Wizards At War

It bent Its gaze on her. “Handmaiden, Favored of the Great One,” It said softly, “give up this vain dream of oneness, of being one’s own self! Don’t you realize this is all an evil plot by the One’s enemies? They would drive you away from your own kind, from the right way to think, the right way to be. Come back within the mind that bore you; come back and be one again with those who will always honor what you have done as a mother of your people, a daughter of the Great One, honored by the King.”

Nita could feel the power the King was bringing to bear on Memeki. Even she began slowly to feel that it was wrong of any being to resist such honor, that Memeki should forget all about them, save herself, bow down before the King.

Beware! said the peridexis’s voice in her head. Don’t let Its shadowy little truth overwhelm the greater one.

Nita blinked, shook her head slightly as if to clear it. Thanks, she said, and the King’s influence receded. But this is just Its usual game, isn’t it? The Lone One would really love it if It could not only stop Memeki from being the Hesper, but also break her will before she died.

Memeki now stood swaying on her many legs, her eyes reflecting nothing but the King as she leaned more and more toward him. “For am I not the One who set your people free from the tyranny of the mighty and evil Force from Outside?” the King was saying. “Do you not owe all your loyalty to the One who stole the tyrant’s power despite everything it could do, and so made your world free?”

Memeki swayed, swayed, slowly grew still … then looked up. “Free?” she said. “Yes. You made us free.” She was shivering again, and she crouched down as if once again feeling the pangs of the eggs beginning to move inside her. “Free to kill. And free to die.”

“But what other freedom is there,” the King said, more softly still, “in this concentration camp of a universe, where all things must happen according to the evil Other’s inflexible rules, on threat of some awful eternal punishment? Far better to tell it, ‘Not your will, but mine!’—and turn your back on the Other’s unkept promise that groveling to It will bring you joy. Death comes no matter what the Other does, and so only Death’s servants, my servants, are truly free! Free to take what they want, to kill what they want, no consequences, no punishment, no limits!”

“Except when the freedom is one you don’t choose to grant,” Memeki said, more loudly this time. She was shaking herself all over, struggling to stand straight again. “You hold out hope with one claw and take it away with the other! I may be weak and doomed soon to die, but I will die as an I, not just one more nameless scrap of shell to be thrown out into the sucking mud! No matter how little a time it lasts, I will be what all these are—” And she looked around at Kit and Ponch and Nita and the others. “— selves unto themselves, and beings that matter to each other! Such a life, even a breath’s worth of it, is better than anything you’ve ever given me!”

Memeki was trembling again, but with passion, with determination, desperate and doomed. She took a step toward the dais, and another, her claws lifted not in that old gesture of submission, but in one more like a warrior’s threat. “I will be what the Voice said I was, the Hesper, I will be the Aeon of Light, the Power that made a different choice from yours. I will be the Star that did not fall, no matter how little a time the light lasts!”

The possessed King tapped a fretful foreclaw on the dais, almost like someone drumming his fingers. It looked past Memeki at Kit and Nita and the others. “Well, they have spoiled you beyond tempting,” It said, sounding aggrieved. “What a shame. But this is no great loss, for in a very little while I will nonetheless get a couple of hundred more avatars out of you. Oh, yes,” It said, as once again Memeki’s legs started to give way under her. Dairine and Roshaun reached out to support her on one side, and Kit and Ronan on the other. Ponch shouldered in between them and started licking Memeki’s face. “I have hastened your time considerably; you can feel them preparing to come forth. This should be educational for these ‘friends’ you’re so enamored of.”