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Piper smiled, her teeth brilliant against her dark skin. ‘Some people know things they don’t know they know. But I only know what I need to know. I was formed for a task, nothing more.’
‘Formed?’
‘I was of the Bliss, at one with the Source, and now I am here with you to provide what you need.’
Miranda saw something behind Piper’s shoulder and said, ‘What is that?’
Piper turned and saw a speck of light. ‘An energy adjustment.’
Suddenly the pinpoint of light blossomed into a cascade of sparkling lights that rapidly blinked out of existence. ‘Despite seeming empty from your perspective, there’s a lot going on here,’ observed Piper. ‘The Fourth Circle is contracting. In … time is a difficult concept … some years, many years, few …? In some amount of time the Fourth Circle will be gone.’
‘One of the Circles will be gone?’ Miranda thought of the ever-expanding void in the centre of the Fifth Circle and asked, ‘Will the Fifth Circle vanish?’
‘I do not know,’ answered Piper.
‘What am I doing here?’ asked Miranda.
‘That I know,’ said Piper. She pointed behind Miranda. ‘Look!’
Miranda turned and where a void had been moments before, a panorama of a massive arc of heaven stood revealed, as if some incredibly large curtain had been drawn aside. A vista of stars was visible and for a brief moment Miranda had a touch of vertigo as the sun rose above it and moved at noticeable speed.
‘This was once a place like those to which you’ve travelled, realms of countless worlds, stars, comets, planets teeming with life,’ said Piper, and hearing a new voice, Miranda turned to discover Piper had changed bodies again. A tall, handsome man of middle years, with a neatly trimmed beard just lightly shot through with grey stood wearing a similar outfit as the last two incarnations had, but this one was in a sable black that looked like velvet, trimmed with gold lamé. ‘Will you stop that?’ said Miranda.
‘Why?’ answered Piper in a deep, melodious voice. ‘Bodies are fun.’
‘You never had one before?’
‘I may have, but I don’t remember. We who are spun out of the Bliss know only what we need to know; whatever pasts we may have experienced are part of the Unity with the One.’ He shrugged and grinned. ‘Makes everything new.’
‘Wonderful,’ muttered Miranda. ‘The gods send out curious toddlers to save the universe.’
‘Watch and learn,’ said Piper.
A massive storm of energies erupted across the panorama before Miranda, and Piper said, ‘The Sundering.’
‘What is it?’
‘When the heavens and hells split. Behold the demon host.’
A swarm of creatures flew out of the rip in space and Miranda’s eyes widened. Instead of the seemingly endless variety of shapes of horror Child had known since her birth, this was an army of incredible beings, roughly human in form and beautiful in a way she could barely comprehend. There was not the slightest resemblance between what she knew from her short tenure in the Fifth Circle and what she now observed.
Soon another figure emerged, a being so brilliant she could barely look at it. ‘Who is that?’ she asked.
‘Hell’s first king,’ answered Piper and she saw he had reverted to the form she had first seen, the youth in the green-and-yellow garb.
‘He … is beautiful.’ Both Child and Miranda found him an object of stunning form and elegant grace. ‘What is his name?’
‘Name?’ Piper blew a shrill note. ‘That could be his name. “Name!” He has a different name for every race of being that encounters him. Some worship him as a god, and others fear him as the ultimate font of evil. He is, or was, or will be a force of nature. Does calling air that stirs “wind” make it different to when it goes unnamed?’ Piper pointed with his flute. ‘The Shining One, Light Bringer, Fallen Star, First of the Chosen, Accuser, Defiance, so many names in so many languages.’ He gripped her arm lightly. ‘There was a first cause. But this was the second. Remember that. Your father and Pug witnessed the First Cause. You are seeing the second. He was first among those created by the First Cause, Most Beloved, but he challenged his creator, and became the Opponent!’
Miranda could not tear her eyes from the image. There was no scale. Hell’s first king could be the size of a man seen from very close, or a mile tall viewed from many miles’ distance. The human-like face was perfection, without blemish or flaw. If one could imagine perfect proportions of brow to nose to chin, fullness of lips, set of eyes, shape and contour of a male body, then he was perfect. A woman of no small life experience, she was overwhelmed by desire and longing, a need for more than mere physical love, but to be accepted by this being. She said it aloud: ‘He’s perfect.’
Piper laughed. ‘No, but as close as any living thing can get. There was only one perfect being in existence.’
‘Who?’
‘In time. You’re not ready.’ Piper waved his hand. ‘This is the event, or as you would see it … time confuses me. This is the Second Cause.’
