8

Ilna was fully conscious, but it took all her remaining strength just to smile. Her weakness in that gray limbo had permitted others to use her.

But she hadn't been as weak as they thought. At the end, the Hooded One must have wished he'd left Ilna os-Kenset alone. Ilna would have laughed if she'd had the strength, but she could smile.

Garric cradled her with his left arm under her thighs and his right supporting her torso. Her head rested against his shoulder. He was breathing hard, but that was from his previous exertions—not her weight.

Water lapped the corridor ahead of them, faintly phosphorescent and the only light since they left the torchlit chamber. Bubbles swirled on the surface, and occasionally a shadow swam past.

Tenoctris was in the lead. The water had risen to the middle of her spindly calves already. Soon the old woman would have to hike up the hem of her tunic.

"A little farther," Tenoctris said. "Though after that—"

Ilna heard a roaring crash behind them. Shock waves danced across the surface of the water, forming arcs from wall to wall of the corridor.

"Here!" Tenoctris said, stepping to the right into what had looked like solid rock an instant before she reached it.

A surge of water boiled up the corridor. It rose to Garric's waist and dampened Ilna's dangling toes. He ignored the current's pull and followed the old woman up a flight of three steps: two cut into living rock like the corridor from which they branched, the third and topmost made from blocks of yellowish limestone.

"Tenoctris?" Garric said. "Are the Hooded One and the queen really the same person?"

They were in a high vaulted cellar. Air and enough light for eyes adapted to the dim corridor came down an open staircase on the other side of the room.

"I don't think so, Garric," the old woman said as she plodded toward the stairs. A tremor shook the ground. "I think the queen is a wizard in her own right, a rival of the Hooded One, and he merely took on her semblance for a moment. They're both searching for the Throne of Malkar. But I can't be sure."

Drifted sand lay against the pillars and in a thinner sheet across most of the floor. The dry air was harsh with grit that danced wildly at a second ground shock. There was no sign of the water that had flooded the corridor below, if "below" was even the right word.

Tenoctris reached the staircase. She staggered as the cellar trembled violently. The pillars wavered like trees in a high wind, and clouds of fine sand humped up from the floor.

A block fell from one of the arches. It crashed down in a loud cracking clamor as the whole vault began to disintegrate.

Garric spread his left hand to brace Tenoctris while still supporting Ilna's legs with his forearm. The old woman stepped briskly up the stairs, pushing off from the wall with one hand to speed her. There was a fourth shock, a small one, but the air was pregnant with expectation of what was about to come.

Ilna twitched her foot to see if she could move. She doubted she could stand; certainly she couldn't walk unaided.

Tenoctris disappeared out the doorway at the top of the stairs. The cellars shook so violently that fallen blocks bounced waist-high.

Garric leaped forward. The lintel, twisting from the doorposts, grazed his shoulder on its way down. The dust of shattered masonry puffed around them but they were clear—standing at the base of a bluff with the sheer ice wall of a glacier pressing close behind them.

Tenoctris was already climbing the pathway that slanted up the face of the bluff. The ice groaned. It was nighttime with no light but that of the stars; Ilna didn't recognize the constellations.

"They wanted Sharina because she's the daughter of the count and countess," Garric said. "But why do they care about me?"

"Sharina is the daughter of Count Niard," Tenoctris said, "but her mother was the countess's maid—Lora. You're the son of Countess Tera, Garric, and through her descended from King Carus. Only that can explain your link to Carus—and his to you."

Garric stumbled in surprise as he followed the old woman. A slab of rock plunged past them and hammered hard on the ground: ice pressure was causing the cliff to flex and fracture.

"Put me down," Ilna said as loudly as she could. "Go on and I'll follow."

"No," Garric said. "And don't wiggle or you'll kill us both."

They continued upward. "Tenoctris?" Garric said. "My mother said Sharina was the countess's child. She was sure!"

"Lora was numb with the pain of childbirth," Tenoctris said. "A state I've been glad to avoid as a participant. She would have believed whatever your father told her."

