"They don't know the discipline."
"They don't know magic, and they have all the guile and unpredictability of the weak and fearful."
"They have emotions even they are not aware of."
"They can become angry in a flash. Some are ill-trained and ill-educated, and because of that they are underprivileged, and that makes them vicious."
"They can turn on you without warning. I imagine even a few Breeds won't miss a chance to take revenge on you."
"And some Breeds know the disciplines. They can assault you with magic."
"Humans and Breeds may join forces to hunt you down. When you go to Earth, that's the way it could be - hard and bitter times."
"Especially when humans find out their real history. No mercy. No style, no dignity. Just revenge."
"Are you ready for that?"
"No," Shiafa said, facing the shadows one by one. They closed in on her.
"Which one of us will you fight first?"
"The real one," Shiafa said.
"How will you fight the real one?"
She shook her head, agitated.
"Think," the shadows intoned together.
"What purpose is this?" she demanded. "I have told you I do not know how to defend myself."
"I think you do," Michael said.
She frowned and bore down hard with a single probe - aimed at a shadow. The effort seemed to exhaust her. She shook her head and made a weak probe at another shadow She had wasted her energy by making the first probe too strong. She should have feather-touched the entire circle in one sweep, as if politely in-speaking for an item of information, something Sidhe did all the time by instinct. Instead, she had panicked.
Michael considered probing her at this weak moment, breaking through whatever personal barriers she might have set up and taking the information he needed about the Sklassa. He would have been justified; a great many lives were at stake, and as Shiafa had stated repeatedly, they had little time. But he did not. The shadows continued to move in, a step at a time, menacing her.
There was something deeper, stronger, far below the surface of her exhaustion and youthful inadequacy. He could sense it without probing. She was Tarax's daughter. And if he could get her to reach that far down, he might be the one to learn a lesson.
She straightened. "You are not going to hurt me," she said. "You are a teacher, not an enemy."
There! He had it. A strong preconception. One of the shadows turned black as coal and swung a long, night-colored swath at her from shoulder-level. The swath wrapped around her head. She struggled to tear it away. It was soaking up her breath. Michael could feel her discomfort. It was not wrong for a teacher to inflict discomfort on a student; it was wrong, however, not to share the discomfort. The Crane Women felt all my pain when they trained me, and all my confusion and fear, he realized. They did what I am doing now when they left me under the path of the Amorphal Sidhe.
Shiafa was genuinely afraid. She could not breathe and she was close to fainting. "Come on," Michael said under his breath. "Dig deep."
She cried out, her voice muffled. Michael felt faint himself and had the urge to run to her and tear away the veil. Then something snapped within her. There was nothing animal within the Sidhe to be unleashed, since they had never been animals, but there were deeper and more primitive layers of Sidhe-ness. Shiafa reached down into one of those layers to perform instinctive magic that - he now knew without doubt - had once been the common heritage of all peoples.
She left a shadow-self wrapped in the black veil and stood outside the circle of Michael's shadows. Lightly, swiftly, she probed the remaining figures and located him. She then reversed the black shadow's net and shot it toward him, tinged red with her own anger.
Michael dodged the veil - but just barely - and dissolved his shadows. They stood facing each other across the snow. "Your feet are cold," he said. "Bring up your hyloka."
She fell to her knees. Her cheeks and neck were flushed. "Why?" she asked, her voice harsh.
"Did you feel your strength?" he asked, reaching out to help her stand again.
She did not look at him for a long moment. He had given her a scare. "I felt something."
"That's where we have to begin. You have it in you. It's closer to the surface than it was in me. You have to find it and make it yours. It's like an epon. You must impress it."
He led her back beneath the overhang and watched her closely as she sat and controlled her energy levels. Her normal skin color returned.
There was hardly any time to bring out her talents and train her, even less time than the Crane Women had taken with Michael. He had to play with an even more delicate balance, between the trust, or at least respect, necessary between teacher and student and the harsh techniques urgency required.
Within hours, they stood on the steps of the largest stepping stone Michael had ever seen. It rose from the floor of a broad rocky valley, at the head of which glowered an immense wall of ice; he could not tell if it was a glacier or something else unique to the Realm. The stepping stone itself was fully a hundred yards wide, circular, with two obelisks positioned beside a twenty-yard-wide slab of white marble at the center. The obelisks were square prisms, featureless and ancient. Drifts of snow formed crescents on the surface of the larger stone.
They crossed the expanse on foot.
Michael climbed the steps to the white slab and stood there with hands extended, hair blowing in the freezing wind. He advanced slowly, feeling for the gate. He passed between the obelisks and turned to look at Shiafa, still standing by the steps. "Nothing," he said. "It's closed."
