JULIEN
II
Chapter 84
Another way
...And the FIRE. The fire of the stake feeding on the sulphur-soaked garment and gnawing at the blistering flesh...
The pain was there, but far away, as if detached from him. It was more of a memory, as of pain that has now stopped. Instead the calm, reassuring presence of Yulmir filled him completely.
Then, suddenly, the universe seemed to go insane. There are sights that no human mind should ever contemplate, perversions for which no language has a name and depths of iniquity that are completely unfathomable. The Dre tchenn wallowed in them, and although he couldn't kill the one who had been entrusted to him, there was nothing to stop him from destroying his sanity by sharing his poisonous knowledge with him. It didn't matter that the prisoner had already undergone a sudden change because of what had happened to him. The only thing that mattered was preserving his body and keeping it in place on the round stone, and ensuring that a spark of consciousness remained in him, since that would keep him bound to the stone for as long as the planet maintained its course, cycle after cycle, around its sun.
Rumour says that there exists a book, the reading of which was sufficient to drive the few reckless men who tried to interpret some of its verses completely insane. What the Dre tchenn showed Yulmir was the tangible reality of what that book imperfectly attempts to describe in its long-dead language.
It was not possible to seal the mind against that flood of horrors. But Yulmir and Julien were able, somehow, to withdraw into each other, like twins in the womb, and to try to share everything they had that was noblest and most completely opposed to the ever-present and corrupting pestilence that assailed them. A tiny flicker of light in a maelstrom of dark insanity, the too-ancient Emperor regaining something of the innocence he had thought forever lost, and the terrified child snuggling under the aegis of the Protector of All. They could only wait and hope that madness would not destroy them.
oo0oo
Subadar lifted the heavy stone with both hands, his eyes blurred with tears, and hesitated, unwilling to bring it down upon the loins of his chenn-da. Despite his desire to hurry to rescue Julien, and despite Yol's unshakable determination, he could not bring himself to begin the slow massacre of his lifelong friend, inflicting upon him not only an undeserved death but also the unspeakable pain which was the price that had to be paid if he was to enter the cursed circle.
“Master Subadar!”
Two metres away stood the nyingtchik, the boy and the young Guide. In spite of this clear disobedience of his orders Subadar felt a moment of admiration: for such a young Guide to achieve such a precise jump was a noteworthy achievement. Nor could he deny that he felt a kind of cowardly relief at being prevented from carrying out his intentions, even if the delay was likely to be brief.
“Master Subadar,” said Ambar, “please listen! I know what you're going to do, but there is another way! Please, I beg you – listen to us!”
Subadar slowly lowered the stone to the ground.
“Very well,” he said, “I'm listening.”
For a moment the boy stood speechless, because he had expected Subadar to have pushed him away angrily. The calmness in the man's voice left him wrong-footed. But he quickly recovered.
“I'm sure we can take you where you want to go,” he said.
“No Guide can do that... all right, explain, but be quick: every kechik counts.”
“Then let us take you to the Outside, because time doesn't exist there.”
oo0oo
The sorcerers of the Circle of Eng'Hornath had literally no time to realise what was hitting them. Practically all of them died in the same instant, hit by the completely illegal but extremely efficient projectiles from the hand weapons whose use was strictly forbidden in the Nine Worlds.
It only took five seconds to cut the bonds which tied an apparently unconscious Julien to a bloody stone, and a barely measurable moment later the whole operation ended with a superbly-executed jump back to Nüngen.
The backlash of the aborted invocation caused a crater to form in the desert large enough to have been made by a decent-sized meteorite, destroying in the process a few particularly venomous specimens of the local population of myriapoda.
oo0oo
Chapter 85
Back
Xarax! I'm happy to see you again. I hope you're not planning to kill me?
Yulmir! It's you at last! What have you done with Julien?
Don't worry, I didn't eat him. He's still here, though right now he's hiding. I see we're in the Palace, and I think this must be Ambar lying here beside me. It's a very long time indeed since I last shared a bed with a boy of that age! I think we should probably let him go on sleeping. How long have I been here?
About two days.
Then I must have sent us deeper than I thought. How did you rescue us?
You'll have to ask Ambar. He was the one who got you out. Subadar says that without his help there would have been no chance of reaching you.
“Julien! You are awake!”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Ambar, but you're talking to Yulmir.”
Ambar, who had already sat up with the obvious intention of hugging his friend and probably sharing a long reunion kiss, froze with an expression bordering on horror.
“Yul... Yulmir? The Emperor? Julien, it's you – you are Yulmir!”
“You're right, my boy. Until now, Julien was me. But not any longer.”
