Everything all at once; that was how it had always been. Chaiel had never been able to choose what he saw. He could, sometimes, leap from one image to a related one, but even then the images rarely made sense. His clairaudience wasn't nearly as reliable as his clairvoyance, and the occasional bursts of clairsentience were simply confusing. He dimly remembered that it hadn't been like that before he was put in the bubble, but he tried not to think about that time.
So it was a pleasant surprise to be suddenly shown Thelyan boarding a train in a great hurry, and immediately on the heels of the image get a clear sense that the Director was on his way to see Chaiel.
Thelyan's visits were stressful. Nevertheless they provided new fodder for thought. Knowlege came through much more strongly when the bubble was opened to sight and sound. But what could have got the chilly bastard so worked up? That thing his predicting people had seen, a while back? Chaiel's memories of that visit were tangled, but he did remember that he hadn't been able to answer the question. Thelyan didn't understand how Chaiel's abilities worked. There had been, of course, a remote chance that a scrap of clairsentience would have given Chaiel the answer, by pure coincidence, but Thelyan always acted like Chaiel could know whatever he wanted.
I used to be a god, Chaiel reminded himself. He said it out loud, to have his voice for company. "I used to be a god."
Then he lost some time. He discovered he'd chewed his nails to bleeding, and bitten his hands and arms raw. This happened sometimes.
He remembered that Thelyan was coming to see him. Nothing by which he could judge time presented itself, so he didn't know whether he'd seen the train-boarding scene a minute ago or a day or a year. Now there were sounds coming to him, so he held his breath, hoping for music. It was so good when music came.
There was a hissing sound. Then a sharp crack, followed by a clank. Then a voice, speaking a language he didn't know; there were many languages he didn't know, though he heard them all the time; also foreign words the meaning of which came to him, though he didn't know what language they were. Then, suddenly, with a feeling of a dislocated joint snapping into place, a blizzard of clear speech in Eskaran:
very strong surge lasted only eight seconds, though the atmospheric effects
resolved, unfortunately. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. No.
can't get anything from him except this garbage about a green man, even in Survey. Well, the report -- yes. The report I received from Sandwell made mention of a green woman, though they've had minimal loss of personnel there. I can't correlate it with the thunderstorm prophesies, though. Yes, the locus appears to be the same, but it
just realized why there's a desert here.
Drink up, it's the end of the world!
When the talking faded away, Chaiel listened to it all in his head several times again. He made no attempt to draw conclusions; he'd discovered long ago that he only frustrated himself by trying to understand. Only one visual image had come with the speech, just a flicker: six wooden matches and an unlit candle scattered on a rough stone surface. This image was somehow sexual.
He kept coming back to one of the voices. The second to last voice caught in his head more than the others. Something about it frightened him, though the tone hadn't been threatening or angry. It was maybe more familiar than the others, though by now all voices, all images seemed at least a bit familiar.
Flash. More time gone. Now his genitals hurt. Apparently he'd been trying to masturbate again. He hated when he did that. It didn't work -- the same suspension that kept him from aging made it impossible for him to shed tears, sweat, void waste, or ejaculate. All the scraps of hair and fingernail he'd swallowed over the decades still lumped in his stomach, and once he'd vomited an accretion of the stuff and found it still sharp-edged, cemented by sticky clots of ancient blood, completely undigested. But his body sometimes did stupid things without his knowlege.
Something nagged at his mind, he'd forgotten something, something important... But then, when had he not? He'd forgotten more than any mortal ever knew.
Sound came again. Another voice, one he heard often, the words too routine to comprehend. This one stayed for a while. It repeated. After a time, he began to understand that the voice was Thelyan's, the familiar word his own name.
He opened his eyes, and discovered that he was upside down relative to the rest of the world. That was sort of interesting. Arching his back, he reached out toward the litter on the floor, bits of himself that he had dropped. Most of it gone to dust. Bits of his body, and his body was made out of energy, and the energy was pure thought. Knowlege was his food. He put knowlege inside himself; hair and skin and nails and blood came out and fell and decayed, a pile of decayed knowlege on the ground... suddenly he was afraid that Thelyan would eat the dust, and know things.
"Chaiel, give me your attention. Chaiel. Speak so I know you can hear me."
"You never bring me any presents. I want a puppy." Chaiel laughed at his own joke. He had a shadow. He waved at it.
Thelyan's voice behind him. "I don't have time for your wanderings now. Tell me what you know about the atmospheric disturbance over Paiwaar this afternoon."
So Thelyan didn't have time. Good for Thelyan. "It must be nice to be so busy." He twisted until he could see Thelyan's face right side up. The Director -- the Judge -- eater of gods, shitter-out of laws -- looked like a woman, suddenly. A pretty girl. Chaiel smiled. "Sometimes I see naked ladies. Sometimes I see very old ugly naked ladies. Once I heard a girl teaching a parrot to talk."
"Tell me what you know about the --"
"Atmospheric effects are still developing. Yes, sir, I'll have a copy sent up. They're not sure yet. A storm system of some significant size, at least, possibly a major climatic change. Yes. I'm quite sure. There's absolutely no way this could be natural. High-altitude winds simply don't move like that." Chaiel clamped his hands over his mouth, as he realized he'd inadvertently spoken what he was hearing, possibly told Thelyan something useful. It was almost certain, in fact, because Thelyan was smiling.
"Very good, Chaiel. That's the disturbance I mean. Now tell me who caused it."
"No."
"Come now. There's no one you have any reason to protect."
"No."
Thelyan's smile, though still icy, grew fractionally warmer. "That is, unless the culprit is one of my enemies. You would protect my enemies, wouldn't you?"
Chaiel tried to escape into the stream of images, but it was thin and sporadic even though the bubble was clear. I'm not going to talk, I'm not going to talk, I don't have to talk. I don't know anyway, I didn't see, nobody ever tells me anything, besides he can work it out for himself, what does he need me for? If Ka'an wants to make rain that's his business.
"So Ka'an has gained control of his host."
Realizing that he'd spoken out loud, Chaiel howled. He hid his face, willing himself to blank out, but when he opened his eyes again Thelyan was still there. All white and sparkly and mean-looking. "I hate you. I'm so thirsty. I hate everybody."
"Even Ka'an?"
"I don't care. You go find him and I hope you kill each other. I hope you kill everybody." A thought occurred to him, and he hastily added, "Everybody but Medur. If you find her, can I have her?"
An expression of disgust crossed Thelyan's face. "I'm not looking for her. She's no use to me. Tell me where Ka'an is."
"No. I don't know." But a flash, shockingly clear, gave him the answer, and he blurted it out before he could stop himself. "Under the acacia tree with the green man, breathing through his elbows, going to get rained on, yes. Ooh, that's against your law now, dog in the manger, bet you wish you ever had that much fun, guess what? I know something about you."
Even more disgusted now, Thelyan said, "I'm not remotely interested in what you know about me. What I want to know is --"
"I know why you hate him," Chaiel interrupted. Before he could go on, though, a deafening clatter of machinery burst through his head, accompanied by a picture of children poking a dead dog with sticks, and when it was finished he woke to silent darkness. Thelyan had blanked the sphere while Chaiel was caught in a fit of seeing.
Frustrated, Chaiel wept with dry eyes. "I know why you hate him," he repeated to the nothingness around him. "Other people get over that, you know. Other people don't have to rule the world just because someone was mean to them once. I know. I know. All the things I know." He screamed, then whispered. "Let me out."
His voice didn't even echo.
--==*==--
Ash lay propped on his elbow, watching Kieran sleep by candlelight. He was a little cold, and all his muscles ached, and he'd never been so happy before in his life. It seemed impossible that anything so good could happen to anyone, let alone to him. He didn't want to sleep, for fear everything would be different when he woke up.
Kieran was sprawled on his back, taking up most of the blanket. One hand was curled on his chest, the other stretched out palm-up across the dusty floor. His mouth was slightly open, and his hair spread in loops and slow curves along his outflung arm. The light of the candle's steady flame gilded the planes of his face, brought structures of muscle and bone into sharp relief, showed the twitch of dreaming eyes under eyelids that Ash's lips knew were soft as warm wind.
Ash's heart was sore with too much joy; he was tempted to wake Kieran and talk to him some more, just to take some of the pressure off. That would be unkind, though. They were both exhausted. They'd barely had the energy to drag themselves inside the temple when the sun set, laughingly comparing how shaky their legs were, and then despite that they'd lit the candle and made love a third time while full night fell. Ash was surprised he could stay awake. By rights he should be sleeping like a baby. He knew his dreams would be as sweet as Kieran's were right now; he could sense the slow swells of emotion rolling in his lover's sleeping mind, curiosity and amusement and the occasional bright flash of discovery.
Twining coils of shining black hair around his fingers, Ash considered what Kieran had said before everything had gone beautiful. The objections he had raised. He'd been so frightened; though he wouldn't have admitted it, wouldn't have used the word fear, he'd been terribly afraid. This meant so much to him.
Much as Ash wanted to dismiss those fears as reflexive, he made himself ask: What could go wrong? What are the ways I might hurt him? I need to think of those things to make sure I never do them. Well, the obvious one was leaving, and that, he was sure, he would not do. Eventually the shine would wear off, being together would become routine -- Ash couldn't imagine what it would be like to take Kieran for granted, but he knew it was human nature. It wasn't about the newness, though. This wasn't a conquest. The things he loved about Kieran would only grow more precious with time. I have to find a way to assure him of that. Ash smoothed stray hairs back from Kieran's brow to make him smile in his sleep. When he wakes. For now what he needs is rest.
Just as he made up his mind to blow out the candle and join the dream, a sighing sound began outside. He looked out past the pillars, but saw only blackness. The candle flame ducked, whirling shadows, and a breath of wind stirred his hair. The wind's sound faded, then rose higher, carrying a scent that made him think of home. Summer. A heat wave; lying in bed sweating in the humid air, and then a wind, and this smell, and a great sense of relief...
"Uh-oh."
He nudged Kieran, but got no response. Well, let Kieran sleep a little longer. Probably there was no danger. He got up and found his pants and shirt and glasses. Another gust blew the candle out, so he got dressed by feel. Flickering light to the west caught his attention. He watched, for a moment, eyes adjusted to the dark now enough to see moonlight dusting a curled shape in the sky; under the towering cloud, dim purple bands rippled.
There was time to grope his way back to the bed -- almost entirely by his Talent's spacial sense -- before the mutter of thunder reached his ears. This time he made a more serious effort to wake Kieran, and this time succeeded.
Mumbling and rubbing his eyes, Kieran began an incoherent protest, but a new gust of colder wind brought him fully awake. Lightning just strong enough to limn him in blue caught him beginning a smile. "Oh. Hey." He sounded pleased. "Will you look at that."
"It seems we succeeded after all."
"Guess so. Wanna go up in it? See what it looks like from inside?"
Ash was tempted, but shook his head. "I think we should move the supplies farther in. Could you help?"
"Yep." Kieran didn't seem to feel any sense of urgency, despite the brightening flickers in the cloud and the increasing wind. He scratched and yawned and fumbled with his clothes at great length while Ash gathered the candle and matches and blankets. Well, if Kieran wasn't afraid of the storm, Ash wouldn't be either.
By the time they'd shifted their belongings to the back of the main room, the wind was constant, strong, and cold. Lightning was visible beneath the cloud as well as in it, and thunder cracked rather than rumbling. Ash bundled up the blankets and coats, and began to take them down a side passage.
"Don't you want to watch?" Kieran said.
Ash dropped his bundle. "Why not?" He let Kieran take his hand and lead him out to the temple steps, into the teeth of the wind.
A flash of lightning printed an image on his mind: Kieran standing on the edge of the step, gathering his hair back with one hand as it tried to fly into his face, unbuttoned shirt billowing around his scarred, lean-muscled chest, teeth bared in a feral grin. Then Kieran pulled him close, and they watched with their arms around each other as the storm stalked toward them on long insect-legs of lightning.
The first drops of rain brought a bark of exhilarated laughter from Kieran, which Ash echoed more quietly. It was exciting, the strength and size of the forces at work, though Ash thought he wouldn't enjoy it nearly as much if he were seeing it alone. Rain speckled his glasses, danced along his arms and across his bare feet; then the skies gave a roar and dumped it down in buckets, drenching them. Laughing, they pressed closer for warmth, kissed the rain from each other's faces, burrowed hands into each other's sodden clothes. They were no longer tired; it was as if the thunder's energy was pouring into them through their skin.
"Again? Already?" Ash raised his eyebrows, knowing Kieran could sense that his surprise was feigned, perhaps even sense in echo the interesting texture of wet leather under his hands. But at that moment a blast of rain hit them with enough force to make them stagger, driven by a wind that was rising to a howl.
No discussion was needed. They fled back inside, to the back wall; then, when the cold wind reached them even there, to the side passage with the painted walls. The thunder was sharp and hard now, frighteningly loud.
"Maybe I overdid it." Kieran laughed.
"You think?"
"You're shivering."
"So are you."
Kieran grabbed up a blanket to wrap around them. They sat on the floor, making themselves small, listening to the roar that echoed through the temple. Ash set his useless glasses aside. He lit the candle, setting it on the side of them away from the main room, where it didn't flicker so much.
"I want to go look at it," Kieran said, glancing up to indicate the storm raging overhead. Ash knew he didn't mean physically. He wanted to repeat the wild, high flight of mind he'd performed that afternoon.
Ash remembered what it had been like. The half-glimpsed geometries of force, of life, the mind-wrecking complexity into which Kieran had dived as if born to it. It was frightening, the strength of yearning Kieran emitted when he contemplated that world. Ash feared he'd be lost in it. But it gave him such joy; Ash couldn't deny him. "Be careful. You don't know what it might do."
