He pulled up short as he reached them, because there was no room to maneuver on the narrow walkway. “Tammis,” he said, the concern in his voice hardening into imtation. “Get back in the car. I don’t want you out here.”
Tammis looked at him. “But I had to come out. I have to be here. …”
“You don’t have to be anywhere, but safe,” Ngenet said, with surprising gentleness, his hands still firmly on Tammis’s shoulders. “It’s all right; you’re just a little shaken up. It’s too much for anybody out here—”
“But it’s so beautiful here,” Tammis murmured, and there was something eerily like the manner of a sleepwalker about him. His eyes drifted away from them as he spoke; he strained toward the rail again. “The light—it keeps getting brighter. And there’s a kind of music here, do you hear it? I had to come out.”
“What are you talking about?” Sparks snapped. “Tammis! Damn it, look at me—”
But Tammis turned toward the void again, staring down into it as if he were looking for the sea, his straining body silhouetted by whorls of light.
“What’s happening down there?” Jerusha PalaThion’s voice interrupted suddenly, through the earjack of Sparks’s headset. “Is everything all right?”
“No problem,” Ngenet grunted, pulling the boy back again. “He’s all right; I think maybe there’s a kind of effect the light down here has, a kind of rapture… .”
“Sparks—”
Sparks started, as Moon’s voice suddenly filled his ears. “Sparks, I don’t like this. Bring him up, it isn’t safe. Bring him up now!”
“He’ll be all right. He’s just got a case of vertigo.” Sparks felt himself frown again. “We’re not finished here.”
“I can’t leave,” Tammis echoed, not looking at them. “I have to get down there—”
“Come on, Tammis,” Ngenet said, more insistent, trying to pry him away from the rail, pulling him around. “Come on, boy, let’s get back.”
“No, I don’t want to get back in the car. I have to be near it; I have to go to it—”
“Tammis—!” Moon’s shrill, panic-stricken voice made Sparks wince; he jerked the jack out of his ear. He pushed forward, his exasperation giving his movements too much force as he caught his son’s shoulder, trying to propel him in the direction of the car.
Tammis twisted, resisting as he was caught between the movements of the two men, trying to break free. He lost his balance, and stumbled into Ngenet. His hands flailed wildly as he began to fall outward; as behind him Ngenet lost his own footing in the middle of a move to stop the boy from pitching over the rail. Tammis’s cry of surprise was drowned in Ngenet’s sudden, louder cry, in Sparks’s shout of warning as he lunged forward—colliding with Tammis, knocking him down, as Ngenet struck the rail and went over the edge.
“No—!” Sparks’s scream filled his own ears, as his frantic lunge grasped nothing but air, too late. “Ngenet!” He hung against the rail, his body strengthless as he looked over and down, at the tiny speck of black falling downward through the pinwheeling light, still falling and falling toward the black depths. Voices clamored in his head, through the headset, out of the mouth of the pathetic figure clinging to his feet, beside him on the catwalk. But he had only eyes, no other senses; only eyes to watch that spot of black growing smaller and smaller, until it was lost at last in the utter blackness below.
TIAMAT: Carbuncle
Tammis …
Tammis spiraled up through an endless tunnel of darkness shot with light, rising like a swimmer, knowing only that he fled from some horror in the bottomless depths. It howled after him like a lost soul, like the sound of his own madness gibbering, calling him by name. He felt it gaining on him; knowing that if he looked back, if it caught his gaze and forced him to put a name to it, it would drag him down into madness forever… .
“Tammis—”
He woke, hearing his terrified cry half-drown the sound of someone calling his name. He jerked upright, felt hands press his trembling body back against pillows. He opened his eyes, staring in disbelief at the ceiling of his own room. His gaze slid down over the line of molded trim onto the wall’s long sky-blue expanse, found the familiar triptych painting of the sea. His hands rediscovered the heavy quilts and woolen blankets of his bed.
His mother’s face hovered above him, her hands still pressing his chest in gentle restraint. “What … ?” he said, his voice a broken whisper. “What am I doing here?”
As he spoke the words, he felt himself begin to fall away, back down into the blackness without bottom… .
“Stop—” Moon said, and there was something in her voice that he had never heard before. Abruptly the compulsion that was suffocating his thoughts began to dissipate like fog. Her hand brushed his hair gently away from his eyes. “Whenever you feel yourself begin to slip away like that, you must say stop,” she murmured. “That’s all… stop. And it will.”
He nodded, staring at her for a long moment, uncomprehending. His eyes caught on the white bandage wrapping her wrist, the matching strip of bandage around his own. He frowned, trying to remember why the sight of those bandages filled him with such awe and terror and grief. He closed his eyes, looking inward, trying to make sense of the images as they began to take form.
The Pit. At first it seemed to be the last thing he remembered: the descent into the Pit with his father and Miroe Ngenet … the hypnotic kaleidoscope of light and darkness swirling upward around him. The light had been made up of all colors, and yet it had seemed to him to become greener and greener, and to have music in it, like no music he had ever heard or could ever possibly hear, outside of his own soul, or the song of the mers.
He remembered nothing more, nothing except the terrible need to join that calling beauty… .
And then somehow he had found himself in the Hall of the Winds again; with hands holding him up, holding him back when he would have gone to the edge—
And as his head began to clear, he had heard the cries and the questions, seen Jerusha PalaThion’s stricken face, heard her voice repeating endlessly, “It can’t be! He can’t be—” And Miroe Ngenet had been nowhere.
He had searched every face around him; seeing only a strobing nightmare of a figure falling, black against night, that couldn’t be real, couldn’t be his fault, couldn’t be.… He saw his father’s face, with eyes as hard as emeralds, turning back his confusion with grief, and his sudden fear with fury.
“What is it?” he had asked, almost desperately. “What is it—?”
The others had looked at him, and their faces gave him no comfort. “Miroe is dead,” his father had said flatly. “He fell. He fell because of you—”
And then his mother the Queen had been there beside him, putting her arms around him protectively, saying, “He doesn’t remember! He doesn’t understand.”
He had followed her away, up the stairs, moving as clumsily at first as if he were newborn, stumbling over his feet. His mother led him to a small, quiet study, a room he had always felt comfortable in, and settled him on the couch.
She sat beside him, looking at him for a time without speaking. He saw compassion in her eyes, and something that might be understanding—although he could not believe she understood something which was so incomprehensible even to him. “I killed Uncle Miroe…?” he said, his voice breaking with his own disbelief. “I killed him?”