As they penetrated further into the swarming oases, which now seemed to cluster as thickly as migrating turtles, the crossed streams of their reflected light mellowed the vermilion Abyss to a golden ambience, as if they entered the hidden atmosphere of a lost world.
The Baugn's woozy, famished spiral descended to a modest planetoid only twice the mass of Flower, and with a shaggier profusion of plants, so that in its constant shiver of titanic weeds it seemed a living thing. The thick green covering this planetoid only had one clearing, a small oval streaked with chalk and boasting a blue flame. The Baugn coasted in so lazily, with such recumbent stillness in its outspread wings, and such a somnolescent stare in its wreath of brown eyes that Leitara would not have been surprised if it died midflight.
"What is that?" asked Elani.
Leitara answered, "they might be letters, though I can't read them from here."
"Yes, those are runes and other script, dear," said Elani. "I meant the light."
Not only had Leitara heard rumors of the Doorways, but her ill-fortuned seed-sister once alluded to the Councilor-Generals' battle plans, strategies which hinged on these portals, and she had an inkling of what lay in the clearing. "While none of us wants to go home, this may mean our deliverance from these toy worlds."
"Do you mean us to immolate ourselves in that blue flame?" Elani's tone fused jeering and incredulity.
The Baugn landed at the clearing's wooded fringe in the shadow of a massive tree, whose overswollen fruit were stretched so taut that they dripped juice. Having lived among the oases for months, and squeezed a number of Abyssal fruit to mush in their haste to be fed, the hungry women now plucked the pendant fruits so delicately that though the enormous pomes shook in their two-handed grip, they did not explode until the first mouthful, when the rind deflated, disgorging the pulpy, juicy pith so rapidly that their cheeks distended accomodating the enormous morsel.
Having wiped their sticky hands on the tall grass, they turned to the flickering flame, which, the nearer they approached, became more gray than blue, as if it sucked color from the surrounding air. Standing over the scrawl on the bare basaltic rock in the flicker of the Doorway, everything seemed different variations of grey, at times darkened by the scudding shadows of the oases above.
"Do you know what this is?" asked Leitara, toeing the chalk scribble, which read Ssyranas, then Julaba.
"Magic," said Elani. "As it's vertical, and the gray spirals inward, I'd say its a door."
"A Doorway," said Leitara. "Though I've never laid eyes on one, not even through the eyes of my past selves, I think this will carry us to an unknown destination. And if I surmise correctly, we might change the destination by this chalk wheel."
"That sounds too easy," said Elani. "Is there some sort of needle to select a city? All I see are stubs of chalk."
After scrounging for any apparatus that might control the Doorway, and finding nothing, the two women sat down to contemplate the gray aperture. When the Baugn flapped into the Abyss, they turned their heads to track it for a moment, then returned to their contemplation.
"We could simply walk through."
"And be burned to a crisp? Though I love you, Leitara, my response is 'you first.'"
"Let's get something to eat."
"That sounds even less satisfying than the unknown risk, as if there are restaurants within a mile of the exit, we could have a better repast than the fruit and creeepy-crawlies of this oasis."
"Not that we have money."
"One thing at a time, Leitara. We have better than money. We have runes." Having produced a velvet bag, Elani shook its clattering contents, pulled the drawstrings, reached in, then tossed three runes to the rock.
"Only three?" asked Leitara quizzically.
"I'm only asking what happens if we enter the Doorway. I'm not planning a battle. Which is a shame, as Huekra the Falcon is not only in first position, but upright, indicating victory in our objective. Going through leads to satisfaction."
"It looks like a Baugn."
"It's an older signification, Leitara. You have a gift for this."
"Your constant flattery is embarrassing. Get on with it."
"Should I continue? Huekra at the outset is very auspicious."
"Please. Foreknowledge is a novelty to me. All my knowing is hindknowledge, the whispers of the dead."
"Very well. The next tile is Uileqro, the seed, in inverted position."
"I can guess what that means. This Doorway goes to Ielnarona, and it's inverted because one of us is not welcome there."
"Very good. That seems likely. The last tile is Lyspera, the spider."
Leitara picked up the tile. No matter which way she turned it, its aspect was an eight-pointed star with eyes between its spokes. "How do you know if this is inverted or upright?"
"Lyspera only has one meaning: the web of coincidences, the fortune which appears divinely inspired. Although its full meaning is only clear in context to other drawn runes, I have a strong guess as to what this signifies."
"What does it mean here?"
"I hesitate to say. The Spider-God does not like to be overjumped, and may change her intent to spite a prediction."
"What about a hint?"
"While our fundamental goals are the same--to leave the Abyss for brighter fields--one of us once had a clearer objective, which she has lost sight of in past weeks."
"No I haven't."
"You've said nothing about it."
"What opportunity have I had to achieve it? If you're insinuatig what I think you're insinuating, I hope you're right, Elani, because why would..."
"Not another word."
"Surely Lyspera isn't actually listening..."
"Her trip webs run everywhere, Leitara. Not another word. We may have said too much already."
"If they go everywhere, who's to say we're not walking along one now?"
