Free Stargate by Pauline Gedge

is dear to me as nothing else is dear. Listen to me. The treasure will tell you what you should do, and it can help you if you will let it. It is forbidden to you, but why? Because the one who possesses it possesses more power than any other. What I say is true. Falia opened and saw and knew, but Falia did not have the courage to use it, so it destroyed Fallan. You have the strength.
You
can use it to outwit the Unmaker. The Law is above dark and light, and so must you be if you want to save the universe. Defeat the Unmaker with it, Ixelion. Restore the balance of the Law!”
    The Law is not above dark and light, Ixelion thought, forcing his mind to reject the Trader’s smooth argument, though the effort was like pushing his way through mud. The Law divides dark from light. The Worldmaker placed himself outside the light, and thus outside the Law. “Surely the treasure can tell me what I will do, not what I should do,” he managed huskily. His head swam, and the Trader nodded mockingly.
    â€œTime divides here, now, in this room,” he said. “You must choose the path of the future. Destruction, Ixelion, or the help of your treasure?”
    â€œI will take it to Janthis,” Ixelion replied stubbornly, faintly, and the Trader laughed.
    â€œDo you trust him that much? Or yourself? Give it to me, and I will deliver it. To Ghakazian, perhaps, or the beautiful Sholia. She, indeed, has the power to use it.”
    Ixelion was galvanized. He leaped back. “Go away!” he snarled. “Ghakazian, Sholia, we are all equal.”
    â€œOh? Really?” And the Trader was gone, walking on the surface of the water, out of the room, out of Ixel, laughing. “Hurry, Ixelion,” his voice floated back. “The ocean is beginning to die.”
    Heart pounding, Ixelion walked unsteadily into the room, where his chair invited him to slump onto it. Very well, he thought. Very well. I think I knew that it would come to this, from the time Falia thrust the haeli wood box into my innocent hands. Mine. Not Ghakazian’s, or Sholia’s. It came to
me.
Jealousy needled him, a stab of sudden hate in his mind. I will open it and I will learn, and then I will fight.
    He swung back the metal lid of the casket and lifted out what lay within. It was a book, its covers hard and smooth except for where its title had been impressed into the ivory-colored substance, horn or bone, Ixelion surmised, or some matter created by the Worldmaker especially to confine such a precious thing. He looked down at the curling silver letters sunk deep into the cover, written in the common tongue, and only the tips of his fingers tingled. He was calm and cold.
The Book of What Will Be in the All,
he read. That was all, and that was enough. The Book that had been forbidden to them from the beginning, whose whereabouts none knew or cared to know. But now … Was it really found on Tran? Ixel wondered reverently, stroking it. Was it cast up from the bowels of the earth when the volcanoes vomited fire and the rocks split open to swallow Tranin and his sun? Or did the Unmaker give it to the Trader in order to bring chaos upon us all? It did not matter. It was here, under his loving, questing hands, it was indestructible, it was his very own. Now he would know what was to come, and that power would be his forever. He opened the Book. The pages were white and thin as silk, the words tiny and silver, and at once his own name leaped out at him two, three, four times. Eagerly he began to read.
    He read through many days and nights of Ixel time, moving only to turn the whispering, feather-light pages, oblivious to the slow passing of his own time or the rush of weeks outside, where Sillix and the people crouched in the sand and no longer buried any fish, for the few had become mounds, walls, towers of stench and disease. He would occasionally draw in his breath and exclaim in amazement or anger, but he did not pause. He began the