First it was gloomy under the pines, then it was dark. Then it was really dark, as the last of the light faded from the sky. We were supposed to be there by now. They stopped to remove the reins from the riding ponies and to link the three horses together with a coil of rope taken from the pack-pony, then led them all along on foot. Belegir had taken a crystal from his pocket at the stop. It glowed with an intense purple light, enough to show them the upward-slanting track through the pines.
Enough to bring any monsters interested in a hero snack running. Glory drew her sword and walked with it in her hand, not feeling stupid about it at all. Every sound seemed unbearably, pointedly loud, from the scuffing of their steps through the leaves and twigs of the forest floor to the unearthly cries of hunting owls. Kurfan walked close at Belegir's side, ears cocked alertly.
"There," Belegir said, pointing.
Glory looked, and for a moment saw nothing. Then Belegir raised the crystal in his hand higher, illuminating a sheer wall of rock, and the pitch-dark opening of a narrow cave.
"This is it?" Glory said, torn between relief and disappointment. From the way Belegir had talked about the Oracle of Erchane, she'd expected something fancier than a hole in the wall.
She needed no more encouragement. Belegir's tension was catching. Kurfan bounded ahead, disappearing through the cut in the rock. The ponies lugged forward as though they scented home and mother, breaking free of Belegir and scrambling up the last sharp incline into the cave, still roped loosely together, followed closely by Glory and Belegir.
She was relieved to see that the cave was tall enough inside that she could easily stand upright, as well as wide enough that she could shoulder past the ponies to look around. It looked pretty much like a natural cave to her, maybe the kind that had gotten a little primitive help. The walls were smooth and cool; the floor, when she scraped the leaves aside with the tip of her sword, was hard rock beneath wind-blown detritus, all illuminated by the weird black-light glow of Belegir's crystal. It seemed to go on for some distance—at least, she couldn't see the far end.
"Is this it?" she asked again. "All of it?"
Belegir chuckled, his voice sounding shaky with relief at having reached sanctuary. "Hardly—though I do not blame you for doubting, seeing us reduced to a nation of ragged wanderers as you have. But come, Slayer. Let me show you Erchane's wonders!"
He strode jauntily past her. Glory shrugged and followed, leading the string of ponies. After a few steps, the passage was filled with the echoing clatter of unshod hooves on stone, blotting out all other sound.
Well, I reckon they'll know we're coming.
The cave-corridor broadened, the walls becoming vertical and even. After a few moments, she realized she could see perfectly well, and when Belegir dropped his crystal back into a pocket of his robe, she realized that the light was coming from the cave itself, though she couldn't see any light source.
Glory stopped to carefully re-sheathe her sword. It was heavy, and there didn't seem to be any reason to brandish it in here. Belegir obviously thought they were safe.
She stopped. When she looked over her shoulder, she could still see the entrance, far behind her. The passageway ran straight as an arrow, directly into the guts of the mountain.
"Belegir, where are we going?" I'm asking questions again. I know I'm going to regret this. But I can't help it.
"To the Oracle," he said, for all the world as if that were an explanation. "Soon we will reach the Outer Courtyard, where once all the Allimir nation came to receive Erchane's wise counsel. We can leave the horses there for the night at the Pilgrim's Fountain—I do not think Erchane will mind."
"So this place is safe as houses, hey?" Glory said. Belegir nodded. "And big, from the looks of it, I reckon. So why didn't you just bring everybody here when the balloon went up?"
Belegir gazed at her in polite incomprehension.
"Bring them here? For safety?" So they wouldn't all DIE?
"We could not do that," he said at last.
At the look on her face he recoiled, and added hastily, "It would not have worked, Slayer! It is true—many of the Allimir nation could have been housed here, and She would not dare to approach this holy place. But they could not be fed. Evesal sent all the acolytes away when Great Drathil burned for just that reason—it was Drathil that supplied the Oracle with food. There is no food here, nor could it be brought, and stored, without making those who carried it targets for Her wrath."
"Hmp." The explanation sounded reasonable, not that that counted for much. "And you say she's dead now, too—so who are we going to talk to?"
"We come to speak to no one, Slayer. We have come to consult the Oracle." Belegir reached out and took the ponies' lead-rope from her slack hand, then turned and walked away.
Glory growled—not caring at the moment if she was stealing one of Vixen's lines—and followed him sullenly. Come here to talk to somebody, only we're not going to talk to anybody. I reckon all wizards must get a course in talking in riddles along with the wand and the pointy hat.
The corridor was like one of those M. C. Escher drawings where a bird turns into a fish by such slow stages you barely notice. As Glory followed Belegir, the hall about her slowly changed. The clatter of the horses' hooves—and of her flat-soled leather boots—was muted when the rock floor was replaced first by coarse gravel, then by fine sand: first white, then colored sand fine as sugar, poured in intricate patterns as bright and elaborate as a woven rug. Just as the floor changed, so did the walls. Decoration appeared: first simple geometric designs, then more elaborate botanical paintings augmented by carvings, as the corridor slowly widened and the ceiling rose, until without any clear sense of transition Glory found herself walking soundlessly over a floor of intricately patterned colored sand through the center of a huge hall a dozen yards wide whose walls were carved with monumental colored bas-reliefs inset with jewels.
