When they rode out of the city, east, in the morning, they began to feel the Concealment. The air grew heavy, burdensome, leaving them gasping for breath. The horses struggled to go on, could not until the travellers walked and led them, struggling step by step, wading through air as though it were heavy liquid. At last the pressure eased, and they mounted to ride forward to find themselves riding back into the eastern outskirts of Tchent. Sun gleamed high above the ivory and green of the city. When they turned to look eastward, the plains stretched to the horizon with no visible barrier.

'Well,' said Medlo. 'Shall we try it again?'

'Something hot, first,' pleaded Terascouros. She was holding to the saddle with both hands, lips blue. Though both Jaer and Medlo had helped her in the travail, her body lacked their young strength and had been pushed to its limits in the effort to breach the Concealment. 'Even then, it may be I will wait for you here while you try again. I do not think I can ...'

'Not I,' said Jaer. 'It will not change. We may do it over and over until the horses refuse to move, but it will not change. The Concealment conceals nothing, and everything. I need to rest and think.'

He mused while they brewed tea, for Terascouros. 'Something gets through, somehow. The thing that pursues me is through there, yet it reaches here.' His eyes were caught by a distant flicker of bright colour against the skyline, and he hissed to the others as he kicked dirt across the fire. 'There are Gahlians coming down the hill to the north. Bring the horses.' They moved swiftly to lead the horses through a collapsed doorway into a nearby tower. Stairs wound up to an observation platform under the crumbling roof, and after a hesitant testing of each tread, Medlo and Jaer wound their way upward to lie on the platform and peer out through narrow slits in the masonry.

There were red robes, a few black robes in attendance, riding beasts of a kind they had not seen before, and some other riders who seemed to flash in the light as though armoured. The procession came into the city, down the distant staircase above the avenue, and down that avenue to turn abruptly south and disappear from view. They did not reappear. Time passed, then their eyes were caught by the swinging of a vine outside their tower. There was no wind. They became aware of a sound coming to them from the tower wall, a recurrent, rhythmic pulsing, as of the passage of marching men on a paved way.

'Under us,' said Medlo, suddenly. 'They are under us, going east.'

The sound died gradually but they continued to watch until the sun was halfway down the sky. Then, marking where the procession had disappeared, they went back down into the city.

The way was not hard to find, a staircase leading downward into darkness at the end of a twisting alley. The stairs had been smoothed almost into a ramp by the accretion of blown debris over centuries, and the way smelled of damp with a disquieting overlay of some other musty smell. Hoofmarks showed plainly, cleft hooves, very far apart from front to rear. Whatever the beasts were, they were long-bodied and small-boned and had disappeared into an impenetrable darkness. The darkness demanded torches.

Terascouros told them where to seek squirrel-cached oil nuts, where to find reeds on which to string them. It was evening before they followed the tracks into the earth by the light of flickering, smoky brands which threatened to go out in every draft.

They followed the hoofprints down long, dusty, straight corridors and into twisting ways, through vaulted hallways peopled with echoes, past cavernous places once bridged by floors which had collapsed into chasms below. At length, a bellowing roar of wind came toward them from some unknown depth and they entered a stone-floored cavern into which a dozen ways opened. There was no dust upon the cavern floor, polished bright by centuries of wind-scouring particles. They stopped, confused, searching black tunnel mouths for any sign that someone had passed there. All the ways led into indistinguishable blackness.

Into this confusion, Jaer seemed to hear or feel or sense some orderly tugging, as though a voice called him or a summoning hand gripped his own. 'Come this way.' It pulled him toward one of the tunnels. 'This way, come.' The way was long and curving, a trackless arc without echo, muted in velvet dark. Without warning, torchlight fell upon a door closing the way before them. Moreover, it was neither ancient nor rotted but shone in the light with a sheen of new metal worked into letters and words in an unknown language.

Or was it? He tingled with recognition as though he knew or might once have known. Terascouros pushed past him with a smothered exclamation.

'Tiene! See, writing of the Tiene! Oh, Powers, can I remember what I learned too long ago? Medlo, do you have any knowledge of ...? No, of course not, stupid of me.'

'Not stupid,' Medlo corrected her. 'The writing is like that found in many places in Methyl-Drossy, the language of monuments of the Drossynian kings. There is a museum in Howbin, one an aunt of mine was benefactress of, which has much writing of this kind. I even have something with-'

'So much information, to so little use,' remarked Jaer. 'What are you both talking about?'

