Zandru's Forge (20 page)

Lord of Light!
What unholy thing was taking place? And what did they intend to do next?

It took all his Arilinn discipline to hold himself immobile, not to take some precipitous action and by doing so, reveal himself. He must not risk an emotional but ineffective outburst.

As the circle members dropped, one by one, into unity with the matrix, their individual personalities dissipated. The stones of the lattice pulsated, at first slowly, then gaining speed and brightness as more minds were added. The outlines of the men and women blurred and the room darkened, but perhaps that was only in contrast to the increasing brilliance of the matrix. Each new burst of radiance cast a wash of blue-gray on the faces of the workers.

The room itself seemed to slip and distort. Outside, mountains like jagged fangs rose treeless and dim under a single moon. Varzil knew only one place on Darkover where such bleak, lifeless peaks reached their lonely heads to the empty sky.

This cannot be Hali,
Varzil realized.
It must be somewhere deep in the Hellers.
But since the destruction of Tramontana Tower a generation ago, there was no working circle in all that mountain range.

No wonder his senses kept unsettling, no wonder the odd echo of sight and sound. He was not only looking into the past, but across the distance of half a continent. A thought crept through the back reaches of his mind, one he did not like at all.

The thought brought a sickening realization. For the circle below him was now complete, in obscene union with the gigantic matrix. The impression of lightning and ashes escalated until it permeated every fiber of his presence. Yet the focus of the energies was not skyward, toward cloud or rain, but down. The circle reached toward the core of the planet, seeking the lines of its magnetic fields.

To gather those vast inhuman forces—and do what? Send them where?

The thought rang out in his mind like the clanging of bells.

A surge of alertness answered him, a break in the concentration of the circle below. They had heard him.

“Half-daemon! Spy!”
Like sickly green fire, laran burst from the circle toward him. Reflexively, he threw himself back.

The next lash of power, following a heartbeat after the first attack, spread out like a burning net. In horror, Varzil watched it speed toward him. The room twisted around him.

The first of the tendrils touched him. It lanced through his astral form, as caustic as acid. Agony shocked through him. Breath burst from his lungs. His vision went white, then gray. He could not see the circle below him, not even the once-brilliant pulsations of the matrix nor his own ghostly form. He shriveled to a mote of pain, a mote that was moving, slowly and inexorably, downward. A maw of darkness gaped wide to swallow him.

His mental cry sounded feeble and tinny, but at least he had a voice. He threw all his determination into the next outburst.

The echoes beat back the grayness. Dimly, he made out the circle, the dots of overshadowed light, the pallid walls. Power gathered below him, murky and swollen.

Varzil pulled away, backward through the Tower walls. He glimpsed the mountains for an instant before they faded into mist. For a moment, he feared he had entered the Overworld, that strange realm of mind where neither time nor distance had any meaning. But no, there was no smooth gray footing, no unbroken colorless sky, no directionless watery light, none of the markers he remembered from his brief, guided introduction.

He floated in a world of shifting vapors, curling faintly into eddies and currents ... like the cloud-waters of the lake.

Air, heavy with moisture brushed his skin, gaining substance with each passing instant. He felt the stomach-wrenching dislocation of time—

Hall.
Though he had never been inside the ancient Tower, he pictured it in his mind just as he had seen it this morning, a tall slender structure, graceful and adamant. He knew the minds of those who now worked the relays at Hali, but he must not think of them now, least he be drawn even more firmly into the present.

He must concentrate on Hali as it had once been, the age-smoothed stones newly cut, their edges sharp and clean, the translucent panels still fresh from their shaping. A lake of ordinary water skimmed by a morning breeze, motes of reflected light dancing in the sunlight. A city between lake and Tower, white like alabaster splashed with the brilliance of pennants and banners, arbors, gardens, bejeweled fountains. A city of peace and splendor like none he had ever seen, and everywhere the mark of
laran
workmanship, minds harnessed to create a paradise.

The images came to him fresher and stronger now, with an urgency he could not contain. His inner senses came alert, resonating with the tension lying like an invisible pall over the Tower and all the lands around.

Hali! The Tower!
Surely there must be
leronyn
awake at this hour who could hear him, even unaided by relay screens.

As his mind reached out in wordless greeting, he slammed against a mental wall so solid, the impact stunned him. Only the concerted action of a full circle could produce so complete a barrier. Not even a hint of presence escaped from within.

Listen to me!
He threw all his power into the silent cry.
You are about to be attacked! Watch out! Prepare yourselves!

For a long moment, he sensed no response. He might as well have been shouting at the wind. There were
laran
workers within, gathered in a circle, minds focused, of that he was certain. They had turned away from the outside world and armored themselves against intrusion. Perhaps they already knew of the imminent attack and were preparing for it.

It came to him that the events which would create the present-day lake had
already
happened. His warnings must go unheeded because they already
had
gone unheeded. There was nothing he could do to change the past.

How easy it would be to give himself over to that thought, to simply imagine himself back in his own place and time. These people were long dead. Why exert himself to save them when they must inevitably perish from age or disease, even if they escaped whatever monstrous weapon Aldaran was even now preparing.

Varzil could not turn away. He
knew,
and with knowledge came responsibility.

Perhaps his own actions here had saved Hali and all its people from an even greater catastrophe. Perhaps he would have no effect. Whatever the outcome, he would still have his own conscience to deal with ... if he survived.

He hovered above the lake, the clear waters kissed into the lightest ruffles by the morning breeze. Moment by moment, he sensed a pressure build in its cerulean depths. At first, there was no visible sign, yet he never doubted it.

Pressure ... imminence ...
The sense of something huge and terrible condensing. Forming, building. He had not realized how dark and cold the depths of the lake were.

