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‘How long have I been here, Em?’ he asked his companion.
‘Quite some time. Why do you ask?’
‘Just curious, I suppose. I can barely remember a time when I wasn’t here.’
‘Time doesn’t really mean anything here in this House, pet. You’re here to learn, and some of the things in the Book are very difficult. It took your mind a very long time to fully grasp them. When we came to one of those, I’d usually let your eyes sleep while your mind worked. It was a lot quieter that way. Your arguments were with the Book, not with me.’
‘Let me see if I understand this. Are you saying that there’s been times when I went to sleep and didn’t wake up for a week or more?’
She gave him one of those infuriatingly superior looks.
‘A month?’ he asked incredulously.
‘Keep going,’ she suggested.
‘You’ve put me to sleep for years on end?’ he almost screamed at her.
‘Sleep’s very good for you, dear. The nice thing about those particular naps is that you don’t snore.’
‘How long, Emmy? How long have I been penned up in here with you?’
‘Long enough for us to get to know each other.’ Then she heaved one of those long-suffering sighs. ‘You must learn to listen when I tell you something, Althalus. You’ve been here in this House long enough to learn how to read the Book. That didn’t really take too long, though. It was learning to understand the Book that took you so much time. You haven’t quite finished that yet, but you’re coming along.’
‘That means that I’m very, very old, doesn’t it?’ He reached up, took hold of a lock of his hair and pulled it down so that he could see it. ‘I can’t be that old,’ he scoffed. ‘My hair hasn’t even turned white yet’
‘Why would it do that?’
‘I don’t know. It just does. When a man gets old, his hair turns white.’
‘That’s the whole point, Althalus. You haven’t grown old. Nothing changes in this House. You’re still the same age as you were when you first came here.’
‘What about you? Are you still the same age you were as well?’
‘Didn’t I just say that?’
‘If I remember right, you told me once that you haven’t always been here.’
‘Not always, no. I was somewhere else a long time ago, but then I came to wait for you.’ She glanced back over her shoulder at the mountain peaks looming out beyond the south window. ‘Those weren’t there when I first came,’ she added.
‘I thought mountains lasted forever.’
‘Nothing lasts forever, Althalus – except me, of course.’
‘The world must have been very different back in the days before those mountains,’ he mused. ‘Where did people live back then?’
‘They didn’t. There weren’t any people then. There were other things here instead, but they died out. They’d done what they were supposed to do, so Deiwos let them go. He still misses them, though.’
‘You always talk about Deiwos as if you knew him personally.’
‘Yes, as a matter of fact we’re very well acquainted.’
‘Do you call him “Deiwos” when you’re talking together?’
‘Sometimes. When I really want to get his attention I call him “brother”.’
‘You’re God’s sister?’ That startled Althalus.
‘Sort of.’
‘I don’t think I want to push that any further. Let’s go back to what we were talking about before, Em. Just how long have I been here? Give me a number.’
‘Two thousand, four hundred, and sixty seven – as of last week.’
‘You’re just making that up, aren’t you?’
‘No. Was there anything else?’
He swallowed very hard. ‘Some of those naps I took were a lot longer than I’d thought they were, weren’t they? That makes me just about the oldest man in the world, doesn’t it?’
‘Not quite. There’s a man named Ghend who’s quite a bit older than you are.’
‘Ghend? He didn’t really look all that old to me.’
Her green eyes went very wide. ‘You know Ghend?’
‘Of course I do. He’s the one who hired me to come here and steal the Book.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she almost shrieked at him.
‘I must have.’
‘No, as a matter of fact, you didn’t. You idiot! You’ve been sitting on that for the last twenty-five hundred years!’
‘Calm down, Emmy. We’re not going to get anywhere if you turn hysterical.’ He gave her a long, level look. ‘I think it’s just about time for you to tell me exactly what’s going on, Emmy – and don’t try to put me off this time by telling me that I won’t understand or that I’m not ready to know certain things yet. I want to know what’s going on and why it’s so important.’
‘We don’t have time for that.’