"I'd rather not think of that either," said Elani. "Although as the warm-blooded one, I'm the one that should fear being stuck to the Spider-God's web."
"You've touched me with your own hands," accused Leitara. "You know I'm warm-blooded."
"I'm sorry. It's just a joke. Unless touching is on the table now?"
"Right now?"
"Sorry. Wrong time, wrong place."
"More like never, never. Though I've never had a thoughtful lover, I remember enjoying them more than the selfish ones."
"I'm thoughtful!"
"Thoughtful of your pleasures, maybe. Not of my ears."
"That was Khyte. He's so enthusiastic."
"You were noisier than he was."
When Elani's face twisted into indignation, Leitara plugged her ears with her fingers. If it looked juvenile, she was less than two months old, and entitled to a little childish behavior. When Elani droned on as if Leitara--whose vegetal fingers weren't the best ear plugs--was still listening, the Tree-Woman heard part of Elani's defensive speech, such as how she liked to please Khyte, because someone ought to be pleased given her frustration at bottling up her longing for Leitara.
Having turned her head, the better to avoid reading Elani's lips, Leitara waited until the witch was silent, then turned back to a telltale flutter in the gray light of the Doorway. Elani was gone.
Scowling, Leitara waded in the rippling gray, and the oasis dissolved in waves folding in and out of the coruscating nimbus, her last glimpse of the grassy clearing wilting in the leaden mist. Had she imagined Khyte waving from a descending Baugn? His happy-go-lucky smile seemed so unfamiliar that she suspected his image was fused from memory and an uncharacteristic, unacknowledged wish, as if she had conjured a disavowed desire, then clothed it in Khyte. Why would she wish here one who repelled her and drove a wedge between her and her only friend? One who was consort to the schemer who ended her progenitor?
Soon, this lingering contempt was all of Leitara that remained, the oases, the Abyss, and the Five Worlds long having been disintegrated by the cold gray light of the Doorway. Leitara's scorn took on a godlike immensity, being the only created thing in all of existence, and it lorded over the negated horizon, the paused distance, her unseen flesh, and the flickering nothingness. Leitara felt a fatal coldness, as if she fell from the frame portraying the world of the living into a dark gallery of nightmares. Her shudder was the disdain of sleepwalking deities.
Once all sensation was subtracted, the ethereal afterimage of a web tangled her vanishing hands and abstracted consciousness. She no longer walked, but was drawn by the divine silk; she was no longer a person, but a perception awaiting a perceiver.
Then clear bricks traced a ghost world; a wall extending into nothingness diminished to cap the far end of a dark, engulfing hallway. When the weight of reality settled, she staggered, and her hand, propping against the left wall, seemed a ghostly sliver.
On the smooth rock that swallowed her were not only runes and letters inscribed in glowing script, but painted frieze sculptures of a hairless, milky-white people armored with stacked rings, so that a dozen layered circles comprised a greave, and as many as thirty—giving pains to the artist—forged their breastplates. In place of helms, their skulls were beringed with a metal hoop.
As Leitara idly eyed the friezes, she noted that rings seemed the motif of their way of life, with hoops piercing ears, noses, and elbows, and cunning circlets for weapons, held by a curved hilt backing a bright edged, circular blade. In the wall sculptures, the warriors alternately hurled them at their hairy, bestial enemies, or wielded both in close combat.
The painted plates were inset in an ongoing spiral, with the central, oldest icons leading to progressively brighter tiles—though all were nuances of grey so near the Doorway—until the outermost image was not only the brightest, but had not even a smattering of gray dust. In this one, the beringed people welcomed a giant three times their size, who held a pouch embroidered with the Five Worlds, and in his other hand, an orb enclosing a baby, curled-up as if still in the womb.
Elani was running her fingers around the sealed fissures of a coarse slab walling off the room.
"Where are we?" asked Leitara.
"I don't know," admitted Elani. "Be grateful it's not an oasis."
"Why should I be happy? This house is only a little bigger, and without the pleasures of food and fresh air, likely to be our tomb."
"You can step back through the Doorway anytime you wish," sneered Elani. "If, for some reason, you decline to do that, I would die long before you."
"Much as I like the thought of so improving my company, we breathe the same air, Elani."
"Do you really?" Elani grimaced.
"Am I no longer exotic?" Approaching the airtight block, Leitara pressed her fingertips in the hairline grooves, then pushed with her hands, shoved with her shoulder, and propped her back against the slab to grunt and thrust with her legs, but it would not budge.
"I'm not the dryad enthusiast I once was. It's not you, it's me."
"There's still a whole world of dryads to pick from, Elani. Don't burn the rosebush for one strange flower. Speaking of strange, this door is a teaser."
Elani's rancor faded to share Leitara's immersion in the mystery. "Perhaps that's the way to look at it."
"A bush to burn? I might go up in smoke, and you're not incombustible either."
"No, it's a puzzle. What good is an unopenable door, when their king or priest might get sealed in, and be forced to take the long way home through the Doorway?"
"While the Doorway is this chamber's soft spot, is it not impregnable from its surrounding world, assuming it exists on one of the Five Worlds? Perhaps the Doorway is it's only entrance."
