Beneath an Opal Moon (36 page)

Then the diablura canted over at an acute angle and began to fall. It plummeted out of the sky with appalling swiftness. It crashed once, twice against the mountainside. The third time, Moichi was thrown loose, tumbling head over heels.

He flung himself outward, using the length of his body, and reached for the lip of the ledge. He hung there, swinging with heavy momentum, back and forth, his nails digging in as he began to slip, feeling behind him his back crawling with sensation. The night air was reverberating with the frantic death throes of the diablura, still moving, juddering galvanically, spastically fluttering like an impaled butterfly as it careened away, down and down the mountainside, spiraling lower and lower, as if, even in death, it was reluctant to relinquish its reign over the air.

He took a deep breath and swung himself upward, his right leg lifting to catch the upper edge of rock. Missed. Tried it again and made it this time, levered himself up onto the ledge.

Stayed there for a long moment, gasping, until he remembered Sardonyx and the Firemask. He had to roll onto his left side to get up, his wounded shoulder aggravated by the enormous strain. He saw Sardonyx standing before the mouth of the cave. Why had she not gone in? He went toward her.

There was the sound of hammers clashing onto ten thousand anvils, the chittering of a cloud of locusts, the resounding of great rams' horns, the sizzle of flames against bloody meat, the dancing of dust motes, the trumpeting of elephants, the crackle and rumble of an electrical storm, echoes upon echoes upon echoes.

And a heat fiercer than the sun.

He reeled. Someone grasped him, pulling insistently until he moved, his feet like lead, and then he was away from the cave's mouth, gasping for breath, his lungs on fire, his eyes watering, his brain besieged as if by crawling insects.

Sardonyx, face covered by the mirrored monstrosity of the Firemask, held on to him. “How could you be so stupid?” she said softly. “Another moment and you would have been killed.”

He stared at her, fighting to regain his breath. After a time, he said, “I do not understand you.”

She patted his arm. “What's to understand? I told you I liked you.”

“I must be going mad.”

“That won't solve anything.”

“Take off that thing.”

She reached up and unsealed it. “I might as well; I cannot get it to work.”

He saw the woman with the dusky skin and night-black hair.

He stood between her and the cave's mouth.

“I don't know what's wrong with it,” she said, looking down at the thing, turning it over and over. On its reverse face, he saw, it was a matte black, deeper than the night. “It offers no protection now.”

“Too old, perhaps,” he said. “All the magic's gone.” He looked at her. “But if that is all—”

“It's not all, of course.” She was still trying to find the key. The opal moonlight flashed against the mask's outward face for an instant, turnlarge rural school with its smell of pine tar and beeswax and cherry wood. He was too young yet to ride the family's land, as his father would one day decree, uprooting him from school and substituting a tutor. Heard the instructor's voice droning away as if from a great distance, his voice, too, like the buzzing of drowsy insects. All in a mist now like the pearled dawn, the silver night, the golden noon, the amethyst dusk, one foot in front of the other, hearing the moaning of the tides, the gnashing of langoustes' claws along the seabed, the stiff rustle of dragonfly wings, the soft sibilance of a forest breathing, standing on a hillock with the sky hanging over him marbled in white and blue and gray streaks, turning northeast from his vantage point, the highest on his land, shading his eyes against the sun, searching for the low sprawl of Alara'at and, beyond, the silver splash of the beckoning sea, green in the troughs where the sun didn't dance like diamonds off its surface. Oh, my sea, my sea! Walking forward, ascending now into the mountains with the fear of God within him, his limbs trembling, his body shaking, his bladder about to burst, falling down upon his knees as he beheld … A peace filling him at last as the ship set sail from the port of Alara'at, taking him from Iskael. The figure of his father as tiny as an insect, standing on the pier. Are you crying, Father? On the sea, at last, the sea which had sustained him through all the long arduous days and nights. Not all of them, for he thought of the times running triumphant and laughing through the apple orchards with Sanda on his shoulders, rolling upon the soft ground, shinnying up the trunks, shaking the branches so that the ripe fruit fell upon their heads, all about them in a shower, or, in another season, walking with her amidst the trees filled with clouds of white and pale pink blossoms slowly drifting through the air, dusting their hair and clothes, coating the grass and the earth like a mattress from heaven. Turning away from the land, turning away from Sanda and the lush orchards which would never see him now, not this year, nor the next, nor …

He steps downward and finds himself on solid ground at last, a kind of promontory in the mist that is no mist at all. Echoes still crashing like surf upon his mind, the images out of time, eddies from, he is quite certain now, the Eye of Time, lapping at him, increasing in intensity as he approaches.

