As we drifted through the light, our boots made no sound on the rock floor, not even the squeak of leather or scuffling on the fine volcanic grit. Even my breathing seemed muffled. The air got thicker and harder to push through, or maybe that was just my imagining.
The cone seemed much larger than it had from the outside. I saw no walls behind the layers of shifting brightness, nor had we way to tell the passing of time or distance or any landmarks except the glowing heart of the cone.
Terris dropped my hand and gestured me to stay behind. Me, I’d rather go on than risk becoming separated. But some instinct made me stop. He traveled on a few paces and paused, his back to me. As I watched him, my fingers curled automatically around the hilt of my long-knife. Solid, cool even through the leather bands wrapped in my own pattern, it welcomed my touch.
My eyes burned and watered. I couldn’t stay focused on Terris and yet I couldn’t look away. He stood in the very heart of the light, no more than a blurred shadow against the glare. He waited there, still as rock in the shimmering brightness, hands out, head high, body shrouded in his thick norther parka, and for a moment I thought — I hoped — nothing was happening.
The edges of his body began to glow.
At first I noticed just a few splotches of red, like heated furnace iron. Then the colors changed to yellow and white, white-blue, hotter and brighter, rushing over his arms and legs. The separate spots flared and melted together. They spread over his body until he was covered by a halo of jagged spikes. The air crackled with unspent lightning. Sparks shot from his fingertips.
Terris shook like a scrap of hide caught in the edge of a steppe twister. His head jerked, turned back toward me. His eyes gleamed white, the irises rolled up in his skull.
I grabbed my knife and lunged for him, but my hand wouldn’t move. My feet stayed rooted to the rock. My heart pounded with the effort.
From the whiteness around us, bolts of piercing brightness showered Terris like shooting stars. I screamed out a warning, but he made no move to dodge them. Where they touched him, the burning outline around his body blazed up like tinder catching flame.
“Terris!”
I bellowed his name, but no sound came from my mouth. My muscles strained and cramped, and sweat poured down my neck and sides underneath my parka. I felt his unborn screams in my bones, in my heart, tearing at me like bloodbat claws.
The air was no longer silent, but filled with a throbbing hum. I couldn’t tell where it came from. Not Terris, for no human voice ever made such a sound — droning, whining, rattling the bones in my skull until I expected to feel hot blood spurting from my nose and ears. It built and built until all I thought of was clapping my hands over my head and squeezing my eyes tight shut.
But I still couldn’t move. I fought just to breathe. My eyes watered in outrage, my knees shook and stuttered. I clamped my teeth together.
Terris...
He looked larger to me now, swollen with light and no longer quite human in form. I wondered if he would burst or merely turn into a god.
If the demon chance were nothing more than a bag of tricks, and the Mother blind and deaf, then why not a god with a human heart? Why not a god who tore up half of Laurea for a sister so long gone he hardly knew her anymore, who begged his enemy’s help to find the truth, who took me into the crucible of my heart and out again, and now stood alone in a cone of fire...
o0o
He lifted his arms, as slowly as if they were weighted with lead, or maybe the light had melted his bones. His head sagged back. His knees bent, his body curving backward. He looked about ready to fall.
I hurled myself forward with all my strength, hard enough to pop a blood vessel. It was tougher than slogging through frozen Kratera Ridge mud or facing a steppe sandstorm, but somehow I managed to break free.
Staggering, I reached Terris and caught him behind the shoulders before he hit the ground. For a moment his body felt thin, light as a handful of rock-dove feathers. I could have crushed him in my hands without thinking. I was afraid to hold him, but even more afraid to let him drop. Then he was solid flesh again, and damned heavy into the bargain. I set him down on the cold stone with a jolt.
Lightning arced over us, illuminating the roof of the dome. Sparks like popping embers stung my face. The racket was worse than any storm I’d ever ridden out, enough to make a sandbat deaf — and they don’t even have ears. My head rang with the sound so much that everything looked doubled. I crouched beside Terris, thinking that if one of those flashes of light hit us, we wouldn’t either of us walk out of here.
