He gave her a surly look, but did not argue with that particular point. ‘I’ve reached a decision, Ellat.’
‘I thought you might have,’ she replied mildly, folding the towel he had dropped on the floor. ‘Since you wouldn’t have come back to Alphenlicht, otherwise.’
‘We’re going to have to confront Madame.’
‘I assumed that, also.’
‘Sometimes I despair, Ellat. Will I ever be able to surprise you?’
‘Yes. If you’d listen to me, ever, it would surprise me enormously. I told you years ago we would have to deal with Tabiti, forthrightly and personally. You, on the other hand, preferred diplomatic maneuver and, more recently, this dream-world pursuit.’
‘Not my choice!’
‘True. However, in my opinion, the best time to have struck at Tabiti would have been immediately on your return from – what shall I say? – episode one. Before you went searching for Marianne again. While Tabiti was still confused.’
‘You overlook one thing,’ he replied in a dry voice. ‘If she was confused, which I’m not at all certain of, I was even more so.’
‘Yes. Well. That’s as may be, and nothing was done at the time, so it’s fruitless to speak of it. What do you plan now?’
‘I plan a visit to the Cave of Light, Ellat. With Marianne. Tabiti gets her power from somewhere…’
‘I thought her power had always been attributed to shamanistic influences.’
‘That’s only a label. Yes, I have no doubt she was taught whatever she knows by the black shamans, but what did they teach her? Where does she draw her force from?’
‘And if you find out?’
‘We must find a way to cut it off. Marianne will never be safe until we do – the world may not be safe until we do.’
‘You’re aware that there is a great deal of risk in such an endeavor.’
‘So far as I can see, there’s more risk in doing nothing. It’s a case of being damned if we do and damned if we don’t.’
Ellat said nothing to this, choosing instead to cling tightly to a serenity of spirit that had cost her a good deal to achieve. He would do it. She could not in good conscience advise otherwise. She would do what she had done so often in the past.
Wait and hope.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Therat recommended an afternoon reading from the Cave of Light, then spent the morning hours with Marianne, telling her of the history of the Cave. ‘I can’t expect you to believe in it totally,’ she smiled, her lips belying her eyes which burned into Marianne’s own with a fervid glow. ‘We do expect that you not come into the Cave as a skeptic. Just be open to whatever happens.’
‘Do I need to do anything? Learn any chants or responses or anything?’
‘Nothing at all. We’ll do the reciting. You will need to stand in darkness for a few moments, which makes some people rather dizzy. I’ll be next to you and you can hold on to me if you like.’
‘Do I get to see the – symbols or whatever they are?’
‘Certainly. All those present are requested to verify whatever message the Cave seems to be offering.’
‘What do I wear?’
‘Whatever you like. Ellat will give you a robe to cover whatever you’re wearing, but that’s tradition, not ritual. I’ve recommended about two o’clock, if that’s all right with you.’
‘I don’t know why not,’ said Marianne. She had been waiting all morning for Marianne to interrupt her or supersede her in some action, but nothing of the kind had happened. Still, the sense of being occupied was very strong. Marianne had not gone away.
When they arrived at the Cave that afternoon – Ellat, Aghrehond, Makr Avehl and Marianne – Therat, along with Nalavi and Cyram, met them at the entrance cavern and escorted them down the winding, sandy-floored tunnel by the light of flaring lanterns. Every wall, every pillar, every square inch of exposed stone was decorated with symbols: words, phrases, or numbers; some superimposed upon others; some ancient, some newly chiseled or painted on the stone.
They placed their lanterns upon the central altar. Words were chanted that Marianne did not recognize. She knew what they meant, however. In the ancient language of the Magi, the question that the Cave was to answer had been asked. What was the source of Madame’s power?
She felt Therat take her arm as the lanterns were turned off. They stood in darkness. Above them the great, perforated bulk of the mountain rested, spongy with micalined worm holes, through which the light from the outer world was reflected in and down, faint glimmerings, no more than the smallest candle glow, falling through all that weight of rock and earth into the cavern below. Light, reflected from leaf or stream or animal or stone. Never twice the same.
