FIFTEEN

A T the top of Undi’s pyramid was another building whose sides curved inwards towards its roof. The Gosa shifter took the imp inside, and then in a series of bounds it leapt up a narrow line of steps. They were on the roof of the structure, a square platform perhaps three fathoms to a side. There the imp was gently lowered to its feet, and the were-ape left. A grating of stone, and the opening in the platform closed behind it.

Bardolin looked up with the imp’s eyes to see the encircling pitch-night of the crater walls, and above them a roundel of stars turning in the endless gyre of heaven. There were so many of them that they cast a faint, cold light down on the city. Many of them were recognizable—it was possible to glimpse Coranada’s Scythe—but they seemed to be in the wrong positions. Even as Bardolin watched, a streak of silver lightninged across the welkin, a star dying in a last flare of beauty.

“Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?” a voice said, and the imp jumped. Instinctively it looked for somewhere to hide, but the stone platform was stark and bare, and there was nothing beyond its edge but a long fall to the pyramid steps below.

Bardolin gripped the will of the creature in his own, steadied it, held it fast.

There was a man on the platform. He had come out of nowhere and stood with the starlight playing across his features. He seemed amused.

“An attractive little familiar. We in Undi do not use them any more. They are a weakness as well as an asset. Are they still as hard to cast through as I remember?”

Bardolin’s voice issued out of the imp’s mouth. The creature’s eyes went dull as he dominated it completely.

“Hard enough, but we get by. Might I ask your name?”

The man bowed. “I am Aruan of Undi, formerly of Garmidalan in Astarac. You are Bardolin of Carreirida.”

“Have we met before?”

“In a way. But here—let me spare your trembling familiar. Take my hand.”

He extended one large, blunt-fingered hand to the imp. The creature took it and Aruan straightened, pulling. But the imp did not come with him. Instead a shimmering penumbra slid out of its tiny body as though he had dragged from it its soul. He was holding on to Bardolin’s own hand, and Bardolin stood there on the platform, astonished, glimmering in the starlight like a phantom.

“What did you do?” he asked Aruan. The imp was blinking and rubbing its eyes.

“A simulacrum, nothing more. But it renders communication a little easier. You need not fear; your essence, or the bulk of it, is with your sleeping body down in the city.”

Bardolin’s shining image felt itself with trembling hands. “This is magic indeed.”

“It is not so difficult, and it makes things more . . . civilized.”

Bardolin folded his imaginary arms. “Why am I here?”

“Can’t you answer that yourself? You are a creature of free will, as are all God’s creations.”

“You know what I mean. What is it you want of me?”

The man named Aruan turned away, paced to the edge of the platform and stared out over the city of Undi. He was tall, and dressed in voluminous, archaic robes that a noble might have worn in the days of the Fimbrian Hegemony. He was bald but for a fringe of raven hair about the base of his skull, for all the world like a monk’s tonsure. He had a beaked nose and deep-set eyes under bristling, fantastic brows, high, jutting cheekbones strangely at odds with the rest of his rather aristocratic face, as if someone had melded the features of a Kolchuk tribesman and a Perigrainian Landgrave. Hauteur and savagery, Bardolin noted them both.

“This is how I once looked,” Aruan said. “Were you to see my true form now you might be repelled. I am old, Bardolin. I remember the days of empire, the Religious Wars. I have known men whose fathers spoke with the Blessed Saint. I have seen centuries of the world come and go.”

“No man is immortal,” Bardolin said, fascinated and apprehensive at the same time. “Not even the most powerful mage.”

Aruan turned away from the dark city, smiling. “True, too true. But there are ways and means of staving off death’s debt collectors. You ask what it is I want of you, and I am wandering around the answer. Let me explain something.

“In all the years I have been here, we have seen many ships arrive from the Old World—more than you could ever have imagined. Most of them carried cargoes of gold-hungry vultures who simply wanted to claim this, the Zantu-Country, and rape it. They were adventurers, would-be conquerors, sometimes zealots filled with missionary zeal. They died. But sometimes they were refugees, come fleeing the pyres of Normannia and the purges of the Inceptines. These people, for the most part, we welcomed. But we have never encountered an Old-worlder with your . . . potential.”

“I don’t understand,” Bardolin said. “I am a common enough brand of mage.”

“Technically, perhaps you are. But you possess a duality which no other mage who has come here from across the ocean has possessed, a duality which is the very key to our own thaumaturgical hierarchy here in the west.”

Bardolin shook his head. “Your answers only provide the spur to further questions.”

“Never mind. It will become plain enough in the time to come.”

“I want you to tell me about this place—how you got here, how this began. What is happening.”

Aruan laughed, a guffaw which made him sound like a hearty ruffian. “You want our history then, the centuries of it, laid before you like a woven tapestry for your eyes to drink in?”

“I want explanations.”

“Oh—so little you think you are asking, eh? Explanations. Well, the night is fine. Give me your hand again, Brother Mage.”

“A phantom hand.”

“It will suffice. See? I can grasp it as though it were flesh and blood. In the other I will take your imp; it would not do to leave him alone here.”

Something happened which Bardolin, for all his expertise in the field of Dweomer, could not quite catalogue. The platform disappeared, and they were thousands of feet up in the air and still rising. The air was cooler here, and a breeze ruffled Aruan’s hair.

I can feel the breeze; I, a simulacrum, Bardolin thought with a start of fear. And then he realized that it was the imp’s sensations he was feeling. Had to be. A simulacrum could not be given physical sensation.

Or could it? He could feel Aruan’s hand in his own, warm and strong. Was that the sensation of the imp or himself?

They stopped rising. Bardolin could look down like a god. The moon had risen and was a bitten apple of silver which lit up the Western Ocean. The vault above Bardolin’s head, strangely, did not feel any closer. The stars were clearer, but as far away as ever.

The incredible vastness of the world, night-dark and moon-silver, was staggering. The sky was a bright vault which spun endlessly above the sleeping earth, the Western Ocean a tissue of wrinkled silver strewn with the gossamer moonlight. And the Western Continent was a huge, bulking darkness in which only a few scattered lights burned. Bardolin could see the watchfires of Fort Abeleius on the coast, the tiny pricks of light that were the stern and masthead lanterns on the Osprey offshore, and inland red glows like scattered gleeds from an old fire.

“Restless forces of the world, at play amid the earth’s foundations,” Aruan said, sounding as though he were quoting something. “Volcanoes, Bardolin. This country is old and torn and troubled. It stirs uneasily in its sleep.”

“The craters,” Bardolin said.

“Yes. There was a great civilization here once, fully as sophisticated as that which exists upon Normannia. But the forces which create and destroy our world awoke here. They annihilated the works of the ancients, and created Undabane, the Holy Mountain, and a score of lesser cones. The Undwa-Zantu died in a welter of flame and ash, and the survivors of the cataclysm reverted to barbarism.”