The Wraeththu Chronicles (16 page)

We descended for some minutes, progressing slowly. At the bottom a corridor with a damp, sandy floor stretched forward. The ceiling had once been plastered. We could see, from the light of a single crackling torch hung on the wall, that most of it had fallen away. The stone beneath was pitted and cracked, but there was no rubble on the floor. It seemed to indicate that the place was used fairly regularly. Wall paintings, obscured by black mold, depicted orderly rows of figures marching toward the end of the corridor, their expressions frozen in haughty piety. I had expected to hear the sounds of chanting, the preliminaries of ritual, but the single sound that echoed toward us was worse than that, much worse. It was the last, desperate cry of the irretrievable soul, still recognizable as human, or har; just. I froze in horror, and found myself gripping Cal's arm. He touched my hand. "Let go. Come on."

The corridor was not really that long. At the end, the remains of huge, wooden doors sagged inwards. Beyond that, the light was stronger. The gap between the door lintel and the wood was so large, we could look through easily into the room beyond. It was a high-ceilinged chamber, columned, camerated; a temple.

Several figures stood around a central bowl of fire. Lianvis, clothed only in his hair and a black loin-cloth threw grains into the flames, which spurted up, amethyst, sapphire and ruby. His eyes shone like a wolf's in moonlight. Reflective, milky and opalescent. Ulaume, robed in diaphanous gray stood at his left side, holding a metal dish. His face was arrogant, yet disassociated, fronds of hair wafting about him as if in a breeze. There was only one man there and that was Shasco. He stood a little apart from the others. I counted six hara, including Lianvis and Ulaume. Candles, thick as my wrist, stood upright in thick pools of their own wax upon the floor, illuminating the circle and the signs that had been chalked there,

Lianvis spoke a word of power, and cold, luminous light filled the entire chamber. The candles guttered fitfully as if the luminence choked their flames. I could see then what had passed unnoticed before. Curled up on the ground at Lianvis's feet, moving feebly like a weak puppy kept from its mother too long, was a child, presumably human. Ulaume clicked his fingers and two of the Hara stepped forward to lift the boy; his feet trailed in the chalk as if the bones were broken. When the light touched his face . .. God knows I never wish to see such a thing again. He knew he was to die, wretched hopelessness was etched across his features, frozen in a rictus of a scream. It must have been his cry we had heard at the mouth of the corridor. I wondered what they had done to him for him to make such a sound. There was no mark upon his body. Lianvis stepped forward, his head thrown back; a wolf's head, his eyes beacons of destroying power. Ulaume bent to untie the cloth about his master's hips and I could see the corded muscles in his lean thighs straining and trembling with restrained energy. Realization made me utter a single, shocked "No!" and Cal elbowed me in the ribs to silence me. I did not want to see any more. Lianvis's face was changing into something demonic, the lips pulled back, long teeth shining in the sulphurous radiance, his neck twisting, twisting, his hair lashing like frenzied snakes. The boy began to howl, to struggle, his feet paddling helplessly in the dust, and I pressed my eyes against Cal's shoulder. There was nothing we could do; nothing. Whatever power we possessed was no match for Lianvis in that state. I clapped my hands over my

ears, but it could not shut out the sound, the dreadful, dreadful cries and Lianvis's snuffling, guttural snarls.

Suddenly Cal pulled me upright. Whirling noises, shrieking out from the chamber broke up his words, but I made out, "Now . . . now ... the power ... him , . . the power . . . back! Back!" Reeling backwards, we started to run, the appalling, scraping screeching chasing us down the corridor; the smoke, the stench of burning flesh.

I shouted, "Does he know?! Does he know?!" as we ran. Cal did not answer.

