Air and Darkness (43 page)

She looked in all directions. There were no humans about, and the only animals were birds in the high sky. The sun rippled the plain with its heat; the only shade was the domed shrine and the jungle-covered hill directly in front of her.

The bare shrine was scarcely welcoming, but Hedia found the notion of the jungle even less attractive. She turned to put herself under the dome again while she made her mind up as to what to do.
Maybe being a little higher will help me see something.

A soldier stepped into the middle of the shrine. He saw Hedia and drew his curved sword. More soldiers followed him.

Hedia ran for the mound of jungle. If Govinda's troops had been keen she couldn't have escaped, but these men seemed uncertain. They were probably afraid.

Hedia was completely certain that she wanted to get away. As for fear, she was too familiar with being afraid to let it affect her behavior.

She wriggled between creeper-festooned trees and scrambled through a curtain of brush. It concealed a pile of tilted blocks that tripped her.

She got to her feet and struggled deeper into the ruins. Leaf litter had decayed to yellow-brown soil dripping from one slanted surface to the next. Some of the blocks had been decorated.

The roots of multi-trunked trees had levered the buildings apart but often held the individual blocks in much the same relationship to one another that they had originally. Occasionally a distorted doorway or a window survived, but generally tree trunks or a wall of earth blocked further passage.

The jungle was so much darker than the grassland that Hedia had come from that she assumed that foliage covered the sky completely. To her surprise she saw many patches of brightness through the leaves when she glanced up. The gloom she felt was more than just a matter of shade after sunlight.

Hedia paused. She thought someone had walked in front of her, a slender man in orange robes; and perhaps he had, but he had walked through a giant tree and the stone blocks around which its roots were wrapped.

The figure vanished. There was other movement nearby, but it was only shimmerings at the corners of her eyes. There was nothing to see when she looked straight toward it.

What are Govinda's men doing?
Hedia looked back, but she saw nothing except foliage. She didn't think she'd come far into the jungle, but she might as well try to look through the stone as through the leaves hanging between her and the shrine.

Hedia moved aside the thin canes of a stand of bamboo that she didn't remember going through. Beyond was a heavily overgrown parapet that wasn't familiar, either.
Have I gotten turned around?

She didn't like the feel of this place. Partly that was because of the things she saw or almost saw among the roots and ruins, but her disquiet was from more than that. There was nothing more tangible, though.

Knowing that she was taking a risk, Hedia crawled onto the parapet and eased her arm through the next layer of undergrowth, then withdrew it and peered down the hole. Whether or not she was going back on the same line by which she had arrived, she was close enough to the edge of the jungle that she could look out at the plain.

The shrine was a little to the left; she had gotten off-line in a matter of twenty feet or less. She could see ten soldiers, though there might be more. Some remained close to the base of the shrine, and none of them had followed Hedia more than halfway to the jungle.

Two Tyla with feather headdresses stood within the shrine. From what the Spring of True Answers had said, the headdresses marked them as Priests of the Moon. They appeared even less willing than the humans to approach the jungle.

She couldn't go back out the way she had come, but this patch of jungle might be narrow enough for her to hike through to the other side. This wasn't a plan for which she could muster any enthusiasm, but she didn't see a better choice.

When she got to the other side, she would consider her next step. At present she couldn't imagine what she would do if faced with another stretch of uninhabited plain.

Hedia struggled over a fern-covered jumble of what had been a balustrade; instead of true rails, the horizontal piece was supported by a sheet of stone into which pilasters had been carved in high relief. For a moment she saw a nude woman spread-eagled on a slab and a group of men in pale robes standing around her. One of the held a stone hand axe high.

The arm that extended from the robe to hold the axe was not human. Neither, in a flash of better light, were the faces of the robed figures. The image dissolved before the axe fell.

Hedia scrambled on, her face set. She had seen hundreds, probably thousands, of people die in the arena, but she was just as glad to have missed the rest of that scene.