‘I see light,’ whispered Marianne.
‘The light rests on an hourglass,’ said Therat.
‘A sundial,’ said Nalavi.
‘A clock,’ said Cyram, all three of them at once, looking in three different directions. Then they were in darkness once more, unrelieved and absolute. After a moment, Therat sighed and struck a light. ‘Well, Makr Avehl?’
‘Time,’ he said. ‘The source of her power is time.’
‘What’s the matter, Makr Avehl?’ asked Marianne. ‘You don’t sound hopeful.’
Time?’ he replied. ‘How does one get at it? What does one do with it? How has she gained access to it?’
The momentary gods,’ Marianne replied. ‘They’d know. They give time its reality, or so they say. No, that’s not quite it. They give space its reality, and that gives time its reality.’
Therat stared at her in the glare of the lantern light. ‘You have spoken with momentary gods?’ Therat asked.
‘There are five of them with us,’ Marianne began.
‘I summoned them,’ said Marianne. ‘It’s something I learned to do from… from Madame, I think. I was in this place, a library, I seem to remember, and she did this thing. Summoned something terrible. All the world was full of snakes, I remember that. And she had this Manticore. She summoned it up, too, from time to time. And she used… used the momentary gods to transport people into her worlds, I remember that. She would reach up and twist the tail of a momentary god, and it would establish a nexus and let someone through. Oh, I do remember that.’
‘And you learned to do this by merely observing her?’
Marianne shook her head, confused. ‘I’m not sure that’s exactly it. Let’s say I absorbed enough to do it once, once only, without knowing what I was really doing and without any idea how to undo it.’
‘Shamanism,’ said Therat in a flat, dismissive tone. ‘Trifling with the structure of the universe. Foolish! Dangerous!’
‘Dangerous, yes, but we’ll have to deal with it somehow,’ mused Makr Avehl.
‘I still think we ought to talk to the momentary gods,’ advised Marianne, turning toward the entrance of the Cave. ’They may tell us something of value.’
Therat came with them to the Residence, where Marianne called the momegs. Black Dog came in answer to her call, but he was most unwilling to talk. He arrived. He listened briefly, then vanished. Marianne called him again, he returned to lie on the floor, head on paws, scowling at them all.
‘Come on,’ Marianne said. ‘You know something. You told me the momegs give time its reality, or something like that.’
‘It’s true,’ he mumbled. ‘Each of us holds a chunk. Our birthright, so to speak.’
‘How big a chunk?’ asked Makr Avehl.
‘You don’t understand. It’s not like that. Not bigness or longness.’
‘Well tell me, what is it then?’
‘What it is, is duration. Or very rarely beginningness.’
Makr Avehl was relentless. ‘Explain that.’
Black Dog whined, pawed his nose, gnawed at some imaginary itch on his hind leg, then said, ‘Something happens. Then after that, something else happens. Let’s say, a light wave comes to my locus. It has duration there, a chunk of it, the only size there is, th
en it has to go somewhere, so it goes to my contiguite. Anyhow, my contiguite has a chunk of duration, too. After something happens somewhere else, something happens with him. Usually it’s light. Sometimes it’s quarks. We do a lot of durations and aftering with quarks.’
‘What about beforeness?’ asked Marianne, puzzled. ‘Don’t any of you have that?’
‘There’s no such thing,’ Black Dog barked, almost howling, putting his front paws over his ears. ‘That’s heresy. We give time its reality by duration and afterness. Everything happens after something else. Nothing happens before something else. It can’t! That’s just a human heresy, that’s all.’
‘Why are you so upset?’ asked Makr Avehl. ‘You’re saying time is quantized, aren’t you? I don’t see why it shouldn’t be. Does this have anything to do with where Madame gets her power?’
‘She twists things,’ sulked the Black Dog.
‘She’s evil,’ said the Foo Dog, erupting into the room from behind a chair. ‘She’ll end up destroying the universe, or at least this piece of it.’
