Which meant she could die. And as far as she could tell, the Allimir were the only ones in this brave new world who'd taken an oath of pacifism.
She sighed, feeling tireder than she had a right to, and followed Belegir into the temple.
She'd expected to see a lot of pomp and circumstance—thrones and altars and whatnot—but what there was instead was a large anteroom that led immediately into a sort of hiring hall space. Here the walls were unornamented, covered with a plain coat of homely whitewash, the worn stone floor set with rows of polished wooden benches soft and smooth with age and use. At the top of the room there was a dais with two deep stone cisterns (now empty) flanking it. Obviously, everyone who entered the Oracle Temple came in here. But where did they go from here?
Along the sides of the room ran a series of narrow archways. Glory ducked into the nearest one and looked around. It led down a long close hallway. Along one side there were rows of small cubbies, each barely large enough to hold (as it did) a meager Allimir-sized bed.
"On his tenth birthday, every Allimir child comes here to the Oracle to drink her waters and dream of his purpose in life. So also come those troubled in spirit, or who seek counsel only the Oracle can give. All sleep—slept—here, and took the dreams sent by the Oracle's waters," Belegir said from behind her.
"I hope you don't reckon I'm going to," Glory said dangerously. "Sleep here, I mean."
Belegir chuckled. "Of course not. We go to the living source itself."
With one last look at the series of tiny sleeping cubicles, Glory followed Belegir back out into the hall. The wall behind the dais was cleverly carved—from straight ahead it appeared solid, but in fact its face concealed a passageway . . . one wide enough, she imagined, to accommodate endless rounds of Allimir apprentices carrying the buckets needed to fill the two cisterns. She and Belegir eased through it, and found themselves in a much larger and more elaborate space, as different from the asceticism of the hiring hall as a Quaker meeting house from the Vatican.
From the central court, passages (built God knew when) led off in a dozen different directions. Though there could have been no particular need for them from a structural perspective, the courtyard space was ringed with pillared archways. The pillars were colored marble, which she was pretty sure hadn't grown down here naturally, and the floor underfoot was a mosaic done in brightly colored stones—its center another map just as Belegir had promised, a circle about five meters across, with greens and blues for water, and golds and white and greens for land, and a bright border of gems set in gold. There were ships (out of scale) on the water, and coiling sea serpents, and small golden towns set at various places on the land. The whole effect managed to transcend weird, alien, and unearthly and move right along to vulgar, garish, and over-the-top. Tastes must have changed (and improved) for the Allimir to have moved the paying customers out to the other set-up she'd seen.
"Here is where those who lived at the Oracle had their place," Belegir said wistfully. "But in the Time of Legend, it was otherwise, and in this chamber the pilgrims to the Oracle once gathered. The outer complex is a later addition, built after Cinnas' day—I could talk until the seasons changed, and not exhaust the wonders of the Oracle's building."
And it would probably be chock-full of helpful useful information, Glory reflected, if she were only the right kind of hero. But she just wasn't the anthropological ancient-cities-finding sort, who could figure out the answers to riddles from antediluvian tomb-carvings and whatnot. She wasn't really sure what sort she was, but she wasn't that. And so, things being what they were, old Belegir could natter on until Doomsday about outer complexes and carved pilasters and it wouldn't tell her a thing.
She looked around, hoping for inspiration.
"Here is the world," Belegir said, gesturing at the floor. "Serenthodial, the High Hilvorns, the Great River Baurod, the Sea Carormanda. Beyond it, the Arkarthane Pelagio, where once the finest dyestuffs in our Empire were woven, and beyond that, the Infinite Ocean which circles the world. To the West, beyond the Hilvorns, the Cold Lands: Nirahir, Kirthim, and Ithralay. Oh, Slayer, once the world was wide!"
"Until She came," Glory said, knowing the responses in this particular catechism.
Belegir's shoulder's slumped. "I think She must go among the barbarians when she turns her attentions away from us, and I shudder to think what she may do there, for surely they are as helpless as we?"
