G
arric stood on a fang of rock above the sea, facing the monstrously tall figure of the Hooded One. The wizard's head brushed the lightning-shot clouds, but it wasn't quite clear where his feet rested.
Garric looked over his shoulder. A thousand feet below foamed the maelstrom of his nightmare, covering the sea almost to the horizon. Among the flotsam caught in its coils were creatures so huge they were clearly visible even at Garric's distance above them. The spirals of water were as slow and inexorable as the tide itself, and there was no escape from them.
“Tenoctris?” Garric called.
Nothing answered but the howling wind and the roar of the whirlpool below. He and the Hooded One were alone. Though Garric knew the figure's giant size was an illusion, when he raised his head to look at his opponent he felt an emotional effect that his intellect couldn't fully override.
“Would you like to be King of the Isles, Garric or-Reise?” the Hooded One said. His voice was a roar, part of the thunder but louder than that thunder. “Hail, King Garric! Do you like the sound of that? I'll make you a greater king than any of your ancestors, boy. Greater than Carus, for
I
will support you!”
Armored soldiers paraded through the center of a city that dwarfed ancient Carcosa. Huge crowds lined the route of vast temples and colonnades, cheering at the top of their lungs: “Great is Garric, King of the Isles! Great is Garric!”
All the structures were built of black stone, and the sky was the color of soot.
Garric took a deep breath and stepped forward. “I'll take
my friends with me back to where we belong,” he said. A gust of wind buffeted him spitefully but he walked on. “You'll leave us alone. That's all I want, and I'll have it or I'll kill you.”
“Do you want the woman Ilna?” the Hooded One shouted angrily. “You can have her! You can have any woman,
all
women, boy! Lead me to the Throne of Malkar and I'll give you all the world else!”
Ilna stood before him, wearing a long scarf that wrapped her from shoulders to ankles. She held one end of the diaphanous fabric high and pirouetted beneath it, stripping herself layer by layer.
Behind Ilna were a score of other women: all of them young, all beautiful; all of them offering themselves in varied forms of coquettishness. Liane was among them.
Garric grimaced and stepped forward. The air resisted him. It had a gelid thickness, as if he were walking through cold broth. He was nearer to the Hooded One, though he knew distances were deceiving in this place.
“I'm your queen, you fool!” the wizard said. “Bow down to your queen, Garric or-Reise!”
Garric hadn't seen the change, but a coldly beautiful woman dressed in lace and ribbons of precious metal stood in the place of the hooded wizard. In her right hand she held a sceptre, its head a gleaming purple sapphire.
Garric paused. He'd never seen the queen or even her image, but this woman looked as the queen should look.
“You're a loyal subject, Garric,” the woman said. “Because of your courage and loyalty, I'll make you my consort. Prince Garric, King of the Isles in all but nameâand you'll have me!”
“No,” Garric said as he took another step. “You're not the queen, and it wouldn't matter anyway.”
She scowled and dipped her sceptre. There was a violet flash.
Soft golden light flooded over Garric. The ground was a meadow of ankle-high grass thick with pastel flowers. A
dome of warm air formed a vault across the sky, though Garric could see lightning continuing to rip between the clouds in the high heavens. The breeze was gentle and breathed sweet spices.
The Lady in Her robe of bleached wool stood before Garric. “Garric, my child,” She said in a voice as kindly as a mother nightingale's. “I've tested you to see that you were worthy. Bow to me, Garric. When you rise, I will make you my Shepherdâa god to rule the cosmos beside me. Bow to me, Garric!”
She was beautiful and pure. She was all Good in a single form.
Garric didn't know what the truth was. He and most of his neighbors in the borough had been perfunctory in their worship of the great gods. They gave grudging support of the Tithe Procession, and the better off sacrificed a lamb on their birthday. He couldn't doubt the reality of this shining figure before him, though.
He didn't know the truth. If he was wrong, he'd bear his punishment knowing that it was just.
“Duzi, forgive me if I stray,” Garric whispered. He stepped forward. He would take the Lady's throat in hisâ
Lightning pulsed down in a triple shock, filling the world with its blue-white glare. All was rock and storm and the roaring sea again.
The Hooded One stood before Garric, the size of a normal man. The figure threw back its cowl. The face beneath was hard, smooth, and sexless. His cold eyes were the color of the jewel on his wand. Ten feet separated him from Garric.
“Stop!” he ordered, pointing the wand. The rock between them bubbled in a gush of violet light.
Spatters fell on Garric's shins, blistering the skin. He halted.
“I've kept you alive,” the wizard said, “because I want you to find the Throne of Malkar. If you force me, though, I'll blast you utterly to oblivion.”
If Garric stepped forward, the Hooded One would dissolve
him in a bath of violet fire. Garric knew he couldn't reach the wizard before the wand stuck him down.
People in the borough said Garric was a smart lad, just as they said Cashel was slow. Cashel wasn't as simple as most of his neighbors thought him, and maybe Garric wasn't quite so bright either, but he'd always felt he was as likely to find the answer to a problem as anybody else he knew.
There wasn't an answer this time. He could submit to evil, or he could die.
Garric laughed, because he understood now what Cashel had meant when he said, “Don't trust that sword. Trust yourself.” There really wasn't a choice after all.
“I won't serve evil,” Garric said as he stepped forward.
“Die then for a fool!” the wizard said, and tried to point his wand.
A net of light as fine as cobwebs bound the wizard's hand and arm. Red threads crossed blue, gossamer but unyielding. The Hooded One's wand spewed violet force, gouging the rock without diminishing the web's strength.
“I am Malkar!” the wizard screamed.
“You're a puppet!” said Garric. “And I see your strings!”
He leaped the glowing rock and gripped the wand in both hands. It was metal and so cold it burned. He took it from the wizard's hand and twisted it with the strength of youth and desperate need.
The wand shattered in a spray of powder and rainbow light. The fang of rock dissolved like sand as the tide rolls in. Garric heard the Hooded One scream again.
Garric wasn't falling. He stoodâhe still stoodâbefore the empty throne in the room whose walls dripped seawater.
The throne was shivering to powder the way a pile of grain settles. Ilna lay beside it, gasping with effort. A web of threads she'd teased from the fringe of her shawl bound her fingers together.
Tenoctris touched Ilna's shoulder supportively. “She has such exceptional power,” Tenoctris murmured to Garric. “Even for a woman whose mother was a sprite. But now that
we've succeeded, we need to get out of here very quickly before we drown.”
Garric stepped to Ilna and gathered her up in his arms. Green water bubbled through the porous walls, and the stone was beginning to crack. A single corridor led out of the chamber, slanting upward.
Garric could see and hear normally, but part of his mind remained in another place. The Hooded One's limbs flailed as he fell toward the maelstrom.
His scream went on and on.
I
lna 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 exertionsânot 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 thatâ”
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 clearâstanding 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 maidâLora. You're the son of Countess Tera, Garric, and through her descended from King Carus. Only that can explain your link to Carusâand 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 â¦
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 â¦
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 bowlshaped 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.