Chapter 23

Niah Reborn

"Well?" said Axis, his voice hard.

"Isfrael has betrayed us," DragonStar said. "He has given Qeteb some secret that will enable him to —"

"That is not what I asked."

DragonStar looked up. His parents, Faraday, Gwendylyr and Goldman were all standing about his chair, their faces carefully unreadable.

Only Faraday allowed the barest of emotions to glimmer forth: her eyes were pools of horror ... a remembered horror.

"What did I say?" DragonStar said. "Why do you all look at me like that?"

"Who are you?" Goldman asked. "You look like DragonStar, and you sound like DragonStar, but who are you?"

DragonStar frowned. "What..."

"Qeteb spoke through your mouth," Faraday said softly. Her hands were clutched before her, twisting and writhing as if they, too, might be in the grip of some demonic possession.

"He said ... he said that he could take possession of your mind at will."

DragonStar closed his eyes and tipped his head back to rest against the back of the chair. Gods, what had he done? Let his confidence get the better of him! Let his arrogance lead them all into ruin!

And Qeteb could take possession of him at will?

"I cannot believe that," DragonStar said, opening his eyes and staring at the five gathered about him.

"He spoke to us," Faraday said. "DragonStar, it was not you."

DragonStar closed his eyes again. He remembered how Qeteb had reached claws into his mind as he'd sat at that table, but he'd not known that he'd ... he'd ...

DragonStar was suddenly filled with such a repugnance he leaned forward and retched. Stars in heaven, was this how a woman felt when she'd been raped?

Faraday swayed forward, then hesitated, and it was Azhure who put her arm around DragonStar's shoulders.

"What we are afraid of," Azhure said, "is that we, or any who speak to you or take your orders, may not be aware that Qeteb speaks through you."

"We will always look at you and wonder," Faraday said.

DragonStar wiped his mouth, jerking his eyes to meet hers. "You cannot trust me?"

"How can we trust you?" Goldman said. "Is this you now, or a cunning persona of Qeteb?"

DragonStar stared, then rose unsteadily to his feet. "You have no choice. You must trust me."

"How 'no choice'?" Axis said. His hand had finally drawn the sword, but he kept the blade flat against his leg.

"Because if you choose not to trust me, then Qeteb automatically wins. But if you choose to ignore what he says he can do, then you have an even chance of coming through. Either I am who I say I am, or I have lost my wits and voice and body to Qeteb. Even chance."

There was a silence.

"Besides," DragonStar continued, his voice hard, "no-one has any idea if Qeteb can indeed take possession of my mind and voice at will. When he did so just then he had me at his mercy in his lair. Can he repeat that trick when I am on my own territory and in possession of my own body?

"Dammit, you have no choice but to hope and to trust! If you decide to abandon me now then you will automatically sign your own, and this land's, death warrants!"

Axis and Azhure looked at each other, and Faraday dropped her eyes. Only Goldman and Gwendylyr continued to regard DragonStar with a steady gaze.

"He's right," Goldman suddenly said. "We have no choice but to trust DragonStar. If we do, then we may win and we may fail, but if we don't, then we guarantee our failure."

Gwendylyr nodded. "I agree."

She remembered how DragonStar had aided her when they'd all been trapped in Qeteb's illusion. Gwendylyr would not abandon him now.

Axis sighed, and sheathed his sword. He attempted a small smile. "I hate the odds, DragonStar. I loathe them. But you are right. None of us have a choice."

Azhure, her hand still on DragonStar's arm, nodded, and gave his arm a slight squeeze, but did not speak.

DragonStar looked at Faraday.

She stared at him, and gave a bright, utterly false smile.

She looked like a glass statue that would shatter at any moment.

"Of course I trust you, DragonStar," she said, and in that one, calamitous sentence, DragonStar knew he had lost her.

"Niah," DragonStar said. Only a moment had passed since Faraday had spoken, but in that moment a chasm had opened between them. "It has something to do with Niah."

"Isfrael went to Qeteb with some information about Niah," Goldman said. They'd all resumed their seats again, but the mood between them was stiff and uncomfortable. How long, DragonStar wondered, before any kind of trust can be rebuilt between us? Qeteb did well... very well indeed.

"There was something he told Qeteb about Niah," Goldman continued, his face creasing in thought,

"that has made Qeteb so confident he thought he had the leisure to toy with DragonStar, and with us through DragonStar."

"Toy?" wondered DragonStar, and then furthered wondered when — or even if — he should tell his witches of the consequences if they failed against the Demons. No, he must tell them. But not yet... not yet.

"Something about Niah," he said, remembering Qeteb's words, "that will enable Qeteb to

'eat' Sanctuary and destroy all of us. What? Azhure, can you help?"

Azhure shrugged helplessly. "Niah is much changed since I knew her. Death warped her soul so much that she has lost any —"

"Oh dear gods!" DragonStar leapt to his feet so abruptly that his chair fell over. "Oh dear gods in heaven!"

No-one could speak, all shocked by the look of horror on DragonStar's face.

DragonStar groped behind him for the chair, righted it, and

sank down again. He was trembling so badly he had to grip the armrests with his hands in order to steady himself.

"Niah ..." he cleared his throat and began again. "Niah is an Acharite reborn. She has access to the power of the Enemy."

There was a horrified silence.

Then Gwendylyr spoke, her voice surprisingly calm. "And thus, through her, so also does Qeteb have access to the power of the Enemy."

DragonStar nodded. "He can use her power to dismantle the enchantments and barriers that the Enemy erected to protect Sanctuary."

No-one spoke for a long time.

"And does that mean he can counter whatever you throw at him?" Axis said.

