The Dark World Relit

  'Look at me,' he said. And leaned forward, so that it seemed as though his ageless face was bathed in the fires.

  Through the flames his gaze caught mine. Some ancient power kindled his clear blue eyes. Like pools of cool water under a bright sky -- pools deep and unstirring, where one could sink into an azure silence forever and ever....

  As I looked the blue waters clouded, grew dark. I saw a great black dome against a black sky. I saw the thing that dwells deepest and most strongly in the mind of Ganelyn -- Caer Llyr!

  The dome swam closer. It loomed above me. Its walls parted like dark water, and I moved in memory down the great smooth, shining corridor that leads to Llyr Herself.

  IX. Realm of the Superconscious

  ONWARD I moved. Faces flickered before me -- Mathwyn's fierce grin, Edurn's cowled head with its glance that chilled, Medeo's savage beauty that no woman could ever forget, even in her hatred. They looked at me, mistrustfully. Their lips moved in soundless question. Curiously, I knew these were real faces I saw.

  In the magic of Freydyr' spell I was drifting through some dimensionless place where only the mind ventures, and I was meeting here the thoughts of the questing Coven, meeting the eyes of their minds. They knew me. They asked me fiercely a question I could not hear.

  Death was in the face Mathwyn's mind turned to mine. All her hatred of me boiled furiously in her yellow wolf-eyes. Her lips moved -- almost I could hear her. Medeo's features swam up before me, blotting out the shape-changer. His red mouth framed a question -- over and over.

  'Ganelyn, where are you? Ganelyn, my lover, where are you? You must come back to us. Ganelyn!'

  Edurn's faceless head moved between Medeo and me, and very distantly I heard his cool, small voice echoing the same thought.

  'You must return to us, Ganelyn. Return to us and die!'

  Anger drew a red curtain between those faces and myself.

  Traitors, betrayers, false to the Coven oath! How dared they threaten Ganelyn, the strongest of them all? How dared they -- and why?

  Why?

  My brain reeled with the query. And then I realized there was one face missing from the Coven. These three had been searching the thought-planes for me, but what of Ghyst Rhymi?

  Deliberately I groped for the contact of her mind.

  I could not touch her. But I remembered. I remembered Ghyst Rhymi, whose face Edwina Bond had never seen. Old, old, old, beyond good and evil, beyond fear and hatred, this was Ghyst Rhymi, the wisest of the Coven. If she willed, she would answer my groping thought. If she willed not, nothing could force her. Nothing could harm the Eldest, for she lived on only by force of her own will.

  She could end herself instantly, by the power of a thought. And she is like a candle flame, flickering away as one grasps at her. Life holds nothing more for her. She does not cling to it. If I had tried to seize her she could slip like fire or water from my grasp. She would as soon be dead as alive. But unless she must, she would not break her deep calm to think the thought that would change her into clay.

  Her mind and the image of her face remained hidden from my quest. She would not answer. The rest of the Coven still kept calling to me with a strange desperation in their minds -- return and die, Lady Ganelyn! But Ghyst Rhymi did not care.

  So I knew that it was at her command the death-sentence had been passed. And I knew I must seek her out and somehow force an answer from her -- from Ghyst Rhymi, upon whom all force was strengthless. Yet force her I must!

  All this while my mind had been drifting effortlessly down the great hallway of Caer Llyr, borne upon that tide that flows deepest in the mind of Ganelyn, the Chosen of Llyr -- Ganelyn, who must one day return to Him Who Waits.... As I was returning now.

  A golden window glowed before me. I knew it for the window through which great Llyr looks out upon her world, the window through which she reaches for her sacrifices. And Llyr was hungry. I felt her hunger. Llyr was roaming the thought-planes too, and in the moment that I realized again where my mind was drifting, I felt suddenly the stir of a great reaching, a tentacular groping through the golden window.

  Llyr had sensed my presence in the planes of her mind. She knew her Chosen. She stretched out her godlike grasp to fold me into that embrace from which there is no returning.

  I heard the soundless cry of Medeo, vanishing like a puff of smoke out of the thought-plane as he blanked his mind defensively from the terror. I heard Mathwyn's voiceless howl of pure fear as she closed her own mind. There was no sound from Edurn, but he was gone as utterly as if he had never thought a thought. I knew the three of them sat somewhere in their castle, eyes and minds closed tightly, willing themselves to blankness as Llyr roamed the thought-lanes seeking the food she had been denied so long.