As before, Kieran's eyes went blank. The wavering light showed him staring past Ash's ear, lips parted, head tilted as if listening. Ash closed his eyes and reached out with his mind, suddenly afraid Kieran's soul would leap entirely free of his body and be lost to the winds.
But what he sensed was no rise -- Kieran's seeking went no farther than the walls around them. Something there had distracted him, fascinated him, so that the din of wind and water outside was brushed aside as an annoyance.
"Tell me." Ash formed the words gently, thinking them before speaking, hoping not to break Kieran's trance. It succeeded; Kieran answered slowly, absently, still mentally groping along the walls.
"The writing. It shows up in this light. These are just... well, I don't get how... how anyone can not be able to read them."
It seemed safe to open his eyes. Kieran was now staring fixedly at the opposite wall, eyes moving from side to side as if reading. "What do they say?"
Kieran was silent for a while, before speaking in Iavaian. Ash caught scraps of meaning in the words, but couldn't really understand. Whatever Kieran was reading, though, seemed to amuse him quite a bit. At last he switched back to Eskaran. "Can you believe they wrote down things like that?"
Suspecting that a request for translation would wreck Kieran's concentration, Ash played along. "Why shouldn't they?"
"Because oracles are only true in the moment." His eyes snapped into focus, an expression of shock leaping across his face as he looked at Ash. "So that's where you went." Suddenly a change went through him, an upwelling of unease quickly mounting toward terror.
It was hard not to look, but Ash had to close his eyes to force himself from visual to mental, strengthen his hold on Kieran's -- whatever it was, mind, soul, spirit -- and try to bring him back from whatever was scaring him. Then Ash saw it, and he began to be frightened as well, nearly recoiled but held tighter instead.
Something was surging up through the familiar texture of Kieran's thoughts. Something huge, strange, dark as oil, something so horribly old that to find it there sent icy claws scrabbling at the edges of Ash's sanity. And it knew him. It was aware of him. It was observing him, and it wasn't impressed.
It was inside Kieran, like a parasite. Rage gave Ash strength; he added himself to the force Kieran was already expending in pushing it back, and together they fought to stop its progress.
You can't have him. He's mine. How dare you dirty him with your greasy night!
A wordless reply raked at him: the outrage of an arrogance so immense that it could not recognize any claim but its own. It weakened, though, bit by bit. Finally, all at once, it was gone. Kieran slumped against him, breathing in hoarse gasps.
Ash was barely able to speak. "What was that?" His voice was half drowned by thunder, but Kieran heard him.
"The same thing I saw when I died. The bigger me. That wanted to eat this me. Oh god. Oh shit. Ash, it's going to come back."
Panic made his skin prickle. "It's coming back?"
"Not now. But it will."
"But what is it? Why's it in you? Do you have any idea?"
"I'm afraid I might." Kieran swallowed hard, burrowed his face into Ash's hair, and stayed like that for a long time. Ash just held him until his despair subsided, until his usual confidence began to reassert itself. At last he straightened and shook himself, visibly gathering his courage. "You know what's stupid? I was warned. Some crazy bum back in Burn River warned me, but I thought he was just, you know, being a crazy bum."
"What did he say?"
"He thought I was a god. He said I was Ka'an."
Incredulity and alarm collided in Ash's mind. He stammered out a few disconnected syllables, then stopped, realizing he wasn't going to be able to make sense.
"Yeah," Kieran agreed.
"But -- that -- you mean the one --"
"Yeah. That one."
"You mean an actual, literal -- you mean a real --"
"A god."
"But. That would. But. Kai, that --"
Kieran looped a hand in the air angrily. "Yeah, I know! I don't believe in them either! Who knows what it really is? Who gives a fuck? The thing's riding piggyback on my brain, and it's getting stronger! It wants things I don't want! It doesn't care what I want!"
"Like what? What does it want?"
"I don't even remember. I know it recognized you, though. There's something in you -- I told you about it, that thing I saw knotted up in you, I thought it was maybe another Talent, like you've got healing too, or something. But this -- Ka'an -- he recognized it."
Scalp crawling, Ash had to make a couple tries before he got the words out: "Do, do, do you remember saying -- do you remember talking --"
"No."
"You looked at me and you said, 'So that's where you went.'"
"Shit." Kieran shoved his hands up his face, took handfuls of his wet hair, shook his head and growled. Then he dropped his hands with a sigh. "Whatever. We should've expected weirdness; nobody ever told us anything about our magic, right? For all I know, I was just seeing my Talent or something. Putting a face on it, getting paranoid. Anyway, freaking out now is useless. We can talk about it in the morning."
"I guess you're right. We're too tired to make sense."
"Yeah. But... ah..." Glancing up at the painted walls, Kieran scooped up their blankets. "Let's sleep in the other hallway."
"I was hoping you'd say that."
--==*==--
The storm calmed later, subsiding to steady rain. Having stripped off their wet clothing, they were soon warm enough to sleep, and weariness conquered the nervous feeling that whatever had been playing with Kieran's mind would return any moment. They dreamed in unison again. This time it was Kieran's dream they occupied; a sickly-sweet vision of opium and incense in a scarlet-veiled pavilion.
In the dream, they fed each other from cups of mixed wine and blood, watching uncaring as floodwaters climbed the hill where the pavilion stood. Soon the flood lapped around their feet. The colors of rugs and gold-threaded cushions under water fascinated them. Then the embroidered veils of the tent walls were lifting and swirling in the flood, and they realized there was nowhere to go. Their hill would be drowned, and them with it. Already, bowls of fruit were drifting away out of the pavilion, like little boats, onto the lake that now stretched all the way to the distant mountains. With a creak and a flapping sound, the tent began to lean. It fell around them and pressed them down into the water.
Ash woke thrashing, fighting free of wet cloth. Beside him, Kieran started up, teeth chattering. They lay in an inch of cold water. Not the brilliantly clear lake of the dream, but mud-milky water scummed with leaves and drowned insects.
"The fuck?" Kieran looked around disbelievingly. He lifted a hand and watched it drip. "What the fuck is this?"
Clutching his arms around him to contain his shivering, Ash got up and splashed out of the short hallway. There he stood -- naked, wet, and confused -- for so long that Kieran gave up asking him questions and came to join him. When Kieran saw what Ash had been looking at, he let out a low whistle.
"Well. That's gonna suck."
It was still raining. But now, instead of veiling a green valley with a stream down the middle, the rain furred the surface of a muddy, swirling lake whose waters were lapping over the top step of the temple and pouring back into it in widening rivulets. The channel down the middle of the temple was brimful and overflowing. The spring no longer sheeted calmly down the wall; now it poured in an arcing stream, chattering and splashing. Outside, debris swirled slowly in currents of inflow. Trees poked up out of the new lake, and in their branches things were caught. Things like the drowned carcass of the bay mare who'd so faithfully brought them here.
Ash made a faint sound of pity for the poor animal, wishing he'd gone and brought her in when the rain started. Not that he would've been able to find her. Besides, they had bigger problems. "Our supplies."
"Our clothes," Kieran retorted. He stomped back into the dead-end where they'd slept, searching with his feet. After a moment he snatched up his pants with a cry of dismay. "You're not supposed to do this to leather! Where's my coat? Where's your coat, Ashes, you're turning blue! Aw, hell. This stinks."
"We have to get out of here."
"No shit."
"Where are we going to go?"
Kieran waved that off as unimportant. "Wherever. Up. First order of business is to not drown."
"Yeah, I'm with you there."
Grumbling and swearing, they dressed in their wet clothes and gathered the dripping blankets. Ash found a stretch of floor that was still dry and used it to fold the blankets lengthwise and roll them up, pressing streams of water out of them. While he did this, Kieran was hauling their supplies into a different area of dry floor, giving a running commentary.
"Flour's all right. Coffee's all right. Sugar's gone to sludge. Salt's all right, it was on top. Meat's kinda crappy, it's been soaking. What's this? Was this rice? It's everywhere. Aw, shit, half the matches are wrecked. And -- oh, this is great. This is brilliant. Fuck."
Ash turned to see what was the matter. Kieran held out his gun, and with a grimace tipped it so water poured out of the barrel.
"That's not so good," Ash said.
"Both the short guns were lying in a puddle. The rifles were stood up, so they're okay, 'cept all their ammo's under water."
"Modern ammunition's supposed to be watertight, isn't it?"
"Sure, it's okay if it gets rained on, or dunked real quick, but this stuff's been stewing. I bet half of it's gone dud. And there's no way to tell which half, until you try to fire it. Shit."
With a sigh of resignation, Ash went to tie the blankets onto the packs. "Nothing we can do about it now. Let's just worry about getting to higher ground. Even if the rain stopped now the water would still keep getting deeper for a while. And that rain's not stopping."
As if to illustrate his point, a gust of wind sent a wave across the lake toward them, spilling into the temple in a flat sheet that quickly eliminated what little dry ground was left. Ash finished lacing his boots, wincing at the disgusting way they squelched. Kieran, oddly enough, laughed as he got his own boots on. "What's so damn funny?" Ash growled.
"My boots are dry."
"Well, nice for you."
That made Kieran laugh harder. "I'd let you wear 'em, but you know, I've got these gigantic feet. Or was it humongous?"
"I'm glad you can see the humor of the situation." Then Ash heard his own words, and smiled halfway. "Actually, I mean that. I think we need to have a sense of humor today."
"I'd rather have a boat." Grinning, Kieran hefted his pack; Ash noticed he'd picked the heavier one. "You know, this is so weird I can't even be mad about it. Ten minutes from now we might be drowned or something, but I don't believe it because it's just -- I mean, I've seen flash floods before, but I've never seen standing water like this. I've never seen it rain like this before."
"Got your guns?"
"Yeah. You? Stick the rifle through the pack flap, keep it out of your way."
"Oh, that works. Okay."
"Ready?"
"Guess I'd better be."
They stood in the temple's open mouth, ankle-deep, examining their options. The only way to get out of the valley would be up the least steep slope, the one on the north side where the deer had come down yesterday. To get there, they'd have to wade, and possibly swim. Then they'd have to toil up among the slicked-down grasses and soupy mud to get to the top. That hill was cut by a number of new streams, which implied that the land above was awash. And there was no end to the rain; the sky was thickly gray as far as the eye could see.
Kieran gave Ash an encouraging smile, kissed him lightly. "Think of it like this: there's no way the Watch is going to be tracking us today."
Steadying themselves against each other's shoulders, they forged into the flood.
Ash's glasses were immediately splattered to near uselessness. Following the cliff wall, half climbing and half swimming, they inched around the head of the valley. It would have been easier if this had been normal desert, but here there were clutching branches and swirling grass to snarl their legs, sinks of deep mud to suck at their feet. At one point Ash reached out for a cracked boulder to work his way across a deep place, when his hand jerked back of its own accord, his stranger senses telling him something wasn't right. A closer examination showed him thousands of light-brown scorpions clinging in the crack. He warned Kieran about it, used a nail-wrenching grip on the outside of the rock to get across, and somehow kept from falling into the rising flood.
Their work wasn't over when they reached the place where the valley's wall wasn't vertical. Here, tumbled slabs of stone were set in ground rapidly going to mud, and they shifted underfoot in dangerous ways. Their Talent sense was no use in telling which ground was solid and which treacherous; the water made everything a blank. Ash found himself thinking that if Kieran hadn't had magical healing -- from whatever source -- neither of them would have made it. Nevertheless he saw Kieran wincing more than once when he had to use his right arm for something. He didn't have the option of favoring that side. This was a two-handed job.
At last they reached the top. Uniformly yellow-brown with sticky mud, scratched and bruised, they stood bent-over and panting for several minutes.
Ash was the first to straighten up and look around. Kieran had had a much harder time of it, not only because he was still weakened from his injury, but because he was bigger. There was more of him to move, which mattered on a climb like that. Ash set a hand on his shoulder to let him know he could rest as long as he wanted. There was no danger up here, that he could see.
To the west, he could just make out that the land dropped off in a lacework of cuts and furrows. East, and out to north and south, the high ground stretched in shallow ripples and low hills for what looked like forever. It was hard to make out distant features accurately, because of the rain streaking his glasses, but he thought he saw something that might be a taller rock, off to the northeast. Not more than two miles, he guessed, probably a lot less.
He pointed it out to Kieran, got a nod in reply, and they struck out for it.
The going was a lot tougher than it looked like it should have been. Water was everywhere, pouring, seeping, cutting, pooling. Uphill areas were slippery with mud or uneven with broken rock, and the lower places between hills were choked with thorny brush and debris, when they weren't impassably flooded.
What should have been a matter of half an hour's walking turned into a three-hour nightmare of climbing and slipping. But they got closer, bit by bit, to the looming rock that Ash prayed would have an overhang they could shelter under. His teeth were chattering now, as much with fatigue as with cold.
Finally they were skirting the slope of debris that had fallen from the rock. It was a squat spire that stood maybe thirty feet taller than the land around it, convoluted and crumbly from aeons of weathering. There wasn't anything that looked like shelter on this side, but they hadn't seen the whole thing yet.
Please, please let there be a cave or something, Ash prayed as they trudged through the rain.
Suddenly Kieran's hand knotted in his collar, yanking him to a halt. Puzzled, Ash glanced back at him, then followed his stare up to the foot of the spire.
Where a man in a white oilcloth rain cape stood staring back at them.
Kieran had his gun out before Ash quite registered what he was looking at, but the weapon only produced a sad click. Ash reached behind him to tug his rifle free of his pack, but two more men in white were coming around a buttress of rock, and Kieran grabbed Ash's wrist to haul him back.
"Just run," Kieran said through his teeth.
They turned and bolted. Behind him, Ash heard a shout, then multiple voices yelling. Just ahead of him, the ground bulged and spattered with a whump sound, spraying mud out of a crater a yard across. He glanced back, trying to make sense of the scene behind him, but Kieran yanked him onward.
