Stargate (50 page)

“Is that so?” Chilka said. His eye caught the strap of his bag, hooked over a low shrub, and he bent and swept it up, passing it over his head and settling it on his hip. He had begun to shiver. Strange, he thought. It feels more like winter now than summer, yet I was so hot and thirsty. “How do you know my name?” he asked. “Are you from the House?”

“No, I am not. And you are right, it is winter.”

Something stirred in Chilka. Dark memories flew across his mind and were gone, leaving him puzzled and shaken. “Winter,” he repeated stupidly. “But that cannot be. All the trees were in leaf when I left Ishban four days ago.” He frowned at Danarion. “I think I know you,” he said slowly, “but I cannot remember where or how.”

“It does not matter.” The stranger was no longer smiling, yet even in repose his face was full of warmth. The golden eyes held Chilka's, and there was sorrow in them and something more. Complicity, perhaps. “I know you very well. You might say we are brothers. You should be on your way if you want to reach the valley by sunset. Greet Lallin for me. Look after her well, Chilka. Take her to Shahan sometimes. She will like that.”

Chilka took one step away and then another. He was not afraid. Although he could not understand, he knew somewhere deep inside him that this man was his friend. “I will,” he replied haltingly, “if you say so.” Their eyes met, and suddenly they smiled at each other. Chilka turned away, but he had not gone far when the stranger called.

“Chilka!”

“Yes?”

“Tell Nenan I love him. He will understand.”

“Madman.” Chilka laughed under his breath and strode away whistling. Danarion watched him go. He knew what the Messenger had done, and he was full of wonder.

The Messenger did not tarry. Before Chilka was out of sight, it gathered up Danarion and raced across Shol. The Mountain of Mourning grew from a jumbled speck on the horizon to a towering breadth of rock with the entrance to the Gate a shadow at its foot. Swooping low, the Messenger went in. The Hall of Waiting was empty, the stars still sparking cold where Yarne stood. The Messenger flashed through, out into blackness, and Danarion, looking back, heard a great crash. His eyes found the Gate, a dwindling square of silver, and etched on its surface was Yarne's face, gazing out onto the universe with grave eyes and a slight smile, framed in waving silver hair. Above Danarion was the transparent column that had brought him to Shol. Then he had been awed but not afraid. Now he was terrified. That part of him that was Chilka and always would be cowered away from the silent immensity around him and longed for solid earth under its feet. Shol was a faint mist, soon lost to sight, and in its place Danarion saw a vague cloud of blackness that was blotting out the stars. He felt the Messenger quiver and fling itself faster into the void. The cloud began to coalesce. It acquired a shape and came speeding after them. The Unmaker. He had hoped that his angry words to the Messenger in the Hall had been a lie, but, they were not. His innocence, his wholeness, was gone. He was bringing a stain with him to Danar. Violence and deception, envy and hatred were all in him, in his essence, where Chilka's memories were shared. Danar would fall, and he would be the instrument of its change. It would not be a catastrophe, a thing of violence, though, like Shol's topple into ruin, but a slow change, a gradual tightening of time's grip, a slipping into the arbitrary. He would not think of it now. He forced himself to watch the Unmaker come. Around him the sky exploded, star merging into star as the Messenger's speed increased, but still the dark blot with the shape of a man clung to their fiery wake. The Messenger roared and suddenly slowed, and Danarion saw his own sun flash by. Then he was toppling toward Danar, a pinprick of reflected light, a white ball, a colored hemisphere, and the dearly familiar towers of his own palace careened to meet him.

There was a moment of confusion when he felt the Messenger toss him away, and he cried out and clutched at nothing. But soon he was lying across the black marble table in the council hall. Mild sunlight pooled across his hands. Shakily he pulled himself into a sitting position and sat staring at those hands, impossibly long-fingered, incredibly, limpidly golden. Above him birds fluttered in and out the clerestory windows, twittering. He pushed back his chair and rose, almost falling. He was so light. He felt he might float away if he let go of the edge of the table.

