“Sun-lord, I am tired.” He smiled. “I have been chasing Hira all over the sky. I think he is going to be another Hiranka, and already he spends much time looking into the past, watching his ancestor glide among the mountains.”
“With dreams of challenging his lord one day, I suppose.” Ghakazian laughed. “I am glad, Mirak. I would like nothing better than a race around the world. Has the sun shone while I have been away?”
“Unremittingly,” Mirak answered gravely. “But if it pleases you, let it withdraw for a time. The grass pleads for rain, and so do I. A little rain will keep my son at home for a while and allow me a few hours of thought in peace.” Mirak spoke lightly, but at his words a shadow passed over his lord’s face. The eyes darkened, the wings missed a beat, and Ghakazian fumbled to hover again just beyond the lip of rock.
“Rain,” Ghakazian muttered. “Rain. Ah, Ixelion!” Then the moment was gone. “So be it.” He smiled. “Let us have an afternoon of rain.” He raised an arm and shouted a friendly command. The sun flared for a second and dimmed, and Mirak saw large clouds hurrying to cover it.
“Thank you, Ghakazian,” he said, and he called over his shoulder, “Hira, Maram! It is going to rain.”
Ghakazian had time to see Mirak’s wife and son come running before he left the cliff, beating his way leisurely downwind. By the time he reached his own domain, the land beneath him had opened under a swift pattering of gray water that was swelling to a steady squall, and before he could rise above the level of the clouds, his feathers and his hair streamed with moisture. Lightning forked suddenly and thunder reverberated. The rain shushed down faster. He broke through the gloom and came out into full sunlight. He amused himself by walking on the clouds until he was dry, his wings trembling like those of a hummingbird; then he turned to his hall and, parting the seal, went inside.
The entrance was a tall, thin arch that began near the middle of the mountain peak and rose to a point of almost painful clarity and sharpness just under the summit. No stone effigy of a winged ancestor frowned over it, as over every other peak on Ghaka, and as Ghakazian dove to it, it seemed to him that the sill of the arch gave the cloud that foamed right up to it an illusory solidarity, made it a false earth. Only the first hall was floored or roofed, and it was here that he received his wingless ones, who sometimes climbed the steep stair cut in the mountain and stood dwarfed within, craning their heads backward to try to glimpse the unadorned roof. Ghakazian would fill the lofty hall with light, so that they would feel less lost, and would stand on his wide gray dais and joke with them, his wings discreetly folded behind him. It was not that they were envious of their winged brothers, or conscious of any inferiority to them. But the hall of the sun-lord awed winged and wingless alike, and the wingless preferred soil under their feet and the sky above, not all around them.
Behind the dais was another, smaller arch, hewn from rough rock, and walking under it, Ghakazian paused, his entrance chamber behind him, an abyss before. Below him a funnel fell sheer to the roots of the mountains, an infinity of dark, silent space; above, it ended in open sky. The crag was hollow. Ghakazian could enter it between the teeth of the summit or through his hall.
Above and below the arch wide rims of stone ran around the circular rock wall. It was here that Ghakazian lived, received Mirak and his other winged mortals, and floated with them on the flavorless airs that blew from the depths in a never-ending draught. If he wanted to stand and think without disturbance, he flew to the high rock rim and perched there. Now he stepped into the nothingness and drifted upward, coming to rest on the ledge, where his sun never failed to drench him in its benison. With a sigh of satisfaction he lifted the sun-disc which sparkled on his breast and, clasping it in both hands, began to recite his responsibilities. I am not a Maker, I am the made. The words were engraved in his mind like flaming suns, and he saw them clearly as he called them to pass before his inner eye. I am not a lawmaker, I am an interpreter. I am not a healer—here he hesitated before going on firmly, a vision of Ixel’s Gate flicking between the eternal words of power—I am a maintainer. I am not a king, I am a guide. Slowly and deliberately he spoke, strength growing in him, and then he let the disc fall and shook out his wings.