Elani gave her a baffled look. "Stupid, how did they build it? In that netherland we crossed? I could barely lay two words together, so there would be little chance of laying bricks or stones in that null space. Speaking of space, what's on the other side of the slab?"
"Is it so unthinkable?" said Leitara.
Elani sighed. "It was a dumb idea, Tree-Woman, but not inconceivable. If it proves true, I'll bite my elbow."
In the stale air of the sealed chamber, embarrassment ruffled Leitara's self-grown garments like a breeze. As the Tree-Woman was between blossoms, her flowery raiment was doubled: sloughed, fading rags draped loosely over a budding garment, which seemed to thicken, waver, and redden under the wood-witch's insult, causing a shudder in the wilted folds of the topmost shroud, which burst into fluttering streamers that settled on the dusty floor. As the tatters rested, the new efflorescence--a scarlet and violet gown, with tulip yellow sleeves--rippled to full fruition in a breathy puff.
Although Leitara detested the wood-witch's repulsive attraction, her ally must believe her intelligent. Moreover, stupidity in Ielnaronan—kirakia--was a monstrous insult, for it meant not only seeds which did not take root, but Tree-Women unfortunate enough to die without returning to embed their memories in the Tree-Mother; its overtones of incompetence and unluckiness went beyond problem-solving, attacking the assiduity, the persistence of a dryad. Not only the persistence of roots, but the persistence of memory; kirakia meant not only unintelligent, but ephemeral, a half-life doomed to fade from rememberance. Kirakia was a label that designated those deemed unworthy of time and existence. Although Elani did not know it, she had told Leitara she was literally good for nothing, that she might as well kill herself, and stop trying to succeed. Despite the vast discrepancies between their languages, Leitara could neither forgive nor forget such a monstrous slight; getting the wood-witch back would prove her tenacity.
Leitara turned her attentions to the pictures. "Perhaps this spiral of images is a narrative?"
"Perhaps." Elani joined Leitara in gazing at the coiled picture. As they perused the pattern side by side, a new, rising anxiety threatened to overflow her rising claustrophobia of the stopped-up chamber; the dryad needed to solve the puzzle before Elani. While they had not refreshed themselves on the oasis, and she was somewhat parched, she wanted this win more than water.
As the colors were equalized by the Doorway's gray glare, she labored to distinguish a repeating shape in the vague images, but did find a rectangle in half the pictures. No doubt the wood-witch noticed this, Leitara reasoned. While most of the rectangles flanked a figure holding a vee in one hand and an inverted vee in the other, two panels bore a difference so slight that it was nearly imperceivable. On the next to the last image, the small figure upraised the sigils it grasped, and two dots marked the rectangle; on the last image, the small figure was pinned under a giant tree's root, and the dots were supplanted by a curlicue.
"Is he making a toast?" said Elani.
"A toast?"
"A benediction at drinking parties."
"I know what a toast is," said Leitara, rolling her eyes. "not that it makes sense. Why spend this much work telling a story—in painted stone—about a party?"
"Then what is it?"
"I'd show you if my idea didn't frighten me."
"If you know, show me. There's nothing threatening in this tomb."
If the alternative was returning to the oases, Leitara would risk landing on this giant's dinner plate. In stooping to scrutinize the gray floor, at first she noted only that it was uniformly smooth, but after dropping to her knees, bracing her hands, and lowering her forehead to the musty stone, she noted a series of minute cracks of a lighter impression than the slab, tracing a rectangle conforming to the dimensions of the obelisk in the spiral. At its four corners were tiny, glassy buttons, two of which were in arm's reach. "Elani—two more are by your feet."
The witch stooped and squinted. "You want me to press these?"
"Please."
Elani knelt, inspected the outline, and scratched her head. "I don't know, Leitara."
"It's this or the oasis."
"Very well." When they pushed the buttons as one, the chamber stirred with a dusty sigh, as if clearing its throat. As the floor hummed, its silt was stirred into a thick, chalky mist, and a pit slid open, admitting an altar, which gyrated back to front as it slowly screwed into place in the floor. Elani stepped back, but Leitara waited until it stood one step high, stepped on, then allowed it to carry her until her head scraped the short ceiling, when she sat cross-legged on the altar. Not two seconds after the table locked in place, the facing slab turned on a hinge, and hung open in the chamber.
"Magnificent. How did you know?"
"The only cause and effect in the spiral is the transformation recorded in the last two pictures."
"You mean the vine," said Elani, tapping the engraved curlicue, "but where's the cause and effect?"
"The seeds." When Leitara indicated the button-sized dots in the penultimate panel, Elani swatted, and the insects scurried in the crevice under the altar.
The witch chortled. "That was lucky. Though your effect was sound, your causes crawled away."
Leitara smiled. To a dryad, lucky was better than smart. If you weren't intellectual, there was nothing to life but being in the right place at the right time, and happening on a lucky break that looked like a bold thrust. One seed lands under a cinder block, and another on a sunny patch; even for a nerveless weed, life was not only growth, but a narrative sum of tough luck and fortune.
