Not her vision, it is the world that whitens. She perceives with preternatural clarity this last moment; her voice hissing in her ears like static: "He's dead!"
Weakness grows, pressing against her skin from inside. A void too large to contain. Her numb fingers no longer feel each other, nor her arms pressed to her sides; thighs drawn up tight to her belly and breasts.
Her fingers, touching her flesh, feel the decaying voices of the Thirty-Six. Scholar-Soldier, student of magia, Master-Physician: she has the skill to hear their last cry, fading in the wake of dissolution- And something else.
"Listen! Feel! Something's happening."
The old man looks sharply down at her. "What is it?"
Far across the city that is called the heart of the world, echoes of destroyed magia vibrate. She, in the wasteland of ruined marble and maggots, points up at his hands. A faint luminescence clings to them, the color of green shadows and sunlight.
Above the city, the sky is suddenly gold.
Dusty wings beating, the sparrow falls. In the bird's bead-black eyes, reflected clearly, the Night Sun is overspotted with a leprous golden light.
Flat as an illustrated manuscript, the sky over the heart of the world sears yellow as fever.
Voices thundered in her head. Visions blurred her eyes. The smell of corruption choked her, sickly sweet. The White Crow retched, dry heaves that twisted her gut.
"Don't hesitate!" The White Crow lifted her head and shouted. "Now, my lord Bishop, now!"
Wood-sunlight limned his bony fingers. The old man's eyes narrowed, wincing. "He hurt me, hurt me unbelievably. I can't find in me the charity to forgive him."
Acerbic fear tugged her smile crooked. "You don't forgive gods, Theo, my lord, the day for that isn't in the calendar. And what can you expect from a Decan who's had entirely too much contact with humans?"
" 'Too much'?"
His beaked nose jutted as the corners of his mouth came up, deepening the folds of his skin. His brows contracted, and the skin around his eyes wrinkled. Sudden laughter spluttered in his voice.
"What can I expect-?"
She fell forward on both hands.
The sweet smell changed.
Her hands slid in the cool flesh of maggots, and it changed. On hands and knees she stared down. White rose-petals covered her hands, buried them to the wrists; she knelt on them. The thick heavy sweetness of roses breathed up from crushed flowers.
She knelt up, head lowered, staring at the wave-front of whiteness traveling away from her among crumbled marble: the heaving bodies of grubs transmuting to flowers. She bent and pushed her hands forward into the mass.
Thoms snagged her skin.
Her skin, tanned, gold by contrast with these white petals and green spiked stems; her skin that smelt of sweat and dirt, now stitched across each arm with the dotted scars of rosethorns. A bead of blood swelled. She lifted her arm to her mouth and licked.
"Oh, but what-?"
She began to laugh.
"Above, beneath: branch and root . . ."
His voice from behind her resonated with a calm casual expectancy. She, magus, Master-Physician, echoed him joyously; feeding the power of the words into the world: "Above, beneath: branch and root-"
"Pillar of the world . . ."
A bramble coiled her ankle, the spikes too young and soft to do more than tickle. Roses fingered their way across her thighs where she sat; coiled up an arm; spread into the masses of her dark-red hair. She shook her head, white petals fluttering down, the corners of her eyes wet with laughter.
"Oh, hey-"
Ten yards away, he stood with his back to her. The old man, the Bishop; his hands folded calmly behind him, his chin a little raised. The wave-front of generation pulsed out from where he stood. "Leaf in bud: shelter and protection."
"Light of the forest . . ."
She stood up, naked, the white roses hanging heavy in her hair. A scent of them breathed on the suddenly blowing breeze. Heat fell down across her shoulders, unknot- ting the muscles there, relaxing her spine; so that she stood with her weight back on one heel and reached up with both arms, stretching up to light that glowed gold and green.
Spikes pushed up through the drifts of white roses.
She took one step forward and then another, unsteady on her feet; and twigs poked up, growing, sprouting into the air, knitting the air together about themgreat clumps of blackthorn and may, elder and wild roses: sparkling with green shoots, pale in the light.
"Protection of the branches that support the sky . . ." Saplings jutted from the earth around his feet. Brown twigs, one looped leaf spiking up from each.
"Heart of the wood . . ."
"Oldest of all, deepest of all-"
Blackthorn grew, tough wood spearing higher than her head now. She felt how it knitted earth together within its roots, beneath the roses; how it knitted together, too, at microcosmic levels, binding energy, possibility, structure.
"Rooted in the soul of earth-"
"Who dies, not, but is disguised; who sleeps only."
"Heart of the wood!"
On the nearest branch a tiny leaf uncoiled, bright green beside the thom-spikes and white flower. So close that she crossed her eyes to focus on it, giggled and stepped back. Leaf and flower together, spidered now with flowering creeper, the horns of morning glory, columbine, old man's beard, and ivy: green and white and dappling the light with new shade.
The White Crow spread her arms wide.
She traced through her fingertips the divine and demonic in the structure.
"Theodoret! Theo!"
Heady: oxygen and excitement filled her lungs. The light of her inner vision blazed green and gold, filling her veins. Beech saplings sprouted from the earth all around her.
She walked barefoot, wincing as a sharpness dug into the sole of her foot; stopping to balance and pull out a thorn, and on impulse kiss her finger and press it to the infinitesimal wound and smile, smile as if her face would never lose that expression.
Warmth shone down.
Warmth bloomed up from the earth beneath Theo- doret's feet. Runners of ivy criss-crossed the ground, the leaves of other plants poking up between. And between one step and another the coiled heads of a myriad shoots unfurled, unwinding into flowers, and she walked knee- deep in bluebells with the old man.