Glory frowned. She thought there must be a flaw in Belegir's reasoning, but couldn't put her finger on it, and decided to save thinking the matter through until later.
"How big is this?" she asked, gesturing at the map in the floor.
"How big?" Belegir asked blankly.
"Where are we? And where were we this morning?" She wanted to get some idea of the scale of the Allimir world, though she wasn't sure why.
"Here is the Oracle." Belegir stepped forward, and bent down to touch a pale triangle of amethyst set into the base of one of the silvery-grey Hilvorns. "Here is—was—Great Drathil." A gold city-shape a few fingers-widths away. That made sense; he'd said that Drathil had supplied the Oracle, so it had to be close. "This is Elboroth-Haden, once called Grey Arlinn." His finger swept upward from the gold city-shape, to a symbol in delicate chips of vivid red stone inlaid upon the flanks of another mountain.
He studied the map for long moments, lips pursed. "Here is Mechanayas. Here is Duirondel the Golden Forest. And here is where we began. The scale of the map is not exact, of course."
Less than a good handspan. Glory stared down at the map, converting the hours on horseback into a rough approximation of kilometers, and the kilometers of travel to millimeters of map, and coming up with a size for Serenthodial and the Land of Erchanen that made her blink. You could drop all of Australia into the middle of the Serenthodial without it making much of a splash.
She looked at all of the little gold crowns that had once been towns, five years ago. And now, according to Belegir, there were four hundred people left in the whole place. She shook her head, as close to panic as she'd yet gotten.
"Once the world was wide."
Yeah. And once the world WAS.
"Okay, mate," she said gruffly. "Let's move on."
* * *
Belegir hadn't said so right out, but Glory got the sense that back at the beginning of the Troubles, a lot of stuff had been brought here for general safekeeping, before people realized they were going to have to devote all their energy to staying alive. A lot of the side-rooms that they passed were full of things stacked in the haphazard fashion of things that people hadn't had time to put away properly. As if in acknowledgement of that fact, the rooms weren't charged up with the wizard light, the way every other place she'd seen here had been. She saw their contents in shadowy glimpses as the two of them walked by, the clutter making it impossible to tell what the original use of those rooms had been.
Not that she was overfamiliar with alien oracles and their interior design at the best of times.
They were still moving in a straight line, and Glory was starting to sincerely look forward to the time that they'd stop. It'd been a long day, and a long ride, and on top of all that, she thought she'd been walking for several kilometers by now. If she'd got some kind of high-powered cannon, the kind that could throw a shell for a dozen klicks at a go, and fired it at the outer opening of the cave, back in the forest, she'd lay good money it'd come straight through here. What kind of nuts laid out an underground temple in a straight line like a runway at Sydney International?
Or (for that matter) could?
Educated, really adept nutcases with a strong engineering background, that was who.
And that was what was really bothering her about all this. Because they were a bunch of folk who could build something like this—who HAD built something like this, and then had been rolled out like pastry dough by a villain. . . .
Whom they expected her to put under heavy manners for them with a nice sword, a fancy costume, a
nd some B-movie dialogue.
Her.
The final results are in and it's definite: the universe is without reason or sense.
"How very odd," Belegir said suddenly.
"Wozzer?" Glory said, startled. She dropped her tote-bag, her hand going to her sword in a gesture that was starting to become automatic. It wasn't as if she thought she could actually use it on someone in cold blood, but it certainly looked intimidating. And she could certainly give them a good discouraging whack with the flat.
"That door oughtn't be open."
As though it had grown as tired as she was, the ornament and the cyclopean scale had both dwindled slowly and unnoticeably away, until Glory and her companion now stood in a passageway little different than the one they had first entered: a bare corridor of grey rock about twelve feet in every direction. Directly ahead, the passage ended. In the end wall, three steps led up to a plain wooden door secured with a drop bar.