Glory had to admit she was impressed. This was light-years more posh than a string of raggle taggle gypsy wagons-O and some smelly sheep. This was Civilization.
She'd dropped further and further behind Belegir, gawking at the paintings, trying to imagine living in the world that they showed. Here were the Allimir as they must have been before the disaster (whatever it was)—a gentle, happy people, as Belegir had said, and a pretty well-off lot besides. It all looked sort of high medieval, if you assumed a medieval artist who'd discovered true perspective. Everything was in scale, so they didn't look like a pack of midgets. No churches, and nothing much she recognized as religion, but everyone looked cheerful and well fed. If it was propaganda, it was still an attractive line of country. There were depictions of villages, of planting and harvest, of hunting and horse-racing, of shepherds with their flocks.
It took her several seconds of staring at a quite nicely painted battle with banners and a lot of foot soldiers with long spears before she realized what she was looking at. Bloodshed. Battles. Conflict. Strife. Peace-breaking, in fact. And all the figures were obviously Allimir, the folks who were allegedly so clueless about this sort of thing they'd got an Aussie schoolteacher to do their fighting for them.
He came running when she bellowed, looking frightened and out of breath, dropping the lead-rope and leaving the animals behind. She pointed accusingly at the wall with its pictures of battles.
"What is this? Is this you? You told me you and your mates were pacifists! Englor got all queasy at the thought of fudging a traffic ticket! You weren't even willing to bully me into sticking around to help you—and now this? Looks like you can stage a good and proper barney when you want to. God's teeth!"
Belegir stared at the wall, where several Allimir spearmen were engaged in graphic and bloody violation of one another's civil rights and personal space.
"But that was long ago," he said weakly. "We no longer—"
Glory turned on him with a low growl, clenching her fists. If this was getting in touch with her Inner Vixen, at the moment she welcomed it. She'd been frustrated, frightened, and guilty for too long. Now she wanted to break something.
"You—told—me—you—didn't—do—things—like—that—" she growled in a low husky feline rumble, leaning over until she was staring right into his eyes. "You said you didn't know how!"
"I said we had forgotten the arts of war," Belegir whimpered, tears welling up in his eyes. "And we have! Oh, please, Slayer, do not hit me! I beg you—"
Glory straightened up with a gasp, stepping back and raising her hands to her face. Her heart hammered. The line between being a bully and an action hero was a fine one, and she was afraid she'd just crossed it. "Sorry," she muttered, stepping back further. "I'm sorry. Belegir— Oh Lord, please don't cry. I'm sorry I scared you. Please. But you have to explain this. I don't understand." She closed her eyes, wishing the ground would open up and swallow her, or that Erchane were a proper Goddess-sort who could rise up and smite her dead. Was this what she'd come to? Beating up on someone she was dead sure wouldn't fight back?
"If you can do this, if you have pictures of this, why aren't you. . . ?"
"These walls show stories of long ago," the Allimir mage said in a low trembling voice. "Long before Cinnas, in the morning of the world, the Time of Legend. That the pictures are true is a secret only the mages know—the people who once came through these halls saw only something they knew could not be, a nightmare to frighten children, but we who are of the Temple know the truth. It is no myth. Once this was so, as real as the wind and the sky. In the long ago, the Allimir had conquered the world, enslaved the nations until they were no more, until there was nothing in all Erchanen but the Allimir. But War was like an old love that would not be set aside, and so, in our folly, we still courted her, turning at last upon our own people to set upon them in lieu of other foes. It was an age of madness. The Allimir would have been swept from Erchane's embrace forever, swept away like the snows of winter when spring once more rules the land.
"But Cinnas came to save us. Cinnas brought peace to the Allimir, may his name be revered forever."
Belegir hung his head, as though he had told her something so shameful she'd hate him forever.
Glory looked back at the painted walls. King Arthur and the Norman Conquest, Ivanhoe and the Wars of the Roses; the sort of endless hearts in armor brawls that had been a staple of cartoons and comic books—and syndicated TV series like TITAoVtS—ever since people had started telling each other stories. So ordinary, so inevitable, that they were kiddie fare where she came from, instead of the stuff of repressed nightmare.
"He banished War from Erchanen, chaining Her upon Elboroth-Haden of the Hilvorn, once called Grey Arlinn. In relief at their deliverance, his people believed She was gone forever, but when I began my studies in this very place, I realized that was not what Cinnas had said to the people when he descended the mountain. No magic—no ensorcelment—endures forever. Why should this of all the great magical workings of history have been different? Discovering those time-lost details became my obsession. I became distant, ungracious, even rude."
"Fancy that," Glory muttered under her breath.
"I taught myself disciplines that no mage had seen a use for in centuries. I mastered ciphers that had lain fallow since Cinnas' day. And I discovered that Cinnas' magics had indeed possessed a term. On the thousandth anniversary of her binding, the Warmother would go free of her chains unless—until—a hero bound her once again."
Belegir heaved a sigh of despair, staring at the floor. His shoulders drooped.
