And then, echoing over the windwail, the shrilling war-cry—

  Ishá ha! lshá ha!—

  A deadness in the wind.

  A childsoldier stood on the airskiff, watching the four of them. His hair, long and yellow, flew behind him like a flame; his dazzlecloak threw a soft corona over his features. His eyes, golden-yellow as clear crystals of brimstone, burned for a moment; then the fire died.

  “What have you done?” Davaryush’s voice was but a whisper in the huge roaring.

  The boy’s voice, a piercing treble, innocent of guilt or feeling: “Lord Inquestor, we are charged to protect your life. What are a million lives to yours, whose high compassion illuminates us all?”

  “You were only to rescue us. Not to kill… .” But Kelver saw that Davaryush was trapped. The Inquestor cried out, “It is always like this! To utter a word is to destroy!” And he covered his face in a fold of his shimmercloak, which glowed an eerie blue.

  And Varuneh said to the childsoldier, “Go, child; you have done well.” The boy bowed and took off into the raging air.

  The wind was still now, but Kelver felt a claustrophobia, as if something vast were closing in—

  Darktouch screamed.

  Kelver turned, gasping—

  A sailsac, tall as a starship, was bearing down on them. The sail-leather was thin, translucent, glowing from the childsoldiers’ light.

  From above, what was left of the hunters’ convoy had drawn into a knot and was plunging once more. A harpoon whined. The delphinoid thrashed … a rent in its sailsac, it flew unsteadily now, circling, sinking … Kelver willed it to flee, but it did not… its sails flapped feebly.

  “It can’t escape,” Davaryush said. “In our continuum it is blind … it sees only the overcosm.”

  We’ve got to do something, Kelver thought, but there’s nothing to be done.

  Just then another Windbringer came, tearing through a vapor-cloud made luminous by the childsoldiers* lightcloak. Purposefully, it seemed, it reared up and headed for the convoy above. When the skiffs aimed for it and charged, it seemed to sense them. It dived again and sprang up from the darkness, ramming into the convoy—

  “It can’t do that,” said Davaryush, “if it is blind.”

  “They have never fought back!” Darktouch said. “So it is written on the walls of knowledge … that they die gladly, that we are appointed to be their homebringers, their private angels—”

  Kelver watched, fascinated, as the Windbringer burst through the wall of airskiffs and sent them cascading into darkness. A hail of shatterstuff rained down, hitting the wounded Windbringer below. It let out a volley of light* streaks and Kelver knew that it felt unthinkable agony. It flew blindly now, it was coming straight up at him, the shuddering mass of brain tissue loomed up before him and filled his vision, and—

  Splintered as the childsoldiers danced into action again! Gray matter spattered Kelver’s face. Shattered brainstuff scattered in the wind.

  “No,” Darktouch yelled, “they’re killing the Windbringer, no, no—” He took her in his arms. She sobbed uncontrollably, clutching. Davaryush averted his eyes, but Kelver thought he saw him weep….

  And then the other Windbringer moved slowly toward them.

  “Do not attack it!” Davaryush shouted to the commander of the childsoldiers. “Even if it kills me! I command it, I, the High Inquestor, absolutely and inviolably!”

  The soldiers moved back now, their floaters shifting behind Kelver into a ring of light The Windbringer moved still; it was so huge that it blocked the wind, and a complete stillness fell over them.

  “How does it know us7” Kelver said. “Are they not blind, perceiving not realspace but the overcosm alone?”

  “I don’t know,” said the Inquestor. They stood, the four of them and the baby, close together, waiting.

  Out of the still darkness the Windbringer seemed to call forth a halo of light that englobed it completely. It was a soft light, a warm light; it lifted the terror from Kelver’s mind.

  “Is this the beginning of one of the lightsongs?” Varuneh whispered. No one answered her.

  In the Windbringer’s light they could see the silhouette of a man. A man was riding die Windbringer….

