Prospero's Children Page 34

  Long after, the waters sank. It might have been another dawn, another age. The bubble burst; welcome air rushed in. Fern found she was still holding Uuinarde, and the nympheline still clung to her: they looked at one another, too devastated for tears, and did not let go. Ixavo leaned on the balustrade. Effort had drained most of the color from his skin, leaving it darkly sallow; only his disfigurement stood out like an open wound. The breath rasped from his lungs, his voice rasped. Fern was visited by the thought that he was enduring beyond normal human capacity, not holding on but held, in the grip of some Other who used him, drove him, consumed him without compunction. “Come,” he said at last. “This is a respite, not the end. Not yet. The key.” He bent over the chain, unclipping the mechanism which released the shackle. Uuinarde watched as if he and the manacle and the wrist it held were utterly divorced from her. “What did you see,” she asked Fern, “through the Door? Was it Death?”

  “Maybe.” Fern shivered at the memory.

  “She saw herself.” Ixavo’s grin was empty, like the grin of a skull. “It was folly. Had you set even a finger or toe across the threshold, you would have been lost. You know that.”

  Do I? thought Fern. What do I know?

  But the question was huge and ominous, and she feared the answer.

  “Dive,” Ixavo told the nympheline. “We want the key. The key Zohrâne used to unlock the Door. It’s down there— somewhere. Get it.”

  Beneath the gallery the water still surged, heaving with debris, sucked into whirling currents by the rifts and tunnels below. They saw spinning beams, sections of roof, clotted lumps of clothing, a hand drifting like a starfish. “No swimmer can live in that,” said Uuinarde.

  “You’re a nympheline,” said Ixavo. “Try.”

  “How will I find something so small?”

  “By looking for it.”

  “Is it important?” she asked Fern.

  “Yes.”

  “More than life?”

  “More than life.”

  Uuinarde nodded; her face grew set. She folded her veil into a sash, winding it across her chest and round her waist. Then she climbed over the parapet, slid into the water, and was gone.

  She emerged some minutes later, clutching one of the supports against the swirl of vicious eddies. Her hair clung to cheekbone and brow; there was blood on her lip; her hands were empty. “I’ll help you,” said Fern, knowing herself helpless, swinging a leg over the rail.

  “Don’t be stupid.” Ixavo pulled her back. Uuinarde recovered her breath, and dived again.

  She was gone longer this time, breaking the surface at last on the wrong side of the chamber, struggling from pillar to pillar to return to her starting point. The shell of the temple still stood, roofless under a cloud-driven sky, broken portions of the gallery jutting here and there in precarious isolation. It resembled a cauldron filled with obscene soup: leakage from the sewers was already finding its way into the mixture; regurgitated flotsam jostled for space before being dragged down again; monstrous bubbles rose at the center, exploding like blisters on the face of the water. Many released evil-smelling gases; one spattered blood. Not far from their unstable peninsula the wall was starting to split as the torrent sought to escape, flood meeting flood. Uuinarde, running out of pillars, negotiated the remainder of the circuit with increased difficulty. As she drew nearer, Fern saw the red of new bruising on her arms and jaw, the filth dripping from her hair.

  “Have you got it?” Ixavo’s eagerness bordered on frenzy.

  The nympheline shook her head, too exhausted to speak.

  “You must come out,” said Fern. “Rest.”

  “No.” Ixavo was inflexible. “The earthquake may return at any moment. We mustn’t linger.” Fern thought he would have kicked the nympheline from her handhold if he had not managed to recall how much he needed her. “Find the key. Then we can all get out.”

  Uuinarde took a few ragged breaths, looking up at the other girl. Fern noticed she never looked at Ixavo now. Her eyes were slits of emerald-blue in a face streaked with slime, distorted with rubescent blotches. Then she pushed back her hair and plunged once more under the water.