As he did so he felt his feathers catch in something at his waist, and with a shock he remembered the book he had picked up so casually from Ixelion’s floor and tucked under his belt. It was still there, and he drew it forth, warm from its contact with his skin, gleaming in the rays of the sun. I read something in it. He frowned to himself. Now why can I not remember what it was? Why did I bring the thing with me anyway? As he fingered it the book jerked in his grasp. The covers fell open, the pages riffled past his startled gaze, and there it was, the passage he had been trying to bring to mind. Magic beat up from it—he could almost see the force of the spell—but he knew that it probed him in vain. He could not discern whether it was a spell of protection or warning and shrugged impatiently. Begone, he spoke in his mind to the shimmering charm, and he dropped his eyes to the tiny silver writing picked out by the sun. Ghakazian stood before his Gate, he read as before, with his armies ranked behind him. “Sholia and the Unmaker rule the universe now!” he cried, and winged and wingless groaned in answer. “There is none left to guard the light but us! We must go to Shol, beautiful, rich Shol, and make war, and take it for ourselves, and the light.”
What madness is this? Ghakazian thought, irritated. It does not read the same as it did on Ixel, I am sure of that, but what it said then I cannot recall. Sholia and the Unmaker? Ixelion, what poisoned nonsense wreathed about your mind as you penned these words? Truly, you fell. I suppose I must take the book to Danar, but it cannot be incorporated into the Book of What Was in the All. It is the rambling of a mind being frozen slowly by black fire. Later I will read more, to see if the knowledge Janthis seeks is somehow wrapped among the madness. He will not rest until he knows how Ixelion fell. Ghakazian tossed the book carelessly onto the ledge and, spreading his wings, flew out into the sunshine.
Tagar was sitting in front of his house, his hands clasped about a wooden cup, as Ghakazian glided down out of the new-washed blue sky and came to rest before him, scattering raindrops. The rain had stopped, and beyond the low stone building the valley meandered back and up toward the mountains, gleaming clean and drenched. Far away, misted in the humid air, a winged one wheeled high above the arms of the valley where they narrowed to a point and vanished into rock and shadow, but here in the shelter of gentle hills and Tagar’s gray stone wall the sun warmed them, and there was no wind. Tagar smiled, and his red-clad arm came out to touch Ghakazian.
“Sun-lord,” he said. “Welcome home.”
Ghakazian smiled a greeting and sat on the wall, sun beating into his face, his wings draped behind him to droop over the grass. “Is all well with you, Tagar, and with my wingless ones?” he enquired politely. The man inclined his head slowly with a natural dignity. The hands that laid the cup aside were large, big-knuckled, and thickly lined. The face was lined also, creased around eyes that had spent uncounted years squinting into bright sunlight and far distances, taking the measure of time and seasons, meditating upon the intrinsic mysteries of night and day, rain and shine, cold and heat. He was a large man, slow with the slowness of the clouds that drifted shadow over the valley, with the pace of quiet contentment of his flocks as they ambled over the fields. Before long his time on Ghaka would be over and a Messenger would come for him, but until then he cared for himself and those who acknowledged him as their elder with a quiet pride. The sky was not his concern. It was the earth that had formed him, and it called him still with its deep, sane voice. Now he answered with calm deliberation.
“All is well. Nothing has changed, and nothing ever will. Why should it, Ghakazian? I walk the hills with my sheep and wait to feel within me the signs that will bring me to the Gate for the last time, but I do not think that my time is coming for a little while yet.” He smiled at the tumble of wind-strewn brown hair
and fluttering feathers. “Have you been far afield in the All?”
“Yes, I have been far,” Ghakazian replied shortly. “I have been to Danar and then to Ixel.”
Tagar drank reflectively and then set his cup on the stone path that ran from the gate in his wall to the open door of his house, just beside him. “Is the lord of Ixel content?” He folded his arms and leaned his red-clad shoulders against the warm stone of his house. “I saw him once when he came to visit you.”
You are a strange mortal, Ghakazian thought, his eyes leaving Tagar’s weathered face and fixing themselves on the dot that still circled lazily far above, black against the deep blue sky. I feel that if I told you what has happened to Ixelion and all the others, you would simply nod and understand perfectly. But though I would wish sometimes to share it with you here, in the freshness and quiet of your valley, it is forbidden. Wise you may be, but innocent also, and innocent you must remain, your simplicity the only thing in your life that does not change but grows deeper and sweeter.
“I do not know whether he is content or not,” Ghakazian answered frankly, for contentment meant many things. Then he suddenly left the wall and stood over Tagar. “Tell me,” he said abruptly. “Has any mortal gone through the Gate to other worlds, not just to Linla or Roita, but out through the deeps of space, at any time since the ancestors were made?”
Tagar looked up at him, surprised. “Surely you ask me something you must know yourself, seeing that you were here when the mountains themselves burst through the soil. Not in my memory, nor in the memories of any of my line before me, has such a thing been possible. The Worldmaker forbade the realms of deep space to all mortals. Why do you ask?”
