~*~
The walk seems endless. There is nothing but unceasing rain and even stone all around us, as far as I can see, and nothing changes however far we walk.
Therrin is very sick. This is the price she must pay for reaching beyond the extent of her talent: she succeeded, and she did not die, but now she is very weak, and fevered. Ty says that she ought to be resting, to regain her strength, but there is no place to rest. We cannot find nor make a shelter in this cursedly flat land, nor can we build a fire in this rain. We shall be cold and wet no matter what we do. So it is better to walk: it keeps us a little warmer, and it gives us a hope – however slight – of arriving at the temple someday. It may well be the nearest shelter, if it exists. I only hope we can find it.
We walk as quickly as she is able – she is very weak, so she must set our pace – and we do not stop until night. Then we lie close together, not quite touching but near enough to give each other some semblance of warmth. It is very cold. We lost our blankets, and all our clothing is soaked through. I think the rain must have reached my very bones by now.
My fingers, my hands, hurt with the cold. I try not to move them – moving hurts them more – and I hold them between my arms and my body when I can.
Therrin is very, very hot to the touch. She keeps saying that she is cold, but her skin feels like it is burning. I am afraid for her. The Unnamed Lands may be dying, but their Princess must live. I don't want her to die. I don't want to lose her. I don't want to be all alone.
I hope she will agree to rest and restore her strength when (if) we reach the temple, that she won't run straight back to save that dying world while still so fevered. I hope she will reach the temple at all. I hope any of us can. We have nothing to guide us but the voice in her mind, and I don't quite trust that the dragon is really calling her, that it isn't only her fever telling her so.
But we have no other direction, so we must follow her. I hope against hope that she will lead us to our goal. I hope she knows something I do not.
The food – what is left of it – quickly runs short, destroyed by the sea and the rain. Our bread dissolves and our once-dried meat spoils. In the end Ty throws away the whole pack, saying that nothing remains that we might still eat. “Do you know how near the temple we are?” he asks grimly, but Therrin only shakes her head.
“Would there be food there?” I ask without hope, already hungry.
“Yes, with some luck. The temple was sealed a thousand years ago, when people still fled to the tunnels in times of need. They were always stocked with food and blankets. Perhaps those, too, have been sealed, though I don't know how much has been destroyed since that time.”
I cling to this new hope, though hope has never served me well. I must have hope. I have nothing else.
The curse follows behind us, where I am safe from the sight of it so long as I don't look back. But too often it is the first thing I see when I wake, and I cannot forget it. It is always there, following me. Always.
I cannot think of it. I cannot stop thinking of it.
It must not follow me. She must not find me. I must not think of her. I must not think.
I must be cold and still and empty as this vast plain of stone. I must not think nor feel. I must think of nothing at all. I must only follow, and wait, and hope.
At last – how long has it been? – I see something different, something that isn't flat. I turn my head, trying to see it more clearly through the rain.
“What is it?” Ty asks.
I don't know. I don't know if it's real. Maybe I am seeing things again.
“The temple,” Therrin whispers. “There it is. He is waiting for us.”
I look at it. I can see the shape more clearly now: a simple building, made of three low walls and a roof laid over them. The fourth wall is left open.
“It can't be,” I say, shaking my head. “A temple is below the ground.”
“It is,” she insists.
“It's only the entrance,” says Ty. “But it is the temple, else it wouldn't still be standing.”
I can't bring myself to nod. It doesn't matter. I don't need to think about it. The thing is shelter, whatever else it might be.
Therrin is so weak by now that she can hardly walk. Many times she has slipped on the wet stone and fallen, so that her hands and cheeks are covered with little scrapes from hitting the ground. Even now she falls as she walks toward the building. Ty lifts her in his arms and carries her the rest of the way. It is not far.
The structure is built of a warm brownish stone, different from that which is all around us, and all along the walls – inside and out – are carvings. I can see the symbols of the eight gods all together, though I don't know any of the other symbols. Maybe this is a temple after all.
It is empty, but it is also warm, and there is a small dry corner into which even the windblown rain hasn't reached. Ty puts Therrin down there. She has her arms around herself for warmth, and she is shaking, and her cheeks are a bright rosy red with fever. I don't think she can do this much longer. We ought to stay here until she is better. It is warm and dry. It is better than whatever awaits us elsewhere, even without food.
