Stargate (6 page)

Danarion had risen, his hands flat on the sun-disc flaming on his breast, his golden eyes large with the intensity of his words. “Truth has no arms!” he shouted. “Think, Ghakazian! Beauty cannot fight! The things that we are, that our mortals are, can only be a wall, a defense against what he is. To take up his weapons is to put on his evil!”

“Stop!” Sholia cried out, her eyes squeezed shut, her hands pressed over her ears. “Oh, stop! I cannot fight. I do not want to fight! I only want to see all as it was. I want him seated with us in his chair, I want Falia back, and Firor. I want the past to be the present once again!”

Danarion heavily resumed his seat. Ixelion had buried his face in his hands. Ghakazian folded his wings and his arms, muttering to himself. “The Lawmaker has forbidden the closing of any Gate unless those within it have become a danger to the rest,” Janthis said emphatically, rising. “He has chosen not to unmake the Worldmaker, and if you think about it, you will see that had he done so, he would have become like the Unmaker, but infinitely more terrible. He has not forgotten us, but his time is not our time, just as our time is not the mortal's time. This council is over. Go home, all of you. I will summon you when I need you.” Quickly he turned, climbed the three steps leading up to the dais, and disappeared behind his door. Ixelion stood up immediately, his limbs clumsy, his head averted, and fled the chamber. Sholia reached up a hand to Ghakazian.

“Come with me to Shol for a little while,” she begged him softly. “We will walk on the docks and watch the ships unload their cargoes.”

He nodded briefly, and arm in arm they traversed the black, smooth floor, their feet covering stars, their shadows drowning the worlds sunk deep beneath the surface. Only five systems lit their way, glowing in a soft, muted pattern of steady light. The rest of the floor was in darkness.

Danarion remained for a while, leaning back in his chair, watching the beams of Danar's sun turn from white to pale pink as the sun crept along the table toward its setting. Birds flew in and out the clerestory windows high above. The enormous sun hanging on the wall to his right, beyond the Worldmaker's chair and the dais, gradually gathered the gloom to itself, fading from bright gold to a sullen, dark copper. Impatiently, almost angrily, he turned to it and spoke a word, and the surface burst into life, flooding the upper end of the hall with brilliant rays of light. Ixelion, he thought. Ixelion. I do not really know. I do not have the Unmaker's cynical ease of divination, I cannot feel for the seeds of something I have only seen at its blind conclusion. He wanted to talk to Janthis, but the door was tightly closed, and no sound came from within the small room. He did not dare to knock. What if a Messenger were there? He got up and left the hall, brow furrowed, and when he found himself outside the palace, on the wide terrace where his sun had laid its myriad scarlet fingers, he paused. “May I sit here on the step, beside you?” he enquired politely of one of the long row of corions fronting each pillar, and when the beast inclined its head, not looking at him, he sank down beside it, his gaze traveling the tops of the haeli trees beyond, the gold of their leaves now slashed with red. Deliberately and consciously he repeated to himself the bounds of his responsibilities, savoring the comfort and gladness of each word, and when they had all been laid out in his mind, coherent and sane, and the image of Ixelion's face had faded, he closed his eyes and withdrew into the welcoming heart of his sun, resting without anxiety, wrapped in its warmth and its uncomplaining obedience.

Ixelion ran out of the hall along the lofty passages that wound unhurriedly toward the terrace, burst out between the pillars and the unmoving corions, and bounded down the steps. When he reached the stone plateau that broke the long flight of stairs, he veered left, slowing to cross the wide stone causeway that arched from the steps, over the gardens below, and brought him to the far end of the terrace. Here a stone door twice his height stood open, sunset reaching into the shadow beyond. Two fantastically elongated corions reared their wings at each side of the door, their slim muscles carved in the stone, their outlines limned in gold, while a stone sun rayed out above. Ixelion plunged into the corridor. I must get away, he thought, I must go home, I must guard what I have in my chest, beside my pool. What if Sillix entered my room while I was absent, and found it? The thought, irrational and impossible, drew a muffled cry from him. He forced himself to walk now, for people passed him, bowing, the citizens of Danar on their way home from Yantar or Brintar. They greeted him respectfully, and with a supreme effort he answered their words and smiles.