"Dodge. They've got a breaker."
"There's six of them!" Ash yelled back. "With horses!"
They skidded down a slope and pelted across rock-strewn sand. With a frantic look over his shoulder, Kieran shrugged his pack from his shoulders and dropped it. Ash did the same, reaching back in the process to catch out his rifle before letting the pack fall. Kieran was pulling ahead; Ash stumbled as he looped the rifle over his shoulder, then ducked his head and put on a burst of speed to catch up.
Voices were shouting behind. It sounded like they were calling out to the fugitives to stop, most likely making dire threats of what would happen if they didn't. It was impossible to hear words over the sounds of running, and it didn't matter. Magics were cutting the air now, hooves were thudding, gaining.
Ash had no time to dwell on how stupidly unfair it was, to run into the Watch by pure chance on a day when rain would have made them invisible to magical senses. There was no time even to be afraid, for himself or for Kieran. Sound and time went strange, took on an eerie clarity. He heard the flat crack of rifle fire, knew by the sound that it had been a warning shot, not meant to hit. Now they'd be trying to wing him. All around, sudden potholes appeared, as the Watch group's entropist broke apart the earth. There was at least one pyro among them as well, and a kinetic or two, from the way mud kept bursting into blasts of scalding steam and flying across the path to obscure it.
Ash ran zigzags across the plain, dodging rocks and leaping potholes. Didn't bother wondering how long he could go on doing it. Tried to keep Kieran in sight. Tried to probe the ground ahead for solidity, but was repeatedly thwarted by the complexity of water. Maybe that was why the Watchmen kept missing. Followed Kieran down another slope and through a stream, into more rippled terrain. A horse screamed, somewhere, and he began to think they might have a chance of escaping.
His pulse beat painfully in his temples, his sinuses, his eardrums. His breath rasped his throat raw. Tan water sprayed in arcing sheets from every footstep, squelched in his boots, weighed his legs.
Kieran led him into a maze of tiny hills, strangely rounded and no taller than a house, where the sand-and-clay earth shed water well enough for their senses to work on it. Unfortunately, it also made a heavier mud, which sucked at their boots and slowed them down. Ash guessed that Kieran was hoping it would break the legs of their pursuers' horses. He was trying not to think of how the Watchmen could simply dismount and chase them on foot. The men in white were better rested, better fed, and had dry ammunition. The small hills suddenly gave way to a steep slope, leading to a drop into a gully full of braided water.
Digging in with their heels and hands, they tried to keep from sliding into it. For a moment it looked like it would work. Then, just as they reached the edge, the ground gave way. Ash yelped as the crumbled mud hauled him down. Kieran reached out to him, but missed. The Iavaian was slowed by his long coat, which dragged above him, catching on rocks; Ash had no such impediment, and had barely time to start to be afraid before he was slammed against the bottom of the gully.
He thrashed and swam to be free of the mud. The runoff stream helped, cutting through the piled mudslide and whisking it away. For a moment his glasses were totally opaque, before the downpour started to wash them clean. But as he tried to stand, he felt that his left foot was caught in something, just before a nauseating pain jolted up his leg.
Kieran landed beside him, having had a more controlled slide down the slope. He reached for Ash's arm, but Ash pulled away. "Wait! Ow!"
"Come on!" Kieran grabbed at him again, glancing fearfully up to where their pursuers would appear any second.
"I can't! My -- it's broken --"
"Broken? What is?"
"Foot or ankle." Ash wrapped his hands around his calf and hauled his foot out of the obstruction, letting out a screech like a stepped-on cat as it came free. Then he fell forward on his elbows and retched.
"Broken," Kieran said distantly. "Holy shit, Ash. We're fucked."
Ash drew a ragged breath. "No. Just me. You run. Go."
"Like hell I will!"
"Run, I said." He was surprised how level his voice sounded, even if it was forced through clenched teeth.
"I'll carry you."
"Then we'll both get caught." Ash pulled his rifle around and shook a clump of mud off it. "Listen, damn you! Let them catch me. You get free. Then you can come rescue me. You know where they'll take me."
"Ashleigh!" Kieran whimpered his name, eyes too wide, panicked. Ash had never seen him panic before.
"Fucking do it, Kai!" Ash shouted back.
Kieran's eyes squeezed shut for a second; when he opened them, his face was stony. In a whirl of flying water, he spun and pounded off down the wash.
Ash watched him go until a bend in the gully took him out of sight. Only then did he allow his eyes to spill over. They both knew it had been a lie between them. There was no way Kieran was going to be able to bust Ash out of Churchrock. But they had to pretend to believe it, or there was no hope in the world anywhere.
He hoped Kieran was out of earshot when the sobs began, wrung out of him through a painfully tight throat, high and thin behind his teeth. He hoped Kieran couldn't hear him.
I didn't get to tell him those things. About forever, and never hurting him. Damn it, why can't the world leave us alone? All sorts of wretched, horrible people get to live out their lives, but this shining thing we found -- the world can't stop trying to put the light out. At that moment, Ash wanted desperately to kill something. The fact that he would soon have that option didn't escape him.
Gritting his teeth, he sat up. He avoided looking at the way his foot was kinked sideways. Patiently, he picked a gob of muddy grass out of his rifle's bolt, then slid it back just enough to see that there was a round chambered. He settled the stock against his shoulder, aiming upslope, and waited.
The longer it took them to capture him, the farther away Kieran got. That was all that could possibly matter now.
The tables had turned. Now the raw and thorny part of his pattern was curled in upon itself, and he was whole outside it. And in whole possession of this body, for what that was worth.
Ka'an had to admit that it was a good body. Far better than he was used to. Of course it resembled his first, as all his bodies had. But of those he'd actually experienced since his defeat at the Judge's hands -- the few in which he'd emerged briefly to self-awareness -- most were in some way weakened or damaged. The mortal state was a fragile one. And all his vessels back to the first had been thin, as weak and graceful as reeds, most further atrophied by dreaming, in various stages of succumbing to the poppy that was his gift to the world.
This one, though... he reveled in its strength as he ran. The frame was his own, the long bones, the precarious height. Somehow, though, this version of him had clothed that delicate frame with muscle like braided wire, toughened and hardened itself -- and, he realized, picked up a great number of scars in the process. No matter; those could be repaired, once he took back his power.
First, though, he had to win free of those minions of Theylan who chased him. He was lucky the smaller mind had folded when it had, or it would have gotten this fine body killed, and Ka'an wouldn't have had this chance. Even now, the diseased mind was paining him. Like a splinter under a fingernail. Keening and raging within itself, yearning to run back to that weak northern creature he'd left behind. Doubt and contradiction. The body's mind had decided two things at once: simultaneously to obey the northerner's order to run, and to refuse and stay. That break had allowed Ka'an an opening. Now he'd shake off the trouble the mortal mind had gotten him into, and then he'd go take back his power, and then he'd find Thelyan and teach that leprous-pale upstart the consequences of standing against his elders.
All this water was inconvenient. He doubted he had the strength to change the weather just now, though. Some knowlege of this life was available to him, and it informed him that all rain falling in this area would eventually drain into the pattern that mortals called the Tama Burn. Thus all he had to do was follow it downstream. Pleased by the slow heat of well-conditioned muscles, he ran along the ankle-deep stream. There was a possibility, of course, that it would deepen suddenly and drown this body.
The thought brought a twitch from the curled, abrasive lesser mind within him. That mind, which he would crush and absorb as soon as he had the time and power -- call it Kai, one of the body's names, appropriate in its sense of 'ghost' -- was not willing to risk drowning. Apparently the northerner they'd left behind was depending on a rescue.
Ka'an laughed out loud. Such a small life Kai had. The world was full of boys much prettier than that one. Girls, too, once Ka'an altered the body so that it could respond to them. Any of them could be made to adore him. They would surrender themselves utterly, without all the playing at equality that the northerner had done.
Anger from Kai. He has a name.
Oh yes. Ashes; a burned thing, worthless. The only interesting thing about him was... there had been something interesting... why, he almost thought that Kai might be denying him access to some of his memories.
Well, there was no time for that now. He'd handle it later. Now the gully he ran along was widening, and he could see that it opened ahead, onto flatter ground. Yes; a lip of stone, a short leap, and he ran on bare stone. Something off to the left made a sharp popping noise, and he wondered what it could be. A rockfall?
Gunfire, idiot.
The image this brain threw at him clarified the risk. It would have to be dealt with. He found some solid earth where he could plant his feet. The rain and the thick soles of these boots would interfere with his drawing of power, but he didn't suppose that would matter much. The two men running toward him across the rocky plain were only mortals, after all. Wearing Thelyan's white, they carried things Kai recognized as rifles, and were surrounded by a fine mist of static power. Mages with weapons? What use did a mage have for a weapon? His power should be his only weapon. Ka'an would show them how it was done.
He drew heat from stone, force from the tiny concussions of raindrops. Not much, but it should be enough to teach these ridiculous creatures a lesson. He spun up a ward against projectiles. Ignoring the furious thrashing of Kai inside him, he fashioned a noose of will and cast it into the nearer man's heart.
That man sagged, choking. How irritating; he should have died in an instant. He was somehow fighting off Ka'an's death spell. Ka'an would win, but it would take time, and the other man had dropped to one knee and raised his rifle.
Crack and whine, and chips flew up from between Ka'an's feet. He ignored that, busy forcing aside the shieldings of his victim. These gave way, flinging the man into death, just as another gunshot sounded. Ka'an was startled to feel a slap against his thigh, followed by a stinging sensation. He looked down to see a red rip in his trousers where the bullet had creased him. How had it gotten through his ward?
His flicker of confusion quickly turned to anger as Kai surged up inside him, running along the body's nerves like fire on spilled oil. He pressed back, and a thought struck him like a slap: Not now, fuckwit. Then he was moving, and the next bullet buzzed past without striking.
Just below the surface, Ka'an fumed at Kai's actions as the body dashed straight at the enemy. How dare he. How dare he oppose my will, and endanger this body, which I have claimed? The enemy was throwing aside his gun, standing, raising his hand and opening his mouth to trigger a spell. Ka'an tried to jerk the body aside, and found Kai's will weakly held, but now it was as if the body itself had intentions of its own. The first syllable of the spell was spoken, making air chill and skin prickle; then Ka'an's new body was airborne, heel striking the white-clad man in the center of the chest, knocking him down.
A wash of heat swept over him and was gone: a fire spell cut off before it could catch hold. Kai was in control now, snatching up the fallen rifle and aiming it. His thoughts as he put it to his shoulder were chaotic, spinning vaguely in the direction of picking off these men one by one and rescuing the red-haired boy. He pulled the trigger; the enemy's head splattered red across the ground; the rifle kicked against half-healed bone.
In the pain that followed, Ka'an took charge again.
There would be no more silliness about rescues. And there would most certainly be no more name-calling or disrespect. Ka'an was a god. Kai was just a trace left in the brain, soon to be absorbed. From deep within, Kai growled defiance as Ka'an pushed him down, but Ka'an paid him no attention.
--==*==--
By nightfall, he could not make the body do more than trudge stumblingly along. It was exhausted. He let it lie down, though he was impatient with mortal limitations. Now he had to remember how to fall asleep without being trapped in unconsciousness. He, the Dreamer, afraid of dreams! Yet he could still sense Kai rumbling in him, like an undigested meal. It was possible that the mortal might take control when Ka'an relaxed his grip.
And do what? Ka'an smiled. He would be unable to stand, let alone take them anywhere Ka'an didn't want to go.
Nevertheless it was a delicate operation. Ka'an would have to remain lucid if he wished to retain control after the body had rested. Gently, carefully, he let Kai slip past him just enough to inhabit the upper layer, the one that felt cold and tasted grit. Let him deal with the ache of hunger in the body's stomach. Ka'an remained just behind him, lacing tendrils of himself through Kai's perceptions; eavesdropping.
Blinking, Kai flexed his hand before his face, then groaned. He pushed himself up on his hands. Ka'an immediately jerked him back; the body flopped like a rag doll. You shan't go anywhere, Kai. I simply mean to let you sleep.
"In a mud puddle?" Kai mumbled when Ka'an let him out again. "Just going upslope a bit. Asshole." This insult got him pulled away once more. The next time Ka'an gave him the body, he crawled on his belly away from the waterway they'd been following. Once on harder ground, he wrapped his coat around him and curled into a ball. Miserably chilled and hungry, he put his arms over his face. He was, Ka'an realized, aware of the same dilemma Ka'an had seen, that of relinquishing control to sleep. Why he was so determined to go blundering back into danger for some white-faced catamite was a mystery.
From Kai's part of their shared pattern came a surge of pity. You have no idea what anything's worth.
Sleep, Ghost, Ka'an replied angrily. Neither of us is served by your maundering.
Kai's reluctant agreement was followed by a relaxing of muscles, if not of mind. The mortal had to bear the brunt of the body's discomfort; if he hadn't been perfectly exhausted, sleep would have been impossible. Ka'an caught his last waking thought: the determination that, when he had rested, he would certainly force himself to the front, defeat what he saw as an intruding, alien mind. He still didn't understand. He should have been honored to be host to his god. Thelyan's influence had done a great deal of harm. Kai didn't have the faintest idea what Ka'an really was, how impossible it would be to win against him, and thus intended to try. This, as he sank into Ka'an's own realm, carrying Ka'an with him.
Kai's dreams began as planning; he tried to find a method of effecting his intended rescue. Mental maps unrolled. These plans soon skewed out of lucidity, but Ka'an was easily able to retain detachment, and observe rather than being involved. Kai ran through nightmare landscapes of looming water-walls, hunting the red-haired boy. He was frantic. Black towers of water crashed on him, and he believed his Ashes had drowned, but went on searching. He believed that if he could find the body, he could follow the departing soul into the land of ghosts.
