Glory growled—not caring at the moment if she was stealing one of Vixen's lines—and followed him sullenly. Come here to talk to somebody, only we're not going to talk to anybody. I reckon all wizards must get a course in talking in riddles along with the wand and the pointy hat.
The corridor was like one of those M. C. Escher drawings where a bird turns into a fish by such slow stages you barely notice. As Glory followed Belegir, the hall about her slowly changed. The clatter of the horses' hooves—and of her flat-soled leather boots—was muted when the rock floor was replaced first by coarse gravel, then by fine sand: first white, then colored sand fine as sugar, poured in intricate patterns as bright and elaborate as a woven rug. Just as the floor changed, so did the walls. Decoration appeared: first simple geometric designs, then more elaborate botanical paintings augmented by carvings, as the corridor slowly widened and the ceiling rose, until without any clear sense of transition Glory found herself walking soundlessly over a floor of intricately patterned colored sand through the center of a huge hall a dozen yards wide whose walls were carved with monumental colored bas-reliefs inset with jewels.
Glory had to admit she was impressed. This was light-years more posh than a string of raggle taggle gypsy wagons-O and some smelly sheep. This was Civilization.
She'd dropped further and further behind Belegir, gawking at the paintings, trying to imagine living in the world that they showed. Here were the Allimir as they must have been before the disaster (whatever it was)—a gentle, happy people, as Belegir had said, and a pretty well-off lot besides. It all looked sort of high medieval, if you assumed a medieval artist who'd discovered true perspective. Everything was in scale, so they didn't look like a pack of midgets. No churches, and nothing much she recognized as religion, but everyone looked cheerful and well fed. If it was propaganda, it was still an attractive line of country. There were depictions of villages, of planting and harvest, of hunting and horse-racing, of shepherds with their flocks.
Of war.
It took her several seconds of staring at a quite nicely painted battle with banners and a lot of foot soldiers with long spears before she realized what she was looking at. Bloodshed. Battles. Conflict. Strife. Peace-breaking, in fact. And all the figures were obviously Allimir, the folks who were allegedly so clueless about this sort of thing they'd got an Aussie schoolteacher to do their fighting for them.
"Belegir!"
He came running when she bellowed, looking frightened and out of breath, dropping the lead-rope and leaving the animals behind. She pointed accusingly at the wall with its pictures of battles.
"What is this? Is this you? You told me you and your mates were pacifists! Englor got all queasy at the thought of fudging a traffic ticket! You weren't even willing to bully me into sticking around to help you—and now this? Looks like you can stage a good and proper barney when you want to. God's teeth!"
Belegir stared at the wall, where several Allimir spearmen were engaged in graphic and bloody violation of one another's civil rights and personal space.
"But that was long ago," he said weakly. "We no longer—"
Glory turned on him with a low growl, clenching her fists. If this was getting in touch with her Inner Vixen, at the moment she welcomed it. She'd been frustrated, frightened, and guilty for too long. Now she wanted to break something.
"You—told—me—you—didn't—do—things—like—that—" she growled in a low husky feline rumble, leaning over until she was staring right into his eyes. "You said you didn't know how!"
"I said we had forgotten the arts of war," Belegir whimpered, tears welling up in his eyes. "And we have! Oh, please, Slayer, do not hit me! I beg you—"
Glory straightened up with a gasp, stepping back and raising her hands to her face. Her heart hammered. The line between being a bully and an action hero was a fine one, and she was afraid she'd just crossed it. "Sorry," she muttered, stepping back further. "I'm sorry. Belegir— Oh Lord, please don't cry. I'm sorry I scared you. Please. But you have to explain this. I don't understand." She closed her eyes, wishing the ground would open up and swallow her, or that Erchane were a proper Goddess-sort who could rise up and smite her dead. Was this what she'd come to? Beating up on someone she was dead sure wouldn't fight back?
"If you can do this, if you have pictures of this, why aren't you. . . ?"
