He wanted me to say more. "How many are there then?"
"Who knows? I have to go to Shere Zaghara, deep carverns, north of j Sahen. Of course, you don't have to come with me . . ."
Panthera stood up. "I never have," he said. "When do we leave?"
The Lyris had granted us passage through his private conduit to the deepest grottoes of Sahale. "It is not a difficult or treacherous route," he told me, "so you may go there alone, or just with your companion, as you prefer. Go to the burrow of the fire-saucer. It is the chamber of greatest light and unmistakable. Your answers may come to you there."
May. We went down through the palace and at first the stairs had plastered, painted walls on either side. Eventually this changed to gnarled rock. Feverish cavern-lights cast eerie shadows in corners and across our faces. At first we traveled downwards in silence. I was thinking deeply and eventually had to tell someone.
"Panthera."
"What?" He sounded disinterested, but I carried on.
"I can see the end now, I think."
"Of these steps?"
"No! Of everything. Of trouble. I can see it all through."
"Have you only just decided that?" he asked wearily, perhaps doubting my sincerity. I didn't blame him.
"Perhaps it's been decided for me, but I don't want to be wishy-washy about it any more. The best form of defense is attack."
"Or a mirror." That could have meant many things, some of them not quite flattering. "So you've admitted to taking up the quest then, have you?"
"I'm not as weak as you think."
He glanced at me quickly then and I could see that he thought I was deceiving myself, wondering how on earth I could be third level Acantha when I was such a fool.
"Listen, Thea, you didn't know me before Piristil, did you, when I was in Megalithica, before Pell . . ."
"And during, and after!" He did not hide the bitter sarcasm. "It's all him, isn't it? The God figure!"
I ignored this. "Let's just say that after Pell died, I let go of the reins, lost control. That has got to end."
"Oh? And how do you plan to regain control of reins that curb the bits of other people's horses?"
"They were my horses once."
"Who rides them now, though?"
"This conversation is getting out of hand!" I laughed.
Panthera wouldn't even smile. "Maybe. Perhaps everything is getting out of hand."
"What do you mean?"
He would not say.
The steps beneath our feet were becoming warmer, the rocks glassier and the air held a hint of sulfur. We could hear strange booming sounds coming from a long way below us. "Are we on our way to hell?"
Panthera asked, too wistfully for it to be a joke. Now the passage was levelling out, widening and heightening. Landings swept away from us to either side, offering glimpses of swooping galleries and dark or flaming caverns. Ahead of us, a smooth sweep of glossy, black stone led to a narrow slit in the rock wall. From here a sliver of intense brightness shone like a ray of sunlight into the passage. It was stronger than sunlight. "This is it," I said. Bulbs of spectral, red light clung to the arching, throated walls like clusters of bubbles, but they were hardly needed. My heart had begun to pound about twenty steps up from here, half with fear, half with excitement. As we approached the entrance, I could see that the gap was just wide enough for me to squeeze through. We paused at the threshold. Panthera put his hand upon the wall, running his fingers over the undulating grooves.
"Should you go in there alone, Cal?" he asked. For a moment, I thought he was afraid. There was a fine lacing of sweat along his upper lip, but then I looked at his eyes; they were dark and tranquil.
"Perhaps I should."
"I'll wait for you here then." He turned away and then, impulsively, wheeled around to embrace me. "Take care."
"Don't worry."
"And don't change too much." He smiled and put his cheek, briefly, against mine.
As soon as I wriggled through the gap in the wall, it was as if a heavy, impenetrable curtain of time and distance had fallen between us. I was alone. Beyond me, I could see the glistering walls of a huge and camerated natural vault. There were veins of micra, taut tendons of mineral splatter-ings, and a thousand, thousand eyes of warm, living gems, glowing from the walls, sullen in the light of a slowly licking fire. The saucer itself was maybe only six feet across and of simple rough stone, broken in places as if it had lain there unseen for millenia. I could not decide whether the flames rose from a cavity in the saucer's center, coming up from the earth itself, or if it simply existed upon the stone; a fire without fuel. I approached the light. A pottery cup and a flagon of liquid sat in the sand, attached to the stone bowl by a thin, metal chain. I had been instructed by the Lyris to take up the flagon, pour some of the liquid into the cup and drink it. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, I did so. It tasted like stale, warm water; a strong, mineral flavor. For a moment, I calmed myself, controlling my breathing as I'd been taught so long ago. Then, making the genuflections of entreaty, I addressed the genius loci of the cavern, and opened up my mind for the reception of thought. The entity that lived within the flame, as if used to such encounters with harish kind, introduced itself without preamble and asked my business. As instructed, I opened up the part of my mind that was like an illustrated book of my life. The entity read it slowly, thoroughly, and took pleasure in it. My small life, entertaining at the best of times, apparently captured its interest; it read with relish.
"You seek answers to questions you cannot form," it decided. "If you knew the questions you would know the answers."
"May I ask one of you?"