Ghakazian shook his head. “Idiocy,” he muttered. “The fantasy of a crippled mind.”
A cry made them both look up to see Mirak swooping low over their heads. They called back a greeting, watching him together until he dwindled to a speck and vanished, leaving the airs that eddied between the peaks behind them empty. Ghakazian flexed his wings. Tagar, still sitting on the ground, saw them rustle open between himself and the sun, an unfolding of shadow, a far-flung, sweeping double fan that arced dark and powerful against the white brilliance of light behind them. He shivered suddenly, a breath of cold contracting his muscles, and his gaze dropped to the sun-lord’s brown feet, where the end feathers trailed the ground.
“Well,” Ghakazian finished, “I think I will go to see how Brengar’s crops enjoyed the rain.”
Tagar struggled to his feet and, bending, kissed the sun-disc. When he withdrew his mouth, it tingled with cold. Slowly he rubbed it, and Ghakazian rose in one mighty rush of hair, limbs, and thrashing wings and was gone.
Ghakazian spent the rest of the afternoon going from valley to valley, talking with those who tended grain fields and beasts far below the eyries of their airborne brothers. As he moved among them, chased the children, smiled upon the women, conversed with the tall, straight-spined men, he found himself once more filling with pride for this, his charge, his boundless, beautiful land. The mountains were his, the green, fruitful valleys were upheld by his breath, the people’s well-being and his own immortality fed upon each other.
When the sun began to sink and the light changed to a soft, warm red which slanted over the fields and gave the peaks long shadows, he flew pensively back to his hall, and the echoing rock funnel beyond. Tomorrow, he thought, I will go through the Gate to Linla and glide above the desert and visit those who live in the caves beneath the orange cliffs. I will even go to Roita and lie on my wings in the snow. He came to the lip of the funnel, swayed for a moment on the sharp rock, then plummeted down, calling to his sun as he did. Outside, on Ghaka, the sun slipped away serenely, but inside Ghakazian’s mountain it blazed true and bright, making the shadows that limned the cracks and crannies withdraw. He went to his stone perch and rested there, listening to the wind sough through the hall and up toward him from the dark honeycomb of the mountain’s roots.
He knew that the book was there, for as he had poised above the funnel he had remembered it with sudden clarity. He stood now for a moment looking down, brow furrowed, its presence a palpable thing there on the ledge behind him. Finally he turned and picked it up. Mortals from Ghaka on Shol! He chuckled to himself. Poor Ixelion. But I am Ghakazian the strong, Ghakazian the mighty. This time the book did not quiver in his hands as he thumbed through the pages, still frowning. Paragraphs leaped out at him instead. He saw his name again and again, and other names that he knew. Mirak, several times. Tagar, four times in one short passage. Where are the words of Ixelion and his people? he thought, still skimming. Where the rain, the ocean, the fog-hung forests and the rivers? If these are Ixel’s Annals, then Ixelion has been toppling into black fire for a very long time. It reads like the Annals of Ghaka, and yet it cannot be, for I myself write in that book. Unless … Unless it is …
For the first time he closed the book and looked at the cover, his thin-boned hands relishing the cool smoothness of the ivory-colored binding, silver letters spidering under his eyes. At first he could make nothing of them, but then suddenly they seemed to come together, six innocuous, simple words. The Book of What Will Be, he read. He swayed, and only the reflex swiftness of his wings’ immediate response saved him from falling. “Ahhh,” he breathed. “Ah, no, it cannot be.” The Book slipped from his fingers into the chasm. With a howl he plunged after it, catching it before it could disappear into the underground streams and lightless holes of the mountain’s feet. Then he bore it gently through the small arch and into his hall, the fear of loss still beating erratically in his chest. He stood on the dais and read the title once more. “So this is how Ixelion fell,” he whispered, and his voice traveled the long walls and returned to him. “And was this also Falia’s doom? Was this the treasure?”
