"Where have you been?"
"Places, that's all. This sounds dramatic, but I'm being followed. A har on a black horse. How symbolic! My trials are not yet over, I'm afraid. There are still ghosts snapping at my heels. They battle for my soul, you know. Succoring Terzian on his deathbed is a karmic point to me, I think." He laughed again, his face lighting up as it always did. A summer smile.
"No-one will ever have your soul," I said. "Cal, about Pellaz. He is alive, you know."
There was a moment's silence. His face shivered briefly. "Yes," he said, "I know, Swift." He pulled a forlorn face and shrugged. He would say no more. "I'll have to say goodbye now, Swift."
"I can't just let you go like this. Stay a while, it can't hurt, there's so much—"
"No! You have to let me go. It's out of our hands. Goodbye."
He opened the door, walked inside, into the darkness, closed it. I stood there for a moment or two, wondering. All was silence. Outside, the wind had dropped.
In the morning, I learned that my father was dead. The house was full of peace. When I looked at the body, I could see tranquility in that lifeless face. A faint smile. My father's spirit was free now. He had another chance.
I took Cobweb and Seel to the long gallery and told them about a dream I'd had the night before about Cal coming back to Forever. I half suspected that Cobweb was responsible, for he was a master of visualization, but his surprise was genuine enough.
"A dream, Swift?" he said.
"It may have been," I answered.
We left it at that. Cobweb covered all the mirrors in the house and had someone stop the clocks. He was serene. We burned Terzian's body on a great pyre in the fields beyond Galhea and the ashes were scattered to the four winds. With their scattering, we all knew that the last of the Varrs had perished. The name was only a dark memory.
Most days, I like to walk in the garden. I can think there. In the evening, the summerhouse calls me and I go to it, although it is barely recognizable now. Ivy has covered it and the lily bowl is choked forever. It is there that I can talk to you best, Cal. For sometimes, I am sure that you are near. It is where I can tell you to come back to us, that hate is banished for good from our home and even you could not bring it back in.
In the autumn, Seel and I are going back to Immanion, but it won't be for long. We shall be coming back for Festival and Ashmael will be with us. Seel says it is because Cobweb has bewitched him and I'm sure you can understand that! It will be a good Festival, Cal. We will remember, but not with sadness. I want you to know that whatever evil you think is inside you (and I do know that you think that), it is only part of the essential harmony of the world; the world needs you. Without pain, there cannot be pleasure, without darkness, light cannot thrive. We need contrast, and the lone wolves who stalk the earth, like yourself, they bring perspective and objectivity into our lives. We need you, Cal, all of us. Angel or devil, you hold the balance. You begin the tales, we end them. It is time that you began your own. Every day, I look at Tyson and see your eyes. One day, he will ask me about you, for you are in his heart. The hostling who did not care. That is something you must attend to, for your son is innocent and your trials are not his.
I often wonder if you and Pell are together again, if you have met, even. Would that be the prize or the punishment? Perhaps, when I go to Imman-ion, I shall find out. When I get back.... Remember, Cal, Cobweb and the harlings will be almost alone in Forever while Seel and I are away. That is the time. I am counting on it. We shall come back through the snow and the yellow lights of Forever will be shining out to greet us. The doors will be flung wide open and the house inside will be alive with celebration. We shall walk into the hall and I shall see you there. I think you'll smile in that lopsided way you have and stand before me and say, "You see, I couldn't keep away. I've come home."
It isn't long, Cal. Listen to me. The bewitchments of love and hate are perhaps the strongest magics in the world. Magic called you to us in the beginning, I am sure of it. I called your name in a dream. Now I'm calling you again. Listen in the shadows; I'm whistling in the dark.
