Dragons on the Sea of Night (27 page)

Moichi's scalp was crawling with a peculiar and unpleasant sensation. ‘What does that mean?'

‘Chaos wants you, me, everyone. It wants to
reintegrate
– to quite literally crawl inside each of us and take up residence.'

‘God of my fathers!' The thought was so abhorrent that for a moment Moichi's mind went numb.

Beside them, Ouwlmy's ears pricked up, swiveling, and she lifted her head. ‘They are coming,' she said to Bjork. ‘I told you they would.'

Bjork turned her beautiful head. ‘If that is so then it, too, is fated.'

‘What will you do when they come?'

‘Shhh,' Bjork said, soothing the Shakra with her long, delicate hand. ‘This matter must be finished before they arrive.'

‘Who is coming?' Moichi said, his hand on the hilt of a dirk. ‘Is there danger?'

Bjork gave him a strange smile. ‘Apparently, your companions have followed you here. And at the moment I cannot say what danger awaits. You know your brother better than do I.' She shrugged. ‘I will tell you this, however. Whatever Hamaan has told you, Yesquz possessed no White Lotus. Do I make myself clear?'

‘I–'

‘Come. Hamaan is almost upon us,' she said abruptly. ‘There is little time to finish what I have begun.' She pointed. ‘Up there, on the summit of the Mountain Sin'hai is the Portal into Chaos.'

‘Impossible,' Moichi said, staring at the cloud-wreathed mountain. ‘That is a sacred place. It is the home of God.'

‘And God made all of us: Shinju, Shakra, human, Chaos.'

‘Wait a minute. Something is very wrong.' Moichi regarded her. ‘Where are the cruel highlands, the mountain goats from which you manufactured fantastic garments lighter than air?'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘The legend of Miira's Mirror,' Moichi said. ‘I have heard it told so many times I can recite it by heart. The Syrinxians swept through here, decimating the Shinju, driving the remnants into the cold highlands.'

‘As you can see, there are no cold highlands here,' Bjork pointed out, ‘save the slopes of the Mountain Sin'hai itself. But no, when the Syrinxians came we allowed them the land they wanted. They seemed to have more need of it than we did. Our home has always been the Khashm, and it was only when they wanted this, too, that they were stopped.'

‘You slew them.'

‘We did no such thing,' Bjork said. ‘That form of violence does not come easily to us.' She smiled, a secret light in her eyes. ‘But we had the Khashm itself, its sink holes, quicksand plains, its Râs Gharibs, its craans, its Shakras. Nature took care of our land, Moichi. We had need to do nothing at all.'

‘Then how did the Shinju die out?'

‘We did not die out,' Bjork said. ‘We were slaughtered by the legions of Chaos who streamed through the Portal atop the Mountain Sin'hai. It was our punishment for feeding them for millennia, for keeping the tenuous connection open between the two worlds.

‘As I said, Chaos is our brother; we are stasis creatures. But when Miira used her mirror to destroy every member of the Syrinxian inner council she set in motion an irreversible chain of events. The Syrinxian capital was thrown into anarchy. A fearsome reign of terror spiralled outward until it engulfed the entire population.

‘A Shinju became an agent of change. It went against Nature. But then Miira was always a rebel. She married a Syrinxian and became an outcast from her own people. She was despised by her husband's race and could never return to her own.'

‘This is very different from the legend.'

‘I am afraid the truth was too terrible to be supported by the common good, so the legend arose, based on fact, yes, but distorted so as to be palatable, inspiring, even.'

‘How do you know all this?' Moichi asked.

‘In the worst way possible,' Bjork said, scratching Ouwlmy behind her ears. ‘I, Bjork, am Miira's child.'

A thick silence now engulfed them. Every other moment, it seemed, Moichi was having to readjust his sense of reality. At last, he said, ‘But you were murdered by Bnak's enemies. They left the body–'

‘But it was not my body,' Bjork said. ‘My mother saw to that. Do you think she did not know what was happening, what was to occur? She was Shinju – and more, she was herself a sorcerer. She looked into her mirror, into the ocean of Time and saw the possibility of my murder. Therefore, she took steps to ensure my safety. She hid me and substituted another in my place.'

