A hostel at night. Fire leaping red and gold, chuckling as it lights the comradely company, rough-hewn furniture, fiddler on a chair tuning to play a dance; at the table’s far end, a woman, long-gowned, deep-bosomed, who bears a sheaf and an infant on her lap.
Wind. A black bird sudden athwart the pane. The sound of its beak rapping.
Descent down endless stairs in the dark, led by one who never looks back. The boat. The river.
On the far side they have no faces.
“I am sorry,” Ydwyr said. “We do not keep a pharmacopoeia for your species. You must forego drugs. Furthermore, the Old Way is not for you to tread to its end—nor me, I confess. We have the real world to cope with, and we will not do so by abandonment of reason.
“Tell me your dreams. If they grow too bad, call me on my private line—thus—and I will come to you, no matter the hour.”
The snake that engirdles the universe lifts its starry head. It gapes. Scream. Run.
The coils hiss after. The swamp clings to feet. A million years, a step a year out of the sucking muck, and the snake draws close behind.
Lightning. Sinking. Black waters.
He held her, simply held her, at night in her room. “From my viewpoint,” he said, “I am gaining matchless experience with human archetypes.” The dry practicality, itself comforting, yielded to mildness. A big hand stroked her hair. “But you, Djana, are more than a thing. You are becoming like a child to me, did you know? I want to raise you up again and lead you through this valley of shadows you must pass before you can stand by your own strength.”
At mornwatch he left her. She slept a short while, but got to breakfast and subsequently continued her regular schooling. It did not keep her from dwelling within her dreams.
Outside, the first mists of autumn sneaked white over the wet earth.
The waters are peace. Dream, drowse…no, the snake is not dead.
The snake is not dead.
His poisonous teeth. Struggle. Scream. The warm waters are gone, drained out with a huge hollow roaring. Hollow, hollow.
The hollow sound of hoofs, shaking a bridge that nine dead kings could not make thunder. Light.
The snake burns backward from the light.
Raise hands to it. But bow down from its brilliance.
That blaze is off the spear of the Messiah.
“Khraich. I would be interested to know if an abortion was attempted on you. Not important, since you survived. Your need is to learn that you did survive, and that you can.
“Do you feel ready for another session this evening? I would like for you to come and concentrate on the Graven Stone. It seems to have traits in common with what I have read your Terran usage calls a…a mandala?”
A mirror.
The face within.
One comes from behind on soundless feet and holds a mirror to the mirror.
Endlessness dwindles toward nothingness.
At the heart of nothingness, a white spark. It flames, and nothingness recoils and flees back outward to endlessness, while trumpets triumph.
“Ur-r-rh.” Ydwyr scowled at her test scores. They sat prosaically in his living room—though what was prosaic about its austere serenity? “Something developing, beyond question. A hitherto unrealized potential—not telepathy. I’d hoped—”
“The Old Way to the One,” she said, and watched the wall dissolve.
He gave her a long stare before he replied, crisply: “You have gone as far down that road as I dare take you, my dear. Perhaps not far enough, but I am not able—I suspect none less than Aycharaych would be able—to guide you further; and alone, you would lose yourself in yourself.”
“Hm?” she said vaguely. “Ydwyr, I know I touched your mind, I felt you.”
“Delusion. Mysticism is a set of symbols. Symbols are to live by, yes—why else banners?—but they are not to be confused with the reality for which they stand. While we know less about telepathy than psychologists usually pretend, we do know it’s a perfectly physical phenomenon. Extremely long waves travel at light speed, subject to inverse-square diminution and the other laws of nature; the principles of encoding apply; nothing but the radical variation of sensitivity, from time to time and individual to individual, ever made its existence doubtful. Today we can identify it when it occurs.
“Whatever happened in these last experiments of ours, you are not becoming a telepathic receiver. An influence of that general nature was present, true. The meters registered it, barely over threshold level. But analysis shows you were not calling the signs I dealt with above-random accuracy. Instead, I was not dealing them completely at random.
“Somehow, slightly, unconsciously, you were influencing me toward turning up the signs you guessed I would be turning up.”
“I wanted to reach you,” Djana mumbled.
Ydwyr said sternly: “I repeat, we have entered realms where I am not fit to conduct you. The dangers are too great—principally to you, possibly to me. At a later date, maybe, Aycharaych—for the present, we stop. You shall return to the flesh world, Djana. No more magic. Tomorrow we set you to gymnastics and flogging, exhausting, uninspiring work with Eriau. That should bring you back.”
He on the throne: “For that they have sinned beyond redemption, the sin that may not be forgiven, which is to blaspheme against the Holy Spirit, no more are they My people.
“Behold, I cast them from Me; and I will raise against them a new people under a new sun; and their name shall be Strength.
“Open now the book of the seven thunders.”
Talwin’s short autumn was closing when the ship came from headquarters. That was not Merseia. No domain like the Roidhunate could be governed from a single planet, even had the Race been interested in trying. However, she did bear a direct word from the Protector.
She stood on the field, slim, sleek, a destroyer with guns whippet-wicked against the sky, making a pair of counterparts from Morioch’s command that were likewise in port look outmoded and a little foolish. The captured Terran scoutboat hunched in a corner, pathetic.
Few trees showed above the stockade. Early frosts had split their flimsy trunks and brought them down, already to crumble back into the soil. The air was cool and moist. Mists coiled about Merseians working outdoors; but overhead heaven reached clear, deep blue, and what clouds there were shone dazzling white beneath Siekh.
Djana was not invited to the welcoming ceremonies, nor had she anticipated it. Ydwyr gave her a quick intercom call—“Have no fears, I am authorized to handle your case, as I requested in my dispatch”—and wasn’t that wonderful of him? She went for a walk, a real tramp, kilometers along the bluffs above the Golden River and back through what had been enclosing jungle and was becoming open tundra, space, freedom, full lungs and taut muscles, for hour after hour until she turned home of her own desire.
I’ve changed, she thought. I still don’t know how much.
The weeks under Ydwyr’s—tutelage?—were vague in her recollection, often difficult or impossible to separate from the dreams of that time. Later she had gradually regained herself. But it was no longer the same self. Old Djana was scarred, frightened, greedy with the greed that tries to fill inner emptiness, lonely with the loneliness that dares not love. New Djana was…well, she was trying to find out. She was someone who would go for a hike and stop to savor the scarlet of a late-blooming flower. She was someone who, in honest animal wise, hoped Nicky would soon finish with his expedition, and daydreamed about something between him and her that would last, but did not feel she needed him or anybody to guard her from monsters.