The Dark Crystal (21 page)

First and swiftest among them were the Garthim-Master, the Chamberlain, and the Ritual-Master. All three burning to be saluted as the savior of their race, they jostled and impeded each other in grabbing for the shard. As a result, Fizzgig, bouncing into the chamber, was the first to reach it. He sniffed at it anxiously, wondering why neither Jen nor Kira was with it.

And then, with a pull at his heart, Jen saw Kira land and run across the chamber toward Fizzgig and the shard.

The Garthim-Master, as the strongest of the Skeksis, was the one who prevailed. His talons closed around the shard; and as they did so, Fizzgig, now beside himself with anxiety and confusion, bit the Garthim-Master’s arm.

The Garthim-Master let out a snarl of pain and flapped his arm angrily. Fizzgig was thrown off-balance, and with one howl he vanished down the shaft, at the foot of which the lake of fire awaited him.

Fizzgig’s intervention had left the shard lying unattended. It was Kira, darting between the colossal bulks of the Skeksis, who retrieved it. She wheeled round, her back to the shaft, and, as she had seen Jen do, held the shard out like a dagger.

In the triangular portal in the roof, the three suns overlapped. Beneath Jen’s body, the Crystal was humming more loudly.

The Skeksis were watching Kira and the shard with beady, glistening eyes. Their talons itched to grab, but they made no assault. The Ritual-Master, however, was shuffling around to one side of her, and the Slave-Master was moving along the other flank. Kira stood there, turning quickly from side to side, jabbing the shard at them menacingly. The Garthim-Master squatted in front of her, his eyes bulging with baffled fury. Beside him, the Chamberlain had a cunning look.

“They’re afraid,” Jen said to himself. Then, whoopingly, he called down, “They’re afraid of you, Kira! Afraid of the shard!”

Kira’s attention was momentarily distracted by Jen’s shout. As her eyes flickered up to him, the Ritual-Master’s talons savagely raked at her.

She saw him just in time, whirled around, and slashed at his arm. She made only a glancing contact, but the Ritual-Master recoiled as though from a powerful shock. The shard emitted a resonant note. Jen felt the great Crystal vibrate in sympathy.

The Chamberlain tentatively extended his hand toward Kira. He spoke in the wheedling tone that Kira had heard before, at the Gelfling ruins. “Kelffink,” he cajoled, “give to me the piece of crystal. Yes, and you go in peace. That is promise I made for you, no? Peace for Skeksis and little
Kelffinks
. Give to me, now.”

“No,” Kira said. She jabbed the shard toward his outstretched hand and threw a rapid look up at the portal. The three suns were almost as one.

Jen saw her glance, the turn of her head toward him. He realized what she intended. And he saw the sunlight flash on the long blade of the sacrificial knife the Ritual-Master had drawn. He cried, “Kira! Give it to them!”

The Chamberlain turned his neck to look up at Jen. Nobody else on the chamber floor moved. The Pod choir piped on.

“Don’t hurt her,” Jen shouted to the Chamberlain. “You can have the shard. Let her go!”

The Chamberlain looked back to Kira, with a smile.

Kira stared straight into the Chamberlain’s eyes while she called up, “No, Jen. Heal the Crystal.”

Jen saw her draw her arm back holding the shard. She turned her face up to him. He was crying, “No, Kira, they’ll kill you!” as she threw the shard back up to him.

In a high, slow arc, the shard glittered through the air, toward the cavity in the Crystal, and curved into Jen’s hand. As he caught it, he looked below and a long moan of despair filled his throat. His gaze was fixed on Kira’s face, smiling up to him, as the Ritual-Master stabbed his sacrificial knife through her back.

Below, around Kira’s body, he saw faces of the Skeksis staring up at him. He regarded the shard with loathing. To drive it back into the Crystal, to heal the wound, he raised his arm.

Suddenly, he could not see. There was too much light. The beam of the concentric suns hit his face.

