l by yourself. And what happens to all of them hinges entirely and only on you… Nita shivered. Shouldn t Ponch have turned up by now she said. Yeah… But they waited, and waited, and he didn t turn up. The one who did turn up was Esemeli, still impeccably clad in white and looking wearily amused. So, It said, you ve decided to trust me after all. Kit didn t say anything. Nita said, Let s get on with it. Where are we headed Down, the Lone One said. Do you want to handle the transit yourself, or shall I do it Kit made an ironic after-you gesture. The three of them vanished. This is where it begins, the Lone One said. They were standing somewhere else, in the mist at the bottom of a huge cliff. The cliff was some dark stone, towering up into the mist, lost in it; and in the stone of its base was a huge vertical cleft that ran down from the cliff, across the ground, nearly to their feet. Nita and Kit looked dubiously at the great opening in the Earth. Nita had started taking Latin in school, and the sight of the crevasse suddenly made her remember something she d translated from the Aeneid last semester: It s easy to get into the Underworld. The door stands open night and day. But retracing your steps, getting back up to the light there s the real work, the tough part She took a deep breath. It doesn t matter, Nita thought. We re as prepared as we can be. Except for one thing She glanced over at Kit and saw that Esemeli was regarding him with an expression of concern. Where s your doggy this morning It said. Kit looked at the Lone Power. I can t believe, somehow, that you don t know. I told you, Esemeli said, that my ability to perceive what s going on is severely limited here. So I have no idea where your dog is. And, anyway, after what she made me promise and It glanced in annoyance at Nita if I knew, I would have to tell you if she asked. Where s Ponch Nita said immediately. I don t know, the Lone One said. Kit stood still and closed his eyes for just one last try. Nita heard him calling Ponch silently. But there was no response. You can wait, if you want, the Lone One said. No, Nita said. The state in which they had left Quelt was very much on her mind. The sooner we get the proof we need for Quelt, the better. Let s get going. They turned and entered the mouth of darkness, vanishing. At first the path downward seemed nothing spectacular: a winding passage between stone walls, the walls growing closer together, the rough ceiling growing lower and lower as they went. Nita, looking around her, began to get nervous as they went downward and the walls began to close in. She had never been wild about tight, constricting spaces; and in this one, her general cast of mind was not helped by the strangely organic feeling to the stone. It had that same warm color, a muted gold with pink overtones, that was seen in many of the buildings on the continent. As the path twisted and turned and descended, it was very hard to keep from thinking that they were descending not into the bowels of the planet but Nita pushed that thought aside vigorously, and concentrated on keeping an eye on their guide. Esemeli walked casually and confidently ahead of them, seeming untroubled by the way they went. How can you be sure Druvah came this way Kit said, pulling out his manual and producing a small light to bob along ahead of him. He s left traces, Esemeli said, even after all this time. He was, after all, the greatest of the wizards who met to enforce the Alaalid Choice. It chuckled a little. There s a joke there, actually; if he hadn t been so scrupulous about bowing to the wishes of the majority, none of us would need to be here now. The Alaalids would ve moved on to the next stage in evolution, oh, thousands of years ago…if he d made them. But like so many wizards who are too wholeheartedly on the side of the Powers That Be, he insisted on making his work difficult for himself. And for the people he was supposed to be serving… They made their way around a tightly curving corner in the stone, a place where all of them had to put their backs against the wider side of the curve and inch around it, little by little. Nita breathed in, trying to make herself as thin as possible, and kept herself moving; but she had to keep her eyes closed. The downward-pressing closeness of the stone was beginning to affect her. Ahead of her, Esemeli moved slowly but with no sign of distress. Nita could hear Kit s breathing becoming labored. He was no fonder of these tight quarters than she was. We could just go through the stone, he said at one point, when he was finding it difficult to follow the Lone Power. No, Esemeli said, we can t. All this road into the heart of the Earth is permeated by Druvah s power. She smiled a secret, rather uncomfortable smile, which Nita could just make out by the faint gleam of Kit s wizard-light. He made sure that anybody who was going to follow him on this road would have to go through exactly what he did when he first found his way to the world s kernel. Even if it was going to be the wizards who would repeal the Choice he oversaw they would have no easier time of it. He wanted to give them plenty of time to have second thoughts. I m having plenty of them right now, Nita heard Kit thinking. Not just you, Nita thought. How do you know where he hid the kernel she said. I watched him do it, the Lone One said. He was using the power that I gave him at the time. And at the time, that made it impossible for him to hide his whereabouts from me. She was smiling, amused again. They came out of the tight, close tunnel