Stargate (11 page)

Ghakazian shook his head. “Idiocy,” he muttered. “The fantasy of a crippled mind.”

A cry made them both look up to see Mirak swooping low over their heads. They called back a greeting, watching him together until he dwindled to a speck and vanished, leaving the airs that eddied between the peaks behind them empty. Ghakazian flexed his wings. Tagar, still sitting on the ground, saw them rustle open between himself and the sun, an unfolding of shadow, a far-flung, sweeping double fan that arced dark and powerful against the white brilliance of light behind them. He shivered suddenly, a breath of cold contracting his muscles, and his gaze dropped to the sun-lord's brown feet, where the end feathers trailed the ground.

“Well,” Ghakazian finished, “I think I will go to see how Brengar's crops enjoyed the rain.”

Tagar struggled to his feet and, bending, kissed the sun-disc. When he withdrew his mouth, it tingled with cold. Slowly he rubbed it, and Ghakazian rose in one mighty rush of hair, limbs, and thrashing wings and was gone.

Ghakazian spent the rest of the afternoon going from valley to valley, talking with those who tended grain fields and beasts far below the eyries of their airborne brothers. As he moved among them, chased the children, smiled upon the women, conversed with the tall, straight-spined men, he found himself once more filling with pride for this, his charge, his boundless, beautiful land. The mountains were his, the green, fruitful valleys were upheld by his breath, the people's well-being and his own immortality fed upon each other.

When the sun began to sink and the light changed to a soft, warm red which slanted over the fields and gave the peaks long shadows, he flew pensively back to his hall, and the echoing rock funnel beyond. Tomorrow, he thought, I will go through the Gate to Linla and glide above the desert and visit those who live in the caves beneath the orange cliffs. I will even go to Roita and lie on my wings in the snow. He came to the lip of the funnel, swayed for a moment on the sharp rock, then plummeted down, calling to his sun as he did. Outside, on Ghaka, the sun slipped away serenely, but inside Ghakazian's mountain it blazed true and bright, making the shadows that limned the cracks and crannies withdraw. He went to his stone perch and rested there, listening to the wind sough through the hall and up toward him from the dark honeycomb of the mountain's roots.

He knew that the book was there, for as he had poised above the funnel he had remembered it with sudden clarity. He stood now for a moment looking down, brow furrowed, its presence a palpable thing there on the ledge behind him. Finally he turned and picked it up. Mortals from Ghaka on Shol! He chuckled to himself. Poor Ixelion. But I am Ghakazian the strong, Ghakazian the mighty. This time the book did not quiver in his hands as he thumbed through the pages, still frowning. Paragraphs leaped out at him instead. He saw his name again and again, and other names that he knew. Mirak, several times. Tagar, four times in one short passage. Where are the words of Ixelion and his people? he thought, still skimming. Where the rain, the ocean, the fog-hung forests and the rivers? If these are Ixel's Annals, then Ixelion has been toppling into black fire for a very long time. It reads like the Annals of Ghaka, and yet it cannot be, for I myself write in that book. Unless … Unless it is …

For the first time he closed the book and looked at the cover, his thin-boned hands relishing the cool smoothness of the ivory-colored binding, silver letters spidering under his eyes. At first he could make nothing of them, but then suddenly they seemed to come together, six innocuous, simple words.
The Book of What Will Be,
he read. He swayed, and only the reflex swiftness of his wings' immediate response saved him from falling. “Ahhh,” he breathed. “Ah, no, it cannot be.” The Book slipped from his fingers into the chasm. With a howl he plunged after it, catching it before it could disappear into the underground streams and lightless holes of the mountain's feet. Then he bore it gently through the small arch and into his hall, the fear of loss still beating erratically in his chest. He stood on the dais and read the title once more. “So this is how Ixelion fell,” he whispered, and his voice traveled the long walls and returned to him. “And was this also Falia's doom? Was this the treasure?”