Several times, Ka'an was nearly drawn into the dream by its intensity. Had people dreamed so forcefully, in his days of rulership? The body wasn't getting good rest. With a twist of power he hadn't exercised in centuries, Ka'an washed light over the dreamscape and put dry land before the eye of Kai's thoughts. But it wasn't enough; Kai was still in nightmare, still searching, reeling with despair. So Ka'an gave him an image of his white-faced boy, standing unharmed in a field of poppies. He waited to see if the symbolism of the poppies would reach him, remind him how to surrender his will.
Then something disturbing happened: the image of the white boy changed without Ka'an's permission, and without the intervention of Kai's imagination either. It went into sharp focus, suddenly detached from the fabric of the dream. Ka'an had cleaned the boy up a bit, but abruptly he was just as wet and bedraggled as he'd been when Kai last saw him, one arm of his white shirt soaked thinly red. He reached out to snatch up Kai's hand and press it to his cheek.
"Where were you, I was looking for you," Kai said in a dreamer's babbling voice. His relief was overwhelming, strong enough to disturb Ka'an's concentration; this time he was actually dragged partway into the dream before he shook himself free.
"You got away. You're all right," Ashes replied; his voice was also a dreamer's, and there came with it a thread of trickled power. Ka'an fought for the detachment to trace it.
"You're bleeding."
"They shot me but they healed it. And my ankle."
"They caught you. I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry." Kai's dream-self shimmered with anguish, much stronger than anything that could be expressed while awake. The storm of regret subsided instantly when Ashes kissed his fingers and smiled forgiveness.
"I don't know where I am. Some kind of trance. This is a true dream, isn't it? I can feel your hand."
"Yes."
The boy's blue eyes widened in anxiety. "You'll come for me, won't you? I already miss you."
"I promise. But I have to fight this monster first."
"That one?" He pointed. They both turned to look, and they were staring at Ka'an. Too late, he realized he'd been drawn into the dream.
Very well. He'd show the mortal what a god looked like. Wrapping his aspect around him in full glory, he glared, making his eyes crackle with green fire. Made his voice thrum in Kai's chest like a drum when he spoke: "You are only a small part of me, Ghost. All that is great or bright or true in you comes from me. Don't you want to be united with something higher than yourself?" He held his arms out, changing the tone of the dream to one of lostness, loneliness, presenting himself as the only home.
But instead of longing toward the vision of the god, Kai wrapped his arms protectively around Ashes, meeting Ka'an's glare with a scowl. "Get the hell out of my head!"
"How dare you speak to me that way!" Ka'an reared up, becoming terrible, but Kai wasn't frightened. Even Ashes was just looking on with faintly disapproving curiosity, as if watching someone else's child misbehave.
Disgusted with himself, Ka'an jerked free of Kai's thoughts, leaving the dream in ruins behind him. He shivered awake. He had possession of the body, which seemed on the verge of hypothermia. Inside him, Kai threshed about helplessly, looking for his lost dream, and was easily subdued.
The rain had stopped. Clouds fled in rags, revealing glimpses of thin moonlight. Where there had been a foaming river, there now flowed a quieter stream. Ka'an dragged his sluggish body upright, reflecting that it must be a well-trained body indeed, to be able to go on after only an hour's sleep in such wretched conditions, especially chilled as it was. Fortunate, that the dream had gone badly. He might have died -- it might have died of the cold, otherwise, casting him blindly toward his next birth.
Not this time. He was determined that this time, he would rise to his true power again. He would take his rightful place. Forcing the exhausted body onward, he followed the flowing water.
--==*==--
Something big was happening out there. Hints and echoes tortured Chaiel, made him twist within his prison. Something big.
He couldn't make sense of it. Couldn't slow it down enough to look at it. The babble of voices beat him, visions bludgeoned him, knowlege stretched his brain and cluttered him until he couldn't think. Memories tore at him, never quite coming clear. He was afraid.
When light burst suddenly in on him, he screamed.
It's only Thelyan, he told himself sternly, and calmed enough to look, though a desperate edge stayed on his thoughts. Why was the Judge bothering him again so soon? And why -- the novelty of this took Chaiel's breath away -- why did he have another person with him? He always came alone. What was happening?
This other person was a hollow-cheeked youth in dirty clothes, whose eyelids sagged as if he were half asleep. He stood with a slumping posture, hands loose at his sides, gazing incuriously at Chaiel. Behind streaked spectacles, his eyes were glassy crescents of watery blue. Thelyan was smiling.
"I don't have any questions for you this time, Chaiel," Thelyan said. "I've found Ka'an, and I'll absorb him soon. Tomorrow or the next day, if all goes well. After that, whether I have a use for you depends on how cooperative you are. With that in mind, I've decided to give you a present." He turned to the slack-faced youth. "Undress and remove your spectacles."
Still hammered by fragmentary visions, Chaiel fought to make sense of this. He felt his lips twisting in a posture between laughing and weeping. "What do I want with that? Bring me a girl."
"You asked me if you could have Medur. The answer is yes."
With dawning horror, Chaiel remembered. He remembered how he had seen that Medur was housed in male flesh this incarnation, and he remembered asking, as a joke, to be given her if she was found, and had not connected the two conversations. Now he understood what he'd brought on himself. Thelyan was not a prankster. He really meant to throw this mindless body into Chaiel's prison to crowd him, to drool and mumble at him and keep him from ever knowing a moment's peace. Probably the thing would be left in here with him for eternity.
He babbled and whimpered, begging, blustering, warning, promising, but Thelyan paid him no mind. Like a statue carved from salt, the Judge watched until he was certain the blank-faced boy had no material on him that might be used for a tool, then steered the unresisting creature to the wall of the sphere. He touched a seal he'd never released before.
Chaiel gasped as air moved against his skin. The bubble was open, it was open! He could get out, if only he could get to the surface he could reach through, he smelled things and felt a breeze on his face!
Thelyan gestured, and the idiot boy was jerked through the air and into the sphere. He fell limply against Chaiel, who shoved and clawed to be free of the entangling limbs, to get out -- but Thelyan touched the seal again, and the sphere went stagnant as before.
"Fuck you, Judge!" Chaiel screeched. "Fuck you! Shit on you! I hope your eyes fall out! I hope bugs eat your bowels!"
"I'll leave you a light," Thelyan replied. "So you can get acquainted." He sent his glowing spot up to cling to the ceiling. He went out of the room, and the door clanged behind him.
Weeping in rage, Chaiel punched and slapped at unresponsive body that sagged all over him. It was drawn to the center of the sphere, as he was, and thus it pressed against him no matter what he did. Briefly he entertained the thought of eating it. When it was dead, he could vomit it out, and it would fall out of the sphere and leave him alone.
Alone. A groan wrung out of him. He didn't want to be alone.
But this flopping doll was no company. He turned it around, held it away from him with his feet against its chest. It looked a little bit familiar -- but then, didn't everything? As he watched it, its eyes slid meaninglessly sideways, clearly not seeing anything.
Bewilderment rushed through him. It was quickly followed by regret, then longing, then worry for the safety of -- someone.
Chaiel sucked in his breath. Those weren't his own feelings. The floppy boy was sending them. Forcing himself calm, he sorted through what had been said, trying to separate his stuttering visions from actual dialogue.
Medur. In a male body. Given to him. This. The Green Lady who wove the vines between hearts; voices babbling about a Green Man; emotions coming up through the soles of his feet. Chaiel squatted on the stranger's chest, peering at him. Well, he looked like a Yelorrean, and immortals tended to incarnate near where they'd first come to power, and there was something foggy about him, like thick clothing, only underneath his skin. Remember. You know how to do this. It's been so long... you know how to do this, Chaiel. Look properly.
Centuries since there had been any pattern in here but his own. He'd stopped seeing it. Blinded by too much information. Making his sight work on the body in front of him was a long, frustrating chore, exacerbated by the leaking emotions that came out wherever their skin touched. And he could not keep from touching, because the stupid sphere pushed them both toward the center, and stupid Thelyan made them be naked so Chaiel couldn't find a way to kill himself with his clothes. Or make a noose of them and swing out to catch the seals when the sphere was opened -- I could have used my hair, I could have made a braid and swung it out and caught it on a seal when he put this person in, oh damn me why didn't I do that? Too late now; he bit himself hard on the forearm, then returned to his task.
Just when he thought he'd forgotten forever, would never remember, pattern bloomed before his eyes in all its brilliant colors of thought.
His own pattern was not pleasant to look at. He was insane, and it showed. Chaotic, jerking and spiking with nauseating randomness. He focused instead on the boy's. It was hard to make out; that fog was still there. Chaiel thought its regularity was a bit reminiscent of Thelyan's style. A spell of passivity, of course. He could shatter it with a word, but stopped himself -- stilled himself, though it was difficult -- and carefully spun off the power in it, instead. Not nearly enough power to break out of the sphere. There might not be enough in the world for that. But more was good anyway. As the last shreds of the spell pulled free, the blue-eyed youth blinked and twitched, distaste and panic spilling out of him.
"Hold still," Chaiel barked. "We'll just get tangled if you move."
Looking from Chaiel's face to his own body to the room beyond the ripple of the sphere, the stranger let out a groan. "What is this?"
"You're in the sphere. Thelyan said Medur's in you. Let me look."
Hands hovering in awkward consideration near Chaiel's feet, the stranger spilled out confusion shading into anger. "Who's Thelyan?"
"The one who brought you here."
"I don't remember that. I don't remember coming here. What's Medur?"
"You're not very bright, are you?"
The boy's brows snapped down. Suddenly he moved, grabbing Chaiel's ankle and thrusting him away. Chaiel began a laugh as he bounced up and began to come down again, but it was cut off when the boy's fist smacked into the side of his jaw, spinning him around. As he yelped in surprise, the stranger reversed their earlier positions, so that he was now kneeling on Chaiel's chest, and he had a fistful of Chaiel's hair.
"Just so you know," the boy said tightly, "I've had one hell of a rotten day, so I advise you to leave off smartassing and answer my goddamned question."
Chaiel gaped at the newcomer. His jaw hurt now. The boy looked so thin, but he'd hit awfully hard. And he was so angry. He was still leaking emotion, which meant he was an empath like Medur's vessel should be, but the feeling coming out of him was a cold burn of fury. Chaiel whimpered. "Don't hit me anymore."
The emission of anger flickered, but came back almost as strongly. "That's up to you, kid. We can be friends or enemies. Your call."
"Friends!" Chaiel tugged to get his hair out of the stranger's fist. The stranger let go with a sigh, anger fading to weary irritation.
"Good. My name's Ashleigh Trine. Call me Ash if you like." He offered his hand, and Chaiel shook it, though the angle was awkward.
"My name is Chaiel," he said, and waited for a reaction. Got none. Sniffed. "So Thelyan really has erased me from history."
"What is this place? This thing? How come we're all sideways and sticky?"
"It's called a null sphere. It suspends me so that Thelyan can try to make me answer questions. It stops aging. Mostly. Hair and nails still grow. But I hope you don't need to piss, because you can't."
"Yeah, I can see your hair. Do they feed us? I'm hungry as hell, and thirsty."
"Eventually, you'll bite yourself and suck your own blood, trying to stop the thirst. It doesn't work, but you'll do it anyway."
"So that would be a no," the boy named Ash said calmly, but there had been a spike of fear in him. "Who's this Thelyan character, then?"
Chaiel's lips quirked. "Say the name a lot of times very quickly."
"No thanks."
"Thelyan Thelan Telan Delan Dalan."
"So? What's that supposed to mean?"
"Are you a Dalanist?"
"You're smartassing again." Ash cracked his knuckles.
"I'm not. I swear. He's an immortal, a theophage like I am, like Ka'an and Medur -- gods. We were all mortal once, but he's forgotten that. He's eaten all the rest, and made the world think he's the only one. Now he's going to go eat Ka'an, and then he'll eat us. He's incarnated right now, made himself Director of the Watch. That's who put you in here, because you have Medur in you, though I can't see her, I don't know how he knew --"
"Calm down. Shy -- what was your name?"
"Chaiel."
"Okay. Look, I happen to think you're nuts, but let's see if it hangs together. I've heard of Ka'an. Tell me about him."
"You should know. You've been fucking him."
The newcomer's already pale face blanched gray. "Oh god."
"Precisely."
"So Kieran really -- how did you know that?"
"It's my function. I know things. Just as it's Thelyan's function to divide things, and yours to bring things together, and your evil sweetheart's to do all sorts of things no one wants done."
"What?"
"Oh, he's a scary one, Ka'an. I can remember when he ruled the rest of us. He was horrible. He must've been buried awfully deep in your Kieran person, if you can regard him with anything but loathing. Just like Medur's buried so far down in you I can't find her."
Ash shook his head rapidly. "Damn it -- this is all crazy. Okay, who's Medur, and what's this crap about... her... being inside me?"
"Let me see if I can find her. Draw her out. Then I won't have to explain things."
"No. I saw that -- Ka'an -- coming up in Kieran, and it scared the hell out of me. I don't think I want to go through something like that."
"With Medur?" Chaiel laughed. "She's harmless."
"Nope. Don't try," he added warningly, cocking a fist.
"And she has the answers you want."
"Didn't I just tell you no?"
"And I miss her."
"Tough. I don't want some girl taking over my mind."
"Don't you want to know all about the god that's running your starving, hypothermic boyfriend to death right about now?"
Immediately after he'd said it -- after it had leapt from his lips as things sometimes did if he had a clairsentient moment while he was talking -- he wished he'd somehow kept his mouth shut. The emotion that spilled into him from Ash was more sharply painful than anything he'd felt in a very long time. Its aftereffects were even worse; Ash was just gnawing a knuckle, afraid because something bad was happening to someone he loved, but Chaiel was forced to see how dulled and numb he'd become over the centuries, and was in danger of losing his numbness because of it.
