The Pearl of the Soul of the World

14

Flood

The White Witch screamed. Aeriel stood frozen, still touching the pearl. She felt something running out of it and into Oriencor, who stood like a statue, immobile, her mouth fallen open to keen one long, high note that went on and on. Those in barges below and on the battlefield beyond stood halted, turned, staring at the keep. Images had begun to play across the surface of the pearl: pestilence and fire—Oceanus destroying itself.

"Dead?" the White Witch screamed. " Dead? How can that be? Not dead. Not dead! Poisoned?

Plague? How could they destroy themselves?"

Aeriel could not move, could not take her gaze or her hand away from the pearl. Neither, it seemed, could Oriencor, whose chilling cries continued. Dazed, Aeriel realized that though the pearl was imparting certain knowledge of the Ancients' fate, Ravenna's daughter was denying it, refusing to believe. Aeriel shook her head. Her ears rang with the Witch's protests. It had never occurred to her that Oriencor might refuse the gift.

"It was only we, only we they caused to war for their pleasure. They can't—they can't be dead! It isn't possible…"

Aeriel felt a stab of sudden fear. She herself had never refused any knowledge she had received through the pearl. She had no idea what would happen to anyone who tried. She had no idea what was happening to Oriencor now. The Witch seemed to be striving to thrust the pearl back into Aeriel's hand.

The aroma of Ancient flowers came to her suddenly as a new image gathered itself within the pearl, that of a dusky lady with indigo eyes.

"Daughter," she said quietly, "believe."

Aeriel stared. This image was no misty construct of the future, no vivid memory of the past—it reflected the present: tangible, alive. A living Ravenna gazed at the White Witch from the surface of the pearl.

"No!" the lorelei gasped, recoiling. "I saw your funeral fire—" The Ancientlady shook her head. "That was only my body, child. Some arts of the Ancients you never learned. My inner essence has been translated, that my messenger might bear me to you. All my being is contained within this pearl. The whole of my magic, my very soul—yours, if you will but accept!"

The White Witch's cries rose to shrills and then to shrieks.

"Never!"

Aeriel would have fled, flung her hands over her ears if only she could have moved. The coldness of the Witch swept over and through her as never before, for the pearl no longer gave her any warmth.

Ravenna's image watched her daughter with horror and pain.

"Take it back!" shrieked the Witch. "I do not want your sorcery! I have my own sorcery now…"

Fractures appeared in the winterock around them. By means of the pearl, Aeriel felt the hair-thin cracks running the length of the palace, down below the waterline, below even the bottom of the Mere.

She glimpsed the figures trapped in the walls of Winterock stirring, awakening, opening their eyes. The whole keep shifted, shuddering, with a low rumbling that rolled under the high, terrible piercing of the Witch's screams.

"Accept, or you are lost!" Ravenna cried urgently. "Use my gift to heal this world…"

Her image reached out to Oriencor, hands outstretched in appeal. Aeriel was aware of Syllva in her Istern barge below sounding her warhorn, signaling retreat. The dark islanders fled the palace terrace to their skiffs and stroked for the far shore. Erin grasped Pendarlon's mane as he leapt away across the Mere, which had begun to lose its dark opacity. The Witch's creatures writhed and struggled in the lightening waters.

"Believe me, daughter," Ravenna besought her. "My Ancient race and their world are no more."

But Oriencor fought the knowledge of the pearl even now. The palace shuddered again, the floor beneath Aeriel's feet tilting. She heard crashes, like slabs of crystal plunging and shattering.

"It's a lie. A lie—I won't believe it! They can't be dead!"

"Stop," Aeriel tried to tell her. "Stop screaming, or the whole palace will fall."

The other paid her no heed, fingers tightening on the pearl as though she meant to crush it.

"Daughter, turn back—" Ravenna called desperately.

Then the pearl shattered against Aeriel's hand, and the Ancient's image shattered with it, scattering, vanishing. The Witch's webbed fingers bore down upon Aeriel's. She felt the shards of corundum biting into her flesh. A white mist billowed from the broken shell, cloudlike and full of sparkling fire. It filled the room, enveloping them both. Oriencor wrenched around as if trying to tear free of the pearl, batting at the mist and colored sparks as though they ate at her. Aeriel felt nothing but a slight glimmer, an almost-pleasant glow.

She had cut her thumb upon the broken edge of the pearl. Some portion of the billowing light was running into her through the wound. She breathed it in. It alighted on her skin and entered her pores, crept under her fingernails, filled her ears and hair. She felt it, fiercely hot, like burning silver in her blood.

