I settled my
behind onto the rise in the floor near the entrance to the
stairwell. I sat there dully wondering why the excavation had been
started way out here on the periphery. I did not concern myself
about it much, though. I ate again. “This stuff could get
addictive.” And not because it made me feel happy and silly
but because it took away aches and pains and every inclination to
sleep. I could sit there knowing my body was at its physical limits
without having to endure all the suffering associated with that
state. And my mind remained particularly alert and useful because I
was not preoccupied with the miseries plaguing my flesh.
Swan grunted his agreement. He did not seem to have been
rendered as cheerful as the rest of us. Although, come to think of
it, I was not doing much whistling or singing myself.
My mood improved after I had eaten again, though.
In one of his more lucid moments Riverwalker suggested,
“We shouldn’t waste any more time than we have to,
Sleepy. The rest should all be gone by now but they went away
hoping that you and the standard would catch up.”
“If Tobo hasn’t already told them, I’ve got
some bad news about that.”
“The boy said nothing about the standard. He may not have
had a chance. Everybody was so shocked about Goblin and so worried
about how to keep One-Eye from finding
out . . . ”
“Goblin drove the Lance into Kina’s body. It’s
still there. You know me. I’m completely hooked by the
Company mystique. I believe that besides the Annals, the standard
is the most important symbol we have. It goes all the way back to
Khatovar. It ties the generations together. I’d understand if
somebody wanted to go back after it. But that somebody isn’t
going to be me. Not in this decade.”
That good feeling was moving through me again. I rose. Swan
helped me step up to the higher floor level.
“Hello!”
Riverwalker chuckled. “I wondered how long it would take
you to notice.”
The crack in the floor was almost gone.
I went and looked. It seemed to be as deep as ever but now was
nowhere more than a foot wide. “How did it heal so
fast?” I assumed our presence had been a catalyst. Glancing
around the crack toward the demon’s throne, I noticed Doj and
Tobo hurrying our way. Shivetya’s eyes were open. He was
watching. “I thought you said everybody had left.”
“The earthquake did it.” River ignored the presence
of Doj and Tobo.
Swan said, “It’s the latest thing in home repairs.
Go down there and stab that thing again, maybe the plain will heal
up completely.”
“Might get the clockwork running again,” Doj said,
having overheard our conversation as he arrived.
“Clockwork?”
Doj did a little hop. “This floor is a huge circle.
It’s a one-eightieth-scale representation of the plain as a
whole, with a complete travel chart inlaid. It rides on stone
rollers and was capable of turning before the Thousand Voices got
curious and broke it.”
“Interesting. I take it your chat with the demon proceeded
informatively.”
Doj grunted assent. “But slowly. That was the big problem.
Just figuring out that communication has to be managed very slowly.
I think that would carry over physically, too. That if he decided
to stand up—if he could—it might take hours. But as the Steadfast
Guardian, he never had to move fast. He controlled the whole plain
from here, using the charts in the floors and the clockwork
mechanisms.”
Never had I seen Doj so straightforward and animated. The
knowledge bug must have bitten him, along with its kissing cousin
that makes the newly illuminated want to share with everyone. And
that was not like Doj at all. Nor like any other Nyueng Bao of my
experience. Only Mother Gota and Tobo ever chattered—and between
them they revealed less than Uncle Doj on a particularly reticent
day.
Doj continued, “He says his original reason for being
created was to manage the machinery that saw that travelers got
where they wanted to go. Over time there were battles upon the
plain, wars between the worlds, this fortress was built around him,
and at every stage he was saddled with additional duties. Sleepy,
the creature is half as old as time itself. He actually witnessed
the battle between Kina and the demons when the Lords of Light
fought the Lords of Darkness. It was the first great war between
the worlds, it did take place here on the plain, and none of the
myths have got it close to right.”
That was interesting and I said so. But I refused to allow the
past’s allure to seduce me right now.
“I must confess a grand temptation to create a permanent
camp here,” Doj enthused. “It will take lifetimes to
recover and record everything. He’s seen so much! He
remembers the Children of the Dead, Sleepy. To him the passing of
the Nyueng Bao De Duang happened just yesterday. We need only to
keep him convinced that we should have his help.”
