Elements 03 - Monsters of the Earth (47 page)

“You see my body, crippled!” the little man said. “But my mind, that’s the horror. That’s crippled too, stunted. I who was the greatest of men and more than a man, look at me now! I should better step out of this place and crumble away entirely, body and mind.”

“We were discussing Lady Alphena,” Pandareus said. He opened his left hand toward the vision in the basin. “You said she was here and you sent her away, master?”

The little man slid up from his grief like a casement suddenly opening. “Yes, that’s right,” he said. “She must have been a magician herself to have come here. I wasn’t; I shouldn’t have.…”

He began to cry again. Corylus wondered what had happened to bring the fellow to his present state. Age alone would not have been enough.

“Can you summon her back from where you sent her, master?” said Pandareus, gesturing again to the basin. “My friend and I have come to return Lady Alphena to the Waking World, you see.”

“Really?” said the little man. “There was a time I would have been able to do that, you know. I was powerful; I had
all
power, except over time. I tried to become young again, but it all went wrong, so badly wrong.…”

He’s about to cry again,
Corylus realized. He put his left hand on the little man’s shoulder and said, “Master? Can you help us with Lady Alphena? Can you help our friend, please?”

The little man shook himself free of Corylus. “No, no,” he said querulously. “I can’t; and anyway, why would I want to? She’s a fool! She didn’t respect poetry and she didn’t respect me!”

He looked into the basin and added, “She knows to respect me
now,
though!”

Ethiopes, the horse-headed giants whom Corylus had fought when he fled with the Singiri princess, were advancing on Alphena and the Nubian dancers. Scores of them were visible already and more appeared with every breath at the misty edge of the vision.

Corylus considered the twisted little creature who had sent a young woman into the hands of monsters. His mind bubbled with cold anger.

“If you cannot return Lady Alphena to us…,” Pandareus said, “… can you send us to her?”

The teacher’s clear, calm voice brought Corylus back to … not his senses, because he had never lost either awareness or control. Rather, it put him back in the mind of a scholar, or of a soldier. Not of a skin-clad barbarian looking for a chance to kill something because he was in a bad mood.

“What?” said the little man. “Of course. Or you can simply go, step into the image yourself. That’s all that’s required.”

“Then if you will give me a hand, Master Corylus…?” Pandareus said, putting his left foot on the lip of the basin—it was almost knee height above the floor—and holding out his right hand to his younger friend. He smiled.

Corylus smiled back as he mounted the lip, then braced the older man to stand beside him. The teacher’s calm good sense made him a better companion in this business than any number of additional swordsmen would have been.

“Ready?” he said.

“But wait!” said the little man. “Do you have to—”

“Yes,” said Pandareus. Together he and Corylus stepped into the vision of another world.

*   *   *

T
HE CLIFFS ON EITHER SIDE
of the chasm glowed faintly red. The color put Hedia in mind of the magic Melino worked, but this was none of his doing.

The bridge they were crossing was very like the structure of cane over which the demon had led them into the Underworld in the beginning. This time the “floor” was a hawser of silk as thick as Hedia’s thigh and the “handrail” was a wrist-thick silken cord. Whatever would the Serians who sent fine silk garments to Carce think of this
industrial
use of their luxury fabric?

Hedia walked without difficulty along the hawser. It didn’t spring upward when her foot or the magician’s lifted, though it always quivered with a high-pitched vibration of its own.

She kept her right hand above the lighter rope in case something unexpected happened. “Unexpected” in this place meant “even more horrible than everything else is.” Hedia had decided that being ready to grab the handrail did not cause her to lose her dignity, or at least not an unacceptable amount of dignity.

Smiling wryly at the mental games she was playing with herself, Hedia said, “What is the name of this gorge, if you please?”

“Be silent, woman!” Melino said from immediately ahead of her. He didn’t turn his head.

“The gorge has no human name, Hedia,” said the demon, leading the procession. Her voice was emotionless, but Hedia was sure that there was a note of dry humor in the words. “No human who crossed it returned alive.”