"I did not know that," she said. "Though perhaps I should have. If the city is forbidden." If she had been human, Michael would have predicted she was about to cry. But she did not cry.
He balled up his fists and kicked aside a limb of snow from a perfect crescent. More time wasted. Dig deep. He let his hands relax. No sense even thinking about it. Just dig deep and do it.
He stared down at his hands. The limits of the possible, of his ability. What were the limits9 In the palms of his hands, he could feel the quality of the Realm as a singing tingle. With the exception of his unsuccessful first attempt to reach into the Realm and his escape from Clarkham's near-Earth nightmare, he had used gates made by others, or adapted pre-existing gates for his purpose. Now. to simply create an opening between one spot in a world and another. he had never done that.
Not the greatest task ever performed. Simple for a very accomplished Sidhe or Breed. In a way, the horses do it when they aband, and they're just animals. Don't even think about it. Dig deep. Last chance. Do it.
"Come up here," he told Shiafa. "And bring the horse."
She obeyed and stood beside Michael between the obelisks. He closed his eyes, listening with his palms, feeling the different parts of the song that was the Realm, now discordant, its melody weak and wandering.
Just what you forced Shiafa to do. Find the resources within
But he had never dug so far into his dark, untried potential. He had never thought it necessary; indeed, he had never known there were such depths to be found. "I'm learning a lesson," he told Shiafa.
"What lesson?"
"Whether you succeed or fail, you are what you dare."
And if I dare to be a mage, against Tarax and Clarkham and all the others?
For an instant, no more, he had absolutely no doubt that he could open a way to the Sklassa, completely avoiding the Stone Field, whatever the barriers and defenses. He would simply invert the song, play it back upon itself, add where normally one would find a taking-away, and then take away during the adding.
Nonsense.
But it worked. He tore aside a piece of empty air and widened it for the horse. Shiafa stared at his face, radiating heat and power, then at his hand, glowing like a white-hot iron, and passed through with the horse. Michael stepped into the rent and closed it up after him.
As when he had let his hyloka run wild, he felt
a sense of giddy exaltation. He wanted to skip and dance and shake his hair in the breeze. But their surroundings immediately sobered him.
"The Sklassa," Shiafa said, her voice filled with wonder and fear.
Chapter Twenty-Five
There was the Spryggla touch about the fortress of the Maln. Michael and Shiafa stood on top of a broad, thick wall of polished black stone. The curved wall was a petal of a huge, squat black flower blooming from a mountain peak. No snow sullied the Sklassa's perfect surfaces. Although their images were reflected in the stone beneath their feet, the hot-milk sky was not, and in the depths of the wall, stars gleamed. The flower-fortress might have been carved from a block of space itself.
Between two huge petal-walls hung a spider's bridge of silvery lace. It began barely ten yards from where they stood and ended at a single small wooden door. "This is incredible," Michael said. "It looks simple from here."
"We are not inside yet," Shiafa reminded him.
He could feel the presence of humans very close, but he could not tell how many. "Did Adonna build this?" he asked.
"My father built this," Shiafa said, without pride or any other emotional inflection. "A Spryggla designed it, and Adonna approved the plans, but Tarax supervised the construction."
"A multitalented Sidhe, your father," Michael said lightly. "I assume the only way in is that bridge."
Shiafa nodded. "From what I heard, even that way is uncertain."
Michael was feeling very assured now. He walked toward the near end of the bridge and motioned for Shiafa to follow. "We'll leave the horse here. It's on loan anyway; presumably someone will take care of it if." He smiled at her. "If. I'll cross first. You follow after I've made it through the door."
The span, Michael realized as he touched the guy rope on his left, was a taut and very fancy rope bridge. Its strands, woven into intricate patterns of starbursts, leaves and flowers, gleamed with an inner light, combining the qualities of silk and milk opal. He pushed one foot forward and tested the tension. To his surprise, there was no give; the bridge might as well have been made of iron. Cautiously, he rapped on a guy rope with his hand to see if it would shatter. It did not.
"Nothing ventured, no pain," he said, mixing adages. He put his entire weight on the bridge. Then, slowly at first, he made the crossing. When he stood before the wooden door, he examined it closely, bending down to run a finger along its intricately carved surface. The wood was dark and well-worn, polished by centuries of touch. The carvings, contained in four panels forming a compacted Maltese cross, were of mazes and whorls. At the center of each panel was what appeared to be a schematic flower representing the Sklassa. There was no knob or latch.
"Open sesame," he muttered. He tried to grip a panel and pull the door outward, but it was fixed. His palms tingled faintly, and he heard a tune playing under the rhythm of his breath. He brought the tune forward to his lips and whistled it softly. The door recessed a few inches and swung inward. Beyond lay a corridor illuminated in a wedge by the milky daylight outside.
