He tore his hands from the shrub and put them over his mouth, rocking to and fro, moaning to himself in shock and horror, and at that moment the Unmaker turned and spoke to Shol. A knife twisted in Ghakazian’s heart, but before he could fully appreciate what he knew would happen next, the city erupted. Screams rent the air, voices thin with panic filled the streets with pleas for mercy, and the sighs of death were drowned in the tumult. Ghakazian cast himself full length on the ground, but he could not weep. I have been duped, he said to himself, but it is too late to redeem myself. Very well. I am lost, and nothing I do matters anymore. I will wait, and perhaps I may still find vindication and a measure of peace here on Shol. I must not care anymore. Bitterness and self-loathing darkened his mind. He dragged himself from the ground and began to shamble across the plain.
Sholia lay faint and exhausted, her cheek pressed to the tiling, which filled her nostrils with the stench of burnt stone. Shudders had gripped her body as he bent over her, but now he had left her to go to the lip of the steps, and the sound of his great voice bellowing out over the plain was somehow more terrible than the nakedness she had felt under the glare of his eyes. Shol woke to chaos, but she hardly heard it. What shall I do? she moaned under her breath. Oh, what shall I do? Painfully she dragged herself up again onto hands and knees, the black-streaked, icy sun-discs swinging from her neck, and began to crawl toward him. Fear was like chains around her ankles, holding her back, and mists of terror caused the sweat to run, golden and wet, down her spine, but she struggled to cover the short distance between herself and his black-clouded legs as he looked out over Shol and laughed. He spoke to her, but his words made no sense, thickening the curtain of dread in her heart. She did not know what she would do when she reached him, but she must not lie on the smoking stone in cowardly surrender.
Then, when if she had managed to raise a hand, she could have touched him, something spoke to her. A small, level voice came clear and sweet into her mind, bringing with it a breath of sunshine and warm laughter, and she came to a halt in amazement. You have two suns, it said. You have two suns. She felt a little strength return to her. Of course, she thought as she fought to stand upright, the pain of his fire all around her now. But, oh, my beautiful suns. He heard her rise and swung to face her, and she placed one hand on her sun-discs and steadied herself against the balustrade of the stair with the other. “I will give you one opportunity to leave Shol of your own volition,” she said to him levelly. “If you refuse, I will throw you out.”
For one moment the wheels of orange and black in his sockets became the eyes that she remembered, two hard orbs that reflected his momentary astonishment. “Can the created command the creator?” he sneered. “You are pitiful, Sholia. Bow before me!”
“I have two suns,” she whispered faintly, clutching the sun-discs as though she would crush them, and it seemed to her that with the frantic tightening of her fingers a tiny glow of new heat was born within them. “Two suns, Unmaker,” she said again, and all at once doubt clouded the ravaged face. For a long time she met his gaze, and he poured into her all the dread and fear he could muster, but one of the sun-disc’s golden fire was growing under her hand, and she stood her ground. Below them on the plain the people of Shol toppled through the gate beside the Towers and ran aimlessly, some falling, some staggering in the direction of the cave-hollowed mountain, but sun-lord and Unmaker faced one another oblivious.
Finally he stirred and smiled at her slowly. “I made the suns also,” he said, but she took no notice of the hint of supreme power behind the words, for the voice had left a seed of courage in her, and she knew that come what may, he would fill her mind with unspoken lies and doubt-filled dreams no longer.
“Will you go?” she asked quietly, though her heart pounded as though it would burst, and he shook his head.
“Shol is mine, and here I stay.”
She closed her eyes and, feeling outward for the sun she had so lately fled to for comfort and renewal, spoke to it softly. Oh, my sun, listen to me. I ask for all your power, all your light, though it may mean the end of both for you. I hold out my hands to you now. Place yourself in them and obey me, I beg, for the saving of Shol and the continued preservation of Danar. If it is to be so, will you accept your death from me? She lifted her hands, palms upward, and again the Unmaker laughed, but she ignored his scorn, for a gentle, willing presence feathered out into her mind, and she felt her fingers spark and tremble. Then she heard the voice of her sun for the first and last time, thick and hot. I know it all, it breathed. I give.
