Ranhé turned and saw a tall familiar gawky man whom she recognized immediately from the White Roads Inn. “You!” she said, unable to hold back a grin.
“Good to see you again, Ranhéas Ylir!” replied Nilmet Vallen, known as the Philosopher. He approached, and took her hand in a warm greeting.
“Acquaintances?” inquired Marihke, raising his brows. “Well met indeed, then.”
And then, Marihke raised his hand up for attention. “Masters!” he said. “We have before us another untrained talent. She has proved that she is capable of calling forth yellow. We must see what else, if anything, she might be able to do. And then, we must make her ready to use her talent as one of the Guild.”
And then they all formed a circle around her, while smiling Nilmet stepped forward, and again taking Ranhé’s hand, looked into her eyes.
“Now then,” he said, “First, you must remember and think of nothing but yellow light. . . .”
An hour later, Ranhé was capable of forming a bright sphere of yellow radiance, easily, and on cue. She was able to make the sphere float in the air before her, to move where she willed it to go, to shrink and to expand in diameter. She was able to take an empty glass orb, and put the light within it, make it reside within the boundaries of thin glass—a mere guideline, not a physical necessity, she realized now.
It was not too difficult to do, this gathering of light. All she had to do was remember one image, like a focal anchor within her mind. And she thought, each time, lightly, of the topaz field beneath a radiant golden sky.
Soon, Nilmet stepped away from her, satisfied, while the rest of the Masters had been looking on. “Now,” said Nilmet, “we would test you further, Ranhé. You learned control of this so quickly that I wonder if there’s an even greater ability within you—that of a Master. All of us here are Masters because of the intensity of our talent, or because of our ability to work with more than one color.”
“I doubt I can do any more,” she began, while her thoughts uncontrollably wandered, and a dull ache tightened behind her eyes, to remind her who she was now, and that nothing had changed.
“You can try,” said Marihke. All of a sudden, there was a sphere of red floating in the air before her, at eye level. He nodded to it, then said, “Look and remember. Now, try to re-create it.”
Ranhé blinked, and the light was gone from the room, which was again bathed in monochrome twilight. She tried to remember the image, but all that came to her was the Red River of the Red Quarter, the street of pure crimson light populated with the City’s nightlife.
A single orb stood out in her mind, across the street from the Rose Teahouse, glowing with joy before the steep colonnade of steps of the House of Erotene. That House—it had seemed a Temple when she had ascended it once, where she had first seen the god with the sun-hair.
Self-hatred surged within her, and then an anger that she thought of him, even for an instant.
The anger burst through her, ran in a passion of feeling through her extremities, and with it, a fireball ignited, three feet in diameter, of a brilliant scalding scarlet.
The Masters had to take a step back. Marihke quickly stretched his hand out, and the fireball came to him, and then, still moving, began to shrink within the recesses of his palm.
It hissed, and not a spark remained.
“Very impressive,” said Marihke. “I suspected you were Master level.” He turned then to the group. “Anyone else?”
Tegra stepped forward, nodding to Ranhé, and raised her two palms together before her, in a gesture similar to that of gathering a scoop of water.
Within Tegra’s palms suddenly came an orange glow. And then, pure light seemed to flow, like true water, through her fingers, down her arms and elbows, and sprinkled in droplets upon the matte floor of the chamber, pooling into a puddle of glorious persimmon brilliance at her feet. Still holding her hands out, Tegra said, “Light does not have to be spherical. Behold! You can form it into any shape you like.” Her smile was feather-light, reserved, and then the light was gone from the room.
Ranhé’s brows rose. She pulled her wandering thoughts back from the distant plane of alienation, and forced herself to think of the brightness. Truly, it still stood within her eyelids, an afterimage, and she recalled vaguely, in another life, the warmth of a roadside inn, as she put her hands forward.