Blindly, he plunged the shard down, in deep.

The great Crystal flashed. With the flash came a high-pitched, bell-like boom of thunderous intensity.

Jen’s fingers slipped from the reverberating surfaces. Already senseless, he fell down through the dazzled air. His fall was broken by the body of one of the Skeksis. Jen rolled down to the floor of the chamber and lay beside Kira.

None of the Skeksis moved toward him. All eight were crouched with their hands over their ears, their eyes squeezed shut in agony.

Only the Pod slaves were clearly aware of what was happening. The Dark Crystal had cleared to a lucent transparency. Within it, the deeply cracked and fissured interior was revealed, but already it was being reamalgamated to its perfection by the energy of the Great Conjunction, shining in a triple column, dark, rose, and radiance itself. From the Crystal, the light was refracted into beams that slanted sharply downward, each of piercing intensity.

The Pod slaves saw each other’s milky eyes clearing, becoming black buttons again. They saw Garthim claws dropping off, armor plates hitting the floor with a clatter, and extinguished purple eyes. Soon, nothing was left of the Garthim but heaps of shell. Awakened dreamers, the Pod People stared with moon-blank faces as the very walls of the castle started to quake. The encrusted filth of centuries was shaken off, disclosing the pure, crystalline beauty of the original fabric, the living stone of the mountain. The harmony of the sunlit Crystal resonated along ley-lines all around the planet, remitting the evil of the rule of the Skeksis.

In the Chamber of Life, Aughra, too, felt the rumbling. “Ah!” she gasped. “At last!” As she hobbled toward the door, an indignant yapping behind her made her pause. She turned and saw Fizzgig in the open portal of the shaft, his paws clinging around the rod with the crystal prism at its end.

“Pah!” Aughra snapped impatiently, but she picked up a long wooden fork and crossed the laboratory. She thrust the fork into the shaft, hoping to reach Fizzgig. He growled at the fork, seeing it not as an implement of rescue but as a weapon. Only when Aughra attempted to leave him did he consent to bounce along the fork to safety.

Meanwhile, continuing to sustain their mighty chant, the urRu swayed their bodies to a mesmeric rhythm in the beams that transfixed them.

When each paralyzed Skeksis arrived at his destined pool of light, he too was impaled on the beam and drawn up it, toward his urRu counterpart, until they were each fused as a single creature, an urSkek, as in the past and to be, the two made one. Beings that seemed distilled from golden light rather than made of substance, the urSkeks stood tall and erect in an arc below the brilliant Crystal.

Through his sobbing, Jen heard a voice call him. “Gelfling, listen to me.” He looked up. The urSkek in whom urlm the Healer and skekUng the Garthim-Master were united was addressing him, while it swayed in the beam from the Crystal, visible energy pouring from its head. In its face were combined the wisdom of the urRu and the knowledge of the Skeksis.

Holding Kira’s body in his arms, Jen stood up, and through his tears faced the arc of chanting urSkeks.

The one that had addressed him spoke again. “We are urSkeks. Long ago, in our folly and our ignorance, we almost destroyed this world. We entered the great Crystal, intending to purge ourselves of the imperfections within. Instead, we shattered the Crystal – and ourselves – into urRu and Skeksis. But the world we sundered has been made whole by your courage, your sacrifice. You have freed us from this world again, to return to the next world, rejoined in our original form. Now we make you again one. Hold her to you. She is part of you as we all are part of each other. You restored the true power of the Crystal. Make your world in its light.”

The urSkek raised its translucent hand, deflecting the beam of light onto Kira, who moved in Jen’s arms and opened her eyes, her wound healing. The chant reached a climax.

Clasping each other, Jen and Kira watched as the urSkeks traveled up along the beams of light and, entering the Crystal, apocalyptically transformed, passed through it into another astral dimension.

The chamber was silent. The three suns above the Crystal moved out of their Great Conjunction.