Stargate (3 page)

Ixelion wanted to ask her what the treasure was, and suddenly his mind was inflamed with a desire to see it for himself, but he recognized the desire as a foreign emotion, imposed on him by the dark power that now flooded Fallan and wished to drown him also. He had no difficulty in extinguishing it. I am whole, he said to himself. Ixel is whole. We will stay that way forever. He walked around to face her and offered her his hand, but she looked up at him, pleading.

“Once more, Ixelion, I beg you. Come back with me to the days when you and I would sit together before my hall while the riders wheeled below us and the wind smelled of new growth.” He would have liked to visit her again in those times, unchanged and beautiful, but he shook his head, reaching down and pulling her to her feet.

“No, Falia,” he said roughly. “Time on Fallan is in the hands of the Unmaker now. It has become a trap, an invitation to illusion, as you well know. The members of the council are waiting for you by the Gate, and you have a decision to make. We must go now.”

She did not protest again but picked up the box, rose without another word, and led the way out of the icy chamber. Down the stairs, through a hall which opened out into another wide chamber, she glided before him, cleaving the darkness with her silver hair, still faintly burnished by her sun's waning light. He caught up with her as she crossed the last cavernous hall, where her riders used to prance, where in the nights she used to borrow light and heat from her sun and fill the airy space with joy, and together they came at last to the pair of arches, and the gray stairs, and the long plain beyond. She went out under the arches, turned, and touched the ground beneath them three times. “The seal is broken,” she said softly under her breath. “Let mortals walk here again without fear. The chambers are empty.”

Ixelion saw that when she rose, she could not straighten. He was swallowed in pity mingled with horror at the inexorable rush of aging taking place in her, as though all the splendor that should have been hers forever had lost substance and become nothing more than a moment of dream.

Halfway down the stair she sank onto the stone. “I must rest for a while, Ixelion,” she begged. “There is a weight within me. I cannot carry it.” Wordlessly he sat also, putting his arms around her, closing his eyes so that he might not see, shutting out the hostility around him, which grew more tangible with every passing second. He felt them also, the seconds, falling delicately against him like blown feathers, drifting around him, seeking a way to enter him and change him. His immortality seemed fragile here, a thin ice-cup ready to shatter. He sensed the eyes of the Unmaker fixed on him and him alone, jealous eyes, cold as the touch of black fire, seeking the flaw in him with which to pry him apart, and Ixel with him. You loved us once! he cried out in his mind. We flew on the solar winds with you, the one who made us, and we worshiped you. Why do you hate us now? You have broken our hearts, all of us.

“Get up, Falia,” he said, helping her to rise, urgency in his voice. “I can stay here no longer.”

The golden veins of her hands stood out through her transparent old-woman's skin, and her mouth was a wrinkled black fruit. “Please, Ixelion,” she said, pushing the box toward him, “take this and give it to Janthis for me. I cannot face the shame of placing it in his hands myself. In it are the records of my worlds from the beginning. See that they are written into the Book of What Was. Also …” Her voice became a sibilant thread of air. “Also it contains the thing that must be guarded by the council. Tell Janthis that on no account must he open it.”

They went on, and at the foot of the stair she stopped him once more, sticklike arms and swollen fingers plucking at him, brittle white hair tufting from her balding scalp.

“I did not tell you all,” she whispered. “The Trader returned and demanded the treasure from me. He said I was not a fit keeper, that he had changed his mind and wanted it back, and all the time he was laughing.” She lifted her head with difficulty and gazed past him into the depths of her failing sun. “I broke the Law. I murdered him. I told myself that I was right to do so, that the treasure was safer with me than in his perfidious hands, but I know now that I killed him because I wanted it for myself.”