The glow began in her palm. Its heat was overwhelming, it tickled her fingers, and soon, if she didn’t let go, it would scald her, and so she must throw it forth, away from her—
And so she tossed the contents of her palms. And suddenly, like a fountainhead, it burst forth, a shower of tiny droplets of orange, microscopic fireworks, rising high overhead, and sprinkling all throughout the room in a cascade of light.
Their voices arose then, for the fireworks burned above their heads, and the sight made many draw in their breath.
“Now, try this!” said a loud expressive baritone, as Baelinte Khirmoel moved in from the circle, simultaneously throwing a narrow contesting glance at Tegra Daqua.
He closed his eyes, and did not lift a finger, but suddenly, the cascading shower of orange sparks began to change in midair, flowing into another hue, that of brilliant green. What he did was change the very color of the already existing light.
Ranhé took up his challenge wordlessly. She concentrated, her memory of orange still overpowering, and forced the particles of green light to fluctuate back to orange, just as they still floated down softly, before they even touched the ground.
“Very good,” said Tegra to Ranhé, meanwhile giving Baelinte a narrow look of her own, like a satiated cat.
And then Ranhé, filled with the vibrant energy still within her—together with that distant ache—felt something strange happening. It seemed, for the span of seconds, that the heat level of her entire body was rising, was stifling her. She stood, suddenly gasping for breath, at a loss of what to do, how to relieve this tingling fiery pressure inside, a gathering of explosive forces.
Noticing her difficulty, Marihke again stepped forth, frowning with concern, and said gently, “Ranhé? Can you hear me? Is there a great buildup within you now that you cannot seem to alleviate? If so, then listen quickly: you must force the energy outside of you immediately, force the flow out somehow. Do it quickly, for it is dangerous to you, do it any way you can! Release the energy via light! Now!”
And Ranhé obeyed him, simultaneously feeling herself burn, go up in flames, at the same time seeing on the periphery of her vision Lord Vaeste come inside the room. He entered and stopped, and was looking at her. And then, like a flood, she released the great volcanic eruption of gathered energy outside herself.
She stood, a human torch of light, framed by an aura of rapidly mutating colors—all six of them, pulsing through the whole range of the forgotten spectrum.
“Are you sure there is no Vaeste blood within you somewhere?” said Elasand, walking toward her through the Circle, just as the last of her fury of flames had been extinguished. His gaze was incredulous, and he looked at her with an intense searching clarity. His face was serious, drawn somewhat, but he appeared better rested today.
“Not a drop, my lord.” She smiled somewhat shyly, feeling completely drained. “I come of common stock, quite unlike you.”
“Then it is truly incredible,” he continued. “Does Elasirr know yet what you can do with light?”
“I think not—yet.”
At that point, a young guildsman, Ukrt, came into the chamber, and heads turned to look at the strange expression of his face. “Master Marihke!” he spoke in a stumbling manner. “And the rest of you! Pardon me, but you must go look outside.”
“What is it?” responded Marihke.
But Ukrt’s eyes were terrified. “Look outside, Masters!” he was saying. “Come now, quickly, look outside at the sky!”
“Indeed!” said Elasand, coming out of his distracted state. “This is the reason I’ve come here in the first place. There is something
unusual happening outside! Come, all of you!”
He began walking to the door. Ranhé threw one look back at Marihke, then followed, while the others did also.
They came out of the spiral chamber into a passageway with soft matte walls, typical of most inner decor of the Guild. The corridor led to an outside entrance within the grounds of the Inner City.
Elasand opened the door, and stepped outside.
He stepped into twilight.
The same predawn faint glimmer on the horizon. The buildings were steeped in evening shadows, and the sky—an ashen obscure void.
There was no cloud mass obscuring the sun. No unusual mist. But the air itself was thick somehow, thick with gathered dusk.
“What time is it?” someone asked.
“An hour before noon,” replied Elasand softly, staring up into the strange terrifying sky.
“Where is the sun?” someone else exclaimed. “I cannot see the sun! Why, it still looks like dawn, like it did when I left my bed this morning.”
