I saw no handle or doorknob, but Callina reached forward and it opened. And we stepped into… blueness.
Blue, like the living heart of a jewel, like the depths of a translucent lake, like the farther deeps of the sky of Terra at midday. Blue, around us, behind us, beneath us. Uncanny lights so mirrored and prismed the room that it seemed to have no dimensions, to be at once immeasurably large and terribly confined, to be everywhere at once. I shrank, feeling immense spaces beneath me and above me, the primitive fear of falling; but Callina moved unerringly through the blueness.
“Is it you, daughter and my son?” said a low clear voice, like winter water running under ice. “Come here. I am waiting for you.”
Then and only then, in the frosty dayshine, could I focus my eyes enough in the blueness to make out the great carven throne of glass, and the pallid figure of a woman seated upon it.
Somehow I would have thought that in this formal audience Ashara would wear the crimson robes of ceremonial for a Keeper. Instead she wore robes that so absorbed and mirrored the light that she was almost invisible; a straight tiny figure, no larger than a child of twelve. Her features were almost fleshlessly pure, as unwrinkled as Callina’s own, as if the very hand of time itself had smoothed its own marks away. The eyes, long and large, were colorless too, though in a more normal light they might have been blue. There was a faint, indefinable resemblance between the young Keeper and the old one, as if Ashara were a Callina incredibly more ancient, or Callina an embryo Ashara, not yet ancient but bearing the seeds of her own translucent invisibility. I began to believe that the stories were true; that she was all but immortal, had dwelt here unchanged while the worlds and the centuries passed over her and beyond her…
She said, “So you have been beyond the stars, Lew Alton?”
It would not be fair to say the voice was unkind. It was not human enough for that. Detached, unbelievably remote; it was all of that. It sounded as if the effort of conversing with real, living persons was too much for her, as if our coming had disturbed the crystalline peace in which she dwelt.
Callina, accustomed to this—or so I suppose—murmured, “You see all things, Mother Ashara. You know what we have to face.”
A flicker of emotion passed over the peaceful face, and she seemed to solidify, to become less translucent and more real. “Not even I can see all things. I have no power, now, outside this place.”
Callina murmured, “Yet aid us with your wisdom, Mother.”
“I will do what I must,” she said, remotely. She gestured. There was a transparent bench at her feet—glass or crystal; I had not seen it before, and I wondered why. Maybe it had not been there or maybe she had conjured it there; nothing would have surprised me now. “Sit there and tell me.”
She gestured at my matrix. “Give it to me, and let me see—”
Now, remembering, telling, I wonder whether any of this happened or whether it was some bizarre dream concealing reality. A telepath, even an Arilinn-trained telepath, simply does not do what I did then; without even thinking of protest, I slipped the leather thong on which my matrix was tied over my head with my good hand, fumbled a little with the silken wrappings, and handed it to her, without the slightest thought of resisting. I simply put it into her hand.
And this is the first law of a telepath; nobody touches a keyed matrix, except your own Keeper, and then only after a long period of attunement, of matching resonances. But I sat there at the feet of the ancient sorceress, and laid the matrix in her hand without stopping to think, and although something in me was tensed against incredible agony… I remembered when Kadarin had stripped me of my matrix, and how I had gone into convulsions…nothing happened; the matrix might have been safely around my neck.
And I sat there peacefully and watched it.
Deep within the almost-invisible blue of the matrix were fires, strange lights… I saw the glow of fire, and the great raging shimmer… Sharra! Not the Form of Fire which had terrified us in Council, but the Goddess herself, raging in flame—Ashara waved her hand and it disappeared. She said, “Yes, that matrix I know of old… and yours has been in contact with it, am I right?”
I bowed my head and said, “You have seen.”
“What can we do? Is there any way to defend against—”
She waved Callina to silence. “Even I cannot alter the laws of energy and mechanics,” she said. Looking around the room, I was not so sure. As if she had heard my thoughts, she said, “I wish you knew less science of the Terrans, Lew.”
“Why?”
“Because now you look for causes, explanations, the fallacy that every event must have a preceding cause… matrix mechanics is the first of the non-causal sciences,” she said, seeming to pick up that Terran technical phrase out of the air or from my mind. “Your very search for structure, cause and reality produces the cause you seek, but it is not the real cause… does any of this make sense to you?”
“Not very much,” I confessed. I had been trained to think of a matrix as a machine, a simple but effective machine to amplify psi impulses and the electrical energy of the brain and mind.
“But that leaves no place for such things as Sharra,” Ashara said. “Sharra is a very real Goddess— No, don’t shake your head. Perhaps you could call Sharra a demon, though She is no more a demon than Aldones is a God— They are entities, and not of this ordinary three-dimensional world you inhabit. Your mind would find it easier to think of them as Gods and Demons, and of your matrix, and the Sharra matrix, as talismans for summoning those demons, or banishing them…They are entities from another world, and the matrix is the gateway that brings them here,” she said. “You know that, or you knew it once, when you managed to close the gateway for a time. And for such a summoning Sharra will always have Her sacrifice; so she had your hand, and Marjorie gave up her life—”
“Don’t!” I shuddered.
“But there is a better weapon of banishing,” Ashara said. “What says the legend…”
Callina whispered, “Sharra was bound in chains by the son of Hastur, who was the Son of Aldones who was the Son of Light…”
“Rubbish,” I said boldly. “Superstition!”
“You think so?” Ashara seemed to realize she was still holding my matrix; she handed it carelessly back to me and I fumbled it into the silken wrappings and into its leather bag, put it back around my neck. “What of the shadow-sword?”
That too was legend; Linnell had sung it tonight, of the time when Hastur walked on the shores of the lake, and loved the Blessed Cassilda. The legend told of the jealousy of Alar, who had forged in his magical forge a shadow-sword, meant to banish, not to slay. Pierced with this sword, Hastur must return to his realms of light… but the legend recounted how Camilla, the damned, had taken the place of Cassilda in Hastur’s arms, and so received the shadow-blade in her heart, and passed away forever into those realms—
I said, hesitating, “The Sharra matrix is concealed in the hilt of a sword… tradition, because it is a weapon, no more—”
Ashara asked, “What do you think would happen to anyone who was slain with such a sword as that?”
I did not know. It had never occurred to me that the Sword of Sharra could be used as a sword, though I had hauled the damnable thing around half the Galaxy with me. It was simply the case the forge-folk had made to conceal the matrix of Sharra. But I found I did not like thinking of what would happen to anyone run through by a sword possessed and dominated by Sharra’s matrix.