Prospero's Children (36 page)

“You don’t really believe this.” Rafarl’s protest lacked conviction.

“The water is low in the harbor; on the east coast the tide has not come in. You don’t have to be a priest to read the omens. It might be nothing more than freak weather conditions but when it comes to my own skin I like to be very, very prudent. If Atlantis falls, I intend to be somewhere else.” His unpleasant grin flashed out for a moment. “Just as well I didn’t take that reward. The
phénix
may be on the verge of drastic devaluation. It would have been a shame to sell my honor for a handful of scrap metal.”

“What honor?” said Rafarl absentmindedly.

“You’re a better sailor than any of us,” Ipthor persisted. “We’ll need you. You have the ear of the sea-gods: hence, no doubt, your penchant for nymphs. If it starts blowing a tempest you’re the only one who’ll be able to handle the boat.”

“If,” said Rafarl. “This is all ifs. I must see my mother. If— if she’ll come—”

“Women are bad luck on board ship,” said Gogoth.

“Women are bad luck anywhere.” Ipthor made a wry grimace.

“
And
Fern,” Rafarl concluded, his tone sharpening. “I won’t go without them. If you think women are bad luck, try sailing without a captain. That’s worse.”

Ipthor nodded; it was Fern who demurred. “I can’t leave till after the ceremony,” she said. “There’s something I have to do.”

“Your mission,” said Rafarl. “I wondered when we’d get back to that.”

There was a short silence. “Very well.” Rafarl turned to Gogoth and Ipthor. “Go down to the harbor, get the boat ready. Lay on water and food: we may be some days at sea. I trust you to enlist a suitable crew: the usual gang, I can’t take more. What about your uncle?”

“I suppose we ought to take him with us,” Ipthor conceded. “It is, after all, his boat. Honesty is not a priority for me, but when he sobers up he might be useful. I’ll peel him off a tap-room floor and sling him in the hold.”

“All right. I’ll meet you at dawn. I’d rather not risk negotiating the channel in the dark.”

They had re-entered the sewer now and were standing at the junction of two tunnels; water thick as grime sucked at their feet. Gogoth and Ipthor disappeared in one direction; Rafarl and Fern took the other. Presently they came to a shaft, much shorter than the one they had climbed before, which brought them out in a narrow yard between high walls. It was deep night and Fern could see little but a glimpse of the waxing moon above and a glimmer beyond the opening into the neighboring street. She followed Rafarl through the gate back into the shadows of the city.

The villa was in darkness when they arrived. The arch leading onto the porch was secured with a blind of wire mesh; the ground floor windows were similarly protected. Rafarl, undeterred, went to the second from the end, and after some judicious fiddling the blind slid upward. “I have an arrangement with my mother,” he explained in a whisper. “Ludicrous, isn’t it?—all this. My stepfather’s idea. He’s too mean to pay for a private guard and too paranoid to leave anything open. He must be home tonight. My mother never locks up.” They shinned over the low sill and slithered to the floor. With the exclusion of the night breeze the room was airless, muffled in gloom. Rafarl felt for the candle and tinder-box Ezramé always left on hand. In a moment, Fern saw a glancing spark, and then his hand was cupped to shield a tiny cone of flame from the draft of movement. “This way.” He led her through to the vestibule and began to ascend the stairs. A noise from above brought him to a halt. Ezramé emerged at the top, her loose night-robe pulled on in such haste she was still tying the strings down the front.

“Raf?”

“Mié.”

“Downstairs. Don’t wake your stepfather.”

Back in the salon, she lit a lamp and fetched wine herself, not wishing to disturb the servants. Most establishments had household slaves to whom they were less considerate, but Ezramé disapproved so strongly of this practice she had been able to carry her point with her husband. “Why did you come back?” she said, the welcome in her looks, not her words. “The city is too dangerous for you now. Indeed, I fear it is becoming too dangerous for us all. The temple guards go where they like and take whom they will. They went to the House of Mithraïs—the oldest of the ruling houses—” the footnote was for Fern’s benefit “—they took the youngest son, though his mother wept and pleaded. He’s ten years old.
Ten.
I can’t bear to think of it. What does Zohrâne hope to achieve, apart from the enmity of her subjects?”

“She doesn’t care for that,” said Fern. “She is going to open the Gate.”

“The Gate?” Ezramé looked puzzled.