Cold ... but not the brittle burning cold of ice, the familiar cold of winter. It was a cold that no fire could warm. The lake, which had seemed so pleasant, now became a womb for something unspeakable, a thing beyond human imagining, conceived in Zandru’s frozen hells.

The morning dimmed, all brightness quenched. The surface of the lake surged, turbulent, like a living thing writhing in the agonies of birth. The Tower itself called to it, summoned it, pulled it forth into day like an unholy midwife.

Varzil strained to make out the shape, vast and murky, on the lake floor. The waters hid it too well.

Suddenly, the sky above crackled to life. Thunder rolled. The heavens went white. Clouds, gray with fury, came boiling out of the north. Though he had no physical form, Varzil quailed with the suddenness and wildness of the storm. He knew thunder and lightning and downpour, the sudden nerve-tearing terror of rock-slide and flood. But this, this was another thing entirely.

Focused as they were on the form beneath the lake, would the workers at Hali recognize the imminent danger? Or would they think themselves invulnerable in their Tower of unburn able stone?

Hali!
he called again.
HAA-LL-11-11-11!!

A sound like an avalanche filled the sky. Unlike natural thunder, it did not break and subside, but grew deeper and louder with every passing heartbeat. In the city, people streamed from their homes to throng the wide avenues. Varzil could not hear their cries nor the explosions as wooden structures burst into flame, but he felt them nevertheless.

The waters rose, whipped to froth. The banks of the lake were laid bare, though the depths remained inviolate, a fortress. All around, trees toppled. Stone walls cracked and shattered. The smell of blood and burning rose from the city.

Varzil held his breath, praying for the clouds to break and release their burden of rain, put out the fires, dissipate the awful tension. There would be no downpour of water from this storm, he realized, but something far worse.

Still the Tower stood, mute and inaccessible. And still the thing in the lake grew. Above it, in the belly of the densest, an griest cloud, darkness condensed into a knot.

The sky reached down to the land. Light exploded over the Tower. In an instant, all color fled. The city turned to whitened ashes and nothing moved as the light bled away.

Still no response came from the Tower. The focus of the circle turned frantic, as if racing for time.

They think they can hold out through the attack and complete their own weapon, the thing beneath the lake.
And which, Varzil, wondered, would be the worse fate for the entire world?

Thunder crescendoed, but now there came a response. At first, it was only an echo, a resonance. The sky had reached down to the land and now the land itself answered. From all around Tower and city and lake, something rumbled up from the very core of bedrock and even deeper.

The lake began to boil. Steam rose in spurts from the surface. A shape surged through the waves, huge and black as moonless night, misshapen in its hurried birth. It shrieked as it came, the sound rising above the clamor of sky and land. Any creature left alive below would surely be rendered deaf. Flesh was not made to withstand such raging inhuman power, and even Varzil’s tenuous mental form reverberated with it.

For a time—a heartbeat, an hour, he couldn’t tell—Varzil lost all sense of where and when he was. He shrank to a kernel of himself, formless and adrift, without bearings or senses.

Invisible winds tore at him, raked across the mote of personality that was Varzil. He no longer witnessed the clash of elemental forces from afar. He was caught up in the maelstrom itself. Battered and tossed, he clung to the tatters of thought. Each moment stripped away some part of him—his name went whipping away in the torrent, echoing as it went,
Varzil, Varzil, Varzil
... until the syllables disappeared into chaos.

Memory shredded, bits of images like petals crushed in a landslide—the feel of his arms and legs—food warm in his belly—the gleam in the catman’s eyes—Carolin’s quick smile—Dyannis prancing through the kitchen, carrying the Midsummer bouquet he’d gathered for her—his father’s voice, rough with emotion—

Sound shaped itself into harmonics—a voice—a word—

Response stirred from far away. There was something he should know. Should do.

Gray drifted around him, the only world he had ever known, the only world which had ever existed. Timeless, eternal floating. Stillness.

“Varzil, you’ve got to breathe!”

Tinny and meaningless, the words swept over him, through him. They left little eddies of discord, quickly settling back into calm.

So quiet, so gray ... All he ever wanted. All he ever was.

“Breathe, damn you!”

Something wet and soft clamped over his mouth. Air forced into his lungs. Gray receded. Pounding shook
him—lub—DUB, lub-DUB.
Then the racket subsided again into blessed stillness. He drifted once more toward the grayness, serene and eternal.

Another breath and then another. Solidness coalesced around him, hands on his shoulders, fingers digging into his flesh. Head and legs and cramping belly. Coughing racked him, wetness sputtering between his lips. He drew another breath, heard the rasp and wheeze in his chest.

Gray ... yes, there was gray, but beyond him, misty currents that thinned and parted as he passed through them, half-walking, half-floating. A strong arm wrapped around his waist, propelling him forward.

“Come on, you can make it.” The voice sounded muddy through the mist-water. “Keep going, that’s it. We’re almost there.”

Varzil nodded, his throat too strange for speech. He staggered up the slope, toward the sunlight. He pushed with his feet, slipped on something, struggled up again. The ground steepened, but the light grew stronger. Long waving grasses gave way to sand pocked with rocks. He stumbled again, landed on hands and knees, and crawled the rest of the way.

Varzil’s head broke the surface of the cloud-water just as his strength failed him. He sobbed a breath before sinking down. This time he knew who it was who caught him, who dragged him the rest of the way and laid him out on the shore, who bent over him, gray eyes dark with concern.

Carolin knelt by his side and turned him over. His skin and clothes were dripping, his face flushed except for the paleness around his eyes and mouth. Moisture darkened his red hair, slicking it against his skull. Varzil knew that he himself looked even worse.