The floor is made of the same brown stone, and also carved, and in the center of it is a wooden double-trapdoor. The wood is gray and brittle, with rusted metal handles. It looks very old. Maybe it has been here all these thousand years. Maybe that is the entrance to the temple, and the dragon sleeps below us.
Ty looks at the walls, and runs his hands over the carvings. Beneath his breath he is saying something, whispering to himself, but I cannot make out his words. At last he turns away, and looks instead at trapdoor. “The temple must be below these doors,” he says, and pulls at the rusted handle. It does not move.
He sets his feet further apart, and grips the handle firmly in both his hands, and lifts with his back, using all his strength. I can see his muscles straining through his wet shirt. Still, it does not move.
At last he lets go. “It will not open,” he says.
“Karr is down below,” whispers Therrin. “I must go to him. I must wake him.”
“Then we must find another way to open the doors.”
For a while we sit in silence, leaning against the stone walls, glad of the dryness, glad of the warmth. I wonder whence this warmth comes. Maybe I have been too cold too long. Maybe I have lost too much feeling, and everything feels warm now.
I look up and see her in the entrance – it cannot be! No, it is only the curse. Only the curse, black and horrible, without a face. I try to stop the feeling that wells up inside me. If I am shaking, it is only the cold. The rainwater that runs down my cheek has turned warm, but still, it is only rain. I will not think. I will not feel.
Not while it is watching me.
At last Therrin takes the necklace out from under her shirt, and holds its clear green stone to her eye to look through it at the trapdoor. “There is something there,” she whispers. “There is something in the way, a bubble, a shield, holding it shut.”
She is raving. She is mad with fever. I mustn't try to understand. I mustn't listen.
She crawls to it on her hands and knees, and draws the black knife from her belt, and slices through the empty air. I watch her in silence. She doesn't know what she is doing. There is nothing there, nothing at all, and yet she thinks she can cut it.
She tries the rusty handle again, and the doors open easily. But she is weak with fever, and she is only young, and Ty is so much stronger. I don't understand. I whistle to Snake. Why couldn't Ty open it? Maybe it is still closed, and I cannot see that because I am mad myself. It is like the fish-people, like the bony dog. The utter blackness below it isn't real.
“Down there,” she whispers; “but I cannot see in such darkness, and we have no lamps nor candles...”
“If they are not destroyed, there will be torches down there, once we reach them,” Ty says. “Arrek, your eye can see without light; will you lead? – I can walk well enough i
n darkness, so I shall take the rear; and Therrin, you'll be in the middle, where we can catch you if you stumble.”
She nods.
I don't want to. I don't want to go through whatever was there, whatever Therrin cut through. I don't want to lead the way. I whistle again to Snake, and I try to remember that this is a place of the gods, and that Snake is with me always, and that all I must do is lead the way and tell them what I see; but I am so afraid.
(I remember when I led the way once in darkness and I carried the light and she was so near and she would not believe me and she was afraid and I could not help her and she cried out and my eye, so much pain and it would not go away and I was blind and I could see nothing at all I could see nothing.)
I shake my head, biting my lip. My gaze darts from Therrin's bright fevered stare to Ty's weary – and eager – eyes to the gaping blackness below us to the black shadow of her that has followed me all this way. It is watching me, the curse is watching me and it will not look away. It wants to find her. It wants her to find me.
It wants her to find me and it will do whatever it must. It wants me dead. It wants her to find me and kill me. She will hit me again with her blue spells that turn my blood to raging fire and my bones to wet ice, and she will hit me again with sticks and with rocks and with tightly clenched fists and she will stab me and cut me open and she will poison me and she will touch me with her wretched beautiful hands that I once so loved.
Snake, how I fear her.
I must flee. I must flee her. There is only one way to go. I go into the hole on shaking legs, shivering and afraid, clutching at my arms. My breath comes short and fast. I am so afraid. I don't know if I can speak. But I must try. I must go down, into the depths of the earth, in the hope that she might not find me here, that the gods may protect me.
(She was afraid to go into the darkness. She was afraid.)
“There is a stair, with a wall on its left side,” I tell them. My voice is weak and trembling, hardly more than a breath, and yet it sounds loud and strange in the stillness. I don't want to hear it. I don't want to speak. I walk down into the darkness, into the warmth of the temple, looking only at my feet as I place one below the other. I walk on stone steps worn with the passing of a thousand feet, all of them so long ago that I cannot even begin to conceive it. I walk into the stillness with Therrin and Ty behind me, breathing. I walk and I hope I can forget.