“The Gate of Death.” Fern turned the goblet between her fingers, looking at the wine, at the wall, at nothing. “I have seen Ixavo. He knows more than she thinks. He knows
me
. He offered me help—after a fashion.”

“I said he knew you.” Rafarl threw her a suspicious look. And, with an edge in the question: “What kind of help?”

Fern gave a slight shrug. “Help on
his
terms. He wants to use me—and I need to use him. After the Gate is opened the Sea will come; it will fall on the city in a great wave, destroying everything. Ixavo has the power to protect me. I have to meet him in the temple and get the key. Then we go to the Rose Palace. The mountainside should be above the water, for a while. There’s another model of the Door there—he calls it the Door, not the Gate, I’m not sure why. Zohrâne had a second made because the first wasn’t rich enough. Ixavo says in magical terms it’s the same thing, and I can close it, and lock it, and fulfill my Task. I can’t refuse. It’s the only chance I have.”

“And then?” said Rafarl.

“He’ll get me off the island on a ship he has prepared. He wants the Lodestone. The key is the core. But he can’t touch it himself, for some reason. He thinks to control it through me.”

“You’ll allow that?”

Fern shook her head.

“How will you prevent him? On his ship, in his power, what can you do?”

“Throw myself in the sea, if it comes to that. If I can’t think of anything better.” Unexpectedly, she smiled.

Ezramé watched them in silence, not understanding but saving her questions, too wise to interrupt. Rafarl got up and paced the room, kicking an obstructive footstool from his path. “You’re really set on this idiocy, aren’t you? I suppose there’s no point in telling you to forget the business with the Door and come with me now?”

“No point.” Her voice was very quiet.

No one said anything for several minutes.

“So this is the end.” It was Ezramé who spoke at last. “The end of Atlantis. I’ve felt it coming—I’ve felt it for some time—but now it’s here, it’s soon, it’s real . . . Strange, it’s almost a relief. The doom that lies ahead of you, sensed but not known, vague and formless as a shadow—that is perhaps worse than the doom you can see clearly, no matter how terrible or how close. Do you know when—?”

“We leave at dawn.” Rafarl was curt, not looking at Fern.

“Oh no,” Ezramé said gently. “Atlantis is my home. I have been here too long to go now. I have loved it and loathed it, ignored its beauties, done too little to combat its evils. There have been many moments when I felt trapped in this city as in a cage of gold, but I chose that cage, it would be wrong to abandon it. Even now. You are young, your choices are not made. You can sail away, find kingdoms of your own, build anew. I am too weary of my life for all that.”

“Don’t talk that way.” Rafarl sat down beside her, took her hand. “I won’t leave without you.”

Fern moved away, feeling she would be an intruder in their dispute. Low voices reached her: Rafarl passionate, deriding, imploring, Ezramé regretful and very calm. At length Rafarl looked round. His face was bleak and set. “What about you?” he asked Fern.

“I told you, I have to complete the Task. I’ll go with Ixavo.”

“I don’t understand what this Task means,” Ezramé said with a revival of anxiety, “or what it is you have to do, but you mustn’t trust Ixavo. The corruption on his face lives but I have often felt that the man inside is dead, an automaton motivated by some external power. Whatever force he uses, it is not the Gift. He comes from Qultuum, the dark city, where natives still worship ancient earth-spirits with pagan rituals. Oh, I know we in Atlantis have no right to superiority now— the House of Goulabey has dragged us down to the level of barbarians—but of one thing I am sure, Zohrâne worships no power but her own. Even the Stone which was its source she has destroyed in her jealousy. Ixavo—”

“I don’t trust him,” said Fern. “I
need
him.”

“So you said.” Rafarl’s manner was unpleasant. “You
need
me, idiot. If you go with Ixavo, you’re finished. Why can’t you bring yourself to
ask
me?”

“Ask you what?”

“To wait for you.”

“You can’t,” said Fern. “The others would never agree to it.”

“I’ll make them agree. Ask me.”

“If you go now, you’ll be safe. If you wait, the storm will come. The Sea has no mercy.” And she shivered as she said it.

“Ask me.”

But she was silent, troubled by forgotten hauntings, knowing only that she could not ask him to risk his life. Her own seemed of little account now.