Miranda looked at the vista before her, distances beyond her ability to imagine, and in the midst of it, a sea of incandescent gases. Tiny lights dotted the cloud and she knew them to be stars. Five beings like the first one she had just seen, magnificent in every aspect, stood in a pose of confrontation, one facing the other four. No words were heard, but Miranda sensed they were communicating.
‘What am I seeing?’
‘Watch.’
Suddenly one of the four moved to the Shining One and grappled with him; then the Shining One was gone.
‘What was that?’
‘There are many different stories. Here’s what you must know. For every cause there’s a reaction, an opposition; for every force, a counter force. It’s part of a balance so fundamental it surpasses even the First Cause. It is called Equipoise at its most fundamental, and that is what you must first understand. The one who fell was cast out because he questioned his creation and aspired to rise beyond his station. He brooded in solitude for ages and felt rage.
‘Then came envy, and the one who fell created imitations of his brethren. His children were demons. They would serve and worship him, as his brethren served their creator.’
Again Miranda saw what Piper had called the demon host, a legion of beauty on the wing, appearing through a massive rift in the heavens, the Sundering. ‘Am I seeing what he really looks like?’ she asked.
Piper again blew a loud note, spun in a circle and said, ‘Of course not. There are bands of energy coursing through the universes impossible for any physical entity to perceive, let alone grasp. Understanding beyond any one mortal’s capacity is what is needed to grasp the totality of what is before you.
‘Threads of possibility, waves of probability, surges and flows of consciousness, vital forces beyond mortal comprehension.’ In a patronizing tone he added, ‘We have to simplify so you can comprehend. Your feeble mind does what it can to understand, but it’s not sufficient.’
Miranda scowled at being called feeble-minded, but let it go. ‘What are you showing me?’
‘The hosts of heaven.’
‘I thought you said it was the demon legion.’
Piper laughed. ‘Your mind! It is lacking. Angels, demons, they are the same thing, but from different places! Or the same thing seen differently! They just serve different causes. They are opposites, yet they are the same!’
Piper came to stand before Miranda, put his pipe under his arm, then formed a sphere with his two hands. ‘You see things like this! But in truth, they are like this.’ Suddenly he pulled apart his hands, fingers wiggling frantically, and moved his hands in a flurry of motion. ‘There is no higher heaven, lower hell. The first circle is the first circle, or plane or realm or demesne.’ He waved one hand high above his head. ‘Here you call it heaven.’ Then he waved the other down below his waist, letting his flute drop, which he deftly caught with his free hand while he knelt. ‘Down here, the same place, you call hell!’
He walked around behind her. ‘From here, I see you with black hair hanging down your back.’ Before she could turn, he was in front of her. ‘From here I see your face! You look different from before. But you are the same!’
‘Perspective,’ she said.
‘Yes!’ He laughed, a clear boyish laugh. ‘You begin to understand.’ He waved his hand and the image changed.
Suddenly the King of Hell was a red-skinned monster with huge white horns that rose from his forehead and curved back over the dome of his skull, an upraised roach of black hair rising between them like the fin of a sailfish, and two enormous black bat wings spreading out from his back.
The host of angel-like demons were now replaced with what Child would have expected to reside in hell. Miranda said, ‘Why …?’
‘You denizens of that region of the spheres, what you call the Fifth Circle, like all beings in one sense or another, are creatures of energy. You look the way you expect to look.’
‘I expected to look like Child?’
‘Language,’ snorted Piper, obviously unhappy with its limits. ‘No, you creatures, all of you, together, over time, you come to believe things and they become so.’ He laughed. ‘Look at this one. It’s wonderful!’
She looked up and instead of figures of demons and angels saw a massive cascade of scintillating lights, so brilliant as to cause her to shield her eyes. Millions of other lights flowed and swirled around the twisting fountain of colour in the middle. It was as if every fireworks display ever conceived had been simultaneously unleashed on a scale to dwarf worlds. Colours darted so quickly, it was a sight to induce madness in a weaker mind than hers.
‘It’s energy, don’t you see?’ asked Piper.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Energy, matter, time, it’s all the same. You just have to know how to look.’
‘Perspective,’ said Miranda.
‘Yes,’ said Piper. He grinned and danced a step.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘Witness,’ said Piper.
Suddenly the entire sky changed. Instead of a window through which to view images conjured by whatever magic Piper or his master employed, Miranda found herself floating over a vast field of stars. There was a glorious harmony to all she beheld. Vast swirling oceans of star-studded gas moved across the heavens in stately progress, while comets blazed their timeless paths around multitudes of stars.
‘This is what the universe looked like from this rock when it was a planet,’ said Piper, ‘before the Enemy came, before the time of madness and chaos.’