I looked
questions at each of my companions. Riverwalker finally
volunteered, “He’s got to have been stuffing himself
with the demon food.” Meaning he thought Doj was out of
character a few leagues, too. “Several others also went
through big changes when they overindulged.”
“That much I understood already. Tobo. Have you undergone
a complete character shift, too?” He had not said a word.
That was remarkable. He had an opinion about everything.
“He scared the crap out of me, Sleepy.”
“He? Who?”
“The demon. The monster. Shivetya. He looked inside my
head. He talked to me there. I think he did it to my father, too.
For years and years, maybe. In the Annals? When Dad thought Kina or
the Protector were manipulating him? I’m betting that lots of
times it was really Shivetya.”
“That could be. That really could be.”
The world is infested with superhuman things that toy with the
destinies of individuals and nations. Gunni priests have been
claiming that for a hundred generations. The gods were banging
elbows with each other, stirring the cauldron. But none of those
gods were my God, the True God, the Almighty, Who seemed to have
elected to elevate Himself above the fray.
I needed the solace of my kind of priest. And there were none
nearer than five hundred miles.
“How many stories are there about this place?” I
asked Doj. “And how many of them are true?”
“I suspect we haven’t yet heard one out of
ten,” the old swordmaster replied. He grinned. He was
enjoying himself. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if most
of them are true. Can you sense it? This fortress, this plain,
they’re many things at the same time. Until recently I
believed it had to be the Land of Unknown Shadows. As your Captain
believed that it had to be Khatovar. But it’s only a pathway
to other places. And Shivetya, the Steadfast Guardian, is many
things, too. Including, I think, infinitely weary of being
everything that he’s had to be.”
Tobo was so anxious to interject his own thoughts that he danced
around like a little boy with a desperate need to pee.
He announced, “Shivetya wants to die, Sleepy. But he
can’t. Not as long as Kina is still alive. And she’s
immortal.”
“He’s got a problem then,
doesn’t he?”
Swan had an idea. “He could divide
up that life span and offer it to us. I’d take him up on it.
I could use another couple thousand years. After I get away from
this kind of life.”
I moved us closer to the demon as we
talked. My natural pessimism and sourness evidently reasserted
itself, though I never stopped feeling younger and happier and more
energetic than I had for ages. I just stopped giggling with the
rest of them. I asked, “Where’s your mother,
Tobo?”
His good humor waned momentarily. “She went with Granny
Gota.”
A glance at Doj made me suspect that there had been a sharp
encounter between Sahra the mother and men willing to accept her
son as one of them. This was Nyueng Bao stubbornness again, from
two directions. On this one the Troll must have sided with her
grandson and Doj.
I changed the subject. “All right. You two claim
you’ve been in Shivetya’s mind. Or maybe he’s
been in yours. Whichever, tell me what he wants.” I did not
believe the demon was being helpful out of the goodness of his
ancient heart. He could not be. He was a demon, accursed of God
whether he was a creature of light or of shadow. To a demon we
adventurers had to be as brief and transient as individual
honeybees would be to us—though, like the bees, we might be able to
make ourselves obnoxious for a short while.
Doj said, “He wants what anyone in his position would
want. That seems obvious.”
Tobo interjected, “He also wants loose, Sleepy. He’s
been pinned that way for a long time. The plain keeps changing
because he can’t get out to stop anybody.”
“What’s he going to do if we pluck the daggers out
of his limbs? Will he go on being our pal? Or will he start busting
heads?”
Doj and Tobo exchanged uncertain glances. So. They had not spent
much time worrying about that.
I said, “I see. Well, he may be the sweetest guy on
God’s green earth but he stays right where he is for now. A
few weeks or months more shouldn’t make much difference to
him. How the heck did he manage to get himself nailed to his
chair?”
“Somebody tricked him,” Tobo said.
Surprise, surprise. “You think so?”
It seemed there was a lot more light now than there had been
when I was headed in the other direction with Swan. Or maybe my
eyes had adapted to the interior of the fortress. I could make out
the designs in the floor clearly. All the features of the plain
could be found there except for the standing stones with their
glittering gold characters. And those might have been represented
by certain shadowy discolorations I was unable to examine more
closely. There were even tiny points that seemed to be moving,
which almost certainly meant something if one knew how to read
them.
