Daniel removed the goggles and dropped them into a cargo pocket. He was wearing a utility uniform since anything else would’ve sent quite accurate rumors racing about the Sissie, but one didn’t greet a potential lover looking like a creature peering up from the surface of a pond.
He knocked softly on the panel. A bar whispered; then the door opened outward, catching on blown sand. Daniel quickly brushed the obstruction clear with the side of his boot.
“Daniel?” a voice whispered from the darkness.
Daniel stepped toward the blurred shadow in the doorway. “Ah, Margarida?” he said.
She threw herself into his arms, whispering, “Beloved!” before crushing her lips against his. He embraced her, noting that her robe slid smoothly over flesh with no sign of undergarments.
Margarida pulled her head back. “Come,” she whispered, leading him inside and tugging the door to behind him. “There’s a room here, nothing fancy but . . .”
They walked together down the narrow corridor, Daniel’s left arm around Margarida’s waist while her right hand toyed at his hairline. She was very warm and soft enough that the side of her body molded perfectly to his.
Something pricked at the back of Daniel’s neck. An insect? he thought, frowning slightly.
His legs gave way. He was conscious, but everything around him happened behind a wall of glass. Margarida tried to hold him upright, but his weight bore her down until the dozens of robed legs scurried to help her. Arms lifted Daniel carefully.
The glass grew even thicker.
CHAPTER 22
Daniel was being carried; deep into the earth, he thought, but he wasn’t sure whether he was confusing what was happening to his body with the slow trail his mind plowed down a slope of ice. He could see normally, but he was face down and couldn’t turn his head for a view of anything but bare feet and the hems of robes.
He heard sounds, but his brain couldn’t seem to connect them with the words he used to know. Once he managed to move his lips to mumble, “Tell Adele. They’ll be worried about me. . . .”
The voices rose in volume; fingers touched his throat, then moved away. Another voice spoke reassuringly. Daniel kept going down.
There were no glowstrips. The companions of the men carrying him held lanterns whose bright white light seemed out of place here in the bowels of the tree. Hard shadows capered across the featureless walls. The rock-cut stairs turned and turned about at landings which seemed far apart. Several times Daniel felt the hands carrying him pass his weight off to others.
Feet moved ahead of him; metal squealed. They passed an iron door into a chamber. Daniel couldn’t guess how large it was, but the lanterns didn’t illuminate its full extent.
The air had a dry, vegetable odor. A long row of mummy-shaped bundles stood upright against a wall at right angles to the one in which the door was set. As Daniel’s captors carried him past them, he suddenly realized that the bundles weren’t balls of twine but rather tendrils twisting over and around themselves like those of a house plant in too small a pot. There were hundreds of the root clumps, perhaps more.
Daniel’s captors spoke among themselves. Hands lifted his shoulders and set his feet on the earthen floor again. His legs supported him, though he’d have toppled onto his face without the others keeping him balanced.
Daniel could see his captors now, though the Prior was the only one he recognized. One of the robed figures moving at the edge of his vision might have been Margarida, but the light wasn’t on her face. It puzzled him that he felt no emotion, but he supposed that was an effect of the drug that held his muscles catatonic.
An acolyte pulled a coiled rootlet toward Daniel and wrapped it around his forehead. The room’s back wall was plant material, a vast plane of root plunging toward water flowing in the depths of the earth. His scalp prickled where the tree touched him. Fluid beaded on his skin, but he didn’t know whether it was his own blood or sap dripping from the Tree.