After a moment she added, "Reise is a very intelligent man, Garric. And as faithful to his duty as he raised his son to be."

The path was too narrow for Garric to carry Ilna crosswise. He turned his back to the cliff face and sidled upward. Ilna hung off the side of the bluff, over ground that was increasingly far below. The wind eddying between the bluff and glacier was cold and bit with teeth of ice crystals.

"Oh!" Tenoctris cried. Rock broke away under her heel and spun into the shadows below, narrowly missing Ilna's legs.

Garric's left hand flashed out and snatched the old woman as she started to fall; Ilna's weight was in his right arm alone. Ilna snorted in a half-conscious attempt to make herself as small as possible.

Tenoctris caught a root dangling beneath the bluff's overhang and drew herself up. Her feet vanished over the edge. Garric gripped the same root and heaved Ilna up ahead of him. Instead of solid ground she found herself hanging on to a root of a tree that tossed in warm salt water while a hurricane raged.

Tenoctris lay on the trunk, gripping the rough bark with her fingers and toes like a tree frog as a wave burst over her. As soon as the water receded she began crawling again toward the leafless branches nearly two hundred feet distant.

She looked over her shoulder and shouted to Ilna. Wind carried her words away, but Ilna had no doubt of her meaning. Ilna wasn't sure she could walk yet, but she could crawl. She looked behind her to be sure that Garric was following and started on.

The sky was a solid mass of cloud, lit occasionally by magenta lightning. In one flash Ilna thought she saw a giant eye in the side of a wave fifty feet away. A trick of the foam, not a creature hunting in this heaving waste....

The tree trunk lifted in the wave's hand. Ilna was gaining strength; already she'd caught up to Tenoctris. She had to be careful not to put her hand on the old woman's foot. They were beyond halfway.

A six-inch lizard peered at them from a crevice in the bark, its tongue flicking the air nervously. How long had it been since the tree fell and stranded its little denizens in a merciless sea?

Lightning flashed. This time Ilna saw not only the slit-pupiled eye but also the pearly shell and a dozen of the ammonite's waving tentacles. The predator was within twenty feet of the trunk now.

Ilna rose to her knees, resting her torso against the thrust of the wind. She spread her hands to either side of her body.

"What are you doing?" Garric said, screaming to be heard.

She ignored him, waiting for the lightning. In the next rippling flash, Ilna moved her fingers in a pattern that she understood as surely as she knew which warp threads to raise as she thrust her shuttle across the loom.

The monster waved a tentacle in a curt, disappointed gesture and sank back into the sea. Its shell was at least thirty feet in diameter, and the beak nested in its tentacles could snap a big man in half.

Tenoctris had reached the lowest branch. Ilna followed, smiling with grim satisfaction. She supposed she could talk to spiders now also. Well, she'd always respected their craftsmanship.

The branch overhung the sea's tossing surface, a foot above or ten depending on the state of the waves. The old woman crawled out to where one branch of a fork had broken so long ago that the stump was covered with a bark callus. She dropped feet-first toward the sea, vanishing before she touched the water.

Ilna checked to be sure that Garric could see what was happening, then jumped after Tenoctris. Her feet hit a slab of coarse limestone with jarring suddenness.

She was on a jungle-covered pyramid which rose in tall steps toward a covered altar. Tenoctris was clambering up the next waist-high platform.

Trees, some of them several feet in diameter, had set their roots into cracks from which they levered the blocks apart. Ilna's quick glance took in scores of different kinds of vegetation. Plants included the great trees, vines, mosses with feathery fronds, and spiky bromeliads.

Garric dropped, apparently from a branch reaching over the platform. The tree had compound leaves and flowers like a mimosa.

"This way!" he said. He draped Ilna over his right shoulder like a sack of grain.

Ilna shouted a protest that didn't make any more difference than she thought it would. Without pausing, Garric snatched Tenoctris with his other hand and threw her over his left shoulder. He jogged along the platform to the flight of ordinary-sized steps running up the center of the pyramid's face. Ilna hadn't noticed them, perhaps because she was close to the point of exhaustion.

