Wizard (44 page)

At first Valiha walked only fifty meters before resting, then a similar distance back to the tent. Soon she felt she was able to handle more. Chris struck the tent and packed everything on his back. It was a large burden, especially the poles of her tripod sling. He would never have attempted it but for the low gravity. Even with that advantage it was hard.

Valiha walked by rolling her shoulders, lifting first one crutch, then the other, following with her hind legs. It put an unaccustomed strain on her shoulders, her human back, and the right-angle bend of her spine. Chris had no idea what her skeleton looked like in there; he was sure only that her vertebral structure must be very different from his to enable her to turn her head around and do some of the other improbable contortions he had seen. But she was enough like him to get backaches. The end of each day’s journey found her grimacing in pain. The muscles in the bend of her back were like stiff cables. Massage was not enough, though Chris tried. In the end he had to pound her with his fists to give her any relief, as though he were tenderizing meat.

They toughened up, though both knew it would never get easy. For a while each trek was a little longer than the previous day until they reached a maximum Chris judged at about a kilometer and a half. Each day they passed many of the marks made by Robin in her earlier traverse. There was no way to tell how old they were and no use discussing what they both were thinking. By any accounting she should have been back with help long ago.

They struggled on, and each day the question grew larger in their minds.

Where was Robin?

It was no longer a matter of admitting Chris had been right. Robin knew that, had known it for quite a long time. She had had no business going off on her own in a place like this.

She tried once again to move her arm. This time she got some results: one finger twitched slightly, and she felt a rough texture beneath it. She swallowed carefully. One of her seemingly endless fears now was drowning in her own saliva. It could happen. Even worse things could happen. She might find, when she got her body back, that it was broken. In that case she would lie here in the dark forever, and while the bulk of that time would pass in peaceful nirvana, the first few weeks promised to be ugly.

How odd to realize that less than a year ago she had been nineteen, and fearless. It did not seem like such a great age, yet it was ancient for someone who could stumble tomorrow and fall a thousand meters to her death.

There was no reason death had to wait until tomorrow. While she lay helpless, the Night Bird could creep up on her and … do whatever it did to helpless witches.

Her breath caught in her throat, and she once more strained to turn her head just the few centimeters that would enable her to see if, as she suspected, the Night Bird was actually crouching on the ledge a few meters above her head. Once again she failed to see it, but a drop of sweat ran from her brow to sting her eye.

You were supposed to whistle, she remembered. Then: that’s ridiculous. You’re nineteen years old,
maybe twenty already. You haven’t been afraid of the Night Bird since you were six. Nevertheless, if she could have puckered, she would have warbled like a canary.

She was half convinced that the faraway sounds she had been hearing since shortly after she left Chris and Valiha were echoes of her own footsteps, the faint whispers of glowbirds shifting on their perches, the distant sounds of falling water. But being half convinced leaves a lot of room for the imagination, and the picture of the Night Bird had leaped from her childhood memories to shriek and gibber just out of her sight.

She did not believe it
was
the Night Bird; even in her present state she knew no such animal had ever existed, either here or on Earth. It was a story little girls told each other and nothing more. But the thing about the Night Bird was that no one ever saw it. It swooped down on wings of shadow and always attacked from behind; it could change its size and shape to conform to whatever dark place was available, hiding with equal ease in a gloomy cubicle, under a bunk, or even in a dusty corner. Whatever was trailing her—if there was anything—seemed to belong to that dreamworld. She saw nothing. From time to time she thought she heard the sound of claws snapping together, the rattle of a ghastly beak.

Robin knew there were more living things in the cavern than the glowbirds, the cucumbers, shrimp, and lettuce, and the various plant species. There were tiny glass lizards with from two to several hundred legs. They liked heat and had grown more abundant as she moved west, so that her first morning chore was to rid her sleeping bag of the ones that had crept in. There were things like starfish and snails with shells as varied as snowflakes. Once she had seen a glowbird in flight snatched away by some unseen flier, and another time she had found something that might have been part of the ubiquitous body of Gaea denuded of her rocky covering, or could as well have been a creature beside which a blue whale would have seemed no more than a minnow. All she knew for sure was that it was warm and fleshy and, luckily, somnolent.

If all these things lived in a cavern that was, at first glance, endless kilometers of rocky sterility, why not the Night Bird?

Once more she tried to look over her shoulder, this time succeeding in lifting her chin a little. Soon she was able to twitch her feet. But long after she could move her legs and arms, she remained perfectly still, her feet almost a meter lower than her head, to be sure she was completely in control before she dared to try to move from the slope where she had fallen.

When she did move, it was with infinite caution. She edged backward on her heels and elbows until she felt the ground leveling out, then turned to hug the warm rock. Gravity was a wonderful thing when it was pressing you down against a stable surface, not so nice when it tried to pluck you from an uncertain perch. She had seldom thought about gravity before, as either friend or foe.

When her trembling stopped, she crept to the edge of the ravine where she had lain helpless for so many hours. One of her glowbirds had been crushed beneath her when she fell. The other was flickering, near death, but it cast enough light for her to look down and see the bottom, no more than a meter and a half from where her feet had been.

When she came to Gaea, she would have laughed at such a distance. She did not laugh now. After all, it did not take a hundred meters to kill; it did not even take ten. One or two would do, if she hit right.

She took stock of first her body, then her equipment. There was a sharp pain in her side, but after careful probing she decided no ribs were broken. There was blood dried under her nose; she had smacked it when her legs gave way, just before starting her terrifying, feet-first slide into the unknown. Aside from that and some scrapes and a torn fingernail, she was all right. An inventory of the equipment she had kept after several episodes of weeding revealed nothing missing. Her glowbird cage was crushed, but she no longer had any animals to keep in it, and she could make a new one from reeds and vines at her next camp.