Not that Elani's unwitting praise had changed anything; if Leitara wanted the respect of herself or the wood-witch, the insult must be avenged.
Having solved the door, they peered into another mystery: forty Doorways could not have justified the hoary radiance spilling into the hallway. The otherworldly grey seemed to spawn more grey, so that even the cross corridors of the long hallway were flooded with the spectral illumination.
"You seem to know where you're going, Elani."
The wood-witch stepped so brazenly through the eerie catacombs that if she did not know their layout, she had stopped caring. "This isn't the certainty of foreknowledge, it's the certainty of frustration. I had hopes of restaurants, and smell only dust, mold, and damp stone."
Privately, Leitara was so tantalized by the damp scent that when the wood-witch turned her head, the Tree-Woman sucked up a dew trail gracing the ancient stone.
Having meandered through the grey labyrinth for hours, crossed halls they had already walked, and passed the Doorway three times, even the Tree-Woman's glacial patience, shaped by centuries of waiting on her Tree-Mother's will, was tormented, and she said, "even a silent tree knows to bend its roots towards water, Elani."
"What are you saying?"
"A sensible strategy would suit us better."
"You choose then."
"We'll share the honor. Pick left or right."
"Your great plan is to wander randomly? Fine. Left."
"No. There's a method to my madness." At every turn, Leitara took them left, until they reached a dead end, when they returned to the previous juncture, and went right. Leitara turned left every time until they hit a dead end, when they returned to the previous corner and went right.
"This is your plan?" shouted Elani. "This will take all night."
Leitara sighed, and led them to the next intersection. There was no other way. Only by backtracking and reversing the chain could they resolve the entire tree of alternatives. Animal minds always wanted to shortcut things. "I doubt it, Elani. As many corridors approach the main wall, one should lead to a door. Besides, you have nowhere else to be."
"You're going nowhere quickly in my book," griped Elani.
Having backtracked to the fifth-to-the-last intersection, they followed the righthand path to a stairwell of black stone speckled with silver, emerald, and gold. Not only did this staircase seem much newer than the ancient gray catacombs, but the steps were swept clear of the profuse dust which caked the labyrinth.
When Elani darted up two steps at a time, Leitara found her enthusiasm contagious and sprang past her, not slowing down until the glimmering torches. While their tiny lights flickered faintly many flights away, the Tree-Woman invested them with as much terror as scorpions, and Elani soon caught up.
"Do you want the bad news first?" said Leitara.
"Why not?"
"I know which world we're on."
"Why isn't that good news?" When Elani's curious tone held undertones of anxiety, the dryad realized the witch had already guessed their location.
"This is the last place we wanted to be: Hravak. The Human World."
"That's not so bad, Leitara. Though my father was an elf, I was born here. What's the good news?"
"There is none. I was softening the blow."
"What blow?"
"The meat men I smelled two minutes ago could come to blows." As they continued up the stairwell, the torch light so gleamed on the polished, iridescent steps that it seemed they passed dozens of torches, not only two. When footfall pattered, and whispers glided toward them, then receded, Leitara was not fooled, for the insect stink of meat man overpowered the stairwell.
When the next flight opened on a dark landing, Elani gibbered, gnashed, and buzzed, then waved up a pillar of fire shedding a shadowy flicker over a dozen humans gripping glinting steel hoops in each hand. Although Elani was taller than any of them, their armor of welded hoops, which perfectly resembled that depicted in the painted friezes, made them seem taller, and their fearsome skull-white heads sported not only enormous bangles stretching their ears and noses, but grimaces of bloodlust that dipped even steeper, and made imposing masks of their terrifying faces. Behind them, a hooded figure in a saffron yellow robe crossed his arms in sleeves so capacious that the touching hems, the bottom of which nearly grazed the floor, could have concealed knives, swords, goblins, or dragonets.
At his muttered command, the warriors stepped back, clapped their hooped blades into one ring, then sheathed the combined weapon in long leather pouches.
The robed man said, "approach, seed-sister."
Though Leitara's brow and nose wrinkled into a sneer, she measured her cold voice so that it might seem mellow. "Are we so familiar? Then greet my friend likewise. This is her world, not mine."
"The Chegana would not believe me, Tree-Woman; they hate Aflyrians so well that they know this enemy better than themselves."
"I'm only half Alfyrian," said Elani.
"But not a whole human."
"Only the Chegana lay claim to that distinction here," said Leitara.
"Would you have me disillusion their furies and prejudices when they so readily serve my every whim in this savage state?"
"I would," said Elani, "though I admit I am somewhat biased."
The cowled figure tittered like a corpse came to life long enough to howl a joyous cackle. "Oh, you are a delight." When his giggling snarked through an incomprehensible command, all but two of the beringed humans receeded into the dark stairwell with an ascending footfall.
"What did you say?" asked Elani.
"That you are a traitor here to whisper elven secrets in my ear," said the cowled man. "Come whisper." When he crooked his finger, the two Chegana followed, and Leitara and Elani trailed them as well.
"Given that introduction, I'd like not to disappoint, but we're only looking for food."