There was nothing he could say, and he turned from her toward the tunnel, crossing the fan of roads that swept from the entrance to run over her silent plains, knowing that she followed him but no longer wanting to walk beside her or speak with her. He moved from the half-light of Fallan into the full darkness of the tunnel without a tremor. Moments later Falia slipped after him. The Gate on this world was not approached through massive, ornately carved arches and brilliantly lit passages. The tunnel was of earth, supported by plain wood brought in the beginning from Shol, and floor and walls were free of decoration. The torches that had once lit the traveler's way had long since gone out, for the guards who had tended them and had watched the comings and goings of the people were dead, slain unprepared as the invaders from sister planets had poured through the Gate. Ixelion walked on. The floor was level and the air was very still. There were no bends, and long before he came up to the company, he could see the faint halo of sunlight that surrounded them, flowing in their veins and pulsing through their skin just as it had once lived in Falia. He turned. She was close behind him, her hands flat on her necklet, her head and shoulders bowed, her white hair only a smudge above the shadow that she was. Turning back, he could see the tall arch, and through it a black sky blazing with constellations. His eyes found his own sun, white and glittering, Ixel and Lix two pinpoints of light dancing beside it. Farther away was Ghakazian's sun with its crown of satellites, and Sholia's twins set in the net of their planets like many-faceted crystals. Danarion's sun was only a mist, so far out into space that Ixelion could hardly see it. At the foot of the arch and just beyond it, on a spur of Fallan that seemed to jut out over an abyss of fearsome nothingness, the members of the council had gathered. They did not move as he stepped through the arch and came up to them. A Messenger was there also, a little apart, wrapped in its constantly shifting spectrum of rainbowed light which flickered and coiled as it fought to maintain itself within Fallan's atmosphere. A drift of perfumed heat came from it to tickle Ixelion's nostrils as he bowed to it profoundly, and then he spoke to Janthis.

“I found her in her chamber, walking in the past. She did not surrender. She ran away because she was afraid.”

The company's eyes slipped from him to the tunnel. Falia stood now with one withered hand against the wall, straining to be upright. Pride shone suddenly out of the ravaged face, and she looked from one to the other with a deliberate slowness, searching their eyes. Ghakazian stared back without expression, his braceleted arms folded across his brown chest, his long dark-brown hair stirring in the draught that blew from some air vent high in the roof of the tunnel. Only his wings betrayed his unease, fluttering spasmodically, opening to brush the archway and close again. Sholia had her hands behind her back, her fingers nervously twisted in the cascade of deep golden hair that fell almost to the ground, and her fear was a palpable thing. Danarion was watching Falia, with undisguised pity, as though she were one with her mortals, all now prisoners, all condemned. Falia stood a little straighter and faced Janthis, but before she could speak, he held up a hand.

“You have a choice, Falia, and though you know it, I am bound to remind you. You may either remain here with your people and make what reparation you can, or you may return to Danar and go from there to be judged by the Messengers. What will you do?”

“I have betrayed my people,” she answered immediately, “not out of corruption but out of cowardice. I did not bow to the Unmaker, but neither did I resist him. I ran away. I am as guilty as Mallan and Kallar, and the Messengers will not spare me. They are just, but they have no mercy in them. They will condemn me to death.” The word filled her with such horror that she swayed against the wall. “I cannot put right what I have done,” she went on shakily, “but I can go down with those who worshiped and trusted me. I will stay.”

Janthis nodded. “Very well. Your necklet.”

With trembling fingers she drew it over her head, kissed it, and passed it to him, and as it left her grasp the lingering spark of fire deep within the polished disc flared once to a blinding brilliance and then died away. A pinpoint of redness remained glowing in its heart, but it too quickly went dark. The necklet now weighed in Janthis's hand like a cold, damp stone, and he handed it to Danarion.

“Will you close your Gate yourself, Falia?” Janthis enquired gently. She nodded dumbly, her face as white as her hair. “Then farewell. We will not forget you. We will walk with you in the past, where there is no grief.”

No one else spoke. After a moment Falia pushed herself away from the wall and raised her arms, holding them out straight, palms down. With a slow force she turned her wrists upward. The company felt the pressure of the power still within her, and the stone archway began to groan.

“I close the Gate of Fallan,” she called. “Henceforth neither mortal nor immortal, Maker nor Messenger nor any created thing may enter here. The stars are forbidden to the people of Fallan, and Fallan is forbidden to the people of the stars.” Her arms grew more rigid. The stone framing her creaked and began to tremble, and cracks ran lightly through it. It seemed to protest with many voices, and a milky gray fog began to gather from roof to floor. Those watching saw a horse come galloping toward them, its neck straining, its eyes rimmed in white and nostrils flared. Fog dewed the rippling flanks and shredded back from a streaming mane. It thundered between the lintels yet drew no nearer. Its mighty shoulders quivered with the effort of its flight, but under it the earth had dissolved and left only thick cloud so that it could make no progress. Falia's courage faltered, but only for a second. “Close!” she shouted. “I, Falia, command you! Your service is at an end!” The horse's frenetic pounding slowed, and its head came up and froze. One hoof remained raised. The mist darkened, thickened, and became at last a wall of Fallan's earth imprisoning the sleek, grained lines of a carved wooden horse, which looked red, as though it had been there forever. Falia was gone.

