Stargate (46 page)

“You do,” she said. “You saw a dying man fall with an arrow in his side. You, gliding invisible and friendless on the Mountain. You could bear it no longer. Oh, the feel of warm flesh around you, eh, Tagar? Ground beneath strong feet, odor of hot sand and dank water in quivering nostrils! I know your lust. Maker, I know it! And this time you could not resist. It happened so quickly. Tagar.” She began to laugh, peal upon peal of harsh laughter. “Tagar!”

“I am Chilka one-mind!” Chilka sobbed, his face to the cold stone. “Chilka one-mind!”

But behind the man's bewildered terror Danarion watched, numb and sick. Ghakazian, he whispered to himself. Ghakazian, sun-lord, my old friend. The despoiler of Shol. He did not dare to think, for fear Ghakazian might sense him. The Lady came close and, taking Chilka by one arm, pulled him to his feet. Holding his tear-streaked face, she probed behind his eyes with her own. Deeper and further she scoured him, and Chilka screamed as she ripped into his memories and tore through his mind. It was as though she had reached into him with her sharp fingernails and had slashed blood from his essence.

“You are hiding!” she snarled, letting him go and swinging to the chair. “I know your tricks. Tell me, Tagar, how has your patience rewarded you? What have you learned, wandering on the Mountain? Have you seen her?” But Chilka was past thought or answering. He swayed on his feet, eyes closed. “Or have you stayed on the Mountain by an empty Hall of Waiting, hoping that someday rescue might come to you through the Gate?” She sat and regarded him dispassionately. “Sholia closed the Gate, and then I took it away. But by now you have become accustomed to waiting, so you will not mind going back to the Mountain and giving the people a few thousand more years of superstitious dread. Yarne, recall the captain.” Instantly the blond head jerked up, the infectious smile lit the beautiful face, and Yarne uncurled and went striding down the hall.

Evening had come. The sun had set, and Chilka, trembling with fatigue, realized how much time had passed since he, Nenan, and the captain had stood before the door. He wanted to lie down at the Lady's feet, those same feet that had bruised and blackened his chest, and fall into an eternal unconsciousness. The doors groaned. Presently Yarne came into the orange light, and the captain bowed and stood waiting anxiously. Once more the Lady's nails crackled against themselves.

“Take Chilka out to the foot of the Mountain of Mourning,” she said gently, “and kill him. This time, cut off his head and bring it to me. I want to see it myself.”

Chilka tried to speak, but his tongue would not obey him. After one frightened, defiant glance at him the captain nodded. “But I dare not go in darkness, Lady,” he said pleadingly. “Give me leave to take him at dawn.”

She shrugged her narrow shoulders. “It does not matter, but guard him well tonight. Now take him away.” The captain went to Chilka and took his arm. Chilka staggered down the hall beside him. The light from the windows that had gleamed gray on the huge flagstones now lay softly pink, and the Lady's magic light dimmed and was extinguished. In the second it took for the heavy doors to swing open, Chilka turned a throbbing head. The Lady had an arm across Yarne's slim shoulders and was smiling into his face.

Nenan supported his father down the never-ending steps which reverberated under their feet, echoing down the darkness like hollow bells, while the captain ran behind. With nightfall the mood of the House had changed, become melancholy and mysterious. They made their way slowly toward the hall, passing many closed doors let into the curving wall. Glancing through one that was ajar, Nenan saw a far window, an arch of lighter darkness, and pressed against it were faces, peering in with blank eyes that saw nothing but their own interior torment, their bodies teetering on the thin ledge outside. He shuddered, and then the hall was there, firm under his longing feet, and the courtyard, empty and snow-filled, and the passage with its row of locked cell doors. Thankfully he pulled Chilka inside, and the captain jingled his keys. “Until the morning,” he said, the sweetness of a just revenge on his face. “I will send a soldier to guard you.” He closed the door, and Nenan heard the keys grind in the locks, one after the other. Chilka was sitting on the floor where he had fallen, and Nenan went to him and put his arms around him. “What did she do to you?” he said angrily, but Chilka pulled the arms away. “Not now,” he said. “I am to be executed in the morning. I must think.” Nenan cried out and sat on the bed, and Chilka closed his eyes.

Nenan watched as he began to rock, his arms about his knees, lost in the meditation of healing and solving. Nothing seemed real to him this night. Not his father's drawn face, not the wails and shuffling outside, not the time creeping by, taking Chilka to his death, not the repellent beauty of the Lady in her vast hall. He felt detached from himself, a spectator at a curious ritual in which he had been taking part all his life and which had twisted and lashed him this way and that, bending and beating him into a shape he hardly recognized. That man was his father or perhaps was not. This youth was himself, yet somehow he had ceased to be himself when he had walked into his mother's cottage and seen that man sitting at the table, very large in the small room, his presence an overpowering thing. That same presence now filled the cell, more real and vital than foolish words about death in the morning, more unquenchable than ever.

