The Ring of Five Dragons, page 30
part #1 of The Pearl Series
Rekkk looked from one to the other without understanding what had passed between them. He was about to ask when the Gyrgon continued.
“I have waited long to meet you, Lady.”
“I wonder why,” Giyan said. “I was under your nose for fifteen years.
You had but to instruct Eleusis to bring me to a Summoning.” Rekkk saw that she had regained a semblance of her composure.
“The reasons were legion, Lady,” Nith Sahor said. “The time was not yet ripe. Your presence at the Temple of Mnemonics would have alerted and alarmed my brethren. Besides, Ashera Eleusis would have resisted such a request.”
“I was not aware that Eleusis resisted you in any way.”
“Ah; Lady, he often found the ways to do so,” Nith Sahor said. “It is this annoying and admirable quality I believe I will miss most.”
“I miss everything about him,” she said.
Nith Sahor lifted an arm, indicating an open doorway they had not noticed before. “The time for the Visitation grows nigh. We must prepare ourselves.”
Giyan did not move. Rekkk stayed by her side.
“Have you changed your mind, Lady?” Nith Sahor inquired.
“I have rolled the seer’s bones, Nith Sahor. I have seen my death and the death of the Pack-Commander.”
The Gyrgon directed his gaze toward the tabletop. “It is true, Lady. Death stalks every chamber of this establishment tonight. For the Visitation to occur, it cannot be otherwise. My technomancy draws two worlds nigh—two worlds inimical to each other. The bones could do ought but echo this anomaly. They have lost their usual reliability.”
She said nothing; she had begun trembling again. “You will find him with your technomancy?”
“Yes.”
“Will you be able to tell where he is?”
“That is a question not to be asked,” Nith Sahor said. “Ashera Annon will appear; whence he comes even I cannot know. It would violate too many laws of the known universe.”
Giyan nodded. “Müna help me, I want to see him again.”
“Let it be so,” Nith Sahor said as he ushered them down the long corridor that ended in the small conical chamber Rekkk had been in before.
“Giyan,” Rekkk said, “how is it that a Gyrgon calls you Lady? It is not an honorific I have ever heard any Kundalan use.”
“No Kundalan does,” Giyan said.
Nith Sahor had that strange smile firmly affixed to his face as they entered the chamber. What is so N’Luuura amusing? Rekkk wanted to ask him, but did not.
In almost all ways the chamber looked different. It had been lac- quered black. The comfortable furniture had been replaced by three concentric circles of braided germanium-alloy wire in the center of the floor within which rose a narrow three-sided scaffolding of dull grey tantalum incised with scientific runes. Affixed to this scaffolding was a series of faceted crystals embedded with networks of biochips. On the floor within the scaffolding was Annon Ashera’s birth-caul. When Gi-yan saw it, she gave a little cry. Tears stood out at the corners of her eyes.
“Do you wish to continue, Lady?” Nith Sahor asked.
She nodded, averting her eyes from the caul.
Nith Sahor directed Rekkk to stand against the curving wall, then led Giyan to a spot just inside the innermost germanium circle. When he was satisfied, he took up his place directly across the circle from her.
“You need do nothing more than listen—and watch,” he told her. “Heed my words, however. Undef no circumstances should you try to touch Ashera Annon when he appears, or move at all. To do so will bring disaster upon us all. Is this clear?”
“Yes,” Giyan said.
“One more thing,” he said. “As I invoke the antienergy from the other world you will find it difficult to breathe. Do not struggle against this feeling. I will protect you.”
Giyan inclined her head. “I understand.”
“So,” Nith Sahor intoned, “we begin.” The Gyrgon raised his hands. Blue fire leapt from his mesh gloves, arcing to the talantum scaffolding. Instantly, it glowed with a golden hue. Even from this distance, Rekkk could feel the heat emanating from the center of the chamber. It felt as if they were inside a kiln. Already his lung was gasping for oxygen. The chamber drained of light, color, substance. Everything seemed transformed into translucent crystal. All at once, his lung stopped functioning. Antienergy ringed the room, throbbing with a lambent brilliance that made his eyes ache. Tears came to his eyes, seemed to freeze up on the surface of his lenses. The air—what remained of it—shimmered.
