Stargate (19 page)

For a second there was profound silence again, a silence filled with shock and disbelief. Then the people turned, and a woman began to scream, falling to the grass. “You lied!” someone yelled at Mirak. “Liar! Liar!” They surged toward him, rage in the groping hands, the incoherent words, but at a signal from Mirak the winged ones rose gently into the sky, and those below could only shake their fists. Some had already begun to move away weeping, seeking the goat track that they had toiled up, their stricken minds already running to their own doors.

“Cast them down,” Mirak ordered. Swiftly the winged ones obeyed, gripping hair, placing strong, relentless arms beneath thrashing shoulders, catching at a fleeing cloak. Like a storm gale howling out of the mountains panic rushed across the exposed hilltop, spreading a madness of terror. The youngest children, seeing their elders run here and there demented, thought that it was a game and shrieked with laughter, but the older ones knelt screaming in the grass and covered their faces.

Like the dregs left after an autumn wind, like deadwood to be disposed of, the people were plucked from the cliff. On the fringes of the melee winged ones hovered, darting to gather those who stumbled inland. All the latent disdain that had slept uneasily within the sky people, all the mute hints of their own superiority that had lain buried deep with their pride suddenly burst into flames of contempt and maliciousness. With an increasing eagerness they went about their task, hands gripping shrinking flesh without pity, power surging new and unchecked, a tumult of exultation. “Die!” they screamed. “Die, mud-diggers. Die, sheep-herders.”

Mirak watched it all from high above. So this is authority, he thought. This is real power. I speak, and I am obeyed. I deploy, I dispose. He felt nothing as the cliff top emptied. When nothing stirred there but the grass bending in the wind, and the sun had gone to leave night drowning the valley, he alighted with the others and walked to the edge. He glanced over. Only glimmers of paleness told him where the mounds of his broken kinsmen lay. The winged ones gathered round him panting and laughing, their eyes gleaming. “Crawlers!” they exclaimed. “That will teach them to do as they are told. What made them think that the Worldmaker would give wings to such as them in any case?” But as they regained their breath and the sweat began to cool on their slippery bodies, their laughter died away to be replaced by an awkward silence. None dared to look at another. What, then, was the meaning of the Worldmaker's orders? None asked aloud why they stood there in the gathering darkness while others piled the feet of the mountains with blood and smashed bones and death.

Mirak, his moment of aloofness gone, began to shiver. He remembered the horror of Tagar by the Gate, and his own panic. Now, as he had feared, the shadows were again brimming with a hostile force that longed to clutch at him. His nervousness was communicated to the others. Silently they lifted and flew, circling far inland so that they did not have to feel the caress of the death-laden wind rising from the valley, and then turned toward their caves. Only Mirak did not glide to perch, relieved and spent, at his entrance. Alone he winged his way to the sun-lord's spire. Ghakazian would be waiting.

Through the dragging, creeping hours of late afternoon Ghakazian paced his hall, the Book of What Will Be in his hands. Occasionally he stopped and looked at it, running his fingers reflectively over the smooth cover, but he did not open it and read. He knew his destiny. He was no longer anxious at the passing of time. No matter what words the Trader spoke to Janthis, no matter what decision the council took, it would avail them nothing. The Book had told him so, and the Book was true. Soon, he thought with a quiver of anticipation, I will be on Shol. Even now the essences of my people are gathering. He fancied that he heard their cries, faint and far away as the light in the hall slowly faded. So will the fallen people of Shol cry out, he told himself, when the avenging arms of my subjects smite them. Is the Unmaker nearing Shol? Is Sholia even now sitting by her window, toying with the fascination of black fire? How strangely, how smoothly all things are drawing to a point. I am the hinge of the universe. I have the power to pivot it this way or that.

Outside on Ghaka the sun sank, and as the last of its light left the hall, Mirak dropped through the funnel and came to stand warily before him. They eyed each other in the soft twilight.

“It is done,” Mirak said. “They listened, but they did not believe. We had to throw them over as you commanded.”

