There were roofless rooms with walls which seemed to go forever upward into darkness and at the top of that darkness the sound of something poised enormously and rocking, rocking, rocking. There were prodigious arches, windows leading into enclosed gardens in which stone beasts looked at me from wild eyes as though they wanted desperately to move. There were great halls in which fires burned and tables were set with steaming foods. I did not eat. I did not drink. But Shattnir within me drew the heat of those fires and stored it.
When I could go no further, it was beside one of the incredible hearths that I sat, hunkered upon a carpet woven with patterns of serpents and quadrumanna in intricate chase and capture. Shattnir drew power, and drew, and drew. Half sleeping, I let her draw, let her make me one great vessel of power. Far off through the halls of that place I could hear sounds once more, as of doors softly opening and closing, and I was afraid of what might be coming. My hand went into the pocket at my side. “Come, Grandmother,” I whispered. “Divine Didir, come …”
What came in answer to that clutching invitation was old, so old that my mouth turned dry and my skin felt crumbled and dusty. Ages settled on me, a thousand years or more. It was only a skin, a shriveled shell. There was nothing there, nothing—and then the skin began to fill, drawing from me, from Shattnir, from the world around us, began to swell, to grow, to push me from within until I thought there would be no place left for me to stand, and I cried in panic. “Stay, stay. Leave me room!” Then there came a cessation, a withdrawing, and a voice which whispered out of ancient years, “I see, I see, I see.”
I sensed Dorn within, and Dorn’s awe; Trandilar, bowing down; Wafnor, head up, smiling; Shattnir offering her hand to that One I had raised from the ages. Grandmother Didir, Demon, First of all Gamesmen of the dim past, She who could Read the mind of this place, this monstrous place, if She would. If I had known the awe those others would feel, I would not have had the effrontery to raise Her up. I am glad, now, that I did not know. My other inhabitants had not been ignorant of my fear, now She was not ignorant of it. I heard all their voices, hers rising above them like a whisper of steel, infinitely fine, infinitely strong.
“Well, child. You have found a dangerous place.”
“Sorcerer’s Power Nine,” whispered Shattnir. “Necromancer Nine,” said Dorn.
“Nonsense,” she said. “Dangerous, not deadly. We old ones do not easily admit to ‘deadly,’ do we, child?”
I did not move, for she was reaching out from me, using the power Shattnir had gathered, reaching out through the very fabric of that labyrinthine construction to find its center, its mind. I felt the search go on and on, felt the blank incomprehension of the mighty walls, the stony ignorance of the pillars and stairs while she still searched, outward and outward from me to the very edges of the place. Nothing.
Down the corridor, a door opened.
“Below,” she whispered, sending that seeking thought out and down, through mosaic floors and damp vaults, down to bottomless dungeons and endless catacombs which stretched beyond the walls away into lost silences. Nothing.
The door shut. It seemed to me that I could hear Didir grit her teeth, a tiny grinding itch in my brain. “Up,” and the mind went once more, more slowly, painstakingly, sifting each volume of air, each rising stair, climbing as the structure climbed into the lowering sky, wrapping each rising tower as a vine might wrap it, penetrating it with tiny thoughts like rootlet feet, to the summit of it all, the wide and vacant roofs. Nothing.
Just outside the room in which we were, not twenty paces down that great corridor, we heard a door open, heard the waiting pause, then heard it shut once more with that great, muffled sound as of an explosion heard at a distance. Oh. Lords of all Creation, we stirred in fear. Those within me gave shouted warning, but I needed none of them. I flowed up the wall, calling upon the power Shattnir had stored, flowed like climbing water, until I lay upon that wall no thicker than a fingernail, stretched fine and thin and transparent as glass, seeing through my skin, feeling through my skin, knowing and hearing with every fiber as the door into the room opened and something came through. The door shut once more. But within the room something hissed, something ancient and malevolent. I could feel it, sense it, knew that it was there, but it was not there to any known sense of seeing. Protogenic and invisible, it filled the room, pressed against the walls, pressed against me in a fury of ownership of that space, that structure. Then slowly, infinitely slowly, without relinquishing any of the threatening quality, a door at the far side of the room opened and that which had inhabited the room flowed away. Behind it the door shut with that absolute finality I had heard over and over again.
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