Kit nodded, moved ahead again. For her own part, Nita was relieved to find that the path they took widened out a great deal. But the passage was always downward, and the weight of millions and billions of tons of rock continued to weigh on her. At least she was able to partially distract herself with the splendor of their surroundings: for the chain of complexes of caverns through which Esemeli led them in the next hours—or what felt like hours—would have been a first-class tourist attraction on Earth. One after another they passed through gigantic multicolored arenas and caves of stone, festooned with stalactites, or growing great crops of stalagmites like petrified forests. There were some caverns in which the stone itself glowed, and there was no need for wizard-light at all; they wove their way among pillars and chandeliers of down-hanging, luminous rock, their shadows stretching in ten different directions, or abolished entirely by the glow. But always the way led down, and down, and further down.
It was getting warmer all the time as they went. But this didn’t reassure Nita; it wasn’t nearly as warm as it should have been underground, and she was now certain that they were indeed not entirely in the physical world any more. She had done some reading in the manual about these so-called “complex states,” in which normal space was blended or “affiliated” with constructed spaces that could be based in myth, or one mind’s delusion, or some commonly held belief. Such complex-state spaces could have physical realities that mirrored some old fairy tale or ancient legend… or a physical reality that had once existed but was now long gone. As they passed out of one deep cavern and into another, always with Esemeli leading the way and Kit following It, Nita’s misgivings grew, despite the Binding Oath she had made the Lone One swear. It was very old, and very wise… and entirely too clever. But it was hard to know where she might have gone wrong. We’re just going to have to rely on the manual for the moment, and try to keep our eyes open, Nita thought, as they went down, and down, and down…
The walk through the caves began to seem more and more like a dream that had always been happening, and always would. In front of her was Kit, with his wizard-light; in front of him, Esemeli, a white shadow that never paused, never got tired. Not like me, Nita thought. She was beginning to regret not having eaten at least something for breakfast that morning. And when was this morning? she thought. How many hours ago? How many years? It was becoming increasingly difficult even to believe in “this morning,” except as something that had happened in a dream a long time ago.
The way before them opened out again, the sound of their footsteps echoing against distant walls as it hadn’t done for some time. Esemeli stopped for a moment, and Kit behind It, and the three of them stood still on the shores of a vast cavern lake under a huge, high-domed ceiling dripping with more stalactites, which glowed.
The water was a strange, milky blue color in Kit’s and Nita’s wizard-lights; and everything was absolutely still, not the slightest ripple of air touching that water. It was like blue glass, as solid-seeming as the crystalline surface of the Display had been. “It looks too deep to wade,” Kit said.
“Indeed, I don’t know that it has a bottom,” Esemeli said. There was something strange about Its tone of voice. Nita glanced over at It and was surprised to see the uncertainty in Esemeli’s face and stance, normally so self-assured and lazily mocking. Maybe even It’s a little out of Its depth here, she thought. But the next moment, Nita reminded herself once more that this was the Lone Power, or a fragment of It—immensely old, immensely powerful, and absolutely not to be trusted, no matter how secure you thought your hold over It might be. And just how sure am I about that?
There was another issue, too, one that she hadn’t mentioned to Kit, but that she suspected was going to come up in the near future and probably make him yell at her. Such strictures as the Binding Oath could not be one-sided; there was also a price to pay by the one doing the binding. What is bound eventually breaks loose, the manual said; the power of the binding is directly proportional to the power of the backlash. Sooner or later, Nita thought, this is going to come back to haunt me. Later, I hope…
And down they went through the darkness, and further down. Slowly, though, Nita noticed something strange beginning to happen. She had been starting to slow down, so that every now and then she would have to force herself to hurry to catch up with Kit and Esemeli, who had moved ahead. But now she was having less trouble keeping up, and this confused her. It’s not like I’m any less tired. I’m not!