  “Look,” said Davaryush. “Somehow a man has linked with the delphinoid, as our astrogators link minds with the delphinoid ships and become one with them.”

  “That’s how it knew where to go,” Kelver said. “The man sniffed out the airskiffs and the Windbringer followed—”

  “But who can it be? Who would mindlink with a delphinoid? Only a trained astrogator would think to do this … and he would not be here, helping them fight off their killers,” Varuneh said.

  The three of them looked at Darktouch. Wiping the tears from her face. Her eyes shining. “It’s Windstriker,” she said softly. “My father.”

  Windstriker bathed in the soft light, a tiny dark figure on the huge creature’s back, his feet planted in a cleft of the brain tissue.

  This time she did not cry out to him as she had done to Stonewise, forgetting he could not hear her. For this was her own father. Everything must be done properly.

  She maneuvered the airskiff towards the Windbringer. His sailsacs lashed the wind… . Windbringer had not yet begun his lightsong, but snatches were already bursting into the air, veils of rainbow flittergauze that sifted into the darkness. In the Windbringer’s windshadow all was calm … even now, knowing what she did about the terrible human exploitation of the Windbringers, about her people’s murder of the lightsongs’ source, there were things she had learnt as a child, things she could never unbelieve … that the Windbringer was God, maker of the cosmos and the Dark Country, father of all men.

  A breeze sprang up from the sailsacs’ rippling. They were near now. The Windbringer hovered ahead like an island. The gray matter was vibrant, pulsating with life. As they drew closer she knew for certain who it was. In the light he was beautiful … she had never seen him in the light, had never completely known what he looked like … even his empty eyes seemed warm, brimming with the glow of Windbringer, and his long gray hair had caught silver fire from the light. Strands of rainbow wreathed him. The brightness grew, grew … she clenched her eyes tight against the glare but even so the light broke in …

  “Look,” she heard Davaryush say. “He does not yet know we are approaching. The boat was not scented; so we are dark to him.”

  Gently Darktouch brought the airskiff down on Wind-bringer’s back. Then she opened her eyes. The light softened, as though it were afraid of harming her.

  She started to step down from the skiff.

  “Where are you going?” Kelver said, and made to restrain her.

  “Don’t be concerned, Kelver, my Touch-brother, my love. I have to go to him … he is my father.” And she ran to Windstriker, the brain-pulp smearing her feet, and when she reached him she threw her arms around him and signed his name and hers on him; at first he was cold to the touch, untrusting, and then she used all their secret touchings and he knew her and embraced her—

  A ghost has touched me.

  No, Father, Tm real, I’m olivet

  Did you too vow to leap to your death? How did you seek me out? You’re so young, strange daughter—

  Father, I’m not dead. But I have been beyond the Dark Country. My eyes have touched a terrible wrongness: the murder of the songs of the undark that the Windbringers make. There are men out there, men like you and me, Father. And it is they, not the Windbringer-gods, who have created us. And stolen the touching of eyes and ears from us, that we might never know what we had murdered . . . for they had touched the lightsongs, and they knew it was evil to kill them, but they needed Windbringer's fartouching, they wanted to possess the million million worlds that lie beyond the Dark Country, and their greed overcame their guilt … by making these things dark to our touch, they took the guilt upon themselves and gave us innocence, and we became like children, not knowing good from evil. But my eyes were opened by a chance of nature, and with those eyes I touched the terrible truth.

  And so have I … I have touched a shadow of this truth, Windstriker signed, l have touched the torment of Windbringer. That is why I crept back into the halls of knowledge and erased the inviolate wisdom … why I lent my sense of smell and touch to the Windbringer so he could make war on my own people, could smell them out and defeat them. But there were others I could not smell, others who stormed out of the big darkness and slew both my people and the Windbringers. I am going mad. This can’t be. What is this light of which you speak? For she had scratched the symbols in the script of the outside world.

