Her magic was of a peculiar kind, he could see from this more experienced perspective. It was not an active magic; it was passive. It did not assert and create and destroy; it nurtured and cherished and allowed development. She was none the less powerful for that.
And she had not followed her sister, Elme, in defying their father, Tonn, mage of the Sidhe. She had remained loyal to Tonn - later Adonna, God of the Realm. In return, Adonna had granted her a place and position in Inyas Trai and had supported at least some of her efforts to help the humans in the Realm. Then had she really differed from Elme? In tactics, perhaps, but not intent?
He heard and felt her approach. Her aura was broad and comforting - and also, more than a little deluding. He penetrated the delusion and found warmth beneath. He also found something that drew tears to his eyes and a fullness to his throat.
The Ban of Hours stepped through the doorway, followed by Ulath. The daylight dome seemed to come alive with a greenhouse heat. She was tall, dressed in a gown the color of clouds covering the sun, with silver and gold trimming the sleeves and hem. She moved silently, gliding across the floor with the ease of a dancer - Kristine is almost that graceful - and smiling at him. Her eyes were the only cold thing about her, as dark and intensely blue-green as the ice beneath the Realm, but the coldness was enhanced by contrast rather than detracting. She was nurturing, but she was not to be trifled with, her eyes said.
And she was using none of the tactics she had used on him during their last meeting. She was not greeting him as a pawn or a weak supplicant.
Her gold-red hair was restrained by a white scarf that trailed down her back. She held her hand out to Michael, and he took it, bending automatically to kiss it.
"Welcome," she said. "Friend of Nikolai and one-time weapon of the Councils, now burst his bonds and turned rogue." Her smile was dazzling, conveying gentle humor and no hint of superiority.
She's treating me as an equal. or an ally, Michael realized. Even though I don't yet deserve it. She nurtures what is in me.
"Thank you," Michael said quietly. "I am honored to be in your presence again, Mother." The honorific surprised him some, but it seemed completely appropriate.
"Unfortunately, there is little time to discuss matters, and not even we can hold back the death of my father's creation. Not even if we join hands and concentrate all our combined power."
She held out her hands, and he took them. The sensation that passed back and forth was stunning, an echo of some of the abilities he had felt springing unwilled and unknown from within him. In the Ban, however, these abilities, though weaker (!), were controlled, fully realized. "Not even then," she added softly. "How will you save our humans and Breeds?"
"I'm not sure yet," Michael said. "I have to know what guards the Sklassa and whether I can open a path to Earth big enough, or for a long enough time."
"You already advance beyond me, if you contemplate such acts," the Ban said. "Only the tribal sorcerers - and my father, of course - could do such things, and they are nearly all on Earth now, with their people."
"What I have. what I am. is not developed, Mother," he confessed. "I do not know my limits. I might be dangerous."
"Oh, yes, you are that. But you are the last chance we have. You have seen the true Sklassa, I assume?"
He nodded. "It is not what I expected."
"The illusions of fortresses and horrors. something of a joke for my father, I fear. He ordered Tarax to create this refuge that he might bring Sidhe males and females together in harmony. The Maln administered this fastness. Here they brought Sidhe of all races from around the Realm, to reconcile." She was suddenly sad. "We have been declining for millions of years. The Sklassa was kept secret because it was not a center of raw power, but only of hope. And the hope was not fulfilled. Few children were born here. Not even Tarax's daughter, though he took a wife in the Sklassa. The wife is dead now. Most of the women who came here did not live, or wished they might not."
There was a darkness in the Ban at that moment that chilled Michael to the bone. The Sidhe were a dying race. Even the Ban had given up hope for them.
"You have brought her with you, have you not?" she asked. "Tarax's daughter, Shiafa?"
"Yes."
"And she will come with us to Earth, should you succeed?"
He nodded. "I'm her teacher, for the time being."
"Yes. She will teach you much," the Ban said. "Now it would help you, I think, to see the quarters of your brothers and sisters, to look over our preparations for the end and to meet our Mahler. He can tell you more that could be useful."
The Ban dismissed him with a distant smile. Ulath took
Michael's hand and led him through another door. "The Ban is very tired," she explained. "Adonna's death and the difficulties since have taken more than even she can give."
"How did you come to be here?" Michael asked. "And where is the rest of the Maln?"
"The Ban insisted that she stay with the humans when Tarax brought them here from Inyas Trai and other refuges in the Realm. Adonna was still alive then and had some influence, though waning. The Maln disbanded shortly thereafter, that the tribal and racial sorcerers might focus on the problem of the dissipation."
They walked through a sinuous corridor, passing many wooden doors with names scratched on them in Roman and other alphabets.
"Dissipation?"
"When the Realm finally breaks up, it must dissipate. Since the Realm is not far from Earth as worlds go, its end will have an effect."
"I haven't given much thought to that."
"It will change Earth's reality, and much time will pass before the influence of the surrounding reality of Earth will stabilize things."