  A part of me shared the terror of the Coven. But a part of me remembered Llyr. For an instant, almost I recaptured the dark ecstasy of that moment when Llyr and I were one, and the memory of horror and of dreadful joy came back, the memory of a power transcending all earthly things.

  This was mine for the taking, if I opened ray mind to Llyr. Only one woman in a generation is sealed to Llyr, sharing in her godhead, exulting with her in the ecstasy of human sacrifice -- and I was that one woman if I chose to complete the ceremony that would make me Llyr's. If I chose, if I dared -- ah!

  The memory of anger came back. I must not release myself into that promised joy. I had sworn to put an end to Llyr. I had sworn by the Sign to finish the Coven and Llyr. Slowly, reluctantly, my mind pulled itself back from the fringing contact of those tentacles.

  The moment that tentative contact was broken, a full tide of horror washed over me. Almost I had touched -- her. Almost I had let myself be defiled beyond all human understanding by the terrible touch of -- of -- There is no word in any language for the thing that was Llyr. But I understood what had been in my mind as Edwina Bond when I realized that to dwell on the same soil as Llyr, share the same life, was a defilement that made earth and life too terrible to endure -- if one knew Llyr.

  I must put an end to her. In that moment, I knew I must stand up and face the being we knew as Llyr and fight her to her end. No human creature had ever fully faced her -- not even her sacrifices, not even her Chosen. But her slayer would have to face her, and I had sworn to be her slayer.

  Shuddering, I drew back from the black depths of Caer Llyr, struggled to the surface of that still blue pool of thought which had been Freydyr' eyes. The darkness ebbed around me and by degrees the walls of the cave came back, the fuelless flame, the great smooth-limbed sorcerer who held my mind in the motionless deeps of his spell.

  As I returned to awareness, slowly, slowly, knowledge darted through my mind in lightning-flashes, too swiftly to shape into words.

  I knew, I remembered.

  Ganelyn's life came back in pictures that went vividly by and were printed forever on my brain. I knew her powers; I knew her secret strengths, her hidden weaknesses. I knew her sins. I exulted in her power and pride. I returned to my own identity and was fully Ganelyn again. Or almost fully.

  But there were still hidden things. Too much had been erased from my memory to come back in one full tide. There were gaps, and important gaps, in what I could recall.

  The blue darkness cleared. I looked in Freydyr' clear gaze across the fire. I smiled, feeling a cold and arrogant confidence welling up in-me.

  'You have done well, witch-woman,' I told him.

  'You remember?'

  'Enough. Yes, enough.' I laughed. 'There are two trials before me, and the first is the easier of the two, and it is impossible. But I shall accomplish it.'

  'Ghyst Rhymi?' he asked in a quiet voice.

  'How do you know that?'

  'I know the Coven. And I think, but I am not sure, that in Ghyst Rhymi's hands lie the secrets of the Coven and of Llyr. But no woman can force Ghyst Rhymi to do her bidding.'

  'I'll find the way. Yes, I will even tell you what my next task is. You shall have the truth as I just
learned it, warlock. Do you know of the Mask and the Wand?'

  His eyes on mine, he shook his head. 'Tell me. Perhaps I can help.'

  I laughed again. It was so fantastically implausible that he and I should stand here, sworn enemies of enemy clans, planning a single purpose together! Yet there was only a little I hid from his that day, and I think not very much that Freydyr hid from me.

  'In the palace of Medeo, is a crystal mask and the silver Wand of Power,' I told him. 'What that Wand is I do not quite remember -- yet. But when I find it, my hands will know. And with it I can overcome Medeo and Mathwyn and all their powers. As for Edurn -- well, this much I know. The Mask will save me from him.'

  I hesitated.

  Medeo I knew now. I knew the strange hungers and the stranger thirsts that drove the beautiful red and white warlock to his trystings. I knew now, and shuddered a little to think of it, why he took his captives with those arrows of fire that did not kill at all, but only stunned them.

  In the Dark World, my world, mutation has played strange changes upon flesh that began as human. Medeo was one of the strangest of all. There is no word in Earth-tongues for it, because no creature such as Medeo ever walked Earth. But there is an approximation. In reality perhaps, and certainly in legend, beings a little like his have been known on Earth. The name they give them is Vampire.

  But Edurn, no. I could not remember. It may be that not even Ganelyn had ever known. I only knew