"By all the evidence, it appears as if the legends about the Hagoshrin are correct," Riane said. "The creature eats the bones of its victims and leaves the rest to rot."

"Ugh!" Eleana shook herself like a wet cor as she made dry land. "I wouldn't want to fall into that moat." She looked around. "How are we ever going to find Thigpen in this maze?"

"Good question." Riane took the lead.

Reaching a wall, they discovered that the chamber at the bottom of the shaft was circular. Embedded within the carved rock were veins of minute creatures, viruses or colonies of bacteria, perhaps, which emitted the shadowless glow. At precise intervals, the wall was incised with a single repeating glyph that looked like a stylized eye with a circlet of pupils. The glyph was not Venca, not any language Riane or, for that matter, Annon recognized. As she possessed a linguist's mind, this fascinated her. Was this glyph part of a language even more ancient than Venca, a protolanguage even, pictograms thought up by Riane's ancient ancestors? Or was it more sophisticated than that, another language altogether, long since fallen from memory like so many things of ancient Kundala buried in this tomb along with the Hagoshrin?

She became aware of Eleana softly calling her name. It appeared as if she had found one section of the wall without a glyph on it.

"Dar Sala-at," Eleana said, "what do you see?"

"A blank wall."

"Come here, then."

Eleana was standing directly in front of the center of the blank area. When Riane came and stood beside her, she saw what Eleana saw: a shadowed archway and, beyond, a lamplit corridor.

Riane moved to her right, and the archway vanished. "More technology we cannot account for," shesaid.

Eleana nodded. "It seems as if this area of the caverns is better at raising questions than providing answers."

With a palpable sense of relief, they left behind the lair of the Hagoshrin. The corridor was smaller than any other Riane had been in down there and, oddly, was as round as the inside of a barrel. It bore few, if any, traits recognizable as being Kundalan in origin. But if the place was not built by Kundalan, who, then, had created it?

They had walked only several hundred meters when they saw before them a kind of hump rising out of the concave floor. Riane knew what it was even before they neared it.

It was a crystal oculus.

She was elated. Annon had seen the one embedded in the ceiling just outside the Storehouse, the one Giyan told her had been created by a series of sorcerous spells.

Kneeling, she peered down through it and gasped.

"Eleana! Look here!" She could scarcely contain her excitement as Eleana knelt beside her atop the oculus. "We are just above the Storehouse Door!"

At that moment, the oculus occluded. Stress fractures zigzagged through it, and it collapsed, sending them tumbling down into the cavern below.

Riane groaned, put her arm around Eleana's waist as the other shook her head groggily. And there was the Storehouse Door, a mammoth, circular affair, studded with deeply carved runes. In its center was a carved dragon, and in the dragon's mouth was embedded the Ring of Five Dragons Riane herself had placed there.

She rose and stood before the Door. She put her finger in the Ring and heard a deep rumbling. At last, the Door began to open. She would have access into the Storehouse, there to begin her search for the long-lost Pearl.

As she stared, awestruck, the Door rolled open, revealed a dark and odoriferous interior. She called to Eleana, but in that instant two powerful tentacles shot out. Riane tried to back away, but the pain in her head exploded and, before she knew what was happening, the tentacles twined about her waist. Eleana grabbed her, but Riane was jerked away, s.n.a.t.c.hed into the Storehouse, where the Hagoshrin crouched, hungrily waiting.

Eleana leapt after her, but the Door rolled closed, separating the two of them.

The stench of Marethyn's temporary abode threatened to make her pa.s.s out. Even in the darkness, it had not taken her long, stooping, feeling around, to ascertain that she had stumbled into a ma.s.s grave.

Like one newly blind, she discovered the wealth of information her fingertips could provide. For one thing, she found that all the bodies she touched were female. For another, they wore Ramahan robes. But what would Ramahan be doing there in the wilderness of the West Country so far from a working abbey? Perhaps they had become lost. There could be no doubt that this poor band of priestesses had run afoul of a Khagggun patrol. But if so, why were there no burn holes in their robes, why was there no aftersmell of dissipated ion-fusion weapons?

Marethyn lay back against the steeply sloping side of the ma.s.s grave and contemplated a mult.i.tude of questions without answers. Could the Ramahan have gotten trapped on this densely forested ridge during the winter? Had they died of starvation and exposure? Running her fingertips over several of the corpses at random, she determined that the bodies were freshly dead. Further, none of them felt emaciated. So, then, what had killed them? That was when she found the first of the daggers. Soon enough, she found others, some still clutched in the fists of the dead. What were Ramahan doing with weapons? Surely, they must have used them to defend themselves because the other explanation was too bizarre. Of course they could not have fallen upon each other.

"Miina? Great G.o.ddess, is that you?"

The faint sibilance made her start. Then she heard a stirring, followed by a small moan of pain.Climbing over the mounds of corpses, she came to a body that moved slightly beneath her touch.

"I am Marethyn," she whispered.

"You have a V'ornnish name and a V'ornnish accent."

