A small cool hand laid itself along his cheek, fingertips brushing his neck as though feeling for his pulse. Just that simple touch was so comforting, so calming, that he could not pull away from it. That cool touch seemed to draw some of his hurt as a moist towel draws fever. He shuddered as it went out from him, as though something inside him clung involuntarily to the pain, the way muscle clamps tight around a wounding arrow shaft if it's pulled too slowly.
"Shh, it's all right" a woman's voice told him softly. "It's all right, I'm here." Her breath smelled of green leaves turning toward the sun, of grain ripening in fields freshly swept by rain.
"No," Deliann said. She had taken enough of his pain that he now found he could move, could speak. He pulled away from her hand. "No, it's not all right. You've touched me. Now you're going to die."
"I am not so easily slain," the woman's voice told him gently. "Open your eyes, Kris Hansen. I bring glad tidings."
"What?" Deliann said. "What did you call me?"
When he did open his eyes, her face stole his voice.
She glowed in the darkened room with a light of her own, as though a single sunbeam framed itself precisely to her form: a small, slight human woman in ordinary clothing, a spray of dark hair framing an oval face rather ordinarily pretty, features unremarkable save for the serene power that shone forth from them: a shimmering halo of life so refined and concentrated that the sight of her burned away Deliann's previous experience of beauty like ice in a furnace. Looking on her, he could not even imagine another woman's face.
Awe compressed his chest. "Who ..." he gasped breathlessly. "Who are you?"
"I am called Pallas Ril."
"The Aktir Queen?" he said involuntarily; Pallas Ril was the name of the ruler of demons in the elKothan pantheon, the bride of the evil Prince of Chaos—but none of the elKothan woodcuts or story windows had shown a woman such as this.
"If you wish," she said.
Electrified, Deliann scrambled to his feet; he made a warding gesture and breathed himself into mindview. "I want nothing to do with the human gods," he said warily.
Slowly, sadly, she straightened, and on her face was a small quiet smile. Her Shell filled the room, and more; he could not see its limit, and it blazed like the midsummer sun. "I am human, and a god but I am not a human god. Know this: I am your friend, Kris Hansen—"
"Why do you keep calling me that?"
"—and I am the answer to your cry for help."
Deliann stopped, stunned, swaying in place, helpless against the flood of pain and need that thundered back into his chest—forgotten for one moment, it returned with overpowering force.
"How—? Who—?"
"I am called by many names. The First Folk call Me Eyyallarann."
Her Shell surrounded him, enveloped him, enwrapped him in effortless comfort; for half a single second, he relaxed
And flashed on her.
She roared into him; in an instant he was filled to bursting, filled beyond pain, but there was more, infinitely more, as though some cruel giant poured the ocean down his throat. From the scream of an eagle wheeling above Khryl's Saddle to the slow squirm of a newt spawning in the mud of the Teranese Delta, from the creak of ancient branches in the wind of the Larrikaal Deepwood to the hush of a rivulet washing a mossy stone below Ankhana's Commons' Beach, she entered him with power that would burst his skull and scatter smoking gobbets of brain throughout the room
"That's enough," she said, and the flood cut off as though a door had been slammed within his brain. "Be careful what you touch, Kris; there are dangers here for such as you."
Deliann stepped back from her, gasping, his hands pressing against his face until the room halted its dizzy whirl; then he lowered himself slowly and reverently to his knees.
"Your pardon, My Lady," he said formally in Primal, his head bent before her. "I did not know Thee."
"Your reverence betrays your human birth," she replied gravely in the same tongue. "The First Folk do not kneel to Me; I am properly greeted with a kiss, for I am your mother, and your sister, and your child."
Deliann rose and embraced her; he was, astonishingly, taller than she, and she felt frail in his arms. "What would you have me do?" he asked.
"Hold on to hope," she said. "Within days, a new disease will strike this city, and the entire land. Whoever it touches need never fear HRVP."
"I don't understand."
"It is how I will defeat this plague. A new plague, that confers immunity to the other."
