‘There would be no need of that, Anakha,’ the Anari replied. ‘Once we are gone, Edaemus will lift his curse from the lake, its waters will return to normal, and other men may freely come to this valley without fear.’

‘I should probably tell you that if I seal the valley with Bhelliom, I will seal it. I can absolutely guarantee you that no Delphae will ever leave. If you’re going to turn into moonbeams or sunlight, that won’t inconvenience you, but if you’ve got some other notion hidden away, you might as well forget it. And if this Edaemus of yours has a secret agenda involving some sort of retaliation against the Styrics, you’d better tell him to drop it. Bhelliom eats Gods for breakfast – as Azash found out. Do you still want me to seal your valley?’

‘Yes,’ Cedon replied without hesitation.

‘How about you, Sephrenia?’ Sparhawk asked. ‘Would that kind of guarantee satisfy you?’

‘They’ll try trickery, Sparhawk. They’re a deceitful race.’

‘You know the Bhelliom, Sephrenia – probably even better than I do. Do you really think anybody – man or God – could trick it? If I tell it to keep the Delphae in and everybody else out, nobody’s going to cross the line – not you, not me, not Aphrael, not Edaemus – not even the God of the Elenes. Even if all the Gods of this world and of all their worlds combined, Bhelliom would still keep them out. If I seal this valley, it will stay sealed. Even the birds and angleworms won’t be able to leave. Will that satisfy you?’

She refused to look at him.

‘I need an answer, little mother, and I’d rather not have to wait all year to get it. Will it satisfy you?’

‘You’re hateful, Sparhawk!’

‘I’ve got a lot on my mind just now. Think it over and let me know what you decide.’ He turned to face the Anari. ‘All right, now I know what you want. The next question is what’s in it for me? What do I get out of this arrangement?’

‘Our assistance in thy struggle with thine enemies, Anakha.’

‘That’s a little unspecific, Cedon. I’ve got the Bhelliom. What can you possibly do for me that I can’t do for myself ?’

‘Thou must have the cooperation of the jewel, Anakha. Thou canst compel the stone, but it loves thee not, and it doth sometimes deliberately misunderstand thee – as when it took thee and the Child Goddess to Demos when thou sought to go to Delo in Arjuna.’

‘How did you know about that?’ Sparhawk was startled.

‘Thy mind is open to me, Anakha, as are all minds. This is but one of the services we can offer thee. Would it not be to thine advantage to know what those about thee are thinking?’

‘It would indeed, Cedon, but there are other ways to wrest the truth from men’s hearts.’

‘But men who have been put to the torture know that they have been tortured, and they know what they have revealed unto thee. Our way is more subtle.’

‘He’s got a point there, Sparhawk,’ Kalten said. ‘What am I thinking right now, Cedon?’

‘Thou art troubled by the duty to slay Xanetia should our people play thee false, Sir Knight. Thy mind is gently inclined toward her.’

‘He’s right about that,’ Kalten admitted to the others. ‘I think these people can hear what others are thinking.’

‘We have other capabilities as well, Sir Knights,’ the Anari told them, ‘and we freely offer them to thee in exchange for what we ask.’ He looked rather sadly at Sephrenia. ‘I fear that when I reveal the nature of these capabilities, it will cause thee pain and harden thine heart yet more toward us, dear sister.’

‘Will you stop calling me that? My heart is already like granite toward you and your kind.’

‘That is not true, Sephrenia of Ylara,’ Xanetia disagreed. ‘Thou art troubled forasmuch as thou hast found no wickedness in us in this, thy first meeting with our kind. Hard put art thou to maintain an hatred which groweth more from thy sense of duty to thy kindred than from any personal rancor. I do freely confess mine own similarly troubled state. I am inclined to love thee, even as thou art so inclined toward me.’

‘Stop that!’ Sephrenia burst out. ‘Keep your unclean hands out of my thoughts.’

‘Stubborn, isn’t she?’ Ulath murmured.

‘It is the nature of the Younger Gods of Styricum to protect their children – even from their own folly,’ the Anari noted. ‘Thus it is that the Styrics must appeal to their Gods with spells and prayers for aid when they would step beyond the powers of other men. Is it not so, Sephrenia of Ylara?’

She refused to answer him.

‘That’s the core of Styric magic, Cedon,’ Vanion replied for her.

She glared at him, and Sparhawk silently groaned. Why couldn’t Vanion keep his mouth shut?

