I reached out with my mind and coerced him, unresisting, into sleep. Closing my own eyes I dropped like a stone through the levels of my mind until I hung above the silver mindstream, caught perfectly between the need to rise to consciousness that was the will to selfhood and the downward pull of ultimate unconsciousness that was an abandonment of self. I gathered my will and coerced a tendril of the stream, drawing it to me and rising with it to consciousness. I willed it to flow through me and let it pool. When I had shaped it, I let myself flow along the silver strand that linked me to the spirit-form and opened my eyes. Immediately I felt the tingle of my spirit-form about me.

All that I would have seen with waking eyes was dull to my spirit-eyes. The hut and its simple furnishings were grey or brownish black, being made from material that had no life, though the fire had a strange orange and gold aura that blazed and leapt wildly about the flames of its physical form. Through the window, the sky swirled and churned and coiled like some fantastical stormy sea of violet and indigo, and under it the mountains were the simple brown of dead stone, though I was startled to see there were hazy green and yellow streaks that wavered and floated over their material counterparts. Curiosity drew me to the window, but something else held me. Turning I saw the silver cord connecting my spirit-form to my flesh, but to my astonishment, there was a second, thick, golden-yellow cord running from my spirit-form to Rushton’s, which passively overlay his sleeping form.

I reached out and stupidly tried to touch the golden cord. Of course it had not substance enough to be held even by the fingers of my spirit-form, but as my hand passed through it I felt the languorous heat of our lovemaking and understood that Rushton and I had somehow forged the link by the depth and potency of our merge. The only spirit-bond I had ever seen before was the lavender twin bond that ran between Miky and Angina, and suddenly I was reminded of Elkar’s words about twins having a goddess bond that could not be severed.

Then I thought of the queer scaled spirit-form that had come to me in my dreams. Help us, it had begged in Angina’s voice. You must use the black sword. Was it possible that he had been asking me to sever the bond that linked him to his sister? But what was the black sword? The only sword that came to mind was the one Cassy had left for me in the Earthtemple in Sador, which now lay wrapped in cloth in my bedchamber, but being formed of stone it was not truly a sword. Nor had Cassy suggested I should use it. I had been bidden only to return it to its owner.