"These walls show stories of long ago," the Allimir mage said in a low trembling voice. "Long before Cinnas, in the morning of the world, the Time of Legend. That the pictures are true is a secret only the mages know—the people who once came through these halls saw only something they knew could not be, a nightmare to frighten children, but we who are of the Temple know the truth. It is no myth. Once this was so, as real as the wind and the sky. In the long ago, the Allimir had conquered the world, enslaved the nations until they were no more, until there was nothing in all Erchanen but the Allimir. But War was like an old love that would not be set aside, and so, in our folly, we still courted her, turning at last upon our own people to set upon them in lieu of other foes. It was an age of madness. The Allimir would have been swept from Erchane's embrace forever, swept away like the snows of winter when spring once more rules the land.
"But Cinnas came to save us. Cinnas brought peace to the Allimir, may his name be revered forever."
Belegir hung his head, as though he had told her something so shameful she'd hate him forever.
Glory looked back at the painted walls. King Arthur and the Norman Conquest, Ivanhoe and the Wars of the Roses; the sort of endless hearts in armor brawls that had been a staple of cartoons and comic books—and syndicated TV series like TITAoVtS—ever since people had started telling each other stories. So ordinary, so inevitable, that they were kiddie fare where she came from, instead of the stuff of repressed nightmare.
"How?" she said at last.
"He banished War from Erchanen, chaining Her upon Elboroth-Haden of the Hilvorn, once called Grey Arlinn. In relief at their deliverance, his people believed She was gone forever, but when I began my studies in this very place, I realized that was not what Cinnas had said to the people when he descended the mountain. No magic—no ensorcelment—endures forever. Why should this of all the great magical workings of history have been different? Discovering those time-lost details became my obsession. I became distant, ungracious, even rude."
"Fancy that," Glory muttered under her breath.
"I taught myself disciplines that no mage had seen a use for in centuries. I mastered ciphers that had lain fallow since Cinnas' day. And I discovered that Cinnas' magics had indeed possessed a term. On the thousandth anniversary of her binding, the Warmother would go free of her chains unless—until—a hero bound her once again."
Belegir heaved a sigh of despair, staring at the floor. His shoulders drooped.
"I tried to warn them. But how could I, when no one, not even Cinnas in his age, had known what would happen then? And things did not stand as they did in Cinnas' day, when all the world looked to the mages for guidance and advice. Even Helevrin thought my studies had addled my mind. Englor, I know now, would have believed, but in that time he was but an apprentice, an untried lad, and I hope I would have hesitated to set mother against son so."
"Wait a minute," Glory said, grasping at the only thing in all of this she clearly understood. "Englor is Helevrin's son?"
"But of course he is," Belegir said in surprise. "He and Ivradan are brothers, and they are Helevrin's sons. Have you not remarked the close resemblance? The magery runs in only a few families among the people, though it is rare for the Oracle to choose two so closely related. Though there was the case in Sinintil's time, when the twins Menegoth and Menelor were chosen. . . ."
Belegir roused himself from the digression with an effort. "But you will not care to know about that part of our history which does not concern itself with the Warmother. As I have said, I alone had penetrated to the heart of Cinnas' riddle, and could convince no one of the truth of my discovery. A
nd to my horror, the thousandth anniversary of our deliverance was drawing swiftly near. Barely could I nerve myself to decide to climb Elboroth-Haden, whom the ancients name Grey Arlinn, to see if in that way I could find some proof to convince my fellows that our darkest, most secret legends were truth. But the records were old, and the day I had set for my endeavor was too late. She rose from her chains before that day, and all the questions I had posed during my foolish years of innocence were answered in full and hideous measure."
"Um. And that was five years ago, was it?" Glory said, still staring at the murals to keep from having to face Belegir. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the mage's nod of assent. "And no one's actually seen this . . . Her?"
"It is the only mercy," Belegir said in a low voice. "That we have been spared that."
Glory shook her head. She'd almost thought she had a notion, but whatever it was it had slipped away while she was listening to Belegir's tale. Maybe it would come back again later. And anyway, it could wait. They had this Oracle to get through beforehand.