He closed his mouth, but his thoughts sped on. There is no word of Fallan in the Book, nor of Ixel. It is all of Ghaka and Shol. He opened it again slowly, gingerly, and the passage that had first intrigued him spoke to him.
Ghakazian stood before his Gate … Sholia and the Unmaker rule the universe now … make war …
No, it lied, this magical, this priceless relic of the dawning of time. Sholia, like himself, would never fall. War was the last resort of the fallen. Mortals could not travel through the Gates to other worlds. “You lie,” he whispered. But in a creeping fear, in a certitude that came dark and edged with despair into his mind, he knew that the Book of What Will Be could never lie. It was a part of the Beginning, when there had been no lies. Sholia would indeed fall and make a bargain with her master, the Unmaker, and he, Ghakazian, would have to fight. How would it end? Frantically he scrabbled to open the Book near the end, but the leaves were gummed together, and he tore at them in vain. “No wonder you were hidden,” he said to it softly, urgently, through his teeth. “No wonder you were forbidden to the sun-lords. Right from the beginning you held between your covers the story of the gathering tragedy that has come upon the universe, and the Lawmaker knew.” Ghakazian's head came up. The Lawmaker knew.
Of
course. He must have known, even before he spoke the Worldmaker into life and commanded him to make. How can the Lawmaker not know everything? And so … And so the Lawmaker is not as we believe him to be.

Ghakazian felt as though something had lifted him and flung him bodily far out into space, as though all his joints were broken, all his golden blood were crystallizing into ice and lumping, painful and cold, in his veins. That is why he will not help us. That is why he does nothing. He knows it all. “Sholia!” he choked, holding the Book high over his head, but it was not for Sholia that he sank to the cold stone and lay with his wings curled around him, weeping. It was for his own disillusionment.

He did not know that he could weep. He had believed that tears were a part of the Unmaker's work, coming from the planting of bitterness and sorrow in the fallen, and he clutched the Book to his breast and cried until he was spent. I will not weep again, he thought, opening his eyes, still lying on the dais, and looking down the vast sweep of the empty hall. I will not allow such pain again. If I am to fight to save Ghaka as the Book foretells, then I will read the Book from the beginning to the end and so discover what I must do and how I must do it, and whether all my effort will be in vain. But even if the Book tells me that I shall be defeated, I shall still fight. For Ghaka, for Shol, the jewel of the universe, for Danar and the council. The thought of Danar brought him to his feet. But I cannot keep the Book, he said to himself. I must take it to Janthis when I have read it. I will explain to him that he must close the Gate of Shol without delay. Not that any Gate-closing so far has done any good. Always too late. They should have listened to me when I spoke to them of fighting, for surely it is better to smash the innocence of the mortals in order to save the worlds than to protect them with falsities and put all our hopes in the closing of the Gates. Janthis is a fool.

Strength came to him, a surge of cool resolution, a throb of assent that seemed to flow from the Book and through his hands. He strode back to the arch, intending to read the Book on the seclusion of his ledge, but all at once he paused. For the first time he was aware of the depth of the abyss that yawned open below him, and for a moment, for just a fleeting second, he imagined himself falling, falling, his wings shredded and useless, his skin burning with the speed of his destruction. Then it was gone, unremembered. He floated upward, reached the ledge, and in the steady aura of borrowed sunlight turned to the Book's first page.

He did not know whether he read for one day or a thousand. He stood on the ledge, the Book held in both hands, lost in the time that would be. The words seemed to change into visions as his eyes passed over them, so that one scene followed another, in his mind and yet too real to be only in his mind, a succession of colors, odors, emotions that enveloped him completely for as long as it took him to read on. He saw himself perched in the rock funnel, reading. He saw himself take the Book to the council on Danar and while he spoke to his kin he smelled Danar's hot sun and saw it catch the gems on Sholia's bracelet, a thick gold band studded with bright red stones that he had not seen her wear before. He felt the frustration and anger as Janthis ordered him to give the Book into his keeping. He argued for war, and war was once again denied him. He saw himself standing inside his Gate, looking out over the star-sick sky, but between himself and the stars the sun-lords gathered, accusing, pitying. He shouted words of defiance at them, knowing something that they did not know, something that filled him with a secret triumph, but though the Ghakazian that read tried eagerly to probe the mind of Ghakazian the vision at the Gate, he could not discover what the secret was. His kin would come to close his Gate. Though the Book did not say so in words, he knew it. But he was not troubled at all, for the Book showed him that long before they came, he would stand in the same place, facing back into Ghaka, addressing an army. He could not see it—and while Ghakazian the vision spoke to it, Ghakazian on the ledge asked breathlessly, Why? Why?—but he knew it was there, and though the mile upon mile of valleys lay patchworked under his gaze, the grass green and long, the houses low and white and ringed by stone walls, the jumbled whispers of a thousand thousand of his subjects pressed against his own thoughts.