Ezramé rose, touching Fern’s arm. “There is an empty bedroom at the back of the house,” she said. “You can sleep there for a while. My husband will not know to bother you. Save your decisions till morning.”

There were two couches, but they only used one, lying together in a fierce embrace, making love without words, for words meant conflict. Rafarl fell asleep immediately after but Fern lay wakeful for a long time. In the dark before dawn she slept at last, a sleep without rest or refreshment, slipping straight into a zone of fractured dreams. She was back in the city, the city of her nightmares, with its hard gray streets and cliff-like buildings, and that background of noise that she had once missed without being able to pinpoint what it was. But in the dream, she knew. In the dream, she knew everything. The city broke up, sections of it peeling away like paint from a frieze, and other images followed, too many to remember, skittering across her sleep like mayflies. She tried to hold on to them, knowing they were telling her something important, something she needed to learn, but her mind would not retain them. And then the rapid scene-changes came to a halt, and she was in a dark room full of tables (Why
tables
? she wondered afterward), and there was a candle in front of her, and beyond the flame she saw Ixavo’s face, no longer disfigured, a golden face framed in an aureole of silver. He smiled in a way that made her afraid, and the candleflame grew until it was as tall as a spear, and opened out, and then the room was all fire. She was surrounded, imprisoned, her hand was in the flames, Ixavo held her wrist so she could not draw back, and she saw the flesh charring and flaking off her bones. There was no pain but she knew it was true because she could not feel that hand anymore. She struggled frantically, screaming the silent screams of nightmare—and woke to find herself trembling, the sweat already chilling on her skin. The darkness was a shade paler; the only sounds were a bird calling out in the garden and the gentle rhythm of Rafarl’s breathing. Her hand had become trapped under his body, causing a temporary numbness. She extricated it without disturbing him and waited for the feeling to return, thankful for such a mundane explanation of the dream-horror. She did not dwell on the rest. The night was ebbing, and she curled her limbs around her lover, pressing her breasts against his back, desiring only his warmth and his nearness for whatever time remained to them.

As soon as it was light Rafarl got up, washing and shaving with unaccustomed deliberation. Fern watched, sitting on the couch, naked under the single sheet. “I’m going down to the harbor,” he said. “The
Norne
will be ready. You still won’t ask?”

“No.”

They did not say goodbye.

Ezramé found her sitting there, dry-eyed and cold. She wrapped her in the priceless veil, heirloom of her house. For all its fineness it was as warm as summer. “I want you to have it,” she said. “What you have to do is obviously very dangerous. It may have some power to protect you.”

“But
you
—”

“I do not need it now.”

At breakfast, Fern ate little, though she knew she should be hungry. Conversation was brief. Rafarl did not return; his step-father, too, had gone out. Ezramé’s presence warmed her as the veil and the summer could not. “I don’t want you to be alone,” Fern said, meaning, at the end.

“Aliph will stay with me. He has been with my family for twenty years. I have spoken to him. I told him to find a ship, but he would not.”

“Maybe we should warn other people.”

“They would not believe you—or if they did, they would still remain. It is hard to tear yourself from your roots.”

There was a pause while Fern sipped a drink made from lemons and other, more exotic fruits, the fruits of Atlantis, which would never grow again.

“What does
Norne
mean?” she asked, for something to ask. The morning loomed in front of her like a wall, a wall with no gate, save the one she had to close.

“It’s a kind of witch,” said Ezramé. “A witch of the sea. In Atlantis, there are a hundred words for
witch
.”

A witch of the sea. Fern saw a carved prow from which the paint had almost bleached, the skeleton of a hull now high and dry. The familiarity of it was like an ache in a tooth long removed. She would have been afraid, if she had had the time. But there was only a little time left.

She finished the blended juices slowly, trying to savor the taste—the taste of Atlantis—to hold it in her memory for always. But it is all but impossible to remember a taste, and it had evaporated from her mind almost as quickly as from her mouth. She wanted to hug and kiss and cling, but she and Ezramé just sat, face-to-face, no longer speaking, hand clasping hand.

It was well before midday when Fern said: “I have to go.”

