Stargate (35 page)

The centuries multiplied on Danar, became thousands, and it seemed as though the matter of Lawmaker and Unmaker, falling worlds and corrupted sun-lords had slipped into the realm of dreams.

Summer hung still and hot in Danarion's garden when he was called. He had been sitting under his trees, talking with Tandil, his neighbor's small daughter, when Janthis's voice came clear and urgent into his mind: Danarion, come quickly. You are needed.

Surprised, he rose, and sending the girl back to her own garden, he went out his gate and turned right, away from the city. He followed the road until it forked, and he took the narrow, grass-choked path that soon plunged in under the murmuring shade of the Time-forest.

He walked quickly, feeling the strange yet familiar tug at his ankles as mortal time relinquished its hold on him and his own time swirled to meet him. The forest was empty, and before long he could glimpse the wide stone stair glinting white in the sunlight, which did not penetrate the umbrella of soft, pliant haeli leaves. Then he was out under a sun that stood at its zenith, and he saluted it with a word as he mounted the stair, still guarded by corions who stifled yawns and watched him out of the corners of drooping azure eyes.

Halfway up he glanced over the bridge span to the Gate, for Janthis's summons had been curt with an edge of fear to it, and he wondered if something threatening was about to emerge. But the ornate entrance arch shimmered quietly in the heat, and no travelers troubled its sleep.

Cresting the last step, he strode in under the cool gloom, crossing the entrance hall. Pacing steadily he came at last to the drowned silence of the chamber, but before he had reached his own chair, Janthis's door had opened, and Danarion sprang up onto the dais and joined him.

“Come into my room,” Janthis said without preamble. “I have something to show you.” After Danarion slipped past him, he shut the door and turned to one of the walls. “I call the worlds to me every day,” he went on tersely. “I watch for changes, and for the last thousand years there have been none. Until today. Look, Danarion.”

At a soft word the wall's grayness dissolved into the wide blackness Danarion knew so well, and at another word the stars began to speed toward him. I had forgotten, he thought in wonder. The ecstasy of the corridors, the freedom of space, the thrill of an easy power, I had forgotten them all, but now it is as though my years with the mortals are fragile visions that fade so fast, so fast.

“Ixel,” Janthis commanded, and obediently Ixel's sun rolled into view, its yellow brilliance encompassed by a ring of tonguing black. Then it had passed them, and Ixel herself hovered, filling the wall, her nimbus of misty atmosphere shot through in blackness. “Closer. I want to see the Gate,” Janthis said, and then the Gate was before them, Lix's cold green crystal glittering. “Tell me what you see, Danarion,” Janthis snapped, not turning to him.

Danarion answered bewilderedly, “I see the Gate as we left it, closed and sealed with the hands. I see nothing changed.”

Curtly Janthis nodded, flung out his fingers, and Ixel vanished. “Ghaka!” he spat, and once more the stars flowed toward them, parted, and Ghaka's sullen purple sun bulged out at them. “Ghaka's Gate,” Janthis said, and it was there, the stone birds still frozen in their moment of struggle, the one smooth surface showing Danarion two hands, palms facing outward in a gesture of warning. Again Janthis questioned Danarion, and again Danarion could see nothing untoward, only the cruel and lonely stamp that they had placed on Ghaka's ruin. Janthis flicked his fingers, and Ghaka disappeared. “Watch carefully,” he said. “I will call Shol.” Shol's one remaining sun careened toward them and was gone, leaving Shol to hang alone in the little room, and where Shon and Sumel had once twinkled in the darkness with reflected light there was only a deeper blackness. “The Gate,” Janthis whispered this time, his voice shaking, and the mirror moved inward. Danarion waited to see the glint of Shol's sun on the silver sheet he knew was there, but nothing happened. The wall was blank. Again Janthis ordered, but the mirror did not move. There was no silver, no hands etched deep, no blackened, twisted lintels.

Danarion turned to Janthis. “What does it mean?” he asked. “Where is the Gate? Has the mirror ceased to obey you?”

Janthis glanced at him and then back to the wall. “The mirror has no mind to decide whether to obey or disobey,” he replied shortly. “It was made for my use only and shows me exactly what I ask of it. I requested a view of Shol's Gate, and that is what we see.”

