by Janet Morris
“How could I forget?”
“The name of that being is Raet, and his world, upon which I found my father, is called Mi’ysten. It is a beautiful and strange place, where natural laws and time itself combine differently. The Mi’ysten have great skills, but not so great as the fathers, who created all we know as time and space. I have heard it said by Mi’ystens that the helsar is drawn into being by the disturbance one causes when first learning to move between the planes, and the attendant rubbing together of the edges of different continuums. That does not explain where the pieces go when they shatter, or why. But it would explain how I came by it. It followed me back from there, one time when I went to see Estrazi—upon the wings of uris. I cannot do other than work my way through it, for in this place its very presence is a danger.”
“What do you suggest we do?” Sereth said, uneasy. “I am not anxious to cross paths with this Raet again. Although some would say I have little to lose, I would retain what there is.” He leaned back against the loam-colored dais, crossing his arms over his chest, slid down on his spine.
“Only what I have asked you: watch over me while I deal with it. It is my problem.”
“Who is Raet?” asked Chayin.
I sighed, and shook my head. “It is a long tale. You and Sereth each hold a part of the puzzle. Compare them. I think you will find that Raet and Tar-Kesa are one.”
Sereth put his hands over his ears.
“Enough! I am a simple man. I want no contest with gods!” He looked at me, his eyes imploring me to tell him I did not bring Raet’s influence again upon him. I could not. There was a long silence, broken only by Chayin digging at the flooring with his knife. It remained unmarred by his attack.
“If you are afraid,” I offered, in a whisper, “I will leave here, this moment.”
“Were I not afraid, I would be a greater fool than I am,” he said. “Now that I have you back, I am not letting you out of my sight.” And he got to his feet. “I am hungry. Here on Opir, one must go to the kettle. Let us do so.” He held out his hand to me.
As we walked down the hall, he questioned Chayin about what had occurred at Frullo jer, and the race results came out. Sereth was suitably impressed by my victory, and I promised to show him Guanden after we ate. Also did we relate to the Ebvrasea what had passed between Nemar and Menetph and M’ksakka. When he heard what Chayin had said to the M’ksakkans, Sereth’s laughter rang through the corridors. When he related our encounter with the Menetphers upon our stolen threx, I, too, felt the humor of the situation. When finally we turned into the kettle chamber, Chayin was just describing to Sereth how he had killed Aknet and become cahndor of Menetph, in the process bilking Celendra out of her considerable heritage. Sereth collapsed onto a bench, holding his middle. Tears of laughter ran down his cheek. My own sides hurt, and I was sure my face would crack from the grin upon it.
“Oh, I would have been there to see her face,” Sereth chortled.
“I would wager if you had seen it, you would also have seen M’ksakkan faces,” I projected.
“You seem to have done most of that worth doing without me,” Sereth objected, wiping his eyes.
“There is still Astria and Celendra,” Chayin reminded him. “And, in truth, M’ksakka.”
“And Estri to help us. We can reinstall her, perhaps. Would you like us to avenge you upon the killer of your uncle and usurper of your Well couch?” Sereth offered gallantly. I was glad the room was empty. As I walked over to the huge kettle bubbling on the sunken mid-room hearth, I wondered for what purpose the shallow pit had been intended.
“I think we would be acting in accord with the law within, to do such a thing.”
I filled three bowls with a huge iron ladle and took them to a plank table. The walls here were dark green, and the floor paler archite. When we went to sit down, the light above us brightened perceptibly. I shivered. “But I would not be reinstalled in Astria, to await whomever Estrazi sees fit to send me. I will go, but not for Astria. That which has been lost, cannot, in this world, be regained.” Only after did I realize I had quoted Carth, who was in service to the dharen. Chayin knew; his eyes sought mine.
I was surprised at what I saw there, though I should not have been. The time had come to uphold him, and reality was less painful than his preconceptions of it. He seemed released, calmly attendant upon the moment at hand. And his calm sprang from his foreknowledge, a taste of which set me back, cowering.