Suddenly it was over. The light subsided to a clear soft glow, the din to a few quiet crackles and then silence.
My eyes darted to the great arching dome above our heads, the walls like alabaster ribbed with bands of gleaming silvery metal. Where they met in the center of the roof, a huge glass bell hung. A tangle of wires and tubes and other, less recognizable things shot forth rhythmic bursts of brilliance. Below the bell, a ball of cold white light, man-high and twice as wide, glowed steadily.
I wet my lips and slowly straightened up. The floor beneath my boots was pale stone, as smooth and precisely fitted as anything I’d seen in Laureal City. No — not all the stones were the same fine-grained rock. Some were darker, green-gray shot with flecks of gold and edged in shining metal like the ribs of the dome wall. Again I saw the pattern of the dotted double circle. The central light turned the shallow inscriptions into a pattern of jagged shadows. I couldn’t read them.
Someone built this place. But who? And for what purpose?
I shook my head, my brains still scrambled from the racket. Terris held on to my arms and clambered to his feet.
If I still felt half-addled, what must he be feeling? Could anyone go through the heart of the Light and come out sane? What did that matter? I’d left a good part of me back with the bloodbats.
He stood there so very long, weaving slightly from side to side.
o0o
Suddenly he spun around, balanced like a cat, and pointed off into the central brightness. “Look there!”
I couldn’t see anything, not even the faint, ghostly shapes I made out before.
“And there! There! The trees, the canyons — Kardith, they’re incredible! Look, look, the desert! Nothing but piles of sand!”
He went on, oblivious to my silence as he described more marvels — the golden plain with animals as tall as trees, the oceans teeming with silver fish, the deserts of gleaming black glass, the scarlet-hued swamps where snake-necked monsters bellowed beneath a single moon.
I said nothing. What could I say?
He stopped, quiet a moment, and said to me in a low voice, “You can’t see them, can you? All the places branching out from this place, all the long green tunnels?”
I shook my head.
“The light. Oh gods, the light...” His voice trembled. He covered his face with his hands.
Part of me wanted to put an arm around his shoulders, but I couldn’t. I mustn’t. This was no child to be sopped off with a morsel of comfort, or a greenie kid who was so scared he almost puked after Montborne’s goons jumped us in camp. This was the man who danced in the norther long-house, danced as if the gods themselves had fired him up. This was the man who stood alone in the heart of the Light.
...and who, even more than Pateros, had given me back my life...
“All the way here I could feel it, calling me...” he whispered. “Changing me. I thought — I don’t know what I thought. I should have known I couldn’t go back.”
He dropped his hands, looking right through me. His face was drawn, familiar and human with his new beard, his tousled black hair. His eyes shone with a light I’d never seen in them before.
I shivered and looked away. Something in my face or my silence told him what I saw. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders.
“It doesn’t matter now, does it?” I expected to hear bitterness in his voice, but there was none. He gestured, “Come on...” and he didn’t mean back out again.
Mother-of-us-all, did he mean for us both to go through the Light?
“You’re crazy!”
He explained it all slowly to me, making shapes with his hands. “Look, Kardith, it’s like a house. Different places, like the weirdies on the Ridge, they’re like doors. From here you can go right through them. The green tunnels — like the one Avi fell into — they’re longer, the back way around.”
He saw all this, the connections, the gates to other places, places I never imagined. Me, all I saw was light and the inside of the dome.
“I don’t know why I can see them and you can’t,” he said, “maybe for the same reason I can feel the thing in the Starhall.”
“That’s great,” I said in a shaky voice. “Really great. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Avi’s green tunnel brought her over fifty miles of badlands. If I can see these doors, I can go through them, too.”
“You are crazy!”
“Not crazy enough to go alone.”
Damn. “Where are we going?”
“Anywhere you want.”