"You can do this?"
"I can. That is why you must hold on to hope."
"Hope?" he repeated. "Immunity—oh, my heart! Kierendal! Kierendal, stop!”
He dashed from the room into the bedchamber next door.
What he found there might have been the aftermath of a cheerful party: bodies sprawled across a wide bed and settled at seeming ease into comfortable chairs, all in the boneless relaxation that might have been sleep
Zakke reclined in a broad sitting chair, his beard spilling down his chest. Pischu lay on the bed, his hands folded peacefully across his chest. Tup was curled up on a pillow on the vanity table.
Kierendal had crumpled to the floor like a broken doll. She lay on the rug at the foot of the bed, and Deliann dropped to his knees beside her. Her long, almost fleshless legs were twisted beneath her; they looked like they would hurt, if she woke up.
He touched her splash of silver hair. "If only you could have waited," he whispered.
The room brightened to the gentle glow of a forest moonset. The goddess stood at his back.
"She was afraid," Deliann said, absently stroking Kierendal's hair. His voice was empty as a raided tomb. "They all were. She knew what it was going to be like. She couldn't face that kind of death—she couldn't watch them face it ..."
"Do you think she would want to live, if she could?"
"Do I—? Would—?" Deliann turned, wide-eyed, gasping with sudden hope. "Are you asking me?"
"Those who still live need not die of this poison," the goddess said. "Can you bear the burden of having called them back?"
"I—yes! Yes, anything—anything--"
"This is not a fairy tale, Kris," the goddess said severely. "I do not take you at your word, when you do not know what you are saying. Any who survive this poison will be infected still. I cannot cure them directly."
"You—you can't? Why not?"
"HRVP is not, exactly, alive. My powers of healing are great, but they are no different in kind than any other: I can only spur the body's natural processes. HRVP is not a natural disease; it is a genengineered bioweapon—" She used, astonishingly, the English words. "—and the body's natural resistance system is no defense. To spur the body's processes would bring only a swifter death."
"But I
The goddess lifted a restraining hand. "The vaccine you received as a child is another genengineered virus." She continued to sprinkle English into her Westerling. "This is how I will stop the infection, in the end: I will create a countervirus that will block the receptor sites to which HRVP binds. If your friends are exposed to it soon enough, it may save their sanity and their lives." "May?"
The goddess nodded. "They will have a chance, but only that. You might call them back from this gentle death to an unbearable one." "How ... how long? How long before—"
"I believe I will have the countervirus prepared within four days."
"So they would have a chance. That's a chance I can take," Deliann said, rising. "So? What's the catch?"
The goddess shook her head sadly. "This is the catch, Kris." She gestured toward the bodies. "Two of these four have yet enough strength to be saved; if I strengthen their hearts, and speed the work of their livers to break down the poison, it will wash from them before it can kill them."
"Two?" Deliann said. "Only two?"
She nodded. "That man—" Pischu, on the bed. "—had a weak heart. He is already dead. And this treetopper—"
Tup ... Oh, Kierendal
, how will you stand it?
"—her metabolism was too fast; she died only a moment after she drank. So, Kris Hansen: your friend may not thank you for calling her back from death. Can you help her live with what she has done?"
Deliann looked down at Kierendal.
If I'm wrong there's plenty of poison left. Once she understands what's going on, she can make her own choice.
He nodded: to the goddess, and to himself. "Yes," he said. "Yes, I can.
"Then it is done," the goddess said.
That simply: without a gesture, without even the faintest flicker of the light around them. Kierendal's shallow hitching breath deepened toward the slow rhythm of sleep.
Now he found that he had recovered the strength to cry.
"My father ..." he murmured painfully. "My family—Mithondion .. . When you have the countervirus—all of Mithondion will be infected by now ..
"Mithondion is beyond my reach," the goddess said. "My power is that of the river—beyond the bound of my watershed, I am blind and deaf, and largely powerless. If they are to be saved, the cure must be carried to them, even as was the disease."