She, too, cried out then, not with pain, but with surprise.

"You," Oriencor gasped, turning back to her now. Her tone was a rasp, as though the misty light had seared her lungs. "You! Little sorceress. I curse the day that Irrylath first carried you away, and I curse the hour that ever you came to this keep with your message and your poisonous gift. Undone! All my sorcery undone! By you, my mother's catspaw. Your very innocence your shield."

The White Witch was dying, Aeriel realized. For those who could not accept, the knowledge in the pearl was deadly. Even now, her creatures thrashed, perishing in the disenchanted waters below. Aeriel had never dreamed, not for a moment, that the pearl could harm as well as heal.

"I never meant you ill in giving you the pearl," she cried. Nor could she believe that Ravenna had meant her daughter any harm. "I meant only to show you, to…"

"To make me see?" Oriencor grated, her beautiful bell-like voice now turned to potsherds grinding, to silk rending and metal twisting. "To change me back from what I am into what I was before, a mortal, halfling, Ancient's daughter? Don't you understand?"

Winterock shuddered again, and the floor dropped a quarter of an ell before catching itself. The dead creatures in the lake below were dissolving into noxious mist. The palace shook like something struggling to awake. Both Oriencor and Aeriel staggered, but neither could release the broken, billowing pearl.

"Don't you see?" Oriencor shrilled. "I am no more redeemable than one of my darkangels—one of my true darkangels. For I am not incomplete, as Irrylath was when you rescued him. I have eaten hearts and drunk blood and drunk souls. My heart is dust. I could not return to what I was even if I wished—

and I do not wish it! I want to walk among my peers—I want the Ancients alive on Oceanus, and I curse you for taking the hope of that—my only purpose—away."

Her last words were a scream that rent the palace from tower to base. The shock threw Aeriel to her knees. By means of the pearl, she was aware of the now-transparent waters of the Mere pouring into the breaches. She thought of the duaroughs held prisoner in the depths of the palace below and hoped desperately for their deliverance.

"Aeriel! Aeriel!"

Above the din, someone was crying her name, had been crying her name frantically for some time.

She turned to see Avarclon bearing Irrylath away from the crumbling palace. Great chunks of winterock sheared off and hurtled down. The prince sat helpless, unable to turn his unbridled steed. Without bit or reins, Irrylath could not compel the Avarclon to wheel and bear him back to Aeriel.

A snarl brought her sharp around. Oriencor was still on her feet, though barely. Her gown was in tatters, her once-white skin, now ashen, was flaking and falling away like curls of burnt paper. Her hair, a nest of tiny, filamentthin snakes, streamed and billowed in a wind Aeriel could not feel. Aeriel shrieked and shrank back even as the Witch's green eyes pinned her.

"I'll have you," she whispered, her ruined voice soft as gravel crushing against itself. "You've destroyed me, but I'll see you undone before me. I'll have your heart, your eyes. Little sorceress, I'll have your soul!"

She reached out one dagger-nailed hand as Aeriel screamed, trying frantically to pull free. Above her in the air, a long way off, she heard Irrylath cry out as well. The White Witch's hand darted toward her.

Aeriel shrank, straining, leaned desperately away. She felt Oriencor's talons barely brush her closed eyelids—not enough even to break the skin, but enough to send their cold through her like a knife.

All the light in the world went out. Setting Solstar vanished. Then Aeriel felt the Witch's hand, still holding hers to the broken pearl, fall away into ashes, into dust—just as the palace shuddered for the final time and plunged inexorably down, down toward the roiling Mere below.

Winterock was falling, but it was no longer made of stone. All Oriencor's enchantments must have unraveled at her death, Aeriel thought, almost calmly, as she fell. Water thundered all around her. She could not see, could not breathe, heard only the water's roaring. The pearl-stuff in her blood told her a little of what was happening around her. She wondered when she would reach the hard end of her fall and die.

But no end came. The rushing and buffeting went on and on. After an eternity, she realized that though she was falling still, she was no longer plunging straight downward. The palace has collapsed into the lake: the knowledge came to her with eerie clarity. You are being borne along beneath the surface now.

She had no air left in her lungs. The cage of her ribs ached, burning, bursting. Just a while longer, she told herself. Hold out a little longer— though there hardly seemed any point. She could not swim.