“He comes,” Nith Sahor intoned. “Beware now. We are immersed in a poisoned singularity. One imprudent motion and we perish.”
As his words died out, an image began to appear in the space between the network of crystals. It gained definition as it turned three-dimensional.
Giyan breathed Annon’s name.
Annon.
Lost in the blackness of the cave, Riane’s head came up. She heard Giyan calling as if from a vast distance. Like sand from an hourglass, she felt something being drained out of Riane’s body. This was followed by an agonizing sensation, as if the fabric of Riane’s essence was being torn asunder. She had the eerie, breathless sensation of being in two places at once.
He was Annon again. His surroundings shimmered and morphed. He saw Giyan standing in front of him, and he called to her to help him. Then he became aware of the others: Pack-Commander Rekkk Hacilar and a Gyrgon. What was going on? He tried to ask her, but as in a dream he could not speak. He was rooted to the spot, able only to observe. He wondered at Giyan’s tears, wanted to reach out for her, but he couldn’t.
Like a ripple on a pond at night he became aware of something alien, malign. He looked beyond the three figures, saw a cyclopean shadow. It was striding across the vast, black ether that surrounded them all. The shadow emerged into the light. Annon wanted to scream. The five faces of Pyphoros turned in his direction and the daemon of daemons grinned.
“I have marked you,” Pyphoros said. “You have become mine.”
“No!” Annon screamed.
“You were foretold. It is my due.”
Annon squirmed, trying with all his might to move. But he was caught as securely as a marc-beetle in amber. The daemon’s jaws hinged open. He had to do something.
Think, Riane’s voice said in his mind, of what is written.
Desperately, he tried to think of passages in Utmost Source but nothing came to him. The more he tried, the further the sacred text seemed to slip from the grasp of his memory. It was as if he had never memorized it.
Pyphoros’ jaws opened to an impossible angle. His five faces merged into one and grew so large it seemed to be the size of Kundala. At this rate, his mouth would engulf everything. I am doomed, Annon thought.
Look, Riane’s voice said, at what he carries.
Annon saw something in Pyphoros’ hand. It was a birth-caul—Annon’s birth-caul. How had he gotten it? But such questions did not matter now. This was how Pyphoros had tracked him down, even here in this unknown and terrifying place.
For the first time in his life, Annon felt at a disadvantage by being
V’ornn. Somehow he knew that Pyphoros, powerful as he was, had no inkling of the Riane personality. The daemon of daemons was fixated only on Annon Ashera. For an instant, Annon glimpsed something—a concept so vast, so unthinkable that he could not get his mind fully around it. Compared to Pyphoros, the V’ornn seemed weak, inconsequential, and Annon was shaken to his very core.
The space around them was beginning to roil with evil emanations. There was no more time to think. Only to act.
Annon let himself go—rushing backward into the shell of Riane. The moment he returned inside her, the agony he had felt lifted. The entire Five Sacred Books of Müna was hers again, and she knew what to do.
“Something is wrong,” Nith Sahor said.
The lambent antienergy was increasing in intensity instead of holding steady. It had stripped the waffs bare, it was encircling them with a rapaciousness that was almost sentient. Three crystals exploded as their circuits overloaded. Nith Sahor redirected the ion flow from his cortical net to compensate. The blue emanations from his glove-grids pulsed at a higher rate, but it seemed to do no good. Something unknown and immensely powerful had thrown off the Master Equation. He recalculated on the fly, but the components were changing too rapidly for him to keep up. The barrier he had erected to protect them was beginning to collapse and there was nothing he could do about it.
In the midst of this chilling thought, he saw Ashera Annon move. This was impossible, and yet his eyes were showing him another truth, one so profound it shook him to his core. The image began to spin. Faster and faster it went until it was merely a blur.
Six more crystals blew, and the containment field collapsed. The lambent antienergy dived into the center of the chamber. If it touched any of them…
As if having a will of its own, it coalesced into a single ball, so bright even Nith Sahor was forced to turn aside his gaze. It dived toward the spot where Giyan stood. There was no time to save her or even to warn her. A flash erupted so intense it blotted out everything and everyone in the chamber.
