Stargate by Pauline Gedge

unhurriedly toward the terrace, burst out between the pillars and the unmoving corions, and bounded down the steps. When he reached the stone plateau that broke the long flight of stairs, he veered left, slowing to cross the wide stone causeway that arched from the steps, over the gardens below, and brought him to the far end of the terrace. Here a stone door twice his height stood open, sunset reaching into the shadow beyond. Two fantastically elongated corions reared their wings at each side of the door, their slim muscles carved in the stone, their outlines limned in gold, while a stone sun rayed out above. Ixelion plunged into the corridor. I must get away, he thought, I must go home, I must guard what I have in my chest, beside my pool. What if Sillix entered my room while I was absent, and found it? The thought, irrational and impossible, drew a muffled cry from him. He forced himself to walk now, for people passed him, bowing, the citizens of Danar on their way home from Yantar or Brintar. They greeted him respectfully, and with a supreme effort he answered their words and smiles.
    A Trader came toward him, the light, transparent body allowing him a milky glimpse of distorted torchlight and undulating fretwork on the tunnel wall before he shied away. The Trader raised his eyebrows and smiled. On his back he carried a bundle and around his hairless head wound a scarf of many colors. Ixelion kept his eyes averted, his hand brushing the tumultuous carvings that blanketed the passage. Reliefs of mortals from Danar and Shol, winged lords from Ghaka, his own round-eyed, graceful fish-people crowded the walls, mingled on the ceiling, reached out to one another and the great suns scattered between their hands. The riders from Fallan also stalked there, frozen in stone, but now their hands seemed to convey a terrible longing, and their eyes and fixed smiles told of the things that were lost to them and would never come again.
    Now the Gate was visible, two corions facing each other across its width, and through it Ixelion could see the darkness frosted by cold starlight, as though he stood on Lix and saw the ice and crystals rearing glittering and exotically beautiful against deep space. He crossed the threshold, and the corions did not move. For one moment he paused, looking over the whole vast sweep of the All, the rock of Danar beneath his feet; then he leaped outward, calling to his sun. Bear me, carry me, bring me! he mouthed. I am wounded, I want to come home. He felt its response, a gentle, enquiring tug which became a grasp that tightened, a fierce clutch of protection that gathered him ever faster into its blazing light. For one moment he saw it, a conflagration, a rolling ball of searing whiteness. He thought that he flung out his arms to it and shouted, but in the weird, timeless confines of the invisible corridor he knew that he had no arms, no mouth, no body. I hurt! he told it. Heal me! But he knew also that healing was not in the suns, as it was not in him.
    Then he came to rest before his Gate. With a regret that he had never known he thought of the mists of Ixel, which shrouded his sun and kept its full glory veiled from him. He stepped under the arch, and the murmur of the water rose to enfold him again.
    At the mouth of the tunnel Sillix was waiting for him, sitting in the river where it poured in a smooth gush over the stone lip. Rain pattered on his head and dripped from his shoulders. When he saw Ixelion emerge, he rose, scattering droplets like sprayed flowers, shaking back his hair. Ixelion barely noticed him, and Sillix padded quickly to take his arm.
    â€œSun-lord,” he said breathlessly. “Oh, thanks be to the Worldmaker! I have been waiting here at the Gate for two long months.”
    Ixelion stopped and turned, fighting irritability. “What is it, Sillix? I am in haste, I must go at once to my halls. Have you been there in my absence?” he finished roughly and Sillix drew back a