Heart of the Mirage by Glenda Larke

Author:Glenda Larke
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Brand and I looked upon the Mirage and did not believe what we saw.

'It is not real,' I said flatly. 'How can anything like this be real?'

'You are right,' Temellin replied. 'In one sense it is not real. Why else would it be called the Mirage? What is a mirage if not an illusion, a dream that is not there?'

'I don't understand.'

Temellin signalled Garis to ride on with Brand, leaving the two of us mounted on our shleths looking out over a landscape that could not exist. He reached across and took my hand. 'It is the creation of entities we call the Mirage Makers. They have made a land including everything that pleases them, and because they are who they are, what they create has reality. I can eat the fruit and be sustained, drink the water and have my thirst slaked. But if the Mirage Makers decide they want a change, then the lake you see here today will be gone tomorrow; the leaves that are purple now might be white in an hour's time, the road that runs across this valley may not exist two seconds hence — ;or it may last a thousand years. If they want music, there will be music; if they want silence, they will have it. As a matter of courtesy, they do not usually remove the buildings from around us without warning, nor do they banish a chair that's in use, nor do they build a wall across a road just as we ride down it.'

I remembered the shapes I'd thought I had seen in the. dancing sands. 'These entities — where do they live?'

'They are the Mirage, all that you see before you now. It is impossible to think of them as being creatures like us, Derya. They have none of our limitations, none of our frailties. They do not need a form to move, nor sustenance to survive, nor a mouth to speak, nor eyes to see. They do not give birth or die, they just are. They are as much found in every grain of the soil beneath us as they are found in every leaf of that tree over there, or every stone in that wall, in every feather of that bird you see.'

He spoke almost as if I weren't there, with a lyricism that spoke of his deep love for this place, the orator coming to the fore again. He continued, 'To our Kardi forebears, the Mirage Makers were enemies to be feared because they were so far beyond ordinary Kardis, so unknowable. In those days patches of the Mirage were found throughout Kardiastan. Those places were dangerous. The Mirage could kill us, and did, without even noticing we were gone. And then the first of the Magor was born. She passed on her skills to her children and her children's children. They were also mirage makers of a kind, people with the power to make what did not exist seem to have reality. Probably you and I also have that latent ability, although we do not know how to use it.

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