I thought of Avi back there in the caldera with Etch and the two northers. If we didn’t come back, they’d have the sense to return to the gatehouse by nightfall. Even without us, Avi would talk Jakon into letting her ride back to Laureal City. Hell, she’d probably talk him into going with her.
What was important here? Finding Avi, keeping Terris safe from Montborne, getting the dagger back to Esmelda? I didn’t know.
I slid my long-knife out. “Anywhere but the steppe.”
He watched me with a strange expression. I wondered for a crazy instant if he could see what I saw, feel what I felt, all those memories. And if he had seen, what did it matter? They were my past, they were what they were. They were not what I was today.
He turned to the right of the glowing center and pointed. “There.”
Blindly I followed him, half a step behind. I felt a faint zzzt! like stepping again through a wall of fire, only cool this time. I’d half forgotten that my face was burned and peeling — it didn’t hurt any more. I blinked in a burst of unnatural brilliant green, and the next step I felt sand beneath my feet and saw jagged black rock in front of us, gleaming wet against the clouded sky and smelling of wild salty fish-stink —
“Kardith!”
Terris grabbed the sleeve of my parka and jerked me sideways, just as a wave came crashing over the beach, frothing and swirling around the scattered rocks. It thundered against the black cliffs, but we scrambled high enough on the slanting yellow sand to only get the soles of our boots wet. Drops of spray stung my face. I dashed a few feet up the sand, laughing without meaning to.
“This — this isn’t the steppe!”
“No.” He smiled, half sweet, half sad. “It’s a place I’ve always wanted to go to. A place that reminds me of someone I once knew. Selfish of me, but I don’t know how many chances I’ll have to go someplace just because I want to.” He sighed and turned, looking over the heaving green wall of water. “And it looked safe enough.”
The overhead sun shone hot, but the breeze curling around my knees was cold and damp. I yanked at the ties of my parka with my free hand, and suddenly I felt very, very scared.
“You could go anywhere — anywhere!” I screamed at him. “You could be ten places at once! You could hide where no one would ever find you. You could jump in, cut anyone’s throat — Montborne’s maybe, Jakon’s — who’d ever know? You could turn the whole crotting world upside down — make yourself Guardian of all Harth, anything you wanted! Who could stop you? You could — ”
“Stop it!”
I shut up, my face as scalding hot as if he’d slapped me. He was shaking and red-faced, just as scared as I was and twice as pissed.
“Stop it. This thing that’s happened to me is no magic trick, no blessing of the gods. It’s a curse,” he spit out the word, “that’s what it is, a damned curse!”
“What do you mean, curse? How can such power be a curse?”
“You don’t understand. Power has been shoved down my throat since I can remember, and nobody — least of all Esme — ever asked me if I wanted it. I could have been Guardian of Laurea — all I had to do was be my mother’s heir. She’s sitting in the Guardian’s seat right now, and the minute I show up...”
He lifted one arm half in appeal, half in surrender.
“And all my dreams — no, not dreams, they’re true, the things I see, the people, the times, the places. All that would be gone. I’d be just like her, don’t you see?”
I started shaking, thinking of Terris just like her.
“But now — I can see all of Harth, places I never imagined! I can touch them, taste them, brighter than any dream. And because I can do all that, I have to go back, I have to take up that power.”
“Why, if you hate it so much?”
“Montborne’s still out there, him and his poisoned daggers. And Esme, doing the wrong things for the right reasons. I have no choice, don’t you see? It no longer matters what I want. And...” He paused, his brow furrowing. His voice dropped, so soft I hardly heard the words above the rattle and crash of the waves. “And now I know what the Starhall thing is.”
What Starhall thing? Another Northlight?
I felt the sadness in him, but I couldn’t understand it. He must be crazy after all. Such a gift he had, even if he used it for some wishcrap altruistic purpose and nothing else. To see the green tunnel connections, to travel along them — to places like this wave-whipped beach — how could it be anything but a gift?
But for him it wasn’t. I could see that, even if I couldn’t understand why. For him that was a loss that could never be made up.
That I understood.