by Martha Wells
The open sky and noon sun were gone. It was as if she was standing at the bottom of a tower that stretched up into infinity. It was roughly oblong, following the shape of the well chamber, and the walls were of rough stone, and lined with rocky ledges. Elen frowned, trying to make sense of what she saw. Her eyes followed one of the ridged projections, and she decided that it had once been something like a ramp, or a spiral stair, that had hugged close to the tower's wall, winding up it, leaving the immense central well empty. At one time something large had fallen down that central well, tearing sections out of the ramp way as it passed. But I see the top of the ramp, Elen thought, as if I'm at the top of the tower, looking down, instead of at the bottom looking up. She shook her head and turned back to the others.
They were all staring upwards, as silent and baffled as she was. Except the veiled figure.
Elen heard it laugh first, echoing in her mind, filling the place where the Remnant's voice had sung. There was something seductive about it that tried to twine around her soul. It seemed to promise all sorts of things-knowledge, skills, power, some beyond her ken and some she understood all too well. In exchange for what? Elen thought, derisive and almost amused. She didn't bother to wait for an answer and closed her mind against it, pushing the intrusive presence away.
She came back to herself in time to see the creature's arms come up, flinging away the robes and veils, revealing a mass of air and solid light, hanging there like a small whirlwind. It rose up, flowing toward the well of the tower above them.
The cold wind of its passing was gentle at first; then suddenly it tore at her, twisting her mantle up around her head and stealing the breath from her lungs. Elen tightened her hold on the cistern's rim and tried to crouch down against it but felt her feet leave the pavement. The stone scraped her palms, and water slopped over the edge, drenching her with a cold spray. She hugged the rim tighter, knowing it could only be moments until she lost her grip. She twisted her head free of her mantle, trying to see what was happening. For an impossible moment she thought she saw Khat in the door of the anteroom, and shouted at him to stay back. The shout was lost in the roar of the wind, and she gasped as her hand slipped and she lost her hold on the cistern.
Chapter Nineteen
The whirlwind tore through them, tossing them like rag dolls. Howling, roaring, striking with bruising force it swept them away.
Any instant Khat expected to lose consciousness or die; either would have been a relief, but the buffeting went on without respite. Watering eyes kept him from seeing much, but he glimpsed rock walls rushing past at a great distance, as if he were being flung down a tunnel of giant circumference and infinite depth. Then something seemed to shove him toward one side, and a limitless plain of rock wall rushed up at him. Then his shoulder and side struck something solid, and he flattened himself against it, clinging to the precarious safety. He felt Elen still beside him: she had a death grip on his arm. He didn't realize the wind had stopped until he was able to breathe without the gale snatching the air out of his lungs.
Dazed, Khat pushed himself up on his hands and knees and shook his head. They weren't in the well chamber anymore. Fear settled into the pit of his stomach, cold and heavy. The wind was gone, leaving the air dry and cool. The light was softer than daylight, and seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. He could see nothing around him but creamy brown rock. It was rough to the touch and sloped dramatically down.
They should be falling, but the ledge felt as if it was level. Khat's fingers hurt from trying to dig into the rock, and he made himself relax. Elen was huddled next to him. She said something, and Khat shook his head to show he couldn't hear her. From her expression, she hadn't heard herself either; they had both been temporarily deafened by the roaring of the wind. At least, Khat hoped it was temporary.
Behind them a featureless wall stretched up; before them was a gulf of empty space. Across it he could see another wall, curving inward and studded with stone projections like the one they were stranded on, the one they couldn't possibly be holding on to without sliding down into that empty space. Don't think about it, he told himself.
This place was something like one of the sinkholes or chimneys of the Waste: a hollow cylinder of stone, its sides lined with outcroppings, but on a scale that was almost unimaginable. Perched here they were like flies on a wall, but without the comfort of wings.
Khat tried to judge the distance to the opposite side, but there was nothing to put it in perspective, no frame of reference; it might have been one mile across or ten. The air was clear, and it smelled of nothing except himself and Elen.
