Servant of the Dragon (46 page)

"We can get away now," said Dalar. He was standing, but his voice wasn't as strong as it usually was. "I think we should."

The moon wasn't up and the sun had set an hour before. All the plaster had been rubbed from the wall across from Sharina. Instead of bare stone, she saw a faint bluish tremor.

"Wait...," she said to Dalar; at least her lips formed the words. She wasn't sure she'd managed to be audible.

The Dragon sat behind his table, watching Sharina with unblinking eyes. She thought of the snake and began to tremble again.

"You are well, Sharina?" he said. "You are able to go on at this time?"

"I'm alive," Sharina said. A natural smile found its way to her lips. "I don't think we'll be alive for long if we wait till the creature we shared this place with returns."

"Ah, yes, Ohmqat," the Dragon said. His jaws gaped in a lipless, reptilian equivalent of a smile. "It was not human, though it took on a human semblance when first it came to Valhocca. It will go to the ruins and stay there. In a few days the coastline will sink and take Ohmqat back to the seabottom where it belongs."

Sharina stood carefully. "I'd still like to get out of here as soon as possible," she said. "Although... Dalar, do you want to leave immediately?"

The bird's eyes moved back and forth from Sharina to what he obviously saw only as a patch of wall. He shrugged his thin shoulders. "I will go when and where my master requires," he said. "But if I had an opinion—"

He clucked merrily.

"—I would leave this place as soon as possible. Or sooner."

The Dragon's laughter trilled in Sharina's mind. "The way out," he said, "is at the bottom of the cenote; the pit, that is, where Ohmqat was confined. His captors placed a stone on him to hold him in place. That was vain, but the depth of the cenote was enough. You will tilt up the stone and go through the hole you find beneath it."

"How deep is the pit?" Sharina asked. She felt surprisingly good, though she supposed she might just be getting light-headed from the stress of the past however-long.

"Thirty feet and a half foot," the Dragon said. His form and the alcove in which he sat were fading. With a last whisper he added, "The moon will give you light if you wait a few minutes."

"It'll take longer than that to get ready," Sharina said, as much to herself as to the vanished phantasm.

To her companion she said, "Dalar, we need thirty feet of vine to reach down into the pit. That's the way we'll be going out. And I guess enough more to tie around one of these blocks to anchor us. I don't trust myself to climb to the bottom without a line to help."

"Nor do I, Sharina," the bird said. "Though if it were jump straight down or stay, I would jump."

He laughed again. "My distaste for a place where my life was unexpectedly saved is most unfair," he said. "No doubt it will cost me a long journey of penance in the afterlife."

The moon, waxing beyond its first quarter, had risen above the treetops. Dalar found a thumb-thick strand of trumpet vine attached to a cedar at the edge of the former clearing. Sharina cut it off at the base but it was barely within her strength and that of Dalar combined to rip the vine loose above.

"The Dragon says that the thing from the tomb here won't come back," she muttered as they strode back to the building, now in ruins. "I'll still be glad to be away."

"I too," Dalar agreed. "The creature seemed as unlikely to appreciate my death lay as the ghouls were."

Sharina tied the vine around a block that greatly outweighed the two of them together. The makeshift rope was too stiff for trustworthy knots, but the two half-hitches wouldn't unravel easily.

"I will lead," said Dalar as she turned from her task. He was already stepping into the pit, holding the vine with one hand and the weights dangling on short lengths of chain in the other.

Sharina waited as the vine swayed, chafing on the limestone but not to a dangerous extent. Only when Dalar called, "I've reached the bottom!" in a booming, ghostly voice, did she start down hand over hand. The vine would probably have held both their weights together, but she didn't want to take a needless risk when the necessary ones were so terrible.

Midway down the hole narrowed to a throat half the size of the opening at the top. Sharina brushed the coarse stone uncomfortably. There was almost no light in the shaft.
Dalar would have said something if there wasn't room for both of us at the bottom
.

Sharina slipped free, turning as the vine straightened under her weight. Water rich in acids from decaying vegetation had eaten a hollow deep in the stone, like an abcess at the base of a tooth. Her outstretched legs touched nothing till Dalar caught her ankle and guided her the last few feet down. His fingers were noticeably warmer than a man's.

There was still no light. Bones,
old
bones, scrunched beneath her bare feet.

"They are human," Dalar said quietly. "The skull is on the other side of the chamber. There is no sign of the serpent."