Shivetya’s throne rested atop a circular elevation
positioned at the heart of an intermediate raised circle just over
twenty yards across. Doj assured me that that was roughly
one-eightieth the diameter of the biggest circle and that that was
an eightieth of the diameter of the entire plain. The smaller
circle, I noted, also boasted its representation of the plain—in
much less obvious detail. Presumably, Shivetya could sit his throne
and, turning, could see the whole of his kingdom. If he needed more
information, he could step down to the next level, where everything
was portrayed in a scale eighty times finer.
The implications of the quality of the magical engineering
involved in creating all this began to seep through. I was
intimidated thoroughly. The builders must have been of godlike
power. They had to have been as far beyond the greatest wizards
known to me as those were beyond no-talents like me. I was sure
that Lady and Longshadow, Soulcatcher and Howler, would have little
more grasp of the forces and principles involved than I did.
I stepped in front of Shivetya. The demon’s eyes remained
open. I felt him touch me lightly, inside. For some reason my
thoughts turned to mountainous highlands and places where the snow
never melted. To old things, slow things. To silence and stone. My
brain had no better way of interpreting the actuality of what
Shivetya was.
I kept reminding myself that the demon antedated the oldest
history of my world. And I sensed what Tobo had mentioned,
Shivetya’s quiet, calm desire not to grow any older. He had a
very Gunni sort of desire to find his way into a nirvana as an
antidote to the infinite tedium and pain of being.
I tried talking to the demon. I tried exchanging thoughts. That
was a frightening experience even though I was filled with the
confidence and good feeling that came from the gift food Shivetya
had provided. I did not want to share my mind even with an immortal
golem who could not possibly have any genuine comprehension of the
things it contained or of why those troubled me so.
“Sleepy?”
“Huh?” I jumped up. I felt good enough to do that. I
felt as good as I should have back in my teens, had I never had a
need to feel sorry for myself. The healing properties of the
demon’s gift continued to work their magic.
Swan said, “We all fell asleep. I don’t know for how
long. I don’t even know how.”
I looked at the demon. It had not moved. No surprise there. But
the white crow was perched on its shoulder. As soon as it
recognized that I was alert, it launched itself toward me. I threw
up an arm. The bird settled on my wrist as though I were a
falconer. In a voice almost too slow to follow, it said,
“This will be my voice. It is trained and its mind is not
cluttered with thoughts and beliefs that will get in the
way.”
Marvelous. I wondered what Lady would think. If Shivetya took
over, she would be deaf and blind until we brought her back from
her enchanted sleep.
“This will be my voice now.”
I understood the repetition to be a response to my flutter of
unspoken curiosity.
“I understand.”
“I will aid you in your quest. In return, you will destroy
the Drin, Kina. Then you will release me.”
I understood that he meant for me to release him from life and
obligation, not just from that throne.
“I would if I had the power.”
“You have the power. You have always had the
power.”
“What does that mean?” I recognized a cryptic,
sorcerer-type pronouncement when I heard one.
“You will understand when it is time to understand. Now it
is time for you to depart, Stone Soldier. Go. Become
Deathwalker.”
“What the devil does that mean?” I squeaked. So did
several of my companions, all of whom were awake now and most of
whom were gobbling demon food while eavesdropping.
The floor started moving, at first almost imperceptibly. Quickly
I noted that only the part immediately around the throne, that had
healed itself completely, was involved. I now knew that all the
damage, including the earthquake so violent it had been felt as far
away as Taglios, had been initiated entirely by Soulcatcher during
an ill-conceived experiment. She had discovered the
“machinery” and in her willful, damn-the-consequences
way, had begun tinkering just to see what would happen. I knew that
as fully as if I had been there as an eyewitness, because an actual
eyewitness had given me his memories.
I knew everything Soulcatcher had done during her several visits
to the fortress, in a time when Longshadow believed he was the
total master of the Shadowgate and did not believe that others
would dare approach it even if they did possess a workable key.
I now knew many things as if I had lived them. Some were things
I was not eager to know. A few concerned questions I had had for
years, offering answers that I could share with Master
Santaraksita. But mostly it was just stuff I was likely to find
useful if I was going to become what Shivetya hoped I would.