"I tried to warn them. But how could I, when no one, not even Cinnas in his age, had known what would happen then? And things did not stand as they did in Cinnas' day, when all the world looked to the mages for guidance and advice. Even Helevrin thought my studies had addled my mind. Englor, I know now, would have believed, but in that time he was but an apprentice, an untried lad, and I hope I would have hesitated to set mother against son so."
"Wait a minute," Glory said, grasping at the only thing in all of this she clearly understood. "Englor is Helevrin's son?"
"But of course he is," Belegir said in surprise. "He and Ivradan are brothers, and they are Helevrin's sons. Have you not remarked the close resemblance? The magery runs in only a few families among the people, though it is rare for the Oracle to choose two so closely related. Though there was the case in Sinintil's time, when the twins Menegoth and Menelor were chosen. . . ."
Belegir roused himself from the digression with an effort. "But you will not care to know about that part of our history which does not concern itself with the Warmother. As I have said, I alone had penetrated to the heart of Cinnas' riddle, and could convince no one of the truth of my discovery. And to my horror, the thousandth anniversary of our deliverance was drawing swiftly near. Barely could I nerve myself to decide to climb Elboroth-Haden, whom the ancients name Grey Arlinn, to see if in that way I could find some proof to convince my fellows that our darkest, most secret legends were truth. But the records were old, and the day I had set for my endeavor was too late. She rose from her chains before that day, and all the questions I had posed during my foolish years of innocence were answered in full and hideous measure."
"Um. And that was five years ago, was it?" Glory said, still staring at the murals to keep from having to face Belegir. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the mage's nod of assent. "And no one's actually seen this . . . Her?"
"It is the only mercy," Belegir said in a low voice. "That we have been spared that."
Glory shook her head. She'd almost thought she had a notion, but whatever it was it had slipped away while she was listening to Belegir's tale. Maybe it would come back again later. And anyway, it could wait. They had this Oracle to get through beforehand.
But at least she was finally learning some facts. She wasn't sure what use they were, but facts were always nice to have. Maybe when she had enough of them she could . . . knit a tea-cozy, or something.
"Well, cheer up. You've got me, now. When She sees that, She oughtta wet herself laughing. C'mon."
Side by side, they walked up to the animals, and then on through the hall of the Oracle of Erchane. As they went backward through Time, the scenes of warfare gave way to depictions of the Allimir fighting against skin-clad barbarians, and then against creatures that Glory hoped were either mythical or extinct: large long-toothed spotted cats, and—yes!—dragons, or something looking a lot like them, sailing through Serenthodialian skies spraying smoking death on harried villagers below. The dragon flame had been depicted with great care, and so it was easy to see that the dragon did not actually breathe flame, but jetted a spray of venom from its mouth which burst into flame as it evaporated.
God's teeth, maybe the Allimir's problem is just a dragon after all! Great Drathil—they said—burned. And SOMETHING happened at Mechanayas. And the stallion, back at the camp . . . you wouldn't have to flay it if you sprayed it with acid—maybe old Belegir knows just what it was those things used to spit. Maybe some earthquake opened up a cave full of them. Now how, I wonder, do you take out a dragon . . . ?
She was preoccupied with her thoughts, taking little notice as they traversed the rest of the hall and passed through the great golden doors that stood open at the end of the Hall of Murals.
"Here the Oracle's domain properly begins!" Belegir announced proudly.
Roused from her dragon-slaying reverie, Glory looked around at the interior cavern. Its pale fine-grained stone walls were carved with heroic figures in deep relief, standing side-by-side in characteristic attitudes, as if caught attending the longest cocktail party ever. Band after band of these figures, their scale impossible to judge, covered the walls all the way to the distant, domed ceiling.
They'd come at least a mile, maybe more to reach this point. This was the heart of the mountain, and so she should have some sense of being planted deep in the heart of the earth, of the tons of rock suspended above her head.
She didn't. The chamber was too large. It was big enough to trick the senses, to convince her body she was outdoors.
Had this ever been an natural cave? Or was it, first to last, an engineering project that made the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall look like a game of Pick-Up Sticks? Done with magic? Done with mirrors?
She could hear the faint sound that caves made—it was like holding a seashell to your ear, only in this case the seashell was a lot bigger, and she was standing inside—and, somewhere in the distance, Glory could hear the faint, definitive plashing of water. Looking down the length of the cavern, she saw a flight of steps that led up to a doll-small temple set at the end of the cavern. The structure glowed with opalescent fire along its pillared face, and at the foot of the stairs was the source of the water music. A wide round fountain, its bowl glowing with the sun-saturated green of a butterfly's wing, splashed and rang with falling water.
She turned to say something to Belegir, but the Allimir mage was already striding toward the temple and fountain. Glory followed reluctantly. She'd expected, maybe, a touch of claustrophobia when she'd decided to go caving with Belegir. Agoraphobia had been the least of her worries.