Elen cleared her throat experimentally, and that time Khat heard her, though the sound seemed hollow and distant. He looked down at her in relief and said, "Can you hear me?"
Her face was as bloodless as a corpse, and there was a bruise on her cheek, though that might have come from being slammed into him by the torrent of wind. Her white Warder's robes were stained and dirty, and she was trembling, but then, so was he. She swallowed and said, "Which way is down, do you think?"
Khat closed his eyes to shut out the contradictory evidence of sight, and his stomach almost turned over from vertigo. "Down is this way, the way that looks like up." He didn't want to take his hand off the stone to point, but forced himself. If they were going to do anything other than rot here, they would eventually have to reconcile themselves to letting go of this rock. Down was directly over their heads, the direction their eyes said was up. "Up is below us, the way that looks like down."
"I'll take your word for it," Elen said. Cautiously, keeping a grip on Khat's arm, she lifted her hand from the stone. Her palm was rubbed raw. "We're in the tower I saw. The creature, the ghost brought us here."
"Tower?" He wasn't sure he was hearing her correctly.
She cleared her throat, and in a stronger voice explained, "I looked up, and above the well chamber was a tower, going up ... forever. There was something like a ramp winding up the sides, but with sections and pieces missing. This stone must be part of it. It doesn't look like much from this angle, but from below I could definitely see it had been a ramp. What I don't understand is where it all came from."
"This is a Doorway to the West." Khat gently pried Elen's fingers off his arm, and edged forward, stretching himself flat to the stone, and looked over the rim.
"It's a what?" Elen asked. Nervously she added, "Careful."
From here he could see what she meant. From this angle, the ledges thrust out from the walls did look like the remains of a ramp that had wound up the inside of the tower, though who could have built it was open to debate. He could also see that this "tower" wasn't perfectly round, but more of an oval shape designed to follow the outline of the Remnant's well chamber. No, he corrected himself, the well chamber was made into an oval to follow the outline of this tower. But the tower was far larger than the well chamber. "Why aren't we falling?" he asked Elen. "I mean, that's down, that's up." He couldn't sense the direction that should be true north, as all krismen could from birth; even trying brought back the vertigo that threatened him whenever he shut his eyes. The absence of that knowledge, the loss of that sense of alignment, was as distracting as a missing front tooth.
"I don't know." Elen's voice was losing its patience. "What is a Doorway to the West?"
Khat told her, as succinctly as he could, what Arad had discovered in the text. As she silently tried to comprehend it he edged forward a little more, giving himself a better vantage point. The air wasn't quite odorless; there was an odd tang to it. Thunderstorm, he identified it suddenly. The air smelled of the aftermath of a too-close-for-comfort lightning strike. And he couldn't get over the fact that they weren't falling. "What do you think would happen if we jumped?"
Elen was shaking her head, her mouth set in a bitter line. "Riathen read the text too, but he saw only what he wanted to see in it. And he was right, as far as he went. When the relics are in place the Remnant does help Warders use their po
wer; it even helped me. For a time I was almost as strong as Riathen himself. But he didn't look past that; he wouldn't even acknowledge the thought that whatever came through the Doors might be more than he could handle." Then she frowned at Khat, realizing what he had said. "If we jump? No one's jumping. Don't say that. We'll have to climb to get back."
If we can get back, Khat thought. He didn't need to point that out to Elen; she was just as aware as he was that they were probably dead. "I think Arad's transcendental device is the Remnant itself. Maybe all the Remnants are part of that device, since the text said that each marks a different Door to the West." Khat's eyes were growing used to the odd contours of the place, though he still couldn't judge distance well.
"And the creature we thought was a ghost is the Inhabitant," Elen was saying, more to herself. "I see why it followed us, and why it pretended to let the Heir control it. But why did the Mages leave this Remnant with a Door that could be opened?"