After a step and another step, the demon added, “Not all of them were alive to begin with, of course.”

Hedia giggled. The situation wasn’t funny—she had no doubt that the demon had stated the literal truth—but Hedia was amused at the way she and the demon were baiting Melino in response to his surly arrogance.

Hedia was used to men assuming they were her superiors, generally for no better reason than the fact they were men. She had never come to like the experience, however. She found the game she and the demon were playing to be deeply satisfying.

Hedia had kept her eyes trained along the course of the bridge in a conscious attempt to keep from looking downward. Movement drew her glance reflexively: something as large as a warship under sail had swept under them. She couldn’t tell what it was, but she had the impression of scales rather than feathers.

“Nothing will attack you while you are with me,” the demon volunteered. “If you fall from the bridge, something may catch you in the air. You will fall for a very long time unless that happens.”

The magician hunched lower. He clutched the
Book
to his chest with his left arm but kept his right hand and the staff firmly over the upper line.

Hedia laughed. Speaking so that the demon could hear also, she said, “You should have been taught to walk gracefully the way I was, Master Melino. My teacher was Narcissus, the most esteemed pantomime in Carce during my childhood.”

She lowered her right hand to her side. She was no longer afraid of falling. The echoing hiss she had noticed when they began crossing the gorge might come from water running somewhere in the depths, but in this place it might not be water; and it didn’t matter anyway.

They had been walking uphill since before the winged thing flew under them: the hawser sagged under its own weight. Ahead of them were a gleaming metal arch and double doors of the same bright metal. Hedia thought it must be orichalc, but she couldn’t be sure in this dim red light.

The demon halted in front of the doors. Melino moaned something, a prayer or perhaps merely a groan, and raised Zabulon’s
Book.
The doors groaned inward even before the
Book
spoke.

White light flooded from the opening, turning the demon into a crimson silhouette of herself. She walked through the doorway; Melino followed; and Hedia, squinting so that she could see in the sudden brightness, followed also. Behind her the great metal valves closed with a sound like souls in torment.

They had entered a domed vault, flooded with light from the floor and the domed ceiling. Hedia couldn’t be sure how big the space was because the material was so dazzling. It glittered like clear white sand, but at least what she was standing on was solid and as smooth as a bronze mirror.

They stopped twenty feet or so from the door by which they had entered. Hedia looked back, but the metal valves were lost in the light. At any rate, she couldn’t see them.

Melino began to laugh. He was standing straighter now. Entering this place had given him back both strength and confidence.

“Now!” he said. “Who but I could have come here? We
can
return to the Waking World from this nexus. It will cost me the ring, but what of that if I have Zabulon’s
Book
?”

He raised the
Book
in his left hand. Hedia looked at the magician sharply, considering what he had just said. The demon remained impassive.

Melino’s lips moved. The
Book
rumbled a word. The vault and the world beyond trembled to the echo.

A vortex formed in what had been a solid crystal floor. It spread outward and downward, eating into the stone. Melino backed a step and knelt.

The demon did not move. “It is not the rock that is dissolving,” she said, her eyes on Hedia’s. “The Cosmos itself is dissolving in this place.”

Hedia looked down. She had not retreated when Melino did, because the demon had remained where she had been standing. The edge of the cavity stopped just short of her toes. Though it continued to expand away from her, they were in no more immediate danger than they had been when they entered the huge chamber.

At the bottom of the slanting pit was a flickering point of light, blue and so intense that Hedia’s head jerked back reflexively from its impact. She felt as though shards of ice had been jabbed into both her pupils. Her head ached, and she saw floating orange afterimages even after she massaged her eyes with the heels of her hands. Her vision cleared slowly.

The magician had knelt, supporting part of his weight on the staff, after the
Book
spoke. He didn’t get to his feet yet, but his features were still animated and his face hadn’t lost its color as it had when he used the powerful spells in the past. This light-filled cavern strengthened him or at least made his recovery quicker.