‘Because?’
‘Because she keeps beforing things. She takes momegs and bends them double, so that things don’t go on to after, they twist around and go back before. That’s how she,’ the momeg indicated Marianne, ‘went back in her own time that way. She learned it from Madame and she borrowed Madame’s power to do it. Not that we blame her. She didn’t know what she was doing…’
‘I really didn’t,’ said Marianne, aghast. ‘Do you mean when I did that, I actually destroyed something?’
‘A momeg is all. One of us. Not one any of us liked very much. He was from a locus way out at the edge of things. Madame keeps a stock of rural momegs around. She thinks as long as she just nibbles away at the edges of things, it won’t really affect anything. She’s wrong, of course. Everyone with any sense knows that the edges of things are really the middle. There have already been disruptions.’ The Foo Dog brooded. ‘I suppose we should have told you this be… uh, at some prior eventuality.’
‘It would have been helpful,’ said Makr Avehl. ‘I’m not sure I understand it yet. Let’s see if I do. The black shamans taught Madame how to evoke momegs. They taught her how to twist momegs in half – is that right? – so that things go backwards or make loops in time instead of going forward?’
‘Taught her how, or gave her some device to do it with, I’m not sure which. Anyhow, she does it, and that makes holes in time where she can stick her false worlds,’ the Foo Dog nodded. ‘And it allows her to fool around with people in very unpleasant ways. And it’s all wrong, of course. Nobody ought to do it, ever. Up until recently, it was only the black shamans who talked about it, but more recently there was some respected human person who taught that time doesn’t always seem to come afterward, even though we know it does.’
‘Are you talking about relativity?’ asked Makr Avehl. ’Really?’
‘That’s what he called it,’ said Wolf Dog, melting through a wall. ‘That’s not what we call it. We call it messing about with things that ought to be left alone. Though of course so long as people just talk about it, no harm is done. It’s when people start actually messing about with it that things start to go wrong.’
‘Then Gojam was right,’ said Marianne.
Makr Avehl stared at her in perplexity. It was Aghrehond who snapped his fingers in sudden memory. ‘He said something about Madame taking momegs and – what? Not sending them back at all?’
To quote him exactly,’ said Marianne, ‘Gojam said, “She has a nasty habit of summoning up momegs on the spur of the moment, without any concern for the inconvenience it may cause, and then splatting them back again whenever it suits her. If she returns them at all, which I have reason to doubt in some cases.”’
Makr Avehl ran his fingers through his hair, then smoothed it, then rolled it again. ‘She’s using them up. Burning them up, as we would burn gasoline. Through some – some mechanism, some spell, something. We need to find how she does it. If the mechanism can be destroyed – assuming she can’t build another one – that will do. If the source can be eliminated, that will do.’
‘If Madame can be done away with,’ said Marianne, ‘that will do as well.’
The others in the group looked at one another uncomfortably.
‘No?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Not except as a last resort,’ Ellat said. ‘People like Madame – often trade off vital parts of themselves in return for power. That, too, is a shamanistic tendency. Black shaman, I should say. Those vital parts are often – well, potentiated, I suppose one might say, when the person dies.’
‘You’re talking ghosts, here?’ Marianne challenged.
‘Something like that.’
‘So? What harm can a ghost do?’
‘I’m talking real ghosts, not comic-book creatures,’ Ellat said patiently. ‘Concatenations of evil intention. Which, after sufficient aggregation, become what we would call demons. As to what harm, a very great deal. To you. To Makr Avehl. To nameless third parties we don’t even know of.’
‘Take her word for it,’ said Therat, who had listened silently to the entire conversation with the momegs and who now spoke for the first time. ‘It would be better to render Madame helpless than to kill her. Truly. If you can figure out a way to do that, you will have done all that needs doing.’
‘And how do we do that?’