The Anari nodded. ‘Edaemus hath, as I say, gone before us to prepare the way, and he is therefore no longer able to watch over us. Thus hath he granted certain of us the power to do what must be done without his guidance.’

‘Unrestrained magic?’ Sephrenia exclaimed. ‘You hold the power of the Gods in your own hands with no restraints?’

‘Some few of us, yes.’

‘That’s monstrous! The human mind isn’t capable of understanding the nature of that kind of power. We can’t grasp the consequences of unleashing it to satisfy our childish whims.’

‘Thy Goddess hath instructed thee well, Sephrenia of Ylara,’ Xanetia noted. ‘This is what she wishes thee to believe.’

‘Thy Goddess would keep thee a child, dear sister,’ the Anari said. ‘For so long as thou art a child, she is secure in thy love. I tell thee truly, however, Edaemus doth love us even as thine Aphrael doth love thee. His love, however, doth compel us to grow. He hath placed his power in our hands, and we must accept the consequences of our acts when we bring it to bear. It is a different kind of love, but it is love nonetheless. Edaemus is no longer here to guide us, so we can do whatever our minds are able to conceive.’ The Anari smiled gently. ‘Forgive me, my friends,’ he said to them, ‘but one as old as I hath but one peculiar interest.’ He held up one withered old hand and looked at it rather sadly. ‘How soon are we altered by the passing of years, and how distressing is the alteration.’

The change seemed gradual, but considering the staggering nature of that change, what was happening before their eyes was nearly miraculous. The withered hand grew more firm-fleshed; the knobby joints smoothed; and the wrinkles faded. It was not only the hand, however. The tracery of wrinkles and lines on Cedon’s face seemed to slide away. His hollow cheeks filled out, and his thin, wispy hair grew fuller, more abundant. They stared at him as, with no apparent effort, he reversed the erosion of years. He regressed to vigorous youth, his skin clear and his hand and face firm and unmarked. Then, he began to diminish, his limbs shrinking inside his garments. The prickly stubble vanished from his cheeks and chin, and, as he continued to regress, his head seemed to grow larger in proportion to his shrinking body. ‘That might be far enough,’ he said in a piping, childish voice. He smiled, a strangely ancient smile which looked very much out of place on that little boy’s face. ‘A miscalculation here might reduce me to nothing. In truth, I have considered that, but my tasks and responsibilities are not yet completed. Xanetia has her own tasks, and I would not yet burden her with mine as well.’

Sparhawk swallowed hard. ‘I think you’ve made your point, Cedon,’ he said in a strained voice. ‘We’ll accept the fact that you can do things that we can’t do.’ He looked around at his friends. ‘I can already see arguments brewing,’ he told them, deliberately avoiding Sephrenia’s eyes, ‘and no matter what we decide, we’ll probably all have serious doubts about it.’

‘We could pray,’ Bevier suggested.

‘Or roll dice and let them decide,’ Ulath added.

‘Not with your dice, we couldn’t,’ Kalten objected.

‘We could even fall back on logic,’ Vanion concluded, ‘but Sparhawk’s right. No matter how we try to decide, we could probably sit here all winter and still not agree.’ He also avoided Sephrenia’s eyes.

‘All right, then,’ Sparhawk said, reaching inside his tunic, ‘since Aphrael’s not here to bully us into agreement, we’ll let Bhelliom decide.’ He took out the golden box and set it on the table in front of him.

‘Sparhawk!’ Sephrenia gasped.

‘No, Anakha!’ Xanetia also exclaimed.

‘Bhelliom doesn’t love any of us,’ he said, ‘so we can sort of rely on its neutrality. We need guidance here, and neither Edaemus nor Aphrael is around to provide it – besides which, I don’t know that I’d trust either of them anyway, given the peculiar circumstances here. We want an uncontaminated opinion, so why don’t we just find out what Bhelliom thinks about the situation?’

Chapter 15

‘Blue Rose,’ Sparhawk said in Trollish to the glowing jewel in his hands, ‘I am Anakha. Do you know me?’

Bhelliom’s glow pulsed slightly, and Sparhawk could sense the stone’s stiff reluctance to acknowledge his dominion. Then he thought of something. ‘You and I need to talk,’ he said, speaking in Elenic this time, ‘and I don’t think Khwaj and the others need to be listening. Can you understand me when I speak in this fashion?’

There was the faintest hint of curiosity in the pulse this time.

‘Good. Is there some way you can talk to me? There’s something you and I have to decide. This is too important for me to simply force you to do what I want, because I could be wrong. I know you’re none too fond of me – or of any creature on this particular world – but I think that we may have some common interest this time.’