They remained like that for a time, throwing pain back and forth, until Ash steeled himself and shut down the circuit. His magic was clumsy -- he slammed himself closed far harder than he had to. Still, it was a relief.
Ash covered his hands with his face for a moment, then took a deep breath and met Chaiel's eyes. "All right. Do it."
"It's easier if you open up again," Chaiel said reluctantly.
"If I get scared, it'll distract you."
"Never mind that. You just startled me. You're no good at this. You never had any training, I suppose."
"No."
"Just open."
Scowling, Ash closed his eyes. After a few breaths, his face relaxed, and his mind's barriers relaxed as well. All he was leaking now was a faint anxiety, which was a sensation Chaiel was well accustomed to.
There was the fellow's pattern, a pleasingly even one, almost floral in its unfurled receptiveness. Shapes of open-minded reason repeated within it. The mind of a scholar. Of course it contained the uneven glyphs of hot-blooded tendencies that were to be expected in someone so young, and the whole was currently underlaid by a deep sense of loss and anger, but on the whole it was a very sane mind. The certain shape of magic which Thelyan's minions had been taught to call a Talent was there, a little stretched and scarred as if he'd been trying to get it to do things it couldn't. Or, Chaiel realized, as if it had recently been caught against a will like Thelyan's. Ash had certainly been interrogated before being brought here, but he didn't seem much changed by it.
Chaiel resented him for that.
After much careful sorting and delving, he saw what he'd been looking for. Scented the faintest hint of someone he knew. Following the hint, he found it tightly knotted, incurved in such a way that it could not, of its own action, break free. A touch from outside was needed to release it. Medur had made herself a seed that could only germinate when conditions were just right.
That was so like her. Chaiel smiled as he touched the intricately tiny glyph, teased free a burr of semi-awareness and saw the whole thing start to unfold.
He drew back into himself and opened his eyes. Ash looked puzzled at him.
"I thought it would be like a Survey," Ash said. "But that didn't hurt."
"Doing it right takes finesse. Creativity. Thelyan's people don't have that. He pounds it out of them."
"Well, I appreciate it. I can sort of see what you were looking at, but I don't feel any different. Should I?"
"Give it time."
"I don't have time, not if what you said about Kieran is true!"
"Oh, Ka'an won't break his body while it's still useful. Probably."
"Probably?" Ash bared his teeth, about to have a tantrum. Then he stopped. His look turned inward. He drew a sharp breath. "Oh."
Chaiel waited, half fearful and half pleased, while Medur unfurled.
--==*==--
Thelyan studied the map. He could get a team into the Burn area within four hours. Faster, if the Splitwood Mine spur was clear, or the engineers handy about shunting traffic off it. But he had to assume the worst, and in the worst case he'd only be throwing those men away. Well, he could withdraw them if the situation changed.
Interrogating Ashleigh Trine had yielded some interesting results. He'd done it himself, not trusting the information to any of his officers. He hadn't made any special effort to leave the recaptured fugitive sane or alive at the end of the session; giving the boy to Chaiel had been an afterthought. The combination of Survey, Compulsion, and physical stressing had broken Trine wide open. Thelyan now knew that Kieran Trevarde was Ka'an's current host, that Ka'an had nearly awakened at least once, that the two fugitives' homosexual relationship might provide a hold on Trevarde if Ka'an didn't emerge, and that Ka'an had apparently seen something in Trine to startle him. A deeper probe of Trine had told Thelyan what it was: Medur, dormant.
One of his two enemies had fallen into his hand, without any effort on his part. He had a fairly clear idea of the location and plans of the other. And the weather was clearing, which would allow tracking.
Either Ka'an had emerged, or he had not. If he had emerged, he would make straight for the Burn as quickly as possible. If he hadn't, he might do so at any point, or he might remain buried. If he remained buried, the motivation would be Trevarde's; either to hide himself, or to attempt to free Trine. That last possibility seemed unlikely, as things stood; some people actually were that suicidally noble, but Thelyan doubted that the multiple murderer Trevarde was one of them. It was also unlikely that Ka'an would remain buried long.
Therefore it made sense to plan for two contingencies: Ka'an in fresh possession of his power, or Trevarde fleeing for the border.
Ways to leave the country were limited, and already closely monitored. It wouldn't hurt to have a search team combing the area where Trevarde had last been sighted, in case he tried to find a bolthole within the country. But Thelyan considered it far more likely that Ka'an had awakened.
In which case, his first action after reassuming his power would be to strike at Thelyan. The evil one wasn't stupid; he knew that planning and preparing were Thelyan's skills, not his own, and would try not to give Thelyan time to be ready. He would not understand that Thelyan had always been ready. Coming fresh from reabsorbing his greater pattern, wearing a body still injured and exhausted from the Watch's harrying of Trevarde, and nearly a thousand years behind the science of magic, he'd be easily defeated.
The only thing Thelyan wasn't confident of was his ability to fully assimilate Ka'an. He'd failed, last time. He'd only been able to cut Ka'an from his power and kill his body. Though he could easily do that this time, it would mean another long period of watching for the evil one's possible incarnations. He would far rather break Ka'an's will and take him in whole. But the methods by which Thelyan had broken the others hadn't worked on Ka'an. The others had loved their worshippers, and thus were vulnerable to Thelyan's threats to their populations. Ka'an, on the other hand, was perfectly selfish. When Thelyan had warned that retaliations would fall on the Iavaians as a result of Ka'an's stubbornness, Ka'an had been unmoved. If they can't defend themselves, let them die, Ka'an had replied.
Well, perhaps something would come to mind. Until then, it was better to plan on keeping the body alive, using the null sphere. Having three of his enemies in one sphere wouldn't be secure; he would have to build more.
Then there would be no chance of anyone spoiling his plans. His people would continue to spread across the world, bringing order and righteousness. Gradually, rebellion and sin would be weeded out. There would come a time when all was clear, all voices raised in unison to him, ordered and regular, grateful for the bliss of perfect obedience. There would be no more of the pain caused by conflict. No more pride or lust or anger. Ka'an's diseased legacy would be erased at last.
Thelyan was surprised to discover that a fine tremor had begun in his hands. With an effort, he stilled himself. It wouldn't do to get excited. He still had to give orders to his people, predicated on the assumption that there would soon be a Burn here. All nonessential personnel would be evacuated. He would have the prisoners locked down; they could go hungry for a few days, if necessary. If they were killed, he could simply collect others later. Did he want to bring extra troops in?
Yes, why not. They would probably die, but they'd weaken Ka'an in the process, lessening the likelihood that Thelyan would be harmed. Loyal men would be grateful for such an opportunity. Even if they didn't know what Thelyan was, they knew they were dying for their God.
Ash watched warily as a stranger's senses spread out beneath his own. It was not quite like Empathy. There was a pressure building, a point of tension; nervously, he waited for this new thing to push through him, as he'd sensed Ka'an doing to Kieran. It didn't push him, though. It found a kind of tense equilibrium, and there it stopped expanding.
At the same time, a memory was nagging at him. A scene: a beach. A green, wet place, dripping with mist, the sound of the sea. It invited him to daydream.
He frowned. Was this a trick, meant to lull him so he could be taken over?
The weird kid was watching him expectantly. Ash had to assume he'd been telling the truth about what this bubble thing was, at least in terms of it stopping aging. The kid's hair was longer than he could have grown it in his life, if he was the age he looked. And what he'd said made sense, in its crazy way -- about what Ka'an was, and the thing in Ash's own mind...
And if Ka'an was harming Kieran, then there weren't any other options, were there? He had to know.
He closed his eyes and let the scene open before him.
Hazy at first, like remembering, but solidifying quickly into something more like a dream. Then something even more real. He stood on a cobblestone beach beside a cold sea, the surf sound rushing in his ears. Above, a steep hill thickly covered with oak and brambles. A thin drizzle was falling, chilling his naked flesh.
He was so tired of being cold and wet and naked. It seemed he'd been some combination of those things for ages. Well, true vision or not, he believed he ought to be able to at least imagine he was clothed. Thinking back to the state of his closet before he'd been arrested, he took his favorite clothes and remembered what they'd felt like on his body. Trousers of heather-colored wool, a bit scratchy but nicely warm. Cream linen shirt, soft from many washings; the green and gray brocade vest; his elastic-sided boots, which were out of fashion but well broken-in. His winter coat, russet wool, with the collar that turned up, and -- why not -- the silly red scarf his aunt had made him, with the fringes all falling out.
Despite the strangeness and sadness of everything, he smiled. He'd missed these clothes. It was so nice to be comfortably dressed, for once. He felt much warmer now.
A footstep crunched behind him.
Steeling himself, he turned to face --
"Aunt Isobel?" He took a step back, incredulous.
"I'm afraid not." She smiled, and it was the wrong smile. Aunt Isobel's smile was a toothy, crinkly thing, wry and cynical. This woman's was sadly serene. She held herself differently, too. This woman stood straight, head high, hands at her sides. His aunt was always in the middle of some movement, her hands never still.
But there she was, dressed in her blue serge suit with the side-button skirt, collar wrinkled, hair coming down at the back, the way he'd last seen her. The lines of laughter in her face were just right, and the sparkle of her eyes, the same color as his own. Homesickness punched him in the gut.
"I'm sorry," she said, sounding as if she meant it. "This was the only clear memory of a woman I could find in your mind. If it distresses you too much, I could construct a face for myself, though it would be a bit hazy."
Ash shook his head. "I'll cope. You'd be this Medur person, then."
"Yes." She inclined her head gracefully, like a queen.
"What are you doing in my head?"
"That's actually two questions, isn't it? What was I doing? -- I was waiting. What do I intend to do now? That's largely up to you."
He narrowed his eyes suspiciously. "What does that mean?"
"I'm not impatient. If you don't want to merge yourself with me, I can wait for another life. We should discuss this thoroughly before you make a decision, though."
"There isn't time. That Ka'an thing is killing someone I love. I need to find out what's going on and get out of that bubble place."
She raised a hand to stop him. The more she moved, the less she looked like Isobel. "Don't worry. This isn't taking up as much time as it seems. Like a dream, in which you might live a lifetime in one night. We have all the time we need. Shall we exchange questions?"
"If I can go first."
"Please do."
"All right, then: what are you?"
"The short answer is that I'm a goddess. Somehow I sense, though, from the flavor of your mind, that you're not inclined to awe."
"That answer doesn't satisfy me, no."
She gave him an approving nod. "It has never satisfied me either. I was born in the ordinary way, perfectly mortal, and what I became, I became through my own efforts. That doesn't taste properly of divinity to me." She stepped closer, reaching out to him. "Walk with me."
He hesitated, but placed his hand in hers, and let her turn him along the shore. It felt strange. He hadn't held his aunt's hand since he was much shorter than she; now he towered over her. But this was not his aunt, of course. She didn't walk like Isobel, or smell like her, and now that he looked more closely, this version was younger.
"In my first life," she said, "I was a queen. In that time, magic was a sign of divine favor, even of divine parentage. For we had our gods, in the sea and in the wood. My people were poor, often hungry, often at war. I was determined to change that. Though the priests told me it was sacrilege to examine magic too closely, I made experiments, I studied my abilities. I discovered ways to help my people. I improved the soil; I improved the laws. I saw into their hearts and helped them to help each other. In this I was a great ruler.
"When my time to die drew near, I was not satisfied that my sons would continue my work. My people still needed me. I told them I would remain nearby after my death, to guide them. They believed me. It was true. I must have been something like a ghost, at first, half-aware, for I recall nothing of it. I learned later that I had been called to give advice on many occasions, through ceremonies that grew up around that purpose. I must have answered truly, for my people prospered.
"In time, I grew more aware. The devotion my people sent to me gave me strength. More often, I was able to help them even when I wasn't called. I watched over my line, as my little kingdom grew into a nation."
"Yelorre?" Ash guessed.
"Yes. Does it still exist?"
"No. You're not done answering me, though."
"True. Well, then, there came a time when all that remained of my descent was a blustering bully of a king, whose children were born dead, three in a row. The next time his queen quickened, I watched over the child, healing it in the womb, keeping it alive. But when it came near term, I saw that its mind had not developed. The people needed a ruler, and would not have one, if this child were not a fit heir. So I inhabited it. I imprinted my own pattern on its vacant brain, and I became the child. However, when that happened, I lost much of my context. A child's brain is not capable of holding the memories and thoughts of an adult, let alone one who has been aware for many generations' time after her death. It was not until after I had married and given up rulership to my husband that I remembered who I was.
"I shouldn't bore you with the story of how I took my sovereignty back. I got children with several men other than my husband the king, in order to invigorate the line --"
"Ceriamme? You were Queen Ceriamme?"
"So you know your history."
Ash chuckled. "The racy parts, anyway. So you figured out how to take over babies in the womb. Then what?"
"I did so only once more, in fact. In that case, the child was not destined to be an idiot, and I had to make my peace with the soul already there. We came to an agreement, however, and she was absorbed into my substance. It was necessary; a god from the south had spurred his people to spread his worship by fire and sword. The people called him Tellin."
"Thelyan."
She nodded. "Yes. In time, I met him in battle. I was defeated. He could have swallowed me, he told me, as he had many others, but despised me so that he would not have me in him. Instead he stripped me of my power and cast me adrift. From then on, I was born many times, lived many lives, as a passenger in many minds. I lived both male and female, good and bad, powerful and weak. Those who gave me shelter in their souls were always of my line. I saw little of the world; I have no idea how much time has passed. From your manner and the way you've clothed yourself, I suspect my descendants still retain some standing in the world, although -- forgive me -- I think you are not a prince."
Ash laughed. "No, I'm not a prince. Well, ask your question, it's your turn."