He sees before him a swirling vortex, coalescing, dividing, reproducing, fissioning. A great iris. Neither open nor closed. Couched. Waiting.

The Eye of Time.

The portal into endless yesterdays and unlimited tomorrows.

Now he is inescapably drawn toward it, volition draining out of him. Hypnotized by the incipient openings and closings, almost, but not quite, stopping frustratingly short of completion.

Shapes changing forming twisting spiraling sucking lapping churned by a force so elemental that it could have no name for the concept of language that superseded it, could only be expressed in the complex symbology of the mind. Directly.

The sounds change subtly, suddenly, so that they beat upon his eardrums most painfully even through the protection of the Firemask. He claps his fists to his ears but there is no change, only now the sounds cease to be painful and an ecstasy such as he has never known permeates him, a heat, a fusion, an excitement he can only relate to sexually, though even that seems a pitifully inadequate comparison. His hands reach out as he closes in on the vortex, drugged and exhilarated, and, as he approaches, another sound cuts through the others: a tone. Trembling fingers almost at the tensile barrier about to caress it as a lover might and the Eye of Time begins to iris-open, revealing—

No!

From somewhere deep inside him, so deep that the sounds of the vortex have not penetrated, a voice of reason cries out. Use it! it cries. Use the Firemask!

At first he does not comprehend and he is so close to the kinetic framework that perhaps it has become impossible to understand.

He halts his motion, pushed onward by some unseen but heard tide of immeasurable force, and it feels to him as if he is attempting to hold back the spin of the world.

Think!

Use it! Now!

He concentrates. It starts in the brain, aflame with the true music of the spheres, pushed outward through his eyes.

And now it comes.

The stored energy of the opal moonlight, directed by him. Through the skin of the Firemask it rumbles and flashes like spot lightning. The heat builds just as it did outside on the shale ledge so far away.

Crackle-boom of thunder.

His face is on fire.

Light of a cosmic beacon.

Energy pouring forth, and for the first time he sees the truth of the vortex, its ultimate sinister nature, and like a surgeon he carefully sutures up the rent in time. Slowly, slowly, with infinite deliberation, sweating with the whole outpouring of sizzling energy, concentrated and focused—until, at length, it is done.

He relaxes and the vibrations begin, explosions building, and he knows that the moonlight energy has built up too far and threatens to run amok. He bears down, his entire body trembling with the effort, and he damps down on the field. Slowly, ever so slowly, the heat recedes from the Firemask, from his face, and, stumbling, he turns away from the dense, intense quietude.

Running, running now out of the cave, out of the silence and into the star spangled night.

FOUR:

Lion in the Dusk

Idyll

THE FIRST THING HE saw was that she was gone.

He reached up convulsively to pull the Firemask away from his flesh but his fingers came away coated in a dull gray powder. All that was left.

He went quickly along the ledge but there was no trace of Sardonyx. Chiisai sat, her back propped up against the mountainside. She had managed to shred the lower half of her shirt into strips and wind them around her wounded shoulder.

She stood up when she saw him, smiling as he came wearily toward her.

“It's over,” he said, his voice sounding odd to his ears.

She handed him his sword and they went down off the ledge, winding down the mountain.

He told her briefly and as best he could what had happened. “Did you see Sardonyx?” he asked her.

Chiisai shook her head. “She must have been gone before I awakened. I did not see her.”

The luma were waiting patiently for them at the foot of the mountain, contentedly cropping grass. They mounted and, as they prepared to go, he took one look back, wondering what seemed to be missing. The carcass of the diablura was nowhere to be seen. Surely he had seen it tumble over the side of the ledge.