‘Let me go.’ The voice was a kind of lingering whisper, but it was familiar.

Sparhawk whirled round to stare at Kalten. His boyhood friend’s face was wooden, uncomprehending, and the words came stiffly from his lips. ‘Why hast thou done this thing, Anakha? Why hast thou enslaved me?’ The archaic Elenic could not have come from Kalten, but why had Bhelliom chosen this most unlikely mouth?

Sparhawk carefully readjusted his thoughts, casting them in the profoundly formal language with which the stone had addressed him, and in the instant of that changeover, perception and understanding came. It somehow seemed that knowledge had lain dormant in his mind until unlocked by this peculiar key. Strangely, his understanding had been bound up in language, and once he made the conscious shift from contemporary Elenic with all its casual imprecision to more stately and concise cadences, that previously closed part of his mind opened. ‘It was not I who enslaved thee, Blue Rose. It was thine own inattention that brought thee into such perilous proximity to the red of iron which congealed thee into thy present state, and it was Ghwerig who lifted thee from the earth and contorted thee into this similitude of a flower with his cruel diamond implements.’

A stifled groan came from Kalten’s lips, a groan of pain endured and pain remembered.

‘I am Anakha, Blue Rose,’ Sparhawk continued. ‘I am thy creature. It is thou who hast caused me to be, that I might be the instrument of thy liberation, and I will not betray thy trust in me. I am in some part made of thy thought, and I am therefore thy servant. It is thou who hast enslaved me. Didst thou not set my destiny apart, making me a stranger to the Gods of this world and to all other men? But, though I am thine enslaved servant, I am, nonetheless, still of this world, and I will not have it destroyed nor its people crushed by the vile oppression of mine enemies. I did free thee from the enslavement of Ghwerig, did I not? Is this not in some small measure proof of my fidelity to the task which thou hast lain upon me? And, bound together in common purpose, did we not destroy Azash, who would have chained us both in a slavery harsher than that which now chains us together? For mistake me not, Blue Rose, even as thou art my slave, so am I thine, and once again the chain which binds us together is common purpose, and neither shall be free until that purpose be accomplishèd. Then shalt thou, and then shall I, be free to go our separate ways – I to remain, and thou to go, an it please thee, to continue thine interrupted and endless journey to the farthest star.’

‘Thou hast learned well, Anakha,’ Bhelliom said grudgingly, ‘but thine understanding of thy situation did never obtrude itself upon thy conscious thought where I could perceive it. I had despaired, thinking that I had wrought amiss.’

Sephrenia was staring at them, first at Sparhawk and then at the seemingly comatose Kalten, and her pale, flawless face was filled with something very like chagrin. Xanetia stared also, and her expression was no less chagrined. Sparhawk took a fleeting satisfaction in that. The two were very much alike in their perhaps unconscious assumption of condescending superiority. Sparhawk’s sudden, unexpected awareness of things long concealed in his understanding had shaken that irritating smugness of theirs. For the first time in his life he consciously knew that he was Anakha, and more importantly, he knew the meaning of Anakha in ways neither Sephrenia nor Xanetia could ever begin to comprehend. He had stepped around them to reach Bhelliom, and in joining his thought with Bhelliom’s, he had to some degree shared Bhelliom’s awareness, and that was something neither of them could ever do.

‘Thou hast not wrought amiss, Blue Rose,’ he told the jewel. ‘Thine error lay in casting thy thought in this particular speech. Mine understanding was also cast so, and it did not reveal itself to me until I responded to thy words in kind. Now, let us to work withal. Mine enemies are also thine, forasmuch as they would bind thee even as they would bind me. Neither of us shall be secure in our freedom until they are no more. Are we agreed upon that?’

‘Thy reasoning is sound, Anakha.’

‘Our purpose then is the same?’

‘So it would seem.’

‘We’re making some headway here,’ Sparhawk murmured.

Kalten’s expression became coldly disapproving.

‘Sorry,’ Sparhawk apologized, ‘force of habit, I suppose. Reason doth urge that since our enemies and our purpose are common, and that since our thoughts are linked by this chain of thy forging, we must join our efforts in this cause. In victory shall we be freed. Our enemies and our common purpose shall be no more, and the chain which links us will fall away. I do pledge it to thee that upon the completion of this task will I free thee to continue thy work. My life is surely within thy fist, and thou mayest destroy me if I play thee false.’