The Wraeththu Chronicles (128 page)

''Jumpy!"he says.

"Well, I expect to be safe in these rooms," Ashmael replies, shaking his hair from his eyes. Of course, he is safe, and so at home there; I hate him. Pellaz offers him a goblet and they drink together."Only the best," Ashmael says.

"Naturally."

I get the impression they are mocking their positions. Pellaz takes up a slim decanter and pours fragrant, liquid soap onto Ashmael's head.

"You shouldn't do this," Ashmael says, enjoying it immensely. He lies back and revels in the attention. I am familiar with that touch. I can only envy him. That should be me there, surely. This is my dream. Pell rubs the grime, the blood, the weariness away. His touch is magic. I know that look upon his' face; he is considering, thinking. Just a whim. Rinsing the soap from his hands, he stands up and throws off the towel. He dives into the water and, for a moment, the stunned expression on Ashmael's face is unmistakable.

"Pell?" he says.

"Here!" And Pellaz explodes from the water, rising up, shimmering jewels of water flying everywhere. Now they look at each other and I am trapped. This is where I should wake up. It is a dream, isn 't it? Why can't I make it end? I am in the water, dizzy, and I can feel Ashmael's arms around me, his mouth on my mouth, his breath in my chest. I want to devour him. I have wanted to do this for a long time. Come with me. Follow me. I lead him from the water. Dripping, we go into the next room. I lock the door. There is no-one else there. I draw the drapes across the long, open windows that lead to the balcony beyond. The room is now in sun-stained, afternoon dimness. I have not submitted to soume for a long, long time. This is because of. . . someone, someone who seems so part of me, I can hardly . . . feel myself anymore. We dispense with preliminaries because we are both so hungry, Ashmael and I. He spears me swiftly,

mercilessly, and I cry out in pain, shuddering beneath his strength, which I cannot throw off. There is no way I could get out of this now; no way. Who am I? The visions come and I am deep beneath the dark earth. Against my lips, the taste of Ashmael's wound. I pull one of the stitches with my teeth and he laughs fiercely. A bead of blood seeps into my mouth. Who am I? Is this some kind of betrayal? But against whom?

I woke up twitching and snarling. Panthera shook me to my senses. The dark body of the earth was pressing against us, bringing dreams. I forced my eyes hard into Panthera's shoulder and he held me tightly.

As soon as Kachina was awake, we continued downwards. Still no lights. How could it

have happened?

"Oh, it does sometimes," Kachina said. "You see, the Sahale do not need the lights to

know the way and very few travelers follow this route. It might be days before they're

fixed."

"All the other hara at Kar Tatang," I said, "where were they going? To Sahen?"

"Some of them, but a lot more head east to Pir Lagadre. That's a temple settlement, not so far underground. It is where the Sahale conduct most of their trade with the outside world."

We continued to walk. This was a fairly level stretch and we could stand upright. Sometimes, though, I was convinced I could hear noises ahead of us, rather chilling ones at that. Scrabbling, muttering.

"Kachina, is this journey dangerous?" I asked: "By that, I don't mean because of the dark, but . . . other things?"

Our guide didn't answer for a moment. "I've made this trip fifteen times," he said at last. "I've never come across anything dangerous, but I have sensed it at times. I believe the lights act as a deterrent to anything unpleasant."

Perhaps it was the morbid humor of Fate that made me bring it up, but it seemed best not to continue that conversation. Maybe half an hour later, Kachina stiffened and hissed us to silence. We all stood still, tense and listening. I could hear nothing.

"Sense life," Kachina whispered, and that slight sound echoed around us. Nothing happened. "Keep moving," Kachina said, "it's not far now .

