Dies Irae Omnibus 01 - 03 by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford [Stableford, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE CROOKED WHEEL

The moment I began to think, the same moment that what Flayr had said began to sink in, someone took away my senses again. The mirrors vanished—flowed away like water and took their strange, distorted inhabitants with them. Flayr disappeared beneath my fingers.

There was a moment of blackness, and then I fell.

I never landed. I saw stars all around me. I looked hard at them, tried to recognize them, searched for the milky way. I remembered something that I had once heard someone say: “Listen to the stars.” I tried to remember who had said it, and realized that it had been Richard Stormwind. It was only a matter of months before, but it seemed as distant as my childhood. Stormwind had been dead for an age, the war was over, and I was going home.

So I listened to the stars, and they spoke to me. They whispered dreams into my ear. I didn’t understand the words. There was a weird sort of rhythm to what they said. I looked at them closely, and saw that they formed a pattern. It was like a gigantic crooked wheel in the sky.

And the stars were taken away, and I looked down at the sea. It was far below, at the bottom of a sheer cliff of monstrous proportions. The waves boomed hollowly against the slate gray rocks. The moonless sky was full of stars, but not the same stars that had made up the crooked wheel. I tried to remember the strange pattern of the star wheel and failed to identify it anywhere in the sky. But I could see the milky way now—as starkly clear and beautiful as when I had seen it in the sky of the Black Star.

I wondered where I was and looked around. There were trees behind me, and a multitude of fleshy leaves. There was a tangled straggle for height, not just to catch sunlight for energy, but to catch wind whose fingers would pluck and carry away the light winged spores they bore. The jungle seemed dense and very extensive as it swept

away up a long slope, but above the crown of the forest I could see a thinner area which gave way to emptiness and rock, and the white stone house where Mariana of Hyla lived.

There were lights in Mariana’s house, and I fancied I caught the distant sound of music. I listened hard for the music, and didn’t quite believe in it. The wind was blowing my way, but it was a very long way, and the noise of the sea should have drowned out any faint snatches of rhythm that drifted all those miles on the wind.

But I automatically began to follow the music as I walked into the jungle and lost the white house in the confusion of leaves. I used the imaginary music as a compass. It was cold in the jungle, and wet. As I forced my way past flaccid, rubbery stems and spongy drapes of leafiness, I got soaked to the skin and began to shiver again.

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