A tree had fallen across the direction she was going. The trunk was more than four feet in diameter, but the wood was rotten. Bright yellow shelf fungi stuck out like fins from the bark, and saplings grew upward every few feet along the bole.

Rather than go around—and probably meet some similar obstacle—Hedia gripped a sapling in either hand and pulled herself onto the log. It wasn't graceful, and the garment Bacchus had clothed her in was irretrievably smeared green. It had not stretched or torn, though; what she thought was sheer silk must be some tougher material.

Beyond the tree was a building: a tower with ornate carvings at each of the three levels she could see. The structure rose higher, but vines completely cloaked the upper reaches.

The ground between the tower and the trunk on which Hedia perched was the usual tumble of sandstone blocks and cloaking vegetation. There were also bits of bronze armor, rusted iron that may once have been weapons, and a human skull barely visible through the leaf litter that filled an upturned helmet.

Hedia paused instead of jumping down as she had intended to do. She could see the equipment of several men, and the remains of many times that number might lie concealed in the undergrowth.

She looked around, then sneered coldly at herself: there was nothing to see but trees, vines, and fallen masonry—just as everywhere else in this ruin. Though it couldn't be called a clearing, the area immediately around the structure wasn't as badly overgrown as most of the region, however.

Hedia slid down from the log and walked toward the tower. The many carved projections at least provided the possibility of climbing high enough that she could see beyond the jungle. It wasn't likely, but she didn't see anything better on offer.

Vines draped the tower, but the structure remained intact, unlike the other buildings, which roots had torn apart. Time had crumbled the door in the center of the ground level—Hedia could see holes in the stone jambs to anchor the hinges—but there was a passageway beyond.

On the threshold was a chest of carved stone. A small sarcophagus, she thought at first glance, but the lid was slightly askew and she caught a glitter from the interior. She walked to it, more from curiosity than for any real purpose.

As best Hedia could tell,
nothing
she could do had any real purpose. Ampelos had tricked her into this business in order to get her away from Bacchus.

Hedia smiled grimly. She had been well and truly fooled, but Ampelos might not be so pleased with his success if she managed to survive and find him again.

She gazed into the corner of the chest and saw polished jewels. She pushed the lid farther open with the scrape of stone on stone, thinking that it might be this corner only. The chest was as full of jewels as a transport urn is of grain coming from Africa. There were rubies, sapphires, and at least one emerald the size of her fist. The gems glowed with rich color even in the jungle's gloom.

Movement flickered. Hedia turned, jumping away from the chest. She did not see a
thing,
but a tunnel in the air behind her fractured into planes as jumbled as the blocks of the fallen buildings.

A figure moved toward her from one plane to the next nearer one, the way a ball bounces among the surfaces of the handball courts at the baths. It was tall. The head was human, but the torso was not. The long upper pair of arms ended in fanged pincers, but there were three tentacle-like pairs lower on the body; the legs squirmed like snakes.

Hedia thought to run along the face of the tower and into the jungle, but that would be pointless. She couldn't have outrun a healthy man through this undergrowth and broken masonry, and this creature's legs rippled like water over the obstacles in its planes of existence.

She climbed over the jewel chest—she couldn't vault it, not as weary as she was—and ran into the corridor beyond. The creature was twelve feet high, taller than the stone ceiling. Hedia hoped to come to a branching too narrow for it to follow, even on hands and, well, legs.

The walls
were
narrowing: they brushed Hedia's arms on both sides, and the ceiling lowered also. She dropped into a crawl. The passage darkened beyond its initial gloom as something followed her into the corridor.

“There's no point in running, Lady Hedia!” a musical tenor voice called. It spoke perfect Latin, the words' only distortion coming from the echoing stone. “There is no way out of the tower except to me. I will be more merciful than starvation.”

Hedia didn't answer. She had no reason to believe the pursuing monster. Even if she had, she would let her blood out with her little knife before she surrendered to those pincers.

