Although he began to examine the walls carefully as he walked, his discovery of the moss was not immediately followed by anything more useful. The tunnel now began to widen, and the next two passageways he chose seemed more artfully constructed, the walls symmetrical, the floor even. Then, as he explored yet another branching, he put his foot down on nothing.
With a shout of horrified surprise, Simon caught at the entrance of the tunnel. His torch flew from his hand and tumbled down into the darkness where he had nearly gone himself. As he watched in fearful anticipation, it struck and then rolled; it stopped at last, flickering … but did not go out.
Stairs. His torch was lying on a flight of rough stairs leading downward. The first half-dozen steps had crumbled or been broken away, leaving nothing behind but a few rough edges.
He did not want to go down. He wanted to go up.
But stairs! Maybe there’s something real down there—some place that makes sense. What could be worse than what’s already happening?
Nothing. Everything.
It was a left-hand turning, so he would not be completely lost if it proved a bad choice. But it would be much easier to drop down the gap comprised by the missing steps—a distance almost twice his height—than to climb back up again if he changed his mind. Perhaps he should take one of the other paths. …
What nonsense are you thinking? he berated himself. He would have to go down just to retrieve his torch.
Simon sat, dangling his legs over the stairless gap, and pulled the strip of dried meat from his pocket. He broke off a small piece and sucked on it meditatively as he looked down. The torchlight showed the steps had been chiseled square, but left unfinished: they were made to be useful, nothing else. Looking at them, there was no way to tell whether they led anywhere.
He chewed and stared. His mouth filled with saliva as he savored the salty, smoky taste. It was wonderful to have something solid between his teeth again!
Simon rose, then turned and went back up the corridor, feeling with his hand when the light grew dim, until he found more moss clinging to the wall. He pulled loose several handfuls, then shoved the sticky mass into his pocket. He returned to the stairwell and peered down until he felt he had located the best spot to land. He slid his legs over, then rolled onto his front and let himself down as carefully as he could, gritting his teeth as the stone scraped against his stomach and chest. When he was almost hanging full length, he let go.
A piece of loose stone, perhaps a fragment of the missing steps, was lying in wait for him like a viper. He felt one foot touch before the other, then the first foot rolled over at the ankle. A flash of pain shot through his leg.
Tears in his eyes, Simon lay on the topmost step for a moment, cursing his luck. He sat up, slid forward until he could reach the fallen torch, then set it down beside him and took off his boot to examine his injured ankle.
He could bend it reasonably well, although each change of position was painful. He decided that it was not broken—but what could he have done about it if it were? He pulled off his shirt and tore loose yet another strip, then pulled the ever-shrinking garment back on. When he had bound the cloth around his ankle and foot as snugly as he could, he pulled the boot back on and tested himself. He could walk, he decided, but it would hurt.
Walk, then. What else can you do?
He began his limping descent.
Simon had hoped that the stairs would lead him down to some place more real than the endless, pointless tunnels. But the more real his surroundings became, the more they also became unreal.
After several score small but painful descents, the stairs ended and Simon hobbled out through a jagged hole into another corridor, a passage quite unlike the tunnels through which he had been traveling. Moss-festooned and almost black with the dirt of ages, it was nevertheless made of carefully-cut dressed stone; its walls were thick with carvings. But when he stared at these carvings for more than a moment, those that were just at the corners of his vision seemed to shimmer and move, as though they were not marks in stone at all, but rather some kind of parchment-thin creatures, slender as thread. The walls and floor seemed somehow unstable, too: when Simon looked away for a moment in his plodding progress, lured by yet another smear of movement at the edge of his eye, or was distracted by the flickering of the torch flame, they appeared to change. The long straight corridor suddenly had an upward slant, or seemed abruptly narrower. If he turned away and then looked back, everything was as it had been before.