He leaned back on his bench. ‘Well, we’re just going to take the time, little kitten. You’ve been treating me like a house-pet for quite a while now. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I don’t have a tail, and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t wag it every time you snapped your fingers. You don’t have me completely tamed, Em, and I’m telling you right here and now that we aren’t going any further until you tell me just exactly what’s going on.’
Her look was very cold. ‘What is it that you want to know?’ Her tone was almost unfriendly.
He laid one hand on the Book. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we start out with everything? Then we can move on from there.’
She glared at him.
‘No more deep, dark secrets, Emmy. Start talking. If things are as serious as you seem to think they are, then be serious.’
‘Maybe you are ready to know what’s going on,’ she conceded. ‘How much do you know about Daeva?’
‘Just what it says in the Book. I’d never even heard of him before I came here. He’s very angry with Deiwos, I gather. Deiwos seems to be sorry that he feels that way, but he’s going to keep on doing what he’s doing whether Daeva likes it or not – probably because he has to.’
‘That’s a novel interpretation,’ she said. She mulled it over a bit. ‘Now that I think about it, though, there seems to be a lot of truth in it. Somehow you’ve managed to redefine the concept of evil. In your view, evil’s no more than a disagreement about the way things are supposed to be. Deiwos thinks they’re supposed to be one way, and Daeva thinks they’re supposed to be another.’
‘I thought I just said that. It’s the business of making things that started the fight then, isn’t it?’
‘That might be an oversimplification, but it comes fairly close. Deiwos makes things because he has to make them. The world and the sky weren’t complete the way they were. Deiwos saw that, but Daeva didn’t agree. When Deiwos does things to make the world and the sky complete, it changes them. Daeva believes that’s a violation of the natural order. He doesn’t want things to change.’
‘What a shame. There’s not much he can do about it, though, is there? Once something’s been changed, it’s been changed. Daeva can’t very well go back and unchange it, can he?’
‘He seems to think so.’
‘Time only moves in one direction, Emmy. We can’t go back and undo something that happened in the past just because we don’t like the way it turned out’
‘Daeva thinks he can.’
‘Then both of his wheels just came off the axle. Time isn’t going to run backward just because he wants it to. The sea might run dry and the mountains might wear down, but time runs from the past to the future. That’s probably the only thing that won’t change.’
‘We can all hope that you’re right, Althalus, because if you aren’t, Daeva’s going to win. He’ll unmake everything Deiwos has made and return the earth and sky to what they were at the very beginning. If he can make time go backward, then things he does now will change things that happened in the past, and if he can change enough of the past, we won’t be here any more.’
‘What’s Ghend got to do with all of this?’ Althalus asked her suddenly.
‘Ghend was one of the early men who came to this part of the world about ten thousand years ago. That was before men had learned how to cook certain rocks to make copper or how to mix tin with copper to make bronze. All their tools and weapons were made of stone, and Ghend’s chief put him to work cutting down trees so that the tribe could plant grain. Ghend hated that, and Daeva approached him and persuaded him to abandon Deiwos and worship him instead. Daeva can be very persuasive when he wants to be. Ghend’s the high priest of the Demon Daeva, and the absolute master of Nekweros.’ Emerald looked up suddenly. Then she sinuously flowed down from the bed, crossed the floor and jumped up to the sill of the north window. ‘I should have known,’ she said in an irritated voice. ‘He’s doing it again.’
‘Doing what?’
‘Come here and see for yourself.’
He rose and crossed to the window. Then he stopped, staring incredulously. There was something out there, and there wasn’t supposed to be. The world didn’t seem to end there any more. ‘What is that?’ he asked, staring at what appeared to be a white mountain.
‘Ice,’ she replied. ‘This isn’t the first time it’s happened. Every so often Daeva and Ghend try this way to slow things down – usually when they think Deiwos is getting too far ahead of them.’
‘That’s a lot of ice, Em. When I was coming here, the clouds were a long way down. Did that water down there start rising?’
‘No. It froze solid a long time ago. It snows on it every winter, and the snow doesn’t melt any more. More snow piles up and presses down on it, and it turns to ice.’
‘How thick is it?’
‘About two miles – maybe three.’
‘I meant how thick, Em, not how far away.’