After several hours had passed, Danarion suddenly stopped rocking and opened his eyes. “I do not know where it is,” he murmured wearily. “I cannot think anymore. He took it away, and where it is now only the Lawmaker knows. Surely I have failed, and I am doomed to be Chilka forever.” He rubbed his eyes and passed a hand through his tangled hair. “Nenan, my son, you must go home. If I put you over the wall tonight, can you find your own way?”

Nenan slipped to the floor. “Are you saying that I must leave you to whatever the morning brings and climb the Mountain of Mourning in the dark?” He shivered. “I don't know if I can do this.”

“Nothing on the Mountain can hurt you.”

“That was because you were with me. Come home with me, Chilka! Back to Lallin and the river and your old friends. Why are we still here, at the mercy of that witch? You know how to get out of the cell. We can go together! I am afraid of the Mountain on my own.”

Danarion's eyes were swollen and red with tiredness and the tears of fear Chilka had not been able to keep back. He rubbed them again and looked at Nenan blearily. “Very well. I will take you over the Mountain, and you must go home. I don't know what will happen then, Nenan. I have no intention of dying, but I must keep looking.”

“For what?” Nenan grasped his arm.

“For the Gate, the Gate, the stupid, meaningless, useless Gate! Start banging on the door, Nenan. The guard is uneasy enough as it is. When he unlocks it, pull the door open.”

“Chilka …”

“Do as I say!”

Nenan went to the door and began to beat on it with both fists, and Danarion hauled himself sluggishly to his feet. He went to stand just out of sight of the door, and Nenan shouted.

“Be quiet!” The guard's voice was muffled, but they could hear the edge of panic to it. “I am not to open for any reason.” But Nenan went on pounding and screaming, and soon there was a rasp of metal on metal. “Hush!” the guard shrieked like a woman. “I don't want any two-minds down here!”

The door opened a crack, and Nenan heaved. The guard tumbled into the room, and Danarion swung, his fist clenched. The guard went down and was silent. That felt good, Danarion thought, his fingers throbbing, but I hope I didn't misjudge my strength and kill him. Almost unthinkingly he bent and tugged a long knife from the guard's belt, and thrusting it inside his shirt, he followed Nenan out into the passage. Together they ran to the courtyard.

It was snowing again, and the night was blanketed in a moving grayness. The gate was closed. Nenan flung himself on the man who stood before it, glad to be acting recklessly, doing anything so long as it was something definite, and Danarion fumbled to release its great locks. They fled into the streets of the city, the buildings unlit and foreign-looking under their clothing of snow.

They walked quickly away from the House and were soon lost in the cold, crooked shadows of Ishban. The sound of their footfalls was muffled in snow. Dark grilled gates, deserted shop fronts, a low wall over which naked tree branches hung glided past them. By now Nenan knew the city as well as his father, and its dangers were delineated. The people hung about the streets like homeless ghosts, standing silently in twos and threes or keening quietly alone at their upper windows. Snow blew around them in glancing flurries. Once Nenan stopped walking and flung his arms wide, his head back. “Farewell, Ishban, black joke of the universe!” he hooted. “Your madness is like a blind man who tumbles into a hole and sets the children laughing.”

“That's enough, Nenan!” Danarion said sharply, pulling him out of the lonely square and hurrying him toward the wall. “You don't know what you are saying.” Nenan fell silent as the wall loomed above them, a hump of blackness through a gray curtain.

Above the city it was cold. As they climbed down they could not see the ocean, but they could hear it grinding on the rocks below. No summer salt smell rose from it, only a dampness that chilled them, numbing their bare hands and laying ice against the crevices their questing feet sought. It took them a long time to reach the bottom, and when they did, the cold drove them quickly away from the corner where they had rested on their way into the city. They circled the wall, found the road, and set out upon it, knowing that nothing would be moving on it. As they walked the snow thinned and finally ceased to fall, although the night sky remained thick with cloud, and no stars could be seen. Grimly they trudged, not speaking, and when Danarion summoned the will to look back, there was no sign that a mighty city lay behind them. No lights glinted, and no sound but the whisper of a tired wind broke the calm of the night. Ishban was a mirage, a spell that held him captive, and when he broke loose from it, it vanished as though it had never been. He smiled to himself without humor at the fancy and pushed on.