Blue light flooded the tunnel as we reached the bottom of the steps. Slipping, grazing myself against the stone, I scrabbled up after Cal, his long limbs sure and swift above me. Outside, the stillness of the night was unnatural. Cold air hit our lungs with a breathtaking chill and I gasped, hardly able to breathe. Cal hauled me out of the tunnel, dragged me across the paving and threw me down behind the wall we had first hidden behind, covering me with his body, Arcane words ripped from his throat, his breath wheezing and shuddering. It was a simple protection. I was in no position to augment his strength with mine. I tried only to press myself into the stones, to become invisible. For a second or two there was only silence and then the night exploded with sound and blue luminence. Cal buried his face in my hair. I could feel his heart racing manically in his chest against mine. "Oh God, oh God, oh God," he kept repeating. I had never seen him afraid. We hugged each other, eyes shut tight. Something formless and huge spurted out of the ground, out of the tunnel. Its light burnt through our closed eyelids. Stricken with terror, I held my breath again, feeling the awesome, devilish fever pulsing round us. Lianvis transformed into elemental power. We were lucky that in that elevated, supernal state we were beneath his notice. With a dismal scream, he shot toward the stars, fizzing and hissing like a monstrous rocket, the air cracking around his phantom shape in shards of lightening. I opened my eyes, looked up over Cal's shoulder. It filled the sky. Lianvis, barely recognizable as he but for the suns that were his eyes. I felt he looked right into me, mocking. He could have reached down and plucked us off the earth. But the night just filled up with his demon laughter and the light that was his greedy soul reached up for the sparkling darkness. He blazed away from us like a comet. A word sprang uncontrollably to my mind. I still don't know why exactly, unless it was some kind of obscure presentiment concerning later events in my life. The word was this: Aghama.

Cal rolled off me and lay on his back, blinking at the sky. "Your idea," I said, sitting up and brushing sand off my coat. Cal closed his eyes and swallowed, clenching his jaw. "We could steal the horses and leave," I added, tentatively. "What horses?" Cal said in a flat voice. I peeped over the wall and could see them lying there; the black humps of their bellies. "Dead," I murmured rhetorically.

Cal sighed. "There's no cover on the way back to the camp. We'll have to wait for the others to leave," he told me.

I said nothing, although I could see no way we could get back inside Lianvis's tent without

being seen.

"Maybe we should just try to get back to our horses and get out of here," I suggested.

Cal rolled his eyes. "Are you joking? We have no supplies, no idea which way to go. Lianvis would know then that we'd seen something. He wouldn't let us get away. No, we wait, and then follow the others back. Once we're in the camp, we could bluff our way through if anyone sees us."

"Cal, he knew we were here, he must have!"

Cal stared at me and then shook his head. "No, I don't think so, no."

We lay in the dark, still breathing quickly. After a while I said, "Cal, what happened in there?"

"Murder," he replied. "Murder for power. Wraeththu essence is death to humankind, remember. But it is a sweet way to kill for those on the dark path, a sweet way to feed on souls . . ." He motioned me to silence then, for we could hear them coming up out of the ground. I heard Ulaume curse when he saw the dead horses, and that was all. There was no sound of conversation as they headed back into the desert.

I turned to Cal. I spoke to him. I said, "What are we, Cal? What are we part of?" He did not answer.

After maybe fifteen minutes, Cal stood up. He said he could see their flashlights in the distance and it was safe for us to follow. Luck was on our side. When we reached the camp, sounds of revelry reached us from around a leaping fire by Shasco's vehicles. His men were getting drunk and the witnesses of Lianvis's conjurations, doubtless desperate for a drink themselves, had joined them. As we slipped silently back into the tent, I saw Ulaume standing staring into the fire, a tin cup pressed to his chest. Even in the orange glow I could see his face looked gray.

I still feel that it was by some miracle that Lianvis did not become suspicious of my behavior from that tune on. When, on the following day, Cal and I went to the inner room to spend more time with him on my studies, I could do little more than twitch and mumble at him. Terrible images of a gaping mouth uttering only a heart-rending mewl paraded indelibly across my inner eye. What made it worse was that Lianvis had conducted that ritual for no other reason than sheer, dissipated pleasure. I had thought at first that the whole exercise must have been for Lianvis to gain some kind of extra power, but Cal informed me otherwise. "What we saw was sheer decadence," he said. "Nothing more. Lianvis took life as we take alcohol. The effect is similar, but as you saw," (and here he smiled) "so much stronger!"

Now, facing our charming host every day was a nightmare. Lianvis sat, composed and neat upon the cushions, hut somewhere inside him the rushing wind spirit, star power, still glowed; a hidden, dense-white core. He had trained me well to focus my strengths; there was little time left to spend with the Kakkahaar and I wanted to make that time as short as possible.