“How much you have broken!” she said aloud to the Unmaker. “How many long partings you have caused, in pain and sorrow!” Gaining her full height, she spoke one quiet word. Light burst from her, kindling in her hair, shooting white from her fingers, shining with a dazzling suddenness on her face.
The Unmaker stepped back, still smiling, as though he would humor her for a moment, but the smile left his face when she spoke again, for a sheet of flames leaped up around her, stretching from balustrade to pillar, crackling hot and new between them. “So you wish to play with your pretty toy!” he shouted. “But the game does not beguile me, Sholia. You are like a mortal who tries to hold back the wind with his naked palms.”
She saw him draw in a deep breath, and when he exhaled, a gush of blackness vomited from his mouth and turned back on him, and through the wavering shimmer of her own fire she saw it burst into spears of dark flame. He had not walled himself off as she had done. His very body seemed to erupt. He grew taller, a living tongue of writhing heat that was more bitterly cold than space itself. Only his face remained visibly the same, a livid, haggard oval staring at her from its heart. He moved his arms, sending waves of ice toward her, and her own fire turned from yellow to red and began to sink. The fire that would have seared all life from a mortal man was powerless to beat down the source of all fire, and Sholia cast about desperately in her mind to bring forth every word of power once taught to her but never used. The Unmaker shivered toward her, and she felt her skin go numb as he approached, but she held firm, and her tongue found another command. Hold for me, my sun, she begged. Give me not only your fire but your being also.
High above Shol the sun began to swell. It grew and began to throb, filling the sky with a pulsing whiteness, and though the wall of flame sank into nothing and vanished, the palace began to heat. The stone beneath her feet grew warm, and behind her she heard the cracking of pillars, the startled settling of walls and ceilings. He knew what she was about to do. “You will destroy yourself!” he screamed, but she, feeling her blood flow faster and hotter and her mind begin to hum, answered calmly, “So be it.” She would have spoken further, but the humming grew, taking into itself the power to form speech. She could no longer hear, and the blood driving through her body was like molten metal, flooding into every organ, changing, transmuting. He saw her gasping, and the breath that left her mouth flickered blue, but she did not halt the sun that poured its sentience into her as she had asked.
Her skin became transparent, and for just a moment he could see her veins and bones, the shuddering, laboring heart, the blue-filled lungs, the shriveling tongue and seething brain, all gushing a blinding white light that caused the fires that blazed behind his own eyes to cringe and falter. Then she seemed to explode with a sound like the collision of two suns. Rays of light burst from her, and he shrieked and, hiding his face, ran down the stair. The grass on the plain caught fire, little rivulets of red flame running swiftly over the earth like ribbons. At the foot of the sheer cliff into which the palace had been built, the trees flamed out suddenly like guttering red candles. The uppermost tiers of the city and the spires of the Towers of Peace blackened, crumbled, and began to pitch forward slowly to come crashing down. The sun, bereft of its essence, began to teeter in the sky. Back and forth it wobbled drunkenly, caught up in the throes of its death, and Shol was dragged with it. The earth shook. The mountain cracked and smoked. But the column of wild, whirl
ing energy that was now both the sun and the sun-lord descended the steps, passing steadily through the sparks and falling branches.
At their foot the Unmaker had turned and marshaled all his strength. His own might was like a solid black, jagged iceberg around which his servile dark fire danced. Though he towered high over the whiteness of the thing Sholia had become, she felt nothing. She was consumed, she was one with her sun. She was the fire that burned to light the universe, feeding with magnificent aloofness upon itself yet never diminishing. Apart, sun and sun-lord were as twins. Together, fused into one entity, they were an omnipotent power, filling up the hollows within each other to become perfect.