Three hours later the fruit trees loomed up, ragged shadows into whose silent shelter he fell gratefully, and he and Nenan rested briefly and uncomfortably. Danarion's eyes strayed to Nenan, who was scanning the sky. He is not only the son of my time in Ishban, he thought. I no longer simply watch Chilka's memories of him as a young boy, I feel them also. Now it is more than a sharing of emotion with Chilka, it is a blending. I know I have loved Nenan since he was born.

“There are the stars,” Nenan said suddenly. Looking through the trellis of black branches overhead, Danarion saw them twinkling frostily. “How long till the dawn?” Nenan whispered again.

His body already cooling rapidly now that he was still, Danarion shivered. “Perhaps an hour, and we still have to reach the face of the Mountain. We will not be safe until we have scrambled onto the plateau and out of sight.”

They came to their feet and veered right. The orchard seemed to go on forever, but eventually the trees drew back as though awed, and by silver starlight the face of the Mountain of Mourning was a nightmare pattern of black shadow and stark slopes. “Dawn comes,” Nenan panted, and indeed, the sky seemed a little less densely black between the nets of the constellations.

They had started across the open mile that in summer was thick grass and nodding red flowers when Danarion stopped abruptly and turned his ear into the wind. He strained to listen, and Nenan, watching him anxiously, thought he caught the far-off neighing of horses and clink of bits.

“Only the Lady could have driven them out before dawn,” he said bitterly. “They are following our tracks in the snow.”

“Can you run?” Danarion asked swiftly. Nenan nodded. “Then run!”

They burst from the trees and fled over the snow, their shadows racing beside them. Now they could see each other faintly, and visibility lent dark wings to their feet. The sun was rolling imperceptibly toward its birth. Nenan counted his steps under his breath, trying to forget the pain in his ankles. Danarion could not ignore his weakness. Chilka's body was slow to respond. His chest was tender where the Lady's foot had bruised it, and the nagging ache in his head where she had forced open his mind had spread to his back and was shooting down his legs. He pounded heavily after Nenan.

Now the horses and the shouts of several men could be plainly heard. Danarion threw a glance over his shoulder and saw three riders break from the trees and point excitedly. I saw them, he thought fleetingly. The sun is close. He tried to draw himself away from Chilka's laboring breath and ailing body but found he could not. He flowed with the streaming blood; he was present in
every
frantic beat of the punished heart.

Yet he tried to think.
I took it away,
she had said.
I took it away.
He heard the horses start across the plain, but the face of the Mountain was nearer now. He made a rhythm out of the words, for his feet.
I took-it-away, I took-it-away.
Then he slowed.

I took …

I took …

The truth exploded in his mind, a burst of light. He howled like an animal and came to a halt. “Of course!” he cried.

“Of course!”

“Father, run!” Nenan screamed, but for a moment Danarion was blind to his danger, the Mountain, the chill bite of snow on his feet.

“Yarne!” he shouted. “Yarne is the Gate! I must go back to Ishban!” But Nenan had flung back and was shaking him, shouting at him, dragging him forward. He was dazed. “It's Yarne, it's Yarne,” he sobbed, and his body stumbled after Nenan, not knowing where it was going.

They reached the foot of the Mountain, and Nenan pushed him violently onto the winding path up which the grotesque funeral procession had climbed. Hooves thrummed behind them. He was both laughing and crying, Nenan scrabbling ahead of him, urging him on. He followed almost blindly. There was shouting below, and the clatter of hooves on rock. Nenan had almost reached the plateau and was turning, a hand outstretched, his face twisted into a grimace, when Danarion heard a quick twanging, like the tuning of a harp string. He could not place it, but Chilka knew, and flung his body flat against the path with a scream. Nenan shouted. And just as the sun's rays topped the Mountain, glimmering red and new, pain flared in Chilka and burst along his veins like the white fire dancing around him. But this time the pain was not his alone. It engulfed Danarion also. Mind touched essence, meshed, and in the extremity of mortal anguish, they became one. He screamed, the taste of sand gritty in his mouth, his knees folding upward to his chest, trying to cradle the pain, to enclose it, his fingers digging deep. Again the lake shimmered before his eyes, tantalizing water just out of reach, and his throat swelled with the need for it. The sun is burning me up, he shrieked in his mind. I am on fire. Lallin, Lallin … Danarion had never known such agony. The Messenger was the Unmaker's tool, it had brought him to Shol to destroy him, burn him, Janthis was a traitor, left to rule Danar alone and unchallenged forever. A raucous yell of triumph went up. They are rifling my bag. I can smell my own blood, steaming in the sun, yet before my eyes there is darkness. Lallin. I am Chilka-Danarion, and I am dying.