Sereth was relating the story of a narrow escape he had had when picking up the knives he contracted in Yardum-Or.
“If you keep roaming the cities in dead men’s chalds, Sereth, one of these times you will not return,” said Chayin.
“If such were not my practice, you would not be here to chide me about it,” Sereth replied, something in his manner reminding me of his bearing before his men in Arlet’s hostel. I felt lonely, uncomfortable. Love between men is something that excludes a woman as nothing else can. I tried to determine what had gone into the making of the brown glop in the bowl. I could not, but I would have laid money that such food had not been cooked by a woman. I regarded them from under my hair. The two of them looked like death dealers before whom Raet might rightly falter. A part of me took a great joy in that sight. It wanted no assignations, yet it did not disdain such tools. Not Estrazi’s will, or Raet’s, or Sereth’s will would I do, henceforth, but my own. I tossed my head and made a satisfied sound. I sat a little straighter, shoulders back, breasts out.
“What?” asked Sereth, handing me a bladder he brought to table.
I saw clear and real, obscuring Sereth’s face close to mine, that seven-cornered room. Not truly seven-cornered, I noticed without surprise, but with seven corners. Portions of seven different rooms, coming together to share a space in the middle. Each of the gold-glowing men stood in his own alcove; behind each was a window, and the countryside framed there in each window was too diverse to be any one place upon Silistra. This was Silistra: I saw a snowy peak, a glistening lake in warm sun, rolling field, deep forest. The seven men looked across the jumping flicker of the central space at each other. Under the flicker a certain symbol danced, actually seven symbols in seven rooms occupying the same space-time congruently. I went to look closer, thinking they could not see me. One leaned forward, his eyes unsurprised. Ice. Miles deep within, a glowing redness took note of my presence.
Then I saw Sereth. I leaned against him, not hearing, a time before I could think. Chayin’s breath was upon my cheek, his fingers at my wrists.
“Did you see?” I asked him. His face swam before me.
“No, but I knew what it was. I think you cannot wait any longer. If you do not go to it, it will surely come to you.”
“You are right,” I admitted, clearing the hair from my face. I stood up. “Though I would not do it now, I will be just as reluctant tomorrow.” Sereth, his face tight, picked up our bowls and deposited them in a barrel of water, wordless.
“Do you have your uris pouch, Chayin?” I asked him as we retraced our steps to Sereth’s chamber.
“Do you think it wise to use it now?” he objected, but handed it to me. I unstopped it and touched my tongue briefly to the liquid within.
“There is no wisdom,” I answered him, “only more or less successful overlays upon what is real.” I handed Sereth the uris pouch. He shook his head in refusal.
“Then what do you seek in the helsar, if not wisdom?” Chayin demanded as the door to Sereth’s chamber slid aside to admit us.
“Power, that I might defend myself against Raet. Weapons, if any be there. Tricks of a new trade whose name I do not know, and whose purpose I can but dimly sense.” I went and took one large brist pelt from Sereth’s rack and spread it upon the floor. Then I stripped off my boot and breech and band and piled them neatly in a corner. Sereth leaned against the dais upon which the helsar rested in my saddlepack, oblivious of it. Chayin paced back and forth the length of the chamber.
I took the Shaper’s
cloak and spread it over the brist pelt, that I might slide under it. Though the room was warm, it was not warm enough to chase the chills from my flesh. Where I went, flesh could not yet follow me, but must rest in icy stasis; I would need both coverings. I fussed with my makeshift couch, smoothing wrinkles and evening corners, until I could put the moment off no longer. I went and kissed Sereth where he rested against the dais. His body was stiff against me.