Deep below the surface of the Mere, water all around, she was keenly aware that as soon as she opened her mouth and drew breath, she would perish.

Perhaps she would faint first and know nothing of dying. Drowning was not such a terrible end after all, she told herself. She'd always feared it, ever since slipping into a cave pool as a child and being pulled, sick and sputtering, onto the bank by her mistress Eoduin. But there was no bank here and no companion to rescue her.

Her head pounded with the lack of air. Presently she would stop fighting, open her mouth and breathe deep of the pummeling torrent. Then she would be dead. At least the White Witch is dead, too, she thought drowsily, and the world is free of her. The pearlstuff in her blood gave her the certain knowledge of it but could bring her no comfort.

She felt only a crushing sense of failure. She had not fulfilled Ravenna's charge, had not succeeded in converting Oriencor to good. The world would know a brief respite now. But without Ravenna's sorcery, could it ever heal? The pearl was broken, its contents scattered, lost. Still she clung to life, continued to resist the flood. Her own tenacity surprised her. Stop fighting, she told herself, preparing to die. You've failed.

Someone caught her by the hair, pulled her close across the current. The tremendous buffeting all around them had lessened now. It had become a fierce undertow, no longer any downward motion to it.

Her companion guided her face to his, put his mouth to hers and gave her breath. Aeriel clutched at his shirt and clung there, drinking in the sweet, magnificent air.

Her head cleared, and suddenly she was fighting again, struggling for breath. The other did not let her break away, did not let her breathe in the white waters of the Mere, much as she wanted to. Air! She needed air. Darkness was everywhere. The icy touch of the Witch's fingers had banished her sight. Her eyes felt useless, frozen, like orbs of winterock.

She could not see who it was that held her. But she felt the strength of his arm around her, his legs stroking for the surface. She was being borne upward against the current's tow by someone. Someone who swam like a fish. Someone who had been raised by a lorelei. Someone who had swum the Mere every day of his life for ten long years: Irrylath.

It seemed an age before they broke the surface. She gasped the sweet air, but weakly now, half-swooned. Hardly any strength remained in her limbs. She was content to lie unresisting in her husband's arms and let the torrent bear them along. Miles and miles, she thought dreamily: the flood must be taking them leagues from where the Witch's palace had once stood. Were the others— those in the barges and upon the shore—safe? She could only hope, wrapped in a darkness devoid of Solstarlight, or Oceanuslight, or stars. Head pillowed on Irrylath's breast, she slept.

Awareness returned to her just as gradually. Water no longer surrounded them. She no longer felt the rush bearing her along. They had stopped moving. Bruised and waterlogged, she felt herself lying on firm ground, stable and solid, if very soggy. Her garment was sopping, and half her hair—she could feel by the gentle give and tug—lay in water. Someone was speaking her name.

She opened her eyes, though without hope of seeing anything. They ached, painfully cold. Then something struck one of them, a hot, stinging drop. Another fell upon her brow, then ran burning and salt into her other eye. She flinched, blinking, and became aware of stars overhead, a blaze of them.

Someone was bending over her.

"Aeriel, Aeriel," he said.

She moaned and, moving, realized how stiff she was. The pearlstuff in her blood made her feel hazy and strange.

"Irrylath," she muttered, reaching for him. "I was drowning, and you came for me."

To have rescued her, she realized, he must have dived from Avarclon's back. Her dream returned to her, clear at last: Irrylath plunging headlong from high above into the roiling confusion of the flood below.

The starhorse had been trying to bear him to safety, carry him up and away, but he had refused to be saved without her, had come after her instead. Not fallen. Dived. Irrylath clasped her to him.

"Oriencor is dead," he whispered. "You killed her, and the palace fell."

She felt him shudder. His tears ran onto her cheek and forehead. Blinking the burning drops from her eyes, she saw mud flats stretching all around, black soil fanning out on every hand. Water lay in sheets, a cool misty smoke rising from it in wraithlike clouds. Broken bits of furniture, tapestry, devices lay scattered about them like a shipwreck.

Her wedding sari, yellow and immune to any moisture, tangled in a patch of scrub nearby. The mist, full of colored sparks still, swirled and drifted, at times obscuring the sky. Oceanus hung canted in heaven amid a fiery swirl of stars.

Strangely, the night did not feel cold. At last, Irrylath drew back from her.

"Not I," he said. "Not I, but you—you killed her."