A startled bluebottle of speculation buzzed through my mind. I
checked to see if I had an answer. But I had no memories of what
might have become of the Key that would have been necessary if,
indeed, Longshadow, as Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha, with his
student Ashutosh Yaksha, had come to our world from the Land of
Unknown Shadows.
And for sure, I did not get any relief from my fear of
heights.
An instant after the floor stopped turning, the white crow
launched itself upward. And darned if I did not launch myself right
after it—though not through any wish of my own.
My companions rose behind me. In their surprise and fright
several dropped weapons and possessions and, probably, body
contents. Only Tobo seemed to find unanticipated flight to be a
positive experience.
Runmust and Iqbal sealed their eyes and belched rapid prayers to
their false vision of God. I spoke my mind to the God Who Is God,
reminding Him to be merciful. Riverwalker addressed impassioned
appeals to his heathen deities. Doj and Swan said nothing at all,
Swan because he had fainted.
Tobo babbled in delight, informing everyone how wonderful the
experience was, look here, look there, the vast expanse of the
chamber stretches out below us like the plain
itself . . .
We passed through a hole in the ceiling and into the colder air
of the real plain. It was dusk out there, the sky still crimson
over the western horizon but already deep indigo directly ahead.
The stars of the Noose shone palely in front of us. As we descended
toward the surface, I found nerve enough to glance back. The
fortress stood silhouetted against the northern sky, on its outside
in worse shape now than when we had arrived. All our clutter,
everything dropped during our ascension or that we had had no time
to grab, now flew along right behind us.
For a while I watched eagerly for the standard to join the
flock. My hopes were disappointed. It did not appear.
In retrospect I cannot see why I should have hoped
otherwise.
Now Tobo pretended he was a bird. By experimenting he discovered
that he could use his arms to direct his flight, to rise and fall
somewhat, to speed up and slow down slightly. He never shut up for
a instant, loving every moment, continuously admonishing the rest
of us to enjoy the adventure, because none of us would ever have
the chance to experience anything like this again.
“Wisdom from the mouths of infants,” Doj announced.
Then he threw up.
They were both right.
I settled my
behind onto the rise in the floor near the entrance to the
stairwell. I sat there dully wondering why the excavation had been
started way out here on the periphery. I did not concern myself
about it much, though. I ate again. “This stuff could get
addictive.” And not because it made me feel happy and silly
but because it took away aches and pains and every inclination to
sleep. I could sit there knowing my body was at its physical limits
without having to endure all the suffering associated with that
state. And my mind remained particularly alert and useful because I
was not preoccupied with the miseries plaguing my flesh.
Swan grunted his agreement. He did not seem to have been
rendered as cheerful as the rest of us. Although, come to think of
it, I was not doing much whistling or singing myself.
My mood improved after I had eaten again, though.
In one of his more lucid moments Riverwalker suggested,
“We shouldn’t waste any more time than we have to,
Sleepy. The rest should all be gone by now but they went away
hoping that you and the standard would catch up.”
“If Tobo hasn’t already told them, I’ve got
some bad news about that.”
“The boy said nothing about the standard. He may not have
had a chance. Everybody was so shocked about Goblin and so worried
about how to keep One-Eye from finding
out . . . ”
“Goblin drove the Lance into Kina’s body. It’s
still there. You know me. I’m completely hooked by the
Company mystique. I believe that besides the Annals, the standard
is the most important symbol we have. It goes all the way back to
Khatovar. It ties the generations together. I’d understand if
somebody wanted to go back after it. But that somebody isn’t
going to be me. Not in this decade.”
That good feeling was moving through me again. I rose. Swan
helped me step up to the higher floor level.
“Hello!”
Riverwalker chuckled. “I wondered how long it would take
you to notice.”
The crack in the floor was almost gone.
I went and looked. It seemed to be as deep as ever but now was
nowhere more than a foot wide. “How did it heal so
fast?” I assumed our presence had been a catalyst. Glancing
around the crack toward the demon’s throne, I noticed Doj and
Tobo hurrying our way. Shivetya’s eyes were open. He was
watching. “I thought you said everybody had left.”
“The earthquake did it.” River ignored the presence
of Doj and Tobo.
Swan said, “It’s the latest thing in home repairs.