To the right of the steps, on the level they were on now, another wooden door—the one that bothered Belegir—stood open. Bright purple radiance, as harsh and strong as desert sunlight, illuminated the room within and spilled out into the corridor.
"What's in there?" Glory asked, drawing her sword as quietly as she could. A random thought came to her: she wondered why the scriptwriters on TITAoVtS had never given the thing a name, like Bonecruncher or Headknocker or something. Maybe they'd been saving it for Season Two.
"Artifacts of the Time of Legend," Belegir said.
"Great. You wait here." She set Gordon carefully down beside her bag, and tiptoed cautiously toward the light.
Why am I doing this? she wondered in the part of her mind that was still bothering with anything beyond listening intently for sounds from up ahead. The answer was patently obvious. Because Belegir was a helpless old man. Because he was doing his best for her, and so she ought to do her best for him. Because good harmless people did not deserve to play the victim for villains and frighteners. And because she was the one with the big sword.
She got to the door and peered cautiously around the edge. If this had been an episode, she'd have done a forward roll and come up fighting, but it was a stone floor and she had no idea what the inside of the room looked like. If it was as full of junk as the others they'd passed had been, she could do more damage to herself than the villains could, assuming there were any in there.
She peeped cautiously around the edge. No sound. No movement. Just a whole room full of . . .
Armor?
And the purple light was coming from a giant neon sword that was hovering in midair.
Glory gave up on stealth, walked in flat-footed, and stared.
She realized after a moment that the sword wasn't all that giant, and it wasn't neon. But it did seem to be hovering, and it did seem to be the source of most of the light in the room. She stared at it for several seconds before she could tear her gaze away and look quickly around the rest of the room.
It looked pretty much like the Wardrobe and Props Department at TITAoVtS: racks of armor, racks of shields, racks of weapons. Nothing else. Nothing that looked like a threat or menace.
"Ah, Belegir? I reckon it's safe to come in," she said sheepishly. She went back to staring at the sword.
It was—radiance or no radiance—purple. No, PURPLE. The blade had that dull satiny sheen and pale grape color of that weird posh metal they made hypoallergenic jewelry out of. It looked sharp. She couldn't quite bring herself to touch it, even if she could have figured out how, with the thing hovering point-downward in the middle of the room eight feet off the floor. She craned her neck to look up.
The helve and quillons (she knew these terms courtesy of Bruce, the show's swordmaster, who was a real bug on all things edged and pointy) were of the same color metal as the blade, though glossier, and very fancy in a curved and scrolled fashion. Quillons and pommel were inset with large fuchsia crystals that looked just like the one that had been on Belegir's staff when he'd come to see her in Hollywood. They were the source of the light bright enough to read Bible print by. The whole effect was rather gaudy and alarming, really, but somehow Glory wasn't alarmed. It was more like she'd gotten to the money shot in the latest summer blockbuster and was marveling at the cool special effects.
"It is the Sword of Cinnas, with which he chained the Warmother and brought peace to the land," Belegir said, awestruck.
"Izzit?" Glory said, trying to sound intelligent and well-informed.
"Long has it lain dormant," Belegir said, indicating a slotted stone pedestal in the middle of the floor, directly beneath the hovering sword.
"Now at last it wakes," Glory said, trying to be helpful and enter into the spirit of things. She stared up at the sword. It was really rather pretty, in a lurid kind of way.
"Yes!" Belegir said, pleased that she understood. "The sword wakes as evil wakes, and waits for a hero to claim it."
There was a pause. Belegir was looking at her again.
"I've already got a sword," Glory said at last. Leaving aside how I get The Sword of Cinnas to come down from there if it doesn't want to. A glowing purple sword might be pretty, but it was also creepy. And how much of what she'd just heard was take-it-to-the-bank truth, and how much myth, wishful thinking, or just the usual game of telephone-through-the-centuries? Maybe the sword hadn't ever really belonged to Cinnas at all. And probably it wasn't waiting around for a hero, and even if it was, the smart money said it wasn't waiting around for her.
