one she had just seen, magnificent in every aspect, stood in a pose of confrontation, one facing the other four. No words were heard, but Miranda sensed they were communicating.
‘What am I seeing?’
‘Watch.’
Suddenly one of the four moved to the Shining One and grappled with him; then the Shining One was gone.
‘What was that?’
‘There are many different stories. Here’s what you must know. For every cause there’s a reaction, an opposition; for every force, a counter force. It’s part of a balance so fundamental it surpasses even the First Cause. It is called Equipoise at its most fundamental, and that is what you must first understand. The one who fell was cast out because he questioned his creation and aspired to rise beyond his station. He brooded in solitude for ages and felt rage.
‘Then came envy, and the one who fell created imitations of his brethren. His children were demons. They would serve and worship him, as his brethren served their creator.’
Again Miranda saw what Piper had called the demon host, a legion of beauty on the wing, appearing through a massive rift in the heavens, the Sundering. ‘Am I seeing what he really looks like?’ she asked.
Piper again blew a loud note, spun in a circle and said, ‘Of course not. There are bands of energy coursing through the universes impossible for any physical entity to perceive, let alone grasp. Understanding beyond any one mortal’s capacity is what is needed to grasp the totality of what is before you.
‘Threads of possibility, waves of probability, surges and flows of consciousness, vital forces beyond mortal comprehension.’ In a patronizing tone he added, ‘We have to simplify so you can comprehend. Your feeble mind does what it can to understand, but it’s not sufficient.’
Miranda scowled at being called feeble-minded, but let it go. ‘What are you showing me?’
‘The hosts of heaven.’
‘I thought you said it was the demon legion.’
Piper laughed. ‘Your mind! It is lacking. Angels, demons, they are the same thing, but from different places! Or the same thing seen differently! They just serve different causes. They are opposites, yet they are the same!’
Piper came to stand before Miranda, put his pipe under his arm, then formed a sphere with his two hands. ‘You see things like this! But in truth, they are like this.’ Suddenly he pulled apart his hands, fingers wiggling frantically, and moved his hands in a flurry of motion. ‘There is no higher heaven, lower hell. The first circle is the first circle, or plane or realm or demesne.’ He waved one hand high above his head. ‘Here you call it heaven.’ Then he waved the other down below his waist, letting his flute drop, which he deftly caught with his free hand while he knelt. ‘Down here, the same place, you call hell!’
He walked around behind her. ‘From here, I see you with black hair hanging down your back.’ Before she could turn, he was in front of her. ‘From here I see your face! You look different from before. But you are the same!’
‘Perspective,’ she said.
‘Yes!’ He laughed, a clear boyish laugh. ‘You begin to understand.’ He waved his hand and the image changed.
Suddenly the King of Hell was a red-skinned monster with huge white horns that rose from his forehead and curved back over the dome of his skull, an upraised roach of black hair rising between them like the fin of a sailfish, and two enormous black bat wings spreading out from his back.
The host of angel-like demons were now replaced with what Child would have expected to reside in hell. Miranda said, ‘Why …?’
‘You denizens of that region of the spheres, what you call the Fifth Circle, like all beings in one sense or another, are creatures of energy. You look the way you expect to look.’
‘I expected to look like Child?’
‘Language,’ snorted Piper, obviously unhappy with its limits. ‘No, you creatures, all of you, together, over time, you come to believe things and they become so.’ He laughed. ‘Look at this one. It’s wonderful!’
She looked up and instead of figures of demons and angels saw a massive cascade of scintillating lights, so brilliant as to cause her to shield her eyes. Millions of other lights flowed and swirled around the twisting fountain of colour in the middle. It was as if every fireworks display ever conceived had been simultaneously unleashed on a scale to dwarf worlds. Colours darted so quickly, it was a sight to induce madness in a weaker mind than hers.
‘It’s energy, don’t you see?’ asked Piper.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Energy, matter, time, it’s all the same. You just have to know how to look.’
‘Perspective,’ said Miranda.
‘Yes,’ said Piper. He grinned and danced a step.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘Witness,’ said Piper.
Suddenly the entire sky changed. Instead of a window through which to view images conjured by whatever magic Piper or his master employed, Miranda found herself floating over a vast field of stars. There was a glorious harmony to all she beheld. Vast swirling oceans of star-studded gas moved across the heavens in stately progress, while comets blazed their timeless paths around multitudes of stars.
‘This is what the universe looked like from this rock when it was a planet,’ said Piper, ‘before the Enemy came, before the time of madness and chaos.’
Miranda was about to ask a question, then ceased as she noticed an anomaly. In a corner of a starfield, a dark spot had appeared, at first hardly noticeable in the flowing pattern of lights against the darkness around her. But after a moment she saw that there was something different about this blackness. If there could be shades of blackness, this was a depth of it, an absence of even the promise of light or colour.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘Watch,’ said Piper.
‘It must be immense,’ said Miranda, ‘and very far away.’
‘Distance, like what I’ve shown you, is illusion. How do you think you move from place to place by thought?’
‘Magic,’ she answered.
‘There is no magic,’ replied Piper. ‘Nakor understands.’ Miranda looked at Piper, who looked quizzically at her. ‘Or he will.’ Piper frowned. ‘Or he has.’ After another moment, Piper said, ‘Time is an illusion, too.’
Miranda had only a rudimentary idea of how vast the distance between stars might be, but she knew, given the size of the sun around which Midkemia spun and how it appeared in the sky, and the size of those tiny pinpoints of light called stars, the distances were vast. Yet the dark spot was growing at an enormous speed. ‘It must be expanding at tens of thousands of miles a minute,’ she muttered. ‘More,’ she amended as entire clusters of stars were suddenly blotted out.
She looked at Piper, who was transfixed by the sight above them. She asked, ‘Is