  She had been gone only a little while when it began again. This time, the noise came from below, the shifting of unwieldy rock, a rumble in the belly of the earth. New crevasses opened up: the sea at the heart of the chamber was sucked down while the current around the edge accelerated, spiraling into a whirlpool. The precipice on which they stood jolted free of the wall, balancing only on a couple of unsteady columns and a stab of power from Ixavo. Uuinarde surfaced some distance away, grabbing hold of a passing hunk of cloth, bloated with trapped air. It was impossible to see if there was a body attached. The flow carried her past Fern too swiftly for her straining hands, spinning the nympheline into orbit around the vortex, pounding her with hurrying debris. She submerged— reappeared—transferred her clutch to a broken beam which bobbed and rolled in her grasp. Fern saw that she would be swept by again even farther out of reach. She twisted one end of Ezramé’s veil around her arm, unraveling the other over the maelstrom, blown on a breeze of thought or faith, a ribbon of gossamer almost too slight to be seen. But the nympheline caught it and it held, strong as a rope, and Fern and Ixavo drew her to safety, though he cursed her for her obvious failure. She did not respond; her mouth was shut hard. Only when she had struggled over the coping did her lips part, ejecting something into Fern’s cupped palm. “The key!” Ixavo said, and his face gloated, yet he shrank from it. Fern did not thank Uuinarde— they had gone beyond thanks—only their fingers entwined for a moment; the nympheline’s were slimed from the unclean water. Then Fern hung the key on the chain around her neck and Ixavo swung her across the gap, onto an uneven ledge protruding from the wall along which she could scramble to the exit. Behind her, there was the sound of tearing marble, sharp as a report, as the Guardian relaxed the grasp of his power. He leaped for the ledge, abandoning Uuinarde. Turning, Fern saw her tumble to her knees on the tilting platform—saw the columns snap like celery-sticks—saw the segment of gallery slide into the water and vanish in a gulp of muddy foam. There was an instant of expectancy, of frantic hope; but she did not re-emerge. She hadn’t even cried out.

  “We don’t need her now,” Ixavo said, thrusting Fern onward.

  She was too stunned to answer.

  Outside, much of the walkway had collapsed but the carrarc was there as promised, pitching on the water below, the painter knotted through the leftover fretwork. Something stronger than luck must have kept it there. Ixavo sprang down into the boat: it tipped and ducked but did not capsize. Fern allowed him to lift her in; she had no choice. The ruin of Atlantis stretched on every hand. The waters were subsiding slowly now, funneled into turbulence down narrow streets, spreading into calmness in the wider areas of squares and avenues. The effect was that of a vast lagoon from which topless edifices, shattered pediments, piers and pillars jutted like fantastic rock formations. The upper storeys now stood clear of the waterline, many of them minus one wall or several, bare rafters spanning the empty roof-space like fleshless ribs. Occasional cataracts poured from crevices and window-slots where the water had been temporarily contained, but most of the devastation was still, wrapped in a deceptive quiet. Sea and storm had withdrawn after the first assault and were recharging their energies before returning to finish their work. Steered only by Ixavo’s will the carrarc slipped through the lake, skirting island buildings, avoiding the man-made reefs below. Great quantities of wreckage drifted past, matted into rafts or piled into pyramidal structures like huge icebergs of rubbish. There were other things among the flotsam, things with hands, limbs, hair, but Fern tried not to look at them. A cat which had survived somehow mewed from a promontory: they saw no other living creature. Massive clouds were stacked above the horizon but the falling sun found a chink to peep through, like a prisoner peering out between the bars of his cell. Low rays ranged across the desolation, turning the brown waters to murky yel
low. Overhead, an inky sky sagged toward them, pregnant with the tempest to come.

  When they reached the mountain they saw the earthquake had opened a wide ravine in its flank: the villa of the Dévornines was gone. A slice of the palace had been hacked away, exposing three-sided rooms, the caverns of vaults unaccustomed to daylight. They left the boat and ascended the slope to the palace entrance. Here, there were people about, though very few. An old woman sat on a step mumbling to herself: when she saw them, she pulled her veil over her face. Two youths, possibly servants or slaves, begged Ixavo for orders, but he brushed them aside. “Go where you will,” he said. “It will do no good.” There were soldiers at the palace gate but they merely stared at the intruders; their spears lay on the ground.