‘She sacrificed a child?'

‘To save me, yes.' Bjork looked at him evenly. ‘She was no saint. Far from it, in fact. But I wonder – and I beg you to consider this before you condemn her out of hand – would your own mother have done less to save you?'

‘How can I answer that?' Moichi asked.

‘How can anyone?' Bjork confirmed.

Moichi considered this for some time. He thought of what Bjork had said regarding an offspring of a Shinju intermarriage:
no one could know what freak of nature might be born
. Bjork was the result, the progeny of a Shinju sorcerer and a brilliant Syrinxian minister. And what of Yesquz? At length, he said, ‘But you yourself said that she was judged to have sinned because Chaos was loosed from the Portal.'

‘As an agent of change, she sinned. It is not in our nature.'

‘But what kind of a God destroys almost an entire race?'

‘By her actions Miira disturbed the delicate balance between the world of man and the dimension of Chaos. God – Nature, the Eternal Force, whatever one wishes to call it – had no choice but to restore that balance.' Bjork's eyes played over Moichi's face. ‘You remember what I said about action and consequence.'

‘Yes. Then what is happening? Why is the Makkon here? I thought that Chaos's destruction of the Shinju restored the balance.'

‘So did I,' Bjork said, ‘until the coming of the Makkon and the Dolman. Now, in seeking the overthrow of stasis, Chaos has begun to take on the characteristics of mankind. This is an absolute impossibility. Chaos was created to be the dark side – the exact opposite – of mankind. If this should change, as it is beginning to do, all lifeforms – mankind and Chaos alike – are threatened with extinction.'

‘If all you say is true then you must close the Portal,' Moichi said.

‘I cannot. Unlike my mother, I am incapable of being an agent of change.'

‘But by what you have revealed to me you have broken your stasis.'

Bjork shook her head. ‘No. I have been a facilitator only. I have taken no overt action as my mother did. I will not do that.'

So that was it, Moichi thought. Here was the bear in the stone, caught like a prehistoric fly in amber.

Bjork's eyes glowed. ‘That is why you have come, Moichi. You are the agent of change. It is you who must journey to the summit of the Mountain Sin'hai and there confront whatever may await you.'

The Kaer'n speaks:

I have never been to Sin'hai, but for myself I admit to some anticipation. For millennia – perhaps ever since our creation out of the cosmic Dark and Light – Sin'hai has been a subject of intense debate among my kind, for Sin'hai is the one place on the planet where we have been enjoined from going
.

Understandable, perhaps. To be in Sin'hai is to acknowledge Syrinx, and we could never exist alongside the Shinju; we would remind them far too much of their eternal enslavement. Also, we would remind them of what, perhaps, they once aspired to be but could not be
.

And, I suppose, it is just as well. We have had no designs on Syrinx. On the contrary, I doubt we could live comfortably among the ruins of the inhumanity of the races. What is Syrinx, after all, but a monument to cruelty? The blood-soaked earth is good for nothing now but growing rank foliage that is fast sweeping through the cyclopean buildings erected by a long-dead race
.

They may be dead, but as we are taught as infants, their legacy infects the races of man with a tenacity that is appalling. War, power, greed, envy – these evils will outlive the abandoned stone edifices of Syrinx, and do far more damage
.

For there is blood-lust still staining the waterways of the Khashm, and the proximity of holy Sin'hai has made it prey to the malevolence there. Perhaps, after all, Sin'hai will prove itself as abandoned as the land below it. I hope not. I hope the God of this Universe is still there. But I have my doubts. Every day now I feel the evil growing, and it is a desecration for any wickedness to exist on Sin'hai
.

Each sunrise, when I make my prayers, I include one for Sin'hai, because as its light goes, so goes the fate of the world
…

PART FOUR

S
IN'HAI

THIRTEEN

D
RAGON

Chiisai, searching for all that remained of Sanda
, could not find her. The transformation was over. Chiisai had become whatever it was she was destined to be. She did not yet know what that was as there were no mirrors, rivers, no reflective surfaces of any kind in Chaos in which she could see her reflection. In fact, there were no surfaces at all, just an endlessly gyring vortex broken only by great bouts of energy, erupting at random intervals, in random directions. In other words, Chaos.