He clucked. "Not that I was looking forward to meeting it again," he added.

"Nor what the snake's body fed," Sharina said. "But it saved us by coming when it did. Ohmqat saved us."

No light at all... but there could be no doubt about the stone slab in the center of the chamber. Sharina's fingers explored it. The block had been smoothed on five of its six faces, but the last was jaggedly diagonal. It had been broken off a larger slab—

"The seat of the throne!" Sharina said. "Dalar, this is the other half of the stone that we pulled out of the wall in Valhocca. Not that it matters."

"If I were sure what mattered in this business," the bird said, "I would be much wiser than I am today."

"I think if we pull it toward ourselves...," Sharina said. She gripped the long edge of the block with both hands but waited for Dalar to position himself before she shifted her weight against it.

They tugged together. Nothing happened till Sharina was almost ready to call a gasping halt; then the block slid and continued sliding until it was completely clear of the spot where it had lain for a millennium.

Sharina felt the uncovered space. Instead of rock, there was a hole of uncertain depth. The granite cap had acted to concentrate water seeping through the walls of the pit, and acid erosion had resumed under its shelter.

"I'll lead," Sharina said, gathering herself on the edge of the opening. It was barely big enough for her to squeeze into, and she was taking it on faith that this really
was
a portal. If it was merely a deep crevice in the limestone, she was going to die in a very unpleasant way.

"Dalar?" she said before she stepped in feet-first. "Do you wish you'd been wise enough to turn me down when I came to you in Valhocca?"

"No, Sharina," the bird said. "That is the only thing in my existence since the storm that I do
not
regret."

Grinning, Sharina let herself through the opening.

* * *

"I hope Elfin is all right," Cashel said as he ambled through the forest. "I guess we don't hear him just because the leaves are so thick; but, you know, I wish he'd come with us."

The trees here didn't have bark, just slick green skins. The leaves were any number of different kinds, but they were all big—none smaller than Cashel's hand with the fingers spread, and some the size of towels. There were blossoms, too: dangling blue and yellow things the size of a grain measure, and towering cones of white fluffiness.

Everything dripped. Cashel wasn't sure if it was raining somewhere above the forest or if water was just wringing out of the air. Duzi! There were drops falling off the end of his nose and the ferrules of his staff!

"You're worried about Elfin?" Krias crowed. "Don't worry about the changeling, sheep-boy, worry about yourself! You have no idea of how dangerous the Underworld is!"

Cashel thought about that for a moment. "I wouldn't want to be somebody who worried about himself, Master Krias," he said. "There's plenty of folk who do, but they aren't folks I like to be around; and I'm around myself, well, all the time."

Krias sniffed. "If ever Elfin does come near enough," he said, "knock his head in with that stick of yours. Or tell me to deal with him. He's not human after living down here all his life—and I
don't
mean living with the People made him as stupid as a sheep, either!"

"I don't much care for the place myself," Cashel admitted. "But there're parts of the world I came from that I wouldn't choose to go back to either."

He chuckled. "I don't remember ever being this wet before that I wasn't trying to swim, though."

"The Sun rules in your waking world," the ring demon said. "Oh, not everywhere, and not all the time... and not anywhere
completely
. But the Sun rules there, and here Malkar rules to the same degree."

Two birds launched themselves from oddly green branches and beat away through the soggy air. They must dislike this weather as much as Cashel did. One was an owl, the other an eagle or a really big hawk. They carried strips of dark flesh in their beaks.

Cashel thought a while about what Krias had said. "So Master Landure is fighting Malkar here in the Underworld?" he asked at last.

Over the squish of his feet settling into leaf mold—the soil beneath was slick, dense clay—Cashel thought he heard Elfin's lute at last. A good thing it had silver strings. Gut would stretch like the truth in Uncle Katchin's mouth.

"Thanks to you, sheep-boy," the ring snapped, "what Landure
does
is fertilize a patch of forest. And he never fought Malkar, since he had better sense. What he did was to keep monsters of the Underworld
in
the Underworld instead of them invading the waking world."

"Could he have, well, made things better down here?" Cashel said. "If he'd tried to?"

"Don't you listen?" Krias shrilled. "There's a balance, the Sun and Malkar, Light and Dark. You can't have one without the other, you just try to keep them as much apart as you can!"