  “What of the queen?” asked one.

  “She’s dead,” said Ixavo. “I am her legatee.”

  After that, they shrank from his path. He moved through the corridors with long strides; sometimes, Fern had to run to keep up. She was thinking: They are all gone. Ezramé, the faithful Aliph, Uuinarde . . . all gone now. The world that remained seemed raw and barren, an existence without meaning. She adhered to her purpose because that was all she had left. Walls of rose-tinted marble unfolded around her, doors and passages hemmed her in, forcing her too close to her protector. It was beautiful, one of the most beautiful palaces ever built, but she stalked through it unseeing, uncaring. Eventually they came to a door that was chained and fettered as if Zohrâne had feared it might escape. Ixavo made a noise like the groan of a quake itself and the chains clattered to the floor, the fetters peeled away from the panels . . . Beyond, there was a long room which had once been longer, cloven by the ravine, filled with the dying sun. Fern blinked in the sudden brilliance. But even as they entered the light faded, smothered in the creeping advance of the storm, and the dazzle shrank to a filament that cut a semicircle through the dark, and at its center was another door, the Door, and it was open. It was far plainer than the version Zohrâne had used in the ceremony, its wooden surface unadorned, its framework bare of jeweled fungi. The lizard that scuttered across the lintel glittered like a dart of green fire; but it was real. The opening was narrow, masked by the Door itself, so Fern could not see what lay on the other side. The keyhole shone with a glow that came from nothing in the room.

  “Don’t try to look!” said Ixavo, reading her thought.

  The circle barred her way, but she knew what to do. “Uvalé!” she ordered—Open!—and the line broke, allowing her through, reconnecting behind her. She was immediately conscious of being sealed within the boundaries of the spell, united in a perilous relationship with the Door and whatever lay beyond, closer to that Beyond—the Beyond she must not even see—than the room outside the circle. Ixavo was not merely excluded but distanced: she felt herself contained in a solitary pocket of power, yet in some way it encompassed a potency and a potential far larger than the exterior world. She had never learned the words of any incantation but it was unimportant; what mattered was certainty and belief. The right words would be whatever she chose to say. “Fiassé!” she cried. “Be!”—and in Atlantean the verb has a far deeper meaning than in lesser tongues, it was the command of creation, the summons that conjured substance from the void. The circle flamed and sank, the Door trembled. She thrust it shut, very cautiously, sensing that it must not swing too far, remembering Ixavo’s warning: Had you set even a finger or a toe across the threshold . . . She murmured the word of closure into a falling silence, the same silence she had heard earlier that day in the temple. The two moments seemed to blend in that quietus: many doors became one Door, the broken circles one circle. The torn edges of Time drew together. She inserted the key in the lock, felt it turn smoothly, without effort. There was a familiar click—the sound of a pin’s fall, of atom colliding with atom—and the world was whole again.

  She removed the key, hanging the chain once more around her neck. When she turned, she saw the circle waning to a glimmer, and the figure of Ixavo, no longer remote, a looming threat outside a barrier that was nearly gone.

  “Come,” he said. He did not tell her she had done well or ill. She sensed the fever of his impatience as a tangible aura.

  “Where?” she demanded. He ignored the question, seizing her arm to propel her in his wake. Instinctively her right hand closed on the key, drawing resistance from the Stone, feeling his grasp slacken, though whether because of her will or as a tardy gesture of tact she was not sure.

  “The treasure vault,” he said. “There’s an underground passage down to the harbor. We must hurry. Do you want to wait until the whole mountain rears up to bury you?”