It might bear a resemblance to some religions' concept of hell, only it was much worse.

Perhaps, Chiisai thought, in the very process of transformation, while she was being born, something had been lost. Why else had she been able to find Sanda's essence before and not now? She closed her eyes, searching for Sanda amid the constant roar of Chaos but she had been cut off from her.

She looked straight into the vortex and it was like staring into the eye of the sun. How was it that she hadn't been aware of the vortex before? She had floated in a void. Deaf, dumb and blind. Now she could see and hear. Did this mean she had become part of Chaos, a beast more at home in this dimension than in the world of man?

But, no. She felt herself crawling on the edge of the vortex. Something inside her warned her not to get nearer to it lest she get sucked in, never to take a breath of air again. Crawling on a sliver of gold, a strand of hair, a filament so fine it often seemed to disappear. Crawling onward.

And at its end was a great eye that opened as she approached. She held neither hesitation nor fear but was, rather, motivated by an elemental need to move forward, ever forward. Through the eye of the lens …

… Onto the flat of her broadsword which stuck horizontally from the crevasse in the cave in the bluff overlooking the sea of Ama-no-mori. Home.

Yet not quite, not anymore. Home and yet strangely different, like returning to the place where her ancient ancestors dwelled, memories surfacing she never even suspected existed inside her. She
knew
this place, and not merely from recent memory. Echoes of voices, strange yet oddly familiar, filled her skull with a feast of remembering. Home for them in a way she was just beginning to envision.

I am the first
, she thought.
But am I the first of many, or the last of my kind?

She dropped off the blade and, mindful of the glowing white metallic veins in the floor of the cavern, made her way as quickly as she could to the mouth. There, she stood upon the escarpment looking out at the water. Where had Kaijikan taken the reanimated Tokagé? He had begun his merging with the Chaos satellite Phaidan, and might already have reached his full potential, unless she had been successful in stopping it. What terrible plan had the revenge-bent Kaijikan in mind? Surely it must involve the death of Chiisai's father, the Kunshin, for it had been he who had killed her sister. Or so Kaijikan believed.

I must away to the capital
, Chiisai thought.
To Haneda
.

And, without conscious thought, she spread her enormous armored wings, the air beneath them levitating her so that she hovered for a moment, as astonished as anyone could be. She looked down upon the rocky scree up which she had labored, ungainly earth-bound being she had once been.

She had a moment of pure panic, seeing nothing but air between her and the crashing ocean. Then, instinct took over, and she wheeled into the sun, flexing those powerful wings.

Over the creaming waves she soared, arcing back over the land as it swept down the snowy scree into the lowlands where their luma had been tethered. The mounts were gone, no doubt taken by Kaijikan and Tokagé. Overcome by a fierce elation, she swung upwards in a series of loops, rolling over so that sky and earth followed one after the other in a tumble of blue and green and silver-white.

When she came out of her last roll she was far away from the scree upon which the deadly cavern resided, and she scanned the countryside leading toward Haneda. Her keen eyes picked out a figure astride a luma. Behind, a riderless luma – no doubt the one she had ridden – trotted docilely, tethered to the leading luma's saddle by its reins.

Chiisai made for the figure. Her speed was such that almost immediately she recognized Tokagé. But where was Kaijikan? Perhaps she had used her powers to transport herself to the Kunshin's moated castle in the heart of Haneda.

Chiisai changed the angle of her wings and she swooped down toward the warlord. Tokagé, seeing her shadow or merely sensing danger, turned in his saddle. He lifted one armored arm while drawing his longsword.

‘Kaer'n!' he cried as Chiisai extruded her talons and, beating her powerful wings in rhythm, struck him across the helm. The golden talons of her forearms scored deep gashes across his salamander helm, knocking it askew. Parallel lines of blood oozed across his scalp.

He swung at her with the longsword but Chiisai found it ridiculously easy to avoid. She struck again, drawing blood again, and Tokagé screamed in unearthly rage. Had Phaidan completed its possession of the warlord? Chiisai recalled the halo of Chaos energy swirling around Tokagé's head when she had stabbed him in the neck. Kaijikan had obviously healed the wound but what had happened inside him?