"I do not know," DragonStar whispered. "I do not know!"

No wonder Qeteb was so damned confident! Would his witches have any hope at all?

"But Niah has no soul," Gwendylyr said, trying desperately to find some shred of hope in the situation. "She is an automat only. She is —"

"She is a body ready to be filled with a soul," DragonStar said. "As was the child StarLaughter carried about with her. Niah is willing flesh imbued with the power needed to defeat Qeteb, but which Qeteb can now use to turn against us." DragonStar looked about at the others, meeting each of their eyes in turn. "I think none of us doubt but which soul Qeteb will use to fill her with purpose."

"Rox," Faraday eventually whispered. "He will fill her with Rox's soul."

"Are you saying," Azhure said, "that Sanctuary will fall?"

DragonStar nodded, his eyes sick with grief and self-recrimination. Curse him, he should have realised this earlier! He thanked the Stars that Axis hadn't killed him earlier when Qeteb had spoken through his mouth. If Axis had done so, then Qeteb could possibly have had the power of the StarSon at his fingertips! They had all come so close to complete annihilation!

"And the Sacred Groves?" Faraday said, pulling DragonStar's thoughts back to the problem of Niah.

DragonStar nodded again. "They will go first, my beloved," and he paused as Faraday flinched, although whether at the thought of the Groves falling, or at the endearment, DragonStar did not know. "Qeteb will destroy them first."

"Why?" Azhure said.

"Because he wants to grow on the power of the Mother before he comes after us,"

DragonStar said. "He wants to feast on the Mother."

"No!" Faraday screamed, and threw herself at DragonStar.

A massive storm held the Icebear Coast trapped. The land had witnessed nothing like this since the days of Gorgrael, and even he hadn't had the power to generate this much fury. Sleet lashed down from the north in almost horizontal sheets, stinging into ice and snow with such force that shards of ice shot through the air like shrapnel.

DragonStar grabbed his cloak in the instant before the wind tore it away, and tried to shut his ears against the screaming of wind and ice about him. He was leaning against the lee side of an ice wall, but even here the storm threatened to pick him up and hurl him into some ice-needled eternity.

Nothing was sane in this world, nothing at all.

Not even him, if one believed the fearful eyes of Faraday.

From the chamber where DragonStar had realised the appalling significance of Niah, he had gone to check on Sicarius and FortHeart. They'd been in a different part of Sanctuary when he'd called them into Qeteb's illusion, and DragonStar eventually found them under a buiche-fruit tree, being tended by an Icarii Healer.

Sicarius was the lesser wounded of the two, and likely to make a full recovery. FortHeart had lost her ear, and one of her legs was swollen, but the Healer had said that she, too, would recover, if not to her former prettiness.

From there DragonStar had dared the uncertainties of Spiredore to come to this spot.

Why? DragonStar tried to force his half-frozen face into a grin as he thought that one through. Why?

Because somewhere on the Icebear Coast was the one person who just might be able to help.

Urbeth.

DragonStar had not seen nor heard from her since Qeteb had been resurrected, but he had no doubt that she had survived the wasting of Tencendor, and currently sat with her daughters, waiting out the time before DragonStar managed to best Qeteb and set Tencendor to rights.

"Well, my lady," DragonStar muttered through ice-hardened lips, "DragonStar doesn't have a hope of besting Qeteb if the

Demon harvests both the power of the Mother and the power of the Enemy!"

He lifted his head slightly and stared into the white oblivion before him. "Urbeth!" he screamed.

"Urbeth! Where are you!"

Nothing but the shrieking of the wind and the groaning of the ice.

"Urbeth, you hairy cow, answer me now!"

Nothing. DragonStar struggled to keep his footing. Everything was coated with a slick of ice: not only the ground, but his boots, his cloak, and even his hands glistened under a thin layer of the loathsome stuff.

"Urbeth!" he yelled, his voice thinner now. "Urbeth!"

Nothing.

DragonStar groaned and sank to his haunches, trying to tug his cloak even more tightly about him.

He couldn't stay here ... he must leave ... Urbeth was gone ...

His head sank downwards. He was so tired. Perhaps if he just closed his eyes a minute, rested a bit before he returned to Sanctuary. Some rest would be good.

His head dropped lower.

"Urbeth," he whispered, and slumped forward onto the ice.

He woke to the frightful smell of rotten fish. He jerked awake, his head pounding so badly he thought it might explode.

He opened his eyes.

He was in an ice cave, the floor of which was covered in decomposing fish.

DragonStar gagged, and struggled to his knees. He was covered in bits of rotting fish.

"Look to what this land has been brought," a voice said behind him, and DragonStar struggled to turn about amid the fish. He slipped over twice before he managed to turn completely around and gain his feet.

Three women stood there. All were tall and willowy, all dressed in pale grey robes, and each of them was standing with arms crossed so that her hands rested on her shoulders. Two had raven-black hair that cascaded down their backs and over their breasts, the other, the middle one, had iron-grey hair with streaks of silver through it.

"Urbeth," DragonStar said. "Your housekeeping skills have slipped."

She snarled, but DragonStar did not flinch. "I need your help."

She arched an eyebrow at him. None of the three had stepped forward, nor relaxed their hands from their shoulders.

"Qeteb will win through to the power of the Enemy," he said. "Sanctuary will fall."

For the first time Urbeth's face registered shock.

"Worse," DragonStar continued, "Qeteb has access to the Sacred Groves. If you have any love, or even a single regard, for the Mother, Urbeth, then aid her now."

And then, with hands still shaking from the cold, DragonStar drew the lily sword and created the doorway of light. Before Urbeth or either of her daughters could say anything, he was gone.