Close the Gate, Danarion.

He started. The Messenger was behind him, rose-red and glimmering. Danarion stared at it through the quiet, long room.

“Where is Janthis?” he said, his head feeling hollow. “Janthis!”

Close the Gate,
the Messenger repeated.
Hurry, or it will be too late.

Danarion remembered, and his heart constricted. Stumbling, he began to run. Down the room and along a passage, out onto the terrace where the corions yawned and cocked sharp eyes at him. He flung himself at the stair, leaped onto the arch that soared to the mouth of the Gate, and fled along the stone passageway. The Gate stood open. Danarion fell against the frame. Out where the stars should have been there was only the towering shape of the Unmaker, and an icy wind blew in through the Gate. Danarion did not pause to think but flung out his arms and shouted, “I close the Gate of Danar! I, sun-lord, command you to close. Your service is at an end. Henceforth neither Messenger nor Unmaker nor any created thing may enter here! Close! Close!”

With a ponderous slowness the Gate began to fill with smoke. Through the scented haze Danarion could see the enemy almost upon him, and he bit his lip to keep from screaming. The haze thickened, the heavy, sweet smell of flaming haeli seeds filling the space before the Gate, and then the whole area burst into red flame. For a moment it burned brightly, sending tongues of harmless flame and billowing sweet smoke into Danarion's face, and then it began to die, until only a glow remained. That too dimmed and went out, and Danarion found himself looking at a wall of gold upon which a thousand burning haeli seeds were spiraling to the ground. Reclining under them, its face lifted to receive their scent, was a golden corion with wings outspread. It is done, Danarion thought weakly. It is over. Danar is the last world to be sealed in upon itself.

He turned and went back the way he had come, one hand against the wall to support himself. He crossed the arch, climbed the stair, and spoke to the corions on the terrace, though afterward he did not remember what he had said to them. In the cool passages and ringing echoes of the palace Danarion searched for Janthis. He could not believe that he was not there. He had promised to wait. He called his name as he wandered from room to room among the bright gems and costly hangings, the flowing arches and tinkling fountains where the sun-people used to walk, but the city within a city gave him no sound but the tinkling water and quiet wind.

He went back to the council hall. Its floor was dark. No world was left to prick its light bravely up at him as he strode along behind the chairs drawn up to the shining black surface of the table. One beside another, the necklets lay in perfect symmetry, and he knew that they would rest so until the end of time. He stood on the dais, looking back down the hall. “Janthis!” he shouted. “Janthis, where are you?” There was no answer.

He left the palace and went out onto the steps. He enquired of the corions, but they could tell him nothing. They had not seen Janthis for a long time. Danarion went down into the Time-forest, scuffing through the carpet of leaves that always lay there, but now when he felt the mortal time rush to meet him, it embraced him as though he were one of its own children, and he slid into it with absentminded ease.

His small house had not changed. One window was open as he had left it. The grass was lush and springy under his feet as he crossed from the swinging gate to the door, and he entered with a feeling of utter unreality. He thought Janthis might have left a message for him here, but there was nothing. Next door he heard children laughing, and he went out again, his eyes searching for the little girl he had been talking with when Janthis's summons had come, but the children were strangers who paused in their play to stare at him with interest.

“I am looking for Tandil,” he said to them. “Is she at home today?”

One child with dark hair and large eyes came to the hedge. “Tandil was my grandmother,” she said politely. “She went through the Gate a long time ago. Who are you?”

“Oh, no one,” Danarion managed, turning away, and he found himself running, over his lawn, out his gate, along the path under the trees, not caring where he was going. In some quiet moment the child might search her memories and find her grandmother sitting on the knee of a stranger whose name was Danarion, he thought, and the thought brought him an unbearable hurt. I am not Danarion anymore.

He wandered over Danar as day followed long, sunlit day. He had no desire to go into his sun or to escape from himself. His eyes watched the people, and sometimes he would run after some mortal whose color of hair or straight walk made him think it might be Janthis, but it never was.