‘So did I. Once it gets thick enough, it’ll be above the level of what you call the edge of the world. Then it’ll start to move. It’ll grind down mountains and spill down onto the plains. Nothing can stop it, and man won’t be able to live in this part of the world any more.’
‘Have you seen this happen before?’
‘Several times. It’s just about the only way Ghend and Daeva have to interrupt what Deiwos is doing. We’re going to have to change our plans, Althalus.’
‘I didn’t know we had a plan.’
‘Oh, we’ve got a plan all right, pet. I just hadn’t gotten around to telling you about it yet. I thought we had more time.’
‘You’ve already had twenty-five hundred years, Em. How much more did you think you were going to need?’
‘Probably about another twenty-five hundred. If you’d told me about Ghend earlier, I might have been able to adjust things. Now we’re going to have to cheat. I just hope it doesn’t make Deiwos angry with me.’
‘Your brother’s awfully busy, Em,’ Althalus said piously. ‘We shouldn’t really pester him with all the picky little details, should we?’
She laughed. ‘My thought exactly, pet. We were made for each other.’
‘Are you only just now coming to realize that? The simplest way for us to cheat would probably be for me to just slip on over to Nekweros and kill Ghend, wouldn’t it?’
‘That’s an awfully blunt way to put it, Althalus.’
‘I’m a plain-spoken man, Em. All this dancing around is just a waste of time, because that’s what it’s going to come down to in the end, isn’t it? Ghend wanted me to come here and steal the Book so that he could destroy it. If I kill him, we can destroy his Book, and then Daeva has to go back and start all over.’
‘How did you find out about Daeva’s Book?’ she asked sharply.
‘Ghend showed it to me back in Nabjor’s camp.’
‘He’s actually carrying it around out in the real world? What’s he thinking of?’
‘Don’t ask me to tell you what somebody else is thinking, Em. My guess is that he knew that I’d never seen a Book before, so he brought one along to show me what they look like. The pictures in his Book weren’t at all like the ones in ours, though.’
‘You didn’t touch it, did you?’
‘Not the Book itself. He handed me one of the pages, though.’
‘The pages are the Book, Althalus. You’ve touched both Books with your bare hands?’ she demanded, shuddering.
‘Yes. Is that significant?’
‘The Books are absolutes, Althalus. They’re the source of ultimate power. Our Book is the power of pure light, and Ghend’s Book is the power of absolute darkness. When you touched that page from his Book, it should have totally corrupted you.’
‘I was moderately corrupt already, Em, but we can sort that out later. What do you think about my idea? I can slip across the border into Nekweros without anybody ever seeing me. Once I’ve put Ghend to sleep, I’ll burn his Book, and that’ll be the end of it, won’t it?’
‘Oh, dear,’ she sighed.
‘It is the simplest solution, Em. Why complicate things when you don’t have to?’
‘Because you probably wouldn’t get more than a mile past the border, pet. Ghend’s about seventy five hundred years ahead of you. He knows how to use his Book in ways you couldn’t even imagine. Using a Book is a very complicated process. You have to be so totally immersed in the Book that the words come to you automatically.’ She looked at him speculatively. ‘Do you really love me, Althalus?’ she asked.
‘Of course I do. You shouldn’t even have to ask. What’s that got to do with what we were just talking about?’
‘It’s crucial, Althalus. You have to love me totally. Otherwise, this won’t work.’
‘What won’t work?’
‘I think I know a way for us to cheat. Do you trust me, pet?’
‘Trust you? After all the times you’ve tried to creep up and pounce on me from behind? Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You’re sneaky, little kitten. I love you, dear, but I’m not foolish enough to trust you.’
‘That’s only playing, so it doesn’t count.’
‘What’s love and trust got to do with getting rid of Ghend and his Book?’
‘I know how to use our Book, and you don’t; but you can do things out there in your world, and I can’t.’
‘That sort of defines the problem, I guess. How do we get around it?’
‘We break down the barriers between us, but that means that we have to completely trust each other. I have to be able to get inside your mind so that I can tell you what you have to do and which word from the Book you have to use to do it.’
‘Then I just tuck you in my pocket and we go kill Ghend?’