"How did you—I mean, when did—" Torronell, his heart whispered, breaking. If she had come two weeks ago, even a week ... "I mean, where have you been?" His heart cried his real question: Why did you wait so long?
"I was on Earth," she said simply. "As you named me, I am also the Aktir Queen. You called, and I came."
"I . . . called? You mean, with J'Than? The Aktir?"
Her luminous, liquid eyes gazed deeply into his. "Hari Michaelson asked to be remembered to you," she said.
She stepped sideways, and reality warped around her: in the barest blink of an eye, perspective distorted so that it seemed she had moved half a mile away while still remaining within the room; with another step, she was gone.
Deliann stood rooted to the carpet, shaken, gasping.
Hari... Michaelson?
At his feet Kierendal stirred, whimpering; Deliann instantly knelt beside her and cradled her head on his knees. "Shh," he whispered. "Shh. It's all right. I'm here. It's all right."
And for a time, he believed he might be telling the truth.
There was, in those days, a man who had been a god. Though a god no longer, he still saw with a more than mortal eye, shaped with a more than mortal hand, and thought with a more than mortal mind. He saw the war made by the dark angel, and he saw the acolytes of dust and ashes, but he did not see the god who lay behind them both. To save his onetime children from this war, he shaped himself a new destiny.
But he was a god no longer; even' his more than mortal mind could not guess the limits of his vision, his strength, and his wisdom. Thus did he open the tale of his own destruction.
Others had brought war against the god of dust and ashes, many others, more than can be counted on worlds beyond number. Among its enemies on this world had been Jereth Godslaughterer, Panchasell the Luckless, and Kiel Burchardt. Among its enemies on the other had been Friedrich Nietzsche, John Brown, and Crazy Horse.
Each had fallen to its patient, infinite hunger. It had killed them in its sleep.
On the day the dark angel went forth to war, the man who had been a god took counsel with the acolytes of dust and ashes
And persuaded them to wake it up.
SEVEN
Tan'elKoth sat alone in the stony gloom of the Curioseum. Motionless, his eyes glittered in the flickering glow from the mirror that served him as a deskscreen. His fingers were steepled before his impassive face. The ground floor of his apartment had no windows; though it was late afternoon outside the Curioseum, black shadows crowded dose around him. He was consumed with the task of waiting.
He had been waiting for this moment for nearly seven years.
The mirror on his desk glowed with a special edition of Adventure Update. Tan'elKoth had watched the recording that Clearlake played for a worldwide audience. With his usual canny political touch for self-preservation, Clearlake had seamlessly edited the recording to eliminate every suggestion that the Studio itself might be somehow responsible for the outbreak, thus protecting himself from any charge of corporate slander; other than that, the recording ran uncensored, and unrelievedly gruesome. Tan'elKoth stabbed the cutoff. He'd seen enough.
"One supposes the Bog has, as well," he murmured.
He composed himself to wait.
Seconds ticked by more swiftly than the beating of his heart. He waited.
Then he waited longer.
And longer.
Still no chime from his annunciator.
Those fractal tree branch world-paths replayed within his mind. No new flowering, no unexpected crook or twist presented itself: this sprouting future was precisely as it had been, in the moment he laid his will upon it.
But still they did not call.
That he had miscalculated was impossible. Even an idiot could now see how easily they had been outmaneuvered; even an idiot could now see that they had only one choice. Even the stupidest fish can feel the hook when it's lodged in its throat.
He thrust himself to his feet and prowled the limits of his cage. He paced up the broad curve of stairs that led through the light trap to his personal quarters, humming distractedly to himself. The voices of the men within him murmured that there was something he'd overlooked.
He climbed the final flight, up to his studio. The skylight showed only the low bloodlit gloom of night clouds over the city. This was where he'd spent most of the past six years—now nearly seven—molding in clay and casting in bronze the interior shapes of his private reality.