“He will smash the ruby,” the demon said, speaking to Hedia. “Then he will order me into the Underworld unprotected; and I will obey, because he is my master. My agony will anchor the spell which he speaks through Zabulon’s
Book.
It will open his passage to the Waking World. His passage and yours.”

Hedia looked at Melino. He took the ruby ring from his left hand and placed it on the crystal floor in front of him, then lifted himself upright with his right hand on the staff.

She had started to say, “Is that true?” but the demon hadn’t lied—couldn’t lie?—yet and there was nothing in what she had said that didn’t fit with Melino’s previous behavior.

“Stop,” Hedia said. “We can’t do that. She’s one of us.”

“What?” said Melino, looking more dumbfounded than angry. “Are you insane?”

He positioned the butt of his staff over the ruby and prepared to bring it down. The blow would shatter the jewel into dust. The demon watched.

“No!” said Hedia. She bent and snatched the ring away with her left hand. “She’s one of
us
!”

“You slut!” Melino said. “Well, your pain will do as well as hers!”

He stepped toward Hedia with the staff crossways, pushing her toward the edge of the pit. She tried to claw his eyes. He blocked her with the
Book
in his left hand.

I’m going over,
Hedia thought. She was beyond fear.
This is how life ends.

The demon’s lips moved. Zabulon’s
Book
boomed a word that froze time. A force set Hedia back on the crystal floor.

Melino screamed in sudden awareness. Spinning, he plunged into the tunnel he had opened into the Underworld.

Hedia didn’t follow him with her eyes—she remembered the pain of her first ignorant glance—but the screams continued as though they would never stop. She swallowed. The demon was watching her with a slight smile.

“What do I do now?” Hedia said, knowing that she was on the edge of more than a passage to eternal torment.

“Whatever you wish, mistress,” the demon said. “Zabulon’s
Book
gives you all power.”

“I want to go back to the Waking World!” Hedia said. “But I can’t; I’m not a magician. I can’t use this—”

She hefted the
Book
.

“—because I can’t work magic!”

“Then it’s fortunate, mistress…,” the demon said with the same cold smile as before. “That your servant
can
work magic.”

Her expression changed slightly. Hedia remembered Melino saying that the demon had no emotions. She had thought him a fool to believe that.
A fool indeed, and now a damned fool.

“There are other ways to focus a spell than by agony,” the demon said. “But agony is fitting, since that was the method my former master preferred.”

Her lips moved silently. The
Book
in Hedia’s hand opened and thundered a word.

Melino’s screams redoubled, seemingly louder than if he were standing beside them instead of by now far below. The pit slowly began to close as a similar cavity rotated into the wall of the chamber behind Hedia.

She looked at the ring in her left palm. “Demon, what do you want?” she said.

The demon had no expression. “My will is your will, mistress,” she said.

“Hecate strike you barren!” Hedia shouted in frustration. “My will is that you tell me where you want to be! Do you want to remain in this place? What do
you
want?”

“If the ring that protects me were dropped into the Underworld,” the demon said, “then it would keep me safe from the rigors of that place; and there I would be safe also from magicians of the Waking World who would use me for their ends. But I have no will but your will.”

“Then go!” said Hedia, and hurled the ring into the pit. The demon’s form sucked into the ruby like a wisp of smoke an instant before the ground closed over it.

The
Book
spoke again. Hedia stood on packed red sand. The sun was rising. It was already bright enough to dispel the chill fog that had come in from the sea.

CHAPTER
XVI

Hedia’s first thought was,
This isn’t Carce. Why did the demon send me here?

Her second thought was that she was back in Atlantis—from which she had escaped either weeks ago or eleven thousand years ago, according to the figure Master Pandareus had given for when the island had been destroyed.

But this wasn’t Atlantis. At least it wasn’t Poseidonis, the capital where Hedia had been imprisoned, and the distant black cliffs cutting the bay off from the interior of the land were nothing like the Atlantean terrain she had seen.