Sara Douglass - Pilgrim

He had used the pattern of melody to accomplish a purpose.

Is that not what Icarii Enchanters did?

And yet there was no Star Dance, no power, no magic. No enchantment left.

Drago shuddered, and the grip of his left hand tightened about his staff. He had not only opened a door, he had also just been taught something.

Ah! Frustrated, feeling that the answer danced just beyond the reaches of his mind, Drago put the problem to one side and stepped through the door.

It swung shut behind him.

Drago paid it no heed. Before him stretched yet another corridor, similar to the last with the pattern of feathered circles on the walls, but curving into a left-hand bend some twenty paces ahead.

Beyond the bend the corridor branched into two. Drago took the left-hand fork without hesitation and then, when it again branched, took the right-hand fork. It led into a flight of steep steps leading to a higher level, and Drago grinned as he imagined how the two Sentinels would have grumbled about climbing them. Somehow, their presence was still very much here.

There was a large rectangular room at the top of the steps. The walls were literally smothered with the feather-backed circles. Metallic racks stood in three ranks, almost empty, save for half a dozen glass jars.

They were empty.

Drago looked about. There were three doors, rectangular now, in the far wall, each of them open. Which one?

From the door on the far right came the faint hum of vast power, but Drago understood he should not take that one.

He walked through the middle doorway instead. Before him stretched yet another corridor, but very short, and ending in yet another doorway through which … through which Drago thought he could see stars.

Stars?

Hesitant now, Drago walked down the corridor to the door, took a deep breath, and stepped through.

He stood in a strange room. The walls, ceiling, benches and even parts of the floor were covered with metal plates, and these plates were studded with knobs and bright jewel-like lights. Before him were the high backs of several chairs, facing enormous windows that looked out upon the universe.

One of the chairs before him swivelled, revealing a silver-haired man in its depths. He wore a uniform made of a leathery black material; gold braid hung at his shoulders and encircled the cuffs of his sleeves, and in his first glance Drago saw a black, peaked cap, gold braid about its brim, sitting on the bench behind him.

But it was the man’s face underneath his silvery hair which riveted Drago’s attention.

It was lined with care … and more. Agonising pain had scored a network of deep lines into the man’s skin. His right hand clenched spasmodically in the tunic over his chest, and he breathed erratically, great deep breaths that tore through his throat.

A slight movement distracted Drago’s attention momentarily. The blue-feathered lizard sat to one side under an empty chair, his black eyes unblinking on the man in the chair.

“Drago,” said the man, and Drago looked back to him.

“You are Faraday’s Noah,” he said, and then stepped forward to touch Noah’s shoulder. “What is wrong?”

Noah’s mouth twisted. “I am suffering the ill-effects of redundancy,” he said. “No, no, that is wrong. I am simply being recycled.”

“I don’t understand,” Drago said. He touched Noah’s shoulder again, leaving his hand resting there this time. “What can I do to help?”

Noah lifted his own hand to pat Drago’s. “First of all, you can sit down. Then you can listen and accept.”

“I meant,” Drago said softly, “what can I do to aid you?”

“Me?” Noah raised tortured brown eyes and looked into Drago’s violet gaze. “You can do nothing to help me. I am dying. After all this time, I am finally, finally dying.”

Then he grunted with pain, doubling over in the chair.

Drago dropped his staff and grabbed him, wanting to help, but not knowing what to do. In the end he just knelt by the chair and held Noah, trying to give some measure of comfort.

Noah managed to straighten. His face was slick with sweat.

“We have all been waiting too long,” he whispered harshly, “for me to die before I tell you what you must know.”

“All?” Drago said.

Noah lifted a trembling hand and pointed to the window filled with the tens of thousands of stars beyond.

“All of us,” he repeated. “The Stars.”

Noah looked at one of the empty chairs, as if considering asking Drago to sit in it, then gave a tired sigh and took Drago’s hand in his. He glanced at the newly-healed scar on Drago’s neck, but said nothing.

Drago settled on the floor, moving the staff to one side as the lizard crept over and curled up against his legs.

“Tell me,” Drago said, and Noah nodded, raised his head, and searched the panels under the window.

“Will you press the copper knob on the panel?” Noah asked, and Drago leaned over, hesitated, then firmly pressed a glowing knob.

Instantly the view from the forward window changed. The stars disappeared, and Drago found himself looking out on a world filled with mountains and valleys, plains and oceans.

He frowned. “I have not seen this place before.”

“Nay. This is not Tencendor, although it is much like it. It is my world. My home.”

Drago looked at Noah. Beneath his pain, the man’s face was lined with memory and regret.

“And its name?” he said.

Noah’s hand clenched a little more deeply into the black leather of his tunic. “Not important. For all I know it no longer exists. It has been hundreds of thousands of years since I have seen it.”

The view altered. There were the same mountains and valleys, plains and oceans, but all had changed.

Now they were a wasteland of pain and despair, of tempest, pestilence and starvation. Maddened people and animals roamed, tearing at their own bodies and at the bodies of any who ventured near them. Their eyes were blank save for their madness, and ropes of saliva hung from their mouths. All the people were naked, their bodies emaciated and covered with boils and streaks of rot. They lived, but in a hell that Drago could barely comprehend.

“The same world,” Noah rasped into the silence, “after the TimeKeeper Demons had come to ravage. Drago, listen to this my story.”

The view in the window shifted again, back to the stars.

“We do not know from where they came. We simply woke one morning to find half our world gone mad with hunger, and the pain continued through the day, and then into the night.”

Drago remembered how the TimeKeepers had leapt from world to world. No doubt they’d found some other poor soul to drain in order to enter Noah’s world.

“Hunger, then such tempest as we’d never before endured, and then midday — oh God! Midday!” Noah shuddered violently, struggled to control himself, then continued, his voice hoarse with the remembered horror.

“Midday is too terrible to even speak about — thank every god you pray to, Drago, that Tencendor has not yet been subjected to Qeteb’s malice!”

Yet . The word echoed about the spaces between them.

Drago studied Noah’s face. The man seemed in more pain than when Drago had first entered. “But you found a way to trap him.”

“It took us forty years, Drago.”

“Forty years?”

“Can you imagine,” he whispered, “what those forty years were like?”

“How did your people survive?”

“In caves and tunnels and basements, mostly. Drago, your first lesson, and one Faraday already understands, is that the Demons, even Qeteb, cannot touch any who rest under shade. They cannot work their evil in shade. For some reason, the mere fact of shade protects the mind and soul from their touch.”