‘We go to Lubovosk,’ said Makr Avehl. ‘We go to Lubovosk and talk to the same people Madame talked to when she learned all this. We start with the black shamans.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Three bodies and four people went. Two Mariannes, one Makr Avehl, one Aghrehond. Makr Avehl’s beard and hair were dyed white, he led the packhorse and walked with a cane. Marianne wore the typical peasant dress of the region; her hair was braided; her face was dirty. Dressed in leather trousers and a full-sleeved shirt under a filthy sheepskin jacket, Aghrehond drove a small flock of sheep with the help of a couple of the momegs who showed up from time to time to nip at a lagging heel or bark at a straying woolface. They climbed over a mountain by a secret trail maintained by the Alphenlicht border guards; they appeared in Lubovosk some miles inside the border with all the requisite papers tucked in one pocket or another.
Before they left, certain processes had been set in motion in Alphenlicht, behind them. Functionaries at the Residence started the day by announcing that the Prime Minister would shortly be married, that even now his intended bride, an American girl of impecccable Kavi descent, was visiting the family. All attention was drawn south, to the Prime Minister’s Residence in Alphenlicht. Such had been Makr Avehl’s intention.
When advised of this ruse, Marianne was furious. ‘I never said I’d marry you.’
‘Since I didn’t propose to you, that doesn’t surprise me.’
‘You can’t marry her unless I consent to it. It’s my body, damn it.’
Makr Avehl considered this for a long time, looking her up and down, walking around her as though she had been a filly for auction. ‘I think I could, don’t you know. We’d simply divide up the time. Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays, and alternate Sundays would be yours. The other time would be ours. That would work out well, wouldn’t it? You’d have lots of time to yourself. Marianne and I would have time to ourselves. You could learn to sleep through our times, just as Marianne did during yours.’
‘I’m going back to Colorado.’
‘That would make what I propose very difficult.’
‘You’re impossible.’
‘Not impossible, no. Merely very unlikely. Face it, Marianne. We are all unlikely. You, me, Ellat, Aghrehond. The world is unlikely. But not impossible.’
She had stormed at him then and did so now, clomping along the trail in her felt boots, unable to set aside her anger even for the moment.
Aghrehond caught her by the hand. ‘Oh, beauteous lady, most glorious master, please. For the sake of my poor, outraged heart. Here are we all, in the very belly of t
he beast, here on the slippery slopes of Lubovosk, here in the necromantic north, in the wicked woods, in the very gut of this dreadful country, and you argue over such trifles as who shall love whom. Truly, it may be none of us will love again, and then you will be sorry to have wasted your time in this fashion.’ Aghrehond sounded much aggrieved, taking out his temper on the sheep as he boomed at them to move in the direction he wished and no other. He had a tired lamb draped around his neck, which somewhat mitigated his attempts at fierceness.
Marianne subsided, though only a little. ‘What are we going to do when we get there? And where is there, come to that?’
Makr Avehl answered her. ‘We’re going to the place Tabiti lives. Not a palace, or residence, I’ve been told, but something more like a villa or chateau, outside the capital city—or what passes for one in Lubovosk. Somewhere nearby, there should be an encampment where we’ll find the shamans. My spies tell me that she consults them or uses them almost daily, so they’ll have to be close by. On the other hand, she wouldn’t want their presence obvious to visitors, so I think they will not actually be part of her establishment.’
The sun marked their progress, from morning until noon, into the late afternoon. Along about dusk they heard the city before they saw it, a dull hum, like a hive of dispirited bees. From the crest of a hill they stared down at it, squatting like a toad in a desolate valley, surrounded by an ancient and anciently ruined wall. Here and there around the perimeter of the city were gun emplacements, and fully half the persons moving about on the streets seemed to be in uniform.
‘Madame’s friends,’ growled Makr Avehl. ‘Invited in to help her keep order.’
‘I should think she would keep order by – by her own methods,’ Marianne remarked.
‘It would take too much of her time. Easier to do it by brute force and a little official terrorism, I should think. No, Madame’s ambition extends far beyond this pathetic excuse for a country, believe me.’
‘Where’s her place?’