The temple was farther than it looked, and as she trudged toward it, the whole scale of the place shifted in the weird mutable way of something without any built-in reference points. Things that she'd thought were small surged and billowed like a Disney cartoon on acid. The doll's-house temple became enormous, its smallness an effect of distance and her inability to put it into perspective, then shifted again; looming and dwindling as her mind fought to make sense of its surroundings. The effect, while not frightening precisely, was dizzying.
Finally they were close enough to it that their own bodies provided the perspective cue, and Glory realized why this place looked so naggingly familiar. Either the Allimir mages had used their dimension-hopping powers back in the Time of Legend to take in a large number of Busby Berkeley musicals, or it was another of those wacky trans-universal coincidences, because the wide shallow half-moon stairs leading up to the portico built in no Earthly style were surely designed for bevies of sequin-clad lovelies to dance down. And whatever they'd been carved from, they sparkled now as if they'd been dusted with sugar.
The travelers stopped at the fountain.
"Here we will leave the animals, and go on alone, into the Oracle's inner sanctum," Belegir told her.
"You're sure it won't mind?" Glory asked uneasily. It had been easy to dismiss talk of the Oracle as primitive superstition on the plains above, in the daylight. Here, in the middle of stupefying proof of Allimir skill—at magic or engineering, it didn't really matter when you came right down to it—it was a lot harder to disbelieve, or to take the Oracle's power lightly.
"She who called you will hardly object to your presence," Belegir answered with easy faith. "And we must have answers."
Damn right, Glory thought grumblingly. She drank from the fountain, then helped Belegir unsaddle the packhorse, unrope the animals, and strip the other two ponies of their remaining tack. He tossed Kurfan the last of the cold pasties, and left the horses with a meal of grain and some of the windfall apples gathered from the orchard at Mechanayas. Apparently the beasts were to be left to wander as they chose in the chamber, but with Kurfan to guard them, they shouldn't wander out.
He made a neat bundle of the tarp and several of the larger baskets and left it tucked against the side of the fountain. The remaining bundle—the tea-kit and a few other items—he rolled into several blankets crisscrossed with ropes, making a sort of crude backpack.
"You ought to let me carry that," Glory said. She had her bag slung over one shoulder, and was holding Gordon.
"It is no trouble, Slayer," Belegir answered, shrugging it onto his shoulders as he straightened up. "A warrior, so say the old chronicles, does not labor like a beast of burden."
"Nice work if you can get it," Glory muttered under her breath. She was still humiliated about losing her temper with Belegir earlier. She had tarnished some heretofore-unsuspected good opinion she had held of herself, and was feeling ashamed. It wasn't a pleasant feeling, and like so many unpleasant things, could easily turn itself into anger if she let it. Anger would make her feel better, for as long as she could fool herself, only she couldn't fool herself forever, and then things would be worse.
Too bad I can't find something around here that deserves to be hit. Because when I do. . . .
The steps were harder than the whole rest of the day had been. Fine for making grand processions up and down, scaled to Allimir legs, they were hell for someone Glory's size to get up briskly. And there were a lot of them. Eventually, puffing more than a little, she got to the top.
Belegir, of course, wasn't even breathing hard.
Must be the damn corset. Has to be. If I thought I was actually going to have to be doing any dragon slaying, I'd be worried.
She looked around. This was a pillared portico suitable for the making of grand pronouncements. Near the fountain, the ponies dozed, looking bored. She could look across the square and see the ribbon-friezes of heroic-scale Allimir all marching toward the open bronze doors.
She could see something else, too. All over the enormous floor of the cavern, there were thin silvery lines, inlaid against the dark stone, that she'd crossed before without noticing. She'd thought they were just meaningless random decoration, but from here, they were more than that.
"Belegir?" she called, taking care this time to keep her voice soft and friendly, "Tell me what you see," she asked, pointing at the cavern floor.
He came and stood beside her, looking where she pointed. "I see a map of the world," he answered, sounding faintly puzzled. "There is another inside, in color, and I think there may still be some maps on velum here as well."
She gazed down at the shapes laid out on the ground below—continents, oceans, which were which? She couldn't tell. But somehow seeing them did as much to make the Allimir real as this whole temple had. With every image she saw, the world became wider and more vivid, more real.
A fantasy couldn't hurt you. In proper stories, the hero always won—and certainly Vixen came out on top in every episode of The Incredibly True Adventures. But Glory wasn't fool enough to imagine those rules held true for real life. She supposed that somewhere in the back of her mind, for sanity's sake, she'd been holding on to the hopeful notion that this was all some sort of role-playing, with everyone improvising their way toward a foreordained outcome that let the hero win.
But despite magic, despite long pink robes and funny-sounding names, despite weird-looking livestock and strange Oracles, there weren't any certainties. The only thing that was looking more certain with every heartbeat was that stupid unfair things could happen just as easily here as in the world she'd left.
Which meant she could die. And as far as she could tell, the Allimir were the only ones in this brave new world who'd taken an oath of pacifism.
She sighed, feeling tireder than she had a right to, and followed Belegir into the temple.