The Fulfilments of Fate and Desire
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
PROLOGUE
One day, a time will come when all that we are pioneering, praying (preying?), cultivating, is history. The past. It shall be analyzed; a subject for earnest scholars to pore over and dissect. Trivial events, accidents, coincidences, shall be imbued with great meaning. I can already hear the voices raised, confident they know it all. Oh yes, I can see it now; our far descendants, all gathered together, clothed in their perfect flesh. One shall say; "The first Wraeththu, of course, were little other than barbarians, hectic in their search for truth and so far from it, eh? All they could grasp at was their sexuality. What a shock it must have been! They were human to start with, after all. What a shock to find they were half-female after centuries of despising that sex." Ha, ha, ha. They will all laugh together smugly. Then another bright spark, perhaps younger or more controversial in his views, might venture; "But surely the reason they couldn't see the truth was because they were so shrouded in self-deception. Knowledge was so close, and yet . . . they couldn't see it through the shroud. How sad." Here, I feel, one of the older hara, stern-faced, will deliver a subtle reprimand.
"The first Wraeththu were without discipline, too outspoken perhaps, before considering what, in fact, they were really saying." This will be said with relish and the younger har will feel humiliated. He may look down abashed, he may not. But whatever, those sentiments may well be right, and half of me is inclined to hope so. If those highly advanced hara never do come to exist, if our race remains static or even slips backwards to the ways of men, then the struggle really was all for nothing. A cosmic joke. The biggest case of self-delusion in the history of the planet—and there have been many, let's face it. We were just mutants, freaks; end of story. Not saviors, not ultra-men, not sons of angels or deities—just accidents. The gods weren't looking; it just happened. And yes I have to admit it, the other half of me is lying back, sipping good liquor, with its feet up, thinking; "Yeah, fuck the heavy stuff. Let it all be—just this!" I don't think this earth should ever countenance a future scorn for what we are—what I am—for, after all, our descendants can never be here, now. They will never know us as we are or why we do things. The bloody times, the horror, will just be history to them, words on a page, so how will they dare to judge? Very easily, I should imagine. Will it ever be said that, in spite of everything, we all lived to the best of our ability? If life is a battle, then my inner scars are medals for valor, for swiftness, for courage, for passion. Evil is the dark-haired brother of Good; they walk hand in hand—always. And by the way, whatever it sounds like, that is not an excuse . . .
CHAPTER ONE
Fallsend: Its Mud Patch
"The burnt out end of smoky days ..."
—T. S. Eliot, Preludes
The years were numbered ai-cara from the time when Pellaz came to power in Immanion. Sorry, that should o
f course read, Pellaz-Har-Aralis, as lesser beings must refer to him. I am a lesser being, best forgotten, best reviled. I have no part in the future of kings. I lost my sense of chivalry an age ago. Thank God! This is my story and perhaps it will be the truth, for I suspect that there will be an awful lot of untruth spoken about me. I realize it's unlikely anyone will ever read it; more likely that it will lie forever in some unhallowed spot, deep in the earth, clasped to my shriveled breast. Who knows? (Who cares?) Will someone bury me when I die? Are demons allowed that privilege? This began as a diary but lost its way. This begun as a confession and developed a life of its own. This is me.
I shall start in the middle of the story. That is a bad place to start, and because of that, the best one for me. Here goes.
And it came to pass, gentle reader, that I found myself sliding down the black, mud channel they call a road, into Fallsend, a town of reputation but not repute, in the tail end of the year ai-cara 27. Time to rest. Time to reflect. Time to get rat-arsed drunk and stop dissecting the past in my head. Some hope. My first impression of Fallsend was simply to register it as a cold town in a cold country where it always seemed to be late autumn. Never winter. This more or less reflected my rather downhearted mood at the time, and later had to be revised when it started snowing. Fallsend never looks pretty. It's built on the side of a hill and the floor of a valley the shape of a teacup. After being incarcerated here for a few weeks it begins to feel roughly the same size as well. The name that the country used to have around here has fallen into disuse. Everyone forgot it. Now, it's a northerly, ill-policed fragment of Almagabra known as Thaine. Nowadays, hara (nice ones) don't want to stay here long enough to think about where they are—if they have any sense. I've never had any sense. Presumably, that's why I'm here. That and the fact I wandered into the place without finery or finance and my horse was about to die on me, or more accurately, beneath me. OK, I'll look on the bright side. I'd managed at long last to shake off the shadow that had been following me to this godforsaken place, but that's about as bright as it's going to get for a while, my friend.