XII

The drum was beating in the temple for the last time. There was a gray haze creeping up from the rim of the sky, tarnishing the sunlight; the gold of the city—of marble and stone, painting and gilding—was dimmed. The strange nimbus which Uuinarde had remarked around the fractured dome had become more noticeable: its fiery luster was blurred as if by a thickening of the air, an imperceptible pollution, its resplendence disseminated into a corona that had the tincture of dust. Up on the mountain there had been a freshness, the hint of a breeze, but in the streets below the atmosphere was that of a sealed room, stifling and curiously tense; every breath tasted of dirt. No one had stopped Fern on her way to the temple, for all her fair skin and alien countenance. Phaidé Dévornine’s veil wrapped her like a film of shadow; she could almost imagine it had the faculty of rendering her, not quite invisible, but somehow unobtrusive. The temple guard had let her pass, and she had arrived unhindered at the Guardian’s apartment. Ixavo found her there when he came to change for the ceremony. “You escaped,” he said, and for an instant his face was blank, as if he did not know how to react, or what expression to assume.

“Of course.”

His features shifted, hardened, becoming vulcanized into their customary aspect. “Yet you keep to your bargain. That is wise. At least you have the intelligence to realize there are no alternatives.”

“It wasn’t a bargain,” she reminded him. “I keep to my fate.”

And now the throb of the drum was dying, and for Atlantis time was running out, the city’s agelong lifespan shrunk to little more than an hour, the minutes and seconds trickling steadily into eternity. Fern crouched in the amber gloom of the gallery, screened by the balustrade, close to a stair. “I have arranged for the arrest of a
nympheline
,” Ixavo had told her. “One of my personal guards will escort her to you. He will see she is secured, so she cannot attempt to escape.” The last note of the drum was still vibrating faintly in floor and walls when the man came, leading the
nympheline
on a short chain. Her head was bowed; long black hair hung forward over her face. When she looked up and the curtain parted her eyes were neither green nor blue but a sea-color in between. She did not speak; nor did Fern. The guard fastened the chain round one of the supports in the balustrade, seemed to hover on the verge of saluting, and then left.

“You’ve changed sides,” said Uuinarde, low-toned by instinct. They could hear people gathering below. “You betrayed us.”

“I’m on no one’s side,” said Fern. “I have something to do. I’m trying to do it. That’s all.”

And: “Why didn’t you go with the porpoises? You could have been far away.”

“I am an Atlantean,” she responded. “This is my home.” Like Ezramé, Fern thought, and she wondered where
her
home was, reaching for memories of the village on Mount Vèz, but all she could picture was the house in her dream in the prison-cell, the strange gray house with the steepled roof and the eerie windows reflecting sky. A house she did not even know.

“Can you undo the chain?” asked Uuinarde, extending her wrist, weighed down by the heavy manacle.

Fern tried, but without success. “Ixavo will do it,” she said. “He’ll release you, when the moment comes. He has a task for you too.”

“I won’t help him!”

“You won’t
be
helping him,” said Fern. “You’ll be helping me.”

She thought Uuinarde would object, but there was no more leisure for talk. It seemed to her right that the nymph should be there, a falling-into-place of the jigsaw-puzzle of destiny, and after her initial protest Uuinarde herself appeared to accept it, and the two of them drew close together, peering through the balusters down into the heart of the tabernacle. The drumbeat had started again, not the great drum this time but a soft tattoo, rhythmic as a pulse, finger-tapped on the tabor by a pair of acolytes standing on opposite sides of the chamber. The priests were still taking up their positions, one at each point of the engraved sun-star. They were chosen from the most Gifted, those who would have been called holy, if holiness had been current in Atlantis. Many were related to the twelve families, having taken to the priesthood for further advancement and prestige. Their heads were shaved like Ixavo’s and their split cloaks embroidered so thickly with metallic thread that the folds hung rigid, like strips of wood. They faced the center of the circle, where formerly the Lodestone had rested on its altar.