"You may."
"Why am I important?"
"You are important only as all natural things are important," it answered obliquely, and then added, "If time is a tapestry, then you are one thread, whose color improves the whole, and without which some threads may become unraveled or cease to have been at all."
"This much was known to me," I said. "You must agree that it is a circumstance that could be applied equally to every living being on this planet."
"Precisely."
"I'm not asking the right question am I?"
It did not answer this, but instead honored me with a physical manifestation of itself, which appeared as a slim, rangy hound with glowing eyes, whose fur was brindled and short, and who had a crest of copper-colored fronds growing from its neck. It lay down some feet in front of me and licked its paws fastidiously with a blue tongue. The fronds all pointed toward me like eye-stalks.
"Must I go to Immanion?"
"Yes. Is that an answer you did not already know?"
I rubbed my eyes. The words were bitter in my mouth, but I had to say it. "Is my destiny to be the Tigron's concubine?"
The hound looked up at that and pricked its ears at my indiscretion. "If that were the case," it said indignantly, "then you would not be here now asking questions of me! Don't waste my time!"
"Sorry. No insult meant by that. Tell me then, what must I know?"
"One thing. What you are. Another thing; what must be done. The tying of loose threads. Finish what has been started, and in the right way. Make it smoooth."
"I still don't understand."
"What is most important to you?"
I pretended to think. It took some time to force the words out. "Pellaz and myself. . . . Are we destined to be ... together again?"
"You will meet in Immanion."
"As lovers?"
I could hear the flames cracking, spitting in the fire-saucer. The fire hound looked at the flames. "You cannot do this alone. Help is needed. Go to the Dream People and join with them in the saltation of vision. They are to be found in the east, and are known in this land as the Roselane. All nears completion. A great cycle draws to a close and heralds the morning of a new age. Among the Roselane, you shall see yourself, and the mirror shall be clear. That is all."
I could feel the creature drawing away from me.
"Th
at is not all!" I cried desperately as its image wavered upon the sand. "You did not answer my question!"
"I have answered as I can, and as I must. Do not believe everything you are led to believe. That, too, is part of it."
"But the visions . . . what are they? Is it real? The dreams? Are they?"
"You do not need me to answer that!"
"And Zack, what has he to . . ."
"No!" I was interrupted firmly. "That is not part of what I have to tell you. I've delivered my part. Remember it well. That is all. Now, leave quietly!"
The flames in the saucer suddenly jetted skywards and then abated to a dull, crimson glow. The pottery cup fell over at my feet. I did not bother to right it again. I walked straight out.
Panthera was sitting where I'd left him, his back to the wall. When he saw me scrambling through the rock, he got to his feet. "Well?" he demanded, searching my eyes for the answers I'd not received.
"Riddles! Just riddles!" I snapped and strode right past him, heading blindly for the stairs.
Panthera hurried after me. "What do you mean?" He grabbed my arm.
"There are no answers!" I turned on him viciously. "Can't you understand? There are no answers. Just another place to go, another move in the game!"
"Didn't you expect that?"
I couldn't answer.
"What happened, Cal. What did it say?"
"You really want to know? OK, I'll tell you. I had a cozy little talk with a supernatural beast. What it told me was nonsense. I'm no wiser. Go to Roselane, it said. Can you believe it? We came all this way, Kachina was killed, for that! If it's somebody's idea of a joke, then I'm not playing anymore. It's ridiculous!" I started running, not bothered whether Panthera was following or not. Near the top of the stairs, my chest began to ache. I could not continue. I had to stop; leaning down, shoving my head between my knees, I gasped for breath.
Panthera watched me for a while before coming out with the inevitable, "Cal?" and touching me warily on the shoulder.
"Don't touch me!" I yelled, shrugging him off. Oh, that felt good! I struggled onwards, one hand on the wall, feeling like about the biggest martyr in the whole of history. Panthera did not speak again. He walked behind me.
We returned to the palace of the Lyris, to pick up our luggage and seeabout finding our way back to Elhmen. The Lyris had just finished his evening audience in the Hall of Hearkening. More time peculiarities courtesy of fire-saucer beast-hound. There was no way the trip could have lasted a whole day. He told lygandil to bring us a meal. Panthera was now touchy about being in the Lyris's presence, probably because he suspected something of what had happened the previous night. We were both anxious to get on our way, I suppose. The Lyris had good news for us about that. It would not be necessary to struggle all the way back to Kar Tatang and from there to Ferike. As Nanine had intimated, there were hundreds of secret entrances to Eulalee. Conveniently, one of them was just a few miles from Clereness. It would be much quicker to travel underground, especially as we'd be going by boat. Eulalee has an extensive canal system. Panthera asked the Lyris if he could arrange for our horses stabled at Kar Tatang to be given to Kachina's family or closest friends. I knew it could not appease Panthera's guilt over the Kachina episode, but I think it at least made him feel a little better. There was a cold and unfriendly politeness between us all the way back to Jael.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Coming of Age
"We have given our hearts away; a sordid boon!"
