High Couch of Silistra (23 page)

The eerie green light steadily brightened, and I could see the thick layer of dust on the passage floor eddying and puffing with our steps. It filled my mouth and nose, and my eyes stung and watered. I pushed back my matted hair from my face with my free hand, feeling the painful twisted clots of it stiff and scratchy against my skin. We reached another intersection, and Sereth again reached high on the right-hand wall.

“These chips cost me a good steel sword,” he said, taking my hand, that I might feel the blazes he had made. By standing on my toes I could just reach them with my fingertips. I felt three parallel gouges, shallow but easily read against the slick, smooth-surfaced rock.

“Three for straight. Two for left. One for right. If you and I truly part company here, you would do well to go by them. One could be long lost in this, maze.” His voice sounded dull, without inflection, as if the walls would suck up the intruding noise. “One more turning,” he continued, “and we are there.”

He took my left hand in his right. I gripped it tightly and tried to follow, but my legs would not obey me. My teeth chattered and my skin crawled. When he had spoken, I had gotten nothing from him but the sound of his voice. And I knew. There was no draw-feel to the time, none of that vague excitement that had been with me the whole of my life. I had, somehow, in this underground labyrinth, entered into the circle of crux. And I could sense nothing. Sereth pulled at my arm, but it happened far from me. It was as if I had suddenly gone blind. All the tiny bits of direct information my skills provided me were gone. I could sort no probabilities, for there were none. From this point in time, dependent upon what occurred, a whole new set of alternatives would be born. And I could not weigh them, nor hedge my bet. Terrified, I begged him to hold me. He did so.

“Tighter,” I whispered. “Tighter still,” as if the pain as he crushed me to him would somehow anchor me to life.

“Any tighter and your ribs will crack,” he said, his head against my neck. “Surely you are not so deep in your need that you must have it now, here, in this place,” he said, misreading my trembling.

“No,” I moaned, my head against his chest. “Just hold me. Please.”

He did, and I searched within me for that inner strength that had always in the past come to aid me. When I found it, weak and shrunken, I went about driving the debilitating fear from my mind. When that was done, and my body’s reaction calmed, I raised my lips to his and kissed him, long and hard. In that kiss were all the thanks and affection I was too proud to speak, and he too much a Slayer to hear.

He pulled back from me, tossing his head. A smile touched the corners of his mouth. The green glow on his scarred face distorted his features, caused his skin to take on a darker hue. His hands on my shoulders, he looked down into my face.

“None would blame you if you left here with me.” His tone was gentle. “You have given this chaldra of the mother more than any mother has a right to ask.”

“It is too late,” I heard myself say, and he blew his breath through clenched teeth and took my hand in his, and we walked down the corridor until it ended, and took the final turning to the right.

He was standing there in the eerie green glow, all cowled and pulsing bronze and massive, barring our path. Beyond him I could see the passage open into a huge cavern. But I could not move.

“Go back,” the cowled one commanded. “Go back and await him. He will come to you in Arlet when the time is right.”

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Sereth, still as stone, frozen in mid-stride.

I struggled for my voice and found it. I would speak! My tongue felt huge and swollen in my dry mouth.

“If such were true, you would have saved us all much trouble, and told me before. Nothing but evil has come from you in the past. I am not such a fool as to believe you. Get from my path. Cease to obstruct me. By my father’s will, I command you.”

“Would you pay your passage with yet another life?” He raised his hand toward Sereth, and the Slayer fell to his hands and knees, then crumpled to the ground. By my peripheral vision, I watched him fall, for I could not turn my head. I thought of the Baniese trader, and that horrible death he had died. My stomach churned.

“I would bargain his life to you, child of Estrazi. Turn from this path, and he is yours.” The voice was full of sibilances that scraped my spine.

“No!” I said. I thought it too late. “You will not trick me. And you will not stop me.” I tried to see the face within the shadowed cowl. I could not.

“There are already enough of the children gathered. You are not needed,” he said, voice slick and oily, and the image before me pulsed and wavered. “But go. I have done my best to stop you. You will wish, very soon, that you had listened. I will give you his life. In exchange, you will serve me equal value when we meet again.”