Nor were these the only tricks this place played on him. The noises that he had heard before returned, voices and rushing water now joined by a strange, abstract music, all sourceless and ghostly. Unexpected scents washed over him, too, rushes of sweet flowery air one moment that quickly gave way to dank emptiness once more, only to be supplanted a moment later by the harsh smell of something burning.
It was too much. Simon wanted to lie down, to go to sleep and wake up with everything stable and unchanging. Even the monotony of the tunnels above was preferable to this. He might have been trudging at the bottom of the sea, where the currents and uneven light made everything sway and dance and shimmer.
How long did you think you could walk in the empty earth before you went mad, Mooncalf?
I’m not going mad, he told himself. I’m just tired. Tired and thirsty. If only there weren’t all these water-noises. They just make things worse.
He pulled some of the moss from his pocket and chewed as he walked, forcing himself to swallow the hateful stuff.
There was no question that he was walking in a place in which people … in which someone … had once lived. The ceiling rose higher above him, the floor was level beneath the rubble and dust, and the crossing passages, almost all of them choked with stone and soil, were faced with carved arches, soiled and worn to pebble-smoothness but clearly the work of careful craft.
Simon paused for a moment before one of these entranceways. As he stood resting his throbbing ankle, staring at the jumble of rocks and dirt that plugged it, the mound of dirt seemed to darken, then turn black. A small light bloomed in that blackness, and Simon suddenly felt he was looking through the doorway. He took a step closer. In the darkness beyond he saw a single spot of luminance, an orb of light dimly glowing. Near it, bathed in faint radiance, was … a face.
Simon gasped. The face lifted, as though the person sitting in near-darkness had heard him, but the high-slanted eyes did not meet his, staring instead out past him. It was a Sitha face, or seemed so in the moment he could observe it, a world of pain and concern in the shining eyes. He saw the lips move in speech, the eyebrows rise in sad inquiry. Then the darkness blurred, the light vanished, and Simon was standing with his nose a finger’s breadth away from a doorway choked with rubble.
Dry. Dry. Dead. Dead.
A sob hitched in his throat. He turned back to the long corridor.
Simon didn’t know how long he had been staring at the flame of his torch. It wavered before him, a universe of yellow light. It was a terrible effort to wrench his gaze away.
The walls on both sides had turned to water.
He stopped, staring in awe. Somehow the tunnel floor had become a narrow walkway over a great darkness and the walls had retreated: they no longer touched the floor on which he stood, and their stone facing was completely covered by flowing sheets of water. He could hear it rushing down into the emptiness below, see the uneven reflection of the torch as it played across the liquid expanse.
Simon moved to the edge of the walkway and stretched out his hand, but his fingers did not reach. He could feel a faint dew of mist on his fingertips, and when he drew the hand back and touched it to his mouth, there was a faint taste of wet sweetness. He leaned out again, swaying perilously over the darkness, but still could not touch even a fingertip to the sheeting water. He cursed in fury. If he only had a bowl, a cup, a spoon!
Think, Mooncalf! Use your head!
After a moment’s consideration, he put his torch down on
the walkway and shucked his tattered shirt over his head. He got down on his knees; then, clutching one sleeve, he flung the rest of it out as far as he could. It touched lightly against the cascade and was pulled downward. He yanked it back, his heart beating faster as he felt the shirt’s new heaviness. He threw back his head, then pushed the sodden cloth against his mouth. The first drops were like honey on his tongue. …
The light flickered. Everything in the long chamber seemed to lurch to one side. The rush of the water grew louder, then hissed away into silence.
Simon’s mouth was full of dust.
He gagged and spat, spat again, then fell to the floor in a panicked fury, growling and thrashing like a beast with a thorn in its side. When he looked up, he could still see the walls and the gap that stretched between them and the walkway on which he crouched—that much was real—but there was no sheeting water, only a lighter-colored smear on the stone wall where his shirt had flicked loose a few centuries’ worth of grime.
Simon shook with tearless sobbing as he wiped the dirt from his face and rubbed the last of crumbs of soil from his swollen tongue. He tried to eat a little of the moss to take the taste of the dust away, but it was so foul he was almost sick again. He spat the leafy wad down into the abyss.