“So... where is Julien, then?”
“He's in here somewhere, but he's not ready to come out yet. Now, I think I've spent long enough in bed, so I'm going to get up and, if you don't mind, I'm going to ask Subadar to come and share breakfast with us. Do you know what time it is?”
“It must be around the end of the morning, but...”
“I know. You've got a lot of questions and a lot to tell me, too, but I'm very hungry. And I could do with a good bath, so everything else will have to wait. Would you like to come and share the bath with me?”
“Er... well, yes, of course.”
“While we're doing that Xarax can go and make sure everyone knows I'm awake, and he can get us a meal served here. Ah, here comes... it must be Yülien, your chenn-da?”
He turned to face the Guide and uttered a series of discordant yelps . Ambar, looking amazed, exclaimed, “You can speak Guide?”
“I'm no good at it, I know, but after a few thousand years I managed to pick it up a bit. Still, we'd better stick to Tünnkeh since you're here. I just asked if he would like a bath too. I hope you don't mind.”
“Oh! No, not at all... Your Lordship.”
“Don't bother with all that. I hereby decree that you are excused from following protocol. After all, Xarax says that it was you and this young Guide that rescued me from hell.”
“It wasn't just us. There were...”
“Later. You can give me the details later on.”
Only when they were soaking in the perfumed water of the pool did Ambar ask the question which chiefly worried him.
“Julien,” he asked. “What's happened to him?”
Yulmir looked him for some moments. He could see the anguish on the boy's face, as well as a growing fear that perhaps Yulmir was trying to hide an unpleasant truth from him.
“Look,” he said, “I'm not going to treat you like a little kid and lie to you. Julien suffered terribly. I protected him as much as I could but in the end the only thing I could do was to more or less completely suppress his consciousness. He's still there, deep inside me, but I haven't yet found a way to bring him back. I can only assure you that he is in no pain – he's simply unconscious, the way he would be if he was in a deep sleep. We just have to wait for him to wake up.”
“But... I mean, he will wake up – won't he?”
“I honestly hope so as much as you do, and I'll do everything I can to help him. I'm hoping that Subadar and his colleagues will be able to suggest a few things we could do to speed the process. Don't cry – Julien isn't dead, I swear.”
oo0oo
It had been hard to keep everyone who had played a part in the rescue of the Emperor away, but in the end the breakfast was a strictly private one, with only Subadar and Ugo invited to share it with Yulmir, Ambar and Yülien.
“Xarax tells me, My Lord,” said Subadar, “that you're truly back with us. I'm glad to hear that. Congratulations.”
“Thank you, Subadar. But it does give us a problem – several problems, in fact, quite apart from the distress felt by Ambar and Yülien who, if I understand it correctly, were the main reason I was rescued.”
“That's true, My Lord. If they hadn't been there the whole operation would have ended in disaster.”
“Perhaps you could give me the details?”
“Maybe Ambar could tell you how it happened from his point of view. After all, he was the one who stopped me committing...”
“No,” interrupted Ambar. “You were going to do what you and your chenn-da thought was the best way to break into the sorcerers' circle...”
He turned to Yulmir. “You see, Ugo, who is actually Yol, the Saviour of the Emperor, had asked Master Subadar to sacrifice him in order to pay his way into the circle. And Master Subadar had agreed because... Well, because he too was going to do something... something that went beyond just brave: he was going to perform a rite of the Dark Arts, because he was sure it was the only way to rescue you. I've thought about it a lot over the past couple of days and I don't know exactly what it would have cost him to break his pledge like that, but I reckon he knew. But he still didn't hesitate.”
“Well... just stick to the point,” mumbled Subadar.
“All right... so, anyway, when we saw he was starting to make big gestures... I should say that me and Yülien were watching from a big rock not far away... anyway, when we saw him starting his ritual we thought we might as well go and look at things from the Outside. I mean, if the Dre tchenn had hidden the circle it was obviously through some adjustment to hyperspatial topology. That's logical, isn't it?”
“If you say so,” said Yulmir.
“So we went to have a look. Nobody noticed, not even Xarax, because if you jump into the Outside and then jump back to the same place, it takes no time at all even if you stay in the Outside a while – Wak Yannan's Theorem explains how that works.”
“I did once know a Guide called Wak Yannan, but I had no idea that he had authored a mathematical treatise.”
