“And then she stepped through the Gate. And then … then it imploded, and I had seized the
birdman and your wife and Urbeth’s two girls and brought them here.”
“Then I thank you for that —” Axis began.
“Oh, I did not think of you when I returned your wife and companions,” the GateKeeper said. “It
was merely convenient that I brought them with me.”
“Then why did you come here?” said Axis.
“Because of Her,” said the GateKeeper. “The Child.”
And Axis nodded, and understood. Not Katie at all, but Leagh’s Child.
They waited.
“Has ma’am finished?” said Raspu, returning from wherever he had been, and Faraday put her cup
back into its saucer and extended it into the dark. The mausoleum had completely vanished,
and now there was only a nothingness.
“Yes. Thank you.” Faraday was not perturbed by the dark and the nothingness, nor by the fact that
she currently shared the void with a former Demon.
All would be well as it eventuated.
They waited.
DragonStar rode his Star Stallion through the void, his pale hounds fanning out behind him in a
comet’s tail.
There was something he should do, but for the moment he did not care. There was only the
wild ride, the freedom, and the void.
Nothing else mattered.
The stallion snorted, and shook his head. Sicarius bayed, and the Alaunt
clamoured. DragonStar sighed. “Faraday,” he said.
She heard him before she saw him. The faint fall of a horse’s hooves, the snuffling of a pack of hounds.
Slowly Faraday rose to her feet, accepting Raspu’s hand on her elbow.
Then, suddenly, there was a presence, and the faintest of luminescence, and there was DragonStar,
sitting his stallion, his hounds milling about him.
“Come,” he said. “We have a Garden to plant.”
Raspu watched as DragonStar helped Faraday mount behind him, and then, as they rode away
and the darkness closed in again, he waited.
The Star Stallion stopped, and DragonStar turned slightly.
“Faraday? Are you ready?”
“Ready for what?” she said. What had he meant, plant the Garden?
She felt, rather than saw, him smile. “You have something of mine,” DragonStar said. “Something you
have kept for a very long time. Will you now give it back to me?”
Faraday frowned, and then jumped slightly in surprise as she remembered what it was. “Oh!”
When DragonStar had worked the enchantment to ensnare the twenty thousand crazed people in the
Western Ranges, he had shot the enchantment into the sky with an arrow.
After the arrow had done its work, it had fallen to the ground at Faraday’s feet, and, eventually,
she’d wound it into the rainbow band that the Mother had given her.
Together with the sapling.
Her hands trembling, Faraday leaned back very slightly from DragonStar’s warmth, and unwound
the band.
She took the arrow, the sapling still safely coiled about it, into her hands.
And then Faraday gasped, for the arrow had been strangely supple all this time it rested so close
about her waist. Now, in the space of one heartbeat, it solidified into strength again.
The sapling still wound its way about its length.
“Faraday?”
She took the arrow, and passed it to DragonStar.
He held it briefly, then lifted the Wolven from his shoulder and fitted the arrow to it.
He paused, and Faraday could tell he was crying, then in one fluid movement, DragonStar lifted the
bow and shot the arrow high into the darkness.
Chapter 72
The Tree
The arrow rose into the darkness, and the hopelessness, and the void. It rose until it could rise no more,
and then it fell. It fell, and fell, and fell until it reached impossible speeds. And then, when it could fall no
more, it struck a resistance, and its head buried itself within the resistance.
Somewhere far, far away, the Star Stallion screamed, and reared and plunged, and stars fell in
their millions from his mane and tail.
A great wind consumed the blackness, and it swept the stars high and higher.
There was an explosion of light and sound from the point where the arrow struck.
It washed out in great rippling waves, engulfing all those who waited within the darkness.
It caught the stars, and twisted them high, and higher, feeding their fire, so that they grew a
million-fold in intensity, and then the wind swept them higher still.
Then the arrow sighed, and let itself be consumed, for its work was done.
Something grew.
Axis and Azhure both cried out and clung to each other as the waves of light and sound engulfed them.
Pain and joy in equal amounts devoured them.
