She said, “Don’t offer me dross. I shall be safe enough here; these are my people.”
And then she talked, quietly and succinctly, of the hours before her kin took her from the krarl, how she had thought me dying or dead, how the braves had raped her and tied her and returned to rape her, how she had lain awaiting death herself, the anguish and the shame and the rage and the fear of it-everything she told me, till she was a lesson I had by heart.
To lose love and find how you have lost it, neither to blame, like sightless children groping in shadow; there is an edge to that like the knife itself.
“Demizdor,” I said, “come with me. We may be friends at least.”
“Oh, but I do not want your friendship. It is your love I want, and yet, I don’t want it. Go, or I shall curse you. It will be a curse that sticks, for women’s curses are more cruel than yours.”
I saw it was past reasoning. I turned and untethered the black horse and mounted up.
When I had trotted him across the stone hall, she called my name, my tribal name, as she had used it earlier.
So I looked back. The tribes say it is unlucky to do so. There was a story Tathra had whispered to me, about a warrior who was enticed into the Black Place by a woman’s spell and half regained his liberty, but the witch uttered his name, and he glanced over his shoulder, and she drew him back by the fox-fire in her eyes.
There was no fire in the eyes of Demizdor. I could barely make her out for the gloom, only the pale face, the one pale hand.
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“You are my life,” she said.
And she stepped away into the dark and vanished like smoke.
I did not call after her. I foresaw she would not answer me. I rode into the tunnel’s mouth and did not look back again.
PART II
The Wolf Hunt
1
Eleven nights, ten days I traveled that thoroughfare. Judging by the additional passages I had observed leading to the hall of broken pillars, many of the great houses of Eshkorek had secret access to the under-city, and thereby to the ancient tunnel. Kortis’ palace indisputably contained one of these entries. How else should Demizdor have known the place or the trick wall-openings unless she had been familiar with them from elsewhere? Besides, others took the route later, and not via Erran’s cellars.
Having discovered the serpent marker on the stone and activated it, I entered a narrow, low-ceilinged run, speckled with the light of green and gray fungus, and with a foul, damp dungeon odor. This section took an hour’s careful riding, occasionally bent double to avoid the roof. Then the way spread out again into some hall or cave, and grew black enough that I could not see a knife’s length before me. I halted, struck a flint, unparceled one of the torches, and set light to it.
The resin flared up, but presently the flame sank a little, for the air was turgid and enclosed. High overhead, where torchlight could not reach, bats stirred, if bats they were; I never viewed them to be certain.
The floor was level and gave the horse no trouble, though we went slowly across the huge cavern, hidden at its perimeter and still shadowy before.
Then the burning resin flashed on something up ahead, and flashed again. A moment more and, lifting the torch to the length of my arm, I perceived a thing that made me swear aloud by gods I never knew I owned. It was not a cave wall but a wall of dressed stone, and in it an open arch taller than any tall tower of Eshkorek Arnor, and wide as seven streets. The lintel of the arch was a slab of red marble that glowed far overhead like a ruby in the semidark; the uprights were a
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pair of columns of polished black granite, both close bound from base to summit by the twinings of a serpent of pure gold, whose massive jaw-wide head and heart-shaped hood in either case formed the capital. From foot to cap, each column stood at least a hundred feet; the height of the blood-glowing lintel was nearer a hundred and twenty. And In the marble there, carved letters filled in with gold, which named this colossal entrance by the most scornful of paradoxes:
SARVRA LFORN Worm’s Way
I sat my horse, torch in fist, staring. The thing confronting me was like some wondrous laughing malice, still fresh, though made in the youth of the world, a joke and a magnificence to outlast earth.
I remembered how she had told me They had built it, whoever they might be-the race from which her people had “degenerated,” the supernatural god-folk, who had no need to eat or squat and who, presumably, had possessed riches without limit and slaves without number. And somehow it stole over me, the thought that I, like the princes of Eshkorek, did not wish to traverse this ancient way, this Sarvra Lforn. But I had no choice, being a fugitive, with perhaps even now the hunt up for me, and betrayal or cunning showing them my path.
I guided the horse forward. It tossed its head as if it wanted to progress no more than I.
The enormous hollow of the arch caught up the sound of hooves, the sputter of the resin, even, it seemed, my own breathing, like the giant soundbox of some instrument.
And then I came into the tunnel.
The quality of the atmosphere was altered at once. The torch sparked up, for, from vast heights and channels, fresh air filtered down. There was a dry, half-spicy smell that clung there, fragrant, pleasing, terrible, as if, just half an hour before, incense had burned and music played on this road none had traveled, surely, for a hundred years or longer.
Meanwhile, the torch was smiting like a sword on a thousand shades of brilliant color, on gems, on precious metal.
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Dust had dimmed only a fraction, not enough. Decay had brushed with its rotten fingers not nearly all it should. It was an enchanted sweet, stuck in the throat of time.
The torch showed merely fragments, like bits of some broken mosaic I must fit together, and as I pieced it out, I was glad in my belly I should not see all at one moment, in a solitary glance.
Columns lined the broad concourse, slender carmine stalks with flower heads, lotuses and orchids of gold that met a roof like black looking-glass. Lamps hung there, fringed with webs now; once they had burned.
A marble paving ran beside the road. The walls of the tunnel rose beyond, tawny Eshkorek stone, yet smoothed to ice, and plastered, painted, fashioned into pictures. At first I thought they lived, those figures drawn there, they were that faithful to the life, and the scenes behind them seemed to stretch away into the walls themselves, where they could not go, but somehow did.
They were curious, the frescoes. Men flew through the sky in them, sometimes winged, more often wingless, always soaring, above wide plains and jagged peaks, the bow of the new moon or the red eye of a sinking sun beneath them. Lovers lay clasped in heatless conflagrations, or rode the backs of fish, or dallied with snakes, panthers, and lions. All these picture-people were sorcerers. They could tame the wind or send it, call beasts, call fire, calm ocean. . . . And one more thing I noted in them, other than their powers and their handsomeness-a few were very dark, dark as my father must have been, and as I was; but most were pale, paler than Demizdor’s race even, not blond with eyes of jade or blue corunda, but white as alabaster with eyes of white flame.
White as Uastis, my albino mother.
White as a picked bone.
The construction of the tunnel was such that you could ride it at a gallop, meeting no obstacle. However, mistrusting the perfection of the paving-the roof which might have fallen farther ahead, some nebulous danger I had no name for (and wished to leave unnamed)-I kept the horse to a brisk parade trot. He was a strong, alert beast; we got several miles in this fashion.
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Then the torch began to bow and smolder, and a weariness came over me like the weariness of the flame.
Up in the world it was near dawn, I supposed. I wondered if hounds were already stirring on my trail, or if they were yet in confusion at my escape. But, whatever their plans or mine, the need for sleep made me leaden. I was aware that I had been making on this long, without rest, not at the thought of pursuit, but because I did not relish halting here, let alone lying unconscious in this exotic desert.