"Very well. Tell me about yourself."
"That's pretty vague."
She waved a hand, unconcerned. "Just a long view of your circumstances. Your name, your age, what titles you hold, whether you're married..." She gave him a thoughtful look. "Somehow I doubt you're married. This aunt of yours is the only female face you remember clearly."
"You won't get any more of your line out of me. I'm only interested in boys. Only one boy, actually, and he's the one that Ka'an --"
"That, later. You, now."
"Well, at least you're not shocked."
"I've lived a long time, child. Come now. Your name, at least."
"I'd think you'd know. You really were asleep. My name's Ashleigh Trine. I'm eighteen -- no, I think I might have turned nineteen by now. I just realized I don't know what the date is. What was the rest of it? Titles?" He snorted. "There are no more titles. My aunt told me my great-grandfather had been something semi-important, a baronet or something, but none of that matters anymore. I'm an orphan; my parents were killed by Commonwealth soldiers when I was four, and I went to live with my mother's younger sister. She happened to be a member of the Resistance, and raised me to be a rebel too. We did propaganda. Wrote pamphlets, put up posters, spread rumors. I got arrested. They found out by reaming out my mind that Aunt Isobel was in on it too, but she got away. That was our agreement -- that if one of us got caught, the other would run." He took a deep breath, swallowed a salt taste. "That way, whoever got caught could know that at least the other one was free somewhere. I sort of made the same deal with Kieran, just a little bit ago, and I thought I could be glad he's free. But this goddamn Ka'an creature is -- look, it's my turn now, right? Tell me about Ka'an."
Medur took his hand in both of hers and squeezed it gently. "Calm yourself, son. We have time, remember? Yes, I'll tell you. It will frighten you, if your lover is involved with him, but you must be calm."
Ash set his jaw and nodded.
"Ka'an is the oldest of us. He was the first to gather power after death; the first of the immortals. I have encountered him several times. What I've learned of his origin is that he began so long ago that men had not even learned to make metal. All they had was bone and stone, wood and clay. Their houses were pits dug into the ground. In his mortal time, weaving was a new art, and sacred. That is how old Ka'an is.
"How he came to be considered divine, he tells proudly, though it's an evil gift: he taught men how to cultivate the poppy to increase the potency of its sap, and use the plant to enter a trance, to dream."
"He was the first junkie?" Ash gave a disbelieving laugh.
"I'm not sure what you mean. In any case, he was a product of a desert people. They worshipped him, and he became very strong. He interfered directly in mortal matters. He constructed for his people an empire of great grandeur and great cruelty; slavery, vice, and human sacrifice were its foundations. Other immortals who stood against him were absorbed or destroyed; this is how he took dominion over death and storms as well as his first power of dreaming. There were friendships among immortals, if you can give that name to a communication as tenuous as ours, and I recall the names and patterns of many who also feared him. None of us were anywhere near his level of strength."
"But -- then how come he was hiding in Kieran's brain, like you were in mine?"
"Thelyan." She shook her head sadly. "When he first proposed to ally and defeat Ka'an, many went to him. You must understand that Thelyan represented justice, fairness. Retribution as well -- he arose from within a tribe of slaves, freed them by his power. Ka'an represented only evil. Thelyan convinced several of the younger and weaker immortals to weld themselves to him, and he swallowed them. Then he began to take us by force, still in the name of defeating Ka'an. His armies attacked our people, and he threatened to slaughter them to the last child unless we surrendered. Only I was left, because he didn't want me, and the Observer, the Silent One, Chaiel, who --"
"Chaiel? That lunatic with the hair?"
Medur raised an eyebrow.
"He's in the bubble with me. He's been there a long time, his hair's about ten feet long. He's not what I'd call silent, either. So he really is a god?" Ash gave a wry grin. "I clocked him on the jaw."
"Oh, dear." Medur sighed. "The poor child. You mustn't bully him, Ashleigh. He was never very strong."
"Yes, ma'am," he said contritely. "Please, finish your story. You got knocked out, Chaiel's in the bubble -- I assume Thelyan put him there -- then what?"
She spread her hands. "I don't know. I sensed a great battle. Thelyan must have won, if Ka'an is coexisting with a mortal mind."
"You don't think he might have just decided to live there, the way you did once?"
"Not Ka'an. He would have done as he always did. He would have destroyed the child's mind in the womb, driven its soul out so as to have sole possession."
Ash shuddered. "That's what he's trying to do to Kieran."
"My question, then. Tell me about this Kieran. From his name, he sounds Yelorrean, or perhaps Eskaran."
"No." Scowling, Ash decided not to get off on a political tangent. "He's Iavaian. His real name is Kai. I love him more than life. I don't mean that as a sentimental expression. He's better than breathing and seeing and thinking. If I lose him -- I shouldn't tell you this. I'm relying on my judgment of you. If I lose him, you can have this body, and do anything you want with it, provided you make sure I don't have to live with missing him."
Medur's smile was indulgent. "This is a new love, I suspect."
"Yes, I see what you're getting at, it's fresh and raw, but it's real enough for all that. If you're going to belittle what I feel for him --"
"I didn't mean to insult you. Please go on. What sort of man is he? A man grown, or a youth like you?"
"About a year older than me. He's lived a lot more than I have, though. He's had a hard life. He's terribly strong, and terribly lost -- he's been fighting all his life just to survive, he's never had a moment's peace, and I want to be that peace for him."
"A warrior?"
"Definitely. Not a soldier, not in the sense you mean it. But he sure as hell can fight."
"Is he strong in mind, or only with a blade?"
"Blade?" Ash raised an eyebrow; then shook his head to Medur's questioning look. "Never mind, long explanation. Yes, he's strong in mind. He doesn't care what anyone thinks of him... or he didn't, before I got to him. Oh, hell. You don't think I weakened him so it'll be easier for Ka'an to beat him?"
"I don't know, child. I think, if you love each other, it might strengthen him." Her look softened, becoming very gentle, a strange thing to see on his aunt's face. "He must be truly kind, to win such devotion from you."
Slowly, Ash shook his head. "Kind... no. No, he can be downright mean sometimes. He's had to be, you see. He can be cold, and rude, and thoughtless, and he's got the filthiest vocabulary you ever heard. But he's true. That's what you have to understand. He's -- he's pure, not in the sense of innocent, but in the sense of -- distilled, wholly himself. Pure iron, pure diamond, pure rage. There's nothing like him in the world, and never will be again after him, I think. To be near that, part of that -- do you see?"
"I do. In a way I envy you. If I had not already meant to help you, I think I would have decided to, seeing how intensely you feel. Thelyan and his type believe emotion is a weak thing. But it gives strength, does it not, when it's honest?"
Ash nodded. "So you'll help. How?"
"We'll decide that shortly. I must know more first, but it's your turn to question me."
"No. I've learned enough. Let's talk about what we can do to save Kieran."
"This 'bubble,' then. You said you and Chaiel are in it; I assume Thelyan put you there."
"That's what Chaiel said. I was in kind of a trance, I don't remember."
"Tell me what it's like. A prison?"
"Yeah. A weird one." He described it to her, but from her expression she was as baffled as he was. "And I can tell you I'm not enjoying being stuck naked to a crazy kid, even if he is supposed to be a god or something. He's even more ticked off about it than I am. At least I can appreciate that he's cute -- too young, mind, and I would never cheat on Kieran, but you see what I mean. He doesn't even have that consolation. I think he's going to wig out on me any minute."
Medur seemed amused. "We shall have to see if we can prevent that. Now; how is it you know Ka'an is battling your Kieran-Kai? Have you seen this?"
"Yes." He shuddered. "I was connected with him, when Ka'an first came up. At least, I think it was the first time. We fought him down, but Kieran said he was going to come back. Then -- long story short, the White Watch caught me but not Kieran, they tranced me, I'm pretty sure they dug through my brain and got everything I know -- the Watch, those are Thelyan's army mages. He's Director of the Watch now. And Chaiel said something about Ka'an running Kai to death. Starving, hypothermic, he said."
"It may already be too late," Medur said gently.
"I refuse to consider that. What am I going to do, give up?"
"I see your point. Very well. If we're to help your Kai fight free of Ka'an, we must pierce that bizarre prison." She sighed. "I will never understand how Thelyan thinks. What a cruel device to have invented. I should like to see it for myself, but to do that I would have to take possession of your body."
"Permanently?"
"That depends on whether you can retain selfhood while I do it. Perhaps it's better not to gamble on that. You could be killed or driven mad."
"Are there any other options?"
"Two. The first is that you could surrender yourself entirely to me. I would do my best to save your lover, but this would do you no good. You would be, effectively, dead."
"If that's what it comes down to, I'll take it."
Respect narrowed her eyes, and she nodded. "I see. Yes, I see. The other possibility is that I could surrender myself to you, and you would then be in possession of my abilities. Thelyan stripped me of my power, and I've built up only a little more since then, so you would most likely survive it. What I question is whether you would be able to get any use from it. My knowlege would not be passed on intact. You might keep some shreds of it, but not enough to tell you how to be what I've been. It would probably not make you an immortal."
"And you'd die."
"I would." Her shoulders sagged a fraction. "Please understand me, Ashleigh Trine. I've held on so long only for the sake of my people. Now it seems Thelyan has conquered them. Could I free them if I took possession of you? Perhaps; perhaps not. You say you're an orphan, and a homosexual. My line of descent is finished in you. Could I force your body to sire children, and continue it? Perhaps. But I'm tired. I'm far behind the times, it seems. I don't understand half of what you tell me. I'm an old, old woman, Ashleigh. I would gladly end... if I had some hope you could accomplish what I wish done. The return of my lands and the posterity of my blood."
He stopped walking the endless beach, turning her by her hand to face him. "Let me get this straight. If I agree to do my best to free Yelorre from the Commonwealth, and -- what -- have a child? Somehow? Then you'll give me all your power, and vanish. Without a fight."
"I've done my fighting, child. It's your turn now, I think."
"It's... a lot to think about." He chewed his lip. "I don't think I could even -- with a girl -- I don't even know any girls."
Medur laughed. "That's the part that worries you? To free a conquered nation is such an easy task?"
"Hell, I'm a rebel already, ma'am. I was going to do that anyway."
"As for continuing my line, if you swear to make the attempt, I shall be satisfied. Or perhaps you have some living relatives, close kin -- siblings, cousins?"
"Nope. It would have to be me. Aunt Isobel never had kids, she's too old now, and we're all that's left of the family. Oh, hell. All right. I promise. I'll do what I can -- but Kieran comes first. Then Yelorre. Then the kid thing." He grimaced. "He's not going to like that."
She patted his arm reassuringly. "From what I've seen, your kind often wishes for children strongly enough to sire them, though at a later age than you are now. You'll manage. But I'd like to be more certain that you can take my power and keep it. What magic have you? Are you a wizard trained, or only a vessel?"
"No training. Not sure what you mean by the other."
"Does it only pass through you, or do you control it?"
"Um... I can turn my empathy on and off, sort of. If I don't get too worked up."
"So you've never shaped a spell."
"I made a sort of charm thingy for Kieran once. It seemed to work. I just made it up as I went along. The Watch has a monopoly on pattern-magic, you see. They own thaumaturgy. Nobody gets trained unless it's with them. But I kind of get the idea that I could do a lot more, if I had some time to study."
She thinned her lips, doubtful. "It could be worse. You seem an intelligent boy. Calm enough, and clear-minded. Do you think you can experience something strange and perhaps painful without pulling away from it?"
"If I've decided to."
"Have you ever seen the figures -- the shapes -- I seem to be at a loss for a word. There was a more accurate one, once. The shapes of life, like interwoven designs surrounding a thing or a person. Have you seen that?"
"I... think so. Through Kieran, when he was calling a storm. He was better at it, he just dived right in."
"Ka'an must have been close to surfacing." She paused for a long moment. Tilting her head, she took his chin in her hand and studied his face. "I find myself stubbornly reluctant. Are you a fit successor? I know so little about you. It seems irresponsible to make this decision without knowing more. Have you even a hope of succeeding?"
He let her look for a little while. Then he gently pushed her hand away. "Ma'am, if there's a way, I'll find it. Giving up is not an option. And if I get half a chance, I'll not only save Kieran, spark up the rebels in Yelorre, and pass on the blood somehow, but I'll kick Thelyan's ass for you as well. Honestly, if I don't have a chance, I doubt you do either."
"You're very confident."
"Call it determined. I'm also seriously scared, but I've kind of gotten used to that lately."
For another minute or two, she stared at him. Then she looked at the sky and took a deep breath. "Yes," she said.
"Thank you," he said sincerely.
"When you have the power settled, follow the designs, the symbols. They'll show you what you can do. If you reach your Kai while he still struggles against Ka'an, remind him who he is. Ka'an will be undermining his personality, eroding his identity. Remind him of his name, tell him his memories. This while adding your strength to his. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
She gave him another one of those serene, sad smiles. "You're a good lad. I wish I could have known you better. Please mention to Chaiel that all people are his. Are you ready?"
Ash nodded. Medur took his hands.
The scene of the shore went thin, began to smear.
Confusion crashed through him, like the dazedness after a blow to the head. Whirling thoughts and shapes and sensations. He felt too small to contain it, and at the same time stretched thin, scattered. He couldn't grasp it, it was spinning by too fast, he was losing himself --
Kieran. For him. Take it, Ash. Ride it.
A wire, a light; a solid center; himself. He reached, catching at the flying sparks of wordless ideas. Little by little, they began to fall into place. Spirals, spheres, braids, key-toothed fronds, clinging vines, settling along the limbs of his mind, grafting there. He healed the joins. He welded. He swallowed. He made room, and things flowered in the space he made. As the task progressed, it changed from pain to pleasure; the quiet pleasure of an intricate task. It was just like a cipher. Once he worked out the key, the rest was already deciphered in principle, and changing it to meaning was only a detail.
