Empire (47 page)

For if all was as it seemed, they had been here, in the temple, for at least ten great cycles: twenty-five years or more, as measured by the human calendar.

As he turned to the priestess, to ask her what magic this was, his skin prickled with a knowing sensation that had been cultivated in him for many years, but that suddenly seemed so much more powerful than he had ever known. It was a sense of premonition and understanding that existed independent of its subject, as if he were able to grasp the plot of a book without ever actually having read it. The sensation told him that they were not alone. In the darkness that fell like a velvet curtain just beyond the dais, Reza could see shadows of regular outline. Occasional glimmers of gold and platinum and ruby caught his eye, and he instantly recognized the pendants that hung from around the necks of the phantoms arrayed beyond the glowing amber light thrown down upon the dais from high above. As he became more accustomed to them, they became more real, their existence more of substance than imagination. In only a few moments, he saw them – all of them – clearly in his mind, even while his eyes were still blind in the darkness. Thousands, tens of thousands of them were gathered around, kneeling, waiting. Reza instinctively understood what – whom – he was seeing. These were the spirits of the Ancient Ones who had once bound themselves in blood to this place, those who wore the peculiar rune that adorned Tesh-Dar’s collar, and who had died fulfilling Her will on the long journey that was the Way of the Empire.

“It is time, my children,” Tesh-Dar whispered.

As if with a will of their own, Reza’s hands extended outward, palms up, to Tesh-Dar.

Esah-Zhurah did the same, a look of serene anticipation on her face. Like Reza, she was aware that much time had passed in what seemed like the blink of an eye. But she also knew that she was ready, although for what, she did not quite remember, nor did she care to try. It had been a dream time, when great secrets had been revealed, and many Challenges fought, but which the conscious mind was not yet prepared to recall. It would take time to learn, she knew. Time to understand, to become something new…

Tesh-Dar held aloft a knife whose blade bore the markings of the First Empress in the Old Tongue. Reza’s eyes widened at the knowledge that he understood what the symbols meant: during the years they seemed to have lost, he had been taught that arcane but revered language, and could only guess at what other knowledge now lay hidden in his mind.

“In the name of The One Who first blessed us,” Tesh-Dar was saying, “and All Who have come after, do we accept Thee,” Tesh-Dar intoned in the Old Tongue, its lilt and measure pleasing to Reza’s ears. She drew the knife across each of Reza’s palms, then Esah-Zhurah’s. Finally, she forced the blade into her own palms before placing the knife into a waiting hand that had appeared from the darkness, and that vanished as mysteriously as it had come.

The three of them joined hands, and Reza felt an electric surge flow through him, a fierce tingling sensation – much like what he had experienced with Esah-Zhurah when they had shared blood, but so much stronger – pulsing up his arms in fiery waves.

As he watched Tesh-Dar’s face, he felt the dais tremble, and suddenly its center seemed to drop away to infinity, leaving behind a circular abyss that stared at them like a sightless eye. The trembling continued, and suddenly a circular pillar began to rise from the abyss before him, within the triangle formed by their outstretched arms and joined hands. Slowly, as if its weight was an enormous burden for whatever force propelled it, the pillar arose from the pit, stopping as it reached the level of Reza’s eyes. Beneath them, the trembling ceased.

The tingling in Reza’s arms had become almost painful now, as if jolts of energy were striking his nerves like tiny, ferocious needles. Reza looked at Esah-Zhurah, wondering if it was having the same effect upon her.

But Esah-Zhurah’s attention was focused on something far above, and Reza followed her openmouthed stare toward the dome’s dark ceiling. A pinpoint of electric blue fire was hurtling down at them like a comet, and Reza knew that it was coming from much farther away than the ancient dome’s ceiling could have allowed. He suddenly felt heat upon his face, and knew that the shooting star was about to strike. He tried to cover his face with his hands, but they were beyond his control, locked in a clasp of bonding that was unbreakable by any mere physical force. As the heat became unbearable, and his ears were about to burst from the hellish roaring, Reza opened his mouth to scream–

There it sat, cupped by the precisely made hollow in the top of the extended pillar. Reza stared at the glowing gem, the scream caught in his throat. Slightly larger than his own head, it was shaped roughly like a teardrop, and glowed like a blue flame. Gradually, he became aware of Esah-Zhurah and the priestess. The three of them still held hands. The circle had not been broken.