Sort of like Ilna and her patterns, Cashel decided. If she'd mixed all her threads together, the cloth would be a muddy gray. She didn't do that, of course.

"Master Krias?" Cashel said. "Who weaves the patterns of good and evil?"

He didn't talk about the Sun and Malkar, or even dark and light. That was all right for a scholar like Tenoctris who had to see things from every direction, but Cashel wasn't a scholar. He was a shepherd, and if something was bad for his flock—or his friends, or his world—he called it by its right name: evil.

"Pattern?" said Krias. "There's no pattern, sheep-boy, it's all random chance!"

"But you just said that there had to be balance, Master Krias," Cashel said in a reasonable tone. "Balance doesn't just happen. If it did, farming would be a lot simpler than it is. Who keeps the world's balance? The balance of all the worlds, I suppose?"

"You're talking nonsense!" the ring demon said. "What, do you expect me to build an altar to the Lady here in my spacious apartments?"

"No, but I guess it wouldn't hurt for me to offer the Shepherd a little of my next meal," Cashel said. "Before, I always crumbled a bit of bread and cheese to Duzi when I ate my lunch. I don't know if a little God like Duzi would, you know, hear me down here."

"Nobody can hear you!" Krias said. "It's just you and me, sheep-boy."

"I guess I'll set up a stone and make an offering anyway," Cashel said. He didn't want to argue with the demon. Krias knew a lot of things, sure, but he thought he knew things that nobody could know for certain. Cashel figured to keep going along the way he always had, no matter what other people—or demons—said. That had worked for him in the past.

For most of today the forest had been as flat as the best plow-land in the borough, but just ahead was a hill that looked rugged though not especially high. Cashel hadn't been following a trail, exactly, but what he'd judged to be the natural course was apparently the right one. Anyway, Krias hadn't objected.

This, though....

"Master Krias?" Cashel asked. "Should I go over this hill or work my way around it?"

"How do I know what you should do?" the ring said. "Go back to your home and herd sheep, I suppose."

After the pause Cashel had learned to wait for, Krias went on, "Tian here is wider than it's tall. And if you go around, you'll find yourself in places that you may not want to be. Not that I pretend to know what goes on in a minuscule brain like yours."

"Thank you, Master Krias," Cashel said as he started up the hill. Instead of clay, the ground was all blocks and outcrops of stone with a thin layer of dirt. He raised his feet high for each step. Though he sometimes braced his quarterstaff behind him, the going was never so steep that he had to use his hands to climb.

It was getting darker. The rain—wet air? Whatever you ought to call it—was slowing down, but there didn't seem much chance of dry wood for a fire.

The vegetation was a little different from what Cashel'd been walking through earlier. The trees had normal bark, for one thing. There were vines, too, with fist-sized translucent fruit hanging in bunches. They looked a lot like grapes except for the size.

Cashel said, "Can I eat these, Master Krias? Without it hurting me, I mean."

"That depends on what you mean by hurting you, sheep-boy," Krias said. "Fruit from Tian may expand your mind, which isn't an experience you could have had very often before. It hasn't hurt other people in the past."

Cashel reached what he judged was the top of the hill, though he couldn't be sure with the forest as thick as it was. A hollow at the base of the roots of a big oak looked as dry a place as he was going to find to sleep.

First things first: he tilted up a block and used his knife pommet to scratch the outline of a face onto the moss. It was a simple thing, but so was the stone dedicated to Duzi back in the pasture. Duzi wasn't a fancy God for fancy worshippers.

"Please help me find Sharina, Duzi," Cashel said. "She probably doen't need our help... but please help me if you can."

He sighed and twisted one of the big fruit loose, then squatted and cut two slivers with his knife. He set one before the crude image. The flesh of the fruit looked a little like creek water after a storm, more clear than not but with dark bits swirled into it.

"Guess I'll give it a try if others have," Cashel said, biting into the slice. It was both tart and sweet, like a segment of orange, and it was deliciously cool. He'd figured to slurp rainwater from the hollow of a stone, but the fruit ought to take care of his thirst better than water.

Cashel ate the whole fruit, and then plucked another one. He couldn't complain about his meals here in the Underworld—he'd never gone hungry, at any rate—but this was the first time that he'd eaten something because it tasted good rather than just to fill his belly.

Smiling and feeling pretty comfortable despite the occasional drop from the oak that splashed him, Cashel curled up and went to sleep. And began to dream....