She'd expected to see a lot of pomp and circumstance—thrones and altars and whatnot—but what there was instead was a large anteroom that led immediately into a sort of hiring hall space. Here the walls were unornamented, covered with a plain coat of homely whitewash, the worn stone floor set with rows of polished wooden benches soft and smooth with age and use. At the top of the room there was a dais with two deep stone cisterns (now empty) flanking it. Obviously, everyone who entered the Oracle Temple came in here. But where did they go from here?
Along the sides of the room ran a series of narrow archways. Glory ducked into the nearest one and looked around. It led down a long close hallway. Along one side there were rows of small cubbies, each barely large enough to hold (as it did) a meager Allimir-sized bed.
"On his tenth birthday, every Allimir child comes here to the Oracle to drink her waters and dream of his purpose in life. So also come those troubled in spirit, or who seek counsel only the Oracle can give. All sleep—slept—here, and took the dreams sent by the Oracle's waters," Belegir said from behind her.
"I hope you don't reckon I'm going to," Glory said dangerously. "Sleep here, I mean."
Belegir chuckled. "Of course not. We go to the living source itself."
With one last look at the series of tiny sleeping cubicles, Glory followed Belegir back out into the hall. The wall behind the dais was cleverly carved—from straight ahead it appeared solid, but in fact its face concealed a passageway . . . one wide enough, she imagined, to accommodate endless rounds of Allimir apprentices carrying the buckets needed to fill the two cisterns. She and Belegir eased through it, and found themselves in a much larger and more elaborate space, as different from the asceticism of the hiring hall as a Quaker meeting house from the Vatican.
From the central court, passages (built God knew when) led off in a dozen different directions. Though there could have been no particular need for them from a structural perspective, the courtyard space was ringed with pillared archways. The pillars were colored marble, which she was pretty sure hadn't grown down here naturally, and the floor underfoot was a mosaic done in brightly colored stones—its center another map just as Belegir had promised, a circle about five meters across, with greens and blues for water, and golds and white and greens for land, and a bright border of gems set in gold. There were ships (out of scale) on the water, and coiling sea serpents, and small golden towns set at various places on the land. The whole effect managed to transcend weird, alien, and unearthly and move right along to vulgar, garish, and over-the-top. Tastes must have changed (and improved) for the Allimir to have moved the paying customers out to the other set-up she'd seen.
"Here is where those who lived at the Oracle had their place," Belegir said wistfully. "But in the Time of Legend, it was otherwise, and in this chamber the pilgrims to the Oracle once gathered. The outer complex is a later addition, built after Cinnas' day—I could talk until the seasons changed, and not exhaust the wonders of the Oracle's building."
And it would probably be chock-full of helpful useful information, Glory reflected, if she were only the right kind of hero. But she just wasn't the anthropological ancient-cities-finding sort, who could figure out the answers to riddles from antediluvian tomb-carvings and whatnot. She wasn't really sure what sort she was, but she wasn't that. And so, things being what they were, old Belegir could natter on until Doomsday about outer complexes and carved pilasters and it wouldn't tell her a thing.
She looked around, hoping for inspiration.
"Here is the world," Belegir said, gesturing at the floor. "Serenthodial, the High Hilvorns, the Great River Baurod, the Sea Carormanda. Beyond it, the Arkarthane Pelagio, where once the finest dyestuffs in our Empire were woven, and beyond that, the Infinite Ocean which circles the world. To the West, beyond the Hilvorns, the Cold Lands: Nirahir, Kirthim, and Ithralay. Oh, Slayer, once the world was wide!"
"Until She came," Glory said, knowing the responses in this particular catechism.
Belegir's shoulder's slumped. "I think She must go among the barbarians when she turns her attentions away from us, and I shudder to think what she may do there, for surely they are as helpless as we?"
Glory frowned. She thought there must be a flaw in Belegir's reasoning, but couldn't put her finger on it, and decided to save thinking the matter through until later.
"How big is this?" she asked, gesturing at the map in the floor.
"How big?" Belegir asked blankly.
"Where are we? And where were we this morning?" She wanted to get some idea of the scale of the Allimir world, though she wasn't sure why.
"Here is the Oracle." Belegir stepped forward, and bent down to touch a pale triangle of amethyst set into the base of one of the silvery-grey Hilvorns. "Here is—was—Great Drathil." A gold city-shape a few fingers-widths away. That made sense; he'd said that Drathil had supplied the Oracle, so it had to be close. "This is Elboroth-Haden, once called Grey Arlinn." His finger swept upward from the gold city-shape, to a symbol in delicate chips of vivid red stone inlaid upon the flanks of another mountain.
He studied the map for long moments, lips pursed. "Here is Mechanayas. Here is Duirondel the Golden Forest. And here is where we began. The scale of the map is not exact, of course."
Less than a good handspan. Glory stared down at the map, converting the hours on horseback into a rough approximation of kilometers, and the kilometers of travel to millimeters of map, and coming up with a size for Serenthodial and the Land of Erchanen that made her blink. You could drop all of Australia into the middle of the Serenthodial without it making much of a splash.
She looked at all of the little gold crowns that had once been towns, five years ago. And now, according to Belegir, there were four hundred people left in the whole place. She shook her head, as close to panic as she'd yet gotten.
"Okay, mate," she said gruffly. "Let's move on."
