Stargate (28 page)

She rose and began to pace the hall, calling quietly for more light to chase the shadow's lurking in every corner. Janthis warned me not to dwell on the meaning of fear, but if I pretend that it is not there, I delude myself and cease to watch for the things that cause it. Am I falling prey to my own vigilance? Am I generating a cause for anxiety, creating in my mortals a ripeness for the Unmaker by the very intensity of my fear? Carefully she laid out in her mind the little knowledge of changes on Shol she had gleaned and attempted to laugh at herself, as she saw only the vaguest of threats. She shouted for more light, and more, until the whole long room blazed with a blinding torrent of sun, but she walked slowly at the center, cold and full of dread, and was not comforted.

It seemed to her that the mists of unease that had dogged her down all the long centuries were at last coalescing into an ominous shape that as yet she could not recognize. Coming to a halt by the open door of her chamber, she found her fingers closing on the sun-disc hanging lightly on her breast. The urge to run away took hold of her, as it so often did. She wanted to fling the necklet to the floor and race from the palace, from the bell-haunted city, and disappear into the mountains, leaving the endless, useless defense of Shol to someone else. For an age she struggled with a desire for flight that she knew came filtering through the Gate as a command to surrender, but the moment of testing passed, and she was able to walk through the door unscathed.

Sholia left the palace gladly, hoping that mere physical distance could free her from the silent, invisible monster that waited in every room. She felt totally vulnerable, as though, unnoticed, something had been stripping her of the shields of immortality and power until she was little better than the mortals around her, and they saw it and rushed to pull her down.

She drew her light around her and stepped from the terrace stair onto the brittle coldness of winter grass, walking quickly away. The high lamps on the Towers of Peace glinted far away on the edge of the plain, and she made her way toward them, looking over her shoulder now and then to the dark, rock-gripped facade of the palace, where windows like mouths spat light at her with spiteful contempt. I cannot go back there! she thought. I must go into the suns, I must think. She came to the nearest Tower, built below the level of the plain and joined to it by narrow stone walkways built to span the gulf between, and here she paused to greet the men who walked the parapets and had seen her light gliding to them over the plain. Then she made her way to the gate and stood by it, looking down upon the city.

Shaban was restless. Few lights showed, but a thousand mutterings and sighings rose to her, mingling with the bells, whose own music sounded harsh and hostile. It seemed to her that the streets were full of a stealthy, furtive coming and going that she could only glimpse out of the corner of her eye, for each time she turned her full attention to a steep, dark street, there was only emptiness and a drowsy moaning of night airs. She called to one of her suns, and briefly it illumined the upper tier of the city, but under its midday glow Shaban was innocent and secure, and she dismissed it curtly. She turned away, but now the same threat of something twisted was at her back and seemed to follow her as she set out across the plain once more. Shol has cast me out, she thought, appalled. Without a hint of impending change she has turned to stand against me instead of with me. How did he do it? She halted in the middle of the plain, a tiny candle of wavering light, and an overpowering impulse to close her Gate rushed through her. She wanted to have done with it all, to be finished so that no one could demand from her those things she was no longer able to fulfill. She began to run, skirting the palace steps, brushing by the potted shrubs at their foot, and came to the outer door of the Hall of Waiting. She sped through it, then halted. A woman stood opposite her by the Gate, head sunk on her breast, arms limp at her sides. Sholia did not recognize her, for her brown hair spilled over her face and hid it, but she could see that she was slim and wore blue gems on her fingers. Past her, framed cleanly by the Gate, the blackness of deep space swirled around the clusters of the constellations, and the eternal silence of the universe breathed a stillness into the empty Hall. The woman did not look up, and Sholia went to her.

“Who are you?” she asked firmly. “Are you going out to Shon or Sumel, or have you come from one of them?” There was no answer. The head remained drooped on the blue gown, and the hands did not stir. Finally Sholia spoke a word of command, and slowly, smoothly, the head rose and the hair fell back. It was a city dweller whose name Sholia did not know, but the face staring back at her bore little resemblance to the smiling mouth and darting eyes she had seen under the trees with her children. Now the mouth was slack and slightly parted, the lips dry from the breath passing evenly over them. The eyes gazed dully ahead, and the large pupils did not respond to the flow of light as Sholia passed a hand in front of them. She repeated her questions, but there was no response. Then she bent and lifted a hand that rested limply in hers. Taking the palm, she pressed the fingers of her own hand against the woman's pale fingertips.