into a slightly more open area. Kit had to stop and get his breath, and for a moment he stood bowed down with his hands on his knees, gasping. Nita wiped her fore head. It was definitely getting warmer. She tried to work out how far underground they might have come, but she wasn t sure exactly how to tell. I could look in the manual, she thought. But at the same time, she found herself thinking that even that wasn t likely to do her any good. There was a strange sense coming down over her as if this journey was not exactly a physical one, or not merely a physical one She looked up to find the Lone One gazing at her with that amused expression. Yes, It said, you do feel it. I was wondering if you would. We re not exactly inside Time, Nita said. Or outside it. This is one of those complex states. Yes, Esemeli said. I m afraid that, as wizards go, Druvah was fairly expert. Which has to be bad for you, Kit said, straightening up, and good for us… The Lone One threw him an annoyed look. Let s get moving, It said. We ve got a ways to go yet… They moved on, downward again. Kit dropped back toward Nita a little. Neets, this is weird, Kit said under his breath. It isn t like the real inside of a planet…any planet. This is more like another dimension. It could be a little of both, Nita said. There are ways to make a place s mythical reality coincide with the physical one…or make one temporarily a lot more powerful than the other. She shook her head. But normally you need a kernel to mediate that kind of overlap or substitution. That, at least, means we re on the right track, Kit said. You ve been doing a lot of reading. Are you thinking about changing specialties Maybe turning into a research specialist, like Tom I don t know, Nita said. Things are changing, all right…but into what, I m not entirely sure. Kit nodded, moved ahead again. For her own part, Nita was relieved to find that the path they took widened out a great deal. But the passage was always downward, and the weight of millions and billions of tons of rock continued to weigh on her. At least she was able to partially distract herself with the splendor of their surroundings: for the chain of complexes of caverns through which Esemeli led them in the next hours or what felt like hours would have been a first-class tourist attraction on Earth. One after another they passed through gigantic multicolored arenas and caves of stone, festooned with stalactites, or growing great crops of stalagmites like petrified forests. There were some caverns in which the stone itself glowed, and there was no need for wizard-light at all; they wove their way among pillars and chandeliers of down-hanging, luminous rock, their shadows stretching in ten different directions, or abolished entirely by the glow. But always the way led down, and down, and further down. It was getting warmer all the time as they went. But this didn t reassure Nita; it wasn t nearly as warm as it should have been underground, and she knew that they were, indeed, not entirely in the physical world anymore. She had done some reading in the manual about these so-called complex states, in which normal space was blended or affiliated with constructed spaces that could be based in myth, or one mind s delusion, or some commonly held belief. Such complex-state spaces could have physical realities that mirrored some old fairy tale or ancient legend…or a physical reality that had once existed but was now long gone. As they passed out of one deep cavern and into another, always with Esemeli leading the way and Kit following It, Nita s misgivings grew, despite the Binding Oath she had made the Lone One swear. It was very old, and very wise…and entirely too clever. But it was hard to know where she might have gone wrong. We re just going to have to rely on the manual for the moment, and try to keep our eyes open, Nita thought, as they went down, and down, and down… The walk through the caves began to seem more and more like a dream that had always been happening, and always would. In front of her was Kit, with his wizard-light; in front of him, Esemeli, a white shadow that never paused, never got tired. Not like me, Nita thought. She was beginning to regret not having eaten at least something for breakfast that morning. And when was this morning she thought. How many hours ago How many years It was becoming increasingly difficult even to believe in this morning, except as something that had happened in a dream a long time ago. The way before them opened out again, the sound of their footsteps echoing against distant walls as it hadn t done for some time. Esemeli stopped for a moment, and Kit behind It, and the three of them stood still on the shores of a vast cavern lake under a huge, high-domed ceiling dripping with more stalactites, which glowed. The water was a strange, milky blue color in Kit s and Nita s wizard-lights; and everything was absolutely still, not the slightest ripple of air touching that water. It was like blue glass, as solid-seeming as the crystalline surface of the Display had been. It looks too deep to wade, Kit said. Indeed, I don t know that it has a bottom, Esemeli said. There was something strange about Its tone of voice. Nita glanced over at It and was surprised to see the uncertainty in Esemeli s face and stance, normally so self-assured and lazily mocking. Maybe even It s a little out of Its depth here, she thought. But the next moment, Nita reminded herself once more that this was the Lone Power, or a fragment of It immensely old, immensely powerful, and absolutely not to