“No. No. He’s never murdered anyone. I thought it over while you were sleeping. He’s just trying to frighten me again. He can be that way. He doesn’t know how to control without fear.”
Radi would have liked to believe Edvar, but he’d seen the Tycoon’s face when he’d announced he’d pushed Deza down the sinkhole. He’d looked triumphant and satisfied, and Radi knew the sinkholes in the karst were virtual abysses, for the Maundifu had run deep there hundreds of years ago before the Red City had diverted it for its own purposes.
“I’ll have to find Deza first,” Edvar was mumbling. “As soon as I get back into the compound, I’ll sneak away to find Deza. Then we’ll go to your friends in the City and tell them what has happened.”
“Even if I told you the sea route and how to find the hidden harbor, you’d never get through the shoals without signal lights, and Sheria’s not likely to arrange that for you.”
“We’ll go overland. Deza has been in the mountains. I’m sure she’ll be willing. I can get sure-footed ponies from my father’s stable and we’ll go overland.”
“Too long,” Radi said. “Even if you don’t get lost in the mountains, it’s a ten day trip.” He didn’t bother to mention how long it would take to search every sinkhole in the karst for Deza’s body. “The City will be underwater just as soon as Sheria has taken possession of the armaments.”
“I have to stop them,” Edvar said fiercely. “I have to save Deza.”
“You are willing to take a lot on yourself, my young friend, and I do admire your courage. But this is real life. Deza is dead and the whole world is doomed, and there is nothing that you or I can do about it.”
Edvar fell silent and Radi knew he was grieving. It was likely that the boy had never lost anyone he loved, and certainly he’d never been so close to affecting millions of lives before. But heroic intentions wouldn’t change anything, and Radi had to get Edvar to stop fantasizing and to deal with what little they might control. The kindness of the light still bothered Radi. He looked up at it now. It was a foreign device that looked like a gob of molten metal in a heavier metal sconce. “Who placed that flambeau?” Radi asked Edvar. “Was it Harubiki?”
Edvar frowned, apparently trying to remember. “It could have been. I think the others were carrying pocket flares, but she took that from the sconce in the foyer.”
“I thought so,” Radi said, still staring at the light. “We need to put it out. She left it deliberately.”
“We won’t be able to see our hands in front of our faces if we do that,” Edvar said.
“But we will be able to see Harubiki when she returns. She’ll have to carry some kind of light to make her way through these caves. If we wait in the dark, we’ll be able to spot her light, and we can at least put up a fight.”
Edvar shook his head. “Why should she want to? We’re no threat to her or to what’s going on up there.”
“You don’t know Harubiki. My being alive is an insult to her, a terrible blow to her pride, especially after so many attempts. She’ll return to finish me off just as soon as she can break away from Sheria.”
“What about me?” Edvar said.
“She won’t leave any witnesses.”
It seemed that Radi had merely confirmed what Edvar had already guessed. He nodded, stood up, and tried to lift the globular light out of the rough niche in the wall. It was out of reach, but he quickly took off his shirt and snapped the fabric at the bright globe. Radi smiled, wondering if he’d have thought of that technique as quickly through the fuzz in his brain. It took several tries, but finally the fabric picked up enough of the light’s weight to knock it out of the sconce. The light dropped and rolled, gathering momentum on the downslope of the ledge. Edvar dived, trying to grab the ball of light, but his chains brought him up short, and the light dropped over the edge, swiftly leaving them in blackness. Edvar cried out in dismay.
“Ah, well,” Radi said. “It would have been a comfort to have something solid to throw at her, but at least we’re not well-lighted targets any longer. Feel around for rocks. Perhaps there’s something we can work loose.”
“You want to throw stones at her?”
In the darkness, Radi heard Edvar laugh. It was ludicrous. Harubiki carried a throwing knife and a laser hand gun. Their chains gave them a little maneuverability, but not enough to make any difference in the end. Harubiki could stand across the chasm and fire at will. She could even use a crossbow and get the job done. But luck had saved Radi from a watery death, lust from Harubiki’s knife. Nothing but his ex-henchman’s wanton need for revenge had left him alive long enough for Edvar to save him from the singing snake. Was it so unreasonable to hope that something would give him an edge just long enough to put out Harubiki ‘s eyes with stones?
“I’ll be damned before I lie here and just let her shoot me,” Radi muttered angrily. “Come on, Edvar, help me find something to throw.”
“Radi, look no further. I have something much better than stones.”
“A knife?” Radi said, choking on the word with hope. He felt the boy touch his knee.
“Better than a knife. I have the snake, Radi. The singing snake. I can pitch it across that chasm as easily as I can throw a stone. It can’t even turn on us because of the precipice, and it ought to be angry enough to strike quickly.”
Maybe not quickly enough, Radi thought, but it would be sure. Harubiki would never escape the frenzied snake in the confines of the tunnels. He squeezed Edvar’s shoulder. “That bit of good news almost makes me eager for her to arrive,” he said. “But how…?”
“With a lure,” Edvar said. “The hunters showed me how. The song-fangs bring good luck. The natives catch them all the time.”