A Trader came toward him, the light, transparent body allowing him a milky glimpse of distorted torchlight and undulating fretwork on the tunnel wall before he shied away. The Trader raised his eyebrows and smiled. On his back he carried a bundle and around his hairless head wound a scarf of many colors. Ixelion kept his eyes averted, his hand brushing the tumultuous carvings that blanketed the passage. Reliefs of mortals from Danar and Shol, winged lords from Ghaka, his own round-eyed, graceful fish-people crowded the walls, mingled on the ceiling, reached out to one another and the great suns scattered between their hands. The riders from Fallan also stalked there, frozen in stone, but now their hands seemed to convey a terrible longing, and their eyes and fixed smiles told of the things that were lost to them and would never come again.

Now the Gate was visible, two corions facing each other across its width, and through it Ixelion could see the darkness frosted by cold starlight, as though he stood on Lix and saw the ice and crystals rearing glittering and exotically beautiful against deep space. He crossed the threshold, and the corions did not move. For one moment he paused, looking over the whole vast sweep of the All, the rock of Danar beneath his feet; then he leaped outward, calling to his sun. Bear me, carry me, bring me! he mouthed. I am wounded, I want to come home. He felt its response, a gentle, enquiring tug which became a grasp that tightened, a fierce clutch of protection that gathered him ever faster into its blazing light. For one moment he saw it, a conflagration, a rolling ball of searing whiteness. He thought that he flung out his arms to it and shouted, but in the weird, timeless confines of the invisible corridor he knew that he had no arms, no mouth, no body. I hurt! he told it. Heal me! But he knew also that healing was not in the suns, as it was not in him.

Then he came to rest before his Gate. With a regret that he had never known he thought of the mists of Ixel, which shrouded his sun and kept its full glory veiled from him. He stepped under the arch, and the murmur of the water rose to enfold him again.

At the mouth of the tunnel Sillix was waiting for him, sitting in the river where it poured in a smooth gush over the stone lip. Rain pattered on his head and dripped from his shoulders. When he saw Ixelion emerge, he rose, scattering droplets like sprayed flowers, shaking back his hair. Ixelion barely noticed him, and Sillix padded quickly to take his arm.

“Sun-lord,” he said breathlessly. “Oh, thanks be to the Worldmaker! I have been waiting here at the Gate for two long months.”

Ixelion stopped and turned, fighting irritability. “What is it, Sillix? I am in haste, I must go at once to my halls. Have you been there in my absence?” he finished roughly and Sillix drew back a little, astonished.

“No, lord, of course not! You know that I cannot enter when you are away at council.”

“Well, what is it, then?”

Sillix's webbed fingers touched his arm again, a brush of reassurance, a tentative, soft caress. “The fish are not right, Ixelion. I cannot say exactly what I mean, but they are washed up on the sands and do not move. We cannot eat them. They do not taste right.”

Ixelion felt as though a cool, foreign hand had curved itself around his heart. Swiftly he scanned the divided, meandering river, the fog-clothed, flower-heavy forest, the tips of his towers, and the odd dull glint of diffused light on the half-hidden houses of the people. His eyes encountered nothing strange, nothing new. But he was conscious of change as his glance returned to Sillix's trusting, relieved face. It was in the air, in the water, dissolving with the mist, unfolding with the colorless, complex blooms, a dullness, a tinge of weariness. It was within himself. Terror filled him, became one with the change, became another new emotion, despair. He did not as yet savor it slowly, in self-pity. He stalked warily around it in his mind, suspicious, afraid, winds of past and future tugging drearily at him. I have done nothing! he protested silently. I have protected the council, I have saved Janthis and the others from the danger of destruction! I, Ixelion, have done this great, this noble thing!

Suddenly he became aware that he was glaring deep into Sillix's eyes. “Very well,” he said with effort. “I will come and see the fish. They are sick, Sillix.”

“Sick, sun-lord?”

Ixelion tore his gaze from the uncomprehending, dumb beauty of Sillix's rain-drenched face. “Show me,” he ordered, and followed Sillix toward the forest and the ocean beyond.