It had been a brutal, bitter, soul-searing struggle, teaching his hands to bring forth the shapes within his heart; every time a casting cooled unevenly and cracked, every time he scraped thin grey curls of clay from beneath his fingernails, every time he so much as touched a-knife or a trowel, he was forced to confront memories of being Ma'elKoth, of constructing His Great Work: memories of ordering reality with nothing more than the power of his mind. Memories of how far he had fallen
And yet, working with his hands had taught him things that working only with his mind could never have: had taught him that materials are not infinitely malleable, nor should they be—that to overwork a piece is to destroy it. Materials have shapes of their own. True art is a negotiation, a struggle, even a dance, between the will of the artist and the intrinsic form—the physical properties of strength and balance, the fundamental possibility-that defines his chosen medium.
He passed a study for his most famous sculpture, The Passion of Lovers. Passion was not his best work; it was merely the most accessible to the limited tastes of his audience. Cast in monumental bronze, two men stand tangled in an intimate embrace, their forms stylized, abstracted into the essence of their desire for each other until they flow together and join as one. One holds a sword that pierces the other through the groin, its blade emerging from that one's back; the sword-pierced figure holds smaller blades in each hand, one seeking his lover's heart, the other buried in the top of his lover's skull.
Obvious. Even trite.
He turned aside from Passion and pulled the shroud from his current work, his David. He had finally allowed himself to attempt a full figure in marble, a material far more exacting than bronze. Larger than life-size, to the same scale as Michelangelo's, the half-completed sculpture rested on a large reinforced dolly with swivel-mounted wheels—locked now—so that he could at need shift the tons of stone to examine it in differing angles of sunlight.
The figure had begun to emerge from its prison of creamy stone. Tan'elKoth surveyed it critically, walking around it, sighing; he struggled to live through his eyes, to forget his tension, his frustration. Even to pick up a chisel in his current emotional turmoil would be an invitation to disaster. He was not unmindful of what historians termed Michelangelo's Struggle series—each tortured and twisted figure abandoned after a single flawed stroke.
Tan'elKoth's David would be greater than Buon
arroti's; instead of the perfection of masculine beauty sought by the Earth artist, Tan'elKoth had taken for his model an older, more seasoned man, a man on the descending curve of his life—a man whose face and form would show in every line the soul-crushing burden of being the Beloved of God, and yet would also show pride, tempered strength, unbendable will. One would seethe beauty of the youth he had been, and see that the scars etched by time's acid had made him more beautiful still.
But now, as he examined the emerging figure, he could see that it would develop not precisely as he had envisioned it. Already the gestural line of its stance had diverged from his intention, as though its form was becoming a vector of two convergent images. As though there is already at work here a will that is not my own.
Tan'elKoth's eyes went wide and round, and he lost a moment in sheer marvel. Somewhere, somewhere within this revelation was the fault line that had shifted beneath his certainty
He had always been a composite entity. Any memories of having but a single mind had been relegated to the ghost-forms that peopled his inner world. From the moment of Ma'elKoth's self-creation in a flare of power from the crown of Dal'kannith, he had been the master of a choir of interior voices. Through the years that choir had swelled to a symphony, of which he was the conductor: many voices, many minds, many lives, but a single organizing will.
He was Ma'elKoth no longer; his latest act of self-creation had reduced the god he had once been to merely the greatest of the shades in his internal Tartarus. Despite the self-deprecation of his new name, Tan'elKoth knew that he was more than even Ma'elKoth had been: more human, more connected to the currents of time and flesh that rule the lives of mortals. And a better artist--which may, in the end, have been the most important difference.
Art had always been his ruling passion.
Hannto the Scythe had been an obsessive collector from his earliest years; he had in truth become a necromancer in service to this obsession. The skill of necromancy consists primarily in coaxing forth the remnants of the patterns that consciousness imprints upon the Shells of corpses—capturing the fading echoes of the mind that had once been expressed by the meat. A skilled necromancer can temporarily tune his own mind, his own Shell, closely enough to these residual vibrations that he can access the occasional tatter of the memories they represent.