But walking was less trouble. And the further downward they continued, the less of a problem it became. Stranger still, she was starting to become aware of light filtering up from below them, as they continued downward through the caverns and passageways in the depths of the world. The caverns seemed brighter, somehow, though there was none of the glowing stone they’d seen earlier—
Nita followed Kit through one more exit from a vast cavern into one more new one, and put her foot down wrong on a place where the stone was uneven. She tripped, and thought she would fall.
She didn’t. She bounced, and came up on her feet again, and bounced once more before she settled.
Hearing the scuffle of Nita losing her footing, Kit turned and saw her bounce. Behind him, Esemeli stopped, too, watching them.
G is less, Nita thought. “Kit,” she said. “Gravity’s decreasing!”
He stared at her. “How can it?” But then he jumped, and Nita saw him hang there briefly in the air before he came down. “Maybe half a g,” Kit said. “How can this be happening?”
Nita shook her head. “Come on,” she said.
Esemeli turned to lead the way again. Kit and Nita went after, bouncing a little in an adaptation of the astronauts’ walk that everyone who went to the Moon learned, because until you did, you spent a lot of time lying face first in moondust. Esemeli, for Its own part, did not bounce; possibly It considered that beneath Its dignity.
They continued downward, and as they went, the gravity kept lessening, and the caverns all around them seemed progressively brighter, as if the stone of them was going translucent. This is beyond weird, Nita thought. It was nothing like the smothering heat and pressure that they should have been experiencing even fairly high up in a planet’s crust, let alone down into its mantle. This is definitely a complex-state environment, someone’s myth about the middle of the world coming true around us. Well, I don’t mind the lessened gravity, anyway…
That was fortunate, for it got less the deeper they went. Nita was grateful that she was used to it; she’d spent enough time on the Moon that she wasn’t troubled anymore by the human body’s usual reaction to microgravity, which was to complain bitterly that it wanted to throw up anything that had been eaten recently. Just as well, maybe, that I didn’t eat any breakfast this morning, Nita thought. Not that I felt like it. The pain and betrayal on Quelt’s face was still very much with her, and the anguished cry, “I thought you were good! ”
They were becoming light enough now that it was becoming something of a difficulty to stay on the ground. Nita had to grab on to handholds in the stone of passages and tunnels they went through. But ahead of them, she could see a huge portal into another cavern, and there would be nothing to hold on to there. We’re going to fall up, Nita thought wearily. We’re going to fall into the sky. She had walked on air often enough in her work as a wizard, but falling was never entirely pleasant, whether you did it up or down. She swallowed, trying to keep her stomach under control. It was already trying to do backflips at the thought of what was coming—
They passed through that gigantic archway, and everything happened at once. Nita saw Kit’s shadow leap out behind him, and Esemeli’s as well—but Its was longer and far blacker than it should have been in that light. Before them lay a great broad plain with a high horizon… but the plain was above them, and the horizon was upside down.
Nita’s stomach flipped in earnest now. It was as if, for all the descending they’d been doing for all these weary hours, they had somehow come rig
ht around through the heart of things and out back on Alaalu’s surface again. Yet they hadn’t.
They were still in the middle of the world: Nita knew this for sure as she looked at that horizon and realized that it didn’t stop. There was never any sky at the top of it, just more and more land. And suspended in space before them, like a pillar buttressing the center of the world, was one great needle of stone, reaching down, or up, an incredible distance into that silvery-glowing, blinding sky. The confusion assailed Nita completely; she could no longer tell which way up or down was. And as if that confusion wasn’t all that was needed to complete the effect, it was then that the earth seemed to let go of them, and all three of them fell into the sky…
Fortunately, the fall itself partook to a certain extent of that dreamlike quality, so that what might otherwise have left Nita screaming in terror now left her in a muted state of astonishment and mild annoyance, like that of Alice falling down the rabbit hole. Up and up the three of them fell, and closer and closer to that peak of stone. “Toward that!” Esemeli cried; and Kit and Nita, having learned in passing a little about handling themselves when free-falling in atmosphere, spread out their arms and legs and did their best to maneuver themselves toward the top of the peak.
