The Carnelian Throne (27 page)

“Chayin!”

“Learning lessens no man,” retorted the cahndor, to Sereth’s exasperation.

“I want to know why you were willing to let us rot in Dey-Ceilneeth and why you are dragging us to Othdaliee. I could care less about what offal you learned from those old ladies at the Lake of Horns.”

I had learned the same offal. Though I thought Chayin had not studied Sereth’s inversions, in my opinion he was not too far off in the rest of it. So I said:

“He is trying to tell you that Wehrdom is in a strategic flux; it is experiencing something akin to the passing of power that occurred when you took the Lake of Horns. There is sometimes a violent flipping between opposite-seeming but equally stable hierarchies. Violent when viewed in evolutionary time. But what exactly does that have to do with us?”

“It is the Curse of Imca-Sorr-Aat.” Chayin grinned. Sereth stared.

“No, truly. Once in a thousand years the interface called Imca-Sorr-Aat changes. Which creature holds that position determines how the next millenium will develop; what strategies, even what factions of Wehrdom will be dominant. Man has done poorly here this last thousand years. In fact, he is nearly extinct. He is merely food for Wehrdom, and his artifacts are but curiosities. In another Imca-Sorr-Aat’s rule they might have provided him a secure place. The manlike wehrs, because of a drastically limited gene pool, make fewer and fewer appearances. And the ossasim, who provided the last Imca-Sorr-Aat, have almost succeeded in establishing themselves as a species. If an ossasim should again hold the interface known as Imca-Sorr-Aat, the man-wehr will certainly become extinct.

“What men are left will be like those we saw when we watched adults kill their own children. That place is called Nehedra, and its folk provide not only fields to be grazed and stores of grain for droughts, but fresh meat and a good chase. And they cull not only their weakest in those forest trials the children take, but their strongest as well: any child who precedes the bulk of them, and all who reach the town’s gates before sunset, are slain. So it has been under the last Imca-Sorr-Aat, and so it will be under the next, if he be ossasim, or ptaiss, or any other creature but man himself. You see, the creature of Wehrdom recall what man did to them, and they would not risk a recurrence. Their methods are, I suppose, resonable coming from species who witnessed the pinnacle of technological man, and fear his works.” And the cahndor leaned forward and wet his lips.

“But it does not sit well with me. And I was given a chance to better the fortunes of those whom I call kin here. Could you, Sereth have resisted such a call?”

Sereth blew out his breath, and did not answer, but instead crouched down before Mahrlys.

“He has told us what he thinks is happening, and how you enlisted him. Now you tell me the truth. You think you have us trapped; it should not matter to you if we know, your designs.”

“Aah, you are a quick one, manling,” she said on a shuddering breath. Her eyes were no longer wild, though triumph gleamed therein. “All he thinks is true, as far as it goes. It is a difficult thing to lie in the wehr-wind.”

“But it can be done.”

“Indeed, Sereth crill Tyris, it can be done. But there was no need to lie, only to be circumspect with what information we made available. I did not tell him that Imca-Sorr-Aat decreed this flight of yours to Othdaliee, if I could not kill you. Die here, die there, it is no different to me.”

“Mahrlys!” exploded Chayin.

“Chayin, I told you they would die chasing that stupid sword, and they will. And you will live to make Wehrdom safe for another thousand years.”

There was something in the way she said it which made me know that what Chayin expected to do and what she had in mind for him to do were two different things. The key and the answer were there, in what she said, but they did not see. Perhaps only another woman could have marked it. And yet, even knowing, I could not pierce the wehrveil and determine how the thing would fall out. I saw what I had seen in the Eye of Mnemaat, and tried a wild guess: “What has Deilcrit to do with all this?”

“Nothing, nothing at all,” said Mahrlys sweetly. “He was given the trial of Imca-Sorr-Aat that he might die mercifully. You will doubtless reclaim your sticker from his corpse. In all the days of my reign, none have ever completed the trial and returned.”

We have a creature, in the west, like a ptaiss but winged. It is called a hulion, and with her green eyes shining yellow in the miniature sun’s glow and that puff-cheeked smirk on her face, she reminded me of one, when the kill is sure and the hulion can take time to batter its prey.

“You predict, then, that I might live long enough to see Othdaliee,” I replied in the same sweet tone.