Belegir hadn't said so right out, but Glory got the sense that back at the beginning of the Troubles, a lot of stuff had been brought here for general safekeeping, before people realized they were going to have to devote all their energy to staying alive. A lot of the side-rooms that they passed were full of things stacked in the haphazard fashion of things that people hadn't had time to put away properly. As if in acknowledgement of that fact, the rooms weren't charged up with the wizard light, the way every other place she'd seen here had been. She saw their contents in shadowy glimpses as the two of them walked by, the clutter making it impossible to tell what the original use of those rooms had been.
Not that she was overfamiliar with alien oracles and their interior design at the best of times.
They were still moving in a straight line, and Glory was starting to sincerely look forward to the time that they'd stop. It'd been a long day, and a long ride, and on top of all that, she thought she'd been walking for several kilometers by now. If she'd got some kind of high-powered cannon, the kind that could throw a shell for a dozen klicks at a go, and fired it at the outer opening of the cave, back in the forest, she'd lay good money it'd come straight through here. What kind of nuts laid out an underground temple in a straight line like a runway at Sydney International?
Educated, really adept nutcases with a strong engineering background, that was who.
And that was what was really bothering her about all this. Because they were a bunch of folk who could build something like this—who HAD built something like this, and then had been rolled out like pastry dough by a villain. . . .
Whom they expected her to put under heavy manners for them with a nice sword, a fancy costume, and some B-movie dialogue.
The final results are in and it's definite: the universe is without reason or sense.
"How very odd," Belegir said suddenly.
"Wozzer?" Glory said, startled. She dropped her tote-bag, her hand going to her sword in a gesture that was starting to become automatic. It wasn't as if she thought she could actually use it on someone in cold blood, but it certainly looked intimidating. And she could certainly give them a good discouraging whack with the flat.
As though it had grown as tired as she was, the ornament and the cyclopean scale had both dwindled slowly and unnoticeably away, until Glory and her companion now stood in a passageway little different than the one they had first entered: a bare corridor of grey rock about twelve feet in every direction. Directly ahead, the passage ended. In the end wall, three steps led up to a plain wooden door secured with a drop bar.
To the right of the steps, on the level they were on now, another wooden door—the one that bothered Belegir—stood open. Bright purple radiance, as harsh and strong as desert sunlight, illuminated the room within and spilled out into the corridor.
"What's in there?" Glory asked, drawing her sword as quietly as she could. A random thought came to her: she wondered why the scriptwriters on TITAoVtS had never given the thing a name, like Bonecruncher or Headknocker or something. Maybe they'd been saving it for Season Two.
"Artifacts of the Time of Legend," Belegir said.
"Great. You wait here." She set Gordon carefully down beside her bag, and tiptoed cautiously toward the light.
Why am I doing this? she wondered in the part of her mind that was still bothering with anything beyond listening intently for sounds from up ahead. The answer was patently obvious. Because Belegir was a helpless old man. Because he was doing his best for her, and so she ought to do her best for him. Because good harmless people did not deserve to play the victim for villains and frighteners. And because she was the one with the big sword.
She got to the door and peered cautiously around the edge. If this had been an episode, she'd have done a forward roll and come up fighting, but it was a stone floor and she had no idea what the inside of the room looked like. If it was as full of junk as the others they'd passed had been, she could do more damage to herself than the villains could, assuming there were any in there.
She peeped cautiously around the edge. No sound. No movement. Just a whole room full of . . .
And the purple light was coming from a giant neon sword that was hovering in midair.
Glory gave up on stealth, walked in flat-footed, and stared.
She realized after a moment that the sword wasn't all that giant, and it wasn't neon. But it did seem to be hovering, and it did seem to be the source of most of the light in the room. She stared at it for several seconds before she could tear her gaze away and look quickly around the rest of the room.
It looked pretty much like the Wardrobe and Props Department at TITAoVtS: racks of armor, racks of shields, racks of weapons. Nothing else. Nothing that looked like a threat or menace.
"Ah, Belegir? I reckon it's safe to come in," she said sheepishly. She went back to staring at the sword.
It was—radiance or no radiance—purple. No, PURPLE. The blade had that dull satiny sheen and pale grape color of that weird posh metal they made hypoallergenic jewelry out of. It looked sharp. She couldn't quite bring herself to touch it, even if she could have figured out how, with the thing hovering point-downward in the middle of the room eight feet off the floor. She craned her neck to look up.
The helve and quillons (she knew these terms courtesy of Bruce, the show's swordmaster, who was a real bug on all things edged and pointy) were of the same color metal as the blade, though glossier, and very fancy in a curved and scrolled fashion. Quillons and pommel were inset with large fuchsia crystals that looked just like the one that had been on Belegir's staff when he'd come to see her in Hollywood. They were the source of the light bright enough to read Bible print by. The whole effect was rather gaudy and alarming, really, but somehow Glory wasn't alarmed. It was more like she'd gotten to the money shot in the latest summer blockbuster and was marveling at the cool special effects.
"It is the Sword of Cinnas, with which he chained the Warmother and brought peace to the land," Belegir said, awestruck.