But at least she was finally learning some facts. She wasn't sure what use they were, but facts were always nice to have. Maybe when she had enough of them she could . . . knit a tea-cozy, or something.
"Well, cheer up. You've got me, now. When She sees that, She oughtta wet herself laughing. C'mon."
Side by side, they walked up to the animals, and then on through the hall of the Oracle of Erchane. As they went backward through Time, the scenes of warfare gave way to depictions of the Allimir fighting against skin-clad barbarians, and then against creatures that Glory hoped were either mythical or extinct: large long-toothed spotted cats, and—yes!—dragons, or something looking a lot like them, sailing through Serenthodialian skies spraying smoking death on harried villagers below. The dragon flame had been depicted with great care, and so it was easy to see that the dragon did not actually breathe flame, but jetted a spray of venom from its mouth which burst into flame as it evaporated.
God's teeth, maybe the Allimir's problem is just a dragon after all! Great Drathil—they said—burned. And SOMETHING happened at Mechanayas. And the stallion, back at the camp . . . you wouldn't have to flay it if you sprayed it with acid—maybe old Belegir knows just what it was those things used to spit. Maybe some earthquake opened up a cave full of them. Now how, I wonder, do you take out a dragon . . . ?
She was preoccupied with her thoughts, taking little notice as they traversed the rest of the hall and passed through the great golden doors that stood open at the end of the Hall of Murals.
"Here the Oracle's domain properly begins!" Belegir announced proudly.
Roused from her dragon-slaying reverie, Glory looked around at the interior cavern. Its pale fine-grained stone walls were carved with heroic figures in deep relief, standing side-by-side in characteristic attitudes, as if caught attending the longest cocktail party ever. Band after band of these figures, their scale impossible to judge, covered the walls all the way to the distant, domed ceiling.
They'd come at least a mile, maybe more to reach this point. This was the heart of the mountain, and so she should have some sense of being planted deep in the heart of the earth, of the tons of rock suspended above her head.
She didn't. The chamber was too large. It was big enough to trick the senses, to convince her body she was outdoors.
Had this ever been an natural cave? Or was it, first to last, an engineering project that made the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall look like a game of Pick-Up Sticks? Done with magic? Done with mirrors?
She could hear the faint sound that caves made—it was like holding a seashell to your ear, only in this case the seashell was a lot bigger, and she was standing inside—and, somewhere in the distance, Glory could hear the faint, definitive plashing of water. Looking down the length of the cavern, she saw a flight of steps that led up to a doll-small temple set at the end of the cavern. The structure glowed with opalescent fire along its pillared face, and at the foot of the stairs was the source of the water music. A wide round fountain, its bowl glowing with the sun-saturated green of a butterfly's wing, splashed and rang with falling water.
She turned to say something to Belegir, but the Allimir mage was already striding toward the temple and fountain. Glory followed reluctantly. She'd expected, maybe, a touch of claustrophobia when she'd decided to go caving with Belegir. Agoraphobia had been the least of her worries.
The temple was farther than it looked, and as she trudged toward it, the whole scale of the place shifted in the weird mutable way of something without any built-in reference points. Things that she'd thought were small surged and billowed like a Disney cartoon on acid. The doll's-house temple became enormous, its smallness an effect of distance and her inability to put it into perspective, then shifted again; looming and dwindling as her mind fought to make sense of its surroundings. The effect, while not frightening precisely, was dizzying.
Finally they were close enough to it that their own bodies provided the perspective cue, and Glory realized why this place looked so naggingly familiar. Either the Allimir mages had used their dimension-hopping powers back in the Time of Legend to take in a large number of Busby Berkeley musicals, or it was another of those wacky trans-universal coincidences, because the wide shallow half-moon stairs leading up to the portico built in no Earthly style were surely designed for bevies of sequin-clad lovelies to dance down. And whatever they'd been carved from, they sparkled now as if they'd been dusted with sugar.
The travelers stopped at the fountain.