be trusted, no matter how secure you thought your hold over It might be. And just how sure am I about that Nita thought. There was another issue, too, one that she hadn t mentioned to Kit, but that she suspected was going to come up in the near future and probably make him yell at her. Such strictures as the Binding Oath could not be one-sided; there was also a price to pay by the one doing the binding. What is bound eventually breaks loose, the manual said; the power of the binding is directly proportional to the power of the backlash. Sooner or later, Nita thought, this is going to come back to haunt me. Later, I hope… And down they went through the darkness, and further down. Slowly, though, Nita noticed something strange beginning to happen. She had been starting to slow down, so that every now and then she would have to force herself to hurry to catch up with Kit and Esemeli, who had moved ahead. But now she was having less trouble keeping up, and this confused her. It s not like I m any less tired. I m not! But walking was less trouble. And the further downward they continued, the less of a problem it became. Stranger still, she was starting to become aware of light filtering up from below them, as they continued downward through the caverns and passageways in the depths of the world. The caverns seemed brighter, somehow, though there was none of the glowing stone they d seen earlier Nita followed Kit through one more exit from a vast cavern into one more new one, and put her foot down wrong on a place where the stone was uneven. She tripped, and thought she would fall. She didn t. She bounced, and came up on her feet again, and bounced once more before she settled. Hearing the scuffle of Nita losing her footing, Kit turned and saw her bounce. Behind him, Esemeli stopped, too, watching them. G is less, Nita thought. Kit, she said. Gravity s decreasing! He stared at her. How can it But then he jumped, and Nita saw him hang there briefly in the air before he came down. Maybe half a g, Kit said. How can this be happening Nita shook her head. Come on, she said. Esemeli turned to lead the way again. Kit and Nita went after, bouncing a little in an adaptation of the astronauts walk that everyone who went to the Moon learned, because until you did, you spent a lot of time lying face first in moondust. Esemeli, for Its own part, did not bounce; possibly It considered that beneath Its dignity. They continued downward, and as they went, the gravity kept lessening, and the caverns all around them seemed progressively brighter, as if the stone of them was going translucent. This is beyond weird, Nita thought. It was nothing like the smothering heat and pressure that they should have been experiencing even fairly high up in a planet s crust, let alone down into its mantle. This is definitely a complex-state environment, someone s myth about the middle of the world coming true around us. Well, I don t mind the lessened gravity, anyway… That was fortunate, for it got less the deeper they went. Nita was grateful that she was used to it; she d spent enough time on the Moon that she wasn t troubled anymore by the human body s usual reaction to microgravity, which was to complain bitterly that it wanted to throw up anything that had been eaten recently. Just as well, maybe, that I didn t eat any breakfast this morning, Nita thought. Not that I felt like it. The pain and betrayal on Quelt s face was still very much with her, and the anguished cry, I thought you were good! They were becoming light enough now that it was becoming something of a difficulty to stay on the ground. Nita had to grab on to handholds in the stone of passages and tunnels they went through. But ahead of them, she could see a huge portal into another cavern, and there would be nothing to hold on to there. We re going to fall up, Nita thought wearily. We re going to fall into the sky. She had walked on air often enough in her work as a wizard, but falling was never entirely pleasant, whether you did it up or down. She swallowed, trying to keep her stomach under control; it was already trying to do backflips at the thought of what was coming They passed through that gigantic archway, and everything happened at once. Nita saw Kit s shadow leap out behind him, and Esemeli s as well but Its was longer and far blacker than it should have been in that light. Before them lay a great broad plain with a high horizon…but the plain was above them, and the horizon was upside down. Nita s stomach flipped in earnest now. It was as if, for all the descending they d been doing for all these weary hours, they had somehow come right around through the heart of things and out back on Alaalu s surface again. Yet they hadn t. They were still in the middle of the world: Nita knew this for sure as she looked at that horizon and realized that it didn t stop there was never any sky at the top of it, just more and more land. And suspended in space before them, like a pillar buttressing the center of the world, was one great needle of stone, reaching down, or up, an incredible distance into that silvery-glowing, blinding sky. The confusion assailed Nita completely; she no longer could tell which way up or down was. And as if that confusion wasn t all that was needed to complete the effect, it was then that the earth seemed to let go of them, and all three of them fell into the sky…. Fortunately, the fall itself partook to a certain extent of that dreamlike quality, so that what might otherwise have left Nita screaming in terror now left her in a muted state of asto