Terascouros was peering at the letters, following them with a fingertip and muttering to herself.' "Otie ah, ninie dra, dosh tabon." It is like learning the alphabet all over again. See, here, in what you would call Drossynian, can you read that, Prince? Look, under my finger. No, ninny, here. Does that not read, "Lords of earth and all Powers ..." Does it not?'

Medlo knelt beside her, scrubbed at the door with his sleeve as though to brighten letters dim from lack of light. ' "Lords of earth and all Powers, know that she who lies here guards thee. Forbear to waken her who waking frees the darkness." ' He nibbled a thumbnail. 'Like a children's story.'

Terascouros repeated the words: 'A children's story.' She was busy at the door, pressing at the leaves and flowers which were cast into the metal, her fingers slipping into curves to press here and there, again, again. There was a quiet 'tlach,' and the door swung away from them.

'Children's stories.' Terascouros beamed. 'Exactly. That was the tale of the Princess Moonlight, who slept in the cavern behind golden doors. In the story, the doors unlocked in precisely that way. What fun!'

Jaer hauled her back, cursing quietly under his breath. 'For love of us, Teras, be careful. This is not a children's story. It is not Princess Moonlight but Gahlians, monsters, pain and hate. Be careful. Think before you go.'

'You think!' she said sharply. 'May I go?'

His hands fell away. 'Yes. Yes, of course. I led us here, didn't I?'

'You will see,' she said. 'It may be a story, one I learned as a child and had forgotten, but there is no harm in it.' She led them into dusty darkness beyond, the horses following, letting the door brush shut behind them.

The darkness gave way to opalescent grey, to pearly light, to a nacreous haze like early dawn. Before them a dais rose between cabinets in which lights fluttered and blinked, and on the dais an oval of haze seemed to float without weight. Within it a figure lay as though asleep, or carved from ivory, or dead and preserved in the appearance of life. Dark hair lay above level brows and dreaming eyes. Lips curved as though smiling. From above them a bell sounded, solemn and resonant, muted by distance but unmistakably the bell of the ruined tower of Tchent, both lulling and summoning. Jaer felt himself weeping, and the figure before them moved slightly, as though it perceived a disturbance, and then slept on.

Terascouros knelt to run her fingers along the letters carved into the stone steps before them. 'Taniel,' she whispered. 'It says that this is Taniel, guardian of the west. Oh, Powers, what wonder to have lived to see Taniel!'

Medlo moved restlessly, looking over his shoulder. 'Not possible, Teras. Here? Almost in the open? Behind a door which took you only moments to open?'

'Oh, Medlo, there are not but a few dozen in the world who knows that old story. It is told to children, true, but only to Sisterhood children. It is obvious why that is. We were meant to tell it, and remember it. What better place to hide a clue, a key?'

'But the Gahlians, those we followed ...'

'Did not come this way. Look around you. Do you doubt it?'

There was thick dust on the floor, on the steps, with no tracks in it but their own. 'How could they have missed it?'

'There were a dozen corridors, each branching into more,' said Jaer. 'Something led me here, and that something did not lead the Gahlians, For them, it is only an unexplored corridor. For us ... well, for us, what?'

Terascouros replied. 'You led us. You tell us.'

He tried to relax, to let the swarming multitude within him speak, the patterns communicate with him, the understanding come. The suspended body before him did not move, and yet within him it seemed to move, to speak, to point, saying, 'Look, there and there, at this, at that. Note, compare, how this joins to that.' He shuddered at the onslaught.

'What is it?' whispered Terascouros.

'She maintains it,' he answered. 'Taniel. She holds the Concealment in place. It is like a great wall which protects us all from what lies beyond.' He turned toward one of the tall cabinets, to the crawling lights and the whispering hum. 'There is something here, something I dreamed of. A map. A design. Something.' His eyes fell upon one of the silvery panels and fixed there. 'Yes. A design.'

They peered over his shoulder at the lines which branched and branched again, the tiny letters, the blinking lights. An arrow marked a place. He pointed. 'We are in this place. There is the corridor which branched so many ways. There is the long aisle which goes eastward and ends in what? I cannot read it.'

'Nor I,' confessed Terascouros. 'It seems to say something about... would it be eggs? What has this to do with eggs?'

'That is where we must go, eggs or no. And this place well, we must leave it quickly, circumspectly, with reverence, being sure the door is shut behind us.'