“Well, I suppose it has to be him... but to get back to the story, me and Yülien jumped into the Outside and from there we could see the singularity, but we could also see that it was impossible to penetrate it. So we went to the In-between – that's what we decided to call the place beyond the Outside until the Council of Guides comes up with a proper name for it. And there... well, I won't ramble on with the details, but the main thing is that we saw that with the added dimensions getting inside would be a piece of cake, because seen from there it wasn't a singularity any more, just a little knot in hyperspace, really easy to deal with... well, not hard, anyway. So we came back and called Xarax over. We told him what we were doing so he wouldn't worry, and then we told Master Wenn Hyaï, and then we jumped over to Master Subadar and showed him what we'd found. He said he couldn't follow our reasoning very well but said that if we were sure he was ready to give it a try.”
“If you don't mind, My Lord,” said Subadar, “I'll take it from here. You're a Master Guide yourself, so I don't need to explain how quickly you can get something done with a few carefully organised jumps. Within a few minutes we had assembled an assault team here at the Palace. We restricted it to the people close to Julien, all of whom have been trained to use the special hand weapons: Tannder, Dennkar, Niil of the Ksantiris, Karik shel Tannder and myself, although I went along just in case I could be useful – I'm no expert with those weapons. Wenn Hyaï used his Gift to help the nyingtchik transport such a large group, although we had to rely exclusively on our young pair to get us safely to the destination. Getting everything ready took less than half a tchouksö, but we knew that time was of the essence.”
“You have no idea just how true that was, my friend,” commented Yulmir.
“When we arrived in the circle those who carried weapons used them immediately while I rushed to try to cut Julien free, and then Niil, who had run out of enemies to kill, finished the job with his nagtri, because my own blade wasn't getting very far. And then we came back here. The whole operation only lasted an instant.”
“Is that it? My dear Subadar, I love the way you can tell a story while constantly downplaying your own part in it. Anyway, I can fill in the gaps for you in due course, and I also want to meet the rest of your team. But first we need to have a few words in private. I'm afraid Aldegard will have to wait a little longer.”
oo0oo
“My friend,” said Yulmir once they were alone, “I am absolutely determined to put an end to the 'Protector of the Nine Worlds' way of doing things. I have no intention of going on with being the Almighty Director of Everything for a few thousand years more. And I hope you're going to help me.”
“I'd guessed something was wrong before you disappeared, My Lord,” said Subadar. “But I had no idea that you wanted...”
“To retire? Yes, I did. In fact I started wanting that long before you were born. Xarax's predecessors killed me several times simply for thinking about it.”
“What?!”
“Don't worry, Xarax isn't going to continue that particular tradition. One day I'll tell you how I got as close as I did to realising my goal. But now I owe it to Julien to finish the thing properly – and while we're on that subject I want you to try to think up a way to get him back, because at the moment he's buried even deeper inside me than I was inside him.
“But right now I need to take up the reins of the Empire again, even if I hope it's going to be the last time I have to do that. I have to try to persuade people that the Nine Worlds is going to have to get along in the future without Yulmir. I'm going to need your support and your clever thinking. Are you with me?”
“Of course, My Lord if that's what you want.”
“Then to start with I'd like you to stop calling me 'My Lord' when we're in private. Just 'Yulmir' will do.”
“Ah, now you remind me of someone else. He hates protocol, too.”
“If you're referring to Julien I find myself liking him more and more.”
“But surely you know him better than I do?”
“Not at all. The only information I have about him is what I could glean from his memory between my... let's call it 'reawakening' – and when I had to render him unconscious.”
“Then all through those years...”
“All through those years I was unconscious, as if I was asleep. There was nothing else I could have done: I had no right to take over a child's body and so deny him any chance of a normal growth and development, or of a normal existence. I know a lot of people have called me a tyrant, but there are some crimes I won't stoop to.”
Subadar's sudden pallor and Ugo's simultaneous groan stopped Yulmir short.
“What is it?” he asked.
“That's exactly what I did!” exclaimed Ugo. “I should have died. I wasn't able to transport my body any longer. And so I stole the life of a young dog, and there's no way to atone for something like that!”
“Yol,” said Yulmir, “you only did it because you thought you were saving me. You didn't think about yourself, not even for one instant. I know you well, and so I know that you were ready to accept the consequences of your action because you hoped for an opportunity to send me back to the R'hinz. Our situations weren't so very different, but if I had done the same thing with Julien it would have been simply to preserve my own existence, not for the sort of higher motive you had. Besides, you didn't kill that young animal. In all probability he's still somewhere inside you now, just as Julien is inside me.”
Yol's eyes seemed to light up and he pricked his ears in an almost comical fashion.
“If that's true,” he said, “then somehow I'll find him and make up for the wrong I did him.”
“There you are, then, Subadar,” said Yulmir. “Now there's another reason for you to find a solution to our problem.”
oo0oo