A dappled light shone on him, silvering and graying his hair by turns: a light of trees only yet potential.
"You're doing it!" Joy filled her; she shouted to the growing trees.
"I can reach him, childjust."
Wind creaked through the branches of trees grown tall, skittered over a ground clear of undergrowth in this newly mature wood.
As far as she could see, the perspectives of the wood stretched. New leaves shimmered on trees, bluebells misted the distance. Far off, far away, in the heart of the wood . . .
The White Crow let her arms fall to her sides. Aching, she stared; keeping the long sight down into the center as a part of her; hidden, dangerous, glorious.
She turned.
This way the trees were not so thick, and she glimpsed past them a light of rose and gold: swirling, granular, hot.
"You . . ."
"Me." Theodoret rasped.
He pressed back against the smooth bole of a grown beech tree behind him. Sunlight and shadow spotted his bony chest, dappled his legs and thighs. He pressed his hands and spine against the bark.
The waves of generation sank back.
Unsteady, the White Crow staggered towards him.
A tendril of ivy crept around the bole of the tree, looping the old man's wrist. His skin darkened, silvered. Before she could draw breath his skin cracked and fissured, merging so swiftly into the lumps and curves of the beech-trunk that she had no time to turn away her gaze.
The tree grew.
He grew with it, embedded into the wood. His long mobile features darkened to green, to silver- brown; his hair flowed out across the bark, rooting down into it.
He opened his mouth and called a word of healing.
She fell down, the leaves and fragments of bark imprinting her flesh.
The call echoed into the heart of the wood.
His jaw strained open, strained further open, and she thought it must surely crack; his head tipped back and growing into the heartwood of the beech.
Two sprouting pale-green leaves poked from the corners of his mouth.
Swift, swift as thought they grew; jutting out like tusks and coiling back, growing into the trunk of the beech.
"Theo! My lord Bishop!"
She pulled herself to her feet, craning her neck to see the tree. Already the trunk was too vast for her to perceive all of it, and its leaves and branches shadowed the world. The coolness of forests shivered across her skin.
"I have found him. "
A cool heartbreaking wind blew around her, out of the heart of the wood. Awe dried her throat. Sweat slicked the skin of her elbows, behind her ears, her thighs: blood and cells burning, warm with a knowledge of solidity. She shook her hair back and craned her neck to look up through shedding petals.
The sense of an old story rose in her, unbelieved, unconquerable; and she gazed up into the heights of branches and green leaves.
"Now . . ."
Her spine shuddered, prickled the hairs at the back of her neck. She touched her fingers to her mouth. Vibrating at cell- and DNA-level, voices sang in her flesh: thirty-five of them. Voices of the Decans of Hell and Heaven.
Something tickled her hand. She lifted it. Blood- heat, imperceptible, red liquid trickled from her palm and dripped to the earth. Blood smeared the sweating flesh of her knee, her ankle. The black bee-stings of the Decan's maze throbbed, her left hand raw and swollen.
"Act-"
"Act now-"
"Channel us-"
" We will inform you-"
"Breathe in you-"
"Speak in you-"
"Open our Selves to you-"
A sand-bright voice, clearer than all others, thrummed in her human flesh: "We made you in Our image and with Our power. You are all star-daemons. My child, my lover, my bride of the sun and widow of the moon, call down the universe now. Heal!"
Sprawling naked, without sword or book, her suntanned flesh scratched with the thorns of impossible roses, the White Crow reached out. With her left hand she drew hieroglyphs, skeining down the bright air to twist in magia patterns. Watching how the light shifted, as leaves shift in a high wind; feeling for the moment and sensing it- At some level above or below perception, binding took place.
A sapling birch brushed her arm, white bark peeling like paper. Transparent green leaves sprinkled the branches. Heat burned into her back.
The dappled light of beech shade fell cool across her skin.
She reached up, holding her hand in the sign of protection. The feedback of power between microcosm and macrocosm, Scholar-Soldier and the elementals, filled her with an electric energy; drawing power down the chains of the world from the Thirty-Six houses of the heavens.
She sprang up, barefooted, stamped a foot down into new grass. Beeches surrounded her, growing up to the invisible sky. Their great boles towered like pillars, soaring up a hundred feet to where they arched together, new green leaves rustling, and a bird sang.
Divine and demonic: demonic and divine.
Tall slender branches rose as pillars to the sky, meeting overhead in arches of new foliage. Birds sang in the branches, caterpillars and woodlice crawled among the roots.
A mass of broken marble lay embedded in the earth. Walking closer, she gazed up at it. Solid, some fifteen or twenty feet high; cracked and fissured and gold, still, with the light of extinguished candles. The last of the ruined mortal matter that had hosted a god-daemon. The White Crow walked close enough to touch, to feel the cold radiating from it.
She drew rapidly, smearing blood from her hand in complex astrological and cabbalistic signs on the broken surface of the marble. A frown indented the dark-red eyebrows, and she rested her free hand against the stone as support, leaning her forehead on that arm. The scrawled signs covered a half, two-thirds of the rock. The symbols grew cramped, smaller as the surface became more crowded; and the White Crow frowned in concentration, muttering the remembered first prayers of training.
"O thou who are the four elements of our nature, and the hundred elements of nature itself; Powers; star- daemons; rulers of the Thirty-Six Houses of the Sky and Earth . . ."
"Draw down power. As above, so below. You are Our creation and We created you kin to Us. Draw power down the linkages of the world and heal!"
The stone split under her fingers.