  Light, she repeated. Their word for the undark, the great warmth that feeds the eyes. Oh, Father, they are here now, people from the land beyond the Dark Country.

  People… beyond.. .let me touch them.

  Darktouch said, “Inquestor, I have told him of you. He wants to touch you, to know your presence in the manner of our people.”

  Diffidently at first, Davaryush came forward; then Kel-ver; then Lady Varuneh with the child, asleep now. One by one she signed their names: Here is Man-who-sits-in-judgment-over-worlds. Here is Touch-brother-from-the-land-beyond-darkness. Here is Woman-born-when-the-universe-was-young. Here is Child-before-Naming. She named the baby last of all. Windstriker ran his hands over their faces, their bodies, savoring the touch of them: the crannies of their features, the softness of their foreign clothing.

  Finally he signed to her, I must believe you. These people are not our kind. Yet they seem dark, without the power of touching.

  Father, they communicate with windshapes.

  So strange….

  “Darktouch,” Davaryush said, “speak to him for me. Be the voice of my hands. Tell him … tell him we have all been blind … that we have not only inflicted a terrible blindness on his people, but have willed a blindness on ourselves in our passion for power … that I come to heal if I can.” His voice was hoarse. “Tell him … I want to make a pact with him, to work with him to open all our eyes, once and for all time.”

  When Darktouch had translated these words, Windstriker signed back, It is good. Yes, we must work together to stop the slaughter.

  And Davaryush said, “Your mind is linked with the Windbringer’s, Windstriker. Tell me what it feels. We can no longer flee from the knowledge that the delphinoids are creatures of vision, of intellect, of feeling. Please, old man, tell me of its thoughts.”

  Windbringer pities you, the old man signed.

  Tension coiled in the air, waiting for an outburst. The light played over them, echoes of a distant lightsong. Davaryush broke the silence again. Darktouch saw through him to the awful pain inside. He said, “Darktouch, tell your father … that we Inquestors have never asked for pity, although all that we did was in compassion’s name. In our vanity we saw ourselves as gods. And now we must fall. Old man, old man … I will do what no Inquestor has ever done. I will say that we have wronged the human race … we have wronged the race of delphinoids. I will kiss your hands, Windstriker, and beg forgiveness from you, who have touched Windbringer’s heart at the heart of darkness.” And weeping he knelt at the old man’s feet and kissed the gnarled hands. .. . Then Windstriker raised him up and hugged him. Two spent old men, Darktouch thought; yet their embrace is the final moment of one epoch, the first moment of another.

  She turned to Kelver with a smile: Windbringer’s light suffused his face, his lithe limbs, his eager eyes. A shy smile stole across his lips. And he went to stand beside him. He is beautiful, she thought.

  An unease hung in the air for an instant. It was like the split second at some grand musical event, when the tuning is over and the song has not yet begun. They waited… . At first there was a slow throbbing, just below the threshold of hearing … the heartbeat of the Dark Country.

  And then at last the tension shattered, and the Wind-bringer’s lightsong burst loose into the void.

  Davaryush watched.

  The light about them dimmed into a whisper of its old brilliance. Far away, arcing out of sprayswirls of distant mist, came Windbringers, each singing a lightsong for himself: from one came filigrees of burning gold, from another spectral rainbows, bridging mistcloud to mistcloud over the abyss of blackness. Another webbed the rainbows with blue silkstrands of light. They were tiny patterns at the limits of his vision: shifting always before they faded and melted into the dark. But this was not the madness of the over-cosm, where light dances and darts and explodes in a wilderness of color; the Windbringers had imposed form upon their vision of the overcosm: it was no happenstance of nature, no accidentally felicitous combinations of colors and patterns • • . it was art* But Davaryush did not hear the music of which the girl had spoken, for the lightsinging that he saw was in the distance, and he felt like a voyeur, intruding on private visions.

