He began ripping away the edges of her dress. The cloth would be capable of staunching the blood loss. She would need air blown into her lungs, and her hearts would need to be massaged. Old lessons more than four decades gone returned to him and his body began to move with the smooth motions of an automaton. He had been too late before, too slow and too old and too weak, but now he would be in time.
Old soldier's instincts kicked in. He heard the noise of the creature behind him swinging into the attack. He smelled its odour of death and hatred. His legs threw him out of the way. His arms reached for his kutari and his hands held the hilt tightly.
The Wykhheran appeared before him.
Lyndisty's blood continued to pool on to the floor.
Dasouri's voice continued to call for him over the comm channel.
Marrago felt twenty years younger. Thirty even.
'She will not die,' he told the creature. 'I will not let her die. Not again!'
The creature moved to attack.
'I have been thinking,' he said softly, hoarsely, the remembered dust and smoke of twenty years ago clogging his lungs. 'Thinking of the past.'
'Really?' Da'Kal remarked, as she stepped inside and closed the door of the cell behind her. For a moment there was darkness, and then the light globe in her hand burst into life and the shadows flickered on the wall. In the half-light she looked ghostly, almost spiritual. He was not entirely sure she was even real. She had lived in his memories and dreams for so long, and yet he had never dared talk of her, talk to her, acknowledge her reality. She belonged to the old days.
'All I think of is the future.'
G'Kar looked at her, feeling his mouth twist into a semblance of a smile. 'You could never lie to me,' he whispered.
'I am not. I think of the future all the time. But the future is shaped by the past. You told me that once, me and a thousand others.'
'G'Khorazhar.'
'I was just one of many. A pilgrim, a traveller, come to hear the words of the prophet, the preacher of the future of our people.' She shook her head. 'I suppose that even after all that had passed between us, I wanted to be near to you.'
'You always were,' he said, although the words were so soft he could not be sure he had actually spoken them aloud.
She carried on without reacting, as if they had been nothing more than thoughts. 'Your words touched me. It was as if you were speaking only to me. I remembered our long conversations at night, beneath the stars, and the voice was the same as the one I knew.
'I later found out that every other person there felt the same way.
'You have a remarkable gift, G'Kar. You always did. I went away and I thought about your words. I thought about what you had said, looking for something there, for some wisdom and insight.'
She paused, shaking. When she looked up again, her eyes were filled with anger. They looked demonic by the light of the globe. 'I found it. I saw your words of forgiveness and unity and understanding and I shook with rage. I had hoped before that your message was misrepresented, or that it was an imposter pretending to be you, or that the Centauri had brainwashed you, or any one of a number of things.
'I had never wanted to think that you were actually advocating an alliance with the Centauri.'
'I told you of my feelings when we parted,' he whispered. 'When I returned your armlet.'
'I remember. I had hoped they were.... fleeting. You were a warrior, G'Kar! A leader. You could be leading the Kha'Ri by now! You could be ruling half the galaxy! Our people would follow you into fire and darkness without a second thought. With just a few words you managed to derail the entire course of the war with the Centauri. Think about what you could have done.
'And you spend all that power on peace.
'Have you forgotten what they did to me? Have you forgotten what they did to your father, to my sister, to G'Quan knows how many friends and allies?'
'No,' he whispered.
'Have you forgotten what they did to my father? Do you remember what was left of Ha'Fili when we found him? I swear I will never forget that.... mass of flesh, sightless and limbless, screaming over and over again for mercy. Do you remember?'
'I remember,' G'Kar whispered, seeing again the knife in his hand that had plunged into Ha'Fili's heart.
'Do you remember your uncle, carrying back his only daughter's body?'
'I remember.'
'Do you remember...?
'Do you remember...?
'Do you remember...?
'Have you forgotten...?
'Have you forgotten...?
'Do you remember...?'
It continued, an endless litany of friends dead and mutilated, of family tortured and butchered, of villages destroyed and burned, of memories lost and eradicated. His reply to each was the same.
'I remember.'
'I remember.'
'I remember.'
'You hated them once. I remember that hatred. Do you remember what you told me the night we buried my sister? You said that you wished you could kill every one of them, and then bring them back to life so you could kill them again.'
'I remember.'
Gently she unhooked the top of her tunic, pulling it open. G'Kar could not look away from the sight of the deep scar running from her neck almost to her waist. A Centauri torturer had done that with a garden fork, forcing him to watch.
'I remember.'
'Do you still hate them?' she asked. 'The people who did this to me, who did all those things to you?'
'No,' he replied. 'I pity them.'
She looked at him. 'I never stopped hating them. I pity them as well, but I still hate them.
'Now I hate you, too. But I pity you as well.
'What do you say to that?'
'I pity you, Da'Kal.
'And I am sorry.'
Sinoval looked out across the dying city, his eyes dark and angry. Elsewhere he knew that a battle was beginning, just one move in a long strategy, just one tactic towards an ultimate goal.
And he was here.
Not trapped, not now that he had time to think and reason. He could see the avenues and warrens of hyperspace opening up around him. He could find a way back. This exercise was not aimed at trapping him forever. It was a warning.
A warning of what the Vorlons would do to the galaxy if he did not surrender to them.
And somewhere down there was Sheridan, as lost and trapped in this soulscape as he was. His body still lay asleep on Babylon 5, vulnerable to whatever the Vorlons wanted to do to him. If his soul was to be saved, it would have to be now, before anything more could be done to his body.
He sighed. The greatest battle plan in history did not survive first contact with the enemy.
There. A spark of life running through a labyrinth of mirrors. The creatures of this place loved mirrors, knowing the portals that could be crafted through them.
Sinoval stepped forward and floated down into the city. He had to be quick. There was very little time to