He closed his mouth, but his thoughts sped on. There is no word of Fallan in the Book, nor of Ixel. It is all of Ghaka and Shol. He opened it again slowly, gingerly, and the passage that had first intrigued him spoke to him. Ghakazian stood before his Gate … Sholia and the Unmaker rule the universe now … make war … No, it lied, this magical, this priceless relic of the dawning of time. Sholia, like himself, would never fall. War was the last resort of the fallen. Mortals could not travel through the Gates to other worlds. “You lie,” he whispered. But in a creeping fear, in a certitude that came dark and edged with despair into his mind, he knew that the Book of What Will Be could never lie. It was a part of the Beginning, when there had been no lies. Sholia would indeed fall and make a bargain with her master, the Unmaker, and he, Ghakazian, would have to fight. How would it end? Frantically he scrabbled to open the Book near the end, but the leaves were gummed together, and he tore at them in vain. “No wonder you were hidden,” he said to it softly, urgently, through his teeth. “No wonder you were forbidden to the sun-lords. Right from the beginning you held between your covers the story of the gathering tragedy that has come upon the universe, and the Lawmaker knew.” Ghakazian’s head came up. The Lawmaker knew. Of course. He must have known, even before he spoke the Worldmaker into life and commanded him to make. How can the Lawmaker not know everything? And so … And so the Lawmaker is not as we believe him to be.
Ghakazian felt as though something had lifted him and flung him bodily far out into space, as though all his joints were broken, all his golden blood were crystallizing into ice and lumping, painful and cold, in his veins. That is why he will not help us. That is why he does nothing. He knows it all. “Sholia!” he choked, holding the Book high over his head, but it was not for Sholia that he sank to the cold stone and lay with his wings curled around him, weeping. It was for his own disillusionment.
He did not know that he could weep. He had believed that tears were a part of the Unmaker’s work, coming from the planting of bitterness and sorrow in the fallen, and he clutched the Book to his breast and cried until he was spent. I will not weep again, he thought, opening his eyes, still lying on the dais, and looking down
the vast sweep of the empty hall. I will not allow such pain again. If I am to fight to save Ghaka as the Book foretells, then I will read the Book from the beginning to the end and so discover what I must do and how I must do it, and whether all my effort will be in vain. But even if the Book tells me that I shall be defeated, I shall still fight. For Ghaka, for Shol, the jewel of the universe, for Danar and the council. The thought of Danar brought him to his feet. But I cannot keep the Book, he said to himself. I must take it to Janthis when I have read it. I will explain to him that he must close the Gate of Shol without delay. Not that any Gate-closing so far has done any good. Always too late. They should have listened to me when I spoke to them of fighting, for surely it is better to smash the innocence of the mortals in order to save the worlds than to protect them with falsities and put all our hopes in the closing of the Gates. Janthis is a fool.
Strength came to him, a surge of cool resolution, a throb of assent that seemed to flow from the Book and through his hands. He strode back to the arch, intending to read the Book on the seclusion of his ledge, but all at once he paused. For the first time he was aware of the depth of the abyss that yawned open below him, and for a moment, for just a fleeting second, he imagined himself falling, falling, his wings shredded and useless, his skin burning with the speed of his destruction. Then it was gone, unremembered. He floated upward, reached the ledge, and in the steady aura of borrowed sunlight turned to the Book’s first page.
He did not know whether he read for one day or a thousand. He stood on the ledge, the Book held in both hands, lost in the time that would be. The words seemed to change into visions as his eyes passed over them, so that one scene followed another, in his mind and yet too real to be only in his mind, a succession of colors, odors, emotions that enveloped him completely for as long as it took him to read on. He saw himself perched in the rock funnel, reading. He saw himself take the Book to the council on Danar and while he spoke to his kin he smelled Danar’s hot sun and saw it catch the gems on Sholia’s bracelet, a thick gold band studded with bright red stones that he had not seen her wear before. He felt the frustration and anger as Janthis ordered him to give the Book into his keeping. He argued for war, and war was once again denied him. He saw himself standing inside his Gate, looking out over the star-sick sky, but between himself and the stars the sun-lords gathered, accusing, pitying. He shouted words of defiance at them, knowing something that they did not know, something that filled him with a secret triumph, but though the Ghakazian that read tried eagerly to probe the mind of Ghakazian the vision at the Gate, he could not discover what the secret was. His kin would come to close his Gate. Though the Book did not say so in words, he knew it. But he was not troubled at all, for the Book showed him that long before they came, he would stand in the same place, facing back into Ghaka, addressing an army. He could not see it—and while Ghakazian the vision spoke to it, Ghakazian on the ledge asked breathlessly, Why? Why?—but he knew it was there, and though the mile upon mile of valleys lay patchworked under his gaze, the grass green and long, the houses low and white and ringed by stone walls, the jumbled whispers of a thousand thousand of his subjects pressed against his own thoughts.
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