A Shadow on the Glass (2 page)

Llian met the eyes of the assembly, one by one, as he told the tale. Everyone in the room knew that he spoke just to them.

The opening shocked Aachan, that frigid world of sulphurcolored snow, oily bogs and black luminous flowers, to its core. The Charon hunted Shuthdar to Santhenar, bringing with them a host of Aachim, that they had enslaved at the dawn of time. All came naked and empty-handed, for any object taken from one world to another might mutate in treacherous ways. The Charon must leave behind their constructs, mighty engines of transformation or destruction, and rely on older powers
.

And Tallallame, its rain-drenched forests and towering mountains the antithesis of Aachan, was also threatened by the opening. The Faellem, a small, dour folk for whom the universe was but an illusion made by themselves, selected their best to put it right. Faelamor it was who led them so proudly to Santhenar. Neither did they bring any weapons. Their powers of the mind were such that on their own world they needed nothing more
.

Shuthdar was hunted across the lands and down the grinding centuries, fleeing through gate after gate, and wherever he went he brought strife. But finally he was driven into a trap…

At last Llian came to the climax of his long, long tale, the part that would turn the Histories upside down. He took a deep breath, searching the faces for a sign that they were with him. The longing for their approval was a physical ache. But they were a true Chanthed audience, both reserved
and highly critical. They would give nothing until they had judged the whole.

In his prime, using the stolen flute, Shuthdar could escape any enemy. But he had lived to a tremendous age, his very bones had shrunk and twisted, his once clever hands were no more use than paws. Now he was trapped and he knew it was the end. Sick with fear and self-loathing he huddled under a log in a scrap of forest, clawing out beetles and roaches and snapping them up, more a hyena than a man
.

Only now as he looked back over his epic life did Shuthdar realize where he had gone wrong. It was not enough that he had been the greatest craftsman of his age, or any age. No, he must gloat over the priceless treasure that he had, that only he could have made, that had changed the face of the Three Worlds. There were times he would boast aloud, when there was no one to hear. But even the inanimate earth had ears for such a secret and his enemies always found him again. For half a millennium they had hunted him across Santhenar. Now they were all around and he had no will to defy them
.

As he spoke Llian scanned the stolid figures, searching for a crack in their reserve, something to inspire him to that ultimate peak of the storyteller’s art. He was sure that they approved of the telling so far; but would they accept the new ending? And then he found what he was looking for. At the back he made out a single pale face in the crowd, a young woman staring at him so hard that it burned. He had moved one person, at least. Llian used all the magic of his voice and spoke directly to her.

Shuthdar squinted out between the trees. Before him, on a promontory extending like a finger into the great lake, the
rising sun illuminated a tower of yellow stone. As good a place as any to end it
.

He crashed through an archway, terrifying a family eating at a square table. Shuthdar bared ragged iron teeth, corroded things that mocked his once exquisite craftsmanship. His mouth was stained rust-red. It looked as if he had dined on blood
.

Children screamed A meager man fell backwards off his chair. Shuthdar glared at them, his misshapen face twisted in a grimace of pain. Crab-like on writhen legs he scuttled past. Chairs, dishes, infants all went flying. A fat woman flung a tureen at his head, snatched a baby from the floor and the family fled abandoning the crippled girl hidden away upstairs
.

Shuthdar licked a spatter of soup from his hand, spat red saliva over the rail and dragged himself to the top of the tower
.

At the sight of him the crippled girl put her hands up over her mouth. With yellow skin drum-tight over his cheeks, shrunken lips drawn back so that the rusty teeth and red-stained gums were vivid, he looked like the oldest, ugliest and most dissipated vampire that can ever be imagined. Pity the forsaken creature, if you will
.

They faced each other, cripple and cripple. Black hair framed a pretty face, but her legs were so withered that she could barely walk Time was when he would have despoiled her pitilessly, though that part of him had dried up long ago. Once he might have cast her off the tower, delighting in his power and her pain, but not even cruelty gave him pleasure any more
.

“Poor man,” she sighed. “You are in such pain. Who are you?” Her voice was gentle, concerned

“Shuthdar!” he gasped. Red muck ran down his chin
.

She paled groping behind for the support of her chair. “Shuthdar! Do you come to plunder me?”

“No, but you will die with me nonetheless.” He pointed
to the forest, now a semicircle of flame centered on the tower. “No one has more enemies than I do,” he said, and knew how pathetic was his pride. “See, already they come, burning all before them. Are you afraid to die?”

“I am not, but I have so many dreams to live.”

His laughter was a mocking howl. “I know the only dreams a cripple can have—misery and despair! Even your own family locked you away so you would not shame and disgust them.”

She let go of the chair and drew herself up, like a queen in her dignity, but her cheeks were wet with tears. To his astonishment, Shuthdar the monster, the brute, was moved to compassion
.

“What is your dream ?” he asked tenderly, a new emotion for him. “I would grant you that before we die, should it be in my power.”

“To dance,” she replied. “I would dance for the lover of my dreams.”

Without a word he snapped open the case that he carried and there was revealed the golden flute. No more perfect instrument was ever made
.

He put it to his bloody lips and played. His ruined hands were in agony but his face showed none of it. His music was so haunting, so beautiful that her ancestors rattled their bones in the crypt below the tower
.

The crippled girl took a step, looking up at Shuthdar, but he was staring into another world. She tottered forward in a mocking travesty of a dance, clubbing the stone with her feet. She began to think that he played the cruelest joke of all, that she would crash on her face to his brutal laughter. Then suddenly the music picked her up and bore her away, and the torment in her limbs was gone, and her feet went just where she wanted them to. She was as light in her slippers as any belle, and she danced and danced until she
could dance no more and fell to the floor in a cloud of skirts, all flushed and laughing, too exhausted to speak And still Shuthdar played till she was carried far off into her dreams and all her present life was forgotten
.