The fish were lying on the broad sweep of the beach, cast up by the tide among the untidy streamers of dark seaweed. There were not many, a scattering of still, glinting shapes, but Ixelion could smell them long before he bent, and out where the ocean rocked toward the sand he saw more of them floating quietly, unresisting, waiting to be thrown up in their turn. Sillix stood by as Ixelion lifted one of them. The pale eye flicked once, the fish flapped in his hand and then lay motionless, dying. Ixelion placed it gently back on the sand and straightened.

“What of the rivers?” he asked brusquely.

Sillix stepped to him, and Ixelion again felt his need to touch, to be comforted. “The fish of the rivers are as they were, also the fish out in the depths where my son dives. It is only these, close in to the shore. The small ones. What shall we do?”

“Bury them in the sand, and keep burying until no more are left by the tide. It is nothing, Sillix, a moment of imbalance, that is all. Have you eaten any?”

“We tried, but they tasted sour. Is the seaweed good?”

Suddenly Ixelion was overwhelmed by an urge to shout into the innocent face, to see shock in the bland, trusting eyes, but he struggled with his panic, his teeth clenched, his eyes on the fish at his feet.

“Yes, the seaweed is good,” he answered. “Do what I tell you now, and don't eat any more of them. I must go.”

Sillix reached out for the sun-disc lying on Ixelion's breast, but Ixelion had already swung away. Sillix's webbed hand dropped to his side, and he watched Ixelion disappear under the forest's dripping eaves, dragging yellow shreds of sunlight behind him.

The water flowing out the doors of the palace was silky-cold and dark, and the hall was filled with green gloom. Ixelion stood on the threshold and shivered, listening to the voice of Ixel as he had never listened before. Even the fogs murmur, he said to himself. The flowers creak open, displaying their limp, pallid petals. The trees and vines suck at the sloppy soil with wet, greedy words. My hair squeaks under my hands, damp, limp, cold. As he stood there a picture came into his mind. He saw Sholia walking along the wide paved road that ran down through her city's tall buildings to the harbor, her escort fell in behind and before her, carrying flags embroidered with Shol's two suns, the gold thread and blue background shining as the wind pulled them taut. Her people came running, and they bowed before her, worshiping. She waved, pacing lightly and slowly down to where her ocean sparkled, sapphire and white. Sapphire and white, Ixelion thought, coming to himself. Her people honor her, pile gifts before her, fete her in great ceremonies, yet she is no more powerful than I, her brother. The water swirling about his ankles suddenly filled him with distaste, and he strode forward shouting, “Light! Give me light and warmth!” Immediately the sun responded. He ran quickly through the hall, along his passages, up his stairs, until he found himself beside the deep pool high above Ixel. Out beyond the rim of the huge window his world lay clasped in an embrace of rain and dimness. Is it still there? he asked himself breathlessly. Is it still safe? Walking softly, as though not to disturb something dreadful and unnamed, he went to his chest and, dropping on one knee, raised the lid. It was still there, resting innocently in shadow, a small gray metal box with a hinged, rimless lid. For a long time he gazed at it, many thoughts flitting through his mind, behind them all a growing desire to hold it, cradle it, that same desire that had flared new and hot when Falia spoke of it. A treasure of death. Did the secret of death, then, lie under his gaze?

Finally he lifted a hand, and the lid of the chest banged shut. Sighing, he rose and stepped into his pool. The water closed over his head like a waiting caress. He sank to the bottom and lay on his back, his breath stilled, his eyes open, his hands moving with the minute swells caused by the river that fell down the wall and splashed into the pool. He did not direct his mind, did not know what thoughts to command. He saw Sillix, and the dying fish. He saw Danarion's face, watching him at the council table. He saw himself, walking up the steps of Falia's palace, whole and free, unfettered by despair, greed, or anger, and he saw himself walking down again, Falia behind him, his mind already sown with the Unmaker's will. Then, all at once, he was on Shol, standing at the foot of the mountains, green fields stretching away before him, rippling in wind and sunlight. His hair was warm and flowing free, his feet were sunk in warm earth. He smelled the dryness, the heat, the strong twin suns pouring over him undiluted. “Oh,” he breathed, lifting face and arms to the burning blue sky. “Oh, what delight, what unutterable pleasure.” Blue and white, not gray, not gray … Ixel was a wet, cold dream, dissolving in his mind like its own mists. Sholia should share this world with me. She has two suns, after all. I do not belong on Ixel, a poor world where my sun and I can never meet face to face.