--==*==--
He opened his eyes and drew breath. Yes. There it all was. The cipher of himself, and the cipher of Chaiel, and the cipher of the sphere. The latter was a very deep code. Not the same language as a living pattern at all. More like math worked in a strange base. Base thirteen and a half or something. But he could get it. He was sure that he could figure it out, in time.
"Medur?" Chaiel leaned close, peering into his eyes. "Is that you?"
"No." Ash paused, then corrected. "Partly. She gave me her power."
Chaiel froze, horrified. "You ate her?"
"We discussed it, and decided that was the best course. She told me to tell you that all people are yours."
Inhaling sharply, Chaiel pressed his hands to his mouth. A quiet sound came out of him, its meaning unclear. His pattern had drawn in, small.
"This means something to you, I take it."
Chaiel nodded without taking his hands down.
"Much as I'd like to give you time to ponder it, I have a really long to-do list now. So what do you say we pop this bubble and get out of here?"
Kieran felt it when the edge of the Burn touched him. He was barely there, a helpless passenger in his own body, but the first brush of the Burn's raw energy stung him nonetheless.
What are you doing, asshole? You're going to get me killed!
Ka'an didn't reply. For the first part of the night Kieran had been able to get a rise out of him, but after a while the arrogant spirit had stopped responding. Ka'an was taking them straight into the Burn. That was where he'd been going the whole time. Kieran had never stopped fighting him, and was now so tired that he felt like a tissue-thin shred of himself. He was starving, he was stumbling, his head was stuffed up. Ka'an didn't care. All Ka'an cared about was getting something out of the Burn and then, for some reason, killing the Director of the Watch.
Kieran could be all right with that last bit, Thelyan was a prick and might as well die, but he was going to rescue Ash first. That was the plan. This was just a little setback.
All around him, Ka'an swelled with pleasure at the sensation of the Burn surrounding him. He was doing something with it, as he walked. Somehow taking in strength from it. Walking straighter, seeing more clearly. Kieran couldn't sense the patterns now, the way he had yesterday -- no, day before yesterday -- but he thought he had an idea what was going on. The Burn had looked inviting, when he'd sensed it in the distance before. Probably that had been Ka'an in him, wanting to do whatever he was doing now.
So maybe two could play that game. It was hard to think how to do it, there was no analogy. It wasn't inhaling, because he couldn't reach his lungs; it wasn't grasping, because he couldn't reach his hands. It was like swallowing without a mouth. Sporadically at first, then more strongly as he grew more confident, he copied Ka'an and took power from the Burn.
"Clever, Ghost," Ka'an muttered. "But I've been doing this far longer than you have." His Iavaian was archaic, with double vowels instead of cut vowels. Kieran thought he'd probably pronounce his name something like Kaaaan, like the sound of a kettle falling down stairs.
The thought gave Kieran courage; irrational, to build himself up by mocking his enemy, but if it worked it worked. He accelerated his grasping of power, growing more real by the second, more aware. Ka'an reeled it in harder as well. At the same time, walking sped to running, and the running got faster and faster.
Now Kieran was beginning to be able to see. Rather, to think about what he saw, for he'd been watching scenery crawl by the whole time, but without making sense of it. He'd never been inside the Burn before. He'd heard rumors about what it was like: dead, deader than a salt pan, without even the hardiest plants or insects. And that was what he was looking at, all right. Bare rock and rippled sand, across which Ka'an forced his body to run at an ever-increasing pace. Soon the ground was flashing by at a speed he wouldn't have thought possible. It was as if he didn't weigh anything at all. He was taking six, ten, fifteen feet at a stride. His coat was cracking like a whip. The soles of his boots were getting hot.
And the sun was going to come up any second now. He'd overheat, his heart would burst. Slow down, shithead, you're going to pop if you keep this up! Of course Ka'an didn't listen.
They were going gradually downhill. On the left, a low squarish shape cruised past and was left behind; in the twilight, it looked suspiciously like a ruined building. A little later, they passed another one, and Kieran realized it really was a ruin. Then they topped a rise and started ripping down the other side faster than an express train on a straightaway, and the growing light showed a city grid spread out below. The ruins rayed out from the shore of an immense lake, the biggest body of water Kieran had ever seen. He could just barely make out that there was land on the other side, just a faint line of purpled hills to prove this wasn't an ocean. Ka'an was driving them straight for it, while the pressure of power from the Burn's whirling pattern increased with every step.
Kieran could feel his skin now, and it was far too hot. Dry, no longer sweating, dehydrated. He ran helplessly along a straight street between dune-buried walls, some broken off at the lowest course of stones, some intact enough to still have a bit of roof on them. He passed a square well that was filled to its brim with sand. A mile jagged by in two breaths.
He took the water's edge in a flat leap that carried him thirty feet from shore, and when he hit he skidded two yards on his steaming heels before he sank in.
The lake closed around him, cutting off the main force of impinging power. It cooled him, and when he bobbed up for a ragged breath he gratefully swallowed the water in his mouth. He could see the pattern now, arrayed above him. So huge.
A moment of pure terror seized him. The Burn filled the sky from horizon to horizon, and all the space between. Its largest form was a many-armed spiral, ponderously rotating. Within that shape, smaller shapes spun, and smaller ones within those, faster as they got smaller. And it saw him, wanted him, beat at him, tried to change him. He could sense the patterns of his body being buffeted by this great power, knew that any moment the walls of his veins would give way, the delicate web of his brain would fray, and he would die in one bloody instant.
But it didn't happen. He stood neck-deep in insulating water, and somehow he didn't die. Ka'an was preventing it. They were both simultaneously in occupation now. Kieran could see what Ka'an was doing, how he was doing it.
Carefully, but with increasing dexterity, Ka'an was pulling in the power as it came. Some of what he took, he used to shore up the body's systems so the Burn wouldn't kill it. The rest, he fed into his own thought-form, so that he expanded within the Burn's shape and took its place. The process was accelerating, going faster as Ka'an got bigger.
That doesn't look hard. If a spoiled brat like you can do it... Kieran copied him, but he left maintaining the body to Ka'an. The spirit wouldn't want to kill his only vehicle, so he'd have to pay attention to keeping it alive. That would free Kieran to work faster.
Doubt nagged, a little; he'd never done anything like this before, never imagined it, never had any idea that stuff like this existed. But what did that matter? He'd discovered long ago that he couldn't expect any warning or practice before the shit hit the fan. Learn fast or die, that was the rule. He was a fast learner.
He reached. He caught. He organized. He went past the point of pressure, to where the power was no longer forcing itself at him, but just beyond him, and he grew to meet it. With half a thought, he put in an order to his body and walked it out of the lake, to get a better handle on the pattern. His mind's eye focused wider and deeper at once, grasping the intricacies of the greater whorl and its component movements. He disassembled the clockwork. He understood the Burn, and he swallowed it whole.
Then he was standing on the shore of a sterile lake, beside a ruined city, in the slanting gold of dawn. And so was Ka'an. It was hard to tell which of them had taken more power. Neither was in full control of the body they shared. Stalemate.
It would have to be dealt with. No compromise was possible. Their mutual hatred was like a balanced stone, poised to crush whichever weakened first.
We have business, Kieran sent.
Ka'an agreed with a mental snarl.
The body crumpled to the sand as they leapt into the battlefield of dreams.
--==*==--
Thelyan paused in mid-word when he sensed the surge of dark power to the west. His subordinates looked at him curiously, concerned. They had never seen such an expression cross the Director's face. Some of them had felt a pale shade of what Thelyan had sensed, but none of them knew what it meant. They were already confused by his preparations.
He pulled himself together, wrapping himself in the chill calm that was his strength.
"Gentlemen, it seems the Situation is, in fact, occurring. Warren, begin evacuating the research section. Vaughart, I want the northern wing locked down and cleared. All viable subjects are to be terminated. Rine, contact Strindner at Splitwood; have him leave a four-man team on standby and pull the rest back here. Liss, prepare your men for deployment."
Sergeant Liss hesitated as the others scattered. "Sir, do you have a time estimate?"
Glancing at the map, Thelyan performed some calculations. If Ka'an were in a hurry, he might use wind and Kinetics to 'fly' here; in such a case, his speed would be governed by the kind of wind he could summon. That method was wasteful of power, though. More likely, the evil one would simply run, and there were limits to what a body could do, even with a god's power in it.
"Six hours," Theylan replied. "Expect Strindner to reinforce you."
"Thank you, sir." Snapping off a salute, Liss removed himself.
Satisfied that there would be troops enough to weaken Ka'an, and that what could be preserved would be, Thelyan left the meeting room by a different door. He would wait outside, atop the mountain. He didn't want anything interfering with his senses now.
Just because he expected to win didn't mean he'd make anything less than a full effort. He had nothing to prove by holding back. No one but he and his enemy even understood the conflict.
--==*==--
Ash grunted as Chaiel let him fall. They'd been standing on the soles of each other's feet so Ash could probe the bubble's surface, when Chaiel had suddenly curled up like a pillbug. Ash collided with him, getting tangled in the ludicrous ropes and nets of Chaiel's hair and grazed by Chaiel's overgrown toenails.
"Damn it, would you pay attention?" But just as he said it, he sensed what had set Chaiel off. A thing like tugging and pressure both at once, a rolling wave of needles. It washed over and through him, left him gasping. "Kieran," he breathed. He'd tasted Kieran's personality in that. And the greasy menace of Ka'an as well.
How had it reached him, here in the bubble? A thought snapped into focus, and he followed it without taking time to analyze. Shot his attention down the wave's backtrail, searching. Somewhere out there was a bullet with his name on it, his scratched initials resting against the skin of Kieran's throat. That connection, somehow, was on a different level from the null sphere's blocking, just like Chaiel's visions. That meant that he and Kieran weren't completely cut off from each other. He would have wept in gratitude, if he could have spared the attention.
Dimly, he sensed Chaiel babbling. That wasn't important. He was going to find Kieran and help him, even if he used himself up doing it.
--==*==--
Kieran stood barefoot on a white limestone floor, beneath a roof painted scarlet, between pillars carved in the shape of bundled reeds. Before him, above him, Ka'an sat on a gilded throne. The dark god wore a body like a pampered version of his own; smooth of skin, attenuated and graceful, impossibly beautiful. Scarlet cloth brocaded with gold draped the god's slender body, leaving his chest bare to reveal a collar of gold and gems that spread across his shoulders. Bands of gold circled his upper arms, wrists, ankles, and waist. Atop his intricately braided hair sat a tall, sun-rayed crown of soft gold, its points decorated with looping strands of lapis and ruby.
A tight sense of anticipation bubbled up in Kieran's throat, and came out as laughter. There was going to be a fight. He felt it coming, like a hot wind, tensing his stomach, baring his teeth. The indignant expression on Ka'an's face just made him laugh harder.
The god rose slowly from his throne, jingling. "You will regret your laughter, Ghost," he thundered.
"You have no idea," Kieran gasped, "how stupid you look."
"See how the vision has dressed you." Ka'an pointed theatrically, arm straight out. "Deep down, you know yourself to be a slave."
Kieran glanced down, to see that all he had between himself and the world was a loincloth. All his scars and tattoos were on display. He looked up grinning. "I'll whup your ass buck naked if I have to, boy."
"I think not." Ka'an passed his arm through the air, and a golden shimmer coalesced into a curved sword in his hand. He stepped down from the throne platform. Green lightning crackled in his eyes, and his robes fluttered around him in an intangible wind.
That was a nice effect. Kieran watched the god stalk toward him for a moment, to see how it was done. Then he pushed with his mind, clothing himself in half a second, not bothering with theatrics. The same stuff he'd been wearing before; he doubted Ka'an would be intimidated by flashy clothes.
He reached into his pockets and held up what he found: three spare magazines in his left hand, the Hart all cleaned up and loaded and chambered in the right. He spun the gun on his finger, showing teeth.
Then he aimed it at Ka'an and put five slugs in him, center of mass.
Pillars rippled and light tore as Ka'an's overdecorated body jerked. When it fell, though, it fell not as a dead body but as a multitude of snakes. A susurration of rattling arose as they multiplied across the floor.
Kieran's grin turned to a grimace. He couldn't shoot them all. What did he want, a net, taller boots, some kerosene and a match?
Wait, why was he letting Ka'an set the stage? It was the same as clothing himself, really: he moved the dream with a thought, and instantly he was standing on a lone rock in the middle of an endless stretch of water. Snakes thrashed and drowned.
His rock lurched, crumbled. As he fell, he grabbed the idea of frost. He fell on ice.
Ice turned to stone. Bare desert, now. As he scrambled to his feet, Ka'an's shape coalesced before him. They glared at each other for a long moment.
"Well played, for a beginner," Ka'an said. "But you have not yet felt my true strength."
"Bring it," Kieran growled.
Everything happened at once, then. Too fast to analyze. He countered instinctively, shifting himself and the world in flickers, as Ka'an did the same. Storms raged. Armies charged. Fire, earthquakes, floods. Serpents, insects, sandstorms. One moment he was drowning in blood, the next he was miles above the earth and falling. Freezing, burning, deafening, blinding.
He was on the defensive from the moment it began. All he could do was keep coming back to images of safety. Empty desert -- but that was where the storms found him. City streets -- which cracked to chasms. Familiar buildings went up in flames. Green fields erupted with boiling masses of scorpions. Kieran was pushed farther and farther back into himself.
He was losing. Ka'an was going to win.
Of course I am. Did you think you could fight a god?
His dream-body was shredding, going to mist. A thousand different kinds of pain beat at him. He could endure it, but he couldn't find a place to attack from. This was no good. He had to think of something -- but Ka'an was giving him no time to think.
Surrender, Ghost. Why cling to this painful life? Death is your home.