What kind of cursed, haunted place is this? Where am I?
I’m alone, alone.
Still shaking, he dragged himself to his feet, looking for a safer place to lie down for a while and sleep. He needed to get away. There was no water. There was no water anywhere. And no safety either.
Faint voices up in the shadows of the high ceiling sang words he could not understand. A wind he could not feel fluttered the torch flame.
Am I alive?
Yes, I am. I am Simon, and I am alive, and I will not give up. I am not a ghost.
He had slept twice more, and had chewed enough of the bitter moss to keep himself moving in between rests. He had used more than half of his treated rags to keep the torch burning. It was difficult to remember a time when he had not seen the world by wavering torchlight, or when the world itself had not consisted of unpeopled stone corridors and whispering, bodiless voices. He felt as though his own essence had begun to melt away, as though he was becoming a chittering shade.
I am Simon, he reminded himself. I met the dragon and I won the White Arrow. I am real.
As in a dream, he moved through the halls and corridors of a great castle. For illuminated moments swift as the whiteflash of lightning, he could see it in full life, the halls full of faint golden faces, the walls pale, shining stone that reflected the colors of the sky. It was a place unlike anything he had ever seen, with streams prisoned in stone banks that ran from room to room, and waterfalls that frothed down the walls of chambers. But for all the splashing, it was still dream-water. Each time he reached, the promise turned to grit in his hands; the walls darkened and slouched, the light dimmed, the beautiful fretwork withered away, and Simon found himself walking in ruined stone halls again, a homeless spirit in a vast tomb.
The Sithi lived here, he told himself. This was Asu’a, shining Asu’a. And somehow they are still here … as though the stones themselves are dreaming of the old days.
A poisonously seductive idea began to make itself felt. Amerasu Ship-Born had said that somehow Simon lived closer to the Dream Road than others—he had seen the Parting of the Families during his vigil atop Sesuad’ra, hadn’t he? Perhaps, then, if he could discover some way to do it, he could … step across. He would go into the dream, he would live in beautiful Asu’a and plunge his face into the living streams that meandered through the palace—and this time they would not turn to dust. He would live in Asu’a, and never come back again to this dark, haunted world of crumbling shadows. …
Never come back to your friends? Never come back to your duty?
But the dream-Asu’a was so beautiful. In the instants of its flickering existence, he could see roses and other startlingly bright flowers climbing up the walls to bask in the sun from the high windows. He could see the Sithi, the dream-people who lived here, graceful and strange as bright-plumed birds. The dream showed a time before Simon’s kind had destroyed the Sithi’s greatest house. Surely the immortals would welcome a lost traveler … Oh, Mother of Mercy, might they welcome him in from the darkness …?
Weak and weary, Simon stumbled on a loose paving stone and fell to his hands and knees. His heart felt like an anvil in his chest. He could not move, could not go another step. Anything was better than this mad loneliness!
The wide room before him pulsed, but did not disappear. Out of the nebulous cloud of moving forms, one of the figures became clearer. It was a Sitha woman, skin golden as sunlight, hair a cloud of nightblack. She stood between two twining trees laden with silvery fruit, and her eyes slowly turned to Simon. She paused. A strange look came over her face, as though she had heard a voice calling her name in a lonely place.
“Can … can you see me?” Simon gasped. He scrabbled toward her across the floor. She continued to stare at the spot where he had been.
Terror rushed through him. He had lost her! His limbs turned boneless and he slumped forward onto his belly. Behind the black-haired woman a fountain of water sparkled, the drops that flew through the slanting light of the windows glowing like gems. She closed her eyes, and Simon felt a questing touch at the farthest edge of his mind. She seemed only a few short steps away, but at the same moment as distant as a star in the sky. “Can’t you see me!?” he howled. “I want to come inside! Let me in!”