Go down there and stab that thing again, maybe the plain will heal
up completely.”
“Might get the clockwork running again,” Doj said,
having overheard our conversation as he arrived.
“Clockwork?”
Doj did a little hop. “This floor is a huge circle.
It’s a one-eightieth-scale representation of the plain as a
whole, with a complete travel chart inlaid. It rides on stone
rollers and was capable of turning before the Thousand Voices got
curious and broke it.”
“Interesting. I take it your chat with the demon proceeded
informatively.”
Doj grunted assent. “But slowly. That was the big problem.
Just figuring out that communication has to be managed very slowly.
I think that would carry over physically, too. That if he decided
to stand up—if he could—it might take hours. But as the Steadfast
Guardian, he never had to move fast. He controlled the whole plain
from here, using the charts in the floors and the clockwork
mechanisms.”
Never had I seen Doj so straightforward and animated. The
knowledge bug must have bitten him, along with its kissing cousin
that makes the newly illuminated want to share with everyone. And
that was not like Doj at all. Nor like any other Nyueng Bao of my
experience. Only Mother Gota and Tobo ever chattered—and between
them they revealed less than Uncle Doj on a particularly reticent
day.
Doj continued, “He says his original reason for being
created was to manage the machinery that saw that travelers got
where they wanted to go. Over time there were battles upon the
plain, wars between the worlds, this fortress was built around him,
and at every stage he was saddled with additional duties. Sleepy,
the creature is half as old as time itself. He actually witnessed
the battle between Kina and the demons when the Lords of Light
fought the Lords of Darkness. It was the first great war between
the worlds, it did take place here on the plain, and none of the
myths have got it close to right.”
That was interesting and I said so. But I refused to allow the
past’s allure to seduce me right now.
“I must confess a grand temptation to create a permanent
camp here,” Doj enthused. “It will take lifetimes to
recover and record everything. He’s seen so much! He
remembers the Children of the Dead, Sleepy. To him the passing of
the Nyueng Bao De Duang happened just yesterday. We need only to
keep him convinced that we should have his help.”
I looked
questions at each of my companions. Riverwalker finally
volunteered, “He’s got to have been stuffing himself
with the demon food.” Meaning he thought Doj was out of
character a few leagues, too. “Several others also went
through big changes when they overindulged.”
“That much I understood already. Tobo. Have you undergone
a complete character shift, too?” He had not said a word.
That was remarkable. He had an opinion about everything.
“He scared the crap out of me, Sleepy.”
“He? Who?”
“The demon. The monster. Shivetya. He looked inside my
head. He talked to me there. I think he did it to my father, too.
For years and years, maybe. In the Annals? When Dad thought Kina or
the Protector were manipulating him? I’m betting that lots of
times it was really Shivetya.”
“That could be. That really could be.”
The world is infested with superhuman things that toy with the
destinies of individuals and nations. Gunni priests have been
claiming that for a hundred generations. The gods were banging
elbows with each other, stirring the cauldron. But none of those
gods were my God, the True God, the Almighty, Who seemed to have
elected to elevate Himself above the fray.
I needed the solace of my kind of priest. And there were none
nearer than five hundred miles.
“How many stories are there about this place?” I
asked Doj. “And how many of them are true?”
“I suspect we haven’t yet heard one out of
ten,” the old swordmaster replied. He grinned. He was
enjoying himself. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if most
of them are true. Can you sense it? This fortress, this plain,
they’re many things at the same time. Until recently I
believed it had to be the Land of Unknown Shadows. As your Captain
believed that it had to be Khatovar. But it’s only a pathway
to other places. And Shivetya, the Steadfast Guardian, is many
things, too. Including, I think, infinitely weary of being
everything that he’s had to be.”
Tobo was so anxious to interject his own thoughts that he danced
around like a little boy with a desperate need to pee.
He announced, “Shivetya wants to die, Sleepy. But he
can’t. Not as long as Kina is still alive. And she’s
immortal.”
“He’s got a problem then,
doesn’t he?”
Swan had an idea. “He could divide
up that life span and offer it to us. I’d take him up on it.
I could use another couple thousand years. After I get away from
this kind of life.”