He turned a page, and suddenly he was on Shol, kneeling behind one of the orange ornamental shrubs that flanked the foot of the sweep of marble stair that rose to Sholia's palace. He crouched low and held his breath, for on the top step, tall and beautiful in his arrogant nobility, immortal and invincible, stood the Unmaker. Sholia was there also, clothed in white and gold, her face the color of her gown, her hair like her suns, rich and pure. They spoke together, but Ghakazian could not hear. Then the Unmaker raised a hand. Ghakazian felt the whole of Shol draw in a breath and wait. He waited also, but for something else, a thing hidden deep in his mind, but before it surfaced, he found himself back on the ledge, and the last page rustled under his hand.

Disappointment flooded him, as though he had dreamed as the mortals did and had woken from the sheen of magical wonders to a drab sky and the four gray walls of a rough-hewn hut. What do I do after that? he asked the Book angrily. Do I fight? Or did I fight and lose and was I imprisoned on Shol? How did I get to Shol when my Gate had been closed? How was it that the valleys were empty, and yet an army, my army, thronged the fields invisibly? Puzzled and shaken, he laid the Book down and began to pace slowly around the ledge, both palms laid against his cheeks. I will raise an army of mortals, he thought. The Book said so, and the Book cannot lie. But neither can it tell me how I will achieve this thing. I take my army through the Gate, to Shol. How?

Dawn came to Ghaka. The sun stepped over the horizon and spread itself out behind the mountains, expanding to flow pink and new down the valleys. The mortals woke from their dreams and long memories, but Ghakazian, for the first time since he and his sun had dawned together, did not leap out of the funnel and soar to greet his brother. An urgency burned in him, a feeling that he must find the key that would unlock the events to come. Things must change on Ghaka, he vowed. The people must be taught to kill, Shol must be saved from Sholia and the Unmaker, I must take over its rule myself. Perhaps it will be my doom to fight them, perhaps it was that that tugged at my mind as I hid behind the shrub. His hands fell away from his face, and he began to smile at the picture. “It will be,” he said aloud. “I will conquer. Then the council will honor me and reopen Ghaka's Gate.” He came to the little arch and passed under it and so to his hall, walking bemused, wrapped in his reveries. He crossed the hall and came out, and so deeply thralled was he that he did not fly but walked down the steep, winding stair that took him to the foot of the mountain. My mortals must be given the power to leave Ghaka, he thought finally. Somehow a way must be found. We cannot wait for destruction to finally come upon us.

Then suddenly his mind was clear of all thoughts. It was as though someone had reached in and brushed them away, and he felt his head hollow and dark, a cavity that waited obediently to be filled. He stood still and closed his eyes, everything in him poised on the brink of the knowledge he knew must come, everything terrified that the moment would pass him by and never return. His fists clenched. His wings drew in tight to his body. But when it came, it was gentle and sweet, voiceless, wordless, a sudden flowering. His mind showed him a small, dimly lit room, full of dust and age. Around the walls were shelves lined with books of every size and description. In the middle of the floor stood a reading desk, its pedestal of blue haeli wood carved into the likeness of a rearing corion, its smooth, tilted reading surface upheld by the beast's front paws. Ghakazian loosened. Energy pulsed through him, and leaping into the air, he turned and swooped across the sky to the cave and the entrance to his Gate. Of course, his heart sang. Of course, the wind answered to the cry of his wings. He dived into the cave, glided along the tunnel, and then was through the Gate and falling into the corridor, shouting for Danar's sun to recognize and bring him. He had not found the key, but he knew where it must be sought.

It was an early spring evening on Danar. The air was cool and still. Stars were beginning to blossom, white against the deep blue of the sky, and in the west a ribbon of purple streaked against the horizon. Ghakazian returned the nods of the corions who sat before the pillars of the entrance to the council hall, and after one glance back down the deserted flow of steps that would have taken him into the strange haeli forest where the two time-streams on Danar intermingled, he bounded inside. The lofty rooms and silent corridors were full of a soft, diffused light. No sound but the shush of his wings greeted him as he rose and flew to the central hall. It too was empty, the table reflecting mutely the splash and slide of light on the jewels that encrusted the dome, and he closed his wings and came to rest before the large sun-disc hanging on the wall. Without pause he strode to the door on the left and knocked. After a moment it opened to him, and Janthis greeted him warmly.