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is the only way you will ever grow up, to know the joys of adulthood."
"Do I understand what you are saying? That the only way I will ever be free is
to die? To be reborn, somewhere else, some other time, and not remember who I
am? How will I know I might be better off?"
"You can't. In the real world, no one ever can. But if you don't help me,
Minho's kingdom will endure exactly as it is, forever. Never again will you
see a new face like mine he will break the last ties that hold these islands
in this world. Never again will you know a visitor from the outside, and your
last chance for freedom will be gone."
What was Neheresta thinking? Was she remembering the terrible indignities
Hatiphas had inflicted upon her, and contemplating a thousand additional
lifetimes of such insults to her body, her dignity, her very . . . soul? Was
she considering the risk not of risking all for a matter of philosophy, but of
failing to do so?
Pierrette stood silent, almost seeing the thoughts that rushed through
Neheresta's mind. At last, the girl spoke. "You can't get there from here,"
she said.
"That's what Hatiphas said. What does it mean?"
"I don't know. That is what the king says also."
"Minho said that? Now I think I understand. . . ." Pierrette turned back the
way she had come. Now she knew why she had felt a chill the last time she had
entered Minho's sanctum. Now she also knew what his muttered words on that
occasion had been.
"Let me come with you," said Neheresta.
Pierrette slowly shook her head. "I'm sorry. Minho was right.
You can't get there from here. But I can get there from . . .
there
." Not from this palace, but through . . . the Otherworld. "Thank you. You
have told me what I need to know. There isn't much time, but I might yet
prevail."
Softly, Pierrette murmured the words of the great, ancient spell. "
Mondradd in Mon
. . ." Then she
looked around herself; nothing seemed to change. It was the same plain,
unadorned hallway as before.
"What strange words are those?"
The unfamiliar voice sounded harsh and old. She spun around. There stood an
ancient hag with thin, bedraggled hair and yellowed eyes. Her wrinkled breasts
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hung like empty sacks upon her bony chest.
But that dress she wore was . . . Neheresta's. And what was that thin, hazy
line, like a jellyfish's tendril, that stretched from her brow and away into
the murk of the hallway? Where had she seen something like that before?
Then Pierrette remembered: when first she had used the spell
Mondradd in Mon
, such a tendril had linked her wandering soul to the inert body that rested
beside the spring in the sacred grove. Later, more experienced with magic, she
had learned how to voyage in the Otherworld without leaving her body behind,
but never without a certain anxiety that should she be trapped there, her
stiff, cold corpse would be found where she had left it, on the cold, foggy
hillside of Sainte Baume, or on a marble floor in the ancient Roman baths of
Aquae Sextiae.
The tendril linked Neheresta for indeed, the hag was none other to her own
origins in the remote past, to the devastating eruption of Thera that had put
an end to the great age of the Minoan Sea Kings.
What would occur if Minho succeeded in tearing his land entirely away from the
world of Time? Without the link to her faraway origins, would Neheresta be no
longer an ancient girl, but . . . an immortal hag, forever locked into the
ancient, hideous body that Pierrette saw, there in the Otherworld?
Suddenly, Pierrette was sure of it. In the Otherworld, things were as they
were, not as they might seem.
No deception was possible, and the inhabitants of Minho's realm would forever,
day and night, be forced to endure themselves not as his spell had made them
seem, but as they really were: warped, wizened, corrupted ancients bearing all
the scars and ugliness that were part and parcel of their unnatural estate.
What choice, given one, would they make? Would they choose as Neheresta had
done, to take their chances, as all mortals did, that indeed what lay beyond
this life was at least no worse than what they faced here? But they would have
no choice. They had had none when Minho had brought them to this pass, and
they would have none now. Either she would stop Minho, or he would defeat her.
The rest would suffer one fate or the other, and there was no help for it.
"Wait here. Don't try to follow me," she said, looking away, afraid that
Neheresta would see the revulsion in her eyes. She turned back the way she had
come.
Busy Hatiphas pattered down the hallway toward her. Pierrette stepped into the
shadow of an ornate doorway, and the vizier rushed by, trailing a milky,
elusive tendril. The brief glimpse Pierrette had of his face showed that he [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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