At the end of the corridor, Ulath held open another thick wooden door for him. Beyond lay a vast ruined garden, rising to hills crested by dying trees and rugged upthrusts of black rock and falling into what might have once been leafy glens. Michael experienced a sharp disorientation; where was the tower? Behind them was only the door in a low cylindrical brick structure like a squat silo. And the sky was not oily slate but a dusty dark gray-blue, like the twilight of the between-worlds.
Across the garden, strolling singly or in groups, were men and women - humans - dressed in Sidhe garb, white sepias and long gray robes. The nearest man, a middle-aged oriental, looked on Ulath and Michael with some interest but did not approach.
"Our humans," Ulath said, smiling. "The Ban has come to think of them as her children - and indeed, she is in a way their aunt."
"Where are we?" Michael asked.
"We are still in the tower. The walls themselves have out-seeing pressed into their fabric. The Ban and Adonna designed this thousands of years ago, that Sidhe might court and find peace. It has not been tended of late."
"I see that. It's sad."
"We are a sad race," Ulath said lightly. They followed a stone path weaving through the hills. Here and there, houses much like the hut of the Crane Women rose in the middle of spinneys of skeletal trees. "Some have chosen to live here, some in the tower."
"And outside the tower?"
"Biri gathered Adonna's abortions and placed them in the grounds around the tower. No one goes there."
Ahead, standing alone on a hill overlooking a lead-colored lake, was a house unlike the others, small and square, surrounded by a rickety porch. The house had apparently been recently assembled in some haste and lacked the ancient stolidity of the other buildings.
A door was half-open on the side facing away from the lake. Ulath knocked lightly on the frame.
A small man, thin and slightly stooped, opened the door and stared at Michael and Ulath over pince-nez glasses perched on a blade-sharp aquiline nose. His gray-unto-white hair flowed back from a high forehead, topping almost emaciated features; he radiated an, intensity that Michael found fascinating.
"This is our savior?" the man asked in English with a soft Viennese accent.
"This is Michael Perrin," Ulath said. "I
believe you are acquainted with Gustav Mahler."
Michael hesitantly extended his hand, and Mahler looked down on it with a frown, then grasped it with both hands and shook it vigorously.
"Please come in," Mahler said. The room beyond was sparely furnished with wicker and wood. There was a small writing table and chair beneath a piece of tattered gray and black floral-patterned Sidhe fabric. The table held layers of dozens of sheets of handmade paper, creamy and rough-edged, covered with hastily scrawled musical notes and blots of watery ink. A goose-quill lay near one of the fresh blots. On the opposite side of the room stretched a narrow wicker cot covered with a richly woven red rug. The walls of the room were bare but for dead branches strung up in the comers, reaching out like withered hands.
Michael hardly knew what to say. Mahler had supposedly been dead for eighty years, yet this man matched the pictures Kris tine had shown him, though he appeared some years older. Remembering the extraordinary music in Royce Hall increased Michael's awe.
With the Ban of Hours, he had stood before a magical presence, an age-old personality enhanced by inhuman power and the mystique of the Sidhe. Mahler was human - not even measurably a Breed, as Michael was - and his accomplishments had been purely human, and mortal.
"Did it go well? Were you there?" Mahler asked.
"I'm sorry?"
"The performance. The new orchestration of my symphony, my Tenth."
"Yes. It went very well," Michael said.
Mahler rubbed his bony hands together. "Ah! Good," he said almost as one word. "Ah yes good. The Jungling Berth-old Crooke was skillful. I came to his dreams. I hinted, pushed, and he was kind enough to listen. It was frustrating not to be there incarnatus, but then, I am a ghost, no? A muse.
"I don't know much about the Earth now. What I was shown in the past. discouraged me. But it still has music. My music is still listened to. More." He took a deep breath. "More popular than when I was alive, I understand. And all the ways you have to listen to it.!" Abruptly his face, which had assumed a mask of angelic enthusiasm, paled and stiffened. He glared at Michael and gestured for him to sit on a second wicker chair. He then pulled out the desk chair and sat on it, hunched forward with elbows resting on his knees, hands clasping each other. "Can you return us to Earth? Bring us all to life again?"
"I came here to try," Michael said.
"Is my. is my daughter still alive? Is Anna still alive?"
Michael glanced at Ulath. "I don't know."
"After I was taken, after I died, your. they put her through such hell." Mahler shook his head furiously, face flushing. "I vowed I would never have anything to do with Earth after I was shown, after the Maln. Tarax, the damned son of a whore, after he showed me."
"I don't understand," Michael said.
"They convinced me to work for them," Mahler said. "The Maln let me see what was happening on Earth. Alma! She I could understand and forgive, though that Werfel fellow." He shook his head sadly. His emotions flashed like shadows of clouds passing over a landscape. "But my last daughter! My only daughter!"
Michael was still puzzled.