The vegetation at the base of the pyramid turned yellow as though a stain were spreading through cloth. Insects were crawling out of the deeper forest. Ilna supposed they were ants, but each individual was the size of her little finger.

There were more of them than any number Ilna could imagine knowing. Stalks of grain in a field, pebbles on the shore of Barca's Hamlet...They advanced with the inexorable certainty of water boiling on a hot fire.

"I can walk," Ilna said, but she whispered the words. The tick of the creatures' mandibles rustled louder than the wind in an aspen grove. They frightened her as she had not thought she could be frightened. Tiny scissors slicing her flesh a thousand times, a thousand thousand times...

Garric mounted the steps on the toes of his feet, jogging despite the weight he carried. He gasped for breath but he didn't slow. Ilna wasn't sure whether he saw the pursuing ants or if he simply knew there would be something to drive them.

"Tenoctris!" Ilna said. Both women jounced violently on Garric's shoulders with each upward stride. "How much longer?"

The old woman tried to smile. The shocks must be even more brutal for her, but there was no choice. "Longer," she wheezed.

Garric reached the top of the pyramid. He was weaving from exertion. His foot turned on a wrist-thick root festooned with hairy suckers and he almost fell.

"Inside," Tenoctris said, trying to look past the head of the man holding her.

The ants were a yellow-brown mass only one level below the humans. They covered all four faces of the pyramid.

Garric threw himself and his burdens under the stone canopy. The altar block had a basin for blood and a groove to carry away any excess. The stone sides were carven with scenes from the rites practiced there. The style was chunky but clear enough that Ilna could see that the victims were human and the priests were not.

The ants had reached the highest platform. Tenoctris wriggled onto the top of the altar and faded from sight. Hand in hand, Garric and Ilna followed her. They sprawled in a bowl-shaped crater from whose floor rose jagged, glassy spikes.

Ilna got to her hands and knees. They were all gasping. The air was cold and their breath wreathed them. The sun directly overhead had a greenish tinge.

"This way," Tenoctris said. She pointed to a fracture in the side of the bowl, a path upward in a surface otherwise too smooth and steep to be climbed. "Garric, Ilna, can you...?"

Ilna nodded. She didn't have breath to waste speaking. Garric got to one knee and they rose together.

A creature came over the basin's far rim about a quarter mile away. It had many legs like a centipede, but its gleaming body segments were polished steel. It started down the wall toward the humans.

The creature's sinuous body was over a hundred feet long, and its mandibles were the length and sheen of swordblades.

"Hold the pace, don't hurry," Garric said, gesturing the women ahead of him into the fracture. "We're tired, and if we try to push we'll fall. Steady will see us clear."

He was right about falling if they hurried. Ilna wasn't sure that any pace she could maintain up this jagged pathway would be enough to escape the centipede, but she no longer really cared.

Tenoctris climbed ahead of her, leaving bloody handprints on the surface. The crater wasn't volcanic. Its wall was a web of fracture lines of which this crack was merely one of the largest. Something had smashed the ground so hard that rock fused and spewed skyward.

The centipede came on, its feet clicking like hail on the mill's slate roof. Ilna didn't look over her shoulder. What would be, would be. She remembered every detail of what she'd done in Erdin. Her only regret was that Garric would die also. The fault was hers alone, but this wasn't a pattern of her weaving.

The old woman's heels no longer climbed at the level of Ilna's eyes. A moment later Ilna fell forward because the handhold she'd reached for by habit wasn't there to take her weight. She sprawled on a plain as flat as a millstone, featureless except for a black throne looming like an island in a calm sea.

Garric collapsed beside her. They'd escaped the centipede. There was no sound but their breath and their hearts pounding.

"The Throne of Malkar," Garric whispered.

"Yes," said Tenoctris. There was no other sound in this world.

