The rest of them appeared rapidly, in ones or twos, or several at a time. One of them was different from the rest, wearing a dark cloak and hood. It was clearly a woman, short and plump, though the hood concealed her features. She moved like a sleepwalker as one of the Watchers took her by the hand and led her to the body on the ground. The pale robe floated up and enveloped her. The Watcher stooped, picked up the mask and handed it to her. As she took it the Ropemaker broke the silence with a snap of his fingers.
The mask crumbled to dust. She raised her hands and threw back the hood of her cloak, shaking her head as she stumbled across the arena, like someone emerging from a dream. With a shock of horror and fear Maja saw that she was Chanad.
“All here, then?” said the Ropemaker affably. “One of you speak for the rest, eh?”
“We speak for ourself,” said a bloodless voice out of the air.
“Yourselves,” he corrected. “Twenty-three of you now. All different people. Bound you to cooperate while I was gone. Back now, so that’s over.”
“You are mistaken,” said the voice. “We are neither twenty-three nor twenty-four, but one. True, with our consent you bound us, and can release us from that binding. But of our own choice we have since bound ourself further and more fully, and there is no power other than our own that can release us. You have made a vacancy in our wholeness. Your choice is either to fill that vacancy and become one with us, or be destroyed. Your time is over, Ramdatta.”
The name they should never have known took the Ropemaker by surprise. He hesitated as the three quietly spoken syllables woke whispering echoes in the rocks, echoes which reverberated to and fro, growing louder and louder and louder, until they became three gigantic raps on the doors of time.
He flinched, staggered, and at the third blow he reeled back, throwing up his arms in front of his face. His turban unraveled and fell to the ground. His magical mane hung limp around him, a dull yellowish orange, streaked with gray. He fell to his knees and put his head in his hands. Zara was already a pile of silvery fabric on the turf. Chanad had fallen beside her and was struggling to rise. Benayu too reeled, but grasped the staff, and steadied himself. As the echoes rumbled into silence Zara’s urn cracked apart, leaving a mound of crystal phials lying among the shards.
Soundlessly, one by one, they burst, like soap bubbles. Each time, a puff of pale smoke rose, carrying brilliant flashes of multi-colored light, like sparks flying up from a bonfire, no sooner glimpsed than gone. The smoke streamed away on the gusty wind, and the animas of the original Watchers, the hostages that Zara had guarded through the centuries in the mysterious space beyond her cell, all that had once made them human, her ultimate power against them, were gone.
Benayu was the first to move. He plucked the staff from the ground, strode to the center of the triangle formed by the three stricken magicians and turned steadily round, with the point of the staff tracing a circle close beyond them. The air seemed to ripple above the invisible line, though the ripples didn’t rise steadily, like waves of heat, but twisted and eddied in an increasingly complex, close-meshed pattern, forming a visible surface, a known shape, a shell of the entangled light of two universes. For a short while Maja could still see the four magicians, three of them sitting or lying as she had last seen them, with Benayu still grasping his staff but kneeling beside the Ropemaker. The Ropemaker took something out of his pouch and gave it to Benayu, who hesitated and took it. He was rising to his feet as the shell misted over, was briefly translucent, and finally became that strange, opaque, impossible substance that had kept them safe in a world where they shouldn’t have been able to exist. Its near side shimmered, and Benayu stepped through it. He touched it briefly with his staff and watched it sink into the turf, then turned confidently to face the Watchers.
Maja turned too, and stared at them, her heart pounding, as she waited for the next shock of disaster. Why had they done nothing to stop him? Surely they had the power. But they seemed not to have moved at all or even to have noticed what he was doing. Something was happening to them, though. Those smooth, pale masks had a greasy, oily look. Their robes too. Blobs of pale ooze were dribbling from their hems, forming into pools around their feet. Their erect, formal stances were losing their stiffness, sagging as if they’d been carved from butter and left in hot sunlight. And the dribbles were rivulets now, and the pools starting to coalesce as the whole line of Watchers melted slimily away and down and were absorbed into a single smooth expanse. A faint but cloying odor wafted to and fro on the gusting wind.
The army of Jexes recoiled, jostling to get away from the spreading edges of the pool. A yellow one with bright blue blotches was staggering directly toward her.
“Jex! Jex! What’s happening? Are you all right?”
“Poison to us,” came the faint and gasping whisper. “Hold me.”
Instantly he shrank into his granite form. She snatched him up, looped his cord round her neck and tucked him into her blouse. The rest of the Jexes were already scuttling off to the surrounding rocks and dissolving themselves into patches of colored lichen. All but three. One of these the liquid must actually have touched. He lay twitching at the edge of the pool until the other two, though themselves obviously already affected, took his forelimbs in their mouths and started to drag him away across the turf.
“Poison?” Ribek muttered. “He said something about that before, didn’t he? Demon magic, wasn’t it? I don’t like the look of this. And Saranja’s got Zald. What’s Benayu up to? Talking to someone?”
When she’d last looked Benayu had been standing sideways on to them, leaning on the staff, gazing broodingly out over the pool. Now he had half turned his head away as if listening to somebody beyond him. She heard the brief murmur of his voice. The words had the lilt of a question, but at the same time were full of purpose, tension, fire. Peering, Maja imagined for a moment that she could catch the faint outline of part of a human figure, shoulder, arm and flank, shadowy, almost transparent, like the smudge of a finger on clear glass. Then she lost it against the jumble of rocks beyond. A man, she thought, if it had been there at all, the top and back of a head, dense hair stiff as a bottlebrush, a broad and stocky body, some sort of stiff kilt.
Benayu turned back to the pool, drew himself up and waited, intent and watchful.
No wonder. The whole body of liquid had begun to stir, turn, spiral inward, a single huge eddy. But this was no normal eddy. When water eddies in a stream it too spirals inward, but when it reaches the center it sucks itself downward and is lost. This was doing the opposite, swirling upward into a twisting column, and at the same time sucking itself away from the edges of the pool and leaving behind it not green turf but a swath of sickly-yellow poisoned grass. As it withdrew it revealed, one after another, a row of fleshless skeletons, sprawled where the Watchers had stood.
Meanwhile, at the center, it continued to swirl silently and slimily upward. It quivered, and the lines of the spiral fell vertical and became the pleats of an ivory robe. Shoulders formed, and arms, folded across the chest, and, as the last glutinous ooze of the pool was absorbed, the hood of a gigantic Watcher grew from the shoulders, a Watcher as tall as a forest tree, glistening from head to foot with the slime of the pool. This wasn’t just a coating, Maja could tell. The monster was made of the stuff. Neither bones nor sinews held it into shape. No heart, lungs, stomach, nerves, brain provided it with the machinery of life. It was utterly dead, more dead than the skeletons it had left behind, more dead than the rocks of Angel Isle, death embodied and held into shape by a single, powerful magical will. This was the One that the Watchers had chosen to become.