“In Her light are all things purified, are all things made new,” the priestess said, looking first at Reza, then Esah-Zhurah. “And so shall it be this day, my children.” She looked upward, and Reza saw that there was now a circular opening in the dome above them, and that streaks of sunlight pierced the darkness of the great arena to form a circle of light just to one side of the dais. “When the light of Her sun strikes the Crystal of Souls, we shall be changed forever. Much pain shall you bear, for what cleanses best of all is fire, and Her fire shall blaze within every cell of your body. Death may come; there is no guarantee of life. But if life finds you afterward, forever changed shall you be in body and soul, crafted to Her will. The strength of ten and talons of ebony did I inherit many cycles ago, when I endured the pain of the crystal. The wonders of The Change are impossible to predict, but I wish no lesser gifts for you, my children. For when you again awaken, you shall be the standard-bearers of the Desh-Ka, and it shall be my honor to teach and serve you for the remainder of my days.” She looked at the rapidly advancing pool of light, focused by the great dome as if it was a magnifying glass, now just touching the crystal’s sparkling facets. “Soon, now, the Crystal of Souls shall shine. Do not avert your eyes from its fire, do not cry out in pain from the touch of its light, or death will take you swiftly. For in its light lies Her light. In its fire lies Her touch. So has it ever been, so shall it always be. In Her name, let it be so.”

The sunlight rapidly swept over the dais toward the crystal. Reza watched, fascinated, as the light seemed to be drawn into the enormous gem; the pool of light that had existed only a moment ago beside the dais had now become a cone focused precisely on the crystal. The hair on the nape of his neck stood to attention, and he felt as if he were standing on a spot about to be struck by lightning. The electric pulses through his joined palms were suddenly overshadowed by a charge that seemed ready to strike his entire body.

And then the crystal exploded with a light that first consumed the pillar on which it stood, a blazing cyan cone that slowly swept upward and outward toward the three joined warriors surrounding it, filling the air with the smell of scorched stone and ozone.

Reza watched as the blue flame crept toward him, eating up the stone floor that separated the light from his knees. The desire to flee was tremendous, but one look into Esah-Zhurah’s eyes was all he needed to redouble his courage. She needed him, needed his courage in addition to her own. They needed each other. Forcing himself to be strong, he gripped her hand tighter and held his eyes steadily on the advancing fan of light.

When it touched him, it was all he could do to keep from screaming. Never had he felt such searing agony as when the light crept upon his knees. He felt as if every cell in the flesh touched by it was exploding into flame. Tears flooded from his eyes, but his mouth remained clamped shut, his voice still. Beside him, Esah-Zhurah and Tesh-Dar also fought against writhing in the pain that was enveloping them, and all three of them used all the control they had ever mastered to keep their eyes upon the blazing crystal.

Faster and faster did the light sweep upward over their bodies, consuming them with the agony of burning flesh. Reza felt himself toppling over the edge of sanity, the light having consumed his body below his neck like a ravenous predator. As his bulging eyes fixed one last time upon the crystal, his last conscious effort to follow Tesh-Dar’s command, the flame swept over them, and the world disappeared in an explosion of cyan.

* * *

Somewhere, deep in the infinite labyrinth of neurons, an electrochemical impulse burst across the chasm that was the synapse. The command instruction that it evoked followed a journey that would take it far from its birthplace. Slowly, very slowly, more synapses began to fire, discharging their energy in the infinite darkness of the surrounding tissue, carrying their messages into the unknown wilderness.

Far away, after traveling a lifetime, the first impulse was received by a receptor that decoded the messenger’s instruction and issued a command of its own. Nearby, a muscle fiber twitched feverishly, contracting as hard as it could, the only way it understood to respond to the nerve’s command.