Ranhé turned her face up, as a cool wind gathered, and then she spied it, the sickly disk near zenith. “There . . .” she whispered. “There is your sun! It is strangely obscured, dull.”
“It is the Enemy’s work.”
The voice came from behind, and she turned slowly, seeing him.
Elasirr stood behind them all, having appeared once again with utmost silence. His face was impassive, and he barely acknowledged her with a narrow glance of empty eyes. Turning to Elasand, he said, “The attack has begun. It has been spoken everywhere, all across the City, and those who work for me have verified it. Feale has promised to eliminate the Regents and all other prisoners, before the day is over, unless I, the Guildmaster, come to him. Only, as you can see, the day is over before it even started.”
“Which means,” finished Elasand, “that we have no time at all to act.”
“Wrong.” Elasirr looked at the people watching him with great concern, at the sky that was like a soup bowl of darkness, at the sun disk that resembled now, more than anything, an extinguished phantom orb of glass.
“We must get to work now,” he said. “This is but the first strike. At last, the war is come upon us.”
And they stood, silent, hearing him speak thus, in a City that was now truly Twilight.
In the hollow spiral chamber of light, they stood, the Nine Masters of the Guild, forming a clean circle along the circular perimeter. In the middle stood the Guildmaster, the Lord Vaeste, and the woman mercenary who was now one of them.
“You will accompany us as we do this thing, Ranhé,” Elasand had told her then. “We need your ability to reinforce us as we attempt this, for inexplicably you seem to be able to draw upon color light as easily as my family Vaeste.”
“What must I do, my lord?” she whispered, echoes of her voice fading softly in the silent chamber.
“You must be able to join into a link that we are about to form, help maintain that circumference of light, and then, you will follow us within . . .” said Elasirr, looking at her with shadowed empty eyes.
“Within? Where?” she echoed, looking back also, vacantly and past him, like a well of inner night.
“You have already been there with me once,” said Lord Vaeste. “It is an otherplace that I myself had gone to often, not of this world but another. A place you saw through a filter of violet. This time though, we go farther than before, and we go by means of our own will and control.”
And then Elasand turned away, and nodded toward his half-brother.
Noting his silence, Elasirr motioned to the Circle behind them, and suddenly, there was light.
Each man and woman stood with hands lightly spread away from the body, palms upward, and from the fingers of each came an undifferentiated radiance. It flowed outward to fill all space between them with a fog of brightness.
They had linked in a specific order, noted Ranhé. Marihke stood with his back directly south, and onto both sides of him poured forth red. On his right stood Gilimas, and he was a source of orange. The colors, where their outer perimeters of presence touched, strangely, did not blend, but continuously blurred through each other, in an attempt to supersede, to overlap, like water and oil.
To the right of Gilimas stood Nilmet, and he poured forth a strong brilliant yellow. Next, counterclockwise, Baelinte blazed in a deep aura of green, then came Carliserall the Phoenix in simmering blue, and Cyanolis, choosing, of all the colors, to form violet.
Elasand looked at his cousin for a moment, then stepped forward within the perimeter of the circle. He stood with his back to the north chamber wall, and suddenly he too was violet, intensifying the radiance that came from Cyanolis.
On the right of Elasand was the priest, Preinad Olvan, drawn in a corona of blue, then Erin, weaving a soft homogeny of green.
Elasirr looked at Ranhé. “Go on. Fill this place with the color you—like so well.”
She did not need to be told twice. Stepping to Erin’s side, and before Tegra who formed orange, she trained her gaze across the circle, on the opposite side where Nilmet stood in topaz glow. And then, from within her, it resounded, and she was a sympathetic torch of yellow.
It felt odd, standing within the Circle. A permanent warmth gathered, building within her, and she hardly noticed how the Guildmaster himself, being the last one remaining outside their circumference, moved in on the other side of Tegra Daqua, next to Marihke Sar, to complete the Circle at last. And suddenly he too blazed forth, in intense crimson.