Fallsend is damp and made a little of stone, but mostly of wood, which rots at a merry pace. There are lots of steps, most of them likely to collapse beneath the feet of the unwarily drunken. Planks across the puddles which are collared with scum and the occasional dead creature. Little color. It's depressing. Just about every Wraeththu criminal, lunatic or honest-to-goodness misfit has passed through this little town, heading east to Jaddayoth. Today, from where I'm sitting, it looks like most of them stayed here. Uptown, they call it Glitter, it will convince nobody. Up here, those sweet souls who make this shit-hole pay have high, gothic houses and you can buy almost anything here. Drugs to make you sane. Drugs to make you insane. Waters of forgetfulness, powders of remembrance. They have white-skinned, moon-eyed harlings of the Colurastes tribe up here somewhere, bought and sold like meat, kept in the dark. Two spinners buys you one as a whore for a night in the shadows. I heard some of them have their tongues cut out so they'll never scream. We are the race of peaceful equality, remember.
Now for the social comment. I suppose it's necessary, though tiring when you've heard it and thought it a thousand times. Back west, children, the supremely superior tribe of Gelaming have scoured the home country of evil, or so I've heard. As a matter of fact, it was still pretty suspect when I was last there, but I admit that was some time ago. Things might have changed. Everything changes on the surface. (But does it change inside? Can it?) The Gelaming also control the south-western part of this continent as well, where it's sunny all the time, I suppose. I've worked out they swept all their rubbish east and it ended up here. Someone built a town on it. Fallsend. Not a place you'd want to die in.
I'd had to leave Morass, a settlement some ten miles west of Fallsend pretty quickly. Painful as it is to recall, I'd got involved in some sordid argument concerning someone's virgin son, which had all got unpleasantly out of hand. I shine at quick getaways, but as I was drunk, I don't remember too much about it. I lie a lot and sometimes get found out when I'm drunk. After forcing my ailing mount over several miles of boggy ground, I was actually relieved to catch sight of the glum pall of smoke that always hangs over Fallsend. Of course, I'd heard about the place. Every town I'd passed through was full of horror stories about it. What could happen to the unwary traveler there; rumors of abduction, slavery, murder—all anathema to upstanding, Wraeththu-kind. After some of the throw-back, puritan woodpiles I'd visited, it sounded like a welcome relief. "Well," I thought to myself, threatening the horse with death if it dared to stumble, "here it is; a town named for yourself. Have I stopped falling now? Is Fallsend rock bottom?"
After half an hour of wandering aimlessly about, taking in the sights, I took a room in a leaning, listing hostel in the south of the town. Its proprietor didn't work out that I couldn't pay him at first. I sold what was
left of my horse to a har that didn't ask any questions, and to further my investigations of the place, went for a walk through the streets. Nobody looks at you in Fallsend. This is because you may well be a homicidal (or should that be haricidal?) maniac with a sensitive spot about prying eyes. Nobody wants to take that risk. I bought a bowl of nondescript gruel in a shady tavern—puddles on the floor, blotted by heaps of soggy sawdust, that sort of thing—and asked the regular patrons about where I could find work. At first, they were reluctant to answer me at all, but because I have a deceptively honest face, they eventually plucked up enough courage to laugh. Someone took pity on me. "What can you do?" I was asked.
"Ah well," I answered, "I'm pretty good at killing people, or just fucking up their lives if you can't afford that . . ."
This was not a remark to be met with humor, which was how I'd hoped it would be. They told me gravely that there was really quite a glut of killers in Fallsend and that there was too much traveling involved, even if you could get work of that kind. Nobody wants to pay traveling expenses to a murderer, it seems. I tried not to look downhearted. The way I was feeling at that time, I'd have welcomed the chance to throttle the life out of someone, even for free! More pity came my way. Someone said, "You're quite a looker. Skinny, but some people aren't fussy. If you're not fussy, you'll find work in Glitter . . ." I'm fussy. I half-starved for a week before I reviewed my morals.