Ilna got her limbs under her and rested her forehead against the ground. The surface had no temperature or texture; its gray hue was a perfect neutral, neither color nor absence of color. It was the palpable form of the limbo in which she had lost her soul.

The three of them were in a vast circle of sourceless light whose center was the black throne. The walls of darkness were moving in.

"Come," Garric said. He stood up.

"Garric, no," Ilna wheezed. She was crying with anger and frustration; and fear, she recognized the fear. "It's better to die. Garric, I know what lives here."

Tenoctris was rising. "Come," Garric repeated, and touched Ilna's cheek with his hand. She got up, blind with tears but unwilling to deny his command.

They walked toward the throne. Garric was between the two women, a hand on either of them. The wall of darkness squeezed closer behind them, though the distance to the throne didn't seem to change.

Ilna bent forward to look at the other woman. "Tenoctris?" she said.

"This is the only path," Tenoctris said. "I don't know whether it's a path out."

"We started this," Garric said. "We're going to finish it."

Darkness brushed close at their heels; driving them, threatening to engulf them if they hesitated. Ilna felt the damned moaning in stark despair, utter and eternal. Their eternity if they let the darkness swallow them, hers and Garric's and the old woman's.

That bleak eternity would be preferable to joining the thing that was the throne.

"Malkar isn't a person," Tenoctris said. Her voice was audible but oddly flat: there were no echoes in this place, not even from the ground. "Malkar simply is. The throne exists only as a symbol."

Tenoctris might have been talking to either of them or to herself, marshaling her thoughts here at the end. Tenoctris had lived for her learning, Ilna knew.

What had Ilna os-Kenset lived for? Well, she'd helped defeat the Hooded One. That was at least a result of her existence if not a purpose.

She chuckled. Garric squeezed her hand in comradeship. Did he understand, even now? Well, that didn't matter either.

"To sit on the Throne of Malkar is to be the focus of half the power in the cosmos," Tenoctris said. "To have half the power in the cosmos. A man with that power could do anything."

"But he wouldn't be a man," Ilna said.

"No," Tenoctris said. "He wouldn't be a man."

Ilna could see details of the throne now, though when she focused on any particular point it blurred away. It was like trying to watch serpents mate in the twilight. The patterns were too complex for even Ilna to grasp fully, but she understood them well enough.

She had been part of the pattern not long ago. The tree she'd surrendered to somewhere in gray limbo was a tiny part of the throne's vast fabric.

"To sit on the Throne of Malkar," Ilna said with a detached smile, "is to become all evil."

"In human terms," said Tenoctris. "In human terms, yes."

They were very close. The throne stood on a three-step platform. It had broad arms and a high back formed of the same material. It was sized for a man—a tall man, a man like Garric—but at the same time Ilna felt its vastness spread through all the darkness of this plain and of the greater universe beyond.

Garric gathered the two women into the cradle of his arms, one in the crook of either elbow. He lifted them and walked forward.

No, but Ilna's mouth didn't speak the denial her mind had formed. If this was what it was to be—

Garric mounted the platform's three steps, moving with the steady grace that had marked him from childhood. He disregarded the weight of the women he carried. He was smiling faintly.

"All the power..." Tenoctris whispered.

So be it! 

Instead of sitting, Garric stepped onto the throne's seat. He lurched up with his burdens and put his left foot on the carven arm as the next step. Then he leaped as though he wasn't exhausted, as though he wasn't carrying two women who for their different reasons would have been unable to come this far without his strength.

Garric's right foot gained the top of the throne's back. He rose once more on the power of that leg alone and hurled all three of them up into the darkness.

Arms caught them. The light of paper lanterns was dazzling, and the twilight glow around the door baffles was like the sun at noon.

They were in a room Ilna didn't recognize, though she saw that the furnishings were Serian. Garric was in the arms of Cashel, whose blank expression showed fear for his friend's utter collapse. Sharina held Tenoctris; the girl was reaching for a cup of juice to offer the old woman.

"Here, let me lay you down," Liane said. "It's all right, Ilna. You're safe now."