The old man pulled his thin grey cloak around his shoulders. It was a
cold night here high above the desert plain and all he had to warm himself on
was a paltry fire, long since reduced to scattered embers. He had cooked a
small tuber on the fire and nibbled it experimentally – food was still a new
thing to him and he was always keen to experiment. This tasted exactly as it
looked – like a piece of dry wood, but he was determined that he’d eat it all.
That is what he’d promised himself; to find out how mortal life tasted. He knew
this may be doomed to failure, but it seemed important to him to try.
He had been wandering in the desert for
many years; seeking out the places that not even the Algharians criss-crossed during
their constant rovings. He met those
dark eyed people occasionally on his travels, but they were as private as he and
they had left him alone once they had discovered that he wasn’t as lost or as
helpless as he appeared. He just hoped that none of them had any inkling of who
he was.
He woke himself every morning just
before dawn. He didn’t really need to sleep any more than he needed to eat, and
he had found it very hard to get used to it. This morning he was pleased to
feel that his body really didn’t want to get up. He even yawned as he drew a
rough circle on the sand. He scratched his nose and stretched. Then he sat
cross-legged in the middle of the circle and waited.
There was a time when all he ever did
was mind-walk, immersing himself in the weft and warp of the universe; moving
through the layers of reality in search of something that he had once called
truth. But once he had realised that his path had been mistaken for so long, he
grew weary of this inevitably subjective truth and spent more and more time in actual
reality; more and more time considering the earth beneath his feet and the
creatures that swam and crawled and flew alongside him. Once he had been able
to place them with confidence in a pyramid of worth, with himself
self-evidently at the top, but the more that he looked the less obvious that
fact became. Now, he only mind-walked at this time of day; the time between the
first light of dawn and the moment when the sun slid clear of the horizon. It
was the best time – the moment when all signals were clearest. Most importantly, it was the time when his
enemies’ voices rang out the loudest. Every listening was an act of
reconstruction – no conversation, no thought, could be received in one go. Time
was relative and some speech lingered on for days or weeks. So it was with the
talk that he sought.
His mind uncurled from his body. He
always imagined this moment as a salmon jumping a weir – flying out into space
and then landing in another waterway, swimming in another reality. Now he sought two clusters of voices, one of
a group of four, the other a group of two. One groups of gods and one group of almost-humans,
but he had learned to fear the near-humans more – they had unconventional aims.
The buzz of yesterday’s ethereal chatter
ebbed and flowed around the old man’s mind. He fixed on to the nexus of one
interlocking conversation. Finally he had it all. They were talking about him:
He has not called a meeting for an age...
He is no advisor if all he does is brood in his pyramid...
We must act soon, but we cannot be sure of the best way...
Why has the thief not yet returned...
Forget the thief, he is dead; the witches saw to that...
Why do we not go to him as we have done before...?
He has not invited us...
He is wise and powerful; let us not offend him...
Not as yet, anyway...
We will continue to wait and hope...
Agreed...
Agreed...
Agreed...
Reluctantly agreed, yes...
We will consider this again...in the next cycle
They were still confused, that was good. Let them think he still sat
in his city brooding and planning; let them think he still kept his acolytes,
priests and warriors. In reality he had let them all wither away through old
age and had stopped replacing them. It was easy enough – they had always been
hidden away inside his temple. There were only two now that he trusted, one
priest and one healer; but even they must not know exactly where he was. He
would flee his brothers-turned-enemies for as long as he could.
He turned away from them and searched
for his more deadly foes, the two witches who were seeking to obliterate the
world. He still didn’t know why. All he could do was try to stop them. Their
ethereal conversations were always painfully clear, even though they used
powerful magic to block their contents. There was always a way when the minds
were so powerful – something always leaked out. This was a conversation that he
had heard before but had now listened to several times.
Who was the Visneorian elf?
Viola of Ortia – she was a strange creature. She had help from some
unknown source. And she herself was anyway strange.
Why was she there?
I have no idea...
Is she assuredly dead?
I see no trace of her in this world; but she is not a spell caster so
I cannot be certain
She will have died in the temporal fracture, surely?
Undoubtedly – no-one can emerge from such singularities...
Good. When will we see the crack begin to widen?
In a few months, but no-one lives there so it may take some time to be
detectable...
We will send spies to Oket and wait
Agreed...
The old man smiled as his mind settled back into his body – they too had
been fooled so far. His numerological friends had done their job well; not all
witches were irredeemable, of course. For how long could they hide the newly
stitched up fragments of the world, however? Long enough, perhaps, to save it,
but only if... He tasted bile in his mouth as he thought of what else was
required; the sourness was yet another new feeling.
The other part of his plan was terrible
to him now – it involved instigating murder and destruction, all things that he
now abhorred; but it was necessary.
And as the gods were now terrified of witches the witch-killing would have to
be done by witches. The bad witches would have to be annihilated by the better
witches, there was no other way; no-one else had the power. Set a thief to
catch a thief; had it come to that? He trusted none of them. They brought with them
such moral hazard but they were his only hope.
The wind had blown sand across the
ragged circle he had made, occluding arcs of the curve. He knew that the circle
did nothing anymore – it was just showing him where to sit. But he remembered
when magic was a splendid ritual and the circle was made from burnt ochre and sorcerer’s
chalk, and the patterns within it were a geometric wonder. All of that was
nonsense, of course, as it had turned out, but it had been reassuring. But it
was all gone now and what did he have left? Just the increasing uncertainty of
wisdom. He must go on, but every day he felt more tired. It was if he were
wearing out. But how could a god grow old?
He wrapped his cloak around him and
picked up his little bag. It was still cold, but that wouldn’t last for long. The
sun was fully risen; hard and strong. He scanned the dark rocks strewn around
him: there were tufts of dry grass and spiny succulents, all clinging on in the
shallow soil. Above him the mountains loomed. It was time to climb down from
the heights and to move on. He craved somewhere a little greener and, if it
were at all possible, the sound of ordinary voices.
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