magic, I call upon you now and ask that with your white cleansing power, you consecrate this har, Ulaume, who is of the Colurastes and the Kakkahaar. Descend now from the mansions of the moon into this water and lend us your cold pure light. Enter into this har and cleanse him of all that is dark and unclean. Lunil, I ask this in your name, dehar of the moon and of magic.’
Flick leaned down and scooped up some water, which he poured down over Ulaume’s head, stretching up to do so.
Ulaume closed his eyes as the icy streams ran down over his face. Then he plunged himself wholly into the pool, opening his eyes upon glittering darkness. ‘If only for this night,’ he prayed in silence, ‘make me worthy of this.’ Flick’s narcotic brew must already be having an effect, for Ulaume could see small pointed faces in the ripples and bubbles around him. He could smell the moon.
He came up gasping and shuddering, hardly able to breathe, because the water was so cold. Flick’s flesh was pimpled with goose bumps.
‘It is done,’ Ulaume said and, taking Flick’s arm, waded back to the bank. Here, he rubbed himself down with his shirt and Flick did likewise. The atmosphere was electric, but also sacred. Magic crackled in the branches of the acacias and sizzled in the blades of needle grass.
In the circle of soft lamplight, Flick called upon Miyacala. Ulaume had read the invocations Flick had written, but it appeared Flick had decided to discard them. Now, he spoke from the heart, saying whatever came into his mind. It was a hypnotic mantra, repeated phrases tumbling over and around each other. At some points, Ulaume was moved to add his voice to the chant, and sometimes he was silent. With eyes closed, he could feel power circling around them, like a great beast attracted to a campfire in the desert. He fixed his entire being upon this force, because he must call it into himself. This was the power they must capture and weave into their union. This was the fire that would make liquid stars of their essence, with the power of the universe within it, the power to create and destroy. Miyacala, dehar of inception and initiation. Ulaume could feel this being’s presence. He could see him in his mind’s eye: immensely tall with long white hair, his eyes milky blind orbs, but whose brow blazed with a white star, which represented his true sight.
Flick had fallen silent. He squatted before Ulaume, who knelt upon the ground, and took Ulaume’s hands in his own. ‘He is here,’ he murmured. ‘Give him the image of Terez. We must do so together.’
Ulaume pulled Flick’s head towards his own and in the sharing of breath, so they conjured the image of the injured and incomplete Terez. Ulaume forced the image to change, to grow, to become whole. He could only offer an image of Pellaz, because that was the single template he had to go on, and he presumed Terez must look similar, under normal circumstances. Flick’s skin felt hot and feverish against his own. Ulaume was filled with a strange, immense stretched feeling as if he were part of the sky and it was yawning.
Flick drew away and lay back on the ground, offering himself. In the moonlight, his soume-lam gleamed like pearl. He was not as reluctant about this as he’d seemed.
Ulaume knelt before him and summoned the power into himself, directing it down to the root of his being. His ouana-lim had become the dark flower of creation, a spiral coral to slide into a spiral shell. The ocean, the sky, the moon. Elemental powers, circling stars. Ulaume uttered a cry of command. He was har, awake and alive, and he had just come back to his kind.
Flick collected their combined essence in a small glass bottle. They held it up to the light of the moon. It was luminous, spiralling slowly, glistening with tiny stars of light. ‘It’s alive,’ Flick murmured. ‘Something different.’ His fingers were glowing with it.
‘Let’s use it now, then,’ Ulaume said. ‘Perhaps don’t tell Mima exactly what it is.’
Back at the house, they found Lileem and Mima in an excited mood. ‘A little moon came in through the window’ Lileem cried as they entered Terez’s room. ‘A ball of white light hovered over the bed and then sank down into his chest.’
‘It was incredible,’ Mima said. ‘Did you do that? He’s been quiet