She struggled to blank out perplexity, desperation, doubt. Whatever happened, he must not see the panic of her ignorance. He had shown her the means to achieve the unachievable, yet her fear was redoubled. She feared the wall in her mind, the dark behind his eyes, the scent of the wine. “Why do you need me?” she asked, fishing for a diversion. “Why not use the key yourself?”
“It is not for me.” His voice grew curt. “You must know that. Its very touch all but destroyed me.”
“What shall I do with it,” she persisted, “when the Door is locked? Shall I cast it into the flood?”
“Do not speak such folly, even in jest. The key is the kernel of the Lodestone, the seed of unearthly power. It can give you your heart’s desire.”
“And you?” said Fern bluntly. “What’s in it for you?”
His control was fraying. “Without my help, you will gain
nothing
. You fumble your Gift, your courage is tentative, your imagination blunders. Do you want to stay here and rot? Did Caracandal deceive you so easily?
There is no returning
without me.
”
Help will be found, had said the Hermit. This is my help. The way back . . . Caracandal . . . Alimond . . . Not back, but forward. I am unborn, ten thousand years unborn . . .
Who am I?
Ixavo bent over her, his hands enclasping hers, raising the goblet. “Drink your wine.”
There was no draft but the candleflames shriveled and the lamps died. All the light in the room was gathered into his eyes, circling and circling the two black holes that seemed to expand even as they snared her gaze, drawing her down, down into the abyss. Zohrâne’s emptiness was famine and greed, bounded by her lost humanity, withered into the dregs of a soul; but this was the real thing, the Pit, enormous, inhuman, implacable as eternity . . .
It’s a dragon: don’t look into its eyes—
For an instant, a splinter of time, fire rushed into her mind, filling her with remembered terror. Then it was gone, and the wall was back in place.
She broke the handclasp with an effort that drained willpower, not strength. The wine-cup fell and shattered, spilling its contents on the floor.
“
I
will decide,” she said at last, emphasising the pronoun. “I don’t need the wine.”
“Decide then.”
She had a feeling he was puzzled, as if, in the invasion of her consciousness, he had been reaching for something he could not find. He sat down in the chair opposite, disposing his limbs with peculiar deliberation. Fern saw the stony muscles coiled in his arms, meshed across his torso. She thought: He could have coerced me, he might still, yet he refrains. He can only try psychological manipulation. Perhaps the use of force invalidates my choice. She mistrusted his protection, suspected his guidance, feared him as she had never feared Zohrâne. But he had insight where she had only instinct, he
knew
what she only dreaded. Uuinarde had said: The Sea is coming. Ixavo talked of a giant wave, of certain annihilation. The beautiful city—the temples and palaces, sewers and slums—the people she had come to know there: Ezramé, Ipthor, Rafarl—all doomed. The choice was no choice. She must do what she could.
Help will be found . . .
“All right,” she said. “I agree.”
He held out his hand, but she would not take it.
“This is not a bargain,” she said. “Just fate.”
“So be it.” He slipped the chain over his head, unhooked the sundisc, and tossed it aside. Then he hung the empty chain around her neck. It felt like a slave collar. “For the key.”
She stood up, encouraged to find she still could. “I have to go. I’ll return in the morning.”
“You go nowhere.” His tone was as heavy as the slamming of a door in a sepulchre.
“I have things to do—”
“Warning the fortunate few? A waste of time and breath. Or perhaps you want to say farewell to your vagabond friend? Let him go. He is dead, little one, many ages dead. They are all dead. Why trouble yourself? We are the only living people here.” His smile ate into her soul. He went to the door, called the guards. “They’ll fetch you food, if you’re hungry. I’ll have you brought here an hour before noon tomorrow. Sleep well. There’s nothing else you can do.”
She thought he would have given her a candle if she had requested one, but she was unwilling to betray so much weakness. In the dark of a solitary cell, despair lay in wait. She summoned what few resources she had to resist it.
