Trembling, Phage approached the stairs.
His arms had meant to kill her, so tightly they held her. When she didn't die, they held her tighter still.
Phage ascended toward the looming image of the First. Her hands rose as if in praise. Her fingertips clove through the fabric. Oil and canvas parted from her killing touch. She stepped again, and her face buried itself in his painted stomach. She pressed through to a place of deep darkness and great cold.
This was not a room sketched out in crude physical dimensions. The height, width, and depth of this space were magic functions. Time was a vector of sorcery. Phage did not exist here within her poisonous form but rather as a focused intentionality. She felt like a will-o'-the-wisp, a drifting point of light above primordial waters. The First occupied a similar aspect, and for a time the two lights only spun in orbits about each other.
Then, the peaty waters beneath them gathered and coalesced. Something formed. A low archipelago of islands emerged from the swamp, with a wide, low parkland at its center.
You will bring a new arena into being. You will build it in the swamps at the center of the world. On the large island, a great coliseum took shape. Across the smaller islands, roads and bridges converged in a vast web on that central place. // will be clean, bright, and safe, and best of all-cheap. So too will be the matches you schedule-bloodless duels, battle reenactments, ocean combats, gladiatorial games, animal races. With them, you will draw all the world into our web, you will draw their open purses and untarnished hearts. Once we have them, we will have it all.
It was never wise to speak to the First without invitation, but she and he were the same, motes of light streaming about each other above a vaporous vision. You would conquer the world with entertainments?
The First paused, as if startled by her umbrage. In a moment, he answered gladly, We will draw them in with entertainment, but the fights must become more. You will schedule battles to the death, yes, but only between condemned killers, and they will be offered not as entertainment, but as object lessons in morality. The people will slowly come to see the arena as the place where ultimate justice is meted out.
This time, she did not question, but only said, Yes. It will be a simple thing to schedule grudge matches between folk who have a common grievance. The level of violence, of lethality, will be commensurate with the gravity of the offense. Border disputes will be to first blood. Cuckolds will be to maiming. Wrongful death will be to death. You will encourage all folk to settle their conflicts in the arena, not in the streets like dogs. You will allow them to hire gladiators to represent them. Once again, such matches will not be called entertainment, but trials of justice.
Yes.
You will teach the people to come to us for entertainment, for morality, for justice, for community, for meaning, for purpose, for life. You will train them in this great coliseum, and you will build arenas at the heart of every city and town. You will move us from the pits to the center of civilization.
Even without a body, she could still tremble. Yes.
The vision was complete. The future had been laid indelibly into the lines of her soul. She would bring this new world into being.
While you build this new spectacle, I shall destroy an old one.
In the primordial waters, Phage thought she glimpsed her brother, struggling away across a sandy waste. He must die?
Only one man in the world could take you from me, Phage. Soon, no man can.
The motes twined about each other in one final swift dance before they parted, retreated, solidified into clumsy bodies staggering out through the larger-than-life portrait of the First.
They followed him from his private chambers, they who knew his mind about most things and they who were his hands. The servants of the First had packed a bag for him-armor, weapons, rations-and had cleaned the sword he had not wielded since he was a fighting mage. It was as if the First were marching to war, but he did not reveal his mind to them.
The First strode to the glass doors, and his servants followed, holding pack and weapon belt ready. The First paused. Servants gingerly cinched the weapon belt on his waist and positioned the pack on his back. They all wished to ask him where he went, but none dared. With a silent nod, the master of the Cabal strode alone out the glass doors. He left his servants behind.
What terrible business would require the First to use his own hands?
CHAPTER SIX: VISION'S FUGITIVE
Sun struck the sand like a mallet on a drum, continuous and thundering. Wind roamed the dunes, tearing apart anything it found.
It found Ixidor. As he trudged, grit gnawed his sandals to strips and heat blistered his feet until the water within boiled. His burnt brow was scaled with salt, and his muscles were so dry they rasped in his skin. Instead of eyes, he had dead hunks of glass in his skull.
He had lost the one thing worth looking at: Nivea.
She appeared as she had throughout a day and a night and a day-white and gleaming, with arms wide open. She was not in that burning desert. Nivea stood beyond the sands, her feet grounded amid grass. She stood in a beautiful place, and she invited him to join her.
Ixidor clambered toward the vision, but she retreated, her eyes clouding.
Don't weep, my sweet, he said, though his breath made no sound in his dry throat. Don't weep for me. I will join you. I will run across this desert and catch you and join you.
There was only one way to join her. His body could not pass that shimmering portal. Only when it was torn away could he be with her. Sand and sun were his allies, picking at his flesh with small hands, the fingers of Phage.
Phage. She stalked the comers of Ixidor's mind, pursuing his visions. She closed in on her quarry and leapt. Her hands took hold of Nivea. Light turned to darkness and life to rot. Once again, Nivea dissolved to nothing.
She had died a thousand times during the day and night and day. Each time, grief ripped into Ixidor anew. He watched his only hope dissolve into blinding tan below and blinding blue above.
Eyes of glass reflected the razor horizon.
Ixidor trudged. He would die; it was a certainty. The Cabal was very efficient. He would die and join Nivea, but only after every tissue flaked away and every hope fled into the killing sky. He would die by degrees, a penance for letting Nivea die in an instant.
In truth, he would die slowly because he could not give up life. The survival instinct was stronger than the blazing sun and the winnowing grit. Even without hope, he walked on.
And then, hope: a green spot in all that gray. Water, plants, life.
It was a mirage, of course, like the others. Still, false hope was better than no hope. It drew Ixidor, and he strode toward it.
If this oasis were a mirage, why need it be a small, mean place? Why not something grand? Ixidor squinted. Why not date palms and coconut trees? Those slender slips of tan along the edge-why shouldn't they be gazelles? What about a wide pool-pure, clean, and charged with fish?
Ixidor tried to take a deep breath, though his lungs felt fused. He walked faster. His legs crackled like stilts. Closing his eyes, he imagined the oasis, willing it on the world.
Why not paradise? Why not life?
He opened his eyes. It was gone-not only his vision of palms and pools, but even the green wedge. It all had been but a fold in the air, a trick of the heat.
Ixidor shuffled to a halt. There was no reason to go on. He wondered how far he had come and looked back across the ridges of sand. His footprints stretched away over two dunes. A breeze had followed him, erasing his steps as he made them. Even now, a dozen tracks drifted in a brown ghost on the wind. It was as if he had gone no distance at all. The desert was an endless scroll, rolling out before him and rolling up behind.