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the sea’s pale glitter still moving in the bay. I turned, and went on over the green and white patchwork paving, between the open foundations which were all that remained. A few cracked marble obelisks leaned toward the hills, as if undecided whether to fall now or to wait a few centuries longer. The strange howling winds which live in deserted places blew through the wreckage of palace walls.
The sun rose higher, and the sky was a brittle uncertain blue. It was noon, and I had passed through many gates, across many ruined roads. They had become one and the same to me. We were higher into the terraced hills, the sea behind us, remotely turquoise. Here, between buildings, a tree had thrust itself. I sat down beneath it, staring out across the empty plaza.
Fethlin, Wexl and Peyuan crouched a few feet from me, shared a small meal of goat cheese and dried dates. I refused the food they offered, but took a sip or two from the waterskin Fethlin carried.
The ruins made me ill at ease, I needed to move on, despite my tiredness, yet I did not know where to go, nor what I must look for. Though the wind still blew hard, it was warmer. I shut my eyes, leaning against the tree. I was dozing, slipping into sleep, when suddenly the green spear opened my brain. I started awake, and in that moment, felt the Pull, strong as I had felt it on the plain before Ezlann. I got to my feet and stood still, trying it, as a dog sniffs out a faintly remembered scent.
There was a little side street, flanked by a few solitary standing walls, leading southward out of the plaza. I walked toward it, and into it, and down it, and heard the sounds of Fethlin and the other two, rising and coming after me. In a while, the Pull became so strong I began to run. One of my black shadows ran beside me, three others behind me. The street vanished in among trees. And beyond their dark moist shade, the land fell abruptly away and downward. I stopped, finding I was looking out across a small valley, hidden by the terraced hills from the beach, and the cliffs.
A flight of steps had been cut in the hill, now as green as the hill, leading down. The valley was also green, and almost empty. A few white stones lay on their sides like sheep, strayed into an enchanted place and petrified.
At the far end of the valley rested a cloud of fir trees, and
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out of this cloud appeared the hand of a giant, with one long finger pointing up, toward the sky.
Behind me, Wexl uttered an unknown hushed word, perhaps the name of a god.
But the hand was stone, like everything else, though not quite like, for the color was warmer-a harder building stuff, which had lasted longer. There was a ring at the middle joint of the finger-tower, which seemed to be a great balcony circling it. There were still bits of gold in the ring; they caught the sun and glittered yellow-white.
I began to go down the overgrown stairway, and at once I was cold. I thought the three warriors might not come with me, but they did.
Near the valley floor shrubs had grown over the steps, and they hacked a way for me with their knives. The grass in the valley was like velvet under my feet, but nearer the building it grew coarser and longer, and there were purple flowers with thorny stems. I looked back several times beyond the warriors. The valley was very still.
I turned my foot on a peculiarly smooth stone, and again, a few feet later, on another. I think I looked down because they had not really the feel of stones at all, and saw a skull lying in the grass, polished and brown from age. I was careful where I put my feet after that, but I saw others, and bones besides.
In the icy shadows of the firs lay the skeletons of three large dogs, or even wolves, perhaps.
Something about the bones terrified me. Yet the cold tingling of my spine and neck, the desire to look over my shoulder, had become so much a part of me that I was almost able to ignore them.
Tree shadows sprayed across the base of the hand, on the intricate stonework and carving which represented a bracelet. Facing me, set like a jewel in the bracelet, was an oval dark door which seemed to be made of onyx. There was no marking on the door, no indication of a way in. Across the threshold something lay staring at us with black sockets.
“The Guardian,” Fethlin said softly.
The skeleton was fully clothed in an ancient decayed armor, a cloak from which all color had faded, a helm with a long crumbled plume. A sword rested on its bone thigh, vivid with rust. It was strange, for the flowers and grass which had overgrown all the rest had not touched him.
The dread I felt then, I realized, did not come from me,
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but from the place, and from some long ago atmosphere laid on it by a curse or a Power.
“No farther,” I said to Fethlin. “I must go in alone, if there is a way in.”
They did not argue with me, and I forced myself forward to the oval door. I stooped over the dead sentry, and touched his armored chest with my fingers.
“Peace, old one,” I said. I was not sure why I said it, but the words seemed to come into my mouth. “I mean no harm, and I have a right to walk here. Know me, and let me by.”
There was no lessening of the cold or terror, but I went past, going around him, and not stepping over, and when I put my hand on the oval door, there came the snap of a lock, and it opened inward in front of me.
I do not know what I expected, I suppose, the worst or the best that could come to me. Certainly nothing so ordinary as the round white room. I went into it and the door flew shut behind me. I felt no particular panic, for somehow I had known it would. With the shutting of the door, the room grew darker, yet not totally dark. Light came, not from windows but from the well above where a stairway led upward into the tower.
On the walls there were faint shapes, the ghosts of pictures. I could make nothing of them. I needed my lost sight-that sight which could make out the engraved words on the High-Lord’s way, so blurred and faded no other could tell what they were. I left the walls and went toward the stairway of white marble. On the first step a second skeleton-warrior sat grinning at me.
“To you, also, peace,” I whispered. Eyes seemed to move far back in the sockets, the hideous mouth laughed. I went around him and up the stairs.
On the first level there was nothing, only replicas of the faded walls, and the light was stronger. At the second level the wind blew in coldly on my face. Five oval open doorways pierced the walls of the room. I crossed the marble floor, and emerged from one of them on the ring-balcony of the finger tower. The balustrade was very high, its carved head a foot above my own. Only tall men or women could have looked out over the ring, across the green valley. To me, only the sky showed itself, hard and icy blue, and the tips of the hills beneath it. I moved around the balcony slowly. The floor was laid with colored stones, red and brown and green and gold, the same as in the ruined theater at Kee-ool, yet the pattern was more intricate, almost mathematical. I moved round and
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round the balcony, my eyes on the colored paving. Round and round. It came to me, dreamily, that I might walk here forever, round and round, until I died. Yet the paving held such a variety of vistas, it did not seem I crossed the same space, but over water and treetops, and the red sands of some other world….
A gull, flying inland, saved me. It shrieked high above the tower, as if to warn me, perhaps in its own fear of the valley. I came to my senses, ran in at an oval door, and stood in the pale room, panting. Fool! Surely I had known there would be magic in this place, and traps to catch every brain and will. Had I forgotten already the brown bones in the grass?
The stairs still led up, this time away from the daylight. I went to them and began to climb. Black marble here, and darkness. And narrowness. My dreams came back swiftly to me now, those dreams I had lost in Ezlann. The white marble leading to the black, and then-