"You're not likely to find a restaurant or a market in a catacombs."
"We came through the Doorway," said Leitara.
"Oh, really?" The hooded figure stretched the really into a vast puddle of sarcasm. "I guessed your shopping trip took a wrong turn."
"You might say that," Leitara adopted a serious tone in the hope that he might drop his facetious attitude. "Although we rode Baugn-back into the Abyss, the destruction of Mount Juntawni left us unanchored, and the confused world-beasts unable to adapt to new migration paths. After many journeys, and a few weary stays on fertile but desolate oases, we found your Doorway."
"Not that I've seen that oasis, but yes, I'm aware. I'm not the only one using that Doorway, and they must have left it tethered to that planetoid."
"If you traffic through them often, you may have run into my father," said Elani. "Frellyx of Alfyria."
"Of course I know your father, Elani. I also knew your Tree-Mother, Leitara."
The impossibility of a mere human conversing with a Tree-Mother sparked Leitara's blurting realization. "You're Sarin Gelf!"
When the cowled man pushed open a simple wooden door and stepped inside, the Chegana flanked the entrance, and as Leitara and Elani brushed past the impassive warriors, Sarin had already draped his robe, then himself, in the highbacked chair behind a polished black desk. A tall golden spear leaned, point down, against the fireplace, and in the corner, a glass case squared a stone orb into a cube. In the sphere, a floating gel brewed a blue storm like an angry eyeball. As Elani stooped, then peered into the strange artifact's shifting depths, Leitara gawked at the dryad relic behind the desk.
The bald man flaunted his thinness in an extremely spare tunic that revealeed much of his skin, which, though plausibly on the fringe of what was considered human, was of a greenish cast. Not that Leitara needed any confirmation of this person's identity, for on first meeting Sarin, she had already taken heed of his dryadic scent.
"I have heard you sought me, Leitara. I can guess as to why, given that you are now a rootless dryad like me."
"While I am a rootless dryad, I am not like you, as my Tree-Mother was burned by yours, who is not only very much alive, but the despot of our world."
"You are mistaken," said Sarin Gelf. "Inglefras is not my Tree-Mother, and Ielnarona not my world—not anymore."
"For this I have sought you, Sarin."
Sarin Gelf's eyes twinkled. "You assume that I remember how I came to be different. Perhaps my seed-self followed a unique course, and this knowledge cannot be transferred."
"Sarin, if you have no wisdom, my voices will die."
"Those echoes whisper nothing to you; you merely eavesdrop their hallucination of an afterlife. When dreams die we grieve, but not memories. Would it be so bad to lay to rest what need not have lived so long?"
"Who are you to say 'need not,' when you persist?"
"The weed wishes not its fate on the flower. If all plants were weeds, what would its roots strangle?"
"One persistent plant is no weed, Sarin. Weeds are legion, and throng the meadows."
"You offer me your society? Does this include your loyalty?"
"In my short life, few of those I met merited my friendship, but if you teach me to become as you, I will give you anything you ask."
"You would give me so much when you are halfway to your goal?" Sarin Gelf smirked.
Elani said, "watch out, Leitara. This self-proclaimed weed teases you."
"To good end," said Sarin Gelf. "Tree-Woman, you have only to dream, and you will have arrived."
"Why waste your breath on riddles?"
"Tree-Women have little need of sleep when they advance the ongoing dream of their Tree-Mothers, as they neither sow nor reap dreams of their own. When a Tree-Woman dares dream their own dreams, and their true selves flower, they are snipped from their Tree-Mother. Whether it was distance from Ielnarona or Inglefras that changed me, being a castaway helps make this possible. Have you had no temptation to sink into a profound sleep, Tree-Woman?"
"Having flowered only weeks ago, I am nothing but desire, and those deep feelings were the profound frustration of my desperate journey. If I seem rational, it is only that centuries of memory mentor my temptations."
"These cares inhibited you from your full inheritance, Tree-Woman." Leitara's scowl must have been scrawled deep in her face, for Sarin Gelf continued. "I understand if you do not believe me. It also seemed alien to me. Inglefras, like your Tree-Mother, seeded her memories and needs in us, so we would do no sowing of our own. You think of yourself as a flower, but we are seeds that have not yet come to fruition. Although all Tree-Women are destined for Tree-Mothers, the Tree-Mothers of Ielnarona mislead their offspring to death or absorption."
"Do you not hope to work your will through me?"
"Should I not, when you have offered your allegiance? Be not suspicious of my motives, be certain, for I do have an agenda of my own."
"Which is?"
"More or less innocent—I only wish companionship, my own society of dryads."
"Which I have offered."
"You use that pronoun naively, Tree-Woman. Although your 'I' was uprooted by my antecedent—an 'I' the I myself has spurned—when you look at me, you see the splinter of the greater entity."
"Then you still serve Inglefras?" Wary, Leitara backed into Elani, her meat body tensed and warmed, though the dryad could not be certain if fear or unrequited desire with the wood-witch.
"If rebellion is a service, I will always serve her; but if you mean, 'is Inglefras my Tree-Mother,' then my heart is my own. From no other center can an iconoclast take root."
