Interlude
The October One spoke. It was always unnerving, that flat, roughened voice. Cor-Reed stood before her as he had four hundred times before, and still, it was as if it were the first time. He looked into those yellow eyes, shining with a sort of background glow, and feared.
“Sim Ban-Gor barely escaped with his life,” she said, her voice grating, “but he will regret it. He was careless, to expose himself to the mob.” She seemed to draw inward, brooding, her eyes almost golden with the flame behind them. “Yet who was she?” she breathed through her semi-vertical, lipless mouth. “Who was that woman who moved like a machine, and held October up to the laughter of ten million worlds?” Cor-Reed could feel the electric tension in the air. He was, all at once, afraid.
“Ghulag Son-Tee has reported,” she said finally, facing him, her hair writhing slowly. They were in her chambers. Only the One herself ever ventured beyond the outer rooms, it was something like a medieval castle, something like the mist-filled glade of a swampy and oozing primeval forest. Tapestries hung on the walls, with patterns that attracted the eye and then deceived, shimmering into inexactitude. Images appeared and were transformed, as if animated by someone with a broad, wispy, indistinct brush. Behind them, glimpsed like ornamented frames in an ancient gallery, was stone, grey and weathered, fitted to such fine detail that the mortar, if it was there at all, was not visible to the naked eye.
Even here there was the yellow line beyond which no one could approach the One and live. From her first arrival, the October One had cast the image of the line around her, wherever she was; she had not had physical contact with any living being for nearly a millennium.
Cor-Reed stared fixedly at her. He had learned long ago that to look around these rooms was to invite fascination, obsession, a kind of brief and awful madness.
He said nothing, as protocol demanded. He waited, breathing in slow, measured, disciplined intakes, his mind still, without thought or reaction or emotion, except for that thin thread of fear. Other, untrained men would have panicked, screamed, gone mad, and fled. But he was trained; he stood, and listened, and waited.
The dark hair writhed. He heard faint snappings as the static flickered and burned above her face.
“Asher Tye cannot be found,” the woman said. “He has vanished from the public deck of a passenger ship as if never there. Ghulag Sor-Tee has left no technique available to him unused. He flushed him out, lay in wait, and Tye never came. No one came. He eludes an Adept of maximum skill, almost equal to you, Cor-Reed, almost equal to me.”
“He is trained well,” the rodent-faced man murmured. Soft as it was, the October One picked it up and hissed at it, spitting it out like the pit of a prune.
“An Apprentice overcomes a full Adept? Is that your suggestion, Cor-Reed? And is the ancient knowledge so fragile, so limited, so simple that the most inexperienced beginner knows enough to deceive the most advanced in Skill, in Power itself?”
She let a silence fall. With her unnatural tallness, and draped in garments of deep, nonreflecting black, she seemed to tower over him, a pillar of nothingness in a background of confusion. The walls mocked him. Out of the corner of his eyes they oscillated and coalesced and retreated, daring him to look and then to stare.
Hypnotic. But no form of hypnotism could touch Cor-Reed. He was an Adept of the October Guild. Nothing and no one, save perhaps the October One herself, could pierce the defenses that years of painful training had provided. And she was not intent upon overcoming him. Rather, she seemed to seek something from him, some knowledge of the boy who had so lately studied with him.
“Do you assume, then,” he ventured to say, “that Asher Tye has somehow resisted the Psychic Probe?”
Her face was finely chiseled, etched by a thousand lines, ageless and fair, compelling to look upon, attractive in an alien, feminine way. He loved her and feared hen. She drew him to her like a magnet, not merely physically, but mentally. He wanted her wisdom, yet at the same time, desire was tangled by the very insights that he pursued.
She spoke. Even in the near-perfect passivity that he cultivated so carefully, that formed a foundation of his training, he jumped inside. The voice wrapped around him, pierced through him, took him.
“For a hundred years I have sent failed Apprentices home with watching Adepts in attendance, for in theory, the Probe can be resisted; yet never have we observed it to happen. You could break the hold of the Probe, and I, but we have known of none outside of October who would have such Skill. Now . . .
“Have you trained him too well, Cor-Reed?” she spoke, the hiss pronounced, air forced through her teeth from lungs that seemed to need no air. “Can he take Ghulag and use him, twist him at his will, skewer him on a spit of knowledge that you taught him?”
She answered herself, then. He didn’t dare to—he from whom the face of death itself would have drawn but a passing glance.
“Nay,” she said. “This I cannot believe. Power—in its ebb and flow I feel, and I have felt Asher Tye, and even were the flaw not there, he would still be as nothing or next to nothing. No, Cor-Reed, there is Skill at work here, beyond that which Tye has learned, beyond Ghulag Sor-Tee, Skill that is the equal to yours, at least, and you only barely pass beyond Ghulag himself.
“You know little of our history, Cor-Reed. We are not alone, yet the October Guild is few in number, spread thinly across the hundred billion inhabited planets of the Galaxy. In oxygen, methane, chlorine, even ammonia and vacuum itself, creatures live near ten billion stars, and only one star in ten has planets at all. And we do not touch more than one planet in ten million.”
Cor-Reed was startled. It was the first time that he had heard even a hint of how many of the Guild there were among the stars. He had known for a long lime that theirs was not the only October One. But he could not at first believe that the October One’s species was spread so thinly as the analogy she presented. There were rumors that the Ones came from outside the main part of the Galaxy itself; the satellite galaxy known as the Sculptor, eight thousand light years from the main wheel of the Milky Way, was sometimes mentioned, but it was only one of twenty known lesser galaxies in near-eternal orbit around the Milky Way—the Magellanic Clouds, the Draco, Ursa Major and Minor, Sextans, Pegasus, Fornax, and Leos I and II, among others.
“The point,” he heard himself saying, “is that the Skill may not be unique to the Guild? That there could he, even should be by all the laws of mathematics, other places where a variety of Skill may have formed that may equal, may even surpass, that of the October Guild?” It was almost heresy. He felt his fear leap up, and only the long years of intense training allowed him to fight it back down again.
But . . .
“That I do not believe,” the October One grated. “Were there a race of such Adepts, I would long since have felt their stirring. Nay, this is a freak occurrence, Cor-Reed, one that will never happen again. For from now on, I will not Probe those Apprentices who fall.”
The October One turned. It was as if she pivoted on a sphere, a gigantic ball bearing. There was no movement under her dead-black robes, as of legs maneuvering. A cold, yellow eye looked straight into his, and static crackled in her hair.
“In the past, I would avoid the public screams of relatives, but no more,” the October One said. “For this is a danger I cannot abide. Rather than one Rogue — one failed Apprentice still holding to his partly trained Skill—spreading chaos among those who would have turned eventually to October, I would have ten thousand die.
“If Tye be such,” she hissed, sending ripples of cold agony up his spine and into his mind, “he must be ended. And if he has been seized by another Power, we must know what it is, and meet it, and defeat it.”
He waited, knowing the words that were coming and tension mounted in him—a man who would face the empty void itself without a tremor or doubt.
The October One spoke.
“You will find him,” the October One said in a voice without breath. “Go, and bring him to me. I will take his mind first, to see how this thing was done.
“Then he will die.”