The solution was at once supremely simple and immensely complex. On top of that, it was impossible. And yet it appeared to Riane as That Which Must Be.
That Which Must Be was written about often in Utmost Source. It was the least likely solution, the one that could not possibly be accom- plished, the path to success that required of the one who would take it every ounce of faith she had. You thought it would work and it did work. It was the Way of instinct, of illogic, the Way rejected by everyone else.
Riane conjured the required passages and did That Which Must Be.
She sent herself Thripping.
She knew that she should not have been able to accomplish this feat. It was Mother’s ability, lost to the Ramahan for over a hundred years. Members of the current Dea Cretan, including Bartta, had tried to Thrip and failed. The ability, it seemed, had been lost along with Utmost Source and The Pearl.
And yet, Riane sent herself Thripping.
Inhaling the instructions from the book she began to spin, and in spinning loosed herself from the amber in which she had been trapped. The cavern in which she sat, the chamber in which Annon’s image whirled, now fell away, flat as scenery in a stage set. Beyond beckoned the true reality—an infinity of realms beyond Time or Space, beyond even Order and Chaos, Life and Death. Here everything simply was. Planets did not spin; they did not revolve around suns. There was no gravity, no laws of astrophysics. Nothing aged, was born or died.
Riane watched the energy fluxes with confusion. She was instantly disoriented. The fluxes were neither lines nor circles nor any other geometrical analog. Instead, like everything else in this reality, they simply existed. Where was she? Where was she going and how was she going to get there? She couldn’t walk, run, sprint, swim, crawl, or use any other imaginable means of locomotion.
And then, looming on what her mind could only conceive of as the far horizon (though it was farther or nearer than anything else around her) she saw Pyphoros. His faces swiveled this way and that, searching. She wanted desperately to hide but, disoriented, she did not know how to move, and in any event where in this infinite, open expanse was there a place to hide?
The chamber inside Nimbus smelled of incinerated material and burnt flesh.
Nith Sahor’s scaffolding had been reduced to a lump of metal, the germanium-alloy wires had been crisped, their remains black smoking lines branded into the floor. All the crystals had been fused, down to the shattered shards.
Giyan stood within the circle. Her robe and sifeyn had been burned off her.
Rekkk leapt to her side, wrapping her in his long, dark cloak. “What the N’Luuura happened?”
“Are you well, Lady?” Nith Sahor asked.
“I do not know,” she said, and lifted her arms for them to see.
Her unhealed wounds had been transformed. Now the skin from the tips of her fingers to her elbows was black as pitch.
“Nith Sahor, what has happened?” she asked with a catch in her voice.
“I do not know, Lady.” He came across the circle and tentatively touched her fingertips. “Hard as stone.” Blue energy patterns gathered and ebbed as he manipulated ions. He gave her a quick glance. “Can you still move your fingers?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
“Then do so.”
“I am.”
“Now?”
“Yes.”
Her fingers were still as death.
“What is it?” Rekkk demanded. “Tell us, Nith Sahor.”
“It looks organic, like a shell of some sort.” The Gyrgon was probing gently all over from fingertips to wrists. “Chrysalides of some sort.”
“Müna protect me,” Giyan whispered. The Nanthera was interrupted, Bartta had said. Giyan closed her eyes. She had put her hands into the sorcerous circle to try to save Annon. No one can say what the outcome will be.
“Is there any pain?” Rektk asked.
“Not now, no.” She licked her lips. “My fingers have very limited movement. I can feel the inside of the chrysalides.”
“I’m going to get them off you.”
“That would be exceedingly unwise, Rekkk.”
Rekkk paused. “What do you mean?”
“Nith Sahor is right.” Giyan took a breath. “I can feel a forest of fibers growing.” Her eyes flicked from his to those of the Gyrgon. “I… I think they are attaching themselves to me.”
Rekkk grew angry. “Nith Sahor, I demand an explanation.”
“At the moment I have none, save to say that I warned you about the dangerous properties of the antienergy. Something went wrong during the course of the Visitation. I cannot say what. Somehow, the antienergy broke free of the containment field.”