The Ramahan was covered in dried blood and nearly dead. There was nothing Marethyn could do for her.

"What happened here?"

"You don't know, do you, V'ornn?" A dry cackle quickly turned into a cough thick with blood and phlegm. "Shhhh." The return of the cackle-cough made Marethyn's gorge rise.

"Won't you tell me something? Perhaps I can help."

"How can you help?" the Ramahan whispered. "I am already dead."

Then she did something strange. She grabbed Marethyn's hand in a dry, trembling grip. "You want to help, V'ornn? Here." She pinched the tip of each of Marethyn's fingers in turn while she counted off, "One, two, three, four, five. What do you see?"

"My fingers."

"Stupid V'ornn. Five pivots. Do you understand now?"

"No, I-" Marethyn stopped in midsentence. The Ramahan was already dead. She sighed, reached out to close her eyes and, with a little cry, s.n.a.t.c.hed her hand away from the empty sockets.

She heard something then, a twig snap or a branch swooshing in the wind. Or was it a furtive footfall?

She turned from her macabre encounter and gazed toward the opening down which she had slid.

She listened.

The soughing of the wind. The rustle of rodents. Hearts beating fast.

The skitter of stones.

And then, so abruptly it paralyzed her, she was. .h.i.t with a brilliant blue-white light.

"You weren't so hard to find, Tuskugggun."

Ka.s.stna's harsh voice seemed to emanate from the center of the light. She shaded her squinting eyes, and he laughed.

"A rat-mole in its hole."

She turned this way and that, but there was nowhere to run or hide.

"How does it feel, Tuskugggun, to be the hunted? To know you are going to die?"

The achingly bright light threw into sharp relief the slashed corpses. Two were locked in a death struggle. So they had fallen upon one another, she thought distractedly. The Ramahan dead grinned as if urging her to join them. She was trapped, and nothing could save her. She turned back to see Ka.s.stna aiming his ion pistol at her.

"You are far more trouble than you are worth," he said, "so I will kill you and bring your severed head back as a trophy for the tribunal leaders."

Marethyn did not beg for her life. On the contrary, she found that she was resigned to her fate. From the moment she had embarked on this dangerous path, she had always known that her life could end this way. She did have regrets, however. She wished she could see Sornnn one more time. She thought of her grandmother. Tettsie, I hope for a brief moment, at least, you were proud of me.

The ion blast resounded shockingly loud in her ears, and she stumbled backward. But, on her knees, she realized that she had lost her balance because of the noise. She remained unhurt.

The light source was canted at an angle that cast her in a penumbra.

Quickly, she dragged over a couple of the corpses. Standing on tiptoe on the grisly mound, she gained a handhold and levered herself up.

"Marethyn?" A blessedly familiar voice.

She gained her feet, her hearts beating fast. "Majja?" The bright light filled her field of vision. "Is that you?"

"Here," Majja said. "Help me with Ba.s.se. He has been hurt."

Marethyn made her way to where Majja crouched, Ba.s.se's head in her lap.

"What happened?"

"He wounded Ka.s.stna and went after him. Ka.s.stna shot him. I think I killed Ka.s.stna, but I can't besure."

Marethyn found the light source-a battle-grade lumane used by Khagggun-and turned it down to low. By its illumination, she saw that Majja had pressed her hand over a spot on Ba.s.se's abdomen. His clothes were soaked in blood, and he was unconscious.

When Majja took her hand away, Marethyn could see a pink iridescence that made her stomachs want to rebel. She stripped off the sleeves of her blouse and, tearing them into strips, wrapped them tightly around the wound.

"How did you find me?" she asked, as much to keep the look of fear off Majja's face as to calm herself.

"Did you think we would just let Ka.s.stna take you away like that?"

"You followed us?"

"I finally persuaded Gerwa." Majja licked her lips. "We must get him back to camp."

Marethyn looked down at the pale, drawn face, and said a silent prayer.

"We cannot move him," she said quietly. "You know that."

Majja's eyes searched hers. "We cannot let him die. We cannot!"

Riane!" Eleana, dizzy with fear, pounded on the Door.

"Riane!"

Eleana's shock-sword was out, striking the Door over and over again with heavy two-handed blows.

After not too long at this the twin blades exploded into smithereens.

"I am glad I saw that for myself." Kurgan stood grinning at her. "Because if you had told me that Kundalan stone could destroy V'ornn alloy, I would have called you liar."

Blood freezing in her veins, she let go a foul oath, lunged at him, the ragged stump of the shock-sword raised. But rage and terror blunted her reflexes, allowing him to dance lithely away from her rather clumsy attack. His push-dagger was already out, and deftly, gently, almost lovingly, he p.r.i.c.ked her side with its needlelike tip.

It did not take long for the Nieobian paralysis gel to work. Her curses turned to unintelligible slurring.

She stumbled over her own boots.

"Come here, sweetling." Kurgan sighed deeply.