  But the heartbeat sound from the air around them was growing, growing—

  Lightning bolts now, ripping into the thick air, lightning in emerald and amethyst. And the heartbeat growing, the sound transmuting into a great groaning with an after whisper of rushing winds. Thunder now, as though the whole world roared for joy. Then more lightning, gem-clear jags streaking from the air around the brain, the colors dyeing the deepest crevasses of the gray matter.

  Why am I so moved? he thought. They are lights, nothing but lights… •

  More lightstrands now, interweaving, interwebbing … now kaleidodisks of light, floating on the far darkness, came flying towards him, a flameball flinging at his face, and he ducked quickly before he realized that it went straight through him, that it was insubstantial as a dream—

  The light surged now! And he heard faint music … the wail of a thousand whisperlyres … a poignant fluting .. . still the light brightening … his eyes watered now, but he dared not close them for a second, he dared not give up an instant of the searing beauty … brightening • •. brightening … now waves of white light bursting, bursting, bursting over him and it was Shtoma in the cadent lightfall, this moment became one with the moment of falling, and there came a childhood memory, repressed for centuries, surfacing in the tempest-tossing of his senses—

  Childhood. He was six years old. The ship was waiting to take him to the war. He was standing with his father by the seashore.

  Ships like silverdoves, soaring, hovering, settling by the mauve-tinged dawn of a world long dead….

  “Are you afraid, son?”

  “No. Never, Father.” But he was on the verge of tears.

  And his father seized him, on impulse, and threw him into the air; and he was screaming for help, half laughing, half sobbing, and he fell for an eternity into the arms that were made for him, for protecting him, for loving him….

  At last, only then, he understood the love of Udara.

  And the Windbringer, whose inner mind saw into the very limits of the overcosm … surely he too had touched the love of Udara. For when the light engulfed him, warmed him, loved him, when the music played as though from the syrinx of the whole cosmos, and he saw pain coexisting with its resolution … he knew that what Wind-striker had told him was true—

  Windbringer pities you.

  And he touched a shadow of that terrible compassion, and he knew that he was only an old man who had chosen loneliness and had sold his soul for power—

  Darktouch watched. They were old friends to her, these lights … but now she knew their names. To herself she whispered the names of the myriad colors: vermilion, silver-splash-blue, green of an al’ksigark-blooded frost, blue-white of sunlight, gold of sunspecks on the Sea of Tulangdaror … colors blended with memories. She stood apart from the others, murmuring the colors’ names again and again; and the wind took up her words and sifted them into its ceaseless wuthering—

  And Kelver saw flower-crystals bursting through veils of clingfire and he saw the burning of alien cities, light-colunms snapping in the lashing of a flamewind, and he stood there in the glare of the fire and did not care if it consumed him, and when it touched him and passed through him he was chilled, turned to stone, cried crystal tears—

  And Darktouch kissed away the tears, and they fell into a tender embrace, and the lights danced now, warming them, and the rhythm of their love was one with the heartbeat of the Windbringer’s song—

  And as Davaryush grieved over his pride, his loneliness, the dance of lights dispelled his sorrow and healed him, and he turned to Varuneh, knowing what he now must do and knowing that she knew and knowing that she forgave him everything—

  And the child laughed at the pretty lights—

  Light leapt from the Windbringer now. A yearning, soaring melody born of the heart’s thunder and the windwhine resounded around them, and then came the far echo of the sound as it shifted along the walls of the Dark Country .., and the walls themselves caught diamantine fire … the swirling vapors below shone like brilliant galaxies … beneath the galaxies, even the murky water of the Dark Country, the dank organic soup that sustained the Wind-bringers, even the Sunless Sound glimmered with the replication of reflections, and the jutting rocks burned on the onyx-glinting water—

  And the child laughed—

  The boy and the girl laughed in each other’s arms—

  The old man laughed as the firesong purged his guilt and his grief, his terror and his torment—

  And at last even the old woman smiled a little, and embraced Davaryush at last, crying out “I’ve seen the beginning and the end!”—