Dawnbringer

She looked as if about to say something more, then shook her head and returned to brushing the horse. The animal nickered in contentment, eyes half-closed.

The little woman shook her head. “Cryptic and poetical is overrated,” she remarked, hurrying back to her chickens.

The Vashtun sat cross-legged in his chamber, meditating. The flat cushion he sat on was the only furnishing. Across the chamber a shallow trench had been cut, then lined with green glass pebbles. Water flowed in it, a diversion from the main geothermal spring. By the time the water flow reached the Vashtun’s chamber, it had cooled, and it made a pleasant sound in the near-empty room.

No portrait, landscape, or tapestry hung on the walls, but their smooth plaster was decorated on all four sides with abstract patterns that integrated fractured circles and angled lines. These designs were the work of previous Vashtuns, beginning with the second, and had been centuries in the making. Much of the pattern was laid in by the second Vashtun and the two that followed him, but each of their successors left his mark. Here a bisected arc; there a triangle of odd proportions was added, and made part of the whole. It was as if a master pattern existed, invisible, beneath the surface of the innocuous white plaster, and those who painted the strange geometries were discovering it rather than creating their own.

It was the custom of the holy man to meditate upon these designs, and often his apprentice-successor would meditate with him. The chamber was private more by custom than law, and any who sincerely desired to contemplate the inner mysteries of the sanctuary were welcome to enter. It was not unusual for a servant of the sanctuary or a visiting pilgrim to stare at a certain coil, or series of fractured lines, and find that many minutes or hours had passed without his being aware of it, and to take away the memory of a conversation that could not have occurred. If one sat in the middle of the chamber, facing any wall, and was very quiet, an insistent whispering would seem to rise like an invisible tide.

Not everyone could stand it. Many of the inhabitants and visitors to Shadrun-of-the-Snows avoided the Vashtun’s chamber, never approaching or entering it without great reluctance.

“It’s like a voice in your head that won’t go away,” one would-be pilgrim had told another after paying his respects to the holy man. “Like someone saying things you can’t quite hear, so you listen closely. But when the words start to distinguish themselves-you don’t want to hear them. Even though you don’t understand what they mean.”

The Vashtun stared at one particular pattern on the wall, and his forehead furrowed. Without looking, he reached out and grasped one of the sticks that lay near at hand-thin, long, and burned at the tips. Rising from his cross-legged position, he stepped over the rivulet of water and approached the pattern-a circle bisected from left to right by a slanting line. He stood before it a long moment, and then with sure strokes sketched three short parallel lines in the lower left half of the circle. That done, he let his hand gripping the charred stick drop to his side.

“That’s better,” he muttered, studying his handiwork. “That’s much better.”

Fandour concentrated. The Nexus was engaging the Vector, and he must use the opportunity to strengthen his connections to the Rogue Plane. With luck, the Nexus would add another element to the Vector, giving Fandour a fraction more access.

Fractions added into integers, and integers multiplied into larger and larger numbers. It was a process that had taken centuries, as this plane reckoned time, and it was not yet finished. But each alteration of the Vector increased hisPower. Each mind to which he connected acted as both lens and prism, concentrating his Power within this plane, and at the same time scattering the light of his awareness across more mind prisms.

And now he sensed that other entities, not just the Nexus, were adding to the Vector in different places and that each allowed him to cling ever more persistently to the plane where the Rhythanko, which kept Fandour imprisoned, was kept.

For a long time Fandour simply concentrated on remaining still, meditating within the confines of his prison, until he could control the waves of panic that threatened to send him pounding helplessly at the iron walls the gith had constructed so well.

He wondered sometimes if nothing existed but himself if the oubliette was the universe and he its only inhabitant. But sometimes Fandour could remember, and he clutched at the memory until he could always remember, that there was something that lay beyond the confines of its world-the Rhythanko; the artifact that was the key to his imprisonment. If the fabrication that held it tight lay without, then there was a without, a world apart from Fandour’s iron eggshell.

He would never be free until he could control the artifact. He almost had, when the Rhythanko was new and not completely forged. And then that odd race, the gith, had come to possess it, and sealed him in tighter than before. And then, just as he had a hope of gaining control of it again, there was a presence that had mastery of key and lock, and had wrested the Rhythanko from his touch and bound it to an alien blood. Fandour still remembered, vividly, the pain as the red-hot walls of the oubliette seared him.

But the grind of years passing loosened all bonds eventually. In cold darkness and across cold time, mind by mind, Fandour wove himself a presence within the Rogue Plane.

It was autumn, with leaves blazing scarlet and a chill in the air, when Lusk returned. The gray horse was tethered to the roan he had ridden back, and there was no sign of the messenger. Bithesi took the horses back to the stables and found them reasonably fit, but their hooves showed signs of wear, and she would have to send word to the farrier.

When the attendant offered Lusk the travelers’ libation, he pushed her hand aside and withdrew into his austere quarters. Lakini was patrolling the slopes above the sanctuary. When she returned, she went straight to Lusk’s door, knowing he was there, and stood outside it a long time, not knocking but simply listening to the absolute silence within. Hours she stood there in her still way, leaving only at the bell that summoned all to the common meal. She took a mouthful to sustain her and returned, laying her palm against the rough grain of the wooden door.

In the morning, Lusk found her sitting cross-legged, her back straight against the semismooth stone blocks of the wall, her eyes closed. He squatted beside her, and she opened her eyes, instantly aware.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” she said.

He shrugged. “Bondaru,” he said. “It took place in another life and is sealed from us now.” Lakini knew there was no possible answer to that.

They sat in companionable silence. Lakini stared at the wall opposite. Someone had sketched a figure on the plaster, carefully limning in straight lines and precise angles to form an odd asymmetrical figure, something like a star. Lately she had seen variations of basic geometrical shapes appear on the walls of the sanctuary, drawn in various pigments and by various people-both pilgrims and folk of the sanctuary-and always with great care. The Vashtun didn’t seem to mind it, and the Diamar, his second, tried to tell her they were a means of meditation much like the great wheels some of the holy people of the eastern lands made out of colored sand.

But she didn’t like them. There was something about how their angles were jointed together that seemed unnatural, like the three-legged frogs one found sometimes in spring ponds, swimming ungracefully with their two- legged brethren. There was simply a sense of wrongness, and when she looked at one of them too long, a humming would grow in her head and start to sound like whispers before she jerked her gaze away. She didn’t like the way the whispers began to break apart into coherent words, words that made sense at first but that she couldn’t remember when she disengaged.

She and Lusk sat against the wall a long time, the adepts of the sanctuary passing them from time to time, intent on their business and occasionally glancing at them in curiosity.

“Will you go again?” she asked, as the shadows shifted around them.

He rubbed his striped forehead before he answered.

“No,” he said. There was a long pause before he continued. “They’re all dead, you see.”

She nodded, glancing at the mathematical figure opposite, feeling the conversational buzz rising in her mind, and looking away again.

“They all die,” she said, thinking of Bithesi, her grace with animals, her limited lifespan. She rose and held out a hand to him. He took it and pulled himself to his feet.