'You don't think we should wake her?'

'As the prince did Princess Moonlight? With a kiss, Teras? No. I do not think we should wake her.'

'It was a silly question,' the old woman admitted. 'But, in the tale, she was awakened.'

'No.' Jaer said firmly. 'Not now.'

They went back the way they had come, all three turning to stare at the one sleeping in the net of haze. The door opened as they approached it and closed behind them with the same gentle 'tlach' as before. They made their way back to the room from which the many corridors had radiated, and Jaer led them from that place without hesitation. They went past side ways again and again, but the way was as clear to him as though marked with lights. As they retraced their steps, Terascouros whispered a song that stirred the dust to cover their footprints. The horses clopped behind them, the two Hill ponies following the stallion.

They came to a place which lifted into vastness, a hall of chains. From the darkness above them chains hung down, swinging almost imperceptibly in some draft of air. In places they were only handspans apart, in others a man height distant. Terascouros saw a tight, secret smile on Jaer's face. 'Mystery, Teras. Far above us these chains are connected to something. Bells, perhaps? Or knives? Or diabolical machinery we are better not knowing of? I will tell you this. We had better not touch them, for they are not hung here for our comfort.'

He led them into the maze of chains, turning once and again, then again from one narrow aisle to another. Terascouros stumbled once, thrust out an arm to catch herself, then stood in appalled silence as a chain moved. Far above, a creaking sound echoed throughout the vast, steel-hung hall. Even when the chain stopped swinging, the sound went on and on as though something delicately balanced were poised monstrously above them. Until silence fell once again, they did not move.

The distance between the chains seemed to decrease as they went on. In some places there was barely room for the stallion to make the turns. Poised like a dancer, the black horse tiptoed into the corners with preternatural care. The ponies were not so large, but they seemed to follow the stallion as though glued to his shadow. At last they came out of the chains and stood breathing heavily at the edge of the hall, the black mouth of a tunnel opening before them. From behind them, and far above, they heard again that vast, premonitory creaking.

The rest of the tunnels were only tunnels, straight and grey in the waning torchlight. When they stopped to rest again, they heard a sound far ahead, as though it might be chanting or the sound of the sea. Jaer nodded as though he had expected this and began to study the walls on his right. 'Somewhere here,' he murmured, 'shown on the map in the chamber of Taniel.' Carved into the stone, somewhat blurred by time, were the same vines, fruits, and flowers as those on the door which Terascouros had opened. 'Teras, can you open this as you did the other?'

'I think, yes. Here, and here. Feel the recesses, so cunningly set behind the carving. Press once, again. Now.'

A section of stone pivoted away from the wall. Jaer stepped unhesitatingly behind it, down the short metal corridor lit by a chill glow almost like that of Murgin but without the acid glare. He stubbed his torch upon the floor, let it fall. The way was not long, ending in a chamber with three walls of the same glowing metal and one which might have been of glass. At the sight beyond it they drew back in dismay. There, in a wide chamber were gathered those red robes they had followed, busy with some ritual of their own.

'I do not believe they can see us,' Jaer whispered. 'Nor hear us. This window is some device of the wizards, letting us see them, but not they us.'

'And how do we test that?' grumbled Medlo. 'By putting ourselves before it, as bait?'

Jaer slapped the stallion with a cupped hand. The horse moved forward into the glowing room to stand almost against the glass, peering down at the Gahlians with intelligent eyes. The red-robed ones walked and gestured below, their eyes moving across the wall, seeming not to see the horse peering down at them. Jaer moved up to the glass, beckoning the others forward.

Below them the curved chamber was cut in half by a wall of blackness, glassy and shining, yet shifting as though some thick liquid moved behind it which carried a burden of glowing dust. Before this wall the red-robed ones knelt, busy with something which squirmed, trying frantically to escape. Medlo and Terascouros turned away, sickened, but Jaer watched impassively as the thing struggled more feebly and then moved no more. Smoke rose from braziers onto which bits and pieces of the sacrifice had been thrown, a greasy smoke billowing before the glassy wall. On that wall a face emerged, monstrous yet familiar, one's own face seen in a distorting mirror; the face of a friend, a lover, a child. Jaer saw Ephraim in it; Medlo, Alan; Terascouros, the face of one long dead. The face brooded over the Gahlians, now prostrate before the wall; its lips sucked in the greasy smoke from the sacrificial fires, the ebon vacancy of the eyes slid across the place where Jaer, Medlo, and Terascouros stood without seeing them. Nonetheless, Jaer felt the passage of that sightless search, knew that it reached out into the western lands to search further as it had searched for him since his birth.