"You do not know about them, the camps, the guards, the ovens? They made my daughter conduct music for human monstrosities. They made her play music to entertain the ones who could have killed her, who were killing all those around her. I saw this, and I hated. I hated my own countrymen. I swore I would never."He stood up and leaned on the desk, facing away from Michael. His gestures were stage-dramatic, but his strength of feeling was beyond question.
Michael gently probed the man and emerged with a confusion of horrifying images: the concentration camps constructed by Germans in Europe before and during the Second World War. "The Maln showed you these things?" Michael asked, incredulous.
"Yes. Jews. Gypsies. Catholics. Children. Old men and women. My entire world, consumed by wars! I blessed the day I was taken away from the foulness of the Earth."
Mahler's cheeks were wet with tears. He suddenly straightened, pressing his hands into the small of his back, and stared at Michael with a sad, dreamy expression. "They wanted songs from me. Songs I wrote for them. But nothing like the symphony, my Tenth. I am not of Earth now, and my strength has always been in the Earth. Erde. My mother, mother of skies and fields and woods." He held up his hands and nodded forcefully, thrusting his long chin forward.
"All right. Here is what they told me. They said my music, my Tenth, was a Song of Power. They said if performed properly, it could let this Realm die gently and pass into the Earth without destroying it. It could harmonize the two worlds. So I worked in the dreams of this young man, this finisher of a symphony I was not allowed to complete because of the Sidhe in the first place!" He smiled ironically, and despite himself, Michael smiled along with him. "They will all tell you. I am a bastard to work with. A perfectionist. Not unreasonable, but demanding of perfection. I could not expect perfection, directing the young man like a puppet master with half the strings cut. But I could expect power, and apparently. that is what
I have gotten. Without my music." He threw his hands out, fingers spread. "Without that, the Sidhe would return to our world and find themselves crushed not long after by the death of the Realm."
"The Maln explained all this to you?" Michael asked. He was piecing together an impression of the Maln very different from the one he had picked up on his first visit.
"They never lied to me," Mahler said solemnly. "They have treated all of us well. Once we were brought here. Their only torture was to show us what was happening on Earth. Our children and grandchildren killed, cities burned, madness and madmen. 'This is your humanity,' they said."
Michael felt a sharp tickle of anger. "Did they show you other things? Humans conquering disease, trying to work against plagues and famine? Going to the Moon?"
Mahler shook his head as if that did not matter. "What they showed was the truth." He gave Michael a hard look. "Going to the Moon?"
Michael nodded. "Landing on the Moon."
Ulath spoke. "Your people were shown only what the Maln considered appropriate, and only in special cases."
Softly, dreamily, Mahler said, "They claimed Sidhe had been to the Moon, and beyond, by magic." He sat again. "I was shown machines that play music, writing it down - recording it. The Sidhe can do that too. They can conjure an entire orchestra out of thin air." He snapped his fingers. "They wanted me to understand that everything on Earth, everything done by humans, they could do as well. So confusing."
Michael pushed back his anger and followed an inner thread of thought, unwinding so rapidly he could hardly keep up. He saw things rather than traced their progression: the Realm's edges meeting the boundaries of the Earth and smoothing out across the landscape - the mental landscape, the physical landscape.
Even with Mahler's Song of Power in effect, the Realm's death would change the Earth's reality. Everything remaining in the Realm would be destroyed. But there was no way he could open a gate for five thousand people. That might not be the best method, anyway.
Again Michael felt the cold dagger-twist of uncertainty. He closed his eyes for several seconds and fought back his fear.
What I am thinking of doing. not thinking, seeing myself do. You are what you dare. Succeed or fail.
He stood and gripped Mahler's extended hands. "Can you improvise a composition?"
A large black man entered the cabin, saw Ulath and Michael and deeply bowed toward the Ban's attendant with hands folded before him. "Excuse me," he said, his voice deep as a drum. "Gustav, the committee is meeting in the tower. Bes Amato and Hillel ask that you be there. Again they want to move 'Die Zauberflote.'"
Michael easily read the man's aura. He was - or had been more than two thousand years ago - a soldier in the army of the Mauretanian king Bocchus. Michael did not know enough about this period to make much sense of the man's memories. He seemed to have been a storyteller, a singer and an archer.
"This is Uffas," Mahler explained. "He is superintendent of
our pageant."
"What pageant?" Michael said.
"Music, drama, dancing," Mahler said. "To celebrate our release by death from captivity. Uffas, the committee should know we may not have time to put on the pageant. This man is here to save us."
Uffas regarded Michael with a mild, almost placid suspicion. "We've planned for many months," he said.
Mahler placed his arm on the huge black's lower shoulder. "Uffas, how long have you been here?"
"Centuries. I do not know."
"And what did you do?"
"I sang and told stories for the Sidhe."
"Like my daughter," Mahler said quietly, eyes on Michael. He looked at Ulath, tall and still. "Like Anna, playing for the monsters. Tell the committee nothing. Let them plan. Perhaps there will be time, and we will celebrate something else. Living."
Greg Bear - Songs of Earth 2 - Serpent Mage Page 28