Because this is the beginning of a book, I think it is a good time to talk about the concept of Wraeththu, if indeed there is one. I can't say it's something I think about often—how many of us in this confused world are allowed the luxury of time to think anyway—and I'm not sure if it is important or not, but for the sake of posterity, I'll say what I think. I am har, a member of the race that came after man. Came from man. We are the race that solved that niggling problem of sexual inequality, not to mention sexual orientation, by evolving into one sex; hara. I have a female temperament at times and masculine strength at times. Usually these things manifest themselves at the wrong time. Masculine temperament coupled with female strength are guaranteed to land you in hot water, so we all have our problems, no matter how complete and whole we smugly say we feel. Most hara will tell you that all Wraeththu are beautiful, but this is not entirely true—and how boring if it was! What is inside a person nearly always influences what is outside. The most beautiful hara are the truly evil, the most powerful and the most clever. Don't believe it if you are told all hara are good. I've never met a thoroughly good har and I don't want to. Not even the Gelaming are all good, although I'm sure they like to think so. They are certainly the most beautiful, so draw your own inferences.
Philosophers might tell you that Wraeththu are a race of sorcerors and mystics, supposedly created to rid the world of evil. Now we have a United Council of Tribes desperately trying to convince themselves that this aim has been achieved, but, like I said before, the rubbish was merely pushed east. Northeast, to be exact. In the west, we have the large countries of Almagabra, Erminia, Cordagne and Fereng. In the middle, Thaine, which is where I am now. E
ast of that lies Jaddayoth, but when I first arrived in Thaine I knew very little about Jaddayoth. Let's imagine a line drawn down this continent from pole to pole. West of the line we find law and order, the ability to get the world on its feet again and tranquility. East of the line is a delightful trip back to the Middle Ages and chaos. South on both sides of the line, we have a huge, hot country we now call Olathe. Humans fucked it up very thoroughly by tossing nuclear weapons around, before Wraeththu spread east from another great continent, Megalithica. Well, that's the essential geography of my tale.
I came from Megalithica originally, and I've been dodging the apparitions of my conscience around Fereng and Thaine for what I think must be several years. It's all very alcohol-fogged, I'm afraid. I don't look any older and I know it's impossible for me to feel any older than I do now. All I want to do is keep running and lose myself in the chaos I know lies east. Sexual inequality may well be a thing of the past, but
believe me, there were a host of other, equally irresistable inequalities that had just been busting a gut waiting to take its place. The strong enslave the weak. That about sums it up. Rewind history. Replay. Ad infinitum. Oh, I'm sure that there's a warm hearth yearning to give me comfort in Jaddayoth!
Anyway, as I was explaining before, I starved for quite a time after reaching Fallsend, and then the hostel-keeper began to get suspicious. Mainly, this was because I never ate in the (dare I call it this?) dining room with the other residents. It was a cash for meals arrangement in there you see, and as I quickly got through the money I'd made from selling my horse, the dining room was deprived of my enlightening presence. On the sixth day, just when I was convincing myself that I liked eating out of trash cans and had nearly finished my last bottle of liquor, money was demanded for my room. The hostel keeper and I argued in a civilized manner for about half an hour, until he lost patience and had me thrown out, keeping my meager bundle of luggage as security until I could pay him what I owed. It was all quite undignified. Sprawled in a black, stinking puddle, sniffed at by a stray, mangy hound, I shouted that I used to be the consort of a prince, which was rather an exaggeration on my part, but I had no fear of being found out in that place. It failed to impress my friend the hostel keeper, however. He told me to piss off back west and claim alimony if that was the case. I acknowledged defeat and abandoned the argument. Too many people had gathered to watch, and even numbed by alcohol I hate feeling embarassed.