Ian Irvine - Chimaera

‘I don’t hate you, Foster-father. I …’

‘Aaargh! Begone. And take her with you.’

Tiaan scrambled down the stairs and outside. Minis clacked after her, avoiding her eyes. A great cry of anguish came from the attic window, after which there was silence. Finally Vithis emerged. His back was no longer bent but his face was more crevassed than ever.

‘All things must pass and First Clan is no more. I will send them on their longest journey, in the way that has always been foretold. Not foretold by a mooncalf with a head full of fantasies,’ he spat, with a glance in Minis’s direction. ‘Forecast by our ancient seers. Inthis came first and we found the Well. Some say it came first and First Clan was born of it. As we came, so shall we depart. No more fitting farewell can I make my people.’

He threw his arms up, clawing for the sky, and opened his mouth to speak the Great Spell.

‘What are you doing?’ cried Malien.

‘I am summoning the Well, Matah Malien.’

Malien looked afraid. Tiaan shuddered and moved closer to her.

‘The Well cannot be summoned,’ said Malien. ‘It just is , and presently it lies chained within Tirthrax. Even to go near it is perilous.’

‘Not to me, for I am the direct heir of Inthis, founder of First Clan ten thousand years ago. I have the power and the right, for the chained Well at Tirthrax is just a shadow of what it should be.’ He raised his arms again.

‘Why are you doing this?’ said Malien.

‘The least honour I can do my people is to send them to the Well, but it is the only honour in my power.’

‘Then let us take them to the Hornrace and entomb them in the time-honoured way. Here, by the great mid-sea rift, the seat of such unstable power, is neither fitting nor safe.’

‘Here they fell and here they will be taken up,’ said Vithis softly, but then his voice rose. ‘What care I for safety? What care I if the whole of Santhenar falls into ruin? My world is gone, and my clan. I have nothing left.’

‘You have Minis,’ she said.

‘I lost him before I lost my clan or my world. It’s too late now; nothing remains of him.’ He raised his voice. ‘Flee now, any among you who fear death.’ He fixed each one of them with his baleful glare. ‘Well, Cryl-Nish Hlar?’

‘I fear your kind of death, but I would honour your dead,’ Nish said softly. ‘I will stay.’

‘There’s more to you than I thought,’ said Vithis. ‘Not much, but something. Take your place over there.’

Vithis offered them the choice, one after another, to go or to stay. Everyone stayed. ‘Then move back,’ he said. ‘The Well of Echoes – the true Well – has an appetite for the living as well as the dead.’

He reached out, clenching and unclenching his fists, and the sky changed to an ashy grey. Thunder rumbled all around them as if they were circled by storms. At least, it sounded like thunder, though it felt more like an earth trembler.

Tiaan shifted from one foot to another. They weren’t far from the mid-sea rift. What might an earth trembler do here, where the very rock beneath their feet had been riven apart by forces not even a geomancer could comprehend?

‘How can he summon the Well of Echoes?’ Tiaan asked quietly. ‘He has nothing in his hands.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Malien, ‘though there exist powers far older than the magic of crystals and devices, fields and nodes. Vithis has lived for a thousand years and is heir to Arts ten times that old, whose secrets have been passed down to none but the greatest in each generation.’

Vithis cried out a word, and a word of power it must have been, for the entire sky went black. It was an absolute darkness – no clouds showed, no moon, no stars. The ground shook so violently that loose rocks rattled like dice in a cup. Away in the distance a red glow appeared, a molten line squeezed up through the black rift.

He sang a second word. A column of yellow light seared a path down from the sky, beginning some degrees off the vertical and ending in the rocks behind the metal death-house, illuminating one of the mausoleums. The column was not solid yellow; rather it seemed to be made of a million threads of light, all different hues of yellow. And all were in motion: vibrating, revolving, shimmering.

He whispered a third word and the threads wove between one another, faster and faster, until they blended into a single bar of colour so bright that everyone had to shield their eyes. Its base drifted off the mausoleum, fingered the ground between it and the metal death-house, and began to rotate. Dust danced where it touched but the particles were instantly sucked down, apparently into the solid rock. Pieces of gravel and salt crust whirled after.

A hole appeared, a couple of spans across, though it did not actually seem to pass through the rock. It was, rather, that the hole was laid over the rock, the two existing in the same place but different dimensions.

Like Tiaan’s brief glimpses into the hyperplane long ago, or the inside of the tesseract, it was all wrong. It confused the mind as well as the eye and she could only imagine what the others must be making of it. Nish, next to her, looked as if he was going to be ill.

The column of threaded light moved steadily down and as it did it thickened. The hole, which Tiaan realised was the slowly materialising Well, broadened until it was five or six spans across. Suddenly, with another rolling rumble of thunder, the column of light evaporated. They were enveloped in darkness within which the only illumination was the Well, while the stifling heat had been replaced by cold air currents coiling about them.

The walls of the Well were midnight black, threaded with shimmering yellow strands that moved when the eye attempted to focus on them. From where she was standing, Tiaan could see down a few spans, and suddenly recalled hanging off Nish’s arm, half in and half out of the Well in Tirthrax. But that had been different. That had been a little, stable Well, frozen in place by powerful Arts. This was the master Well – wild and free, and only Vithis could control it.

Tiaan reached out blindly and her hand struck Nish’s. It startled her. She saw the same memories in his eyes. He was shuddering with horror. She felt for him – she had some small understanding of the Well, but Nish could have none. She squeezed his hand and he gave her a weak smile.

Vithis looked around him, though Tiaan knew he was not seeing any of them. He was remembering the Histories of Inthis, the first of the clans on Aachan and always the greatest. So powerful was the moment that she could almost see the story of Clan Inthis flickering in the air in front of him.

He stood that way for a long time. No one spoke or moved. Then Vithis shook himself and held up one hand, as if to give a blessing.

‘Farewell, my beloved Inthis,’ he said in a majestic voice drawn from somewhere deeper than the bitterness that had been his daily existence. ‘We were the greatest of all clans, and it will be recognised as long as our Histories endure. But now the time of First Clan is over. Go to the soft sweet Well of Echoes, my people. Go Hulis, go Maris, go Irrien …’

He went through the names from memory, one by one, listing them in the order that he had found them. There were thousands of dead but not once did he hesitate. Tiaan found tears welling in her eyes yet again.

As he spoke the last name, Vithis spread his arms and the Well lifted and slid toward the mausoleum directly behind the metal death-house. Crusts of salt whirled in the air and were pulled down to nothingness. It was eerie, the way the shimmering shaft drifted through the ground with no more sound than a sigh. There was no groan or crack of shifting rocks, no wind, no clatter. It settled over, or under, or around the mausoleum, which hung there even though there now appeared to be nothing underneath it.