The lips moved, speaking to the Gahlians below, but the three could not hear what was said. The room in which they stood had dimmed with the advent of the face, as though some great reservoir of power had been tapped, and this dimness served only to make the face more clearly visible, It seemed to speak pain and a hideous desire for something which no living creature could desire. Then it faded and was gone, leaving Jaer thinking of the red-robed ones in Murgin who had had the same expression.

'That, shuddered Terascouros. 'I have looked upon that: Below them the worshippers turned from the wall, assembled their troop around them and moved to leave the chamber. Some of the figures gleamed as they moved, robes falling aside to disclose scaled arms and legs, taloned hands. The heads of these were hidden by tall helmets with massive visors. Animals with long, snaky bodies and lizardlike heads on supple necks pranced, snarled, half unfurled great bat wings before being mounted and ridden out of sight. The three heard the troop pass to one side of them, then away, and the light within their room brightened.

Jaer leaned against the window, peering at the glassy wall which was now lightless and solid, while still giving the impression of fragility, thinnesss, of being only a veil between one place and another. 'We will go through there,' he said. The others reacted with expressions of amazement and horror. 'No. Don't look at me like that. You can go back, if you like. Or you can come with me; but if you do, you will go through there with me.

Medlo began to expostulate arid was cut off. 'Think,' said Jaer. 'We find Taniel here, in Tchent. The Concealment begins here, in Tchent. The Gahlians come here, to Tchent, but go no further. When the that came to the barrier, yonder, some great power was drawn as though to keep it from coming further. I could feel it. All part of the pattern. All saying, "The Concealment is maintained not to keep people from the east, but to keep that which is in the east from getting out." It prevents our going east as an effect, not out of design. Be thankful for that, for it prevents the Gahlians going there likewise.'

'But we saw it so close, one could almost touch, so close they could hear it....'

'Yes. Those who established the Concealment left a window here, a place of observation, a way to see what happened there, eastward. They did not foresee my use of it, but the pattern within me tells me they left an access, too. A way to get through. As I shall.'

'Into the very hands of...'

'No. That has gone, Medlo. It comes here when it is called. It searches through here from time to time. It will not be here now.'

He led them out of the observation room and down into the chamber. He picked up a robe discarded by the Gahlians and threw it over what remained of the sacrifice. The stone was stained as by a myriad such sacrifices, and beady eyes winking behind carved stone, a skreeking and scuttle of lean forms along the wall spoke of rats finding enough food here to inhabit the place. At the glassy wall, Jaer paused, laid his hands against it to feel its structure. Within him, voices of his inhabitants argued with one another, the pattern of them shifting and dancing. Sternly, he bade them be still and concentrate. Slowly, all of the multitudes that were Jaer became focused upon the wall, felt it, understood it, moved into it.

To Medlo and Terascouros it seemed that Jaer melted into the Wall, the stallion beside him, leaving only Jaer's left hand reaching toward them out of darkness. With hopeless looks at one another, they took that hand and were drawn through the barrier into a timeless, lightless dream. They walked on ashen plains. On the horizon were fire-topped mountains breathing a constant fume and smoke into still air. Thin uneasy music dwelt here, an endless crying. To either side stood tents, tattered and stained; torn banners flew at their peaks. Armour was piled into a dented monument before them, and they could hear a song as from great distance.

Camped on fear's ground ... in terror's tents ...

among life's shattered monuments ...

Drinking alone, from horror's cup ...

with all of hope used up ...

used up. ...

The voice sang to Medlo, telling him that it was time to give up hope, to stay in the dreary land and listen to the sound of weeping. He tried to draw his hand from Jaer's, but was held with iron fingers.

Terascouros chanted silently to herself, words of negation against the voice crying from the sky. 'Hope not gone, not ended, never ended.' She stumbled and would have fallen, silenced, except that Jaer's hand drew her on. Above them the voice sang again and again, but the hand led them into a pall of grey, a sightlessness, and then out once more.

They stood at the bottom of a flight of great stairs. Above them the sky was pink with dawn. At the top of the stairs they fell to their knees, exhausted, to look eastward at the land beyond the Concealment.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE.

BEYOND THE CONCEALMENT.