The music slowly died away. She came back to herself. Shuthdar seemed lit up from within, all his ugliness burned out. He lowered the flute and wiped the ruby stains lovingly from it
.

“They come,” he said gruffly. “Go down, wave a blue flag from the doorway. There is a chance they will let you pass.”

“There is nothing out there for me,” she replied. “Do what you must.”

For an instant Shuthdar thought that he did not want to die after all, but it was far too late for that
.

The audience sighed audibly—another sign! The Histories were vital to Santhenar, and no one, great or small, was untouched by them. The highest honor anyone could wish for was to be mentioned there. Llian knew what the masters and students were thinking. Where had he found this new part of the tale that turned Shuthdar’s character inside out? The Great Tales were the very core of the Histories; tamper with them at your peril. He would have to prove every word of it tomorrow. And he would.

Llian looked down into the crowd, and out of the impassive hundreds his gaze was caught by that pale face again. She was concealed by cloak and hood, though from the front of the hood peeped hair as red as a plum. She was leaning forward, utterly rapt. Her name was Karan Elienor Fyrn and she was a sensitive, though no one in the hall knew it She had come right across the mountains to hear the tales. Lhan’s eyes met her eyes and she started. Remarkably, she broke through his concentration and for a second their minds touched as though they were linked. Llian was moved by her impossible yearning
but he wrenched away. He had worked four years for this night and nothing was going to distract him.

He dropped his voice and saw the crowd inch forward in their seats, straining to catch his every word. He felt reassured.

Shuthdar’s enemies crept closer. The great of the Three Worlds were there, four human species. There were Charon and Aachim and Faellem; the best of our kind too. Rulke was at their head, desperate to recover the flute and to atone for the crime of having had it made in the first place
.

Shuthdar watched them with his blanched eyes. There was no hope—his life was over at last. Soon the flute would pass to another. Death he welcomed, had long wished for, but he would not even think of the flute in another’s hands
.

And so, as they drew near, he stood up on the top of the wall, outlined against the ghastly red moon, the deep lake behind and below. The crippled girl cried out to him but Shuthdar screamed, “Don’t move!” He lifted the flute in one claw of a hand, cursed his enemies and blew a despairing, triumphant blast
.

The flute glowed red The air gleamed with luminosity. Birds fell dead out of the sky. Rainbow waves fled out in all directions and flung the watchers into insensibility. The tower fractured and Shuthdar toppled backward and smashed on the hard dark water far below. The earth was rent and the waters of the lake leapt up and broke over the ruins
.

Some say that the glowing flute fell, faster than Shuthdar, into the deep water, sending up a great cloud of steam and boiling the water until at last it was quenched in the icy depths and perhaps lies there still, buried in the slowly deepening mud; preserved forever, lost forever. Others said that they saw it melt and turn to smoke in the air and vanish, consumed by the forces trapped within it long ago
.

Others yet held that Shuthdar had tricked them again, escaping
to some distant corner of Santhenar where no one knew of him; or even into the void between the worlds, out of which came the desperate Charon to take the world of Aachan in ancient times. But that is surely not so, for two days later the waters cast back his shattered corpse in all its hideousness onto the rocks not far from the tower
.

The tale was well told but the audience had expected more. They began to fidget and murmur. But Llian was not yet finished.

Shuthdar was lost, the golden flute too. The broken tower was a nightmare of fumes and radiation, save for a protected space where the girl lay, unharmed. Specters walked the glowing walls, her heartless ancestors. The crippled girl wept, for her dreams were gone forever. Then she thought to tell the tale, to have a precious memento of this day, and to put a small white mark on the black stain that was Shuthdar’s reputation; the most reviled man on Santhenar
.

But as she finished her writing the world twisted inside out. Splinters of solid light seared her eyes. The sky began to shred itself into drifting flakes. The tower shivered; the rubble shifted like rubber blocks, then a gate burst open above the ruins with a flare like a purple sun, and she looked into the void between the worlds
.

Shadows appeared in the brilliant blackness. An army swarmed behind the gate, creatures out of horror. The void teems with the strangest life imaginable, and existence there is desperate, brutal and fleeting. In the void even the fittest survive only by remaking themselves constantly, and every being there is consumed by a single urge—to escape!

Now the crippled girl saw that creatures out of legend did battle beyond the gate, struggling to get through. The whole world was in peril. Nothing could withstand this host
.

Her legs were too painful to walk. Terrified, she dragged herself in among the rubble and hid. Then, as the sun stood nearly to noon, a cloaked specter separated out of the mass of ghosts that still swarmed over the tower. At first she thought it was her Shuthdar, restored to the flower of his youth, for the hooded figure was tall and dark
.

The specter moved its arms over a fuming crater in the stone. Immediately it was attacked by carmine lightning that sizzled out of the gate. Ghost-fire outlined its cloak. Beneath its feet the stone suddenly flowed like water, dragging the specter down into the crater. The air reeked of brimstone, then it conjured a shimmering protection out of the turmoil, a cone of white radiance that hung the gate with a cobweb of icicles, a Forbidding! The gate boomed shut and vanished
.

The crowd sat up in their seats. This was controversial, for the Histories told that the Forbidding came about by it-self. If it had been
made
, it raised all sorts of possibilities. Yet Llian knew that it would take more than visions to convince this audience.

The audience began to stir uneasily. The tale was practically done but no proof had been offered. They felt let down. Llian drew out the moment.