Yorl. Focusing, he found that he could interpret what he was sensing
as colour, a line of light that snaked outward, another crossing it and another, a net to capture any spirit that might be wandering there. And Lalo could feel the presence of those Others, beings less conscious than the ghosts he fled, but more active and aware.
A Symbol flickered into being in the centre of the knot, pulsing lividly, colour, shape, and flavour all combined to lure its intended prey. Lalo shuddered as something swept by him. The glowing lines distorted and the Symbol in their midst dissolved and then reformed, imprisoning a roil of writhing energy and forcing it into a form that human eyes could, however unwillingly, see. But the Gateway that had opened for the creature was still there, and Lalo, frantic for contact, thrust himself through.
"Ehas, barabarishti, azgeldui m 'hai tsi! Oh thou who dost know the secrets of Life and Death, come to me! Yevoi! YevadF The Voice snapped shut the gap and set the imprisoned entity to whirling in a shower of nitrate and sulphur-smelling sparks.
Lalo contracted like an upset snail, seeking to avoid the touch of that light, the sound of those words. They were the language of the plane from which the spirit had come, and Lalo's present condition gave him the power to directly apprehend them, and to realize that there were worse places than the one in which he found himself now.
'Evgolod sheremin, shinaz, shinaz, tiserra-neh, yevoi!' The Voice rolled on, conjuring the creature to bring to him the knowledge of how to separate the soul from a body to which it had been obscenely and indissolubly fettered by sorcery, of a way, though the price of it might be annihilation, to set such a soul forever free. Lalo cowered from knowledge that was never meant for his ears.
But presently the Voice stilled, the echoes died away, and Lalo allowed himself to focus on tlie insubstantial figure that stood within its own shimmering circle beyond the triangle within which Lalo and the demon shared an unwilling captivity. It was Enas Yorl - it must be - yes, he would always know those glowing eyes.
And at the same moment Enas Yorl appeared to realize that his summoning had been more successful than he intended. A wand rose, and power swirled and eddied in the still air.
'Begone, oh ye intruding spirit, to thine own realm where thou shall wait until I do summon thee!'
Lalo was tumbled by a riptide of power and for a moment knew a desperate hope that the sorcerer's instinctive house-cleaning would send him home. But where was home, now?
Then the power ebbed, and Lalo sat up, still in the triangle. The demon in the sigil beside him spat and reached for him with flaming claws.
'Oh thou spirit who hast come to my summoning, I conjure thee to tell me thy name.' Enas Yorl seemed unmoved by his first failure, and Lalo began to understand the patience and plain nerve required for wizardry.
He got to his feet and approached the edge of the triangle as closely as he dared. 'It's me, Lalo the Limner. Enas Yorl, don't you recognize me?'
And as he waited for the sorcerer to reply, Lalo realized that he himself recognized Enas Yorl, and that was very strange, for the essence of the curse that tormented the sorcerer was that his form should never remain for long the same. With a kind of horrified fascination, Lalo looked into the true face of Enas Yorl.
He read there passions and evils at the limit of his comprehension, barely confined by lines of vision and tormented love. In that face all that was great and terrible were joined in an eternal conflict that only the slow erosion of hopeless years might ever hope to reconcile. And those years had already become so long. It was a face whose planes had been chiselled out by the relentless blade of power, ground down again by a kind of patient, painful despair. At last he understood why Enas Yorl had refused to let Lalo paint his portrait. He wondered which part of it the sorcerer feared most to see.
'Enas Yorl, I know you, but I don't know what I am, or why I am here!'
The sorcerer certainly saw him now, and he was laughing. 'You're not dead, if that's what was worrying you, and there's no stink of magic about you. Were you fevered, or did that mountain you are married to knock you senseless at last?'
Lalo sputtered, denying it, while he tried to remember. There was nothing - I was painting; I was alone, and -'
Abruptly the sorcerer grew grave. 'You were painting? Yourself, perhaps? Now I understand. Poor little pond-fish - you have opened the forbidden weir and been swept through it into the great sea. Those whose portraits you have painted could reject the truth they saw, but you could not reject what you painted on the canvas without denying all you are!'
Lalo was silent, testing his memories. He had been painting a picture, and he had stepped back from the canvas when he was done, and he had seen ... Awareness lurched beneath him, dizzying - he glimpsed depths and distances, upwelling springs of light and darkness that could drown him equally, a universe of power that had been trapped beneath the facade that was the self he knew.
'And so you have run away from both the truth and its image, and your body lies abandoned somewhere. I can return you to it, if you truly desire - but don't you understand? Now you are free! Do you know what I would give to achieve what you have inadvert-ently -' the sorcerer stopped himself, 'but I forgot. Your body is whole, and young ...'
Lalo scarcely heard. His first sight of the vastness within had been sufficient to send him in frantic retreat into the shadow-realm. But whence could he escape from here? The meaning of his vision hovered on the edge of comprehension, terrifying, tantalizing, beating at his awareness like mighty wings.
And then the wings were outside of him as well as within; the captive demon spiralled away in pinwheels of foul sparks like burning wool and the exquisite lattices of power within which Enas Yorl had imprisoned it were shattered by a rift between the worlds through which dark wings sliced like swords.
Pain dismemoried and dismembered him, and Lalo's consciousness was whirled away. trailed by the sorcerer's unavailing cry -
'Sikkintair, sikkintair!'
Gilla pulled her cloak more tightly around her and hurried over the worn cobblestones ofPrytanis Street, hoping that the patter she had heard behind her was only wind-drifted leaves. The Jewellers' Quarter was supposed to be safer for foot travellers than the Bazaar, but everyone on her home ground knew that Gilla was not worth tackling.
But of course she was, today. Nervously she fingered the bag at her neck where the remainder of her little hoard of gold weighed so heavily. The services of wizards came high. Gilla cursed them all; cursed Alten Stulwig for his incompetence and Illyra the half-S'danzo who had been able to tell her only that wizardry was somehow involved, cursed Lalo for having gotten into this mess and most of all, cursed herself for her fear.
And the rustle behind her resolved into the thud of running feel, and Gilla wheeled, fear-fuelled anger strengthening the massive arm that smacked into the first cutpurse as he came on. He buckled with a sound like a sliced bladder, and a knife glittered through the air to rebound with a tinny clatter from the nearest wall. Gilla brought her other fist down on the man's head and waded into his companion before he quite realized why his point man was down; she belaboured his ears with all the obscenities that a lifetime on the edge of the Maze had taught her as she put her full weight into her blows.