She had never been so close to him before. Even by starlight, she saw the four long scars that raked one side of his face, and the fifth that trailed just below the jaw. The scars Pendarlon had given him, an age—no, only two years—ago, when he had been a half-darkangel in Avaric. She laid her hand along those scars.

"In Winterock," she said, "while the palace stood, the pearl gave me a glimpse of what the White Witch did to you."

She saw him flinch, felt the shock that passed through him. He gazed at her. "I thought you knew all along," he whispered. "I thought your green eyes saw everything."

She shook her head. Was that why he had stayed away—shunning not her, but the things he feared she knew?

"It's why I thought I wanted Sabr," he said, "because she knows nothing of that, and even if she ever learns, she'll not believe it. She'll insist on thinking I was brave."

"You were brave," said Aeriel. She remembered him leading the battle from Avarclon's back, swooping to rescue Sabr, confronting his own and his brothers' darkangels. "You are the bravest one I know."

Irrylath shook his head. "I wasn't. I'm not. Oriencor found my every flaw. In the end, she broke me like a toy."

"And you imagined I might do the same?" Aeriel mused, stung, full of wonder at her own stupidity.

Blind! Until this moment, she had been blind. "So you turned to Sabr, who adores you— lonely for someone who did not know your past, longing only to escape that painful memory."

She saw the prince's jaw set, as he nodded, thinking of the Witch. His eyes were like two lampflames burning.

"But Oriencor is dead now," he whispered fiercely. "I will never dream of her or feel her touch or hear her voice again. My rescuer. You have delivered me."

She wanted to contradict him, to protest: he had turned away from Oriencor of his own volition, striking her seventh son from the air long before Aeriel had handed her the pearl. But all she did was put her lips to his to make him still. The night was a blaze of Oceanuslight and stars. The mist swirled around them in whispers, like wraiths.

Scattered sparks still drifted randomly, alighting in Irrylath's hair. Her husband put his arms about her, drew her to him like a man so long dying of thirst he almost feared to drink.

Then something with a human shape but made all of golden light glided past them and vanished into the mist. Aeriel started back from the prince with a cry. The first apparition was gone, but a moment later, from another quarter, a different figure strode by—again of golden light—this one a young man, garbed in a style she did not recognize. He might have glanced at them before disappearing into the fog.

Aeriel felt Irrylath's arms about her tighten.

"What are they?" she gasped.

"Souls," he whispered. "All the souls Oriencor or her darkangels ever captured or drank. All those she kept prisoner in the walls of Winterock. Delivered now. Look. The air is full of them."

Aeriel gazed upward, following the line of his arm. The sky above shimmered with revenants of golden light, ascending toward deep heaven. They seemed to add to the number of the stars. The mist and the night were lit by them. The air felt heavy and electrified. The hair on Aeriel's arms and along the nape of her neck stood on end. She held on to Irrylath.

"They mean us no harm," he murmured, then stopped himself, shivering. "At least, they mean you no harm. You freed them."

A luminous figure resembling a woman of Zambul came to a halt not ten paces from them. The sparkling fog swirled and thickened all around. As the spirit gazed at them, the corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly in the beginning of a smile. Then she lifted her arms and arose, right in front of them, elongating and attenuating as she ascended.

The mist closed denser and denser before lifting suddenly without dissipating. Gazing upward, Aeriel saw that the stars were now completely obscured. She could no longer see the confluence of souls ascending, caught only glimmers of them in the distance, like flashes of light. The electrical quality of the air intensified. She heard a long, low rumble she could not identify. More flashes. Another rumbling.

Something wet and cold struck her skin.

She flinched in surprise, felt Irrylath do the same. The shock repeated itself: a spattering of droplets.

The scent of water pervaded the air. The pattering drops grew larger and more numerous. They began to fall harder, more steadily. A wet breeze rose and slapped at them. The sensation was cold, thrilling, strange. She huddled against the shelter of Irrylath's body. The sound of falling water drummed against the night, marked by low booming and glimmers of light.

"What is it?" she exclaimed.

"Water from heaven," he answered wonderingly, holding out one hand to catch the falling drops.

"Such as fell in Ancient times—a dozen thousand daymonths past."

The water came in wind-whipped spatters now, gusting and unabating. Aeriel cupped her own hands and brought them to her lips. The taste was cool and sweet, full of air and minerals. She held her joined palms up to Irrylath and let him, too, drink. Still clasping her to him, he kissed her hands.

"The drought of the White Witch is broken," he told her. "It's rain."