I moved us closer to the demon as we
talked. My natural pessimism and sourness evidently reasserted
itself, though I never stopped feeling younger and happier and more
energetic than I had for ages. I just stopped giggling with the
rest of them. I asked, “Where’s your mother,
Tobo?”
His good humor waned momentarily. “She went with Granny
Gota.”
A glance at Doj made me suspect that there had been a sharp
encounter between Sahra the mother and men willing to accept her
son as one of them. This was Nyueng Bao stubbornness again, from
two directions. On this one the Troll must have sided with her
grandson and Doj.
I changed the subject. “All right. You two claim
you’ve been in Shivetya’s mind. Or maybe he’s
been in yours. Whichever, tell me what he wants.” I did not
believe the demon was being helpful out of the goodness of his
ancient heart. He could not be. He was a demon, accursed of God
whether he was a creature of light or of shadow. To a demon we
adventurers had to be as brief and transient as individual
honeybees would be to us—though, like the bees, we might be able to
make ourselves obnoxious for a short while.
Doj said, “He wants what anyone in his position would
want. That seems obvious.”
Tobo interjected, “He also wants loose, Sleepy. He’s
been pinned that way for a long time. The plain keeps changing
because he can’t get out to stop anybody.”
“What’s he going to do if we pluck the daggers out
of his limbs? Will he go on being our pal? Or will he start busting
heads?”
Doj and Tobo exchanged uncertain glances. So. They had not spent
much time worrying about that.
I said, “I see. Well, he may be the sweetest guy on
God’s green earth but he stays right where he is for now. A
few weeks or months more shouldn’t make much difference to
him. How the heck did he manage to get himself nailed to his
chair?”
“Somebody tricked him,” Tobo said.
Surprise, surprise. “You think so?”
It seemed there was a lot more light now than there had been
when I was headed in the other direction with Swan. Or maybe my
eyes had adapted to the interior of the fortress. I could make out
the designs in the floor clearly. All the features of the plain
could be found there except for the standing stones with their
glittering gold characters. And those might have been represented
by certain shadowy discolorations I was unable to examine more
closely. There were even tiny points that seemed to be moving,
which almost certainly meant something if one knew how to read
them.
Shivetya’s throne rested atop a circular elevation
positioned at the heart of an intermediate raised circle just over
twenty yards across. Doj assured me that that was roughly
one-eightieth the diameter of the biggest circle and that that was
an eightieth of the diameter of the entire plain. The smaller
circle, I noted, also boasted its representation of the plain—in
much less obvious detail. Presumably, Shivetya could sit his throne
and, turning, could see the whole of his kingdom. If he needed more
information, he could step down to the next level, where everything
was portrayed in a scale eighty times finer.
The implications of the quality of the magical engineering
involved in creating all this began to seep through. I was
intimidated thoroughly. The builders must have been of godlike
power. They had to have been as far beyond the greatest wizards
known to me as those were beyond no-talents like me. I was sure
that Lady and Longshadow, Soulcatcher and Howler, would have little
more grasp of the forces and principles involved than I did.
I stepped in front of Shivetya. The demon’s eyes remained
open. I felt him touch me lightly, inside. For some reason my
thoughts turned to mountainous highlands and places where the snow
never melted. To old things, slow things. To silence and stone. My
brain had no better way of interpreting the actuality of what
Shivetya was.
I kept reminding myself that the demon antedated the oldest
history of my world. And I sensed what Tobo had mentioned,
Shivetya’s quiet, calm desire not to grow any older. He had a
very Gunni sort of desire to find his way into a nirvana as an
antidote to the infinite tedium and pain of being.
I tried talking to the demon. I tried exchanging thoughts. That
was a frightening experience even though I was filled with the
confidence and good feeling that came from the gift food Shivetya
had provided. I did not want to share my mind even with an immortal
golem who could not possibly have any genuine comprehension of the
things it contained or of why those troubled me so.
“Sleepy?”
“Huh?” I jumped up. I felt good enough to do that. I
felt as good as I should have back in my teens, had I never had a
need to feel sorry for myself. The healing properties of the
demon’s gift continued to work their magic.
Swan said, “We all fell asleep. I don’t know for how
long. I don’t even know how.”