“But there must be some way to free her,” Rekkk cried.
“She will be freed when the chrysalides have completed their task.”
“But we don’t know what that is!”
“Transformation is the task of every chrysalis.”
“You are a technomage!” Rekkk thundered. “Make this go away.”
“Preliminary findings show that if I try to pry the chrysalides off, I will put Lady Giyan’s life in grave jeopardy.”
“I don’t believe you!”
Nith Sahor inclined his head a little. “Forgive me, Lady.” So saying, he fabricated out of blue ion fire a wicked-looking surgical instrument. Applying the wire-thin blade to the chrysalis on her right hand, he began to make an incision.
Immediately, Giyan cried out in agony. Her eyes rolled up on her head, and she collapsed into Rekkk’s arms.
Nith Sahor caused the implement to disintegrate into its subatomic component parts. “You see Rekkk,” the Gyrgon said sadly, “I do not lie to you.”
Rekkk saw Giyan’s eyes fluttering open. “Are you all right?” he asked.
She nodded and, with his help, regained her feet.
“Lady, again I apologize.” Nith Sahor handed her a silver chalice. “Please drink this. It will speed your recovery.”
While Giyan did as he asked, Rekkk turned on the Gyrgon. “Don’t tell me there is nothing you can do.”
“I fear there are still some things outside the control of the Gyrgon.”
“That would come as a surprise to many Kundalan as well as V’ornn,” Giyan said, handing him the empty cup.
Nith Sahor went and found a robe and sifeyn for her to put on. “Lady, I would very much desire the opportunity to research these chrysalides.”
“No,” she said immediately. “I do not wish to seem ungrateful, Nith Sahor. Thank you for letting me see Annon one more time. However, I will be no one’s laboratory subject.”
Again, Rekkk was astonished to see the Gyrgon bow.
“As you wish, Lady. I will not intrude on your privacy.”
“It grows late, and we are both weary,” Rekkk said curtly.
“Rekkk,” Nith Sahor said as he escorted them back down the corridor, “in your anger you have blamed me. I cannot deny that you have every right to be angry, but these circumstances could not have been foreseen even by the most gifted Kundalan seer.”
“I will not allow anything to happen to her,” Rekkk growled.
He did not see Giyan’s glance, but Nith Sahor marked the expression in her eyes. “Lady, it seems you have quite the formidable champion by your side.”
Giyan said nothing as she went out, Rekkk just behind her.
When they were gone, Nith Sahor returned to the conical chamber. He scoured every square centimeter searching for the origin of the energy intrusion. Of course he had given no hint of it to the others, but the surge had unsettled him. He had never experienced the level of energy flow he had witnessed tonight. Whatever—or whoever—had caused it was clearly a threat to him and to the Gyrgon Modality. It disturbed him profoundly to think that it might be the Centophennni. If that were the case all was lost.
No residue of the intrusive force remained—at least none that his extensive battery of tests revealed. Ashera Annon’s birth-caul was gone as well, incinerated, he guessed, when the energy fused the dynamic bionetwork. That loss was a great tragedy.
He turned his mind in another direction. This Visitation was unique in more ways than one. Something Ijuite remarkable had occurred even before he detected the anomalous energy intrusion. The image of Ash-era Annon appeared to him differently than it had to Lady Giyan and the Pack-Commander. To Nith Sahor it was composed of an incredibly complex equation. There was about all the Visitation equations a common component. This was logical because the subjects were all dead, and this state of being was represented by an embedded energy signature. Except in this instance there was no signature, though Nith Sahor had spent precious seconds searching for it. Then the image of Ashera Annon had begun to spin. This, too, was absolutely remarkable. Unheard of, in fact. Nith Sahor had been so taken aback that the energy intrusion had been able to gain hold very quickly.
Nith Sahor stood in the center of the burnt chamber and contemplated the curious and unexpected twists and turns life took. The Visitation image was able to move of its own accord. Further, it did not contain the Death Signature. The logical conclusion was that despite all the hard evidence to the contrary Ashera Annon was, in fact, alive.