As she began to feel for the roots of this odd trance she was surrounded by a dense white fog. Streamers of it touched her mind lightly and with a damp coolness. Then she realized that the fog was a dense cloud cover, and she was speeding down through it, for the streamers broke, the fog creamed back over her shoulders, and she found herself high over earth, looking down upon two valleys full of gray light, a serried range of crags between them. Above her the clouds formed a solid, low roof of rain-burdened heaviness untroubled by any breeze. But wind hissed in her ears and pressed steadily against her forehead, for she was flying. The rustle of her wings came to her clearly, and she could feel the ripple of movement under the skin of her back. With the rhythmic flexing of her muscles a sense of fulfillment and contentment warmed her, and she happily scanned the lush green, rolling panorama beneath, glimpsing through the woman's lazy thoughts a cave mouth set high on a crag, a fire within, and food to prepare. As the woman checked her flight and began to angle down toward the sharp teeth of the range the rain began, cool and gentle, pattering audibly on her wings and striking her face. Sholia watched the country below rise slowly to meet her, and as the horizon became sliced by rock half-hidden in misty cloud a nagging sense of familiarity started in her. She had been here before. She had seen these valleys, not from the air, yet from some high place. As the woman swerved to hover upright and the mountains also suddenly became perpendicular, she found her eyes drawn to one isolated, rough peak thrusting from the earth, slit from the tip to halfway down its broken, sheer slope by a thin, soaring arch now blurred by the quickening rainfall.

Then she knew. Ghaka! She had often stood on the lip of the arch, Ghakazian's hall behind her and he himself beside her, looking out over the awesome grandeur of Ghaka's landscape. She did not stay to see more. With heart thudding and the intimation of some terrible mystery churning through her thoughts, she pulled out of the woman, releasing her hand and stepping away from her. The fingers collapsed to swing briefly against the blue gown, and the eyes continued to stare ahead, unblinking. No Sholan has ever been on Ghaka, Sholia pondered furiously, not even in the beginning. There can be no memory of such a visit hidden in any mind under my suns. The Gate of Ghaka is now closed, and Ghaka is a dying world; therefore what I saw, the trance this Sholan is living, belongs to the past, and not to Shol's past, but to Ghaka's. She is an alien, a Ghakan on Shol.

Then the truth burst upon her. A Ghakan on Shol in a Sholan body. The mystery of Rilla, the unspoken breath of threat and complicity, resolved into a shape of horror with yet another, darker mystery behind it. Once more Sholia placed herself in the woman's mind and for a second was standing inside a cave, eyes on the warm flames of a fire while the mouth of the dwelling was obscured by a thrumming pall of water. Then she wrapped her own essence around the woman's and uttered a firm order. The woman quivered and cried out in pain, but Sholia spoke again, heedless of her outrage, and holding the Sholan's mind steadily under her control, she forced it back to the Hall of Waiting and faced the woman, whose face had gone suddenly very white and whose lip was now caught between strong teeth.

“Let me go!” she hissed, the eyes no longer blank but full of fear and hatred. “I hurt!”

“Who are you?” Sholia demanded, and the woman squirmed, the hands clenched into fists. “Answer me!”

“Release me,” the other begged through gritted teeth. “I am in agony, sun-lord.”

“I will burn away all memory unless you answer me,” Sholia said levelly, the sun-discs blazing white and searing hot. “I will make a shell of you, an unfilled emptiness. How did you come to Shol?”

Sweat stood out on the woman's face, dampening her hair, but even as she tightened her grip on the foreign essence within this lissome body Sholia felt a tremor of craft and slyness ripple through it.

“If you torment me further,” the voice grated back, “I will tear into
her
essence. You are forbidden to harm your mortals in any way, I know that, Sholia, so let me go!”

