The boy leaped up from his couch. His hand swept over some hidden
control in the arm of the stone cross, and the milky light died out. At
the same time, an opaline glow suffused the darkness beyond.
Bas the Immortal ran down the steps--a dark-haired, graceful boy
running naked in the heart of an opal.
Ciaran followed.
They came to the hollow core of Ben Beatha--a vast pyramidal space cut
in the yellow rock. Bas stopped, and Ciaran stopped behind him.
The whole space was laced and twined and webbed with crystal. Rods
of it, screens of it, meshes of it. A shining helix ran straight up
overhead, into a shaft that seemed to go clear through to open air.
In the crystal, pulsing along it like the life-blood in a man's veins,
there was light.
It was like no light Ciaran had ever seen before. It was no color, and
every color. It seared the eye with heat, and yet it was cold and pure
like still water. It throbbed and beat. It was alive.
Ciaran followed the crystal maze down and down, to the base of it.
There, in the very heart of it, lying at the hub of a shining web, lay
_something_.
Like a black hand slammed across the eyeballs, darkness fell.
For a moment he was blind, and through the blindness came a soft
whisper of movement. Then there was light again; a vague smeared spot
of it on the pitch black.
It glowed and faded and glowed again. The rusty gleam slid across the
half-crouched body of Bas the Immortal, pressed close against the
crystal web. It caught in his eyes, turning them hot and lambent like
beast-eyes in the dark of a cave-mouth.
Little sparks of hell-fire in a boy's face, staring at the Stone of
Destiny.
A stone no bigger than a man's heart, with power in it. Even dying, it
had power. Power to build a world, or smash it. Power never born of
Ciaran's planet, or any planet, but something naked and perfect--an egg
from the womb of space itself.
It fought to live, lying in its crystal web. It was like watching
somebody's heart stripped clean and struggling to beat.
The fire in it flickered and flared, sending pale witch-lights dancing
up along the crystal maze.
Outside, Ciaran knew, all across the world, the sunballs were pulsing
and flickering to the dying beat of the Stone.