‘It’s a little more complicated than that, Althalus. You’ll understand better, I think, once we’re inside each other’s minds. The first thing you have to do is empty your mind. Open it up so that I can get in.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Think about light – or dark – or empty. Turn your mind off.’
Althalus tried to empty his mind of thought, but that almost never works. The mind can be like an unruly child. Tell it to stop, and it works that much faster.
‘We’ll have to try something different,’ Emerald said, her ears laid back in irritation. ‘Maybe –?’ she said a bit uncertainly. ‘Go to the south window. I want you to look south at the mountains of Kagwher. Pick out the closest one and count the trees on it.’
‘Count trees? What for?’
‘Because I said so. Don’t ask silly questions, just do it.’
‘All right, Em, don’t get so excited.’ He stood up and went to the south window. The nearest peak was only a mile or so away, and he started counting the snow-covered trees up near the top. The snow blurred the outlines of the trees, and that made counting them very difficult.
‘Move over just a little.’ Her voice seemed to be murmuring in his right ear, and he jerked his head around in surprise. He couldn’t feel her on his shoulder, but he could almost feel her warm breath on the side of his face.
Emerald was still sitting on the bed a dozen feet away. ‘I asked you to move over, pet,’ her voice sounded inside his head. ‘I need a little more room.’
‘What are you doing?’ he exclaimed.
‘Shush. I’m busy.’
He felt a kind of surging inside his head as if something were moving around in there. ‘Quit fidgeting,’ her voice told him. ‘I’m not taking up that much room.’
Then the sense of intrusion began to fade and he felt the gentle rumble of her purring within his mind. ‘Now you are mine,’ her purring gloated.
‘What’s going on?’ he demanded in alarm.
‘You don’t have to talk out loud any more, pet,’ she breathed inside his mind. ‘Now that I’m in here, I can hear your thoughts; and you can hear mine, if you’ll just take the trouble to listen.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘Just think the words, Althalus. There’s an awful echo in here when you think them and say them at the same time.’
‘Are you really in there?’ he sent his thought inward.
‘My awareness is. It’s also over on the bed, but it’s easy to be in two places at once with your mind.’ There was a kind of tickling sensation over his left ear. ‘It’s bigger in here than I thought it’d be. You’re more clever than I’d imagined, and you’re really rather poetic’.
‘Will you quit rummaging around in there?’
‘Not a chance, pet. Cats are curious, didn’t you know that?’
‘How did you manage to break through so quickly? I thought this was going to take a long time.’
‘So did I, to be honest. I was pushing at the barrier before you started counting. I couldn’t get through it, though. As soon as you started counting trees, the barrier went down.’
‘Does that mean that I’ll have to say, “one-two-three” every time I want to talk with you this way?’
‘Not any more, pet. I’m in now, and you’ll never get rid of me.’
‘It’s going to take some getting used to. I’ve never had somebody inside my head before.’
‘Is it really that unpleasant?’
‘Not really.’
‘Now I’ll be with you wherever you go.’
‘I wasn’t going to leave without you, Em. I’d been meaning to talk with you about that. I’m not going anywhere without you, kitten – even if that means that the world goes all to smash. The world doesn’t matter; you do.’
‘Please don’t say things like that, Althalus.’ Her voice inside his head had a melting sort of tone. ‘You’re making it very hard for me to think.’
‘Yes, I noticed that.’ He considered it. ‘When you get right down to it, though, this is where we’ve been going since I first came here, isn’t it? You started out by talking to me out loud, and a talking cat isn’t the most natural thing in the world. All we’ve done is take that one step further, so now you won’t have to waste all those thousands of years teaching me how to use the Book. We could leave right now if winter weren’t settling in.’ He looked at her with one raised eyebrow. ‘Now that you’ve opened the door, all sorts of things are coming through,’ he said aloud. ‘I don’t want to seem critical, Em, but you shouldn’t really be having those kinds of thoughts, you know.’
She glared at him for a moment. Then she jumped down from the bed and stalked away.
‘Are you blushing, Em?’ he asked mildly.
She turned and hissed at him.
PART TWO
The Gathering
CHAPTER SEVEN
‘Stay out of there, Althalus! What’s in there is none of your concern!’