But the ancient altar was gone. In its place stood a door, a door without a wall, erected in grotesque isolation in the midst of that vast floor, duplicated by its own reflection, like the lone gateway to a vanished palace, marooned in a standing pool. But the water was hard and did not ripple, and the Door was set under an arch of quartz, with strange growths of jasper and agate on either side, fungoid creatures whose jeweled eyes squinted from toadstool heads, grasping the frame with many claws. The Door itself was black, but the panels were inlaid with obscure hieroglyphs in red gold, the handle was a single ruby, and a tiny reptile encrusted with green stones glittered on the architrave. There was no keyhole anywhere on its surface. A monument to insanity, thought Fern, a nightmare fantasy in gilding and gems, extravagant and crude, ultimately banal, the brainchild of a witch-queen with the taste of a barbarian conquistador. The Gate of Death, or so Zohrâne had claimed, a gate from world to world, from Life to Immortality. But Fern had seen that Gate on a rooftop terrace, had felt its awe and its horror, and she knew Ixavo was right, this was a Door, only a Door, though where it led she could not guess.
She will try to open the Gate of Death,
had said the Hermit, but the memory of his instruction faded, and she seemed to hear another voice, clear but very far away, saying “Things are not always what you want them to be.” It came to her that this was her own voice, in some other place or time, but she had no idea to what she referred, no respite to wonder or fear. Two thurifers entered the chamber below, walking at a measured pace, bearing vessels of burning oil from which scented fumes drifted toward the gallery. Behind them came Zohrâne. She wore an ankle-length dress of a silk almost as fine as her veils, glittering as if sprinkled with crushed diamond. Every detail of her anatomy was visible under the shimmer, the tumorous breasts with nipples black as grapes, the red jewel in her navel, the triangular shade of her pubic hair. Long drifts of gauze, tinted with the hues of sunset, orange and vermilion and rose, flowed behind her like a comet’s tail. The hair on her head was stiffened with gum and twisted into a tall conical structure, like a horn, secured with gold wire, a style Fern recognized, though she did not know from where. Possibly it had some ritualistic significance. A faint patina of gold overlaid her eyelids and cheek-bones; her mouth was like polished metal. The key hung on a thread about her neck. Ixavo followed her at a suitable distance. He did not look up at the gallery but assumed a position near to the adjacent stair. The thurifers also drew aside: Zohrâne alone stepped into the sun-star and stood facing the Door.

Certain preparations had already been made, Fern guessed; she could just distinguish a line of grayish-white powder describing a circle inside the star. No, not a circle, a semicircle, closed off along the diameter that included the threshold of the Door. Zohrâne made a sweeping gesture and spoke a single word, and the line crackled as if taking fire, flickering into a glow, so she was divided from her assistants by an arc of flame. The engravings on the floor also started to pulsate with an elusive radiance, a phantom glimmer that came and went as though at the mercy of an erratic power-source. The priests began a low chant in which Fern could identify only the noun
haadé
, a reverential term for death. As the chant grew in volume she began to be conscious of the terrible potency of language, the sense that a name spoken is a summons and more than a summons, an act of creation, for a word shapes an idea, an idea shapes belief, and belief shapes the world. The temple was filled with belief, a rising tide of belief, building in force like water behind a dam, and Zohrâne stood in the center controlling it with fluid gestures, her rippling fingers leaving brief trails of light on the air. Her lips moved in an invocation at first inaudible but which grew with the momentum of the ceremony until the murmur had become a crescendo, drowning out the priests. “
Haadé! Haadé ai zoiïna!
Death for the living! Unlock the Gate, open the Way!
Uvalé!
Open to the key—the key—the key!” She held it up, and light leaped from her hand onto the Door, a snake of light that writhed and danced across the toadstool faces, the claws of agate, touching them with an obscene animation. The background litany changed, becoming deeper and stronger; the semicircle parted. Many hands plucked a slight figure from the shelter of the cloister and thrust him within the perimeter, which closed behind him, sealing him in. He was very young, perhaps eleven or twelve, nearly naked. He looked this way and that in confusion and fear. Fern’s grip tightened on the rail. Zohrâne let the key drop against her breast and seized his shoulder, pulling him effortlessly toward her, her supple fingers tensed into steel. She raised her other arm: a knife appeared in her grasp where no knife had been before. The boy shrank and seemed to cry out, but his voice was overwhelmed by the rising clamor of the incantation, the pent power was released, and a curtain of flame hissed upward and boiled against the dome. Through a blue haze of fire Fern saw the knife fall—the knife unsheathed from air and nothingness— saw the blade buried deep in the boy’s chest. But the knife was real, and the flesh was real, and the tongue of blood that licked across the floor was red. The spell peaked on a word Fern did not recognize, and Zohrâne bestrode the body, shuddering with an orgasm of power, and the fires silvered and sank, but now the Door was set in a wall, thick as a shadow, and beyond lay a darkness not of Atlantis, and the circle was complete.