More nerves in the area received the frenzied, sporadic impulses from the Command Center, immediately issuing their own instructions to their subordinate muscle fibers. Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of the tiny fibers were called to action by the desperate rain of impulses from the Command Center, ordering the muscles around them to contract…
contract
…

A finger twitched. The effort had been Herculean, temporarily exhausting many fibers, damaging a few. But the Command Center was not content with such sacrifices; it demanded more. The darkest recesses of the entity that controlled all within its Universe were slowly alighting. A cascade of impulses exploded along the neural pathways that led away to its lieutenants, associates in life whom it controlled and brought to its will, but who in turn kept it alive in a miraculous symbiosis. Millions upon millions of messages were encoded and dispatched, received and decoded. Slowly did the Command Center come to grips with the status of its domain, and as new information was received, more messengers were sent forth: more commands, more demands for information. The Command Center was not the least bit hesitant to use the authority granted it by nature, and it had an insatiable appetite for information.

Over and over was the cycle repeated, and gradually, within the lifetimes of only a few million of the cells under its unquestioned authority, the Command Center was satisfied that all was prepared for the next step on its programmatic cycle. Under a barrage of impulses, the great gathering of special muscle fibers that was the heart contracted, then released. Another barrage of impulses was rewarded with a second beat, then a third. As the heart warmed to its work, the Command Center allocated the supervision of this most vital of tasks to a subaltern within itself. Thus, it freed the remainder of its resources to concentrate on reviving the many other organs of The Body.

It would be some time yet before the Command Center would begin to apportion effort to analyze the unaccustomed condition from which it had recently emerged. In its haste to make The Body serviceable again, it did not notice, nor pause to contemplate, the changes that had taken place within the living quilt of its domain.

In the meantime, Reza began to breathe.

* * *

“Reza.”

He blinked, then opened his eyes fully. Tesh-Dar’s face was close to his, her hands on his shoulders.

“Yes, priestess,” he murmured. His face tingled, the muscles tight as if he had been forced to hold a smile for several hours on end. The rest of his body was the same, tingling and burning at the same time, his nerves feeling as if someone had tried to electrocute him. And had very nearly succeeded.

Looking up at Tesh-Dar, he saw the traces of a similar level of discomfort. Her eyes, normally clear and sharp as silver-flecked diamonds, wore a glassy cast that made them look almost hazy, slightly opaque.

“Esah-Zhurah?” he asked, allowing Tesh-Dar to help him to his knees. Neither his balance nor hers would allow them to stand up all the way.

“I do not know,” she breathed, winded from the effort. Her hands trembled as they touched him. Together, they crawled around the pillar, empty now of the strange blue crystal, to find Esah-Zhurah sprawled upon the far side of the dais.

“Esah-Zhurah?” Reza called her name several times with mounting urgency as he cradled her head in his hands. He felt behind her ear for a pulse, but his own fingers betrayed him: his sense of touch was still virtually useless. He fumbled with her breastplate, trying to get it off so he could listen to her heart. His fingers turned black with the carbon of the scorched metal and burned leatherite, both so resilient that only the heat of white-hot coals could affect them. Out of frustration he simply tore the plate from its weakened bindings, brute strength prevailing where simple procedure had failed. He brushed the remnants of the undergarment – like the armor, burned to ashes – to find her skin unmarred, pristine, without a single scar of the many combats she had fought. Kneeling down, he put his ear to her breast and listened intently. After a terrifying moment of silence, he was granted with a slow
lub-dub
. Then another. And another. “Her heart beats,” he whispered. And as he did, her chest rose gently as her lungs pulled in a shallow draught of air. “She is alive.”

Only then did he notice what had become of the collar she wore. In its center, over her throat, was affixed one of the sparkling eyestones they had taken from the genoth they had killed. The scale had been meticulously polished and shaped into a precise oval. And on its face was carved the ancient rune of the Desh-Ka. He felt his own throat, and his numbed fingers told him enough to know that he wore the stone’s companion.