He was a ghost? He remembered being dead, remembered dying. But then there was living after that. Ka'an was lying...
So why did the word ghost sound like it belonged to him?
No, he had a body... somewhere... this dream-body was modeled after it, this torn and tattered thing... he had arms and legs, he had skin, he had scars...
Taking a step backward into himself, he clutched at his memory of flesh. Hands, feet, clothes, something hanging around his neck -- he grasped it --
Bright as a scalpel, a thought cut through the fog:
Fight him, Kieran! Beat him and come back to me!
In a rush, he remembered. Eyes, hands, mouth, words, thoughts, Ash. Ka'an threw more horrors at him, but he realized that they were repeating. Ka'an had run out of ideas. They weren't doing anything, anyway. He'd gone past that part of the battle. Ka'an had won that part.
It doesn't matter. You're still you. Remember. Kieran Trevarde. Your name is Kai, which means courage. Do you remember?
I remember, he returned, and let the pains and horrors wash by him. Why had he let them matter in the first place? He didn't even need a body, in a dream. Or, if he wanted, he could have a body that just plain wasn't affected by all this weird shit Ka'an was doing.
At the moment he realized this, it all stopped. He was alone in a dark place. He swallowed down the urge to tense in expectation. Whatever happened, it wasn't going to affect him, because this was a dream.
Oh, really? That was Ka'an, sounding smug. He had something up his sleeve.
Kieran sent the sense of a snarl. You waiting for an invitation? Do your thing. Let's see if you can touch me.
Light swelled. Dim, flickering. It outlined a rounded, uneven space: a cave. Messy little lamps burned here and there, and the air was filled with a complex stench of rotted meat, burned meat, fresh meat, and unwashed bodies. In the middle of the cave a frail figure sat crosslegged on a wad of greasy fur.
It was even weirder seeing this version of Ka'an than the clanking emperor in gold. Seeing his own face smeared with yellow ochre, dotted with black. Yellow grease matted his hair into dreadlocks. His wrists were like twigs, his ribs standing out, his feet looking ungainly at the end of legs that were sticks of bone. He was dressed in nothing but blue beads. Ropes and ropes of little turquoise beads. His eyes were closed, the eyelids decorated with the smeared remains of dots meant to make it look like his eyes were open while he slept. Before him on the fur, between his feet, there was a stone bowl encrusted with something brownish. Food?
Opium. Kieran had almost lost himself in observing, but the realization of what was in the bowl jerked him back to himself. He knew, abruptly, what Ka'an was showing him: a past so distant there were no records of it. This was what Ka'an had been once. Mortal, and on the nod.
Vertigo hit him as he began to sense the enormous weight of time involved. Thousands upon thousands of years. How many thousands?
"Too many to count," the emaciated figure said without opening its eyes. Its voice was hollow, otherworldly. "Time is a figure like any other. Past and future are the same. Behold, I have dreamed: the People will grow greater than the number of seeds in a field of grain. All good things will come to them. For many years, it will be thus. Too many to count. Then will come a dark time, when the People fail and become less. In that time, I too will fail and become less. But it will only be as a sleep. I will return to bring the People back to the light."
Ka'an opened his eyes and fixed them on Kieran. Hollow, sunken, brilliant green. "I was given these eyes that I might see into the spirit world. I am holy. None may touch me. You may not touch me."
Loneliness snaked out from his words, threading a chill through Kieran's veins. He wavered as it struck him. A loneliness so immense no human soul could carry it. Holy and outcast. A whole life, and then life after life, without human contact. Any who touched him would be put to death. They had to do this, or the contamination of Ka'an's dreams would draw ghosts and sickness, and the people would suffer. All things pertaining to the otherworld had to be sequestered here with the Dreamer, and only the shamans dared even speak to him. It had always been this way.
Caught in the tide of Ka'an's memory, Kieran was whirled along. Life after life sped before him. Hidden in the dark, sacred and untouchable. Change came slowly; a tent rather than a cave, then a temple built of stones. Then there were battles, and the People triumphed. New arts rose. Cities spread and fell and rose again.
The People conquered to the east and north, many lesser people, enslaving them. Gold and jewels came; strange animals came; there was music and dancing, there was blood and crying, there were beautiful whores in his temples and cruel visionaries in his palaces. There was magic and wonder. Those who rose against him were destroyed. Those who venerated him were rewarded.
He was worshipped. He was adored. He was feared. He was always alone.
Time; the weight of all that time; it was unbearable, it was crushing him. He didn't want it. Better to give it up, let someone else take it. To be mortal, singular, to die, it was a blessing, and he yearned for it...
Kai! I can't hear you anymore! Kieran! Where are you?
Names. He'd had so many names. What did names matter?
Fight him, Kieran. Are you there?
He didn't want to fight anymore. He was so tired. Let someone else fight.
I love you, Kieran! Fight! I want you to come back to me!
So someone was talking about love. That didn't have anything to do with him. It couldn't. He was holy. No one could touch him.
The voice came again, and this time it was angry. Are you giving up? You don't ever give up! Loser unity, Kai! Don't you read? The underdog always wins! Confused, he groped after the source of this voice. It reminded him of something, maybe a time when he'd been happy...
Time? How could he find one moment among the years and years and years?
Kai, it's me, it's Ash, don't you remember? Remind him who he is. Damn it. Are you there? How am I supposed to do this? Kieran! Kieran Trevarde! Kai, Green Sky, Suneater, each one of these dots is a dead man, do you remember? You died and came back, you called the storm, do you remember? You're too mean to die, too beautiful to die, you don't care what anyone thinks except maybe me and I love you so much, I won't let you give up, damn it --
Wistfully, he listened to the voice rant. Was that meant to describe him? It sounded like such a strong person. He wished he was strong like that.
Hey Ka'an, are you listening? Let him go, or I'll personally reach down your neck and rip your balls off. Let him go, he's mine! Kieran, don't you let Ka'an win, you deserve everything good and he's just a spoiled child!
He was a spoiled child? Or was he the one that was too mean to die? Was he Ka'an, or the one who was supposed to be fighting Ka'an? He was drowning in this loneliness, the loneliness was Ka'an's, Ka'an who was a spoiled child, he didn't want to be Ka'an --
Shock. Perspective. A jolt like being shot. The smothering of years broke, leaving him light and empty and blind.
Rage boiled up to fill that space. The son of a bitch had almost won that time. Sneaky fuck.
I got it now, Ashes, he thought fiercely. You just sit tight.
For convenience, he built a scene. The barroom of a roadhouse outside Canyon, where the miners went to waste their pay. He didn't people it, left it deserted except for himself and a sort of clockwork bartender to work the taps. He leaned back against the bar and waited. He could feel Ka'an blundering around, trying to change the dream, but Kieran held it. A place this familiar was easy to make solid. Ka'an's many lives were working against him, here -- the god had trouble distinguishing between all the places he'd seen in all the lives he'd lived.
A minute later, Ka'an stormed in, furious at being made to use the door. He was wearing his emperor getup again. "You look like a twit," Kieran told him before he could speak.
"How dare you," the god fumed. His voice was low and menacing. "How dare you. You've seen what I am. You've felt how small you are. Yet you persist in this, this satire. I will make you suffer for this."
"Uh-huh." Kieran raised an eyebrow. "You done?"
"I am not."
"That's too bad, 'cause I'm just not impressed. Hey." He knocked on the bar. "Get us a bottle of the hard stuff."
As the clockwork bartender produced a chilled bottle of bootleg gin, Ka'an calmed himself. "You're very stupid, mortal, to speak to me that way. I felt your fear. Are you trying to make me angry?"
Kieran shrugged. "Have a drink with me. We haven't actually talked. You know, you really do look like a moron in that getup. Let me fix that for you." He had to push through some resistance to change how Ka'an looked, but it was only a matter of letting his familiar dream smooth over an anomaly, and in an eyeblink the god was clothed in a white linen suit like the tar runners wore. He could feel Ka'an's fury building.
Though this little success tempted him to get cocky, he reminded himself that he couldn't afford to. He knew where the battlefield was now. The real fight was still ahead of him, and he suspected it wouldn't be a messy slugfest like what Ka'an had hit him with. It would be like a gunfight. Twitch the right way and live. Freeze and die.
He pushed a filled shotglass along the bar at Ka'an. "So tell me. If being immortal is such a pain in the ass, how come you're so keen on coming back?"
"Why should I explain myself to a mortal?" Ka'an sneered.
"Okay, you need to get over that. Because obviously you can't just squish me, like you thought you could. I'm as tough as you are. My guess is that I'm a lot tougher. See, you had all that ammunition, you had all that skill and time, you did this a bunch of times before, and I came into it totally raw. But here I am. And there you are."
"If you count stalemate as such a victory --"
"Nah, we can fire it up again anytime. I'm just curious. Aren't you curious?"
"No." Ka'an spat the word contemptuously.
"Point for me: reason to live. Oh, now you're mad at me."
"I am rage, Ghost. You will learn that soon."
"Point for me. Kept my cool. What are we playing to? Three? You wanna drink that, gin's nasty when it's warm."
Ka'an's eyes narrowed. "Very well. You've chosen the game. My move: I submit that you're too weak to survive the power you seek. Your mortal mind can't possibly encompass the immensity of pain and pleasure that is my lot. It would break you."
"Doubt it."
"You tasted just the merest hint of what I --"
"You're bluffing. I got into that pretty deep. I think I saw the whole thing. What do you want, you want me to feel sorry for you?"
The air rippled around Ka'an as the god's anger swelled. "Pity is also a weakness," he said, tight and low.
And Kieran suddenly understood. "Shit, you do want that."
"I'll waste no more time here!" Ka'an pushed, but could not change the dream.
"You do want someone to feel sorry for you. Poor pitiful critter, he's had such a hard ten thousand years. Oh poor me, nobody loves me. Look at you getting pissed at me, you're just proving I'm right!"
"I am holy," Ka'an hissed, swelling larger, glowing. "I am sacred. No one may touch me!"
"You know what? You don't deserve my sympathy! In all those bazillions of lives you showed me, you never had the balls to break loose. You believed your own press. You made slaves of people, and then you feel all put-upon because no one could comfort you. And you're still doing it. Look, here I am right in front of you, the only person who could possibly know you for who you are, and you're trying to kill me for it. And then if you managed that, you'd just go on with your pity party. 'Oh I'm so lonely, oh I'm so high above everyone.' It's your own damn fault, Ka'an. Fucking get over it."
The god was all teeth and eyes now, snarling. "You have no concept of what true pain is."
"Yeah?" Kieran felt his own face going feral too. "Try this on."
His hand shot out and grabbed Ka'an's head, driving a path through between them, and down that connection he poured his life.
Ka'an cried out in disgust, then in anger, then in dawning fear. Kieran sent him image after image of squalor, degradation, and pain. But he didn't send it to show how sad his life had been. There was no self-pity in it. After each beating, each rape, each hungry day and freezing night, each trick, each loss, he got up and kept going. Out of pure stubbornness, pure lust for life, he pushed himself onward. And bit by bit, he forced his way from defense to offense. He made himself strong. He made himself hard and cruel. He took what he needed, got rid of whatever blocked him. He was very close to being evil, when he first met a pair of pale blue eyes behind smeared glasses.
Ka'an's struggling weakened, uncertain. This was not pain. The hurts that came after this were small compared to much of what he'd suffered before. He didn't understand why he was being shown this.
Then he began to think again that it was all about pain after all, when Kieran dragged him through being shot, the sickness and festering wound, helpless under the shadow of death. And then came the memory of dying. When the two of them together looked down on Ash's grief, Ka'an ready to leave the body behind, Kieran unwilling to abandon the one person who had ever come anywhere near knowing him.
And Kieran had won. They wouldn't be here now if he hadn't.
Kieran released his enemy, watched the spirit's image reel and clutch the imaginary bar. "Get it now?"
Pulling himself upright, Ka'an glared, speechless. Lost.
"Do you know why I won, that first time?"
In a growl, Ka'an said, "I suppose you'll tell me it was because someone loved you, and no one loved me."
"You've got it backwards. I won because I love someone, and you never loved anyone. Not even yourself. That's why I'll always win. Because I give a damn, and you don't. You'd surrender the first chance you got, if you could get past your pride."
"You don't know what I want." Ka'an's voice faltered.
"Actually, I do. You've been waiting all this time for someone to say: You're done now, kid. You don't have to be holy anymore. You did your job, it's time to quit."
"And you'd take my place? You'd do my work? No one will thank you. They don't understand that they need me."
"They don't need you, Ka'an. They don't need me either. Doesn't mean I can't help without being asked. No, I won't be the Prince of Pain. The Dreamer can rest now." He offered his hand.
The former god's voice was thinner now, his shape fading. "What will you be?"
"Human."
"My enemy..." Just a whisper.
"I'll get him. Trust me."
Ka'an's form was just a blur now, the hand he reached to Kieran's little more than a wisp. The murmur of his voice was almost inaudible. "I was beautiful..."
"Yes. You were."
With a sound like a sigh, the last resistance gave way. The fragment of smoke that was all that was left of Ka'an flowed over Kieran. For a breath's time it clung there. Then it was gone.
--==*==--
He took a deep breath, waking. Aches washed over him; heat, thirst, hunger. The sun stood overhead, burning down hard. There was no wind. The sterile lake was smooth as glass.
But he could feel the power inside him. So much power. All marshaled and ready to do whatever he wanted. It was exhilarating. He could almost see how having this power had made up for Ka'an's misery, made him hang onto it through life after life. For a moment he regretted it, a little -- having killed something that old, that strong.
That full of pride and malice.
No, he didn't wish he hadn't done it.
He closed his hand around the bullet that hung at his throat. Gave it a little power and felt it pull. Pretty much due east. I'm coming, Ashes. Don't you worry about a thing.