"Izzit?" Glory said, trying to sound intelligent and well-informed.
"Long has it lain dormant," Belegir said, indicating a slotted stone pedestal in the middle of the floor, directly beneath the hovering sword.
"Now at last it wakes," Glory said, trying to be helpful and enter into the spirit of things. She stared up at the sword. It was really rather pretty, in a lurid kind of way.
"Yes!" Belegir said, pleased that she understood. "The sword wakes as evil wakes, and waits for a hero to claim it."
There was a pause. Belegir was looking at her again.
"I've already got a sword," Glory said at last. Leaving aside how I get The Sword of Cinnas to come down from there if it doesn't want to. A glowing purple sword might be pretty, but it was also creepy. And how much of what she'd just heard was take-it-to-the-bank truth, and how much myth, wishful thinking, or just the usual game of telephone-through-the-centuries? Maybe the sword hadn't ever really belonged to Cinnas at all. And probably it wasn't waiting around for a hero, and even if it was, the smart money said it wasn't waiting around for her.
"But do you not want to . . . ?" Belegir sounded confused.
"No," Glory said decisively. "Bazza and his mates paid a lot of money for this sword," she said, wagging the one in her hand. "It's the real deal, forged and everything. The least I can do is actually hit something with it." If it comes to that.
"Well then." Another weird thing about the Allimir was that they never argued. God only knew how they got anything done. But Belegir simply took her at her word, and that was that. When they left the armory, Belegir pulled the door shut behind him, shutting out the violet radiance.
"Behind this door is a place which few among the Allimir have ever seen," Belegir said proudly a few moments later. "The waters of the Oracle of Erchane Herself. It is from the Well Itself that I and my co-mages journeyed across the worlds in search of aid—and found you."
He paused to set down his pack and excavate a small metal lantern from it. He opened the lantern and lit the candle within with a snap of his fingers.
"There is no magic beyond that door save what Erchane bestows, not what we choose. Stay close beside me."
"Too right." She slung her bag over her shoulder and held Gordon close.
Belegir left the pack and strode confidently up the steps to lift the bar from the door. The thought took strong possession of Glory's mind that anyone following them would only need to drop that bar into place again to put an end to anything the two of them could do to set the situation here to rights, especially if Belegir was right about not being able to use magic beyond that door. With an effort, she dismissed the notion. Who could do that? The rest of the Allimir were cream puffs and the Warmother (whether she existed or not) couldn't get in here. Who did that leave?
Belegir pushed the door open and stepped inside. Glory followed, having to duck for the first time since she'd entered the temple in order to get through the door. Suddenly she was surrounded by the suffocating dark of deep underground, and for the first time she could feel every kilo of the living rock above her pressing down. Even the wan light of Belegir's candle seemed compressed by the weight of the rock above. She drew a quick shaky breath, glancing longingly over her shoulder at the corridor outside. Belegir was going to shut the two of them in here with the dark. She just knew it.
Belegir crossed the small chamber as easily as if he were in his own living room and set the lantern into a shallow niche carved into the wall. With the new angle of the light she could see that the circular chamber was small, smaller than the corridor outside. The walls were rough and curved, resonant with age. In the center of the floor, round and smooth and still as a black mirror, was a spring, the Oracle in which Belegir placed so much faith.
Why can't we sleep outside in the hall? Why can't we leave the door open? she wanted to ask, and didn't. She wasn't going to demand that Belegir change the recipe before she found whether the cake rose. Maybe there wasn't any Oracle beyond wishful thinking. But she owed the business a fair test, like it or not.
Belegir came back inside carrying the bedroll in his arms. He set it down, and then, just as she'd dreaded, pulled the door shut. The darkness seemed to rush in, pressing against her with a soft dry weight.
But once Glory got past the first sharp clutch of unease, she found the darkness's weight almost soothing, like a mother's hug. This was strange and just a little weird, but she felt the deep conviction, too, that nothing bad could happen to her here. She had the sensation of being safe, protected, watched out for in a way that people left behind with childhood. Slowly she felt herself relax, and as the tension drained from her body, exhaustion seeped in to take its place. She took a couple of steps back and leaned against the wall (and her sword), feeling things she'd been too keyed up to feel in hours. Her shoulders were hot and raw with sunburn, making the rock feel colder and rougher than it was. Her feet hurt. Everything under the corset itched, making her long to get it off and have a good scratch.
First things first. She set down Gordon and her bag, then unhooked the sword and sheath from her costume—an operation that required a person to be only slightly double-jointed, but she was feeling too lazy to go about the operation in the proper fashion.
As she struggled with her armor, Belegir moved around the edge of the room, lighting fat white candles from a splinter of wood he'd lit at his lantern. Once several of the candles were lit, the little chamber was surprisingly bright.
"Here we will spend the night, drink the oracular waters, and take what counsel Erchane sends us," Belegir announced. He unrolled the pack and separated out the blankets: two for each of them. Well, she'd slept rougher. After today's hike, Glory felt she could sleep on the bare stone as comfortably as if it were an innerspring mattress. She spread the blankets out and sat down on them, pulling off her thigh-high boots and wiggling her toes with relief. A quick rummage through her purse found her enough pins to get her hair up off her shoulders, and then she pulled on the big logo T-shirt and proceeded with the delicate business of getting her costume off beneath it.