(She saw faces and she knew they would kill her and she asked me to help her but I could do nothing.)
The stair winds downward, a very long way. The walls are carved as all temple walls are. I see the Sundancer's symbol often, and the Sea-Father's. But there are places where it comes together strangely, as though the images had been carved first and then stuck together, and there are places where the walls are smooth. It makes no sense.
It is a very large room we are in, very long and very wide and very very deep. The stair winds around the edge of it. I wonder why a temple was ever built to look like this. Maybe the ceremonies were different then.
(The Queen of the Dark-dust came to me in my dreams and she warned me about her and I would not listen. I would not listen. I gave up my life to her, I gave up my life, I was warned and I would not listen.)
I can see the dragon, now, if that is what the great sleeping beast is. I cannot see him well without light, but well enough to know that he lies asleep, his eyes closed, his great wings folded, his snout resting on his forelegs. It is very warm here, a welcome change from the bitter rainy cold outside the temple.
(She thought that I was misleading her, that I was letting her be lost to the darkness, that I was leading her astray, that I had forgotten the path. She would not believe me. She would not listen.)
“There is a sconce on the wall to the left.”
Ty feels for it with his fingers, finds it, lights the torch therein with flint and steel. It catches light and burns, flooding the temple with warm light.
(She would not believe that the water shone with its own light and she was astounded when she saw it and she never gave apology for calling me a liar.)
Now I can see more easily. There are no other rooms to this temple, nor any sign of the tunnels. Across from us is a large pile of – something – is it food? Has it survived? I want to look, but my attention is drawn to the dragon, the thing which has slept here for a thousand years, which destroyed the city under the sea, which came from that other world, which Therrin has come to save.
(She said the food would not last and I gave her my rations, I gave her all mine freely, and without hope for reward. She did not thank me. She knew that I would. She relied on it.)
He is a great four-legged beast covered in glittering red scales, with thick leathery red wings. Thick spines perhaps as long as my forearms form a line down his neck and his back and his long barbed tail.
I have never seen anything like him before. His sharp white claws are each as long as my hands, and his great head must be at least as long as Ty is tall. He looks almost like a god in his own right. I can see how such a creature could destroy an entire city, easily.
I whistle to Snake in awe.
Ty looks at the great beast with reverence; the curse (it is still here, it has followed me even here) watches without feeling. Therrin walks toward him on unsteady legs.
“Karr?” she asks in a hoarse voice. “Karr, how do I wake thee?”
She pulls up the necklace to look through it again. Her fingers are trembling. She must rest. We have found her dragon and now she must rest.
(Even after she hurt me I did everything I could for her. Blind, I led her through the caves by touch. Yet she wanted nothing more to do with me, no matter how I tried to make it better.)
(“That's repugnant,” she said. “Cover it up.”)
“There's another shield,” she mumbles. Again she draws the black knife and slices through the air. This time I believe her. Something is cut. Something tears, something breaks. Something is released that was not there before. A feeling washes over me like awe, like fear, like safety. The beast before me drives the past from my mind.
Now the dragon's great eye opens. It is a bright emerald green, with a black slit like a cat's and the same green eyeshine behind it, and at least as big as my hand with outstretched fingers.
When he speaks his voice is deep and clear: “Thou'st come at last.”
I don't even notice at first that he is using the shared tongue. It doesn't give me a feeling of wool in my head like it did in the Unnamed Lands. I can understand him and it is as though I always knew this tongue.
“I have,” Therrin answers. Her knees buckle and she falls, but she does not quite swoon. She looks at him, holding herself up on trembling arms. “I am Therrin Shiaran of House Lithuk,” she says. Her voice lilts with fever. “And these are Arrek and Ty and they are traveling with me. And now we can free the others and save the Unnamed Lands.”
“Thou'rt unwell,” he says, snorting. His breath sparks. It must be he who has warmed this temple, with his very breath. “We will free them – but first, thou must regain thy strength. We will wait here.”
“The Unnamed Lands are dying,” she protests weakly.
“Time is not yet quite so short. Now come: there is food here, and fresh water, and soft blankets – enough for thy companions as well as thee. Rest now, wanderers. You must have your strength before we take wing.”
~*~