Behind them the stair broke in two with a sound like a clap of sudden thunder, and the pillars above gave way, but Unmaker and white fire faced each other in silence. The Unmaker reared up, and with a cry he fell upon Sholia. The two fires clashed, and Shol and the empty, tormented sun in the silver sky screamed in agony. The city rocked, toppled, and began to slide toward an ocean that steamed and heaved. A hundred ravines gaped open in the plain, and the exquisite airy bones of the palace melted and fused together. The Unmaker felt as though he also were being shaken apart. Three times he strove to smother the thing that was Sholia and her sun, and three times his black fire shivered and splintered into a thousand shards while pain such as he had never known roared through him and left him shaken and weak. “I made you!” he howled, demented. “I made you!” And though he wanted to smash and maim, tear down, slash open, he knew in an overpowering spasm of hate that Sholia had defeated him.
He turned and strode in the direction of the Gate, but the fire came after him, ripping at his heels, searing his back. Once he looked back and fancied that in the midst of the blinding torrent of energy he saw the outlines of a face he had hoped he would never see again, a face from beyond the universe. Real terror sunk its teeth into his throat, and shrieking, he broke into a run.
Although the Hall of Waiting was on fire, it still stood, for strong magic protected the Gate on every world from all disasters save the word of a sun-lord. The gems and bright scenes that had adorned walls and ceiling had melted and run down to sizzle on the red-hot stone of the floor, and the room was full of fumes and a stinging, sulphurous smoke. Here, before the Gate which framed him with stars and cool darkness, the Unmaker turned for the last time. “I will not give up!” he croaked. “This is not the end!” And Sholia and the sun, drawing to themselves the last of the sun’s vitality, saw him as small and far away, and infinitely insignificant.
Will I die also? Sholia thought, but no emotion was attached to the question. Death did not matter, not at all. The Unmaker must be thrust far from Shol, but even that act was seen by her against the backdrop of the unrolling of the whole universe’s history, from the moment when the Lawmaker had called the Worldmaker into being and the Worldmaker had entered time. Now she was ready.
For a second they regarded each other, and she spoke to him with the strange, turgid voice of the sun. Go back to your own accursed place, Unmaker, she said. Depart from Shol. She saw the Unmaker lifted from his feet and flung bodily through the Gate. She heard him scream as he fell, and the lintel of the Gate buckled and heaved. But behind the seeing and the hearing was a pain that rushed upon her with the speed of light itself, and her own scream mingled with his as the sun exploded and its light was extinguished forever. Shon and Sumel, sucked into the last conflagration, burned fiercely and then disintegrated.
Sholia found herself on her hands and knees before the Gate, her necklet grasped tightly in her fingers, her hair straggling singed and limp around a face swollen with tears; aching, bruised, and buffeted, but her own face, her own heavy, paining body. The sudden weight of it dragged her down, and she wanted to collapse and lie with eyes closed, to go immediately into the near past and live again and again the few moments when she had been above all, a thing of unparalleled beauty and unconquerable power, but she was too weak to take even that journey. Ponderous with blood and bone, empty of all save her own small thought, she crawled closer to the Gate, summoning her will to send one last call winging out on the frail remnants of her immortality. Come to me quickly, she pleaded to her one remaining sun. My life wanes, yet I ask not for myself but for the closing of the Gate. Still trembling from the force of its companion’s dying, it answered her, and its shivering light played shyly around her, beaming through the curling smoke that choked the Hall of Waiting. Sholia could not rise, nor could she find the strength to make the full spell. “I, sun-lord of Shol, order you to close,” she whispered at the Gate through charred lips. “In the name of the Lawmaker I beg!”
For a long time nothing happened, and Sholia began to sob, knowing that she was incapable of taking the spell from its solemn beginning. But with a delicate, faint tinkle one and then another tiny silver bell appeared suspended within the Gate, swaying to and fro on an invisible arm, the little clappers tonguing back and forth and filling the ruined Hall of Waiting with sweet, discordant music. The two became twenty, and the twenty multiplied rapidly until uncounted numbers of little bells rang out as though the stars had condensed themselves and their song to fill the Gate. For an age Sholia wept in relief, listening to the voice of Shol as it had been, until one by one the bells fell silent and still, and when the last thin note had ceased to vibrate, they melted cleanly and swiftly to form one glittering, smooth silver wall. The Gate was shut.
