Stargate Read Free

according to his nature. And the Worldmaker made the worlds.
… Ixelion could not go on. He riffled through the pages, aching with sadness. The first chapter was well known to him. The Annals of every system began with the same words, and he did not want to see them again, in Falia’s hand, red against the yellow vellum. He sighed and leaned back, closing his eyes and grasping his sun-disc. I will go back, back to the pain of my last visit, he thought dimly, already tranced, the Annals under one limp hand and the box at his feet.
    On Ixel the sun rose and set, the people swam and fished, and the endless rain fell. But Ixelion was now once again on Fallan, walking toward the deserted sweep of stone stairs that lifted to Falia’s palace, high above. It was noon, but the sun’s rays lay red and ominous over the treeless, rolling country, sliding stealthily through the bending silver grasses and changing to a dull ocher where they touched the blackened crops rotting in the fields. Furtive shadows moved on the periphery of his vision, and he forced himself to turn his head. A procession of vaguely human shapes was disappearing over the brow of the nearest hill. In their arms and slung over their shoulders, severed limbs gleamed dully like the fat stems of obscene flowers. They did not notice Ixelion, and he averted his gaze and quickened his pace.
    As he began to mount the stair he heard a muted roar behind him and turned unwillingly. Fire flicked orange on the unbroken line of the horizon; silhouetted against it horsemen rode to and fro with lances raised, black men on black horses, crying out like hunting animals. Wails and shrieks came faintly on the wind, mixing with the acrid odor of burning, all imbued with the same cold essence of death. He turned back abruptly, stepping carefully where the steps had crumbled or split and grass now tufted, one hand going to the colorless gem hanging on his breast. A sense of oppression came burgeoning out from the palace’s great twin arches lost in dimness above him. “I am not a judge, I am a guardian,” he whispered as he passed under them. “I am not a lawmaker but an interpreter.” The hall was deathly silent. Ixelion crossed it, still whispering, fingers tight about the crystal, and by the time he had come to the far end and had passed Falia’s stone chair, he knew that he was himself again, armored against the decay around him, invulnerable to any lurking seed of dissolution. He climbed the black-sunk steps behind the chair, and above the first level the halls grew smaller and somehow lighter, as though some vestige of Falia’s quicksilver integrity still clung to the walls and lingered in the musty air. He went from room to room, climbing more stairs, searching quickly and methodically. He did not stop and seek an echo of her in his mind. He knew that she would no longer be capable of calling to him.
    He finally found her, in the small, octagonal chamber that crowned the myriad tiers of her palace. He stepped through the archway and saw her facing him, sitting motionless in a high-backed wooden chair, her outline black and silver against her sun, which seemed to leer in through the wide stone aperture of the window. Wind stirred her hair and sighed gently in the corners of the naked room. Ixelion looked about him, but there was nothing else to see. A stone floor glimmering gray, stone walls bare of any adornment, the curved vault of the ceiling now rivered in cracks from which dust floated, and Falia in her chair. He went closer. Her hands were folded in her lap, and under them Ixelion could make out a container. Slowly he bent, as from it there rose a perfume, a faint sweetness. It was a large box made of pale-blue wood grained in tiny channels of gold, and under his fingers it was warm. Haeli wood. He remembered then that he had admired it once, long, long ago, and she had told him that Danarion had given it to her after some council