Peace, said Leagh’s Child.
The pain eased, and the intensity of the light dulled back to a soft and gentle radiance.
But the joy remained.
Azhure, among all others, was the first to open her eyes and look.
She shuddered, wracked by emotion as the import of what she saw sank in.
A Tree. Gigantic, all-encompassing. Its leaves every shade of green, its trumpet flowers a brilliant gold
edged with scarlet.
It stood in the void, shedding a soft, gentle light.
Then, as Azhure put trembling hands to her face, and everyone else opened their eyes, the
Tree’s leaves trembled, and …
… and a garden rippled out from its base, consuming the blackness and the void, and all trembled as
earth and grasses and flowers formed under their feet as the Garden flowed outwards.
For those who had known the Field of Flowers, the Garden was like, and yet unlike. It was filled
with flowers and their scents, but the Garden was more formed than the Infinite Field of
Flowers had been. There were paths and glades, and shadowed, dappled spots of coolness where trees
congregated.
It was like Sanctuary, save it did not share Sanctuary’s sense of impermanence.
This Garden was the reality from which everything else had been insubstantial reflections.
Above, in a deep blue sky, millions of stars blazed.
Azhure cried out softly again, and pointed.
DragonStar and Faraday were walking through great, gorgeous drifts of flowers, the Star
Stallion sauntering behind them, his head nodding and dipping with happiness.
Behind the stallion bounded the Alaunt, and behind them, carefully adjusting his vest lest it had
become creased during Creation, walked Raspu.
Chapter 73
The Garden
“Aha!” cried the GateKeeper. “I know what this is!”
“What?” said Azhure politely, her eyes still on DragonStar and Faraday.
“It is that which existed beyond the Gate!” the GateKeeper said.
DragonStar, now within two paces of them, smiled and nodded. “In a manner of speaking,
yes. But this Garden is far more than an ‘AfterLife’. It is a ‘BeforeLife’ as well. It is a beginning and an
end within itself. It is a well, a reservoir, of life.”
Azhure disentangled herself from Axis’ grasp, and slid down from Pretty Brown Sal.
There was something … someone … walking through the flowers towards her.
She gave a great sob — would she never stop crying? — and leaned forward to embrace Caelum
and River Star, and Zenith just behind them.
And then there were the thousands, the millions, walking out through the flowers from the oblivion of
death — Rivkah, Belial, MorningStar, a hundred neighbours and friends, ten thousand names and
memories, faces and voices drifting out of the forgetfulness of death, but reaching out with living
arms. But among them all, there was no StarDrifter.
“Why?” said Azhure, distraught. “Why?”
Rivkah, Magariz beside her, had her arms about Azhure, comforting her as she had done so often
when Azhure had been so lost and lonely and friendless within Smyrton.
DragonStar shrugged his shoulders helplessly. “I do not know.”
The GateKeeper, strangely soft and pretty in this place, said: “/ know. He did not pass through the
Gate, nor even through the Butler’s gate.”
“But I saw StarDrifter’s wings!” said Axis. “He was dead! He must have been!”
“Nevertheless,” said the GateKeeper, her eyes resuming a hint of their former steeliness, “he did not
pass through either Gate.”
And to one side the Butler, polishing a tableful of silver, nodded his agreement.
“Then where is my father?” Axis shouted.
Leagh walked up with her Child in her arms.
Beyond us, said the Girl. If he is not here, then he is somewhere back there.
“Back ‘there’?” DragonStar said.
The wasteland of Tencendor only was consumed, said the Child. The other lands bordering it
still exist. StarDrifter, perhaps as a result of some magic, must still be there. He was not in the
wasteland when it was consumed.
“Then we must go after him!” Azhure said.
No.
“No?”
No. You may not pass from the Garden and return. I would have you here with me.
StarDrifter, somewhere in the lands bordering Tencendor? thought Axis. How? How? What magic
could have transported him? And where?
“What exactly does remain of Tencendor?” he asked the Child.
Nothing. Not in the flesh. The land was consumed by earthquake and waves when