Where were those Werist swine? She had expected to catch up to them by now. Even if the satrap owned the finest onagers in the world, Dark and Night should have been able to outrun them when they only had Frena as cargo. The brutes might have gone by way of Lobsterclaw instead. She peered around but saw no sign of Verk and Uls behind her, or anyone at all for that matter, but she couldn't see far. Streets were brown rivers. The air was a sea, the train of her dress a mess of filthy tatters. Shivering violently and trying to remember the last time she had been cold, she took another one-wheel corner and shot out onto the bridge to Temple. The deck was empty, booming under the wheels.
Lightning turned the gloom milk-white; instant thunder struck like sixty-sixty sledgehammers. Night and Dark panicked and bolted. She dropped her whip and almost lost the reins; when she regained them she clung like death to the rail and screamed at the onagers to go faster. Under the roar of the rain lay a deeper, more sinister sound. Something that should not be there loomed up in the mist downstream, something advancing purposefully up the channel. Fabia howled and tried to rein in.
She couldn't see much, but there was a ship, certainly, and what looked like the remains of houses, and this wall of death rode relentlessly up the channel on a high gray wave. The bridge was doomed and so was she, unless she could reach the far side before that mess arrived.
"Faaaaaster!" She flogged the onagers with the reins. The car took several long leaps, veering madly from side to side, when one nudge against the paling would spill Frena out and very likely smash the chariot to fragments. The ship was above her now, tilted so she could see weeds encrusting the hull, riding a tumbling wall of froth full of gnashing timbers. The chariot's wheels spun along the deck, faster than they had ever gone before and still slow as nightmare, for the end of the bridge seemed to come no closer and death was reaching for her in that swelling mountain of water.
Fortunately, she made it out from under the ship and other flotsam before the wave hit close behind her, crumpling and burying the bridge. The onagers saw it or felt it, and seemed to redouble their speed. As the final span lifted and broke apart under their hooves, they reached land, but certainly not dry land. The chariot sprayed up the slope with the storm surge frothing at its wheels, then raced along a street with a smaller wall of water still pursuing. Frena no longer pretended to be in control, or even aware where on this rock pile of an island she was. They had missed the turnoff to the Pantheon. The onagers took a right fork, then a left, and came to an intersection where a muddy torrent raced across their path. Then she saw a door she recognized from her dreams.
"Whoa!" She reached for the brake just as one wheel dropped into a pothole as big as a bathtub. The river was cold as death and deep enough to break her fall. It lifted her, rolled her, and seemed to be carrying her straight back into the killer storm surge. Dazed and choking, she struggled to her knees and grabbed hold of the wall. She caught a glimpse of one wheel disappearing downstream, but otherwise her chariot and onagers had vanished.
She stood up, still clinging to the wall. Water sucked at her shins; mud slid away under her toes. She stumbled, bare feet finding all the sharpest rocks, but heading uphill anyway because there might be more waves yet. Although she passed a couple of doors, she never thought of banging on them to beg for shelter. The alley jittered in and out of sight, daylight-bright lightning alternating with utter, sepulchral dark. Between the clashing, clattering madness of thunderclaps, she heard another, ominous sound, the roar of hail. In seconds the torrent turned white with floating ice, and soon hailstones were battering the buildings all around her—big hailstones, the kind that could do serious harm.
But by now she was at the door, a curiously misshapen door in a corner between a wall and a rocky knob, just as she had seen it time and again in her dreams. She stumbled over to it, never hesitating, and when she reached it her feet were clear of the water for the first time. The fastening was a simple latch, but she had to struggle against the pressure of the wind to force the flap open. She squeezed inside and let it slam shut behind her.
♦
For a long while she just stood in the dark and shivered. It might not be much of a refuge, but it was better than drifting out to sea as a corpse. There were no ghosts, no voices, only strangely leafy, earthy smells. Thunder continued to rage and for a while hail rattled persistently against the planks behind her, then stopped as quickly as it had begun. The rain roared on—a storm like this might last for days.
Careful fingers found living rock on one side, rough-dressed stonework on the other, and a low roof of flagstones. Toes, even more cautious, located a step up. Then another. The air was not cold, but the waterlogged remains of her gown were. She was almost tempted to strip it off, but discretion suggested waiting until she knew where she was—she might lose it, and then what? Ten steps brought her to a level passage. She took stock again. The tunnel was now a true cave, or rather a slanted gap between two massive rocky slabs that leaned against each other; the roof was dangerously low on one side, too high to reach on the other. Someone had packed gravel in underfoot to make a level floor.
Soon the wall on her right disappeared. So did her nerve. The danger of becoming hopelessly lost seemed all too obvious. She sat down and hugged her knees in misery for a while. But obviously that was not going to help; she must go on or go back into the storm ... and either her eyes were playing tricks in the dark or there was a very faint glimmer ahead. The thunder's petulant rambles were coming from that direction. She rose and began feeling her way along the left-hand wall, testing every step.
Blood and birth; death and the cold earth.
That she had been brought here could not be doubted—but surely not by the Bright Ones! The Dark One was also known as the Womb of the World; the grave was a return to the womb. Had Paola come here sometimes, instead of going to the Pantheon? This was a well-traveled path, a prepared way. The Pantheon must be somewhere overhead.
Frena came at last to a grotto. The roof was lost far overhead, but in at least two places it was open to the sky, admitting enough light for her dark-adjusted eyes to distinguish the outlines of a huge, irregular chamber. When lightning flashed, wet rock faces twinkled like silver moldings. The floor squelched below her bare feet, but she could not tell how much was moss and how much just mud. The air felt soporific with fetid, humic odors, which she did not find unpleasant; and, yes, there was sanctity here, immortal timelessness. Water dripped everywhere in staccato irregular counterpoint, but also trickled serenely. She tracked that sound to its source, to drink and lave her muddy hands.
The altar was a wide flat slab against one wall, like a slightly tilted sleeping platform, and the image inscribed in the wall behind it was the outline of a very obese woman, styled in pillow shapes—head, breast, belly, buttocks. High Priestess Bjaria had mentioned traces of very old worship on Temple Island. The Old One. The Womb of the World.