I held the blades in my hand above the boy’s head and crushed them as I released time. The boy stood there for a long moment, waiting for the blades to strike him, or land harmlessly to his sides. When nothing happened, he glanced around, then looked up in horror at the mass of molten silver whirling above his head. It was not fear for his own life that widened his eyes. To his mentor the blades meant the world and now they were so much liquid.
“Boy, why do you throw in the Diram Ring?rdquo; I asked. There are other places where you could play. Places where they serve beer and where you could preen in front of your kind.”
“Ahnli,” he said to me, “this is the only ring in the world where the gods still live. That is why I came to the Diram Ring.”
The voice was strong, strange, yet touched with the familiar. “What are you called?” I asked.
“Alan.”
“Alan,” I said, “we will keep the blades here, above the ring. Go and bring us your teacher.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Alan turned until the sun was in his eyes, and walked from the ring. As the sun’s orb touched the western horizon, Redgait asked, “Do you believe he will return?”
I watched a horned spider begin its new nest between the stones Alan had placed upon the wall of the Diram Ring. Above, in the sky, were the trails of cargo and passenger ships. On another world a child prayed. “Yes,” I answered. “He will return.”
“And we will wait for him?”
“We will wait.”
“In which case, my sister, we are all of us fools.”
The next day, just as the morning sunlight touched the molten metal above the Diram Ring, Ril, the ancient grandson of the great Giya, came before us. His wrinkled skin was the color and texture of rotted leather. His human, Alan, stood at the opening in the west wall. They had come over the moat upon a raft. Ril was too old to swim. Indeed, he was too old to be alive.
The hairless old Mieuran, his rheumy black eyes looking in dismay at the remains of his father’s precious blades, held out his pitifully thin arms and called, “Ahnli! Redgait! Spirits of the Diram Ring, can you have given over this arena to the Gezi demons, as well? Is there no ring left in the world where gods rule?”
Ril stood directly beneath the whirling globule of metal and turned his face up toward it. In the light reflected from the metal I saw how timeworn Ril was. Redgait and I could never grow old, which is why we always felt terribly ancient.
“You speak as a child,” scolded my brother. “Why did you send the human?” Redgait filled the sky with fire.
Ril lowered his arms and looked first at the northern niche, then turned and stared at me, an expression of astonishment on his face. “Can it be that the gods do not know what has happened to the world? Ahnli,” he cried, his shaking hands extended toward the south niche. “Ahnli, look upon the world. Your people are starving without their gods.”
“I see them,” I answered as I let myself appear to the old Mieuran. To him I appeared as a Mieuran female. “They do not seem hungry to me. They dance to the Gezi’s tune and grow fat and sleek.”
Ril lowered his arms, a hint of anger edging into his voice. “Play me not the fool, Ahnli. You know the starvation of which I speak. The light within each of them grows more dim with each passing moment. It is a hunger of the soul.”
“Why the human?” interrupted Redgait.
Old Ril whirled around and snapped at the north, “No Mieuran could have awakened you! You curl in your niches wallowing in self pity while your world dies the death of the spirit. How else were you to be driven from your cowardly hiding places?”
A great red hand, the palm of which could cover the ring, reached up from the north niche to crush the old Mieuran. My own hand reached up and held Redgait’s until my brother’s temper cooled.
“The balance!” cried Ril as he held his hands up toward the clasped hands of Redgait and myself. “The balance! It is for this that the world starves.” He turned slowly and looked upon his dark little human. “Alan believes in gods. That is why he is here. I believe in those who believe. That is why I trained him and brought him to the Diram Ring. I must see my grandfather’s blades thrown in the consecration once more. I must see the gods live.”
Far above the ring, away from the ears of Ril and his human, I spoke to Redgait. “Where from here, brother? Do we crush them and retire to the peace of our ring?”
With his hand, Redgait touched the molten metal above the ring, fashioning them again into Giya’s sacred blades. He took them and drove them toward Ril’s upturned face and I guided them apart. They both stuck into the sand. Ril reached out his hands, grasped the handles, pulled the blades from the sand, and held them out toward the human.
Alan took the blades. As Ril retired to the edge of the ring, the human stood at the eastern edge of the ring, tossed the blades into the air above the center of the ring, and ran beneath them to the opposite side of the ring. Both blades struck vertically into Alan’s footprints.
“Excellent!” exclaimed my brother, but in a voice only I could hear.
“He is swift and his throw is accurate,” I admitted. “It is different, though, with eight, sixteen, or sixty throwers mixing their blades. He knows where his blades will strike. He cannot predict the others.”
“For that, Ahnli, he has the gods.”
I watched Alan retrieve the blades and throw them again. This time they landed in his path directly in front of him as he reached the far side of the ring. Without a pause he took the blades, touched the edge of the ring with his foot, and threw again, this time catching them by the handles as he reached the opposite side. He was far better than Giya had been. Swift, accurate, graceful, and he had a certain style that said, “Witness my passage. The gods protect me.”
That had been the purpose of the rings and the passage through the blades. It was to bear witness that the gods were there, that they were strong, and that they helped those who sought them. Advertising, a human might have called it.
Redgait and I could protect Alan in the Diram Ring. For Alan to throw in another ring, however, he would need the gods of that ring. As the boy continued to throw, proving his stamina as well, I came before Ril and asked, “Where would you have him throw?”
“The ring at Jaffri.”
“Where the gods killed your grandfather.”
“No. Where my grandfather placed his faith in a paper god who could not protect him. There is where the end of the world began: the end of the blade throwers, the end of the gods, the end of faith.”
I stared in wonder at Ril. Had he spent his many years searching for the proper champion to correct the long forgotten wrongs of his grandfather? Did he think he and his dark little human could alter the direction of the world? Did he think he could replace guile with courage, money with honor, sham with faith? The decision wasn’t mine. Ril would begin his quest in the Jaffri Ring, hence the decisions that needed to be made belonged to other gods.
Lok and Diru were the gods of the Jaffri Ring, and they were still fast asleep deep inside me where I had hidden them. I reached out far beneath the eastern horizon with my sight and looked down upon the great metropolis of Jaffri beneath the morning sun. In the center of the city stood the ancient walls and columns of the Jaffri Ring. The ring itself was identical to the one at Diram, but instead of hundreds, the stands above and beyond the walls at the Jaffri Ring could seat hundreds of thousands.