“Take care,” he said. I smiled a smile that had no reassurance in it, and fumbled in my saddlepack with clumsy fingers for the helsar. I felt the sueded leather that bound it. It reached toward me, and I barely restrained it. By the thong I carried it, dangling, through the mist that sprang up around me to the resting place I had made. When my feet felt the cloak and pelt, I got down upon my knees and plucked at the knotted thong. I could barely see, so heavy was the fogging around me, but when the thong fell loose, I saw the helsar. It blazed blue-white, blinding, thrice its former size. The filaments spun whirling within it, pulsing. The room around me was a great blur, a prism, a prison. I felt my way between pelt and cloak, the helsar molten between my palms. My feet were shards of ice, my legs frozen stiff even as I tried to draw them against my chest for warmth. I saw Chayin’s face for a moment, mouth moving, and from that mouth came curling flames of sound, undecipherable. Beside my head the helsar pulsed, and the rhythm drew my eyes to the filaments, and the filaments drew my spirit out from my body. I stood between them, and I was no longer cold. They were fourteen, and they spun around me. I let them go unchecked for a time. The place was all alight, and that light sang to me, a soft song. The spinning filaments hummed the harmonic. All was mist enshrouded, and I knew that mist for my sustenance, and partook of it. The molecules I breathed each had a name, nature, and awareness, and the introductions between us were lengthy. Golden became my feet, for I had feet. Straited armies of mist-chain became my arms, for I would need arms. Between my breasts a great sun flared white-hot, and filled the empty expanses of my new form with light. The strands of my hair flared out from my head and did my will upon the filaments that whirled all around me like swords flashing.
And we did battle there, standing upon nothing, in the light. A great wrenching pain from left of my head stopped the first filament, the second, the third. The fourth tore a thousand strands of my strength from me by the roots. It drove toward my heart. I caught it with my golden hands, and it charred them to flakes of ash. But I stopped it, and with my stumps I fumbled it to its place. Pain taught me its rule in the universe. I screamed and screamed, and the sounds of my mouth twisted in flames around a filament, and hardened there, imprisoning it to serve my will. I rubbed my stumps against my eyes, and I laughed, and my laughter froze the next into silence. I had another. Gloating, I turned to the next. Shocked, it retreated before my will, and I had half the arc I sought. I breathed a sigh of relief that danced before me, jester in my court.
It cavorted and rolled, diverting me before I realized it a trick, and a filament skewered me through one ear and out the other. Upon my knees—did I have them?—I began to slide. I needed no ears to hear the derisive victory chant of the filaments. I threw all my being again into the strands that stretched light-years from my head, and hung by their grip upon the conquered filaments above a pit that held such apt and personal terrors as could only have come from my own mind. Seeing this—that it was my own fear that threatened me with extinction—I assayed the journey upward. I pulled myself by stumps and teeth along the strands of my own hair: welcome pain, keeping me conscious. I climbed through walls of slitsas, writhing, through infirmity of age, upon wizened wrinkled limbs, through voidness, where my lungs imploded and I drowned without them. I discarded the form when the cold between the worlds froze my eyeballs between blinks and they fell in icy dust upon my fleshless cheeks.
Only then did I begin to see. Freed of flesh-need, I hung there, and the rhythm key to the remaining filaments, which was always within me, came to my sensing clear and strong. With it, I fashioned a framework, and another form, so vast it encompassed all that was, is, and ever will be between two atoms of its being. I raised what was not a hand, and from it created a platform. Upon that platform, I stood upon no legs, and with the lightning from my non-eyes did I cause the last seven filaments to do my will. The arc around me shivered, settled, became a path.
A new form was needed, and I made one. My dozen legs carried me tireless upon the glassy surface of the path, claws clicking my three-chambered heart’s complement. At my left and right, time displayed itself, scene upon scene, lifetimes flicking by me. Occasionally I turned my stalked eyes backward to follow some drama of temporal interest. But not once did I slow my pace. I would not fall into that trap. My loins burned with need, exacerbated by the rubbing of my depending sex organs against my hid-most legs as I ran. Off in the distance I saw another, whose eye stalks were a sensual fuchsia, and whose invitation trumpeted clear to me across the vermilion plain. I snorted my answer. With it, out of my mouth came the smoke and flame of my passion. But I would not stop. I came to the end of the path and did not falter, but launched myself across the yawning gulf upon the wings of need.