"Is this a metaphor, Sarin Gelf?"
Sarin Gelf gave her a brief, unsmiling nod. "Come with me."
"How far?" said Elani. "I am very weary."
"Be that as it may, there are things here I would trust neither to dryad nor human, nor whatever you are, changeling."
"Could I not rest here while you talk? I will touch nothing."
"You may sit in the hall, where my guards can watch over you, or come with us, and understand your obsession." When his glance flicked toward Leitara, the Tree-Woman pretended not to notice.
"Am I so transparent?" said Elani.
"Unlike your haunted mind, my own memories are a century old, and my eyes have seen enough to be accounted wise. Moreover, I have spies in Drydana and Cuvaernei. Had spies," he added absent-mindedly. "Perhaps one after the cataclysm."
Leitara said, "it is easier if you come with us, Elani."
"If you don't mind carrying me." When the wood-witch shrugged, she was so exhausted that her sagging shoulders couldn't recover their regal baring, and she settled into a morose slump against the wall. "And we have not eaten. That isn't much to you, but it's a great deal to me."
"There will be much to feast on later, daughter of two worlds--not only with your appetite, but with your eyes. Come." The women followed Sarin into the hall, where he muttered to the Chegana. One turned down the shadowy hall, while the other brought up their rear as the old dryad led them to another stairwell, where vines burrowed in the earthy mortar between stones had entwined spiral flights of stairs. The overgrowth merged so delicately with the disintegrating structure to give it new strength that here a step was a sturdy stem, and there a spongy stone reinforced by foliage that had threaded the ancient, porous stair. The arrival of this viny visitor had given new strength to the failing stairway.
As they ascended, the airs seemed to mingle: the cool, sterile breeze from the barren catacombs wafted the scent of vines and the greenery of the human world. While she had savored the scents separately, together they swam in an undercurrent of threat, neither the purity of death nor life, but death burgeoning in life, and life devouring the dead as its shadowed futures swelled into the brightness of day.
The stairs ascended into a jungly tree canopy leaning over chirruping cicadas and fruit bats screeching towards syrupy trunks that were gummy with resinous sap. The shadowy air of this hot, concealed timberland glittered with thick dust shaken by the rustling canopy to blight its trees and shrubs.
While the flow of black stone stairs was interrupted, their climb continued up wooden stairs spiraling a smooth, ivory bole to an enormous branch jutting towards another tree of odd dimensions. On first glance, it resembled a squatting giant with knotty elbows rested on its knees, a head turfy with moss, and a copious green leafage streaming over its gaunt face, and this first impression was supported when its eyelids rustled open, revealing vast whites, which, though utterly void of pupils, nonetheless took interest in the three tiny figures ascending to be surveyed by its stolid face. That face bore a marked resemblance to Sarin Gelf, despite the obvious contrast between the beardless, bald visage of the old dryad, and the green covering the becalmed giant.
"Why does it look like you, Sarin?" Leitara asked in trepidation.
"This is you, isn't it?" said Elani. "A novel solution, but I prefer mine."
"If you believe yourself the same woman, you are a fool; you were not renewed but erased, wizard. If you can only live on by effacing your history, eternity will never be yours. Having seized the mantle of change, life and death are mine."
"How is this you, Sarin?" Leitara approached the gigantic tree fearlessly, for though its eyelids moved, the rest had rooted and hardened to the spot, more torso and limbs than trunk and branches, like a transitional stage between Tree-Mother and Tree-Woman. "You are the seed of Inglefras."
"No," he laughed. "That is the seed of Inglefras. Or it was, as having worshipped itself for so long, it became its own god. I am the seed of Sarin Gelf."
Despite her rootless birth, and her castoff life in the oases of the Abyss, Leitara's first reaction was to echo her selves' whispered accusations of horror, for her hall of memory echoed that this was not only taboo, but anathema, and they wished fire on this seed of evil. With an effort, she stifled her revulsion, for this change was her only hope for the persistence of her memory. She must become the horror or die. Continuity was the great dryad value, the center of dryad morality, for mere existence was only the common ghost that possessed material bodies for a time and a space, only to suffer, hunger, and die. As only in an unbroken continuity of memory could one be said to live truly and with meaning, the dryads sought to perpetuate not only personality, but this wakeful rememberance, the unending, deathless dream of the Tree-Mothers. If Sarin Gelf had perverted this ambition, he had also achieved it.
"What happens to me, Sarin? Will I remember?"
"You will remember yourself."
"Stop selling it, Sarin. Give me an answer."
"You will remember yourself—only yourself."
Leitara gasped, then drew back from the evil seed. This Sarin Gelf was spawned in an act of soul-murder, when the arboreal giant's growth uprooted the whispers of his hall of memory. Though he had extirpated her hated enemy Inglefras in this moment of self-creation, she could not help shrinking from his transgressive indifference.