I looked at the demon. It had not moved. No surprise there. But
the white crow was perched on its shoulder. As soon as it
recognized that I was alert, it launched itself toward me. I threw
up an arm. The bird settled on my wrist as though I were a
falconer. In a voice almost too slow to follow, it said,
“This will be my voice. It is trained and its mind is not
cluttered with thoughts and beliefs that will get in the
way.”
Marvelous. I wondered what Lady would think. If Shivetya took
over, she would be deaf and blind until we brought her back from
her enchanted sleep.
“This will be my voice now.”
I understood the repetition to be a response to my flutter of
unspoken curiosity.
“I understand.”
“I will aid you in your quest. In return, you will destroy
the Drin, Kina. Then you will release me.”
I understood that he meant for me to release him from life and
obligation, not just from that throne.
“I would if I had the power.”
“You have the power. You have always had the
power.”
“What does that mean?” I recognized a cryptic,
sorcerer-type pronouncement when I heard one.
“You will understand when it is time to understand. Now it
is time for you to depart, Stone Soldier. Go. Become
Deathwalker.”
“What the devil does that mean?” I squeaked. So did
several of my companions, all of whom were awake now and most of
whom were gobbling demon food while eavesdropping.
The floor started moving, at first almost imperceptibly. Quickly
I noted that only the part immediately around the throne, that had
healed itself completely, was involved. I now knew that all the
damage, including the earthquake so violent it had been felt as far
away as Taglios, had been initiated entirely by Soulcatcher during
an ill-conceived experiment. She had discovered the
“machinery” and in her willful, damn-the-consequences
way, had begun tinkering just to see what would happen. I knew that
as fully as if I had been there as an eyewitness, because an actual
eyewitness had given me his memories.
I knew everything Soulcatcher had done during her several visits
to the fortress, in a time when Longshadow believed he was the
total master of the Shadowgate and did not believe that others
would dare approach it even if they did possess a workable key.
I now knew many things as if I had lived them. Some were things
I was not eager to know. A few concerned questions I had had for
years, offering answers that I could share with Master
Santaraksita. But mostly it was just stuff I was likely to find
useful if I was going to become what Shivetya hoped I would.
A startled bluebottle of speculation buzzed through my mind. I
checked to see if I had an answer. But I had no memories of what
might have become of the Key that would have been necessary if,
indeed, Longshadow, as Maricha Manthara Dhumraksha, with his
student Ashutosh Yaksha, had come to our world from the Land of
Unknown Shadows.
And for sure, I did not get any relief from my fear of
heights.
An instant after the floor stopped turning, the white crow
launched itself upward. And darned if I did not launch myself right
after it—though not through any wish of my own.
My companions rose behind me. In their surprise and fright
several dropped weapons and possessions and, probably, body
contents. Only Tobo seemed to find unanticipated flight to be a
positive experience.
Runmust and Iqbal sealed their eyes and belched rapid prayers to
their false vision of God. I spoke my mind to the God Who Is God,
reminding Him to be merciful. Riverwalker addressed impassioned
appeals to his heathen deities. Doj and Swan said nothing at all,
Swan because he had fainted.
Tobo babbled in delight, informing everyone how wonderful the
experience was, look here, look there, the vast expanse of the
chamber stretches out below us like the plain
itself . . .
We passed through a hole in the ceiling and into the colder air
of the real plain. It was dusk out there, the sky still crimson
over the western horizon but already deep indigo directly ahead.
The stars of the Noose shone palely in front of us. As we descended
toward the surface, I found nerve enough to glance back. The
fortress stood silhouetted against the northern sky, on its outside
in worse shape now than when we had arrived. All our clutter,
everything dropped during our ascension or that we had had no time
to grab, now flew along right behind us.
For a while I watched eagerly for the standard to join the
flock. My hopes were disappointed. It did not appear.
In retrospect I cannot see why I should have hoped
otherwise.
Now Tobo pretended he was a bird. By experimenting he discovered
that he could use his arms to direct his flight, to rise and fall
somewhat, to speed up and slow down slightly. He never shut up for
a instant, loving every moment, continuously admonishing the rest
of us to enjoy the adventure, because none of us would ever have
the chance to experience anything like this again.
“Wisdom from the mouths of infants,” Doj announced.
Then he threw up.
They were both right.