He walked in the empty places, too, where there were pools that reminded him of Chilka drinking avidly, and low mountains that he invested with height and valleys with rivers along whose banks small cottages clustered.

At last he stood again at the foot of the long stair that swept to the terrace. It was winter. The corions had gone to sleep their long sleep, and the pillars fronting the shadowed audience hall were nakedly empty. He climbed to them and faced out, his eyes traveling the forest, the silhouette of the city beyond, sharp against a blue sky, and the arch that led to a silent passage and a blind Gate. I lack, he whispered to himself. I lack, and I am lonely. I miss Chilka's mortality, the swift numbering of his days, the challenges, the choices for good or evil, the opportunities for heroism or baseness. Who would have thought that out of a disfigured, fallen world could rise such precious things? The perfection of the worlds before the Worldmaker became the Unmaker was a bland, tasteless state, as Danar seems to me now, stale in its changelessness, stifling in its orderedness. I am wounded, my immortality is decaying, and I embrace this wound, I welcome it. How much time has gone by on Shol? Is Chilka dead and Nenan gone from youth into old age? Yet Chilka will live on in me, a seed of ruin to Danar, and it is good. I am Chilka. I am Danarion. I am Chilka-Danarion, and I would not have it any other way.

He left the terrace and wended his way toward the council hall. No dust drifted in the empty rooms. Precious metals from the far corners of the universe gleamed as softly as ever. The stonework was as fresh and clean as it had been on the day it was set in place. He reached the hall and went up onto the dais and paused.

“Janthis,” he said. “What happened to you?”

A Messenger
took him away, Danarion.
The voice was quiet yet filled the hall with its presence. Danarion swung round. The door on the left stood open, and within the tiny room where Janthis used to peer into his mirror a white light burned.
Come in,
the voice went on. You
have nothing to fear.

But he did fear. It was not a fear of some terrible darkness but an awe that had fallen on him, and he went toward the light on trembling legs. Janthis's mirror-wall was blank and gray, but the opposite wall had vanished in an outpouring of splendor that dazzled him so that he had to avert his eyes.

“Who are you?” he choked, though suddenly he knew, and the voice woke rivers of joy in him.

You know who I am. I stand on the edge. I am outside time and beyond all space. For me there is no such thing as a beginning, for beginning and ending are one and the same. There is no future and no past. There is only an eternal now. I have been waiting for you to understand.

“Why did the Messenger take Janthis?” He knew he should not ask. He really did not want to, for he felt completely at peace, but his question was answered immediately, as though he had asked it of an equal.

Janthis surrendered himself to the Messenger because he had allowed corruption to enter Danar. It is the Law.

Janthis must have known, Danarion thought. Even as he was calling to me to come to him he must have been measuring the price he would pay for sending a sun-lord out onto a shadowed world, knowing that someone changed and maimed would return.

The day of the sun-lords is over, Danation,
the light went on.
The universe belongs now to the mortals. Sun-lords were part of the dawn, and it is now full morning. You have done well, all of you, against a terror that is stronger than anything but me. You do not yet recognize the fruit of your long battle, but you will. Your powers will be in healing that which is wounded.

“But it could have been different!” Danarion burst out, over-whelmed suddenly by the futility of all that lay behind him, the pain and change of what lay ahead.

The voice answered gently.
Yes, it could have been different. The hall behind you could still be full of sun-lords with the Worldmaker sitting smiling in his chair. The Gates could still be open, spilling life over the universe. You yourself could still be without the knowledge of pain. But that is not the way that was chosen.

“I did not make the choice,” Danarion whispered.

I know you did not. It will be remembered. Now go to the ledge by the window and bring the Book.

He could no more refuse the voice than he could refuse to breathe. He felt as though every desire had been fulfilled before he had felt it, every doubt and terror burned away. He went to the ledge and a book was there, its white cover gleaming, its silver lettering sparkling in the light that continued to flood the room and spill out to gild the bare branches of the trees far below. He picked it up and gave a low cry.

“This is the Book of What Will Be!”

Of course. Open it.