"But do you not want to . . . ?" Belegir sounded confused.
"No," Glory said decisively. "Bazza and his mates paid a lot of money for this sword," she said, wagging the one in her hand. "It's the real deal, forged and everything. The least I can do is actually hit something with it." If it comes to that.
"Well then." Another weird thing about the Allimir was that they never argued. God only knew how they got anything done. But Belegir simply took her at her word, and that was that. When they left the armory, Belegir pulled the door shut behind him, shutting out the violet radiance.
* * *
"Behind this door is a place which few among the Allimir have ever seen," Belegir said proudly a few moments later. "The waters of the Oracle of Erchane Herself. It is from the Well Itself that I and my co-mages journeyed across the worlds in search of aid—and found you."
Lucky mages.
He paused to set down his pack and excavate a small metal lantern from it. He opened the lantern and lit the candle within with a snap of his fingers.
"There is no magic beyond that door save what Erchane bestows, not what we choose. Stay close beside me."
"Too right." She slung her bag over her shoulder and held Gordon close.
Belegir left the pack and strode confidently up the steps to lift the bar from the door. The thought took strong possession of Glory's mind that anyone following them would only need to drop that bar into place again to put an end to anything the two of them could do to set the situation here to rights, especially if Belegir was right about not being able to use magic beyond that door. With an effort, she dismissed the notion. Who could do that? The rest of the Allimir were cream puffs and the Warmother (whether she existed or not) couldn't get in here. Who did that leave?
Belegir pushed the door open and stepped inside. Glory followed, having to duck for the first time since she'd entered the temple in order to get through the door. Suddenly she was surrounded by the suffocating dark of deep underground, and for the first time she could feel every kilo of the living rock above her pressing down. Even the wan light of Belegir's candle seemed compressed by the weight of the rock above. She drew a quick shaky breath, glancing longingly over her shoulder at the corridor outside. Belegir was going to shut the two of them in here with the dark. She just knew it.
Belegir crossed the small chamber as easily as if he were in his own living room and set the lantern into a shallow niche carved into the wall. With the new angle of the light she could see that the circular chamber
was small, smaller than the corridor outside. The walls were rough and curved, resonant with age. In the center of the floor, round and smooth and still as a black mirror, was a spring, the Oracle in which Belegir placed so much faith.
Why can't we sleep outside in the hall? Why can't we leave the door open? she wanted to ask, and didn't. She wasn't going to demand that Belegir change the recipe before she found whether the cake rose. Maybe there wasn't any Oracle beyond wishful thinking. But she owed the business a fair test, like it or not.
Belegir came back inside carrying the bedroll in his arms. He set it down, and then, just as she'd dreaded, pulled the door shut. The darkness seemed to rush in, pressing against her with a soft dry weight.
But once Glory got past the first sharp clutch of unease, she found the darkness's weight almost soothing, like a mother's hug. This was strange and just a little weird, but she felt the deep conviction, too, that nothing bad could happen to her here. She had the sensation of being safe, protected, watched out for in a way that people left behind with childhood. Slowly she felt herself relax, and as the tension drained from her body, exhaustion seeped in to take its place. She took a couple of steps back and leaned against the wall (and her sword), feeling things she'd been too keyed up to feel in hours. Her shoulders were hot and raw with sunburn, making the rock feel colder and rougher than it was. Her feet hurt. Everything under the corset itched, making her long to get it off and have a good scratch.
First things first. She set down Gordon and her bag, then unhooked the sword and sheath from her costume—an operation that required a person to be only slightly double-jointed, but she was feeling too lazy to go about the operation in the proper fashion.
As she struggled with her armor, Belegir moved around the edge of the room, lighting fat white candles from a splinter of wood he'd lit at his lantern. Once several of the candles were lit, the little chamber was surprisingly bright.
The Warslayer Page 9