“It is done,” Ghakazian echoed, and Mirak heard weariness, even boredom in the deep tones. The body of the sun-lord seemed heavier somehow, and the graceful limbs worked sluggishly, as though the sun-fired blood that used to race through his veins had begun to cool and lose its potency. “So the valleys are empty, but the roads …” He stopped and licked his lips with a dry tongue. “The roads are full, and the Gate stair is crowded. Now we come to the final moment. I and I alone will make the skies as empty as the earth. Will you die here, Mirak, or will you go home to Maram?”

Mirak began to back away. “I had thought …” he croaked, but Ghakazian cut him short.

“I do not ask you to think,” he sneered. “Did you
think
that you would pass the Gate in your handsome body, with your glorious black wings? No, you did not, and yet you hoped to, didn't you? It is your choice, Mirak. Because of my regard for you I will allow the fire to pass you by, and if you wish, you may remain alone on Ghaka, and all the sky will be yours forever. Have you lost the courage to stand by me on Shol? Did you
think
that I was playing a little game?”

The sneer had twisted Ghakazian's full lips into a grimace, but Mirak did not see. Nor had he heard but one word which had stamped itself on his consciousness and was eating deeper into his brain.

Fire.

Fire,
the sun-lord had said.

He tried to answer, choked on the sudden fear that rose to engorge his throat, then turned and ran, tripping as he fell out under the arch, plummeting through the clouds like a flung stone before he found his balance and clumsily opened his wings. Only the reflexes of his muscles kept him flying. He was numb with fear. He tumbled onto the little lip of rock before his cave, fell to his knees, and with wings drooping crawled to find a corner to fit his back against. I knew, he thought desperately to himself. Of course I knew. But I was blind and stupid then. I do not want to give up my body. I do not want to die.

Ghakazian walked to his arch and looked out. Clouds moved quickly under him, as though hurrying to some unknown meeting, and as the sky cleared he saw the vague humps of the peaks crowned with the ancestors, their tips silvered in starlight while below, the mountains shivered down into blackness. Nothing moved under his piercing eye. The air smelled stale and used up.

He shook out his feathers, steadied himself on the edge of nothingness, and held both arms before him, rigid from fingertips to shoulders. Before he spoke, he found his mind wandering to the day when he had returned to Ghaka from the closing of Ixel's Gate and had hovered by Mirak's cave entrance. He had called gaily, and Mirak had come out to stand before him, tall and brown, healthy and smiling, hair straggling black over gleaming wings, amber eyes alight with pleasure. He had asked for rain. At that memory Ghakazian's arms loosened for a moment. He heard Mirak's voice again, young and strong and full of an innocent excitement:
Hira, Maram! It is going to rain.

Mirak has changed since then, he thought. He cowers when I look at him, he whines when I speak. We have all changed. Annoyance shot through him as he saw Mirak run once more from the hall, bent over like a craven beast, and his arms stiffened again. His chin rose.

“It is going to rain,” he hissed aloud. “Oh, yes, Mirak, it is going to rain. But this time you will not welcome it, and then … Then for the Gate.”

He called to his sun. He did not address it as a brother but commanded sharply as a master, clearing his mind of all save the link that joined them. He felt its enquiring, glad quiver, and greeted it silently. Then he spoke again with a slow, deliberate emphasis, putting together words of antagonism and destruction never heard before on Ghaka. The drifting clouds suddenly raced away from him. Even the night darkness seemed to let go its hold of his feet and slip farther down the mountain. The sun hesitated, its doubt a mushroom burgeoning in him, and it probed his command shyly.

He repeated the order abruptly, pushing away the little flurries of affection, and then he heard its voice. Like a liquid tongue of flame drawn from a fire, like hot yellow syrup pouring slowly, it oozed over him.

No, it breathed, a scalding sigh. No,
Ghakazian.

For a moment he was numb with shock. In all the eons since he and the sun had burst into life, it had never spoken to him, and he had not known, or had forgotten, that the suns could form words. He had loved it as a lamb, a puppy, a young and playful being brimming with an eagerness to please and to be loved by him, though the Worldmaker had in fact taken from its own energies to create him.

He became angry. “You must obey me!” he snarled. “You are unable to refuse. I have power over you, and you dare not deny me!”

He stood still, and its anxious turbulence made him close his eyes. It whimpered softly, it sighed, and he felt its presence leave him. Its last impression on him was one of hurt, of wounding, but he brushed aside its sorrow.