I visualized the shining symbols of protection against evil above my head and kept them there. If Lianvis guessed I knew something of his activities, he gave no sign, but knowing his level and his art, I think it virtually impossible that he did not know. It seemed he did begin to accelerate my studies toward their conclusion, but I may have imagined that. Of course, Cal and I had considered leaving the Kakkahaar before my ascension but we did not want to risk making Lianvis suspicious of us. We were afraid of him and it was fear that kept us there beside him.

Two days later he told me that my ascension to Acantha would take place that night. I asked him where and he replied it would be at the ruins some way west of the camp. He watched me sleepily as horror must have thrilled across my face. But that was all. He said, "It may be a good idea for you to ride out there this afternoon. Look at the place. Take Cal with you."

Of course, once we were there, in radiant daylight, there was no sign. The underground corridors smelled old and unused. Flaking cobwebs dangled from the crumbling plaster. Perhaps we took the wrong route down. The vast temple chamber was lit hazily by smoking bars of sun. There was no blood on the floor, no marks at all. Cal and I did not speak, but looked at each other in the gloom. Cal moved into the radiance and looked up through the cracked ceiling. It was a perfect picture. I poked among the rubble; not even a candle had been left behind. Nothing spoke to me there; it was thoroughly cleansed.

I had to fast that day. At sundown, Lianvis put me in a different room. He would come for me at midnight, he said. I lay down on the couch, uncomfortable in the hot, close atmosphere of the tent. My mind was in a daze; my ascension seemed something of an anti-climax now, The pleasure, the pride, the excitement had gone out of it. Kakkahaar's noble Hara were bloody with unhallowed crimes. I knew that what we had witnessed under the ruins was no isolated incident. The memory of it would not leave me and I knew it never would until the desert was behind us. One awful thought, that I could not banish, that made me feel sickened, saturated with sickness, was this: me going with trusting innocence with Cal into the desert. Me leaving my home with a stranger whom only Fate had decreed had not been a Kakkahaar, or something like them. Visions of me smoking, writhing, sizzling in the most unspeakable of agonies kept rising before me. Me, unconsciously flirting with Cal, tempting a possibility I could never have dreamed of.

So, here I lay, still in Lianvis's tent, awaiting the hour of my ascension ceremony. I vowed we would leave as soon as I was rested the next day. Perhaps then the bad thoughts would fade. I threw my arm across my eyes and pressed down hard, making the colors come. I knew that outside, in the real outside that is, far beyond the sand, the rocks, the scrub, the world of men still struggled to maintain their supremacy. I knew that the things that had frightened me so far were mere nothings in comparison with what might await us beyond the solitude of the sand.

Outside, muted voices called mournfully on the night air. The sun, a great, boiling, ruby globe, would be sinking in a haze of colors behind the ruins. Bars of light sneaking in through the cracked vaults of that unholy place would be crimson now, the chamber suffused with bloody light. And later I would go there, later bite my tongue whilst Lianvis stands in that same place; different, calmer forces bowing to his touch.

I turned on my side and curled my knees up to my chest. The room looked tawdry, the air stale beneath its veil of incense. I felt hot and dirty, hungry and anxious to be free to leave. The hours till midnight seemed interminable. I rolled around on the couch, trying to get comfortable and reciting rituals in my head until I hated them.

It was almost dark when I heard the curtains rustle behind me. Someone came in on silent feet, bringing with them a hint of the freshness of the air outside. I rolled over quickly. It could not be Lianvis; it was far too early. A dark figure, barely visible, stood at the side of the couch. All I could see was one pale hand holding the folds of its hooded robe together. I made no sound, but waited. The figure pulled itself up to its full height and gradually unfolded the draperies that swathed it, raising its arms above its head. Pellucid skin glowed like phosphorous in the shadows; yet I still could not make out the face. There was a cloud in my head forbidding recognition. I held out my arms and the strange, silent, pliable visitor curled into them. I found a mouth tumid with desire and I drank from it dark and secret things. All the colors around me were mazarine blue and richest purple; a taste of ink. A burst of starfire. I was ouana, violet and gold, tongued with flame, seeking ingress, conquering and revering. Streams of ice flowed from my heart, meeting fiery air, hissing, swirling, making steam. It may only have been an erotic dream; a temptation, an illusion, or it may have been a living, hungry thing.