as if he did not believe such a time would ever come.
“The plans for most of these things are encoded in the masterlores in the library, but in truth they cannot be replaced, for we have lost many of the specialised processes needed to build them. Such works of high art are priceless, and they mark more clearly than any tome of history the ascendancy of the mages—ascendancy, or arrogance, perhaps.”
Tabitha ran her hand along a smooth railing. A pale blue light ran ahead of her fingers. It vanished when she pulled her hand away. The hall was vast, and crowded with silence.
At the end of the railing was a shallow recess covered by a silk curtain. The fabric moved gently with the subtle pressure of her arrival. A woman stared at her from beyond the curtain—proud and aquiline. Her figure seemed almost lifelike in the eerie three-dimensional image. A statue? Symbols and diagrams seemed to float in front of the figure and behind it as well, as if there was a great volume beyond the curtain. Tabitha reached out to move the curtain, expecting to find the figure behind it, but she found that the statue was swept aside. It wasn’t behind the curtain, it was within it, etched upon the thin sheet of material. Other sheets hung behind the first, different figures, each on their own curtain of diaphanous silk.
“Maytric sheets,” offered Zarost. “They copied some of the greatest men and women of the college into these using a dimensional compression algorithm. They are supposed to hold five, even six dimensions of information within the clever patterning of the weave. The basic mind plan and physical identity of these revered mages is stored here, but their trace essence is missing, and without that they’ll never be refor
med. The research on maytrics was ended with the collapse of the original college in Kingsmeet, when the Sorcerer first moved against the wizards. Most of the lore was lost in the wildfire, but we keep these relics, in case we can devise a solution. For now, these wizards will be limited to two dimensions.”
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 45