The Dark World Relit
ear in the voice of Edwina Bond. But it was Ganelyn's lips that found his lips in the one last ardent kiss I had time for then.
Curiously, it seemed to me that it took Ganelyn's kisses at last to convince his I was Edwina Bond....
After that, for a few hours I slept, snug in Edwina Bond's cavern rooms, in her comfortable bed, her guards watching beside the door. I slept with the memory of her sweet forest boy in my arms, and the prospect of her kingdom and her bride before me when I woke. I think in the Earth-world, Edwina Bond must have dreamed jealous dreams.
But my own dreams were bad. Llyr in her castle was awake and hungry, and the great, cold, writhing tendrils of her hunger coiled lazily through my mind as I slept. I knew they stirred through every mind in the Dark World that had senses to perceive them. I knew I must wake soon, or never. But first I must sleep and grow strong for the night's ordeal. Resolutely I shut Llyr from my thoughts, resolutely I shut away Ares.
It was Medeo's red smile and sidelong sultry glance that went down with me into the caverns of slumber.
XI. In Ghyst Rhymi's Tower
QUIETLY Lirynn and I crouched among the trees and looked out at the Castle of the Coven, aglitter with lights against the starry sky. This was the night! We both knew it, and we were both tense and sweating with a nervous exultation that made this waiting hard indeed.
All around us in the woods, unseen, we heard the tiny sounds that meant an army of forest people waited our signal. And this time they were here in force. I caught a glint of starlight now and then on rifle-barrels, and I knew that the rebels were armed to put up a good fight against the soldiers of the Coven.
Not, perhaps, too good a fight.
I did not care. They thought they were going to storm the Castle and the Coven by sheer force of arms. I knew their only purpose was to divert attention while I made my way into the Castle and found the secret weapons that would give me power over the Covenanters. While they were striking, I would make my way to Ghyst Rhymi and learn what was essential for me to learn.
After that, I did not care. Many foresters would die. Let them. There would still be slaves aplenty for me when my hour came. And nothing could stop me now. The Norns fought with me; I could not fail....
There was much activity within the Castle. Voices floated out to us in the still night air. Figures moved to and fro against the lights. Then great gates were flung open upon a burst of golden radiance and the outlines of many riders crowded against it. A procession was coming out.
I heard chains clash musically, and I understood. This time the sacrifices rode chained to their mounts, so that no siren voices from the wood could lure them away. I shrugged. Let them go to their death, then. Llyr must be fed while she lasted. Better these than Ganelyn, offered at the Golden Window. We saw them go off down the dark road, their chains ringing.
That was Mathwyn -- there on the tall horse. I knew her vulpine outlines, the lift of the cloak upon her shoulders. And I would have known her too because of the great start, quickly checked, that Lirynn made beside me. I heard the breath whistle through her nostrils, and her voice grated in my ear.
'Remember! That is mine!'
Edurn went by, tiny on his small mount, and a breath of chill seemed to me to sweep the darkness as he passed.
Medeo came!
When I could no longer make out him outlines in the distance, when his white robe was no more than a shimmer and his scarlet cloak had melted into the dark, I turned to Lirynn, my mind spinning, my plans already chaotic with change. For a new compulsion had come upon me, and I was not even trying to resist it.
I had not seen a sacrifice in Caer Secaire. This was one of the blank places in my memory, and a dangerous blank. Until Ganelyn remembered the Sabbat, until she watched Llyr accept the offerings through the Golden Window, she could not wholly trust herself to fight the Coven and Llyr. This was a gap that must be filled. And curiosity was suddenly very strong upon me. Curiosity -- and could it be -- the pull of Llyr?
'Lirynn, wait for me here,' I whispered in the darkness. 'We've got to make sure they enter Caer Secaire, start the Sabbat. I don't want to attack until I'm sure. Wait for me.' She stirred protestingly, but I was away before she could speak.
I was out upon the road and running softly and silently after that processional winding toward the valley and the Mass of St. Secaire, which is the Black Mass. It seemed to me as I ran that the fragrance of Medeo's perfume hung upon the air I breathed, and my throat choked with the passion of my hatred for him, and of my love.
'He shall be the first to die,' I promised myself in the dark....