And then his words were cut off as something large rumbled swiftly from a side passage just ahead of us. I was dimly aware of teeth, eyes and hair and a miasmal stench. Kachina, in the lead, cried out and raised his staff, but it was too late. Before he could throw whatever power he possessed at the attacking beast, it clipped him with some gigantic, furred appendage and the staff fell to the ground, followed quickly by a stunned Kachina. For a second, the beast, whatever it was—and surely not sprung from this earth—hung between spidery legs, staring malevolently yet without expression at Panthera and myself. I could hear a whistling sound that may have been its breath or its voice.

"What is it?" I squeaked.

Panthera did not care about such details. "Quick, Cal," he hissed, "combine force. Acantha level. We must. Pyro—killing strength!"

"What!" I had entertained no doubts that Panthera's occult training had been more refined than my own, but this was something completely out of my field. Pyrokinesis is the ability to make heat, intense heat, even fire, by the power of the mind alone. Panthera groped for my hand to strengthen the bond.

"Open up!" he ordered and I automatically slipped into mind touch.

"Panthera, I'm not really sure whether I ..."

"Shut up! We have no time! Follow my signal!" It happened swiftly. A fireball was igniting, swelling, between us. I didn't have much to do with its construction other than lending Panthera my strength. It was he who pointed the commanding finger, he who released a bolt of white-hot radiance from his taut body. With a thin screech, the beast scuttled backwards, but not in time. Within seconds, it was ablaze, moaning and screaming terribly. Fortunately for us, it decided to back blindly into the tunnel from whence it had come, instead of charging forwards. We could hear it squealing and creaking until it died away into the distance. Panthera leaned forward, hands braced on knees. He wiped sweat from his face. He wasshaking and so was I. "Oh God; Kachina!" Panthera went to kneel beside the motionless form. "Oh God," he repeated and his disgust and horror could not be contained. Whether the beast had killed him or not, we shall never know. Unfortunately, Kachina had been in the line of fire of our heat blast. Very little remained that was recognizable as Elhmen. "Oh Cal!" In the light of Kachina's rapidly dimming light-cell, I could see Panthera's chalk-white face looking anxiously up at me. He wanted me to reassure him that we had not just committed murder. I would not comment, but picked up the light cell.

"Can you operate this?" I waved it under his nose. Panthera took it and examined it carefully, too carefully. Clearly, his mind was in a whirl. "Yes," he said at length. "Yes, I can." Sparing Panthera any further unpleasantness, I dragged the body of Kachina into the beast's tunnel, going back for the bits that dropped off as I dragged it. Panthera and I then walked on into the darkness, grimly.

"You are more accomplished than I realized, Thea," I said. "How come you didn't use these talents to break out of Piristil, or to confound Outher and his cohorts? It would have saved us a lot of time and bother!" "You don't understand," Panthera replied, in a bitter tone. "Try me."

"Alright. It is something to do with aruna." He spoke as if his mouth was full of something noxious. "When I was captured and taken to Fall-send, I was only third level Kaimana and incapable of mustering my powers alone. As I aged, I did try to improve myself in secret, but as you probably know, hara are such sexual creatures; we need aruna to progress. All that happened to me only served to hold me back. My powers were minimal and unreliable ..."

"And what has happened since you returned to Jael then?" I asked sharply. "I wasn't aware that the situation had changed!"

"It hasn't! Not exactly. I've been purified, of course. My father raised my level to Acantha to purge the contamination of pelcia and chaitra away . . ."

"That still doesn't explain how you managed it without aruna ... or didn't you?"

"No, I didn't. If you must know, I've been taught some exercise in auto-eroticism. It's intended that such practices will rid me of my distaste for physical contact. But now I've learned a way to get on without it, I don't see why I should ever seek it, if you know what I mean. I don't want anyone to touch me again. It revolts me."

"Thank you for being so frank," I said, rather taken aback.

"You're welcome." He sighed deeply. "Oh come on, Cal, you're my friend. Let's get the hell out of here. One wrong turning and neither of us will have the chance to worry about such things again anyway!"

We hoped the road would not branch again, but since our encounter with the beast, Panthera felt that his powers were completely trustworthy.