“But there is no Gate! There is nothing! Where is the Gate?”

Janthis dismissed the vision and turned at last to face Danarion. “The Gate has gone,” he said wearily. “If we were standing in Shol's Hall of Waiting looking toward the Gate, we would see the shape of a door set into a wall. The physical parts of the Gate are still there, but its essence is not. And that is a matter for grave concern.”

Danarion wanted to laugh in his anxiety. “How can a Gate vanish? What power can move one, and why?”

“I had thought that no power but a Maker's could do such a thing,” Janthis said heavily, “and then only if a Gate was open and needed to be moved within a world. Such a thing never happened. The Gates were set down in their ordained places in the beginning. I cannot answer you, Danarion. The Unmaker's will goes on working behind a closed Gate, and who can say what unknown forces that will is able to bring to birth through the use of fallen mortals? Since he ceased to be the Worldmaker, many things have happened that I have not been able to explain.”

“Then some new magic has been devised on Shol?”

“I think so. I fear that some dark work may be coming to fruition there, and we must know to what end.” Janthis put his arm around Danarion's shoulders, and they passed out into the hall. Foreboding hung over Danarion, as though he knew what Janthis would say to him next. The touch of the other was neither calming nor reassuring, and when Janthis took his arm away, Danarion saw that in his other hand he held the dim sun-ball. He began to pass it from one hand to the other, his thoughts far away, and Danarion waited.

Presently he sighed and looked up. “You and I have not been much comfort to each other, Danarion,” he said softly. “Too many sorrows clothe us. Yet there has been security for me in knowing that I am not an immortal alone on Danar, that you are kin to me.” He faltered and then went on more briskly. “We cannot leave the mystery of Shol's Gate unsolved. It would be easy to tell each other that there is not much we can do, but while the power to reassume some of our responsibility lies in us we must not turn away. The time has come for us to part.”

Dread stole suddenly over Danarion. “What do you mean?” he said huskily, but he knew, and the knowledge filled him with terror.

“One of us must go to Shol and find the Gate and, if possible, fit it once more into the Hall of Waiting. If it hangs open somewhere, it must be closed again.”

Danarion wanted to run away from him and his mirror, to find his own little gate and go through it and shut it, to lie on the grass of his peaceful garden until dusk stole, still and warm, over him. He had not battled the Unmaker. He had not grappled daily with the delicate balance of a world bombarded by greedy flames howling to enter it. He had seen his kin go down one after the other, he had walked for a time on worlds he would never see again, but he had been able to return to Danar, and safety. Danar had rested untouched, ignored by the Unmaker as he plotted to encompass Shol at last, and now Danarion acknowledged to himself the relief he had felt when the long fight for Shol had reached a conclusion. But now it is my turn, he thought grimly. I have received my share of quiet, and the price must be paid. He dared not answer Janthis, and Janthis spoke again.

“Danar is your world,” he said slowly, “and ultimately the responsibility for its defense is yours. I can only advise. I cannot order you to Shol. You can refuse this request without damage to your wholeness, but if the Gate on Shol is open, it means danger to Danar, and Danar is all we have left. Will you go?”

“I do not think it is possible to go even if I were to agree,” he answered. “You know the words of closing: ‘Henceforth neither mortal nor immortal, Maker nor Messenger nor any created thing may enter here.' And if the Gate is missing, there is no way to enter, in any case.”

“I did not say you would use the Gate. Of course that would be impossible even if it still fitted its visible confines. A Messenger will take you.”

Danarion's fire blazed out in surprise. “What?”

“I have already called one and spoken with it. It tells me that it can carry you to Shol if you are willing to go. It has the power, but until now such a thing has been forbidden. It went to the Lawmaker and has returned with his permission.