Michael entered the corridor, then turned and called for Shiafa to cross. She did so without mishap. "We need some light," he said. "Do you know how to turn up your hyloka and make your hand glow?"
She shook her head. "But I know how to see in the dark."
"Good enough," Michael said.
"Can you?" she asked.
"I can certainly try." He tried and found that with some effort, he could indeed see down the hall as if through a night-vision scope. The hall's green, ghostly image shimmered like a heat mirage. "Will wonders never cease?"
"You do not seem serious," Shiafa observed.
"I do not feel serious," Michael said. "I have had just about enough of Sidhe wonders and portents. This place is incredible. It's beautiful, it's weird, it's powerful - and I don't really care any more. I want to get my people out of here and return to the Earth. And I'm hungry. I'd love a plain old hamburger right now!' He glanced at her apologetically. "Pardon my savage heritage."
"Flesh of beasts?" she inquired.
"You got it."
She shuddered. "Will humans stop eating meat if the Sidhe live among them?"
"That's a good question," Michael said. "I don't know the answer."
"That will cause." She touched his aura lightly. "Friction."
He grimaced and chuckled. "I'll worry about it later." The presence of humans was much stronger. Michael tried to determine where they were. "I think we're very close," he said. "I can feel my people everywhere, all around." The hallway ended at a circular shaft about twenty yards across, with a spiral staircase winding around its walls. "Down," Michael said. But he held her shoulder before they descended. "If push comes to shove, are you still committed to your teacher - even against Sidhe?"
"Do not doubt me," Shiafa said in the dark. "Without discipline, I am nothing, and you will teach me the discipline."
They came to the bottom of the shaft. Throughout their time in the Sklassa, not once had Michael felt any sign of Sidhe. This lack of sign carried no information to him. The Sklassa was a place of unknown qualities, and the Sidhe within it were bound to be watchful, protected - as Shiafa had told him, without being specific. And they would have good reason for protecting the humans now held prisoner within the fortress and for wanting to keep them away from Earth. There might be hundreds of potential mages here, Michael thought, not without a tinge of worry. His newfound desire to be a mage rankled like a burr. Why a mage? Because of the challenge. Because the alternate candidates are so undesirable. And is that all?
Because of the power. Wouldn't it be something?
The hallway ended abruptly. One moment, Michael was looking at what appeared to be a bend in the hall, and the next, it was a blank wall. He touched the wall tentatively - cold stone. Nothing more. He turned. Behind Shiafa, there was another wall.
"No," he said. "This will not do." He extended his palms and squeezed around her in the cramped space. "This is one trap you didn't know about?"
She shook her head, her breath coming faster.
"Control yourself," he said. "The air might give out." And it might not. Everything. vibrated suspiciously. He smiled and felt his power again, like stroking an internal dynamo. It seemed to expand within him, taking its own kind of breath.
"If I were to design the Sklassa to be impregnable," he said, turning back to the other wall, "with the power of the Sidhe at my disposal, how would I do it? Would I build physical traps? That seems too obvious. No, I might go for something more ornate, more devious. More a credit to the style and ingenuity of the designer." Concentration was the key to this prison. Shadows could take many forms.
Blue flower, yellow flower. Black flower.
The flower fortress was not real. "We have to close our eyes and clear our thoughts," Michael said. They did so. After a few moments, Michael opened his eyes and touched Shiafa's arm.
They stood at the end of the hard silk bridge, on the flower-petal parapet. The horse blinked curiously at them. The black flower-fortress was losing definition, powdering in the air, the powder swirling and assuming a new shape.
This new shape was less artistic but much more ominous. They now stood on a cliff edge, with the same bridge before them, but the Sklassa had become a broad, many-leveled castle. Its walls were rounded like water-worn rocks, and its towers were blunt, squat and featureless, upper surfaces polished gun-metal gray, vertical surfaces streaked with black and rusty brown.
The bridge led to the same wooden door, now embedded in a metallic wall below one of the faceless towers. Michael squinted, his palms still tingling. Shiafa said nothing, watching him with a studied patience he found faintly irritating.
"Why is the door made of wood?" Michael asked.
"I do not know," Shiafa said.
He frowned at her briefly. "Do you believe this shape?" he asked, pointing to the castle.
"I have my doubts," she said.
"So do I." Concentration. Palms extended. The de
signs could be arrayed like bars, bells and fruit on a wheel inside a slot machine. Any one of them could be real. Choosing one that was not real could result in their being lured into a dream of imprisonment and even death. They might or might not be able to escape from the trap of each false design.
And, of course, it was just as possible that the true Sklassa would have traps of its own.
"Adventure," Michael said under his breath. "This part's like a game of Adventure. I never liked that game."
Think it out.
Greg Bear - Songs of Earth 2 - Serpent Mage Page 26