"I don't know, Elen. I got here at the same time you did." Khat reached down and ran his hand over the front of the ledge. This side was perhaps two feet thick, and rough with raw, broken rock. He rolled over on his back so he could look up, or the way that looked most like up. It appeared identical to the way that looked most like down.
"That was a rhetorical question," Elen said, sounding annoyed. "This isn't: can you see any of the others? They must have been brought here too."
"No. Constans went toward Riathen, but that was the last I saw of him." The others Khat didn't give much of a damn about, and he wasn't going to waste effort worrying about Constans. If the old Warder was dead, that was that, but if he was alive he was far better equipped to take care of himself in this situation than they were.
There was a pause, then Elen said, "Constans is here?" Her voice told him this question wasn't an idle one either.
Khat sat up on his elbows so he could see her. She was still crouched against the wall, though the security it afforded was imaginary. He said, "Yes. I told him to come to the Remnant if he wanted to stop Riathen."
Elen was too reasonable to explode, even now, even here. Her face didn't change, and she said only, "Why?"
"When I realized what Riathen wanted to do, I knew someone had to stop him. Constans already knew about the Inhabitant, and the Doors to the West, and that's why he wanted to take the text away from Riathen and to stop us from finding the other relics. The only reason he didn't let me drop it in the cistern and destroy it that time was because he thought it would tell how to close the Doors. I don't think it does. I looked, but I couldn't find anything about it."
Elen dropped her eyes, one hand twisting the frayed seam of her mantle. She said, "What if he was in league with Seul and the Heir? I know about their part in this."
Khat knew her well enough by now to tell she was angry. Well, he hadn't expected anything else. He said, "He wasn't. It didn't make sense that way. And I had other reasons. I saw him out on the Waste that night, before the pirates came." She looked up at that, startled. "And in the palace when Riathen was meeting with the Heir, in the chamber where the Miracle is kept. And again in the garden outside Riathen's house, the last time you took me there. I didn't understand what he was trying to tell me. He really is mad, just not in the way people think he is. But I didn't really believe him until I went to the Citadel of the Winds, and he let me go again." That was the short version, but he didn't think he had left anything of importance out. She probably hated him for this, and he wasn't sure he could disagree with her. The only reason she wouldn't tell him so was because she had too much sense to rage at her only ally at a time like this. But he wasn't going to beg her to understand; if she couldn't forgive him it was her prerogative.
Elen looked tired more than anything else. "Well, you've been busy, haven't you?" she said.
That was all. Not wanting to press her on it, Khat went back to looking up the center of the tower. It seemed to go on forever. Some distance away he could see a stone platform jutting out from the wall-not the jumbled, random confusion of the broken projections all around them, but something regular, with a curved edge. Like looking at the underside of a balcony, Khat thought. A balcony that ran around the entire circumference of the tower. "Come look at this."
Unwillingly Elen crept forward. "Now," she muttered, "I know what spiders feel like." It took her some moments to get used to the perspective, but eventually she saw the strange platform. "Hmm. What do you make of it?"
"I don't know. If the Inhabitants built it... But why would they? They can fly- they don't need ramps and platforms. If people like us built it, they might have been trying to close off this Doorway."
"You mean, build a barrier all the way across so the Inhabitants couldn't get through." Elen edged forward to squint up at the platform. "Does it matter? We should be trying to climb out of here before that Inhabitant comes back for us."
"Which way?"
"What?"
"Which way is out?"
Elen hesitated. "Don't you know?"
"I can tell up and down, but that's it. I don't know which way we came from."
Elen stretched forward to peer up again. "When I looked up, I saw the underside of the broken ramp."
"Elen, look down now. It looks the same either way, up or down."
Elen did, not liking the result. "I thought krismen couldn't get lost," she muttered.
That was unfair. "And I thought Warders knew better than to get sucked into corridors connecting the real world to the land of the dead."
That stopped whatever angry reply she had ready. She met his eyes directly for the first time since he had told her about Constans. "Is the place the Inhabitants come from really the land of the dead?"