She stood as immobile as a statue, her hands folded before her. The high-windowed chamber grew dark, until she alone stood in a column of radiance. Something brushed against Simon’s thoughts, light as a spider’s step, soft as a butterfly’s breath.
Go back, little one. Go back and live.
Then she opened her eyes and looked at him again. Her eyes were full of a wisdom so vast and kind that Simon felt himself lifted and held and known. But her words were bitter for him.
This is not for you.
She began to fade. For a moment, she was only another shadowy figure in the ancient parade of shapes. Then the beautiful airy room itself flickered and vanished. Simon was sprawled in the dirt. His torch burned fitfully on the ground, half a pace from his outstretched fingers.
Gone. Left me behind.
Simon cried until he could not cry any more, until he was hoarse with weeping and his face hurt. He dragged himself to his feet and went on.
He had almost forgotten his name—he had certainly forgotten how many times he had slept, and how many times he had sucked at the diminishing wad of moss crammed in his pocket—when he found the great stairs.
There were only a few rags left to replace the one that burned on his torch. Simon was thinking about what that meant, and realizing that he had gone too far to find his way back to the pool of Perdruinese Fire before he was plunged into darkness, when he walked through one of the sweeping portals of the labyrinthine castle and found himself on a vast landing. Above and below this open place stretched a flight of wide stairs circling around emptiness, an uncountable sweep of steps that curled up into shadow and down into darkness.
The stairs! A memory, dim as a fish in a muddy pond, came floating up. The … Tan’ja Stairs? Doctor Morgenes said … said …
Long ago, in another life, another Simon had been told to look for stairs like these—and they had led him upward to night air and moonlight and damp green grass.
Then that means … if I go up …
A shockingly ragged laugh burst out and echoed in the stairwell. Something, bats or sad little memories, fluttered away into the darkness above, rustling like a handful of parchments. Simon began climbing the stairs, his throbbing ankle, his terrible thirst, his utter, utter loneliness almost forgotten.
I’ll breathe the air. I’ll see the sky. I’m … I’m … I’m Simon. I won’t be a ghost.
Before he had gone half a hundred steps upward, he found that a section o
f the wall had tumbled down, smashing the outermost edge of the steps so that a ragged gap faced out into the empty darkness. The rest of the staircase was blocked by fallen stone.
“Bloody Tree!” he screamed in rage. “Bloody, Bloody Tree!”
“… ree …” the echo repeated. “… ee …”
He waved the torch over his head in a furious challenge to the empty air; the flame billowed and streaked across the black. At last, defeated, he hobbled back down the wide stairs.
He remembered little of his first journey up the Tan’ja Stairs almost a year ago, a journey that had taken place through both outer and inner darknesses … but surely there had not been so many of these damnable steps! It was almost impossible to believe that he could descend so far without finding himself in the pits of Hell.
His plodding descent seemed to take at least a day. There was no way off: the arches that led from the landings were blocked by rubble, and the only other escape would be over the baluster and a plummet down into … who knew what? By the time he stopped at last to sleep on one of the dusty landings, he wished he had never stepped onto the stairs at all, but the thought of dragging himself all the way back up that near-infinitude of steps to the spot where he had entered was horrifying. No, down was the only direction left to him. Surely even these monstrous stairs must come to an end somewhere! Simon curled up and fell into an almost painful slumber.
His dreams were powerful but confusing. Three almost painfully vivid images haunted him—a young fair-haired man bearing a torch and a spear down a steeply-sloping tunnel; an older man, robed and crowned, with a sword lying across his knees and a heavy book opened on top of it; a tall figure, hidden in shadow, who stood straight-backed in the middle of a strangely mobile floor. Again and again the same three visions appeared, changing slightly, showing more while revealing nothing. The spearman cocked his head as though he heard voices. The gray-haired man looked up from his reading as though disturbed by a sudden noise, and a bloom of red light filled the darkness, painting the man’s strong features scarlet. The shadow-shape turned; a sword was in his hand, and something like antlers lifted from his brow. …