9

Blue-Hair said "Oh!" in surprise. The nymphs looked at something behind Garric. He turned and saw Cashel walk through one of the many doorways onto the courtyard. There was a tiny girl on his shoulder, perfectly formed and quite normal except for her size and hair of an inhumanly red color.

"Cashel!" he said. "What are you doing here? And what's that on your shoulder?"

The nymphs drifted closer to Garric. Blue-Hair placed herself between Garric and the newcomers. She and her sisters seemed apprehensive but determined.

Cashel glanced at his shoulder. "Oh, this is Mellie," he said. "I didn't think you could see her. I guess I'm dreaming."

"You've got to let him go, Cyane," said Mellie to the blue-haired nymph.

"Garric's ours!" Blue-Hair insisted. "You have one of your own, Mellie! Why are you coming here?"

Cashel seemed to ignore the women's argument. "Mellie says we can help you leave," he said to Garric. "Though if this is a dream, I don't know. Have you been keeping well?"

"Well enough," Garric said. "It's all pretty confused."

He laughed and added, "It was confused before now. I think I must be dreaming too, but I'd like to wake up."

It was good to see Cashel again. He projected a sense of solidity that nothing in this place and perhaps nothing else in the waking world could match. You could always trust Cashel not to do the wrong thing even if there might be many right things that he didn't bother himself about.

"Cashel wants you to turn his friend loose," said the tiny girl on Cashel's shoulder. "He's even stronger than you think. You have to do what he says, Cyane, or..."

She fluttered her little hands in a gesture that was somehow as threatening as the way a storm surge humps as it approaches the shore.

"I dreamed I dived over the side of the ship," Cashel said. He frowned, trying to organize the details of his memory. "But there wasn't any water. I just walked through the door."

"I was following a path but I went off it and got lost," Garric said. "I found this—"

He looked at the sword and wondered again if he ought to belt it around his waist.

"—but I wasn't looking for it. At least I don't think I was."

He frowned too.

"It's not fair!" the nymphs chorused. Green-Hair looked ready to cry with the frustration of having her wishes balked.

"Show Cashel's friend the way out," Mellie said with cruel nonchalance, "or Cashel will make a way for him. You know he will."

"I met Mellie on the way to Carcosa," Cashel said vaguely. "I didn't say anything then because I didn't think you could see her. I guess you only see her in dreams?"

Garric shrugged. He buckled the sword belt. There were five sets of tongue holes; the set tighter than those the previous owner had normally used felt most comfortable on Garric.

"Not fair," Green-Hair whimpered as she took Garric by the hand and tugged gently. He hesitated, looking from the nymph to Cashel.

"Go along with Prasina," Mellie said. Garric heard her voice as clearly as if she'd been the size of a normal woman. "And you should be more careful about what you get yourself into. My Cashel may not be around to help you the next time!"

She put her hands on her hips, leaned forward, and stuck her tongue out at Garric.

"Mellie!" Cashel said in embarrassment. The girl burst into laughter and patted his earlobe with one hand while waving to Garric with the other.

Prasina tugged again. Her sisters had gone somewhere while Garric wasn't looking. He followed the green-haired nymph toward one of the arch- ways.

"Goodbye, Cashel!" he called over his shoulder. "Good to see you again, even this way."

Whatever way that was...

Prasina stopped at the archway. "This will take you back, Garric," she said. "The way you came is blocked, but this is shorter anyway."

He smiled awkwardly at the nymph. Cashel and his tiny friend were no longer in the courtyard. Garric was afraid to say anything in case it meant he wouldn't get free after all, so he ducked into the corridor beyond.

"Goodbye, Garric!" a nymph's voice called behind him. "Don't get off the path!"

The corridor was paneled in yellow pine with many knots. The way grew darker with each step Garric took, but patches of fungus on the wood gave off a pale light to which his eyes adapted after a time. Until then he kept his right fingertips against the wall.

He jogged, holding his scabbard with his left hand to keep it from flopping as he moved. It felt natural to do that, instinctive even, though he supposed it was a habit Carus had had to learn a thousand years before.

A hundred yards from the entrance, another corridor crossed the one Garric was following. There were lights burning in the branch to the right; he heard cheerful music coming from that direction.

There was no chance at all that Garric would leave the path he was on this time. If he saw his sister being murdered down another corridor, he'd treat it as an illusion and keep on going.

Keep on going and pray to the Shepherd that he was right.

He came to a place where part of the ceiling had fallen in; he clambered over the debris. A bronze helmet and the gold hilt of a sword lay among the masonry, but the blade and the bones of the man who'd carried it had rotted away in long ages past.

A slime of glowing fungus now covered walls of bare stone. Garric jumped a crack in the floor several feet wide; the air that puffed up from it was hot and sulfurous. The corridor was by now a tunnel through living rock. At one point a metal pipe crossed from one wall to the other. It was cold and hummed when he touched it.

Garric saw light ahead of him. He sucked in his lips and continued at his previous deliberate pace instead of breaking into a dead run. Something small squealed and crunched beneath his callused foot; it felt like bare bones without a sheath of muscles and fur.

The tunnel ended in a circular room hundreds of feet across. The ceiling was a harsh white blaze. Garric couldn't guess how high it was, but the light itself was a pressure on his shoulders.

He stopped and released the scabbard. His palm ached; he hadn't realized how hard he'd been holding the weapon.

Machinery whose purpose Garric couldn't imagine was bolted to the floor. Most of it had slumped into piles of rust from which poked tubes of a crystalline substance, some of them broken.

The exit was a quarter of the way around the circle. Garric let out a deep breath. Until he saw the rectangular opening in the wall he'd feared that there was no way out of his nightmare after all. He strode to the exit, letting the sword swing and feeling almost jaunty.

The passage grew larger beyond the opening, but it was nearly blocked by the skeleton of the giant who'd crawled as far as he could before he stuck. His right hand was extended: the finger bones lay in the tunnel just short of the circular room.

Garric squeezed past the skull, four feet across through the temples. There was a single eyesocket where the bridge of a man's nose would be. Garric didn't know whether that was a deformity or the way all the creature's kin were born. The giant's bones were relatively heavier than those of a human.

The rib cage was still articulated. Spiders the size of Garric's palm hung from webs marked with a Z-pattern of silk. The creatures scurried to hiding places among the spiky processes of the spine.

The spiders' hairy bodies were dirty yellow; their eight eyes glittered in the light seeping past Garric and the skull behind him. He pushed through the webs, pretending they were thin cloth, pretending that he wasn't afraid of fat yellow bodies dropping on his neck in the darkness.

This was the way out of his nightmare. He was going back to his friends. He was going home, and fear wasn't going to stop him.

The passage kinked. It was pitch dark. Garric felt his way over a pelvis more massive than an elephant's. He stepped down, his right hand on a great thighbone, and there was no floor beneath his feet.

Garric shouted. He clutched at the bone but his fingers slipped from the smooth surface. He dropped through darkness, flexing his legs by reflex. Hitting the stone surface was as great a shock as the fact of it being ten feet below where he'd expected it, but he landed on his feet.

He stood in the center of the circle Tenoctris had drawn on the tomb floor. The candle on the empty shelf had fallen over but still burned in a pool of wax. The door was open, and the night was dark outside.

Tenoctris lay on the floor unconscious, and of Liane there was no sign.