Brann could feel a faint breeze, air was coming through the glass or whatever it was, at least she wasn’t going to smother. She leaned against the wall, looking out at the others. Ahzurdan and Daniel Akamarino were feeling round similar cylinders. As she watched, Daniel shrugged, settled back on his bench and began sucking on the spout of the wineskin. Ahzurdan’s face was dark with fury, he beat against the transparency, nearly incinerated himself trying to break through it. Abruptly, both men were stripped naked, Daniel’s wine was jerked away from him.
A SOUND like fingernails scratching on slate. The hair stood up on Brann’s arms and along her spine, her teeth began to ache.
The cylinder with Ahzurdan vanished, reappeared superimposed on DaMel’s prison; inside the suddenly single cylinder, Ahzurdan and Daniel seemed to be trying to occupy the same place at the same time; the Chained God was forcing the two men to merge. Brann watched, horrified.
Their flesh bulged and throbbed, hair, eyes, teeth appeared, disappeared, arms, legs, heads melted and reformed hideously deformed. The Ahzurdan part and the Akamarino part fought desperately to maintain their separation, but the terrible pressure the god was placing on them was forcing the merger.
The struggle went on and on. Tongues of flame danced briefly about the tormented shapeless flesh thing, but the god damped them. He/it hammered at the emerging form, beating at it as a potter beat at clay, driving out the beads of air trapped inside it hammering hammering hammering until he/it sculpted the lump into a meaningful manshape that was new and old at once, recognizably Ahzurdan and Daniel Akamarino yet very different from either of them.
A coughing sound, a sub-audible whoosh. The cylinders disappeared. The composite man crumpled to the grass and lay without moving.
Blindingly angry, Brann stumbled as the wall she was pushing against melted away; she caught her balance after a few lunging steps, ran full out to fling herself down beside the man’s body. She pressed her fingers up under his jaw, relaxed somewhat when she felt a strong pulse under her fingers. She snapped her head back, glared up at the haze that hid the metal arching high high overhead. “You!” she cried. “What have you done?”
The god’s voice came booming down at her, dry and pedantic. “They were inadequate as they were, Drinker of Souls. Incomplete in themselves. They are one and whole now. And who are you to chastise me, you who have drunk the life of thousands?”
“So I have. But they died before they knew something had happened to them. No pain. No fear. Not like this, not… ahhh… shaken and warped, mind and spirit, it’s rape, you wouldn’t know about that, would you? it’s invasion and mutilation. Are you going to try telling me they… he… won’t feel all that? Both of them? Are you going to try to tell me they’ll take a look and say what the hell, I’ll crip along on what’s left? How can two minds live in one flesh without being destroyed by it?”
“That is for you to determine.”
“What?”
“When Danny Blue wakes, Daniel Akamarino and Ahzurdan are going to be fighting for dominance within him just as the parts of me fought when I first began. You think I don’t understand, Drinker of Souls? It took me five hundred years to reach a full integration of my parts. I can’t afford to give him that much time and he won’t live that long. You and the children together, you are capable of leading him, them, through this, healing him. You don’t need instructions, do it. “
Brann knelt looking down at Danny Blue. He was long and lanky, not a great deal of bulk to him though his muscles were firm and full. Ahzurdan’s beard had vanished, but his hair (somewhat thinner than before, considerably grayer) filled in Daniel’s baldness. The changes in the face were more subtle, fewer wrinkles, none of them so deeply graved as those Ahzurdan wore like badges of hard living, the lips were fuller than Daniel’s had been but thinner than Ahzurdan’s, the cheekbones a hair higher and broader than Daniel’s but not so high and broad as Ahzurdan’s, the rest of the changes were a thousand such midway compromises between the two men.
His body shuddered, his fingers jerked, began clawing at the sod, his lips and eyes twitched. His breathing turned harsh and unsteady. Brann bent over him, spread her hands on his chest. “Yaril, Jaril!”
With the children occupying her body and his and guiding her, Brann began the struggle to integrate the two minds. She couldn’t see what the three of them were doing, only feel it; she groped blindly toward what she sensed as hotspots, paingeysers, cyclonic storms, working from an instinct that was an amalgam of her inborn unconscious bodyknowledge and the learned knowledge of the children (their understanding of their own bodies and minds, their considerable experience of the minds and bodies they indirectly fed upon). She was still seething with anger at being trapped into doing the Chained God’s work; her fantasies about bargaining with him were fantasies indeed, about as useful and lasting as writing on water. His/its tampering with Ahzurdan and Daniel Akamarino put her in a position where there was only one thing she could do and continue to live with herself.
The work went on and on, images fluttered into her mind; she didn’t believe they were dreams leaking from the disparate parts of Danny Blue, no, they were translations of emotion, perhaps concept, into images from her own stores, Ahzurdan had told her something like that when he was explaining how sorcerors developed their chants. Black malouch snarling circling about black malouch, these malouchi with sapphire eyes, not gold. She whined with angry frustration, every troublespot she soothed down seemed to birth two more. Black hair blue eyes not black Temueng trooper with a serpent tail, rearing up, swaying, hissing, deadly, tensing to strike, On and on. She saw the trouble under her touch gradually diminishing. Her anger drowned in a flood of fascination with what she was doing, with what was making itself under her fingers. Blue water heaving, blue iris, blue hyacinth, blue lupin, blue flames, blue EYES blue and blue, blue glaze shining, look deep and deep and deep into a blue bluer than a summer sky, deep and deep… Her need to make was almost as deep-seated in her as her need to breathe. She labored over Danny Blue, blind fingered, eyes shut, shaping him, manipulating his clay, all thought of the Chained God pushed away so that the Danny Blue under her hands seemed her creation, almost as if she’d birthed him. Thoughts (gnat swarms of blue sparks) in cloud shimmers blue funnels wobbling about each other, dipping toward each other, fragile, fearful, furious with hate, touch and shatter, struggling away, drawn back, always drawn back… On and on, spending her strength recklessly, no thought of the god and what other treacheries he might be planning, on and on making a man with all the art and passion in her. Clay under her hands, blue clay fighting her, holding stubbornly to its imperfections, holding its breath on her, keeping the treacherous air bubbles locked in it, bubbles that would fracture it in the firing, stubborn, resisting, tough but oh so fine, so fine when she got the flaws out. On and on until there were no more hotspots, no more images in blue, until the need that drove her drained away.
She broke contact and sat on her heels looking blearily down at him. He was asleep, snoring a little. She turned him on his side, shifted off her heels until she was sitting beside him on the grass. Jaril slid out of her, flickering from globe to boy, lay down a short way off, a naked youth molded in milkglass, she could see the jagged line of dark green grass through his legs. Yaril slid out of Danny Blue, crawled over to stretch out beside her brother, naked milkglass girl like she’d been when she rolled off Brann the day this all began, but older now with firm young breasts and broadening hips. Pale wraiths, they lay motionless, waiting passively for her to feed them or do something to restore their strength.