The Wraiths of Will and Pleasure - By Storm Constantine Page 0,244

am given proof or evidence, then condemned never to be able to share it.

Lileem leaned her forehead against the stone for a few moments. She felt the ghost of a headache, far behind her eyes. The books were not heavy, despite appearances. She found she was hauling this one right out of the stack. She was going to take it to the upper place. She was going to make Terez look at it.

If there is a way to get home, she thought, it lies somewhere within this library. I just have to keep looking for it.

Aruhani had come to her. He had prodded her and made her remember the life she had left behind. She could not ignore this message.

Outside, no suns were in the sky and the stars wheeled overhead. Lileem found Terez beside the ocean, staring up. Her footsteps crunched upon the gravelly shore, but Terez did not look round. In the strange light, his naked skin looked like marble. Once, I believed I loved him, she thought. This place has stolen that from me.

‘Terez,’ she said. ‘Look.’

He did not respond immediately, but then turned slowly towards her. She held out the stone, which was almost half her height.

‘You shouldn’t bring those out here,’ Terez said. ‘It’s forbidden.’

‘Who’s here to forbid?’ she asked. ‘Just look at it, will you.’

She hunkered down and laid the stone out on the ground. Terez squatted beside her. ‘What am I looking for?’

Lileem pointed out the words. ‘Dehara,’ she said. ‘See? We didn’t make it up.’

‘Maybe you did,’ Terez said, annoyingly unimpressed. ‘Whatever any creature thinks is recorded here. This is just your book, or Flick’s book.’

‘No,’ Lileem said. ‘I know it’s not.’

Terez sighed. ‘What does it matter?’ He stood up again and stared at the sky. ‘Somewhere, out there, perhaps in another layer of reality, lies home…’

Lileem was silent for a moment, then said, ‘I want to go back too, Terez. And I’m going to find a way how, I promise you. The information we seek lies in the library.’

He glanced at her. ‘Maybe wanting to is the beginning,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s been you all along who has kept us here, because of that damned library. You haven’t wanted to leave badly enough.’

Lileem considered his words. He might well be correct. ‘Well, I do now,’ she said. If only they could find desire in this arid place, but she knew that route was closed to them. ‘I’ll find a way. Come with me. Don’t stay out here. It’d be quicker if we looked together.’

They walked back along the shore with the cyclopean edifice looming over them, casting its gaunt shadow on the sea. It was necessary to climb long sloping dunes of silver grey sand to reach the entrance to the library. Lileem and Terez waded up the dunes, their progress hampered by the shifting granules. The book felt heavy in Lileem’s arms now.

Just as they reached the top, there was a great flash in the sky. Lileem almost dropped the stone. ‘What was that?’

It looked as if a star had exploded for much of the sky ahead of them was filled with pulsing, sparkling clouds. The ground was shaking, and there was a sound like thunder.

‘A portal!’ Terez cried, trying to scramble faster up the dune.

Lileem stumbled after him. ‘Another har and parage, do you think?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe Gelaming. They can go anywhere in creation, I’m sure. We must make them see us.’

‘Terez,’ Lileem said, ‘it might not be…’

Whatever words she was about to speak were swept away from her. An immense radiance burst out of the boiling sky with the sound of an entire city crumbling to destruction at once. Both Lileem and Terez ducked down, and a hot wind seared over them, blowing back their hair. Sand scoured their naked bodies. Does this library have an owner? Lileem thought. And they have they just come back to it?

She was afraid.

Terez dragged her to her feet and together they reached the top of the dunes. A short distance away, they could see two bizarre creatures, crouched on the ground outside the pyramid. Were they creatures? They could equally have been machines. In some ways, they were like giant insects, because they had wings and their segmented bodies appeared to be made of some metallic substance that shifted with many colours like oil. The wings were similar to insect wings in that they moved so fast they were simply a blur, but Lileem could see that they were rotating