"Here we will leave the animals, and go on alone, into the Oracle's inner sanctum," Belegir told her.
"You're sure it won't mind?" Glory asked uneasily. It had been easy to dismiss talk of the Oracle as primitive superstition on the plains above, in the daylight. Here, in the middle of stupefying proof of Allimir skill—at magic or engineering, it didn't really matter when you came right down to it—it was a lot harder to disbelieve, or to take the Oracle's power lightly.
"She who called you will hardly object to your presence," Belegir answered with easy faith. "And we must have answers."
Damn right, Glory thought grumblingly. She drank from the fountain, then helped Belegir unsaddle the packhorse, unrope the animals, and strip the other two ponies of their remaining tack. He tossed Kurfan the last of the cold pasties, and left the horses with a meal of grain and some of the windfall apples gathered from the orchard at Mechanayas. Apparently the beasts were to be left to wander as they chose in the chamber, but with Kurfan to guard them, they shouldn't wander out.
He made a neat bundle of the tarp and several of the larger baskets and left it tucked against the side of the fountain. The remaining bundle—the tea-kit and a few other items—he rolled into several blankets crisscrossed with ropes, making a sort of crude backpack.
"You ought to let me carry that," Glory said. She had her bag slung over one shoulder, and was holding Gordon.
"It is no trouble, Slayer," Belegir answered, shrugging it onto his shoulders as he straightened up. "A warrior, so say the old chronicles, does not labor like a beast of burden."
"Nice work if you can get it," Glory muttered under her breath. She was still humiliated about losing her temper with Belegir earlier. She had tarnished some heretofore-unsuspected good opinion she had held of herself, and was feeling ashamed. It wasn't a pleasant feeling, and like so many unpleasant things, could easily turn itself into anger if she let it. Anger would make her feel better, for as long as she could fool herself, only she couldn't fool herself forever, and then things would be worse.
Too bad I can't find something around here that deserves to be hit. Because when I do. . . .
The steps were harder than the whole rest of the day had been. Fine for making grand processions up and down, scaled to Allimir legs, they were hell for someone Glory's size to get up briskly. And there were a lot of them. Eventually, puffing more than a little, she got to the top.
Belegir, of course, wasn't
even breathing hard.
Must be the damn corset. Has to be. If I thought I was actually going to have to be doing any dragon slaying, I'd be worried.
She looked around. This was a pillared portico suitable for the making of grand pronouncements. Near the fountain, the ponies dozed, looking bored. She could look across the square and see the ribbon-friezes of heroic-scale Allimir all marching toward the open bronze doors.
She could see something else, too. All over the enormous floor of the cavern, there were thin silvery lines, inlaid against the dark stone, that she'd crossed before without noticing. She'd thought they were just meaningless random decoration, but from here, they were more than that.
They made a map.
"Belegir?" she called, taking care this time to keep her voice soft and friendly, "Tell me what you see," she asked, pointing at the cavern floor.
He came and stood beside her, looking where she pointed. "I see a map of the world," he answered, sounding faintly puzzled. "There is another inside, in color, and I think there may still be some maps on velum here as well."
Oh.
She gazed down at the shapes laid out on the ground below—continents, oceans, which were which? She couldn't tell. But somehow seeing them did as much to make the Allimir real as this whole temple had. With every image she saw, the world became wider and more vivid, more real.
More dangerous.
A fantasy couldn't hurt you. In proper stories, the hero always won—and certainly Vixen came out on top in every episode of The Incredibly True Adventures. But Glory wasn't fool enough to imagine those rules held true for real life. She supposed that somewhere in the back of her mind, for sanity's sake, she'd been holding on to the hopeful notion that this was all some sort of role-playing, with everyone improvising their way toward a foreordained outcome that let the hero win.
But despite magic, despite long pink robes and funny-sounding names, despite weird-looking livestock and strange Oracles, there weren't any certainties. The only thing that was looking more certain with every heartbeat was that stupid unfair things could happen just as easily here as in the world she'd left.
The Warslayer Page 8