Down into the chasm I glided, regulating my descent easily. It was a simple matter to allow the ground to draw me. Gravity held no sway here, where conception ruled.
Awaiting me there were seven beings, whose shapes were diverse and merely an expression of choice. I altered to an upright form, with vocal cords for speaking, as is polite in that land.
“You are late coming,” remarked the first, whose skin suit was a universe forming.
“How long have you been awaiting me?” I asked.
“How long ago was this moment woven into the everpresent? Since the conception of creation, when self-differentiation of One created Interchange and together they begat Time. Not long,” said the second.
“What dost thou seek here?” said the third, who bore the semblance of an iridescent-winged slitsa, and crossed his six arms across his breast.
“Do you not know?” I asked, incredulous.
“He is supposed to ask,” said the fourth impatiently, twittering his pale tendrils together. I cleared my throat, fascinated by the image thrown back to me from the reflective doorway that appeared behind them.
“I seek my heritage, that which has been saved for me.”
The sixth gave up a sigh of satisfaction from a mouth which could have swallowed Silistra for a tidbit. “You are she. Would you settle for half?”
“Would you? I am my father’s daughter.”
“His skills in you are long atrophied, buried by assumptions. Audacity must be companioned by responsibility, would the Shaper’s daughter shape,” intoned the seventh, and he waved his hand, which was followed upon its arc by the sights of a different place.
I spent so long there that the entropy inherent in the sequentiality I instituted to absorb what I was learning wore three bodies from under me. One was destroyed while still exploring the worlds of simple sorting; that which exists in time and space regulated by reigning natural laws.
The second crumbled from under me while still about the skills of the hest; of bending and twisting natural laws to serve the will. While in that form I learned to adjoin and weave times together, and to bring into being certain chains of events without regard to inertial backlash. I should have stopped there.
But I built a third form, by far my finest, and traveled by the side of my seven teachers into the domain of creation; I learned to suspend natural law and put my own will in its place. There did I find the weapons with which I might oppose Raet. There also did I learn reverence and constraint, and the laws by which such actions are governed. But it was hard and heavy upon me, and when the third form crumbled from beneath me prematurely, I was not willing to make another. Burdens of power, shackles of freedom, did I carry out of that last place. I had reached my limits before reaching the end. It was enough, I thought.
Since I could do no more, my teachers agree
d with me. That small sphere I managed, upon the outermost edges of inhabited space, spun lonely. There was no life upon it. I had shrunk back from that last task, refusing the responsibility I must bear to life of my creation. But I promised my world I would return to it.
I took leave of my teachers then, in a form close to my Silistran one, and went upon a vainglorious and precipitous journey. I searched out my father where he was resting.
I found it necessary upon my arrival there to expand my lungs and the chest cavity that surrounded them, and convert their nature. And I walked into the sea that lapped redly at a pinkish shore. And the nature of that sea did not eat the flesh from my bones; for I had changed it also.
I found my father nibbling choice vegetation from the murkish sea bottom, his great red head half-submerged in muck. He was not pleased to see me.
“Since, you have learned enough to come here”—his wave-words sounded against my ears—“why have you not learned enough to know better than to do so? I come here for solitude.”
“There is no respite from one’s own creations,” I reminded him, puffed with my new knowledge.
“Speak then,” Estrazi said sitting his considerable bulk down like some huge boulder dark upon the sea floor. Bubbles came from the corners of his mouth. I caught one as it tried to rise to the surface, and turned it into a mirror, upon which I projected that which concerned me.
He watched it solemnly, his lidless eyes unblinking. When it was done, he bent his head once again into the muck. When he raised it, his jaws dripped with brown plump weeds. He chewed a time, ruminating.
“What you showed me,” he said at last, “differs quite markedly from what I had intended.”
“Then stay Raet’s hand from my world.”
“Your world, is it?”
“I was born to it, my flesh is of its soil. I must protect that which I love.”
“Do that which I desire. In time you will come to see things differently.”
“No. There is no validity in self-fulfilling prophecy. I must do that which is right in my sight. You will use me against him no longer.”