She had lost track of how many times she had brushed disaster, was to some degree unsure of just what counted as a brush. Even if she eliminated all the times she had felt her hands slipping on the rope, the momentary losses of footing, the falling rocks that hit only a few meters away, the quicksand that turned out to be only waist-deep, the flash flood that came from nowhere and thundered through a gully
she had been about to cross … even if she counted only the times she had actually felt the grasp of death as a cold, malefic presence, as though its clammy hand had brushed her and left its spoor of fear on her soul, it was too many times. She was lucky to be alive, and she knew it. There had been a time when danger exhilarated her. That time was no more.

Each day brought its new fear. There were so many by now that she was no longer even ashamed of them; she was too beaten down, too crushed by the collapse of the person she had thought herself to be. If anyone ever emerged from this cavern, she knew it would not be Robin the Nine-fingered but some subdued stranger.

It had not been easy to be Robin, but she was a person to respect. No one had ever pushed her around. Once again she wondered why she kept on. It would be more honorable, she felt, to live her life here where no one could see her. To emerge into the light would be to expose her shame.

But sometime later, urged on by a force she did not understand and would have resisted if she had known how, she got up and resumed her long walk east.

* * *

It had seemed so simple when she explained it to Chris and Valiha. She would make her way through the cavern, heading always toward the east, until she reached Thea. Of course, that was assuming the direction they were calling east really
was
east, but if it wasn’t, there was little she could do about it.

But it soon became apparent she would have to make more leaps of faith than that first, basic one. She had to assume that the cavern, which was one or two kilometers across at the west end and reached into the unguessable east, would keep going in that direction. And there was no reason to assume that. By the pinpoint lights of the glowbirds she was able to tell the general trend of the passage for two or three kilometers in each direction. It
seemed
to average out as a straight line, but there were so many twists and curves she could not be sure.

There was another possibility. It was impossible to tell if the cavern was rising or descending. They
had started at a level she knew to be five kilometers beneath the surface because Cirocco had said so. She also knew Gaea’s outer skin was thirty kilometers thick. There was room to miss Thea’s chamber by quite a margin.

Two simple instruments could have banished her disorientation. To go up in Gaea was to become lighter, while descending would have made her weigh fractionally more. A sensitive spring scale could have measured those differences. Her own senses were inadequate. The gyroscopic Gaean clock could have been used as a compass because when its axis was oriented north and south, it no longer turned. By aligning the clock until it stopped and then turning it ninety degrees, she could learn east and west by whether the clock ran backward or forward. But neither Gaby nor Cirocco had ever needed a spring scale in her travels, so they had not packed one. And the clock had stayed with Hornpipe.

She wasted a great deal of time trying to fix her position and direction using simple equipment, and ended up being completely baffled. In particular, it should have been possible to determine east and west by the behavior of falling objects. She tried setting up long plumb lines and dropping things, with inconclusive results.

So in the end she blundered on, lost in the dark. She had been doing it for at least three kilorevs, possibly more. She followed the north wall. It had seemed a good idea until she came to the end of a passage, no more than twenty sleeps into her trip. She had followed the south wall back until it began to bend and kept bending through 180 degrees, and she realized she had entered a side passage without knowing it. There was nothing to do but go back across the passage until she reached the marks she had made to guide Chris and Valiha, cross out one and chisel in a new one, directing them to the other passage. Until it, too, ended abruptly three sleeps later.

From that time it had been a nightmare of long treks and heart-breaking backtracks, of gaining slowly as she eliminated false trails one after the other by fighting her way to the ends of them. It was grueling, dangerous work. Her overriding fear was that there was, in fact, no way out, that after all the tears and frustration and the growing realization that she had no real idea
where
she was going, she
would one day see Chris and Valiha’s camp in the distance and know it had all been for nothing.

The possibility began to grow that Chris and Valiha would one day catch up with her. She would not have minded that at all. In face, she often wondered why she did not sit down and wait for them to arrive. It would be nice to have some company. She longed to see the two of them … or it could very well be three by now. She wondered what the baby Titanide would be like.

The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. Three of them working together would do better than Robin working alone. It would be safer, there was no getting around that. Chris would bear some of the danger of leading the way, so her risk would automatically be halved.

And every time she thought that, she pressed ahead with more determination than ever. If she could no longer be fearless, she could at least be dogged. If she must face the fact that she was fearful, she would also face the fear and overcome it.

* * *

She entered an arched corridor much like the one she and Chris had fled through. There was nothing unusual about that fact; she had explored a hundred just like it. But she had come to expect so little of her journey that it was more than a surprise when she saw what lay at the end of it. For a moment she was too stunned to move. There was an unpleasant smell in the air. Robin looked vaguely to the left and right, then down, where a thin sheet of clear liquid lapped at her toes. The tips of her boots were smoking.

She jumped back and hastily kicked them off. She might have waded right into it. She could have fallen on her face. It might have gotten into her lungs… .

“Stop it!” she said, aloud, shocked to hear the sound of her own voice. It would never do to stand here and worry about the things that might have happened. She had to deal with what still
could
happen.

“Thea!” she called. But what if it was Tethys she faced, or Phoebe? She doubted she could tell the difference even up close, and from where she stood, several hundred meters down a dark corridor with
the conical regional brain only a speck of light, there was no hope at all. It might be best to go back, to think it out better, maybe approach the problem later… .

“Thea, I need to speak to you!”