Days 17-18, Month of Wings Returning They half carried Terascouros, she protesting, across a few paces of grassy meadow to the bank of a brook which flowed over smooth stones. Away to the north the same line of mountains reached from west to east; the same river ran westward. Nothing behind the Concealment seemed immediately different from the place they had left. There was, perhaps, more bird song, more rustle and squeak of small creatures in the grass, a clearer air as though some oppressive force had been left behind. Jaer smiled at the thought, stood over Terascouros to gesture toward the horizon.

'We're going there,' he said. 'To Tharliezalor. To the most mysterious of cities.'

'There are said to be monsters beneath Tharliezalor,' said Medlo. 'At least there were in Sud-Akwith's time. Have we not come through enough monstrousness that we must now confront the what were they called, Teras? "serim"?'

'There is no need to frighten ourselves with what might be in Tharliezalor. There are no serim here, now.'

Terascouros pulled herself to her feet, tottered around in a circle to get her blood moving again. 'Medlo's point is well made. There were serim there, hard to kill, in uncounted numbers. But they are easy enough to subdue, so I have learned. Be careful with me for my song is your weapon against the serim.' She pantomimed extreme age, toothlessness, the hunched back. Jaer laughed, then became abruptly serious when he saw the pain it caused her to straighten that back. 'I have no real wish to encounter the creatures. I think that land we came through, the ashy land within the veil, I think that was the time of the serim. It is told that when Sud-Akwith returned to his army with the sword of power, in one place he found only the minstrel alive, all others dead, and he liked not the minstrel's song. I liked not the song we heard. However, we go with you where you go, and if you must go to Tharliezalor...'

'Yes,' Jaer answered her. 'I must. As for you, Medlo, I can let you back the way we came.'

Medlo made a grimace of annoyance and began to rummage among his odds and ends looking for something he could use as a snare. Tall ears bobbed above the grasses here and there and he intended to eat hare as soon as possible. Terascouros lay down again on the blanket Jaer spread for her, content to rest for a time and drink hot tea. 'How many days were we under there?' she murmured, surprised when Jaer answered.

'Only one. One day, not even a whole day, and one whole night. Not long, Terascouros, but long enough that I, too, am weary. Let Medlo snare us something to eat, and let us rest while he does it. I think we will travel little today.'

They did travel very little, stopping at the first sign of approaching darkness to build a comfortable fire and cook the hares, augmented by fresh herbs and the starchy roots which Terascouros pulled up as they travelled. They slept early, deeply, and it was not until dawn separated the horizon from the sky that Jaer woke to see a dark, winged body silhouetted against the dimming stars.

The form turned, furling a wing, crouching like a cat, smiling into Jaer's face from so close a distance that Jaer pulled away in discomfort. It was a sphinx, terribly near, ideously familiar.

'I have come,' she said, 'as is my right, human, to ask a question. It is our custom.'

Jaer drew the blanket around her shoulders, noticing as she did so that she had changed in the night, without dreams, without the feeling of being sought. 'I was not aware of that.'

'It does not matter what you are aware of. We do not care what you are aware of. For all the generations of man, my people have dwelt in the hidden places of the earth, on the edges of great deserts where basilisks bake in endless sun, at the roots of mountains beyond the memory of those who pass, letting those who answer go free with our blessing, letting those who do not answer end their lives with us in the desolation.'

Jaer cleared her throat. 'It hardly seems a profitable relationship for man.'

The sphinx laughed, a metallic sound. 'We have no relationship with man, changeling. To riddle and be answered is all our life and reason for being. There are many among mankind who would undo us, uncreate us. Are you one of these?'

Jaer thought about it. 'No. For if you were unmade, brutal sister, who would hiss the hard questions in the black places of the heart? Come. Ask me your riddle and be done.'

'I have done,' the sphinx said, spreading a wing against the dawn. 'But I will ask another.'

'Is that allowed?'

'We make our own rules, especially with the unwary. Tell me, Jaer of the Outer Islands: what weapons do you carry?'

Again Jaer thought, again answered. 'I will tell you what I will, winged one. One weapon binds for a time, one binds forever, and I carry neither.'

The sphinx laughed, screaming at the sky. Wrapped in their blankets, Medlo and Terascouros slept on, unconscious of the wild laughter. In the trees, birds wakened to chorus drowsily at the flushed sky.

'Now,' said the sphinx, 'it is allowed that you may ask one question which I am bound to answer. Think well. Ask well.'