That was the worst time. They brought her food which she did not eat, water which tasted of dust. Then they left her alone. By Ixavo’s orders she had been provided with some cushions and a blanket as well as the pot which was standard issue. On entering the cell, she had had a moment to take in a few details before the door was shut and the light extinguished: unlike the dungeon she had occupied with Rafarl, this one was not delved in natural rock but lined with stone blocks, set in mortar, with the additional luxury of a grating in the floor through which the pot could be emptied immediately after use. Fern tugged at the grating but was unable to lift it: the iron fretwork had been drilled deep into the surrounding stone. Defeated, she sank back on her heels, brushing against the cushions. She lay down to rest her head and wrapped herself in the blanket, more for comfort than warmth, though there was no comfort to be had. In the lonely dark the passage of time altered, becoming no longer continuous but a shapeless limbo where she floated in stasis, reaching in vain for minutes and hours to hold on to. She lost track of her own body, feeling it meld with the blackness until only by touch could she maintain contact with her outer self. And as she lay there her grip on her inner self gradually slackened, and she was swamped by the all-pervading night.
She never knew when she crossed the boundary into unconsciousness. It was a transition from darkness into darkness, slow or swift, she could not tell. She opened her eyes on sunlight and a green hillside, green as the valleys of the Viroc, furred in patches with the misty purple of heather. There was a house below her, a strange gray house with a steepled roof and tall chimneys, unlike any house she had seen before. The windows were shutterless and seemed to be filled with glass. She started to go down to the house but a wolf rose out of the grass beside her and gazed at her with yellow eyes.
I must go,
she said.
They’re waiting for me.
She had no idea who
they
were but the compulsion was growing, pulling her onward. The wolf did not move.
I must go,
she repeated, but she seemed to be rooted to the ground. The house was so near she was seized with a fury of frustration and need. She struggled to move her feet . . .
It is not permitted,
said a voice beside her, and there was the Hermit, only he didn’t look like the Hermit anymore: he was thinner, or fatter, younger or older, and instead of an assortment of ragged pelts he wore a curious garment like a coat, with a pointed hood shading his face.
This is not your time.
But I must go!
she pleaded.
You cannot.
His tone was stern.
History will not be
cheated. Go back.
Back . . .
The dream changed as image melted into image in scenes too rapid for the mind to retain. When the pace slowed everything was blue. She was drifting through a blueness lanced with silver; it was vaguely familiar and after a while she realized that she was under the sea, gliding through a shoal of bright fish in the subaqueous light. There was a coral reef below her, a horned forest full of waving shadows, and she was peering into every cranny, brushing aside tresses of weed, touching sea anemones to close them. It came to her that she was searching for something, though she did not know what, and a great dread was on her that she might find it; but she found nothing. And then the reef dropped to a dim plain of sand, and there was a wreck ahead of her half sunken into the sea-bed, a wooden ship which might have been a fishing vessel but for the prow carved in the form of a woman. As she drew nearer she saw it was Uuinarde. Her black hair broke free of the carving and fanned out in the current, and her dead face was turned toward Fern, and her eyes were full of sorrow.
But you left,
said Fern.
You went with the porpoises—
But Uuinarde was gone and the tide turned and the water shrank into pools and puddles of slime, and all around her the sea-floor was drying in the sun. Very small and far away she saw the cove where she had stayed with Rafarl, and the rocks hiding the cave entrance, but in between was a great space of mud, littered with dying things. There were fish flapping helplessly from side to side, and writhing worms, and the feeble snapping of tiny claws. She began to walk toward the beach, picking her way through the carnage, but suddenly she was assailed by an overwhelming sense of wrongness: she should not be there, she had gone long ago, she ought to be in a prison cell, with a cushion against her cheek and the hard floor pressing her body. With a vast effort she tore herself away from the wasteland of the disappearing sea, and then she was back in the dungeon, and her eyes opened on darkness.