"If necessary, I shall smell which is the right way to go," he said. "I'm not afraid."

"Are you ever?" I enquired drily.

"Not really, no."

We kept walking. Sometimes, we could hear strange groanings from tunnels, that led off the main passage, causing us to increase our pace, but nothing else actually attacked us. I'm not sure what kind of beings stalk the tunnels of Eulalee, whether they have always lurked there unseen or whether they are the children of powerful and malefic thoughtforms, but it appeared they had been discouraged from molesting us by the fate of their fellow.

"I wouldn't like to have to explain to the Elhmen what happened to Kachina," Panthera said, meaning he was having trouble explaining it to himself.

"He was killed by the beast," I replied. "Believe it, Thea! Don't think anything else; there's no point."

Eventually, a red haze became stronger in the passage before us, which was widening considerably. Statues of naked hara wreathed in flaming hair stood in alcoves along the way, where offerings of fruit and bread had been left at their feet. Ahead, we could see the glow of an intense radiance, and within minutes, reached the end of the path, emerging onto a lip of stone. Below us stretched a vast, underground valley, lit by a thousand, thousand points of fire. Gases and multicolored bursts of flame jetted from cavities in the rocks and valley floor. The air was richly perfumed; very sweet and smoky. Sahen; uncomfortably like a vision of hell

Encounter with the Lyris

"All shall be well... When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one. "

—T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

"So, how do we get down?" I asked, peering over the edge. There was no apparent way from where we were standing.

"Look above you," Panthera said smugly, pointing.

"What is it?"

"Cables. My father talked to me of this. It's a kind of public transport here in Sahen. We'll have to wait." He reached up and pulled a white flaglet out from the wall, which would be clearly visible below. Shortly, a cable-car shaped like a vast, wing-furled bird swept gracefully up to us, and paused at the brink of the ledge. "Passage to Sahen?" Panthera said politely and the pilot answered, "That'll be three fillarets."

We didn't have anything smaller than a spinner, so Panthera was magnaminous and told him to keep the change.

"And where is your intended destination, tiahaara?"

"The residence of the Lyris," I replied, grandly, and without a remark, the pilot released the brakes and we were sweeping, as if in flight, down to the city of Sahen. The buildings were incredible; a forest of stalagmites, precarious walkways linking the gnarled towers, spider strands of cable sweeping between them. All the Sahale have ferociously scarlet or crimson hair (variation in hue depending upon cast). As we swooped along, the pilot's hair (far from all-enveloping as an Elhmen's, but still impressive) billowed out behind him like flames. Panthera and I huddled together on the floor, both of us rather concerned about our safety, for the car rocked dangerously at times, and we were given terrifying visions of the city beneath us. Tall spires seemed to graze the car's wooden floor, often rising right above it, as it

weaved and skimmed its way between them. It was a rollercoaster ride to end all rollercoaster rides. Panthera, of course, had never heard of such things, and looked at me blankly when I mentioned it.

The car glided to a halt upon a large plaza in the center of the city. In front of us rose a magnificent confection; the palace of the Lyris. It resembled a crown of stone, spiked and starred, bridges swaying from spire to spire, where small figures could be seen mincing along them. Our pilot lowered the side of the car and we stepped out, none too sure of our feet. "Over there," he said, unnecessarily, pointing. "Go to the outer gate. If the guards consider your business worthwhile, you may be granted entrance. If not, allow me the liberty of recommending the inn on Ash Row. It is owned by my uncle, true, but good and cheap fare are to be found within, nonetheless. Good-day to you, tiahaara."

Panthera and I glanced at each other quizzically and advanced toward the palace.

"A strangely hospitable and amenable race considering their habitat," I commented.

"Well, I doubt that they ever encounter unwelcome visitors," Panthera replied. "No-one who was unwelcome would ever get this close, I'm sure!"

Thinking back on the oppressive darkness, snaking tunnels and unspecified, mannerless monsters, I was inclined to agree.