"Don't get me wrong, Tree-Woman. Though your plurality of being will die, you will remember their actions as if you lived only one centuries-long life. You needn't look at me like that. It was not only his choice"—Sarin pointed to the transforming giant—"but it is our natural life cycle. Before we dryads began naming things and building our culture, many Tree-Women were happy to sacrifice themselves to their Tree-Mother, while others were cultivated as replacements and additions to the growing crop of Tree-Mothers. When Ielnarona swarmed with dryads, the Tree-Mothers craved a monopoly on life and death, and concealed that dark truth to disallow any new Tree-Mothers to share their power."
"If it is as you say, perhaps they are right in doing so? They are older and wiser—perhaps they know the limitations of their ability to mother our world."
"Where is your companion, Tree-Woman?"
Elani was gone. Engrossed by Sarin Gelf's revelation, Leitara had not noticed when the witch skulked away. "I do not know. Is this not more important? I am about to commit to a strange way of life."
"Cursed Tree-Woman! Whatever your intentions, you are the witch's tool, here to distract me." Dropping back to the wooden stairs, then to the black steps leading to the catacombs, Sarin disappeared from sight.
Although she was concerned for Elani, Leitara could not take her eyes off of the abomination. "Can you hear me?"
When the arboreal giant's eyelids blinked, its head shifted to the smallest degree, rustling its leafage.
"Can you talk?"
At this the titanic tree—once the true Sarin Gelf, she reminded herself—could only stare at Leitara.
"Is your seed overzealous in advancing your cause?"
While the staring continued, its focus seemed to shift. When it abruptly closed its eyes, Leitara sighed. What a stupid question to ask, when she could only expect a head wiggle and a blink in response.
With time, the new dryad would become as quiescent as the Tree-Women of Ielnarona. Would it be better, she wondered, to live on immobile, and waiting for the periodic return of seed-pawns to expand her unending dreaming with new knowledge and memories, or was it better to live a short, sleepless life as she wished?
If Elani betrayed them, Sarin would give Leitara little time to mull it over, and it was not an easy decision. If he believed her already committed, that was before she found out he was an abomination. If she followed his path, she might be glad for the companionship of a fellow abomination, but if she repudiated it now, he would understand. While he might not like her for it, he could remember being a Tree-Woman, and having the same prejudices she once did.
When she turned to follow Sarin Gelf, their escorts had blocked the end of the gigantic branch bridging to the spiral stair. Though one held up an empty hand politely, his other hand clutched his keen-edged rings. When two more Chegana came to join the barricade, her first thought was to hurl them by their lip-rings, and as she feinted forward in a peeved, half-hearted attempt to ply this malicious idea, the others unsheathed their hoops, unmerged the metal circles, and dropped into their unnverving two-fisted fighting stance.
"Move," she commanded, but they only advanced. Although the blight oozed black on the unwholesome vines, she trusted them more than the two-fisted warriors, whose grim smiles, no doubt delighted with the prospect of shedding her blood, seemed a third bright edge. Gripping a flimsy vine, she stepped into space, slid in tangled greenery, then dashed toward the catacomb stairwell, where a dozen Chegana emerged, followed by the Sarin seed.
"Seize her."
When the four in the lead clutched her arms, a fifth stripped her of the Inamu sword.
"What hospitality is this? Would you force me to join your dark dream?"
"Your half-human friend stole my own dearly acquired hybrid--whether to please her father or my mother, I don't know." The Sarin seed chuckled nervously.
"It wasn't at my bidding," Leitara's voice rose hot and fierce. "And if Elani was a villain, I did not know it. While that lazy witch has power, she's content to beg, and wait on her friends to work her will." The more she struggled in the Cheganas' grasp, the tighter they held her fast.
As if he had not heard, Seed-Sarin continued: "She escaped through the Doorway to who knows where. Our fecund worlds not only breed too many lives, they multiply relations and such subtle ties, that I am connected, one way or another, with these teeming, meaningless lives." Turning to Leitara, he added, "laziness feeds schemes and ambitions, and you were drawn into this preconceived web."
"What web? The circumstances of my birth from the ashes of my death? The unfolding of my few months of life? How could she reach so far, when despite my received memory and rehearsed wisdom, I am only a motherless child."
"Do not dismiss the wisdom of your many lives. While humans are nothing without their illusions, you are more than the sum of your memories. They merge into a greater soul that you have yet to get to know."
"Is that my fate, Sarin Gelf?"
"Although my design has not changed, I must hasten your choice, for I am so shaken by your choice of acquaintances that I know not whether to treat you as foe or friend."
"It isn't so simple, Sarin Gelf. While I once thirsted for your insight, I now muster the courage to follow through with my decision, which you complicate in requiring that I join your grove. What if I prefer a lonelier immortality? Or what if I prefer to lurk for centuries, as you did, in the cities of Hravak and Nahure?"
"I see. You want the secret of prolonging one seed life, not of advancing into life everlasting."
"Just as your progenitor lived freely and independently for a century before becoming a parent dryad. Should I be denied that chance?"
"Why would you want this lonely life?"
"As my choice of enemies and friends has thus far been unlucky, I fear becoming so familiar with the famous Sarin Gelf. And how long before my thoughts could walk the worlds?"