He and Marihke were the red poles, while Elasand and Cyanolis completed the violet poles of gathered brightness. It grew, rose about them, and suddenly, it seemed to Ranhé, they all stood under the roof of a brilliant waterfall of light.
And this light, it was strange, furious, unable to coexist with itself, and it danced—formed of distinct photons of separate colors—none merging, all swirling like a blizzard of antagonistic heterogeneous particles that refused to blend.
For, the truth lay therein, Ranhé suddenly realized. It was the blending that would change the nature of light, the inherent flow of one into another, a universal bond.
Indeed, she herself was like those light particles—poor sorrowful lonely dust motes that would never come together with each other in a fusion that was the final goal.
Yet, it was, possibly, her very own choice.
Elasirr’s voice broke into her dizzying color-filled thoughts.
“Werail!” he cried, himself a red burning demon with sun-hair. “We call upon you and all the others, O Tilirreh! Allow us to enter your place of silence!”
And there was suddenly a great pull upon her personal warmth, the energy that wielded the light, a scalding jerk, as though the ground itself was being pulled from under her feet.
Elasirr’s touch. She could almost feel its intimacy, though he stood at least ten paces away.
For he had taken over her light, and was now transforming the colors of the whole Circle.
The Circle, blazed into a single blinding band of red.
And then Ranhé felt herself losing consciousness, for it was being sucked into a vortex of brilliance, and she was drowning, falling, falling. . . .
Werail stood on a barren red plain. The world was red. From above, blazed a brilliant terrible red sun.
They stood on the plain before him, and cast dark shadows, like burning coal.
There were three of them. Of all the Circle, only they could wield all of the colors. Thus, they had the freedom to move between worlds.
“Lord!” spoke the shadowmaker that was Elasirr. “You once showed me the Enemy, and thus I was prepared. Come back with us to the world, Werail! Your presence will dispel the darkness that gathers all around us now.”
I have told you this once already. I may not . . . replied the red one, in a voice that resounded more hollow than his whole barren world.
It is beyond me. The Rainbow is incomplete.
And then, in a maelstrom of red fury, the world
began to dissolve before them, and again, Ranhé felt a swooning, as she jumped. . . .
Into a place with an orange sky.
Melixevven of orange joy was a woman with laughing lips and untamed hair, like a head of dandelion.
The pixie soared before them in the brightness of that sky, and they too floated, disembodied—or rather, unanchored to land.
For, there was no land, no earth in this world.
Only sky.
Come! cried Melixevven in a voice like carbonated water, acute, stinging, and clear as glass. And they flew with her, hurtling through the boundless void of mandarin sky, like flying fish. Or maybe, it was but the air that rushed against them, and they were stationary, in this world without a physical frame of reference.
“Where do you take us, Tilirreh?” cried Elasand, and disembodied Ranhé thought she heard from him a note of despair.
Come, fly with me! cried the goddess, as she sped ahead of them, her extremities flaming with a comet tail of sparks in the supernatural wind. Her bubbling voice again echoed, her laughter bounced in the crystalline void, and she flew onward, unto eternity. . . .
“Stop!” cried Elasirr. “Come back with us to the true world, O Tilirreh!”
At which the orange one laughed, throwing her head back, saying, Oh, but don’t you know this is the one true world? It is but yours that is a pale specter, that is the dying place of dwindling truth?
“Then come back with us, lady,” whispered Ranhé, “and restore the truth as it once was.”
And the bright one heard her whisper.
If I were to come alone, it would kill me, you know, responded the laughing voice, and Ranhé was not sure why she still laughed.
I may come only after Werail, but before Dersenne, Melixevven whispered back directly into Ranhé’s heart. But they would not have me. Without the Rainbow, we cannot touch. Only you can touch us.
And again she laughed, spinning through a universe of pumpkin gold, radiant, sunless, and yet brightness itself.
And with her spinning, they were flung also, outward, into a funnel of indescribable centrifugal energy. . . .