again, peeled it apart, and read. What had he forgotten? Nothing. He was sure of it. He scanned the text, his vision blurring. He rubbed his eyes, stretched the scroll out again. And there, amid the warnings of dire consequences awaiting he who failed to follow the path to the end, there was the final opaque phrase that had to be recited from the center of the pattern. He laughed at his simple foolishness. Then he read the lines, whatever they meant, in whatever language it was.
“The darkness closed in from all sides. It circled the pattern, pressed down from above. The shade beside him began to spin. He watched tendrils drawn out of him, pulled into the whirling thing, which grew smaller as it spun faster. Warmth left him, beginning in the core of him and withdrawing to his extremities. Behind it came a sharp chill, like the touch of marble. When the last warmth left him, the tendrils vanished and the spinning form compressed still further, until it was a small flickering thing, hard, burnished and knurled. He reached out to close his hand around it . . . at which point the door to his house flew open.
“The head of his order stood there, clinging to the sides of the door, and clinging to him was Auuenau’s apprentice. The apprentice let go one hand and pointed. ‘See?’ he cried.
“Auuenau, standing with an unfurled scroll in one hand and the pearl of his soul gripped in the other, could only shout, ‘No!’ Even as he said this, the room changed. The chaos of the monsoon was pulled through the doorway and into the pattern. It sucked the hapless priest and apprentice with it, whirled them like dolls around the pattern and straight at him. He watched them scream as the forces of the storm and of the magic he’d unleashed tore them apart, shredding skin from bones and grinding the bones to dust. He howled and the dust of their deaths poured into his open mouth, down inside him, filling him. What was cold as marble became as jagged as fishhooks within. The floor beneath him was disintegrating. The pattern itself turned to blue crystal, flowing out from him. Still he clung to the twisted pearl that was his separate soul. The scrolls had made it clear that he could not leave the pattern so long as he held on to it, yet he dared not let it go with disaster unfolding about him. He stretched his arm across the pattern, and the only thing he could reach was a nautilus shell in the heap of those he’d collected. He dropped the pearl that was his soul into the shell, listened to it rattle through the chambers and into the center.
“He found that he could move then and walked quickly back around the pattern. He tucked the shell into his robe. The other scrolls blew and tumbled about the room. He dashed to grab them as he balanced on the path, but they were being torn apart, too, and he managed only to snatch shreds. The knowledge contained within them was lost forever. Even had he wanted to, Auuenau could not now undo what he’d set in motion, which his apprentice had disordered; but he did not want to undo it. His very substance had by then become Chaos, and what was happening around him was his doing.
“He exited the crystalline pattern and from the doorway watched as it began to unthread, the scored boards torn loose and drawn down into the center. Then the floor outside the vortex broke apart, whirling around it. Shards of crystal gashed him, embedded in his flesh. The woven walls of the building shredded and fell in, every moment the great whirlpool growing, expanding as if unappeasable. Auuenau remained in the avenue for only a moment before the storm seized him and yanked him off his feet. Instinctively he clutched a guide-rope, but in doing so he let go of the final scroll, and it flitted away on the wind.
“The surface of the span of Dyauspitar cracked beneath him and collapsed into the maw of the whirlpool. Like the dark form that had arisen beside him, that core seemed shot with stars.
“He dragged himself along the rope, and the darkness circled after him. The rope came suddenly unmoored and flung him into the air, all the way to the opposite side of the span. He struck the rail, doubled over it, but