It was a thread of hope I was eager to grasp. I wanted no more death on my account. Sereth’s loss was a gaping hole within me. I could have him back; the price seemed little enough.

The cowled one waved his hand, and the force that had held me prisoner was gone so abruptly that I staggered and stumbled as the impetus of my interrupted stride carried me forward. I went to my knees by Sereth, not daring to believe, but desperate with hope.

His head was turned from me. I remember the feel of his silky, thick brown hair under my anxious hands as I turned his head toward me. His face was peaceful and composed, as if in sleep. My hands at his temples, I could feel, clear and distinct, the blood pounding there. He lived! But the Baniese had lived awhile, cut off from all sensory reality. I could see his eyeballs moving, as in dream state, under closed lids. With difficulty I turned him over. Finally, I sat quietly beside him, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest, where he lay on his back. He was covered with the dust of the passage floor.

The cowled one was gone when I first had the wit to look about for him. I cared not. He had won. I could not leave Sereth, alive and unconscious, alone in the passage under Santha. The bargain, the offer of life, had been but a final gloating goad. What semblance of life was this?

I stared at him a long time, wondering how I could have gone so wrong. I had seen his timeline fold back upon itself and branch. My constricted, dust-filled throat burned and ached. I lay my head on his chest and wept quietly. I doubted my ability to drag that large, powerful man back along the passage, up out pf the crevice, down the fallside jumble of rocks to where the threx grazed, waiting.

Sereth groaned, and his arm went about me. I cried his name.

His eyes opened and focused. I was limp with relief.

“Let me sit up.” Slowly he struggled to a sitting position, crossing his legs under him, hesitantly, as if relearning their control. He swayed, and I put my arm about his shoulders to steady him, but he shook me off, supporting himself with stiffened arms, his head bowed low.

“Dizzy,” he mumbled, one hand to his eyes. He sat quietly, breathing deep, a long while.

“Your friend has a heavy stroke,” he said finally, raising his eyes to my face. It was as if he would smile but had forgotten how.

“I thought I had lost you,” I said.

“You lost me long ago, Estri. Nor would you have had it otherwise.”

“Did it hurt?”

“No. Just nothing. Floating nothing. My mind still quivers. It is a very lonely place, where he sent me.”

I knelt before him in the dust of the corridor. I wondered if he knew how he had regained his life.

“What think you of what he said?” I asked.

“I heard none of it.” I could see his body steadying under him. He needed no longer the support of his stiffened arms to keep him erect. I had very little time. I leaned forward and kissed him gently, then rose to my feet. I was glad he had no remembrance of my meeting with the cowled one, of the bargain I had made.

“Estri, wait.” But I was already in that chamber I had given so much to reach.

I looked back and saw him leaning unsteadily against the passage wall, watching me. I could not wait until he was fully recovered.

The great cavern was not natural in its form. It was smooth and regular, as had been the passages, and brightly green-lit. The floor was unseamed, though the expanse of it was as great as Arlet’s Inner Well. In the center, I saw what I had sought so long. It sat waiting, twice my body’s length, the height of my knee. It was black, of the same material as my father’s ring. I knelt before it. Emblazoned upon the side of the oblong platform, magnified perhaps a thousand times, so that it covered the whole middle of the longitudinal side, was the pattern that the ring bore, fashioned just the same, from scintillating inset stones. But these stones were not white, save for one, but every shade imaginable. A fortune beyond comprehension glittered here in the green-lit cavern below the Falls of Santha. The bloodred stone in the upper-right-hand arm of the spiral was the size of my fist. I ran my dust-covered hand over it. There was no doubt in my mind as to what to do.

I got to my feet and regarded the couch-sized upper side. There were two sets of gleaming golden rungs recessed deep in the black stone, perhaps one-fifth distance from either end. I lay belly-down between them, hooking my feet under one pair of rungs, my fingers around the other. My hair obscured my sight. The stone was warm against my belly, my legs, my arms. I heard Sereth’s voice dimly. Then I heard a great rushing, and my consciousness blew apart screaming, every molecule straining to retain its relationship to its fellows. And we were lost, all. the billions of fragments of me, among polarized entities of undulating colored light, each atom distinct, forming great serpents who wound the centers of the gravity circuits that join all matter, synchronism preexisting. Pulling reality constantly within, ever devouring the now, they whirled and spun in nontime.