She shrugged delicatedly. “Let me rephrase that:
Chayin
will reclaim it.”

“You would do well as a forereader, with that tongue,” said Sereth. His fingers toyed with the hilt of his knife. His eyes measured Chayin’s concern. Then he rose and stretched and said, “I gave you your life once. Do not make me take it back.”

And he motioned that Mahrlys and Chayin should precede us down the featureless, sloping corridor into the dark.

“What think you?” Sereth subvocalized, while in front of us Chayin took up a low dialogue with Mahrlys and their backs receded before us down the steady incline of green stone.

“I think,” I replied, my lips at his ear, “that things are not so simple as the ‘man-wehr-facing-extinction’ story. How does Chayin’s visit to Othdaliee make Wehrdom safe for a thousand years? And why is Mahrlys so anxious to help the reins of power change hands when she stands so high in the present hierarchy? And if kin altruism is in effect between those sharing the communications gene, why is there strife in Wehrdom?”

The miniature sun sent dizzying shadows dancing across the low ceiling. I steadied it.

Sereth’s gaze searched the crannies in the stone. “I know nothing of communications genes and kin altruism, and care less. But I know women. Her plan was that we enter this passage without her. She objected quite strongly to being dragged down here. If she could have convinced me that her own creatures sought her death, so that I left her to their mercies, she would have been much pleased. She says she is dead, yet she walks before us. She celebrates our demise—I feel very much alive. And I intend to stay that way. She calls on Chayin to make Wehrdom safe for a thousand years; he could not keep himself safe from her clutches.

“I will hazard that she has not yet drawn back for the kill. All this has been foreplay.”

“She fought realistically enough when we changed her plan.”

“And yet she did not break. She is too haughty for one who faces death. Real satisfaction is a difficult emotion to conceal.”

“My reading of her agrees with that”

He looked at me askance. “What do you draw from Wehrdom? All I can dredge out of those mists are wordless songs and clicks and whistles and the taste of warm blood. I come away feeling like I want to eat something raw.”

“The Stoth priests maintained that all of time, owkahen’s entire extent, is but a function of volitional consciousnesses. Wehrdom is a multifaceted unit: one consciousness. Thus Wehrdom is not really volitional individuals interacting in owkahen as possible futures.”

“Which means you get nothing from it either.”

“That is what I just said.”

“Estri, does all this lead you to conjecture anything?”

“What?”

“I read Wehrdom only when it brushes events in which I am physically concerned. The same must be true of you. And yet it is out there, wrapped around the time-coming-to-be. The woman flaunts us, admits she has lied, chortles over the fact that her attempts to kill us have, to her mind, succeeded. And my reading gives me nothing but some splinters floating on the top of Wehrdom’s fog.”

“You see those? Deilcrit, and Se’keroth, and Chayin?”

“Yes, but over what, I cannot ascertain. It is not knowing enough to deduce a motive from a displayed moment of culmination that is the problem. Wehrdom is there, but its methods of symbolizing and its concerns are different from ours. It makes them dangerous. Their machinations do not show on owkahen’s face.”

“As if they were not creatures of time. The Shapers and the Mi’ysten race have that exemption. But Wehrdom is composed of time-space creatures. They, too, must inhabit owkahen.”

“Our owkahen? Or a part of it not natural to our use? Wehrdom is concerned with things that do not concern owkahen as we know it. They have not yet the capacity to inject their will into that arena in which all intelligent beings contest. Which means, obviously, that they are a greater threat than they would otherwise be because we cannot preguess them; and, not so obviously, that they may be a self-extinguishing threat. If owkahen does not acknowledge them, it may be that they will not survive long enough to be acknowledged.”

I murmured a noncommittal reply, thinking that Sereth was reading his preference into the time; that he, himself, was the most likely reason Wehrdom might not survive long enough to be acknowledged by owkahen. It rode his words, sat behind his tight jaw. I knew then that if he lost Chayin to Wehrdom it would not be Chayin whom Sereth would blame. Wehrdom would feel for his grief in a rage the like of which they had never dreamed.

I was about to comment that even Khys, who had ruled previous to Sereth, had had the grace to let this shore go its own way, when Mahrlys and Chayin, with an exclamation of surprise, suddenly dropped from sight. The cahndor’s grunt hung momentarily in the air; then it too disappeared.