A fierce wrath fumed up in Sholia, driving out every hesitation, and she drew herself up in a burst of energy. “You dare to speak to me in that way!” she shouted, the deep, vibrant tones booming to the ceiling. “The Law gives me all power over you, for you are on Shol without leave.” She flung out her arms, and light exploded from her fingertips and splintered with a roar against the far walls. “I will consume you, Ghakan, I will plant a fire of torture in you that will never go out!” Her body had thinned and now poured heat and sun fire into the room. Her face had lost the softness of a mortal woman's and had become all bright bones under a skin like a molded sheet of incandescence, all fiery eyes.

The woman screamed and fell back, scrabbling against the side of the Gate, one hand shielding her face, but the Ghakan who squirmed in the sun-lord's grip was desperate. “Harm her and you will fall! You will fall!” it wailed shrilly.

Sholia paused.
You will fall.
Yes, it is true, she thought, the anger giving place to an anguished defeat. And if I fall, Shol is finished. “I will rip you from her body,” she yelled in frustration, but already her hold had loosened, and the Ghakan turned and leered at her.

“You cannot take me from this body without killing,” it sneered. “Kill her, take me from her, destroy me, then what will you do with her naked essence? Tell it how sorry you are?”

Sholia released the brutal fingers of her mind, and she heard the Ghakan essence laughing as it ran back behind the Sholan's.

The woman put both hands to her face and turned confused eyes to Sholia. “Sun-lord?” she whispered. Her hands fell, and she smiled faintly. “Oh, I remember now. I was going to Sumel for a little while. Why was I going there?”

“Go back to the city, go home,” Sholia answered wearily. “The night is almost spent, and you need rest.”

The woman turned obediently to the outer door, but not without a wistful glance through the Gate where the stars wheeled and flamed. “I was going somewhere,” she ended lamely. “I do not want to rest. I do not like to dream anymore.” Then she was gone, head hanging.

Sholia did not wait. Stepping up onto the Gate's narrow floor, she ran three steps and fell into the corridor shouting to Danar's sun to carry her. She emerged from Danar's airy Gate tunnel and paused for a moment. Dusk was deepening into a warm twilight. The haeli forest lifted its branches under the weight of a calm gloom. Resolutely, stilling the fever of haste in her feet, she took the stone walkway which brought her to the middle of the stair and climbed quickly. She reached the marbled flagstones of the cloister and, nodding to the immobile corions, went inside.

The passages were quiet. She paced them steadily and came at last to the chamber where only two systems pricked in the black immensity of the polished floor, Shol and Danar, winking up at her with a gallant courage as she crossed under the high dome. She ran lightly up onto the dais, swept past the dull gleam of the sun hanging on the wall, and knocked on Janthis's small door.

He opened immediately and welcomed her courteously, yet behind the soft words she sensed surprise. She did not consider how her fire still rippled, agitated, beneath her skin, and the furious burning in her eyes that had been lit by anger was still not subdued by the hard quelling of it. Janthis followed her into the room.

“Well, Sholia,” he said as she turned to face him. “Why have you come to Danar?”

She did not hesitate. “Shol is slipping from my grasp,” she snapped. “I don't know how or why. You must help me quickly.”

He looked at her reflectively for a time and then responded, “Tell me.”

She did so rapidly, putting together all the hints that had curled just out of reach of her consciousness, and she did not falter until she spoke of the woman by the Gate. Then her hands touched each other in a gesture he had come to recognize as uniquely hers. “It was an essence from Ghaka, I know. I flew the valleys, I saw the slit darkness of Ghakazian's door!” Agitation caused her to turn and pace to the wide bay window, and she stood gazing down into the sun-ball where it lay black and inert on the sill. “I cannot take the thread of that essence and feel my way from Shol to Ghaka. How did it come to Shol, and why? I almost lost myself, Janthis, I almost forced the essence into oblivion because of my fear and anger.”

Fear, Janthis thought. It is always Sholia who must be fed courage with stirring words. It has made her vulnerable, eaten away at her strength. Has it eaten into her mind, also? Is she slipping into the fire by her own eagerness to hold it at bay? He walked to her and, taking her shoulders, led her to one of the gray, unadorned walls.