The Golden Sword (26 page)

“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 agreed 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.”

His mouth stopped its chewing. “How do you know that this very rebellion of yours is not my will? Have you joined with those others of like mind near you?”

“Not yet, but I will do so.”

“If you survive, send me a message, and we will meet again. Now, leave me!”

And his command was such that I found myself flung upward into the baby’s cheek of that world’s sky, past it, into the dark between the worlds.

Only away had Estrazi flung me. I ended there, in the darkness where potential unrealized is banked. That which does not happen goes to this place, and is reabsorbed into the ever-forming now. There, alone, growing faint, did I learn the consequences of power, and the price paid by those who seek it. There is no fixed future, the darkness whispered. There is no omniscience; nothing is sure, it said as it devoured me.

And I may never know if Estrazi realized his mistake and extracted me, or I escaped by my own power. I was almost not, when an answer crept to me and warmed me in the cold. That thing in me that would not sleep snuggled warm against it. Shatter the helsar, it suggested to me, and you have confirmed yourself in the real world. Will it here, and yourself there. That which is cannot be in two places at once. Trade with the dark. Try.

I tried. I took what self I had and set it spinning, that I might reach all directions. And the spin gave me coherence. No one had ever spun here before. No one had ever refused oblivion, even retained self long enough to conceive such an act. I was. I spun my laughter in nothing’s face. And the helsar heard me. I drew it, desperate. It flared the whole of ever-dark nothing light at its entrance. I was blind in the afterglow, caught up in someone’s arms like some small child.

I knew he rocked me slowly back and forth. I breathed flesh upon the air, warm moist lifesmell. I heard my heart. My legs were prickled with fire. My feet did not feel. I found my eyelids and caused them to open. It was Sereth’s room I saw, but Chayin who held me. The room was night-lit. Sereth slept, his head upon his arm, his rest uneasy, nearby. Chayin rocked me softly, his chin resting upon the crown of my head. The helsar was not in my sight. My mouth was very dry.

“I am thirsty,” I said to him, with enough effort for a shout. I produced only a croak, but it was sufficient. He looked down at me, and I smiled at him. Perhaps he thought he dreamed. He touched my face with his hands; then he called my name and crushed me against him. Sereth, as light a sleeper as a hulion, was crouched there beside us. I tried to reach out a hand to him. It fell short, but he caught it in his.

“I thirst,” I tried again. My legs would not respond to me. They seemed dead. My hand in Sereth’s trembled violently.

“Get it,” Sereth ordered, and Chayin, who deferred to no man, laid me down upon the Shaper’s cloak and went to do Sereth’s will.

I tried to maneuver my thick-furred tongue. It remained, despite my best efforts, recalcitrant and unwieldy. Sereth knelt over me. He put a finger to my lips.

“Be silent,” he said. His strong, sure hands kneaded my legs, and I found voice enough to moan as his ministrations brought my muscles awake.

“I know,” he said, not ceasing his work. His hands had reached my thighs. “I was once, after a severe miscalculation, bound in one position five days. Truly, this is the least painful way.” And when I could, I flinched from his touch.

“Good girl. Now, sit up.” And I did that, too, that I might be as brave as he thought me. I bit my lips until I tasted my own blood, but I got my legs under me.

Sereth grunted and sat back on his haunches. A smile played on his lips, his eyes prowled me, returned to meet mine.

“There will be no more of this,” he decreed. “I have thought long about what to do with you. You came here, seeking my protection, my help, perhaps another thing from me.” And he was not now smiling. “I demand and receive unquestioning obedience from those who follow me. If you join them, I must have the same from you. You do not want Astria, you say. What do you want?”

“To serve you. My life is your will. I want nothing more,” I managed. I wished he had waited until I had my wits about me. I closed down my sensing, pushing away that which I would not see. If it was so short a time I would .have him, then that time was all the more precious.