They were falling up at enough speed for Nita to erect a personal-shield wizardry around herself; she was concerned about the possibility of slamming into the rocks. But she was pleased to find that the velocity of their fall seemed to be lessening as they got close to the top of that peak. By the time the haze of distance disappeared, they had slowed to a leisurely plummet; by the time they were within perhaps a mile of it, they had slowed to a glide. And as they came to the top, or the bottom of it— Who knows what it is anymore? Nita thought, as she concentrated on somehow putting her feet flat down on stone instead of air. Let it be up or down, whatever it pleases. I just want to stand still!
And then she was standing still, on the stone, and Kit and Esemeli were standing there on it with her. Nita looked around at the plateau on which they stood, all made of the pale plain peach-colored sandstone of the Inner Sea lands. Nita made herself hold still and breathe and try to get used to some kind of normality again… if you could call this normal. We’re on a pillar of rock maybe a thousand miles high, inside a planet, Nita thought, at a level where there should be nothing but magma, or maybe even molten iron under millions of tons of pressure. There’s a sky here where there can’t be one, and air here where there can’t be any. If I were a pseudoscience freak, this would be terrific, and I’d be expecting flying saucers next. I think maybe normality needs an overhaul…
Next to her, “Wow,” Kit said softly.
“What?” Nita said, looking around.
Then she saw Kit turning slowly, looking all around him. And Nita saw that he had good reason. The perspectives of things had shifted again, or rather their topologies, so that what had been the truncated top of a cone was now the flat top of a shallow rise, and all around them, from perhaps thirty feet away to the horizon, and seemingly right up into the impossibly glowing sky, there were people.
Nita’s mouth went dry with sudden irrational fear at the sight of them. All around her she heard, more strongly than ever, the sound that had been trembling at the edge of her hearing since they came to Alaalu… an incessant, friendly whispering. Now she knew where it came from. It was from these people, a myriad of Alaalids, all standing around with their amiable, interested faces, looking at her, and Kit, and Esemeli… and the Alaalid man who stood nearby the place where they had come to rest.
Nita found herself experiencing a case of the shivers, for the people were the dead: everybody who had ever lived on Alaalu, in their many billions, filling all this vast space out to the edge of the sky. And as for the man—
He had a shock of red hair that was rather untidy and casually kept, by Alaalid standards, but a face that was composed and good-humored, even for an Alaalid, with those dark and liquid eyes suggesting a profound wisdom underneath the good humor. He was very casually dressed, in the long kilt that some Alaalids wore, and a long loose jacket thrown over it. He looked like someone who’d just been out for a swim. But he carried in his hands something that not many beachgoers would have brought with them. It was a tangle of near-blinding brilliance, lines of fire in many colors and many thousands or tens of thousands of words in the Speech, all knotted together in one complex structure. It was Alaalu’s world-kernel, the bundle of wizardly software in which was contained the laws—natural, physical, and spiritual—that governed Alaalu and its homespace.
The man holding that kernel nodded, first of all, to Esemeli. “I thought you’d turn up here eventually,” he said.
It smiled and bowed to him. “You and I,” Esemeli said, “have unfinished business to transact.”
“So we do,” the man said. Then he looked over at Nita and Kit. “Druvah,” Kit said.
The Alaalid bowed a little to Kit, and then to Nita. “Cousins, well met on the journey,” he said. “You’re very welcome to the heart of things.”
“Thank you,” Kit said.
“Yes,” Nita said, “thank you. But I have a question…”
“Ask,” Druvah said.
“When we’re finished talking to you… how do we get out of here?”
“No one does that,” Druvah said, “until we change the world.”