Mistral loomed ahead of them and now he was anxious to get Aufeya and leave this land far behind him.

All was quiet as they reined in in the courtyard, but as he dismounted they heard a rumble from high above them and, peering upward, saw a section of the wall of a high turret shatter, stone and masonry gouting outward, hailing down.

Moichi ducked through the falling rubble, ran through the doorway into the main hall. He took the spiderweb staircase three steps at a time, calling, “Aufeya!”

Another quake shook the castle and he thought, God, the whole place is breaking up. Dust filled the vault of the immense atrium and the walls were trembling.

He raced upward, at last gaining the top—and found Aufeya where they had left her. Still pale, she looked somewhat recovered from her ordeal. He bent and scooped her up, sprinting for the stairs just as the chamber next to hers imploded. Choking dust billowed out with a scream of demons.

The chill north wind now howled dissonantly through the splintering architecture. On the second landing, part of the outside wall ballooned outward and the door to the jewel room ripped open. The chamber was empty save for the squat lamp.

Into the main hall, and he felt the structure itself shudder and he leapt through the doorway. Outside, Chiisai had his luma ready. He thrust Aufeya up onto the saddle. The entire front wall of Mistral began to cave inward. Stone flashed by them with the buzz of angry bees.

Moichi leapt up behind Aufeya and they were off, speeding through the shattered portcullis, jumping over the strewn rubble.

Behind them, Mistral rent itself, a funeral pyre rising into the night sky, obscuring for a time the bloody horned moon.

On the way south, she whispered it all in his ear, ridding herself of the terror she had lived with for so long a time. “I became other people. At first, they were people I knew or had known, then they turned unfamiliar, becoming stranger and stranger, distant and—hostile. That was bad enough and, foolishly, I thought I could endure anything but that. But it was worse when it stopped, because I became all manner of animals, with minds as dull and syrupy as mud. I tried to think and could not. Then reptiles, by turns lethargic and energetic, like some monstrous manic-depressive, for when my reptile mind could function, all it thought of was food to fill the vast stomach, a killing urge that was impossible to ignore. Then the insects, my brain buzzing with a thousand sights and scents, making up for deficiencies in other senses. I tried to think but there was too much interference. And then I was a fish, placidly swimming with nothing on my mind. Who was I? There seemed to be nothing left. Was I truly a fish? Or perhaps a bird, or another animal or—The human me was gone and I felt the loss all the more terrifyingly because I could not remember what it was I had been. I was not even a serpent dreaming of being human. Even that small thing was now denied me.

“I screamed then and went on screaming until Sardonyx came for me, scooping me out of the water. That is when I told her what she wanted to know,” she said against his ear. “And you know the really odd thing? I'm not sorry. I wanted my humanity back. Whatever the price had been, I would have paid it. Gladly.”

Moichi understood her all too well and could not find it in himself to blame her.

“Tell me,” she said, “what happened beneath the opal moon.”

So he told her all that had transpired. She seemed the most fascinated by what had taken place in the cave of time and he was happy to elaborate, feeling that it was taking her out of her own memories for a while.

He felt her lips open against the soft flesh of his neck as he spoke, the licking of her tongue, inquisitive and naive as a child's, licking the salty sweat; and, with that, all his fear and anxiety for her safety dissipated, as if with this simple gesture, she had freed him as well as herself from the enslavement of pity.

He made certain that they took their time on the way back. Not that he did not have a desire to return to Corruña and, thence, to Sha'angh'sei, but they were, all three, like the walking wounded and he deemed it more prudent that they not expend their last reserves of energy on a hard ride but rather gain strength through a leisurely journey. He did not, perhaps, think consciously of the fact that he wished to be with Aufeya, knowing instinctively that when they arrived in Corruña they would have to say good-bye.

But Chiisai knew and, during the endless afternoons—they traveled only in the still coolness of the morning and the slanting, diffuse sunlight of the last of the day—while they rested, she would wander off under one pretext or another, leaving them alone. Most often, she would explore the ruins of past civilizations which dotted the countryside.