"It might as well be as far as we're concerned." Khat took a deep breath, bracing himself, then sat up. It was hard to ignore the sensation that he was about to fall, but closing his eyes was worse. He would just have to get used to it. "We should head for that place that looks like a platform. It's the only thing different we can see."
Elen was silent; then abruptly she twisted around and sat up. She made herself look over the edge again, trying to acclimate herself to the disquieting sense of vertigo. Then she said, "I know you. You just want to die somewhere more interesting than this rock."
That was the first time one of them had actually said it. Barring some friendly god returning to life to rescue them, they were dead. Khat smiled at her, a real smile, no teeth showing. "At least I'll have company."
Elen's mouth twisted wryly. "I'm so honored."
* * *
Once they got used to sitting up, standing was easy.
Getting the hang of standing near the rim of their ledge, stretching up or jumping to catch the edge of the rock above, and hauling yourself up without panicking from the sense that at any instant you were about to plunge into empty space was a different matter. Khat was tall enough to do it without too much difficulty, and was able to help Elen. She managed it by concentrating only on the stone just in front of her, and ignoring where she thought she was and if she should be falling or not. After the first few successful attempts, she stopped and tore her mantle into strips, binding them around her palms and the soft part of her feet, leaving fingers and toes free to feel for holds but affording her some protection.
While she did this Khat leaned out from the edge to look up again, and couldn't tell whether they were any nearer to the platform or not.
It didn't get any easier, but after a time Khat could tell they were making progress. They made frequent stops to rest, but Khat's arms were aching from the strain, and he couldn't close his eyes for even a moment without bringing on an attack of sickening vertigo. Elen wasn't having this trouble, and he didn't know if he was just more susceptible to it than she was or if it had something to do with being kris.
On one of their rest stops they had taken stock of their supplies. Khat had a knife and the clothes he was wearing. Elen had a tiny fruit knife she had stolen with the idea of insertin
g it in Kythen Seul at some time, and, oddly, the little relic with the winged figure.
"How did you get that?" Khat had asked when she pulled it out of her mantle.
"Riathen left it in the antechamber, with some other things, as if it wasn't part of the ritual. Did the text say anything about it?"
"No, but I didn't have time to study it that closely. Arad might know. Too bad we can't ask him."
She rubbed her thumb over the figure of the faceless winged man. "It still feels warm. It felt alive when I picked it up, but so did every other part of the Remnant I touched. See if you feel anything."
Khat had held it, but it felt like nothing other than inert mythenin. Elen had told him something of what she had experienced last night in the gradually awakening Remnant, and though he thought most of it sounded like a dream, he was still willing to believe her. In light of their current predicament, he would have to be a fool not to. And he really didn't know why they bothered to ask each other these questions. Habit, he supposed. They had no water, no food, and no hope of getting any, and he couldn't even close his eyes to sleep. They were not going to last long in this strange, empty place.
Khat scrambled over the edge of the next projection, and reached down to help Elen. As he pulled her up beside him she stared at something over his shoulder and gasped, "Look at that!"
He twisted around, reaching for his knife. He had been checking each projection carefully before crawling up onto it, but the repetition and the lack of any sign of anything alive but them had made him careless. But Elen was pointing up at something about a man's height up the wall.
After a moment his tired eyes found it. It was a glyph, the size of his outstretched hand, carved into the wall. Elen must have seen it purely by accident. Khat stood, one hand on the wall for balance, and traced its outline.
Elen demanded, "What does it say?"
There were only a few characters of Ancient Script, but as weary as he was it took him some moments to translate it. "It says 'Aventine-denan, twenty-seventh dynasty, day seventy-one.'" He wished he could copy it; he didn't have anything like paper to do a rubbing or to trace it. He stared hard at it, carefully memorizing the lines; just in case they did survive this, he wanted to be able to reproduce it. "That's in Ancient reckoning. The twenty-seventh dynasty was the last one before the Waste rose. I don't know what 'day seventy-one' is unless he was keeping track of how long he had been here."