—William Wordsworth, The World
We've been back in Jael a week now. Over the last couple of days, I've sat up here in my room and read and re-read everything I've written. Piristil is no longer real to me. A blessing, perhaps. Sometimes I'm scared that I'm getting dangerously close to being the sort of Cal that Thiede wanted to drag back to Immanion. (See, I'm still not sure about the Cleansing.) Occasionally, I allow myself the luxury of thinking about Pell and about the type of reunion I'd like us to have. The destruction of Almagabran society predominates in these fantasies and it would be me pulling the sole survivor from the wreckage; the Tigron. Then we could resume our wanderings together, ride off into a glorious sunset. I know it's impossible. The chances are, that once in Roselane, I shall merely be given yet another clue to the puzzle, shoved off into the unknown on another journey. Bearing in mind everything else, this seems distinctly plausible. How can I believe, sitting here, that my life has great purpose? I look at my hands; they are scratched from rock clambering, yellow around the first and second fingers on the left hand through chain-smoking. They are not the hands of a hero; no. To be fair to myself, I have started working again; you know, the real work of Wraeththu, flexing the muscles of my strange abilities. Every evening, I've taken to sitting in meditation wih Ferminfex. The visualization's OK, but I can't say I've learned anything dramatic from this battered head of mine. Most of it's memory, but I know that has to be relived until the stings have worked themselves out before I can get on with the heavy stuff. Self-examination. I've never really liked it. Demons with my face. I don't want to be faced with the gravity of existence, because it forces me to become obsessed with the concept of time, aware of how much of it I've wasted. Each moment is terrifying in its brevity, never to be relived again, for better or worse. Perhaps I'll be two hundred years old by the time I see Pell again and we'll both last long enough to say hello before death steps in to say, "That's long enough, you two!" It wouldn't surprise me. Not at all.
The family Jael celebrated themselves silly when we returned. It was all supposed to be nice and friendly, but nothing could breach Panthera's ass-stupid silence, which even caused his doting parents to look askance at him. I've not been alone with him since Sahen. It would seem that our friendship, which was never very close at the best of times, is doomed to wither. For some reason (unspoken) he has decided to take offense at something I've done or said. All of Panthera's actions (and reactions) are premeditated; I've learned that much. He is doubtless furious that I haven't worked out what I've done wrong yet. Ferminfex wants me to stay here in Jael for a couple more weeks before I set off for Roselane. (You see, I am going there.) By then the weather should have wanned up a bit. I haven't yet worked out my route, but it seems fairly certain that either by coincidence or design, it'll pass close to Oomadrah. After all, didn't the fire-hound tell me to tie off all my loose ends? Well, if the Archon of Maudrah is who I think he is, that is definitely a loose end I want snipped off, if not tied. Perhaps it is all circumstantial, just coincidence. The law of averages dictates that Wraxilan should have been killed a hundred times over back in Megalithica; he certainly deserved it. Wraxilan. We all go back to the beginning sometimes, don't we. For Pell, it would be me, but for me it is always the Lion of Oomar. Like a glamorous, brutal father, he influenced my Wraeththu shaping, is perhaps responsible for what I am now. I feared him, I supplicated at his feet. OK, I was sixteen, for God's sake! That's forgivable, isn't it? I want to see him again so he'll know I made it alright (comparatively) without him. It might not be part of the plan— it might be the ultimate self-indulgence—but it's something I have to do. Anyway, it's not going to happen yet. I have Jael to enjoy for a while longer. Now it is evening, and Jael is a magical place of soft shadows and fading spring sunlight. I can smell the dinner cooking; venison in wine. Yes, I feel good at the moment; about myself, about everything. This is probably transitory, and because of that, dangerous, but who cares! Soon, I shall go downstairs. Another evening of routine comforts.
Panthera was late for dinner. Lahela had to send a servant to fetch him from his studio high up in the castle. He came in smeared with paint, indignant at having been disturbed.
"Immerse yourself in work if you want to," his hostling reprimanded him politely, "but one custom I wish to uphold in this house is that we eat together in the evenings. It would be pleasant if you could avoid looking on this as an inconvenience!"
Panthera mumbled an apology and helped himself to food; small portions.
He was sitting next to me, but I might as well have been a stranger. I wondered whether he was angry with me or disappointed, or had just decided he did not particularly like me.
"Panthera," I said, "I would like to talk with you after dinner."
"I'm busy. Can't it wait?"
"No."
He looked up from his food with cold eyes. My first instinct was to wince away, but I managed to hold his gaze. He snorted and pushed food around his plate with his fork. "Very well then, but not for long!"
The evenings were still cool in the high towers of Jael. Fires were still lit in the deep grates. Panthera and I went to sit in a comfortable, private sitting room on the third floor. Panthera stalked restlessly around. He found a pack of cards and suggested we play some game or another. I'd had more than enough of games, of any kind.