Sholia crept slowly to the wall, but when she put out a hand to pull herself upright, it scorched her palm. On hands and knees she struggled to the doors and, finding them cooler, hauled herself to her feet and stood looking out upon Shol. In every direction fire met her gaze. The Towers of Peace had vanished, and she knew that the city was no longer perched on the slope of the cliff, for the convulsed plain was shorter, its new, raw edge visible through the smoke spewing out of the clefts in the mountain. To her left the palace stair lay buried under a rubble of rock, and the entrance to the palace itself was blocked by stone that had come crashing from the heights above. Rivers of lava oozed onto the plain, and apart from the sounds of fire and cracking rock, Shol was silent. Sholia did not allow herself to think of Shon and Sumel, their orchards and the sun-bronzed people. She turned from the desolation around her, away from her palace, away from the Gate, and began to stagger across the plain toward the place where the mountain had sloped down to become forested foothills threaded with rivers. Now the rivers were steam and the foothills a smoldering waste of ash, but beyond them were more valleys, secret places, far from the scene of her agony.
She had taken no more than ten slow steps before a rumble behind her made her turn in time to see a cascade of boulders tear loose from the rock above the door to the Hall of Waiting. When the dust of their passage had cleared, the doorway was no longer there, and the doors themselves had been wrenched from their hinges and buried deep. She looked ahead to the parched devastation on the horizon and back to the place where the Gate now lay hidden in stillness and darkness, and then she flung her necklet to the ground and set out to cross the plain. I am sun-lord no longer, she thought, but it does not matter. I have served my purpose, and Shol does not need me anymore.
TWO
18
Danarion’s small wooden house lay on the outskirts of the city. Three haeli trees clustered together at the foot of his garden, casting a blue and dim golden shade over his lawn and shedding rustling rivers of crisp leaves each autumn, and beyond them was his wall, a gate, and the road beyond that. He could have lived in the palace with Janthis, for Danar was his charge by right and its sun had spawned him, but he preferred to be where he could hear the voices of the city by day and see the lights of the surrounding houses flicker through the dark trees by night.
Each morning he would walk across his dew-heavy grass, go out his gate, and follow the road that took him into the city, and he spent his days wandering, talking to whomever he overtook, entering a house whenever there was an invitation, feeling almost unconscio
usly for any undercurrents of dark change beneath the slow tidal washing of the usual mortal flow and ebb. He found none. In summer the corions would sail over his wall and lie in the shade of his trees, talking lazily together. In the short winter he gathered up the iridescent feathers dropped by the migrating birds, as his neighbors did, and piled them into vases to mingle with his own sunlight and glow through the still nights. He gardened a little, cooked a little for his mortal neighbors, and even learned to spin and weave. He helped to fell trees in the forest that pressed close to the city, and he gave a hand to the people who crafted houses. The world of mortal life fascinated him; it always had, but now he sought its heart out of his own loneliness.
Sometimes he almost succeeded in believing that he could forget the powers dormant within him. Sometimes, when he became involved in a task or sat beside a mortal’s hearth with a family gathered around him, he fancied that his blood flowed red instead of golden, that his place was in just such a house with his own wife and children. But in the nights, when his mortals rested, dreaming their dreams, he stood at his windows and watched the calm, motionless shadows lie over his lawn, knowing that he did nothing more than play a game. Time would not receive him as its servant. Try as he might, it continued to bow before him, step reverently around him, set him apart from the people whose homes hugged close to his own.
He tried not to see the children grow into adults and the adults mature into a strong and vital old age while his reflection in the ruffled pools that lay in the roads after a rain showed him the same face they had given back to him one thousand, six thousand Danar-years ago. He tried to greet the sun as the mortals did, with a cheerful moment of gratitude soon buried under a preoccupation with the business of the day, but dawn after dawn as his brother lipped the horizon his heart leaped within him and he wanted to leave his body and go soaring toward it, to plunge deep into its welcoming embrace, and the frail mirage he had built around him during the previous day vanished and had to be painstakingly erected once more.
Stargate Page 26