The others waited silently, hardly daring to move. Soon two hands began to appear, etched ever more deeply into the impenetrable wall, palms facing outward in a gesture of warning. Burned into each palm was a rayed sun; between them were the delicate outlines of Fallan's sun, Fallan itself, and its sister planets. “It was too late,” Sholia said flatly. “It is always too late. Each time I hope will be the last, and each time another sun-lord is forced to stand in agony and pronounce sentence upon himself.”

“Where is the Lawmaker?” Ghakazian muttered angrily. “Why does he do nothing?” He turned to face the invisible corridors, leaning outward, his wings slowly unfurling. “I am going home to Ghaka,” he snapped, and without bidding them farewell launched himself down with a rustle of dark feathers and a rush of warm air. They heard him call once to his sun, and then he vanished. The Messenger, its duty as witness to a Gate-closing discharged, had gone as quietly as it had come, leaving a sense of relief behind it.

Janthis turned to Ixelion. “The records,” he said. “Did she give them to you?”

Suddenly Ixelion remembered the box that he still held. The records, and something else. A treasure. A thing of destruction. He wanted to hand the box to Janthis, but unaccountably his fingers tightened on it. I will take it home for one night and sit with it on my lap as she did, in memory of her, he thought to himself. I will cradle it and look out upon Fallan in the star-studded sky. I will go back to that day when we sat together on her stone stair and talked so happily of nothing. He nodded reluctantly to Janthis.

“I have them. I would like to read them before I bring them to the council. Is it permitted?”

Janthis looked long at the box now wrapped in Ixelion's long arms but finally gave his consent. “Do not neglect your people while you mourn, Ixelion,” he warned. “Do not forget that though a night passes slowly in your palace, the years flow swiftly on your world.”

Ixelion glanced at him sharply. “I learned this long ago,” he answered. “Why do you speak to me as though I were a mortal?”

For a moment despair passed behind Janthis's dark eyes. “I am afraid,” he replied simply as he recovered and smiled at Ixelion in apology. “Go home, all of you,” he said. “The danger has been held at bay yet again.”

Ixelion opened his eyes. Fleetingly Janthis's face hung before him in the dim room, the lips still parted in speech, and then there was nothing but the endless gush and roil of water and his own hands caressing the Annals. She should have taken the treasure from the Trader and run with it to Janthis, he thought. Why that sudden need to look at it, the selfishness, and then the greatest of transgressions? But that same need was curdling in him again as it had done for the one warped moment when she had spoken of the thing that now lay quiescent at his feet, and he knew that he must never speak with her on that last day again. Feeling thin and somehow drained he lifted the book from his lap and held it against his cheek. Falia. The monotonous chatter of his waterfalls and streams wove with the sick vestiges of longing still tugging at him, and suddenly he wanted to stand and shout “Stop! No more water! Give me silence!” as though he might slay the desire to bend and pick up the box if he could only end the sound of water. A council meeting was due soon, he knew. He would be called, and until then he had only to place the Annals and the other thing in his chest and firmly close the lid. I must take the Annals in the wooden box, he thought suddenly. Someone must have seen it in my hands by Fallan's Gate. I would like to keep it. It is so beautiful, so warm and dry. But to keep the box I must first remove the treasure. His spine seemed to bend of its own accord, and his hands reached down, trembling. Then he realized what he was doing and sprang up, dropping the Annals into the box with head averted and shutting the lid and fastening the hasp. I am playing with death, he thought, horrified. Walking into his three-walled room, he flung the box into the chest and dove into the rocking coolness of the pool. I will spend more time with Sillix, he vowed. I will not be alone. He swam determinedly, refusing to bring forward the other thought that hovered behind the image of Sillix.