Safca went into the cave room, down its sloping floor, mesmerized not by the worth of the treasure but by its fabulous presence.
The others spilled in after her. Daylight and struck flints shot diamond and ruby eyes across the dimness. There were whispers: Here was wealth to succor Lan against her enemies. Secondary whispers—No, this was a sacred trove, would carry a curse if plundered, had you not seen the carving of the snake goddess on the door? Safca was intrigued at herself, for she had missed it altogether.
It was the pool which had caught her attention, and still did so. She went to it and looked in.
“Make a steady light,” she said quietly, “and bring it here.”
Someone did. By the glow of his flaring lamp, they stared down into the pool.
Its floor was a great pale stone, which had been cut into. The tracery of letters went on and on. It was one huge book. The water, rather than eroding, had somehow preserved. The writing was Visian. They could read every line.
When night came, black as the city, they had located a huge old house on a hill. Some mansion of the past, its round columned hall was intact. No one lived in the city, or none they had come across. A tirr’s nest was long unoccupied, mummified, even its stink was dead. They had seen no tirr in the valley at all. Perhaps these beasts, venom-clawed and ugly beyond reason, were no longer prevalent.
They made their fire, prepared food and ate it. A wine-bag from Olm was opened and shared. They had reached their objective. When the little heap of children slept, a stillness that was in them all came to the surface of their skins and eyes. There was only the crackle of the flames, then, the dance of light on a bead, a woman’s hair.
Safca had gone away behind a stone screen many hundreds of years of age. She lay still there, and heard their stillness, with all that time locked in the screen between them.
She had been celibate since Zastis. It was curious. She had known in the mountains she might have chosen a man from among her captains, and he would have lain with her in an excitement and desire no man had ever felt for her before. Because she was special, because she was holy. But of course it was this very thing which had made sex unnecessary.
And now.
She stared up toward the far-off ceiling, the ebony rafters, young a thousand years, perhaps, before her birth.
Could she contain the force, the fire, which might come? She had known Ashni. But she herself was only mortal. She might die.
Then again, the design of the goddess, if so it was, might fail. But she could not make herself think that. Faith was paramount. Safca’s faith was utter.
Out in the long hall, Yannul and another man were checking the livestock roped in among the pillars with their straw. The animals, also, were silent. When Yannul turned, he found his younger son, and the pure-Vis boy he was friends with. Somewhere along the road they had sworn blood-brotherhood. Yannul had noted the white scars on the side of each of their arms. Now they gazed at him. His son, the spokesman, said, “Is it true?”
“What does your mother say?”
“Yes, and ask you.”
“Then yes.”
They strolled back toward the fire.
“The magic must be very powerful. What will happen?”
“I don’t know. What happened on the pass, maybe, but more.”
“Like what happened under Koramvis when you were with Raldnor Am Sar?”
“I don’t know,” he said again.
Odd that the knowledge should only have been here. He suspected it had actually lain in other areas, but was now destroyed or lost. Passages on the stone in the pool had made no sense. Others were memories, and legends. The Am Dorthar had always boasted that they had come from heaven, riding in the bellies of pale dragons which burned the ground black with their fiery breath. The writing in the stone had also mentioned this. In the beginning, which was before the beginning as they remembered it, the people of this continent had been universally white-skinned and pale—Lowlanders. But the Vis races, dark, avaricious, and clever, had come from elsewhere—out of heaven. Something had gone on that the stone did not properly reveal. There had been a fall, from strength as well as from the skies. The Vis had in some way degenerated, mislaying some mighty power, not sorcerous, yet uncanny. The pale races had already sunk from their personal apex. It seemed they had been witches, but had abused the gift, which finally withered. They gave in to the invaders, who in turn gave in to their own weakening.
These items were peculiar. Mythos. Then the writing in the stone postulated other things, other myths, which belonged here, in the upheaval of the present.
“The Lowlanders have always had such beliefs,” Medaci said to him, when the fire had almost died. “Wells of Power, that might be tapped. And lines of Power that linked each well, painted invisibly over the earth, the water and the air.”
“Did they say where these wells could be found?”
“Some of the priests were supposed to know. There was always reckoned to be something close to Koramvis, and the story of a hidden temple there, made in the time when only yellow-haired men held the land.”
Koramvis. The stone tablet in the pool had called it Dorthara’s Heart. And here, that was Zor Am Zor. And the Lowland city, which the stone called Anak of the Plains. And one other situation, which the stone specified as Memon. And then came the reference to a second country, southward, beyond Aari Sea, that must be the second continent. And here there was a fifth Power source, at a place the stone named Vathak. One imagined this was Vathcri where, disgorged from the ocean, he had ridden with Raldnor Am Anackire, and where Raldnor’s white-haired son had been conceived and birthed. And one saw too, with a shattering clarity, that the doomed tower ship which had borne them to that alien shore, through storm and fire and mutiny and murder, and despair, had driven all the way along or beside the line of invisible force which ran between Vathak-Vathcri and Koramvis, Dorthara’s Heart.
Yannul wanted to laugh with anger. He was close to weeping, too. The supernal authority which had picked him up and flung him through the mirror of destiny, that monster clutched him yet, had never let him go, or any of them, live or dead.
He tried to dispel his tearing emotions by rational comment.
“But Memon,” he said. “Where is that? It isn’t a city, whole or ruin. Not even a town that I ever heard of. Some dot of a village, perhaps, seething with psychic broth. May all the gods help them.”
He put more wood on to the fire. It was damp, and sputtered. Maybe the spiritual force of the planet would be like that, now.
From the valley, the world, the snows, the nightmare invasion and prologues of war seemed nothing. But his other son was out there, in the thick of it. And the two sons of Raldnor Am Anackire.
“And she also,” Medaci said, having read his thoughts with an exactitude that no longer shocked him.
He stirred the fire grimly, the stick gripped with his sword-hand.
“Ashni.”
And the sparks became a leap of solid light.
20
Across the East and the Middle Lands, the cold had cast its spell of white sleep. Through these drifts and canyons of alabaster there presently came struggling a knot of riders, their chariots foundering, their beasts often breast-high or almost to the throat, in snow. Reaching Dorthar, they struggled on. They struggled to Anackyra, and into the Storm Palace of the High King, where they stood, their faces raw, their eyes dull, and one of their number bandaged, having lost fingers.
They brought Raldanash news. The news was bitter, like the journey.