She didn’t need to kill him,
thought Fern, somewhere in the stillness at the back of her mind. She knew she had never seen killing before.
She didn’t need the sacrifice. She was feeding
her ego, not her Gift . . .

And there was the keyhole, as she had known it would be. A ray of white light sprang from it like a lance, roving the chamber, dwindling to a notch of brilliance. Zohrâne bent over the child, pressing her mouth to his forehead for a long moment in something that only resembled a kiss, as if she sought to suck not his life but his death. Then she straightened, grasping the key, wrenching it from its thread. “I’ll be back,” Fern whispered into Uuinarde’s ear. “I must
see
. . .” Her footfalls on the stair barely ruffled the all-embracing silence. She found herself beside Ixavo, but it did not matter. Zohrâne was stooping, sliding the key into the lock. It turned with a tiny snick, impossibly loud in that vacuum of noise. And as the queen pulled open the Door, Fern, hiding in the cloister almost directly behind her, the veil drawn instinctively over her face, was one of the few to see what she saw.

A woman. Attitude for attitude, shock for shock, she seemed to mirror Zohrâne. She might almost have been a specter of the queen’s own death, that Death which she wished to cheat and defy: waxen-cheeked and haggard, skeleton-thin, her dim hair leached of all color. And in her eyes Fern thought she glimpsed the same hunger, the same emptiness, before all was lost in the blankness of absolute bewilderment. She wore a dress of some unknown material, more opaque than Zohrâne’s but equally clinging, dull red like old blood. Behind her there was only a dark in which the completed fire-lines of sun and circle floated like star-trails in the void. This is no other world, Fern told herself, inexplicably certain. One witch has found another: spell has turned on spell, seeker on seeker. There are no loopholes into eternity. Zohrâne’s back was toward her but she could see the tensing of her muscles, the involuntary tightening of her grip on the knife. And at the same moment she was conscious of a swelling sound, beyond the silence, a noise that would have filled her with new panic had she not been concentrating wholly on the Door. She took a step forward, heedless of discovery; thought she heard the woman speak. And over her right shoulder, for a fraction of a second, she saw someone else. Someone outside the perimeter as she was outside the perimeter, white-faced and desperate, peering through into Atlantis. She froze.

“Fool!” The admonition came from Ixavo; he was grabbing her arm, wrenching her away from the sight. “Don’t you know not to look? Run!” They were on the stair even as Zohrâne dropped the knife, raising her hand. The clamor now shook the chamber, a great rushing, roaring din in which all individual sound was lost, filling the world. Darkness reared above the dome; the sun was blotted out. As they reached the gallery Ixavo was already shrieking an enchantment too primitive for speech, a gibbering of animal voices from the aeons before language was invented. He flung Fern down beside Uuinarde and towered above them, his face distorted from the utterance of sounds not meant for human throat, sounds more sensed than heard against the onslaught of noise from outside. And then the Sea came, falling on the dome with all the weight of the five oceans, crushing the gilded roof like sugar glass, and the gold and the beams and the black water were crashing down on them, and terror fled and panic, and there was no more circle, no more ritual, no more time . . .

Fern’s arms were around Uuinarde: the
nympheline
’s face was buried in her shoulder. She looked up, and saw Ixavo had drawn on the sea itself to shield them, encasing them in a great bubble, a skin of water tugged this way and that by the pressures without, wavering, flexing, bulging. Ixavo’s own features seemed to be pulled and pummelled as he struggled to keep the membrane intact. She felt the quiver in the ground itself, the cracking of supports below. The gallery floor began to sag; Uuinarde’s head jerked back with a scream she could not hear. Ixavo had no strength to spare for the earthquake. But Fern was already groping with her mind, without hesitation or thought, reaching down into the very foundations, clenching rock on rock, holding the shuddering pillars with her willpower, her Gift, her belief. Her ears closed out the sea’s howling: she was exploring deep in the Earth, feeling for the quickening heartbeat of the planet, fighting to get a grip on rending stone and the jolting of plate against plate—
No!
Ixavo’s warning seared through her brain.
Don’t spend
your strength! You cannot do it! Focus your power here—only
here—
Reluctantly she let go, withdrawing into the cell of their immediate safety. Below, she sensed a chasm tearing through the temple floor, felt the pouring sea boil in the updraft of escaping gases. But beyond the fragile protection of the bubble she could see only the seething dark.