She lay there wondering why she had gone to so much trouble to wake up, when waking was so bleak. But her brain recoiled from further slumber, dwelling instead on the meeting with Ixavo, and the terrifying doubts and questions it had raised. She thought of the huge tragedy he had foreseen so indifferently, and the fact that he talked about it as if it were already in the past, ages past, and Atlantis itself was only a fragment of history, and there was nothing to be done, nothing worth doing, except to retrieve the key and complete the Task. Yet she knew the Task was not important to him as it was to her: he wanted the Lodestone, or what was left of it, to control it, to exploit it, maybe through her. She was
his
key. Somehow, she had to prevent that. He had drawn her into an unholy alliance, shown her how to act, offered her his aid— bound her to his service. But she would not be so bound: she must find a way to use him and cheat him, even as he sought to use and cheat her. He had said:
We are the only living
people here,
relegating Atlantis and all its citizens to a vanished graveyard; but she refused to accept that. She would fight for the people she cared for. She would fight to save them, to salvage the key and close the Door and defeat Ixavo. But the enterprise appeared vast and impossible, and she was alone in the dark, and suddenly she felt horribly young, and hopeless, and afraid.
A long time later, there was a light. She saw it on the ceiling, an unfocused mesh of faint radiance traveling across the cell, shape-shifting as it moved. Yet because it was there she knew there
was
a ceiling, and floor and walls, and the blackness was no longer amorphous. The light was coming through the grill; she realized someone was passing below with a torch, and she knelt and peered down, and saw the flicker of flame, and an enormous pair of shoulders spread beneath. “Hello?” she called. “Who is it? Can you help me?”
“Fernani!” The voice was Rafarl’s. “Where are you?”
“Here.”
The shoulders stepped aside; the torch was raised; she felt the sudden draft of heat on her face. Then she made out Rafarl, looking up at her. “I’m locked in a cell,” she said. “There’s a kind of grating in the floor but it won’t budge. Can you get me out?”
“Why don’t you use the Gift?”
She hadn’t thought of that. Somewhat pessimistically, she tried to concentrate on the criss-crossed ironwork, willing it to break; but her will felt ineffectual, her faith half-hearted. “It’s no good,” she said. “I haven’t had enough practice. It only seems to work when I don’t have time to worry about it—mostly when I’m in danger.”
“You
are
in danger,” Rafarl pointed out.
“Not
immediate
danger,” said Fern.
Rafarl consulted with his companions—one of them sounded like Ipthor—then turned back to her. “Hold on,” he said. “We’ll come and find you. When the Lodestone broke the aftershock opened up new passageways: Ipo says we can get through from here into the catacombs, and thence to the dungeons. Do you know your cell number?”
“No,” she said, “but it’s right beside a stair, close to the apartments of the Guardian.”
“All right. We may be a while: we’ll have to get the keys from the jailer. Hold on.”
And with that they were gone.
She sat down and waited. The best part of a century went by in a pitiable state of anticipation and suspense. She had given up all hope several times when she finally heard the bolts sliding back. And then there was Rafarl, and she was stumbling through the door and clutching him in something between an embrace and a stranglehold, and behind him Ipthor was looking amused, and the shoulders, last seen manning the entrance to the basement club, lifted the torch for a better light on the situation. “Are you hurt?” demanded Rafarl, alarmed to find her so overtly demonstrative. “What did they do to you?”
“Nothing. Nothing. I’m fine.” To her astonishment she found she was weeping, uncontrollable tears streaming down her face. “I’m so glad you came. So glad . . . ” And, smudging the tears with her hand: “Why did you?”
He grimaced. Scowled. Shrugged. “Does it matter?”
“No.”
“This is Gogoth.”
The shoulders gave a grunt of acknowledgment. Fern looked up into a broad face, olive-dark, with the nose spread widely across its flat surface and eyes compressed into slots between cheekbone and brow. There was a fading slave-brand on his left temple in the shape of an owl. The
th
sound at the end of the name, rare in Atlantean, gave it an uncouth ring. But Fern, torn between relief at her escape and the renewal of urgency, had no time to be daunted. Even as they ran down the passageway, stepping over the unconscious jailer, she was pouring out the gist of Ixavo’s revelations—the imminence of doom, the tidal wave, the fall of the city. She had expected incredulity and skepticism and was surprised when Ipthor took her side. “There is an uneasiness, a buildup of pressure: you can feel it when you’re underground. I think we should go. The
Norne
is waiting. I’ll get the others together. Meet us on the wharf.”