‘You’re the one who opened the door, Em,’ he replied mildly. ‘It swings both ways, you know.’
‘Just mind your own business and quit snooping. You have to start paying closer attention. When I tell you which word to use, I’m sending a picture of what the word’s going to do. You must have the picture in your mind as well as the word. The word’s just a sound, pet. Nothing’s going to happen if all you’re doing is making noises. Now try it again.’
‘How much longer is it before we have to leave?’
‘About a month – six weeks at the most. As soon as spring arrives, we go, whether you’re ready or not.’
‘We have to pick something up in Arum?’
‘The Knife, yes.’
‘Is that the knife I’ll use when I kill Ghend?’
‘Will you stop that?’
‘Isn’t that what this is all about? Ghend’s interfering with what Deiwos is trying to do, so I’m supposed to get rid of him. It’s not really all that uncommon, Em. I’ve done it before. I’m primarily a thief, but I’ll take on a murder if the pay’s right. I thought that’s what you had in mind.’
‘It most certainly is not!’
‘It is a simple solution, Em, and you wouldn’t even have to get your little paws dirty. We go to Arum and pick up the knife. Then I go to Nekweros and cut Ghend’s throat with it.’
‘That’s not what it’s for, Althalus. It has writing on the blade. There are some people we’re going to need, and we’ll recognize them because they’ll be able to read that writing.’
‘Isn’t that just a little exotic? Talk to your brother and find out who these people are. Then we’ll chase them down and get on with this.’
‘It doesn’t work that way, Althalus. Situations change. If things have happened one way, we’ll need certain people. If they’ve happened in another way, we’ll need different people. Circumstances decide exactly who we’re going to need.’
‘Wouldn’t that mean that the writing on the knife-blade changes as the circumstances change.’
‘No. It’s not the writing that changes, pet. It’s the reading.’
‘Wait a minute. Doesn’t the writing mean the same thing to everybody?’
‘Of course it doesn’t. Everybody who reads any writing gets a different meaning from it. When you look at the writing on the blade, you’ll see a certain word. Other people will see a different word. Most people won’t see words at all – only decorations. The people we want will see a word, and they’ll say that word out loud.’
‘How will we know that they’ve read it right?’
‘We’ll know, pet. Believe me, we’ll know.’
The tag-end of winter dragged on for the next month or so, and then one night a warm wind blew in from the southwest, cutting the snow away almost overnight. Althalus stood at the south window watching the muddy brown streams overflowing their banks as they ripped their way down the mountainsides of Kagwher. ‘Did you do that, Em?’ he asked.
‘Do what?’
‘Call up that wind that’s melting all the snow.’
‘I don’t tamper with the weather, Althalus. Deiwos doesn’t like it when we do that.’
‘If we don’t tell him, maybe he won’t notice. We’re already cheating, Em. What’s one more little cheat? Maybe we should work on that a bit. You teach me how to use the Book, and I’ll teach you how to lie, cheat, and steal.’ He grinned at her.
‘That isn’t funny, Althalus!’ she flared.
‘I sort of liked it. How about a little wager on which of us can corrupt the other first?’
‘Never mind.’
‘Corruption’s a lot of fun, Em. Are you sure you wouldn’t like to try it?’
‘You stop that!’
‘Think it over, Em, and let me know if you change your mind.’
They were both edgy for the next week while they waited for the spring runoff to subside. Then, after the mountain streams had returned to their banks, Althalus gathered up his weapons and they made ready to leave.
He pulled his cloak over his shoulders and looked around. ‘I guess that’s everything,’ he said. ‘I’m going to miss this place. It’s the first time I’ve ever had a permanent home. Do you think we’ll be able to come back some day?’
‘I think so, yes. Shall we leave?’
He picked her up, reached back and spread the hood of his cloak. ‘Why don’t you ride back there, Em?’ he suggested. ‘Once we get outside, I might need to have both hands free in a hurry.’
‘All right,’ her voice murmured in his head. She crawled up over his shoulder and down into the bag-like hood. ‘This should work out just fine.’
‘Will other people be able to see you when we get outside?’