  He moved toward the door where they had entered; she followed, knowing he was right, fearing his rightness, his practicality, his urgency. But even as he passed through a shadow arced and fell—there was an ugly thud—his body folded, disintegrating into a sprawl along the floor. In the momentary paralysis that ensued Fern saw the gash sliced across his naked scalp, the spreading discoloration around dented bone. An onyx vase rocked on its side close by, its circular base sharp-edged, dipped in red. Fern looked up and met Rafarl’s eyes.

  “I’ve killed him,” he said. Possibly it was an effect of shock that his tone sounded clipped, devoid of inflection.

  What was there to kill? Fern wondered.

  But all she said was “We must hurry,” picking up the dead man’s words, stepping over the thing that had been a present menace only seconds before. “He said there was an underground passage from the treasure vault—”

  “It’ll be locked.”

  Fern, however, was already running down the nearest stair. At the bottom, they found earthquake damage had chipped the foundations and loosened the joists. Doors were shaken from their frames, bolts unfastened. In a string of interlinked vaults three of the palace soldiery, deprived of the restraints of authority, were smashing locks, wrenching open chests, breaking into cupboards. One of them drew his sword on the newcomers; then let it drop. “Help yourselves,” he said. “There’s plenty for all.” His face shone with a greed on the edge of despair—the wallowing in riches that will never be spent, the grasping at a dream in the instant before awakening. He plunged his hand into a chest and lifted it out dripping with coins. A second man was rummaging through a heap of sacks and leather pouches; one split, leaking a puddle of gems that flashed and glittered on the murky floor. He upended another, and a shower of rubies, blood-dark, streamed through his fingers. These were the jewels the Atlanteans had rifled from the hoards of a thousand mainland kings—royal heirlooms, holy symbols, stones blessed and accursed: an emerald torque might have been the wealth of an entire tribe, a single diamond the purchase price of a kingdom. And all had been stored in the dark, unseen, forgotten, fire and ice, legend and malediction, piled like rubbish in a heap, secret as a sewer, commonplace as muck. What were ordinary jewels to the Gifted monarchs, who had the Lodestone under their hand? And Fern felt automatically for the piece around her neck, seizing Rafarl’s wrist when he hesitated, casting a wanton eye over the treasure they had to leave behind.

  They found the entrance to the passage in a corner, shoving a heavy chest out of the way in order to gain admittance. It was unlit, but Rafarl appropriated a discarded lantern from the unobservant looters. The floor sloped down a short distance before breaking into steps. The sidelong beam of the lantern showed them walls of natural rock curving into an arched roof, snail-tracked from the transit of ancient moisture, riven from the subsidence of endless droughts. Wider fissures were presumably the result of seismic activity: at one point they had to leap a chasm more than five feet across, landing precariously on the crumbling stair below.

  “So you’ve done it,” Rafarl said as they groped their way down into the dark. “The crusade crusaded. Your Task tasked.”

  “Mm.”

  “Was it worth it?”

  She paused for a moment, stared at him. “I don’t know. I don’t suppose I ever will.”

  They wen
t on. For some time neither of them spoke. She did not ask him why he had come back, for the second time, against his judgment, against his word. He had come: that was all that mattered. In her heart, or wherever the truth of her soul was subsumed, she had always believed he would.

  “What about the others?” she said at length. “Will they wait for you?”

  “They’d better.” His voice was grim, essaying in vain for a note of amusement. “They won’t make it without me. I’m the only one who can manage the ship in a storm. Ipo knows that: he’s no fool. His decision will rule the rest.”

  “And he said he’d wait?”

  “No. He damned me for a stubborn imbecile and said he’d go.” She heard the ghost-laugh she remembered from the prison cell, shaking the lantern-beam into an arabesque. “I hope he lied.”

  “I hope so.” She caught his hope and held it close. “He’s your friend, isn’t he?”

  “Of a kind.”

  After a pause, she inquired: “Why did he make you pay for guidance through the sewers? Wouldn’t he do it for friendship’s sake?”

  “That’s different. It’s a question of principle. He’s the only one who really knows those tunnels. To lead people through for nothing would be to cheapen the secret of his knowledge. Nobody values a service which they get for free.”