“And a lot of them get killed in the process, too,” Radi said.
“They do?”
“They do,” Radi assured him.
Momentarily there was silence and blackness. Then Edvar said, “Where’s the flagon? I think I need to contribute to the contents.”
Radi handed it over.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“There is a way out of this,” her father was saying to the little girl, speaking to her out of the darkness before he reached up to lift her out of the niche into his arms so she would not be frightened. “You can find the way, Deza.”
“Is he dead?” the little girl said.
“Yes. Now listen carefully to me, Deza. Can you find the underground lake that Chuma told you about? With the little boat made of glass?”
It was an extraordinary conversation. He mentioned Chuma as casually as if he had not just come upon him silently in the dark and murdered him, but Deza was not surprised by it. She accepted it with the straightforwardness of a small child and was worried only by the pressure of the water, seeming to come at her from all directions, even from overhead, now that she focused on it. She concentrated inward, trying to separate water from water.
No, that was not what she was doing. That was what Deza had to do now, sorting the water pressures out patiently, fighting at the same time to stave off the panic she always felt that the water would somehow overwhelm her. The little girl Deza felt none of that panic. There was water all around her, even bearing down with incredible power through the mazelike structure that crisscrossed the entire cliff they were now under. Not only that, but the little girl could do more than feel the pressure. She could identify it unerringly from a dozen sources.
“The lake is that way,” she said, her father holding onto her hand again like a blind man as she pointed first in this direction, now that. “There’s water between us and the lake.”
“How much?” her father said.
“This high,” Deza said, pointing to her stomach.
“Wadeable then,” her father said, and they had plunged into the darkness in the direction they had come. Deza’s father led for awhile, but he kept getting them off into side tunnels. Then the little girl would dig in her heels, and he would retrace their steps back to the main tunne
l. After two episodes of that, he had exploded, “You lead! You’re the one who knows where we’re going!” and pushed her ahead of him. She had whacked her head a couple of times on rocks jutting suddenly from the ceiling or walls, and once her father got stuck where she had squeezed through easily. But she had made no wrong turns. She had led them straight to the lake.
She was not so much heading blindly toward the water, Deza realized, as visualizing the entire network, tracing a mental finger along the intersecting natural tunnels and manmade viaducts to find the most direct path to the lake. Now, why can’t I do that? Deza thought, annoyed. I could have found the Tycoon’s source for him.
Her father strapped their lanterns to their wrists and they lit like magic when they reached the lake. Deza was so astonished by what she saw in their light she almost got them lost.
“Pay attention, Deza,” her father said as the boat bumped into the solid rock end of a cul-de-sac.
“But it’s so pretty,” Deza protested, and her father let the oars rest a moment so Deza could look her fill. The lake was crystal clear under a high domed ceiling the lanterns only caught glimpses of. Deza lowered her hand over the edge of the boat to look at the delicate stone flowers growing under the water and along the shores like clusters of snow. Her father was not looking. His head was cocked to one side for the sound of pursuers.
After a few minutes, he said quietly, “Which way, Deza?” She pointed and then pointed again and they rowed silently out of the dead-end and into the main current of the Maundifu. Their oars made rippling, overlapping echoes that crossed each other into a kind of music. Once Deza started to say something, and the effect of her own voice, multiplied and diminished till it sounded like a bird’s trill, so unnerved her she didn’t speak the rest of the trip down the long dark river.
After a very long time the river widened and smoothed out to a surface of glass. Deza’s eyes, almost closed in sleep against her father’s chest, suddenly widened. She sat up, her whole body stiff, and her father steered the boat immediately into a sandy cove and left it there, lifting Deza out onto the soft sand and setting off on foot in the direction she pointed, into a dark passage that turned and turned again into the open, to the spot where the water of the Maundifu plunged straight down into blackness.
From there on the trip was harder. Her father knew where he needed to go, but their destination did not end in water, in fact needed above all to get away from the Maundifu, which was the route their pursuers would follow. He had to take the lead again, using what landmarks he could remember and consulting Deza as to what lay between. It was not so much that he didn’t know the way as that the landscape changed constantly with the computer’s shifting of the water table, flooding a chamber here, leaving a usually drowned passage dry, opening and closing the sluices and dams that kept the delicate interstices of the water table from drowning the Red City or cities on the surface. The Maundifu had been a roaring flood on Mahali’s surface, pouring through canyons, tumbling underground to carve and destroy, spilling Mahali’s very life into the poisoned sea so that she was a true desert planet, uninhabitable at all except along the shores. The people of the Red City had changed something more important than the face of the planet. They had changed its very foundation, subduing the Maundifu to their own wills, to the wills of their computers, claiming its deepest canyon for itself, and once entrenched there, using its impenetrable position as a base for ruling the planet: diverting the water of the Maundifu into a complicated network that crisscrossed under nearly the entire continent, creating oases all across the land with rich wells of sweet water for the nomads and even richer wells of mineral-laden ground water for the mbuzim.
They had had an extraordinary gift for water. Much of the technology that had been able to do that had been lost over the years, replaced by superstition and politics until the originally water-sensitive witches became formalized priests who were forced to consult their computers on every decision, and the men of the Red City no longer travelled through the complicated underground they had created. Except to escape.
