At that moment the skin of the creature’s face tore like volcanic ground splitting apart under vast subterranean pressure; its hand became a knife that cut out her heart in one bloodless stroke. She screamed as pain twisted her muscles. The candle-gleam artifact sprang from the cut and its pointed, undulating arms grew swiftly, flowing outward and around, engulfing her, binding her, one with her body and spirit, utterly consuming her every thought. Then the artifact began to rise away from her and it drew her life with it, leaving her crying out in despair and torment. There was fire in her chest and it supplanted the hollowness of her body, flowing through her like blood. Desolation overtook the world. She cried out: “Where are you going?” but the evanescent artifact gave no reply. Its departure left the world ablaze.
Remis was tossed into wakefulness. She stared up at the ceiling still, re-living the nightmare in an effort to secure it in her memory. She was a student of the Deep Power, and in the philosophy of the Magic Arts dream-imagery held mysteries it was worth making an effort to solve. The meaning of this one escaped her.
The night was quiet, and her surroundings suddenly unfamiliar. Her wooden casements had been transformed into threatening alien relics.
A storm pelted heavy rain drops against her tile roof, creating a rumble that vibrated through the baked-clay walls. Wind swept over her. She shivered and dragged herself from her bed, realizing that a door or window must have been blown open in the sudden tempest. Sure enough, as she emerged from her room into the central corridor, she could see along it to the square of liquid dark that should have been the closed front door. She cursed. Her feet padded across the gritty sandstone floor toward it.
Lightning flared, cracking the night apart. There was something there, in the doorway. Two vivid green eyes, low to the ground, pierced into hers, surrounded by a compact gray shape. A cat?
For a moment, while storm-light lingered in the air, and as the building trembled with the concussion of lagging thunder, she stood as though paralyzed, staring at this specter. Then darkness engulfed her.
She moved forward again. The cat was no longer there. Remis leaned out into the storm, glancing up and down the street. Nothing but the detritus of the night.
She shut and locked the door and in the resulting stillness went back to her bed.
iv.
Ishwarin claimed it was simply because Tashnark was so bone idle, and had nothing better to do with his time, that he had become so focused—but something more drove Tashnark to visit the main offices of Lanaris House, seeking information about the woman he’d seen in The Night Binge. Call it obsession, call it lust. He didn’t care what it was called. He simply wanted to know who she was and felt a growing urgency to find her.
Lanaris House was less than cooperative. The insincere fool he was allowed to talk to was suspicious of his request for information and sought guidance from above. Whoever his reply came from, the answer was the inevitable one: such a meeting as Tashnark described could not have taken place—it would hardly be appropriate for a commercial Family of Lanaris’s eminence in the Supreme Council to conduct business in a grubby dock-side tavern. Tashnark must have been mistaken.
“Maybe it wasn’t official business,” Tashnark suggested, “but I’d like to speak to the Lanaris official who was there. He was wearing the House emblem.”
He described the man, but still received no satisfactory answer. If he hadn’t been so physically imposing, they would have thrown him from the building. The experience confirmed the prejudice he harbored against Family bureaucracies and made him suspect a conspiracy.
That night he must have dreamed of Hanin, for when he woke his head was filled with memory of the man. How could such memories suddenly exist where before there’d been nothing? Moreover the memories were from the point of view of Bellarroth, who haunted his nights with greater and greater frequency.…
* * * *
“Who are you?” Bellarroth had asked.
Hanin’s old eyes flayed him, as though the issue were one that should never be raised. He had not answered.
But Hanin had taught Bellarroth many things—how to cook and sew and hunt and survive. He found him shelter where there was none, fed him when vermin was scarce, and gave him thoughts beyond those of simple survival. The old man always appeared whenever he was needed.
“What’s does my name mean, Hanin?” Bellarroth had asked once.
“It means nothing, as now you mean nothing.” Hanin smiled ironically, his weathered face creasing into a complex pattern. “One day—in another place—you will be more important than you can imagine and then you will have a new name. Until that time, you are nothing.”
Hanin spoke of the ‘other world’, the world he called Tharenweyr, born out of the dream of the fallen deity Errellinarth. He spoke to Bellarroth of many things in that other world—of great magic and the Deep Power, of greed and of ambition and how these evils had brought destruction; and he told Bellarroth of the exile of his mother, who was named Korrenea, onto Tammenallor’s shoulders. “Tammenallor?” Bellarroth would declare. “What is Tammenallor to me?”
Tammenallor was a great cosmic monster, Hanin explained, a living world…one of the mythological Kharathahul who were said to inhabit the spaces outside reality—manifestations of the deepest of human emotions. “You live upon its shoulders. It’s no natural dwelling for men and women, rather a tomb and a prison…we’re simply parasites and die in futility like the vermin we parody, trapped in the guilt we have ourselves provoked.”
Bellarroth protested. “Guilt? I have nothing to be guilty about.”
Hanin smiled at him with affection. “Not you, my son—no, you are born of this place. The guilt is not yours. It belongs to those who brought it from the first world.” He sighed melodramatically. “But you inherit the consequences of their actions.”
Bellarroth never understood the purpose of Hanin’s teachings, nor did he question the source of the old man’s knowledge. Only once had Hanin come close to that subject. “My son,” he’d said, “you are my expiation. Responsibility lies heavy on my soul and somewhere a world laden with pain by my indulgence. I will pay the debt.”
Bellarroth knew from this that Hanin had been one of those whose guilty acts had created Tammenallor and exiled them both onto the monster’s vast shoulders. He did not understand what to do with the insight.
Once they talked of death, Bellarroth asking whether it was true that life did not end, that each person was formed around a grain of the Immortal Being. But Hanin spurned his questioning. “I’m neither a god nor a prophet. Don’t ask me to delve beyond my mortal knowledge.” He lowered himself into a crouching position and stared at Bellarroth with his disturbingly lambent eyes. “This I can tell you, son. I am a dealer in the arcane and I live in power. To one such as I life consists less of surface and matter than it does of spirit, and though I have spent many years and much error learning the cause and the course of things, it is still the unpredictable, the mystery, that most forcibly defines my experience. If I chose I could draw my life into the smallest part of me, and it would survive there, invulnerable to blade and disease. I can’t be killed by mere attack upon the flesh. Something as malleable as the life that sustains me is not confined to flesh and space…truly it can resist the demands of time and the tyrannies of fate.”
* * * *
These thoughts were in Tashnark’s mind when he awoke. He felt threatened by them. It was mid-morning, as he discovered