Danarion glanced quickly about the chamber, but there was no sign of the familiar spiral of whirling light. The heat of summer hung stultifying in the room, and sunlight gleamed through the clerestory windows. A tiny flicker of hope woke in him, and he turned back to Janthis. “So the Lawmaker knows,” he said. “He has not forgotten us, he still watches.” Janthis nodded, and Danarion turned away from him, gazing down the long hall without seeing. If I go, I may never return, never again walk the crowded, sundrenched streets of the city, never draw in through eyes and nostrils the wonder of the seed-fires. Yet if I refuse, if I walk out of the palace, Danar's security will be forever threatened. He could not feel resentment toward Janthis, who so easily put this task on his shoulders. He had seen him lose composure when they had watched the closing of Shol's Gate, and did not doubt the depths of hurt he suffered. Yet he cast about in his mind for some alternative that would leave him secure on Danar without compromising his honesty.

Janthis gazed at him quietly, the sun-ball tight in his grasp, and then broke in on Danarion's frantic thought. “You cannot go in your body, if you decide to go at all,” he said. “You must know the risks, Danarion. The Messenger will travel outside the corridors, through places where you would not survive, even in such a body as you have. And even if you were able to, the Sholans would see by your body that you are not as they are. The Messenger will put you in a mortal's body. You will be a Sholan.”

“My powers?” Danarion whispered, not looking at him, and Janthis told him the truth. “You will not be able to command fully Shol's sun, for only Sholia or I may do that. You will carry with you some of your own sun's power, but how much help it will be to you I do not know. Your body will be a prisoner of Shol-time, but not lightly and willingly, for time on Shol, like everything else there, must be hostile. Your host body will bleed, suffer pain, even die, Danarion, and I cannot tell you whether these things will affect you or not. But be very careful that you do not allow your essence to become fused with the Sholan mind, for then you will lose your wholeness and fall.”

“You presume that I shall go!”

Janthis smiled. “If I could go, I would,” he replied mildly. “But I cannot. Something must be done, and only you can do it. Have you not sometimes wished that you were mortal?”

“But not a fallen mortal on Shol, not on a world where every step would be for me a torment!”

“Your body stays here in my care. Your feet will not tread the earth of Shol. Will you go, Danarion?”

After a long interval, during which Danarion's light trickled unchecked over the floor, he raised his head. “I recognize the choice,” he said formally. “I will go.”

Janthis did not thank him but merely nodded. “Then go and sit in your chair and place your necklet on the table in front of you. Do you understand what you must do on Shol?”

“Yes, I understand.” Danarion went down the steps and lowered himself into his chair, lifting his necklet over his head and laying it on the table. I did not even sense this coming, he thought, his hands folded on the sun-disc. I have been playing with the mortals for too long. This is my judgment. He felt Janthis move to stand at his elbow, and all at once the room was full of a hot, strong perfume. He did not dare to raise his eyes to the thing whose power roared like a wind through the chamber.

“You have great knowledge of mortal life and thought,” Janthis said, his voice seeming to come from far away, and Danarion felt a hand pressed briefly against his forehead. “Inhabiting a mortal's body will diminish you, but it may bring you a measure of contentment also. Farewell, Danarion.”

The momentary touch had brought calmness with it, and Danarion felt his mind clear, become cool and alert. He heard receding footsteps and then the closing of Janthis's door. The Messenger came closer. Danarion could see its silver and blue colors throbbing on the polished surface of the table. He tensed in anticipation, and a voice spoke, a voice without the warmth and timbre of breath passing over tongue, without the fiery flow that wove in a sun's speech, a thin, unhuman voice that made him tremble.

Close your eyes and move out toward your sun,
it said, and Danarion obeyed. For one moment he felt himself speeding to the sun, and it prepared to embrace him eagerly. But then between him and the sun a vast silver curtain was spread, spangled through with shards of blue light. It shook and dissolved to become green, then red. He could not slow his pace and went hurtling toward the net. Then he was in it, and it wrapped him around, and abruptly his vision cleared.

He was not facing his sun after all but was in a cage of transparent fluidity, as though he stood surrounded by waterfalls. Beyond the sliding, shaking curtain the immensity of the universe lay around him, under and over him. He was reminded of Janthis's mirror, for the stars flashed by him, leaving sizzling white trails, and it seemed to him that everything was in motion but himself. Glancing to where his feet ought to have been, he saw that he was hanging inside a column which just below him broke into streamers of blinding colored light that hung for a moment before exploding in a silent shower of rainbowed sparks. He looked up, but as far as he could see, the undulating walls of the column stretched away, and above him the stars were fixed and without movement.