The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [149]
Rather than an artificially crafted body of light, Merodda appeared in her etheric double, the matrix that had formed and interpenetrated her body during life. Faithfully it had recorded her death as well: her neck furrowed by the rope, her head flopped at an angle from its breaking. Already, however, the double was beginning to distort. Her legs seemed too long and thin; her torso, bloated and squat. Although she knew how to drain life-stuff from her victims, she seemed to lack the knowledge of how to distribute it within her etheric form.
In this grotesque simulacrum she drifted toward the bed, then stopped, staring at the unexpected sleeper. Nevyn called upon the Light and dropped like a striking hawk. In answer to his call, light came—a vast glowing sheet of it, shifting and twisting in rainbow colors like those northern lights the Dwarven folk tell of. Nevyn caught the edge with the hands of his body of light.
Merodda looked up, saw him, and shrieked—or rather, sent the thought of a wail out into the etheric where his mind heard it as a shriek. Like a fisherman throwing a net, Nevyn hurled the sheet of light at her and over her. She shrieked again, twisting back and forth as she clawed at it with both hands. He grabbed the edges and clutched them grimly, trapping her. She was beyond thinking in words; over and over she shrieked and tore and threw herself back and forth, but slowly her struggles exhausted her. She stopped moving; her shrieks turned to a thin wail of fear.
Above them both Nevyn visualized a pentagram, glowing with silver and blue, then drew round it a circle of gold. He rose, hauling Merodda with him, and flung them both through this gate into the astral plane. An indigo wind, dark as a bruise, caught them, swirled them, tumbled them around and around as they fell, rushing downward through a cloud of blown images—faces, beasts, stars, symbols, and letters in unknown scripts. The images beat against them, then flew on, borne by the indigo wind. In her net of light Merodda was screaming and twisting as she tore at the glowing strands.
“Courage!” Nevyn called out. “You go to your redemption!”
Straight ahead in the indigo a long slash of violet appeared, then swirled and thickened into a shimmering oval of pale lavender light. Nevyn called out a Name, and they fell through, tumbling at last to rest in a field of white flowers, nodding on a breeze that barely trembled their pale white leaves. Some distance away a river gleamed silver, or was it a mist? It shifted, tenuous as moonlight. When Nevyn tugged on the last tatters of his astral net, they fell away to reveal a tiny child, formed of pale golden light.
“Call upon the Light!” Nevyn said. “Call upon the Light and forswear the Darkness!”
The child wept, throwing tiny hands up in front of her face as if she feared a slap. Even though the astral wind blew so gently here, it caught her up and began to carry her toward the river. She drifted this way and that, bobbing on the breathless wind, but ever closer she came to the silver river.
“Go with the Light!” Nevyn called out. “Go in peace!”
Whether she answered, he never knew. The struggle to travel on this plane in the body of light was growing too much for him. He saw his gathering weakness as a shattering of the vision: pieces of landscape fell away, the flowers withered and vanished. Only the violet light still gleamed, and in it a rift of indigo. With a last effort he launched himself through and fell back into the wind.
Spiraling around and around, up and up it seemed, past the manic frenzy of torn images and broken snatches of strange music, he saw at last his pentacle gate of silver and blue. Soaring and struggling both at once, he reached it and slipped through, bobbing up into bluish light that glimmered on the dead black walls of the chamber. Below him he saw his body, lying twisted on its side but still joined safely to his consciousness by the silver cord. Nevyn floated to a position directly over it and hovered for a moment, gathering strength