The corset came away from her skin with a sucking sound—it was lined in buckram, and they usually replaced the lining every week or so, or the thing went higher than roadkill in August—and she took a deep grateful breath. Then she squirmed out of the chafing leather panties and into her jeans, and dragged off the double bracers (she still couldn't bring herself to vandalize them, not quite), piling the stiff damp costume elements against the wall.
Then she rooted around in her purse for a hairbrush, tucked her legs under her, took down her hair, and began to brush it. She probably ought to braid it, if there were going to be further adventures, and elegance be damned.
But maybe there wouldn't be. Hadn't Belegir said that the Oracle might send her home?
This time tomorrow I could be home in Melbourne. Or at least in a hotel room somewhere in America.
It was an unsettling thought. She ought to have been uncomplicatedly delighted by it, but oddly, she wasn't.
If I leave, I go knowing Belegir and all his mates're going to die.
But it wouldn't be her choice, now, would it? It'd be the Oracle's choice.
Did that make things better—or worse?
Daft cow brought me here in the first place. S'her problem, innit?
No. Now that Glory knew about the situation, it was her problem, too, in some fashion she hadn't quite worked out yet.
She glanced over at the pool, and blinked to see Belegir scooping water out of it into his tea-bottle in a rather cavalier fashion. The spirit-stove was already assembled and lit, the tea-things laid out around it. She'd thought there'd be more ceremony and reverence somehow, if this place was as important to the Allimir as Belegir had let on. Her stomach rumbled loudly, reminding her that it had been a long time since a small lunch, and a bit of something would be nice.
"A little tea and fruitcake to refresh us," Belegir said, smiling, "and then we will drink from the Oracle and dream her counsel."
"Happy days," Glory said. She pulled her henna-enhanced mane into a thick braid and tied off the end with a scrap of ribbon, then picked up Gordon and cuddled the stuffed blue elephant protectively. Vixen had Sister Bernadette, the Fighting Nun. Glory had Gordon.
The tea was thick and sweet, a different thing entirely than what they'd drunk at noon, and the fruitcake was exactly that—cakes of dried fruit, mashed together with honey. Her head rang with sugar overload, but at least she wasn't hungry anymore.
"Belegir," Glory said impulsively, "what do you reckon will happen?"
"Whatever happens, it will be Erchane's will," the Allimir mage said firmly.
Glory bit her lip. She hated to ask the inevitable follow-up question—she liked Belegir—but she needed to know.
"And the rest of it? The reason I'm here? That, too?"
Belegir smiled sadly. "Erchane is not kind, though She is just. Her face is both dark and bright—ask the farmer who has lost his crop to drought or storm, his flock to wolf or lion. Ask the mother who has lost her firstborn to fever. Life feeds life. That is Erchane's way. But it is also the way of Life to struggle to live, and so we must. We are Her children, no less than the wolf and the storm. She favors none above the other. The beasts have fang and claw—the Allimir have magic, and the knowledge of Erchane's will. She will help us, if we will help ourselves."
Which seems to bring it right back around to you, gel.
"But wouldn't the Warmother be sort of against Erchane's will?" Glory asked, floundering through unfamiliar epistemological territory. Either chaining Her up or letting Her loose would have to be. Assuming, of course, She existed. That was the real question, now, wasn't it?
Belegir shook his head, not smiling now. "Perhaps a Great Mage could answer such a question, but there has been no such since Cinnas died. You ask questions no one thought to ask in all our long golden years of peace. And now there is no one left to ask them."
"Well, maybe we can find some answers anyway," Glory said with a defeated sigh. Why do I keep trying to have these conversations?
Belegir tucked the tea-things away again—she'd been sure, for one apprehensive moment, that he'd been going to wash them out in the spring, but apparently, spiritual informality didn't extend that far—and then circled the cavern again, dousing all the candles except for the small glass lantern. When he came back to the edge of the pool, he was holding a footed cup in his hands.
It was most of a meter high. The bowl was of bone, dark gold with age, the stem and foot of some darker material, with the sheen of oiled and polished wood. Belegir plunged it into the spring, submerging it completely, and then held it out to her.
Glory took it reluctantly. She'd seen a lot of magic since she'd come here, but this was the first time she'd been called upon to drink any.
Assuming, of course, that this Oracle business wasn't all humbug and social engineering.
Whether it was or not, the water itself was pure and numbingly cold, chilling her all the way down to the pit of her stomach. She emptied the cup and returned it to Belegir, who dipped it full again and drank, then returned it to its niche and came back to his bedroll carrying the lantern.
"Are you ready?" he asked, lying down.
"I reckon," Glory muttered, trying not to sound as uncertain as she felt. She pulled out her sweatshirt and struggled into it. Might as well be warm.
Belegir hooded the lantern, and the darkness fell like a hammer. In the dark, Glory squirmed out of her jeans and rolled them up into a pillow, then insinuated herself between the two blankets, clutching Gordon to her chest.