Then I lay on my stomach with the warmth of the black stone once again against my flesh. I exhaled the breath I had drawn on Silistra into an alien air. I lay for a while with my eyes closed, savoring my body, once again whole.

The air in my nostrils was thick and syrupy, full of almost-tastes and nameless smells. It was rich and intoxicating, and brought to me a sense of fullness. I had, in a few breaths, had enough of it. Its heaviness sickened. But there was nothing else to breathe. It was uncomfortably warm. Perspiration trickled down between my breasts.

I loosened my fingers from their aching grip upon the golden rungs and rolled fast to my back, as one dives into mysterious waters. I sucked in another breath involuntarily as the reality of the place crashed in upon me. I was in a small crystal chamber. Through the walls I could see another chamber, and another, and another. In each was a similar platform. Far down the prismatic row, I could see shapes moving among the crystals. Above me I could see the sky. It was a blue sky, where it was not green or gray or white or gold or black or red. The cubes of storm became summer’s day, became twilight, and morn and snow’s fall, and lightning flash. It melted and reformed before me, ever-changing, but each segment distinctly enclosed by some invisible geometric barrier. My eyes ached from it. I turned my head to the left, expecting to see again only the ever-receding crystalline partitions.

I saw, instead, two lithe and yet powerful bronze figures. My peripheral vision had not warned me. They had not been there before. One was a female. She was molten, brazen perfection, that reality of which I was only a shadow. Her companion was a head taller, and twice her girth, as perfectly formed and primally male as she was female, and a shade of hair and eye darker. He had a haughty, angular face, with high forehead and prominent brows. It was not the face of my father. Otherwise they might have been brothers.

I thought to rise to greet them, but the female put forth her hand, and I was paralyzed. She came forward, her face infinite compassion, and leaned over me where I lay helpless. In her hand was a band of metal on which were glyphs unfamiliar to me, and this she snapped closed around my neck. It was a tight fit; I could feel the restraining snugness when I swallowed. The metal was cold and unyielding.

I tried to speak, and the woman brought her lips close to mine and kissed me. Then her cool hand was on my brow, and sleep rushed upon me, and I saw nothing.

I leaned back against the crystal-clear wall of my prison and tried to comb the snarls from my hair with my fingers. It was very difficult work, painful, frustrating. When I had regained consciousness, I had been alone in the crystal cube, under that alien jumble of tiny chunks of sky. I had felt every reachable inch of my prison in the hysteria that followed my reawakening. There was no seam or joint in the cube’s construction. It had no door. It adjoined the other crystal cubes on the bottom, and the two sides parallel with the long end of the platform. Above us was the sky. I had tried to determine the number of cubes, and the height to which we were stacked, but I could not tell it. There were more than four cubes under me, or just that number. Between the cubes were white walkways, on the side parallel with the short end of the platform, and these made perspective impossible. Eventually I had given up trying to determine my surroundings. I was on an unknown world, held by an unknown race, for an unknown reason. That I should be so desperately concerned with ascertaining the exact nature of my prison seemed finally ludicrous.

I do not know what I expected to find on the other side of the black platform on Silistra. I think I expected my father to greet me like some treasured, long-lost love, and escort me through a land of storybook marvels. I had not expected, certainly, to be stripped and imprisoned by strangers without so much as the courtesy to inquire as to my reason for being here.

Disgusted, I ripped the snarl out in a clump and straightened up. My shoulders were sore from too long spent tensed in one position. I stared again at the walls that bound me in. Only one cube directly adjoining held an occupant, and this was the cube I had arbitrarily dubbed north. In it was a black couch or platform, with no identifying device—identical, as far as I could see, to mine. Recessed into the north wall was an oblong about the height of the lower part of my body, but an arm’s length off the floor. Set beneath this box, sunken into the clear floor, were what could only have been, as in my cube, a bowl and plate. Within the clear oblong box, the length of my lower body, an arm’s length wide, and that high off the ground, writhed an unpleasant-looking, thick, roiling brown mass. Half between gas and liquid, it was ever in motion, and tiny sparks of colored light chased each other sporadically across the restless surface. I was glad it was enclosed.