At first Deza’s father had led her haphazardly from pool to tributary to waterfall, but the landscape had changed so since he had last explored the vast underground kingdom, that he had led them from dead-end to rock wall and finally to a trap cave, a sloping passage that ended in a hundred foot drop that would have killed them both had not Deza cried out in warning. The trap cave was one choice, the other was going back the way they had come, the third a flooded sluice that Deza’s father refused to tamper with, even though a terminal stood near where it would have opened onto the trap pit. “Any change in computer instructions will show up immediately on the main terminal. It would be like shouting, ‘Here we are, come and get us!’ ” he told Deza.
He sat the little girl down at the junction of the three equally bad routes and said, “I am going to try something, Deza. Close your eyes.”
He must have used telepathy, Deza thought. It was not a complex process, just a simple visualizing of the karst where she had just been with the Tycoon—a picture of the yellow cliffs, the blue-gem lake, the sinkhole she was in now, the ledge. The ledge. Deza was excited, distracted by that knowledge, but she did not have time for it. She needed to finish remembering the journey, all of it, the wading down dark airless passages in slimy mud, climbing up long-forgotten human-carved stairways and down natural stairs made over the years by the slow spilling of minerals, till they were pulling themselves up the long last slope into the stunning daylight of the karst. She remembered it all, not in order any more, but plunging out of her like the Maundifu plunging over the edge of an abyss.
Here! Deza thought, standing up, we came here. Only it wasn’t chopped off like this. The slope went on up—in her mind she visualized how the truncated ledge had been part of the longer slope she and her father had climbed, gradually widening into the climb that brought them to the end of their journey farther up the sinkhole’s side. That had caved in, and perhaps the recesses below Deza had caved in when it collapsed, but if it was blocked only by a layer of rubble, Deza knew not only where she was but where she was going.
Deza hurried as far back in the cave as she could get, then dropped to her knees and crawled into the recess, testing the walls to see if they were solid. The back of the recess was piled with rubble, gravel and chunks of rock that Deza was able to brush easily aside. It was easy to see where the opening had been. There was one large rock wedged between two smaller ones in the opening, and Deza searched momentarily for a long sharp rock to use as a wedge in freeing the smallest of the rocks.
She was thinking very clearly, undisturbed by outside thoughts, fears, or distractions, as she had when she was three years old, too young to read terrifying implications into the actions of others, when her own actions had been simple and direct. Deza was not thinking of the Tycoon, or of Radi, even of the astonishing meanings of what she now remembered about her own past. She thought only about the problem at hand, which was enlarging the opening and descending into the underground world she and her father had explored.
The small rock came free, tumbling the other two down to where she could roll them out of the way with her hands. The passage was very narrow at this point, but Deza squeezed through, only to encounter more rubble. She backed out and searched for a different stone, a flattish rock she could use as a scoop. The red scarf the Tycoon had tied her with still hung on her wrist. She put it across her lap and leaned far into the hole she had made, scooping the rubble into the scarf and then, when the scarf was full, dumping it to the side on the sand. She worked steadily until she suddenly broke through dirt and emerged into emptiness on the other side. Then she abandoned the rock scoop and scrabbled with both hands to widen the hole.
Her cloak was in the way. She folded it into a flat packet and stuffed it into her blouse. Then, unencumbered, she wriggled through the hole. When she stood up on the other side, she was in complete darkness. Her effort to pull herself through the hole had lo
osened more dirt and rocks and blocked the opening again. The sound of dripping water was louder ahead and below her a little.
She had changed from the child Deza in one important way. She was no longer afraid of the dark. And she knew exactly where she was. She did not even hesitate—the warm spring was ahead of her and drinkable. She and her father had filled their canteens at it.
She stopped to drink at the spring and then moved, surefooted, down the gentle slope, vaguely aware that she was in utter darkness but seeing that other journey vividly now. The spring, and beyond it a steepening slope, winding down to the floor of the sinkhole. It was not only the memory that was guiding her, she realized so suddenly it stopped her cold for a moment in her blind descent. It was the water, mapped clearly in her head, the spring just behind her, the shallow pool at the base of the sinkhole, the network of thermal vents that had warmed her hideyhole, farther away but as clear as if she were reading a grid, the blue hanging lake on the karst, the oasis where she and the Tycoon had stopped, the sea.
—Father,—she thought, forgetting she could not make contact with him.—When you repressed those memories of our escape, you repressed a lot of other things, too. No wonder you had trouble passing me off as a water witch.—
—It seemed the best thing to do under the circumstances,—her father said.—Where are you, Deza?—
—You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, but I’m on familiar ground now. Why didn’t you tell me I was a princess of the Red City?—
—You might have believed me.—
—And tried to claim my birthright? Tried to get revenge for all those who were murdered for me? You bet I would have.—
—That would have been a mistake. All those who deserved revenge are dead. Sheria rules. She was no older than you during the coup. An innocent child. Revenge is a dangerous thing.—
—How dangerous, Father? So dangerous a wandering con man and his daughter are not safe from it?—
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