Eyes rolling up, Eleana fell into his arms.Krystren's Journey Krystren, at the western edge of the island onto which she had been washed up, rolled a cube of worn red jade between her fingers, sea wrack sloshing at her feet. She heard the call of the Sea of Blood. She inhaled the sharp, clean tang of the ocean. In the bright, tender days of her childhood, before the Onnda had come to claim her, she and Courion had swum with giant spotted rays and dancing deep-water snapper. The intelligent cephalopods, which he had loved best, she left for him, preferring the cities of coralbright, colonies of sh.e.l.lfish, armies of circling glittery eels. It was for him to peer into the deep, and see there the shadows of immense creatures no Sarakkon had ever encountered.

They had been born in the Great Southern Arryx, an enormous swath of undulating valleys that ran through a chain of slouch-sloped volcanos. Centuries ago, in the Time before the Imagining, it was said that a pair of Dragons cavorted across the Arryx, their s.e.xual couplings creating the first Sarakkon.

Perhaps this was true, for all around the Arryx was an arid place. No tree rose from the nutrient-poor soil, no flowering plant pushed up through the sharp-edged igneous rock.

She sat in the lee of a blue-black fang of rock with her knees drawn up, staring out at the Sea of Blood, and thought of the time she had returned home from the absolute isolation of Onnda training to find Orujo moping on the veranda. His family name was Aersthone, but for many reasons they always called him by his given name. He was simply Orujo. He had come looking for Courion, who was away at sea. For two days they sat drinking a highly potent distillation of oqeyya, the rare fungus that grew in the caldera of Oppamonifex, regent of the volcano chain, while they spoke of Courion, whom they both loved. When they ran out of the distillation, he suggested they hike into the caldera to gather more of the fungus.

At the summit of Oppamonifex, the air was so thin that those raised in the coastal cities could scarcely catch their breath. Clouds pa.s.sed ghostlike below them. Wind and sun scoured their faces raw, dried their lips as if they were in the desert. They felt their hearts laboring, the blood rushing through their veins.

Peering over the lip into the crown-like caldera they saw an area blasted by natural cataclysm into a landscape both surreal and wondrous, for it looked like nothing else on Kundala.

Krystren had tried to take everything in, to do more than remember it-to somehow absorb it, keep it forever whole and throbbing and alive just as it was at that moment. It was, more than anything else, the spontaneity of their decision, like a color pure, rich, fresh, that filled their hearts with such elation. If only each decision in life could be this quick and clean, a knife slash across the throat.

And she had succeeded, because these were the dominant images that occurred to her now, vivid and breathtaking still after all this time. The wind quartering in off the Sea of Blood smelled of torment, the torment of memory.

"It is so spectacular," Orujo had said, alight in his turquoise jacket at Oppamonifex's summit. "Thank you. I never would have gotten Courion up here."

He spread his arms wide, Orujo the adventurer, who preferred hanging three thousand meters in the air to sailing on the deep. Which was where the nettles of his relationship with Courion resided.

"Let's see if we can find some oqeyya," Orujo had said with his unquenchable enthusiasm, "before we lose the light."

"Are you sure?"

Orujo flashed the smile that Krystren loved and which made Courion weak. "Even you and I will likely never pa.s.s this way again."

And so they had begun the precipitous descent, entering the miraculous Oppamonifex caldera, home of living Dragons, seedbed of oqeyya, of, so the Sarakkon believe, Kundala itself.

The blasted world opened wide to meet them, the harsh blue sky slipping away just as if they haddived into deep water. The darkness of the caldera rose up, loose rubble and powdery ash slithering away like wild rivulets in a tempest. Gla.s.sy fingers of obsidian, wicked as daggers, proliferated on the steep incline. Once or twice, Orujo almost lost his balance as the friable rock underfoot gave way. He laughed as Krystren reached for him. He did not need her arm around his narrow waist but, being Orujo, he enjoyed the attention.

Their descent was methodical and cautious. There was no cause for concern or alarm. High above, in the dwindling oval of the sky, enormous golden-winged vistures circled silently, scanning for prey with telescope eyes.

Orujo's thick, braided hair was pulled back from his face, tied with a band of silver runes, in his thick beard was a cube of red jade, ancient and worn, given to him by Courion on their first anniversary. His slender, open face was alight with the impromptu adventure. Or was it impromptu? Krystren found herself wondering whether Orujo had this in mind all along, a trophy greater than any other to take back to his lover, Krystren's brother, Courion.

By the time they were a third of the way down, the caldera was pitched at a dizzyingly steep angle.

They slowed even more, picking their way carefully down the precarious slope. Above them, the sky was deepening, color impastoed onto the undersides of clouds as the sun swung lower in the sky.

Krystren prudently called a halt, and they drank deeply from their water flasks. Orujo pointed. Below them was a rufous patch of oqeyya. He grinned at her, for it was far larger than they could have envisioned, and they said what was in their minds, that spontaneity caused life to be at its most surprising.

So much oqeyya would make them rich.