Ahead of her was a ring of light. It was probably very faint, but she could see it the way she could stars on a dark night.

“Hedia, come back!” the voice called. “You think you see escape, but this passage ends in something far worse than death.”

The passage continued to narrow; Hedia crawled with increasing difficulty. She reached out with her right arm to cock her shoulders at an angle. She had almost reached the ring of light.

“Hedia, beyond is only limbo and the Eternals,” the voice said in liquid tones. “You will curse yourself to life without existence, for eternity. If you pass the barrier of light, you will not be able to die, but you will never live. Come back while you can, or you will regret it forever.”

Hedia squirmed through the ring of light. For an instant she felt a spiderweb drape her bare shoulder.

Then there was blackness and Eternity.

*   *   *

V
ARUS FOLLOWED
G
OVINDA UP
the ladder as quickly as he could, even more glad to be out of the vault than he was curious about what was going on in the sanctum. The outside door was now open.

The king was shouting at the guards clustered there. He pointed at the wall panel that showed the shrine where Bhiku had brought Varus and the officials back to the Waking World. In its background was the jungle-covered ruin that Bhiku had called Dreaming Hill.

After a moment's hesitation, the soldiers shuffled into the little building and jumped
through
the panel as though it were empty air instead of the sheet of alabaster that Varus had seen as they approached. A pair of Tyla followed the soldiers.

Govinda bent to pick up a piece of iron—a lamp, apparently—giving Varus an unobstructed view of the panel for the first time. The soldiers had spread out and were walking toward Dreaming Hill. They weren't moving very quickly, and several of the men waved their curved swords in front of them as though they were brushing away spiderwebs.

“What are they doing?” Varus said, nodding toward the backs of the guards. Presumably if he wished, he could step through into the shrine himself.
I didn't particularly like the place when I was there before.

Govinda was looking at the iron lamp. He said nothing.

“Are your men going into Dreaming Hill?” Varus said. He was irritated at being ignored and kept in the dark, though he supposed he shouldn't be in a hurry to get to the business Govinda planned for him.

“He could not force his men to enter Dreaming Hill,” said the boy hanging by his hair. His voice was clear, but it roused no echoes. It sounded as though he and Varus were standing on top of a mountain. “Even Govinda could not force them to do that. But sometimes men do enter the hill, because it hides great treasure.”

“A thief entered my sanctum,” Govinda said abruptly. He opened a waist-high basket and set the lamp inside. The basket appeared to be empty. “Either my men will catch and deal with her, or she will go into Dreaming Hill and the hill will deal with her. It's no concern of ours either way.”

He gestured to the couch beside the small table and said, “Lie there while I prepare for your journey.”

Varus seated himself, then reclined on his left elbow as he would have done at dinner in Carce. He wondered vaguely whether he would ever see Carce again. That wasn't really a concern.

He remembered that he had entered the lens at Polymartium in order to prevent King Govinda from bringing the Republic to ruin. Now that he was here, though, Varus was focused on the things he was learning; which he could not have learned in any other fashion.

Govinda reached into the basket and brought out … brought out nothing, so far as Varus could see, though his fingers were curved as though there was something in them. He placed “it” on the table and returned to the basket.

Varus stretched out an index finger, moving it to and then into the air where the king had set the invisible object. Air was all Varus found.

“Are you satisfied?” Govinda said in a sardonic tone. “There is nothing until I bring the ideals to life. There is no other wizard of my power!”

“Go on, then,” Varus said. In the back of his mind he saw the Sibyl smiling. She was always with him, whoever or whatever she was. Govinda's boasts did nothing to change reality, and the Sibyl's view of reality obviously differed from that of the king.

Govinda took the black speculum from his tunic and set it on the table, then brought out the tablet. He held the tablet in both hands instead of setting it with the speculum. Glaring at Varus, the king began to chant in Indian or at least in an unfamiliar language.