There was a pause. He waited patiently. Then out of the darkness a rain began to fall. Slowly and lazily at first, then faster it came, a hail of orange balls sizzling and leaping around him. Briefly he was reminded of the bursting of the haeli pods on Danar when in fragrant red fire the seeds were showered into the autumn air. The calm night broke into dancing, brilliant light which caused the shadows to gyrate as though the mountains themselves were tugging free of the earth and the valleys were heaving up and down like an ocean. A wind came too, a searing, humming blast that scorched the grass and shriveled the leaves on the tossing trees. Still Ghakazian waited. Night was dismissed. Wherever his glance traveled, there was light, not the bright sunlight of a summer day but the harsh, unreal glow of naked fire. He spoke again, and with a hiss the balls rolled away from him, crackling through the smoking air, seeking something to devour. One by one they found the caves that honeycombed the crags and peaks, and with a crash and a hungry hot roar they entered. Ghakazian folded his arms and leaned against his archway.

Then the screaming began. Not the constant, sullen whine of friction but the spasmodic outcry of flesh in agony. All at once the cave mouths were candle-lit, the sides of the mountains flickered in reflection. The winged ones staggered over their thresholds. One by one they toppled, wings streaming fire, flames sparking in brittle hair, skin blackening. Rain fell again from crag to scorched earth, now a shower of jerking, red-wrapped bodies. The tiny bonfires that littered the floors of the valleys burned fiercely for a while, and one by one died away. Darkness crept back, laden now with the stench of bubbling flesh and a curling, oily smoke. “Sun,” Ghakazian whispered. “Sun?” But the sun did not respond. There was a rumble like thunder very far away, and then silence.

Ghakazian spread his wings and, taking to the sky, circled the crags slowly. The cave mouths gaped at him, dark and empty, and the sides of the mountains were smeared in wet soot that dribbled downward like black tears. Satisfied, he beat his way toward the Gate, arrowing swiftly over road and river, knowing that though Ghaka seemed to lie vacant and exhausted beneath him, he was not alone. He flew steadily until the Gate mountain loomed ahead. He slackened his pace, fluttered carefully up the face of the peak, and when he found a small ledge that jutted halfway up it, he alighted, standing easily and looking out over the approach road and the wide vista of valley that opened to each side of it.

The night was waning. He had not been aware of the passage of time, but now a grayness was spreading slowly like a pool over the sky and would soon seep down to the land also. He rested for a while, reviewing the night and the afternoon before it, and as he pondered a feeling of impending climax grew in him, a slow tide of creeping doom that he welcomed. I have come far, he said to himself, since I first took the Book from Ixelion's damp floor. It was fate that moved my hand that day. He did not ask himself just what he meant by fate, and though he had never used the word before, it gave him a quick flash of security, an assurance that he had taken the right path. Now, he thought. They are there below me. They wait without volition of their own, without substance, and before my sulky sun rises on Ghaka, my people will have conquered the Gates. They will be on Shol. I have done more in the cause of light and truth in one month than the council has been able to do in a hundred thousand. Now it is time.

He glanced out at the horizon. The soft light had strengthened, pushing through the thinning smoke, and the accompanying breeze wafted the foul odors away from the Gate mountain. Ghakazian looked down and laughed out loud. Now the riddle in the Book is solved, he thought. I am about to address an army though the valley before me and the road winding through it is deserted and still. Oh, wise Book! Oh, mighty Ghakazian, that I should have put my faith in it, and in my intellect. “Mirak!” he shouted, the name echoing mournful and thin against the rocks. “Come up to me! Now you may stand beside me and receive your destiny from my hands!”

No voice answered him. No bustle of eager wings cut the hush of early morning. But Ghakazian felt the ledge suddenly fill with a cold presence, and the shadow in which he stood acquired a sentience. He was not afraid. He had done this thing. He was the master.

“Tagar!” he called again. “Old one skulking by the Gate! I adjure you now to come!” For a fleeting second he believed that he felt ice brush his face, and then the shadow glowered around him with an unmistakable hostility that prickled his spine. “You can do nothing, Tagar,” he remarked cheerfully. “Where are your hands, your strong legs? You and Mirak must lead the people to Shol. Find bodies in the palace. I will come later.”