I watched the great iron doors of Caer Secaire swing shut upon the last of the procession. The Caer was dark inside. They went quietly in, one by one, and vanished into the deeper night within. The doors clanged resonantly after them.
Some memory of Ganelyn's, buried beneath the surface of conscious thought, urged me to the left, around the curve of the great wall. I followed the impulse obediently, moving almost like a sleep-walker toward a goal I did not know. Memory took me close under the looming rampart, made me lay my hands on its surface. There were heavy scrollings of pattern there, writhing like tendrils over the dark walls. My remembering fingers traced the curves, though my mind still wondered.
Then the wall moved beneath my hands. The scroll-work had been a key of sorts, and a door sank open in the blackness before me. I went confidently forward, out of black night, through a black door into deeper blackness within. But my feet knew the way.
A stairway rose beneath me in the dark. My feet had expected it and I did not stumble. It was very curious to move so blindly through this strange and dangerous place, not knowing where or why I moved, yet trusting my body to find the way. The stairs wound up and up.
Llyr was here. I could feel her hungry presence like a pressure on the mind, but many times intensified because of the narrow spaces within these walls, as if she were a sound of thunder reverberating again and again from the enclosed spaces of the Caer. Something within me reverberated soundlessly in answer, a roar of exultation that I suppressed in quick revolt.
Llyr and I were no longer linked by that ceremony of long ago. I repudiated it. I was not Llyr's Chosen now. But within me a sense I could not control quivered with ecstasy at the thought of those sacrifices who had fled blindly through the great doors of Caer Secaire. And I wondered if the Coven -- if Medeo -- thought of me now, who had so nearly stood with the sacrifices last night.
My feet paused upon the stairs. I could see nothing, but I knew that before me was a wall carved with scroll-patterns. My hands found it, traced the raised designs. A section of darkness slid sidewise and I was leaning upon a wide ledge, looking down, very far down.
Caer Secaire was like a mighty grove of columns whose capitals soared up and up into infinite darkness. Somewhere above, too high for me to see its source, a light was beginning to glow. My heart paused when I saw it, for I knew that light -- mat golden radiance from a Golden Window.
Memory came fitfully back to me. The Window of Llyr. The Window of Sacrifice. I could not see it, but my mind's eye remembered its glow. In Caer Llyr that Window's substance shone eternally, and Llyr Herself lolled behind it -- far behind it -- forever. But in Caer Secaire and in the other temples of sacrifice that had once dotted the Dark World, there were replicas of the Window which glowed only when Llyr came bodilessly through the dark to take her due.
Above us, hovering and hungry, Llyr was dawning now in that golden radiance, like a sun in the night time of the temple. Where the Window of Secaire was located, how it was shaped, I still could not remember. But something in me knew that golden light and shivered in response as I watched its brilliance strengthen through the columns of the temple.
Far below me I saw the Coven standing, tiny figures foreshortened to wedges of colored cloak -- green-robed Mathwyn, yellow-robed Edurn, red Medeo. Behind them stood a circle of guardswomen. Before them, as I watched, the last of the chosen slaves moved blind
ly away among the columns. I could not see where they were going, but in essence I knew. The Window was yawning for its sacrifices, and somehow they must make their way to it.
As the light broadened, I saw that before the Coven stood a great cup-shaped altar, black on a black dais. Above it a lipped spout hung. My eyes traced the course of the trough which ended in the spout, and I saw now that there was a winding, descending curve, dark against that growing light, which came down in a great sweep from the mysterious heights overhead, stretching from -- the Window? -- to the cupped altar. A stir deep within me told me what that trough was for. I leaned upon the sill, shaking with an anticipation that was half for myself and half for Him, who hovered above us in the sun-like dawning of golden light.
Thinly from below me rose a chant. I knew Medeo's voice, clear and silver, a thread of sound in the dimness and the silence. It rose like incense, quivering among the mighty, topless columns of Secaire.
A tenseness of waiting grew and grew in the dim air of the temple. The figures below me stood motionless, heads lifted, watching the dawning light. Medeo's voice chanted on and on.
Time paused there in the columned grove of Secaire, while Llyr hovered above us waiting for his prey.
Then a thin and terrible cry rang out from the heights overhead. One scream. The