"While those many Leitaras will feel the breeze and warm sun on their uplifted faces, your feet would root here, and breathing, the pulse of sap, and dreaming will be so unhurried that you will never know the passion of life's blood, nor the desires that stirred your endless dreams, ever again. Trapped in soil, you will beckon the return of your unconscious desires, your Tree-Women, to be enfolded within your roots and branches, and from their deaths eke out your immortal meanings."
"You changed your mind! You would no longer share your power."
"There is nothing I want more."
"Then why dissuade me?"
"Is it so repulsive, when I describe the life of your lamented Tree-Mother? You'd attain your full potential as a seed, a potential which the Tree-Mothers of Ielnarona have denied their offshoots for millenia. If your inborn nature seems unnatural, their rotted husks have succeeded in choking your roots."
Although her face twisted as his persuasion rooted in her heart, Leitara knew this to be true. "You know there is only one way for me. My protests only preserve the illusion of choice. If I do not continue, I am no dryad."
"Choice is a human consolation, Leitara. Alternatives are a deadly illusion. Dryads only will or will not, live or live not, however much we allow our fancies to flourish." After his smiling nod, the Chegana released her, and she followed him sullenly as he wended around the arboreal giant.
While huge from the front, the squatting figure seemed even more massive as they circled him; especially its side view, a jungle of blighted branches and fronds.
"Can we flourish in this soil?"
"Ages ago—before the oldest memory of the wisest dryad—the Five Worlds survived a cataclysm. As the Human World grapples this shadowy winter, your branches may suffer, but you will drink the dull light trickling through ashy clouds, and siphon the cold reservoir that runs deep and irrigates Chegana gardens. If your roots are strong, they will sustain your lives until the blight is behind us."
"How many other dryads could you turn, Sarin, with only diseased grounds to offer your followers?"
"Inglefras is on the verge of something that will turn their heads for us."
In the clearing behind the arboreal giant, remnants of leaves and roots mulched the coarsely plowed ground.
"You say it is only dreaming?"
"Such is death," said Sarin Gelf. "On the verge of your transformation, I will not lie, Leitara. While your dream will not end, and you will not mark the moment of transition between your old life and your new life, you will die. From this ending, you will be reborn."
"You're being glib. I doubt it is so sudden a change."
"That's a curious thing to say, when I have arrived, and you remain on the other side."
"When I close my eyes, will they ever open again? In this very grove, your Tree-Father blinked less than an hour ago.
"If we judge by our Tree-Mothers, quiescent in their groves, this will one day cease. Do you have second thoughts?"
"No, Sarin. Only last thoughts."
"You may not succeed at first. Your Tree-Mother instilled such an aversion in your hall of memories that their clamoring whispers may distract you from the greater good. Perhaps those nerveless voices know your new life means their oblivion."
"Although I hear the concern of my past selves, they do not fear death, having already seen it. Our situation is different, Sarin. My selves have already seen their end in the cremation of our Tree-Mother. Like me, they know this is the only way."
"Then this is goodbye."
"Goodbye, Sarin."
When Leitara closed her eyes, the roots went out, not only from her feet and fingers, but her mind, stretching through desire into memory, and from there into murdered possibilities, and daydreams of unlived days: unloved Elani, unkissed Khyte, unforgotten but poorly remembered Kuruk, unwished but heartfelt memories of her cozy oasis, Flower, where she was forlorn and anxious, but oddly content.
In Leitara's hushed hall of memory, her dormant selves held hands waiting for the end, but her future selves had many objections, and being infinite ghosts with no knowledge of what was possible, they not only greatly outnumbered the past lives, but overturned their contemplations of the end, then swarmed Leitara's death-wish and the fruition that laid beyond it. If they do not know you, she told her selves past and potential, they will remember me, and we will number so many after our fall that our good fortunes will rise again.
When she fell asleep mid-breath, it was as if she only closed a thin door, and the horde scrambled and screamed against the veneer, shouting "wake up! live!" She wrapped herself numbly in unconsciousness, burrowed in the unwelcoming surface of her distraught mind, then soothed the voices in the violent but forgiving soil of Hravak. As her strained sleep continued, it was less that she was unconscious than more and more estranged from her consciousness, and seeing it for the husk it was, so swelled a bold desire to grow anew from the kindling of this former being. No sooner was this desire felt than it flourished, and Leitara faded in the sudden dissolve.
The Tree-Mother felt the dead seed for some time, as if it was an irritant, the grain of sand from which her pearlescent dream expanded. The bitter seed often had its way, unraveling thoughts of a taller tree, with flaming fruits; regretful impressions and carnal longing for the repulsive creatures it had so poorly loved, that it could only enflesh them in fantasies so meaty they seemed not real, but a bruised, bleeding unreal. This unwanted guest, this ghost seed, lingered overlong, its excitement whetted by the knowledge that it birthed the first Tree-Women in milleniae; that it had borne not reinforcements for a dollhouse world, the empty-headed duplicates burgeoned from the Tree-Mothers of Ielnarona, but a crop of dryads fertilized by her companion, each different in its own way.
While she tried to mitigate the callous, loveless heart of the ghost seed, when it expired at last, she felt its spite slither into the clutch of seeds.