It spun with the Dagger in one hand, a wheel of flame, and as it spun the beribboned Eesties fell before it like grain before the scythe. Was one of them the Oracle? Cautiously, as one who has just escaped the attack of some great, sly beast, I raised my head and shoulders to see what was there. Those who had been in the crevasse behind me had poured forth once more. The shallow ditch was empty. I stepped across it to the hilltop, sinking once more to a crouch, watching.
And still they fell, by the tens, by the hundreds. Their forms littered the hillside, changing now, losing their mock-human forms, turning to Eesty shape once more, starlike upon the grass, fading as I watched, becoming mere shades of themselves which melted into the herbage and were gone. I stepped from the stones to the dried, brittle grass. Still the voice cried, or another voice like it; still the Dagger spun, and those who were left living began to flee. The Dagger did not remain behind. It pursued them yet in the hand of one of their own kind, mad with anger and frustrated purpose, furious at betrayal.
And only two were left living in that place—Jinian and one other. The Oracle.
It was shrunken. Eesty-like. The painted eyes were only painted and the bony hands mere sketches of light and shadow at the ends of its points. It had no face, and yet I knew it. I knew it no matter what guise it took, and I spoke to it at last.
“You did not think of their anger, Oracle.”
“No,” it replied. The voice was an Eesty voice, and yet it hurt me like a file across my bones in its horrid intensity. “I did not think of their anger. I made the Dagger. I set it where you found it. I foresaw much. I knew you could not use it against me. I never thought of them.”
“They were betrayed, Oracle. Ganver tells me there is no anger greater than that of a zealot betrayed. Where is your strength now, Oracle?”
“So it would seem.” It hummed, like a hive of warnets. “And yet, Dervish Daughter, I have strength enough to deal with you still.”
My eves dropped. The Eesty was larger than I, and older by far. I had no weapon. Any magics the Wize-ards knew had been known to this older race. It was true. It could deal with me still. I stroked my breast where the star-eye had lain, wishing for it. I would say what the star-eye required, whether I would die or not, crying out in a voice unlike my own.
“No. You have no strength at all, Oracle. Hear the message of the star-eye:
“A soul does not dwell in your shape, Eesty! A soul does not live in your seed. Mercy will not allow you to live. And vet, you are part of the whole, Oracle, and I may not destroy you. “
“What is my punishment?” It laughed at me, a final, bitter mockery. “What do you think you can do? Those like me will always prey on those like you, Footseer! Until you learn mercy toward us! Until you learn that not-being is more merciful than being for one like me! Where there is no belonging, no way, why do those like you always think it merciful to make us go on living?”
I started to answer, but the answer did not come. I could have told it why it had been allowed to live so long, but I did not. Instead I cried with all my heart into the silence, “Ganver! I know why you did not act in the past! I know your love for that which you gave life. But bao demands that this creature die, Ganver, and I may not take your bao. This is your duty. This is your own child!”
The Oracle heard me and was shocked to stillness. At least, so I thought later. Perhaps the Eesties do not know parents as we know them; perhaps they do not know who gives them life. Perhaps as the ages pass, they forget. So, perhaps, the Oracle had not known or did not remember. It had no time to remember then, for a great rolling wheel came out of the trees and the cloud, something more huge than could be imagined, more inexorable. It spun, and when it had spun away, the Oracle was gone. Ganver had found strength to do the merciful thing at last.
Then, only then, the sound came. Below me, in the valley, they were ringing the Daylight Bell.
The sound surged like a tide, washing over me, then retreating, coming forward once again, higher each time, touching the burned earth, the scabbed stone, upward into the air, into the tree branches that angled stark and graceless against the sky, upward still until tree and stone and earth lay beneath that tide, like creatures of a shore pool dried from the sun, now laved, soothed, lifted. . . .
Where the shadow lay the light came, and the great bank of shadow raised itself and fled.
I dropped to the earth, floated to the earth, sat there, hands drifting to and fro above the surface of it. My hair flowed before my face, then back, before my face again in the wind of that ringing. It was good to sit down, inexpressibly good. I gripped the grass where I sat, holding it as though to hold myself in place upon the world or the world in place beneath me.
A shudder then, like distant thunder, felt rather than heard. As though something monstrously large had clapped its hands. I was buffeted by the silent blow, touched all over. Before me on the ash-gray soil a blade of green pushed upward, shivered, split itself into several leaves, and thrust outward at the world a cluster of buds that broke into silvery bloom.
A tree