Miranda was about to ask a question, then ceased as she noticed an anomaly. In a corner of a starfield, a dark spot had appeared, at first hardly noticeable in the flowing pattern of lights against the darkness around her. But after a moment she saw that there was something different about this blackness. If there could be shades of blackness, this was a depth of it, an absence of even the promise of light or colour.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Watch,’ said Piper.
‘It must be immense,’ said Miranda, ‘and very far away.’
‘Distance, like what I’ve shown you, is illusion. How do you think you move from place to place by thought?’
‘Magic,’ she answered.
‘There is no magic,’ replied Piper. ‘Nakor understands.’ Miranda looked at Piper, who looked quizzically at her. ‘Or he will.’ Piper frowned. ‘Or he has.’ After another moment, Piper said, ‘Time is an illusion, too.’
Miranda had only a rudimentary idea of how vast the distance between stars might be, but she knew, given the size of the sun around which Midkemia spun and how it appeared in the sky, and the size of those tiny pinpoints of light called stars, the distances were vast. Yet the dark spot was growing at an enormous speed. ‘It must be expanding at tens of thousands of miles a minute,’ she muttered. ‘More,’ she amended as entire clusters of stars were suddenly blotted out.
She looked at Piper, who was transfixed by the sight above them. She asked, ‘Is it just blocking out what’s behind it, or …’
‘It’s eating stars,’ said Piper. Then he said, ‘In your home world, the demon realm, the void where the first Kingdoms once were, that’s what it becomes eventually.’
Miranda’s hand went to her mouth. ‘Gods.’ Whispering, she asked, ‘What is it?’
‘The Enemy. The true Darkness,’ answered a voice in the air, and when she turned Piper was gone.
There was a popping sound from behind her and she turned. A vortex awaited. For a moment she hesitated, then she realized she had learned all she would here. She took a step and leaped into the dark vortex.
• CHAPTER EIGHT •
Storm
LIGHTNING SPLIT THE SKY.
Brendan cursed every god of weather in every nation of every world that had gods of weather. He had made an uneventful journey down the coast, staying close and putting in whenever he caught sight of a sail on the horizon. As he moved south of the headlands known as Schull’s Rock, he took his bearing off the rising sun and pushed through straight on to Sarth. He knew the Quegan fleet would not put in that close to the Kingdom coast and felt safe hurrying along.
When he came into sight of Sarth, he took a quick inventory and discovered he had four days of food and five of water on board. Rather than stop at Sarth, he put the helm over to starboard and beat a course dead south. He ran out a Kingdom pennant he had liberated from the mayor’s library in Ylith, used by Kingdom couriers, in case he encountered Kingdom warships that might otherwise stop and board his vessel. It was providential, as twice Kingdom ships altered course to give him a closer look, but catching sight of the snapping guidon in the royal blue and gold and Brendan giving a cheery wave, they returned to their original course, assuming Brendan was seeking out another ship.
Now he was caught up in one of the Bitter Sea’s sudden weather changes. It wasn’t raining yet, but he could smell the moisture in the air. Lightning was cracking overhead, followed by thunderclaps that felt like physical slaps.
The little smack was starting to climb up crests and dive into troughs and Brendan was starting to worry. In clear weather, if the charts and maps he had studied were correct, he should be seeing the smudge on the horizon that would have marked Sorcerer’s Isle, but now visibility was down by half as rain from the south-west formed a curtain on the horizon. If he was lucky, it would pass to the west of him, or only get him a little wet, and prove to be just another sudden squall.
If it was a big storm, he could be sailing and bailing for days, and literally sail right past the island and be halfway to the Keshian coast before he realized his error.
Or he could sail right onto the rocks of Sorcerer’s Isle’s north shore.
Brendan checked his jib and saw it was well extended as the wind picked up, and knew that he would soon have too much sail. He tied off the tiller and quickly lashed the boom with a preventer, a short rope that would keep the wind from suddenly jibbing the boat while he pulled in the jib sail. Normally this type of smack had two masts, but this one had sacrificed the smaller abaft mast for the fish well. Usually two men manned this craft, but Brendan could find no one in Ylith willing to make the journey with him. He was young and had spent his life sailing the Far Coast near Crydee, and felt able to sail her solo. Until now, he realized. Right now a second man to man the sheets or bail out the bilge would have been most welcome. He had a small bailing bucket nearby, and if a wave crested the bow, he could hold the rudder with one hand while dumping some water overboard with the other. But it was tedious, fatiguing, and ineffective.
Dropping the jib, he decided to sacrifice order for speed, wadded up the mass of canvas and dumped it in the fish well. He returned to the rudder, unlashed it and the boom and set his eyes on the horizon.
Lightning flashed and he waited for the following thunder, but there wasn’t any. And then he realized most of the lightning was behind him. Then the lightning flashed again, and he realized it was in the same place as the last time he had seen it.
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