Slowly, cautiously, we approached the edge, wholly invisible in the uncertain light, over which they had plunged.

Sereth crouched down, a hand on my arm. “I should not have let them go so far ahead. Send your sun down there.”

And I did, into that sudden fifty-five-degree angle of descent. Sereth, most carefully, for the floor on which we squatted was itself angled downward, called Chayin’s name, leaning over the steepened incline. When no answer drifted up from the dark, he ran his palm along the stone floor where it abruptly changed to a black glassy material. “Frictionless,” he pronounced. “The Beneguans no more built this than Dey-Ceilneeth. See if you can drop the light lower.”

So I did, and my little fireball hovered ever farther down that corridor that plummeted into the depths of the earth. We saw the walls and floor and ceiling converge in a trick of perspective. All we could determine was that the passage kept the same relative dimensions but for the steepening of its angle.

“Well?” I asked when he had been long silent.

“Take my hand.”

I did that.

“We are just going to slide down it. Under no circumstances tense up. Try to keep your head uppermost, but do not stiffen your legs. It should be a fast descent, and if at the bottom the rock continues, you could break a limb on impact if you are not very careful.”

“Sereth!”

“Now, you are not afraid of a little slide like that, are you?”

And his tone told me that there was no arguing, so I said that I was not afraid and sat back on my haunches and extended my legs and muttered a quick prayer to my father, who had certainly not put me on Silistra to have me end in a pulped mass of flesh and bone in the well-forgotten belly of Dey-Ceilneeth.

Then I thrust my little sun downward, and Sereth said “Ready?” and I nodded and we slipped down into Dey-Ceilneeth’s well.

There was a rising of my stomach, a hissing of wind in my ears. My eyes watered and burned and saw only a blur of stone. Then blackness: we passed the miniature sun as if it were hovering unmoving, and plummeted on into the darkness.

The feel of the black, frictionless material was like liquid ice, a strip of cold under me, and yet there was no sensation of weight, as if our speed had outstripped gravity itself.

Sereth, drawing me closer by his arm wrapped around my waist, shouted in my ear: “Get your light down here.”

I closed my tearing eyes and called it, trying not to think of how long we had been falling, nor how fast we must be traveling to have so quickly overtaken the little sun.

“I used to kite-jump off the Nin-Sihaen ridge,” he confided loudly, as my hair whipped around me and the rushing pursuit by my miniature star made it seem that we were rising and my stomach threatened to leap out of my mouth.

I was still thinking of a reply when Sereth rumbled: “Look!”

And I did, and remedied myself for whatever glowed with its own light up through the dark beneath us.

Closer and closer came the other light, until the glow rushing toward us showed itself white water and the light of the little star was swallowed in a dull luminescence and I braced for the concussion.

“Relax,” he ordered as we began perceptibly to slow. I looked at his face in the bleaching light that seeped up from below, and knew from his expression that he sought to break our fall with mind.

So I relaxed and concerned myself with aiding him, and when we hit the white frothing water it only knocked my breath away for a moment.

Then the warmish water closed over my head and I concerned myself with not drowning in my entangling hair and kicking my way surfaceward.

Gasping, I broke into the air. My little star hovered, uncertain, where the stone chute’s ceiling arched up into a cavern from whose dome hung gigantic stalactites that glowed whitish, and silver, and green.

Sereth’s head erupted from the choppy water on my right. He surveyed the ceiling, and the ledges that edged the fast-rushing subterranean river. Then he indicated Mahrlys and Chayin, huddled drenched and exhausted and tiny at a stalagmite’s base, and bade me swim toward a promontory jutting out into the stream. His shout, swallowed in the echoing river roar, did not reach the cahndor’s ears.

Spitting out the tepid, mineral-tasting water, I swam until my stroke brought me close enough to grabe the iregular rock and cling to it. Still, my feet had not touched bottom.

Sereth hauled himself along the froth-slicked jetty, hand over hand, to my side, and boosted me roughly upward.

We lay there a time, facedown on the half-submerged ledge, listening to the muted cacophony of the water’s slap and our own breathing. The rock under me was not cold, but tepid, as the water had been. I wondered how deep into the earth we were, and my geological knowledge told me that this particular kind of cave, at this depth, with such a river whose course was so rapid, was as anomalous as the fact that fresh air brushed my cheek and dried the droplets on it.