And Esemeli smiled…
***
Dairine, Roshaun, Sker’ret, and Filif were standing in position in blazing light, perhaps two thousand miles above the Sun’s photosphere, while the invisible corona lashed space with superheated plasma above their heads.
The wizardry was protecting them from the heat and more than ninety-nine percent of the visible light that boiled out of the Sun’s nuclear furnace to express itself in the photosphere’s glare. That outermost layer of the Sun’s actual body was no more than an eggshell’s thickness compared to the vast bulk of the star beneath it, but it boiled and roiled with golden fire. It was beautiful, but instantly deadly to anyone not protected as they all were. Even so, none of them intended to linger a moment longer than necessary. But the beauty was compelling.
“Look at it,” Filif said, gazing into that furious brilliance with all his berries, which caught it and glinted red as blood. “So magnificent, so dangerous—”
Dairine had to smile just slightly at the poet living inside the bush who liked baseball caps. Her own impression was more prosaic. “It looks like oatmeal,” she said. And so it did, if oatmeal boiled at seven thousand degrees Celsius and every grain of it was a capsule full of burning liquid helium eight hundred miles across. The motion was the same, though—new grains bubbled up every second, persisting in the violent roiling pressure for maybe twenty minutes, and then were pushed away to be swallowed into the depths. They rumbled, and the sound was real; sonic booms from them rippled incessantly across the surface of the Sun.
“Where’s the tachocline?” Roshaun said.
“Two hundred eighteen thousand five hundred kilometers through two hundred twenty-one thousand six hundred,” Sker’ret said. “It’s fluctuating, though.”
“Which way?”
“Up.”
Roshaun looked uncertain. “We could wait for it to stabilize,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No point in that. I’m going to adjust the wizardry to take us in, and hold steady at two twenty two. Everyone, check my numbers.”
They all watched as Roshaun brought out his version of the manual, a little tangle of light like a miniature sun itself, and read from it a precise string of words and numbers in the Speech. Inside the wizardry, the “depth” constant changed to reflect the shift. Everyone looked at the numbers.
“Did you all check me?”
Dairine read the numbers three times. “You’ve got it,” she said.
“Check,” Sker’ret said.
“And I check you, too,” said Filif, trembling.
“Then let’s go—”
They vanished again—th
is time into the inferno.
***
In the heart of hearts of Alaalu, Nita and Kit stood looking at the planet’s oldest surviving wizard—if his present state, half myth, half spirit, could be described as “surviving”—as he said, “We’ve been waiting for you here for a while.”
“Not too long, I hope,” Kit said.
Druvah’s smile was reassuringly ironic. “Long enough,” he said. “But I don’t mind.” He bowed to Esemeli, and It eyed him with an expression of reserved disdain.
“You did a good job hiding your kernel,” Nita said.
“It seemed necessary,” Druvah said. “Under the circumstances, it seemed wise to keep it in an ambivalent state: not quite in the real world, in Time; not all the way into the deeper world, out of Time; but oscillating between them, a million times every moment, so that its location was always more a possibility than a definite thing.”
“Uncertainty,” Nita said to Kit. “The way you get it in atomic structure, with the electrons more or less certain to be in a given area, but never really just in one spot… ”
“That quality of matter I borrowed for this wizardry, yes,” Druvah said. “And for myself as well, so that I could keep an eye on what our destiny was bound to.” He looked at Nita and Kit. “But where is the last wizard?”
They looked at each other. “Well…” Nita said.
“Unfortunately,” Esemeli said, “she will not be coming.”
Druvah looked at her in a shock so stately it closely resembled composure.
“The strangers on whom you pinned all your hopes,” Esemeli said, “unfortunately have given your wizard the fright of her life, by telling her the truth. A choice irony. She’s seen what the Telling showed her of their world and wants nothing to do with it, or them. Or, by extension, you, Druvah. She even made herself unavailable enough to them this morning that they couldn’t be warned in time about what they were so eager to do.”