Quibble, 17. Journey
Traversing ancient ruins, Quibble and Alnasl are attacked by Far warriors.
17. Journey @Alnasl
I brightened my amber as we arrived at the first of the three night-doors, the only one of which it knew anything.
The door had no seam, no sill. It was just a circle of flat, jet-black stone, its texture smoother than the striated yellow sandstone of the wall in which it was set. I flattened a hand against it. Quibble did likewise. I extinguished the amber and put it away.
I intoned the door’s key – dazzler, trance, penitent – careful not to let Quibble hear it, as Alsephina said she once did by mistake.
We emerged into shadow, frozen wind blasting our bodies.
I led Quibble to the daylight at the cave mouth. We stood in a mountainside cleft. Before us lay a field of jagged ice daggers. They knelt on a glacier’s surface. Clustered in what almost seemed formations in some places, all of the massive blades of ice pointed at noon, to which the sun had nearly climbed.
“This is the Arc of Edict,” I said, waving at the cave mouth overhead. “Control and kindness meet here for parleys.”
Quibble shivered in her cloak. “They must be short parleys.”
Unlit torches stood in two sconces on either side of the cave mouth. Coming this way to the Egg previously, I’d taken a torch to light my way in the cave. I knew better now. When we left the Arc of Summary, Alioth and Vega were on the verge of fighting. In the confrontation’s aftermath, assuming neither kindness nor control bested the other array, they might send emissaries here for a parley. We must leave no sign we’d passed.
“On the way, you said your mind lets go of nothing. Is that true? Nothing at all?”
“Nothing,” Quibble said with a grimace.
I could well imagine the disadvantages. Having mastered my amber, I could stop its recall of memories, dam the flood. If Quibble had perfect, eidetic memory, it must be like having an amber in her own mind all the time. She could decide when and what to remember, but she could never remove her hand from the glass.
Now I did so, pocketing my amber, and I looked at Quibble’s fuzzy form. “Then you recall perfectly well how to find your way Within?” I asked her.
“Listen to my footsteps. They echo on the chamber walls. Yes, I can do that.”
“Then walk exactly where I walk, and count our steps to yourself,” I instructed. We reentered the cave. As we went deeper, the cave narrowed, and the night Within huddled around us, I brought out and brightened my amber. Keeping thoughts from it was excruciating. Ambers want to know, demand it. My left hand stroked a control, and I told the amber nothing. It only saw what I saw.
A multitude of night-doors appeared in the walls and floor. Walking at a steady pace, I counted the doors and noted patterns. I clutched the control tighter as we neared the door I wanted. Finding it, I let my gaze wander casually over it. Then, as we walked on, I kept looking at the patterns the doors made as if continuing my search – but now I counted our steps myself, fourteen of them. By the time I pocketed my amber, let it go, and took the excelsior’s arm to halt us, the control had grown hot in my hand.
“Quibble, turn around in place and look back the way we came. See anything?”
“You mean the night-doors? No.”
“Can you lead us back the last fourteen steps?”
“Oh, sure,” she said, chuckling. She led me by the hand back along the passage. “Fourteen,” she announced, and we stopped.
“Kneel here,” I told her. “Can you feel the door?”
“Yes.”
Pyramid, sacrifice, deity. Away we went.
When we removed our hands from the floor-set door and stood erect, we were atop a weathered pyramid. Behind us rose the humps of nearby mountains and around us spread a vast desert plain baking under midmorning sun. Three steep flights of stone stairs descended the pyramid to a giant plaza. In its midst rose a wide platform of stone also, and around the plaza hunkered about a dozen lesser, flat-topped pyramids of tall steps. Opposite the plaza from us, a straight paved road stretched off into sand, and to the road’s left, half a mile from us, was another large pyramid. Beyond that, distant mountains were etched blue on the horizon.
Blurry, Quibble seemed to shrug. Her color grew paler.
“Don’t take off your cloak,” I warned her.
“Oh?” she said. “I’m hot.”
“This is the desert, Quibble. Your skin will burn here. Put the hood up.”
Quibble darkened. “Another meeting-place?” she asked.
“No. We’re atop the Pyramid of the Moon. I don’t know who built it or what for. We’re looking down the Avenue of the Dead—”
“What a name!”
“—and that—” I pointed to the farthest pyramid, tallest of all. “—is the Pyramid of the Sun. Atop it is our next night-door.”
Now Quibble’s shape changed. “Look,” she said.
“Stand behind my right shoulder and point it out to me from there,” I suggested. Shading eyes with my hands, I stared off into the desert where she pointed, southeast.
Across the flank of a low dune, less than a mile distant, there wound a line of people, animals. Their line did not break, and I hoped it meant they hadn’t yet spotted us. At least some of the animals they led were horses. If they saw us already and only waited now to see what we’d do, a race to the next pyramid was risky. I doubted we could outrun them. I’d never popped from one pyramid to the other. It meant giving up the Egg’s secret to the glass, and doing it for the first time with Quibble for a passenger too was chancy.
I hovered a moment in indecision. Go back? And risk walking into the midst of a parley between control and kindness, with no reasonable explanation for what we were doing at the Arc of Edict? If Quibble wasn’t under suspicion yet, she would be then.
“Come,” I said, “let’s descend quick as we can.”
“Who are they?” Quibble said.
“Far,” I answered. “Come!”
We hurried down the pyramid’s stairs, made our way across the plaza – where, thank kindness, the squat pyramids to our right hid us from the Far’s view – and along the narrow avenue. The Pyramid of the Sun grew taller before us.
There was the sound of a shout.
Glancing slightly over my right shoulder, I saw horsemen breaking off from the caravan, galloping at full tilt down the long slope of the dune towards us. The leading horse was at best a quarter of a mile away.
“Run!”
But running was hopeless. We hadn’t reached the pyramid’s base when I heard hooves striking stone behind us. An arrow whizzed by my legs, slicing through the hem of my cloak. I clutched Quibble’s hand, pulled her up short.
“We’re popping!” I shouted. “Be ready!”
Making the quickest surefire calculation I could, I intoned my wish to the glass. Quibble and I dangled midair for a breath, then stone rushed up from six feet below us. Accustomed to bad triangulation, I splayed my feet. Just as I landed with a back-aching jolt, a clap of thunder – the pop’s sound – hit the pyramid’s side. Quibble cried out and fell to her knees. I helped her up. At once she stumbled, fell again, then lay on the stone clutching her left ankle. Her face was a mask of pain.
There was no time to berate myself for foolishness.
We were at least halfway up the pyramid. Horses milled below, riderless. I saw no horsemen from this vantage. No doubt they would be climbing the steps, out of sight for now but gaining on us. I looked up. The pyramid’s top was also out of sight. I put the amber away. It would be of no more help here. I jerked Quibble up, lifted her over my shoulder, began to climb. Shouting came behind us, closer now. I didn’t look back. It was after all a race.
My breath was short. I had a stitch in my side. I struggled on. Making the top but still yards from the night-door, I risked a look over my shoulder. Two scantily clad men clambered over the rim, not far behind us.
Words sprang to mind, I knew not from where: Qahlif-sah.
Seeing me looking at them, the Qahlif-sah slackened their pace and held back to wait for their comrades. They had the sense, then, to be wary of my glasses. I huffed the last few steps to the night-door, collapsed on my knees, held Quibble tight, and risked one more look, this time through the amber.
The ethereal sphere of its negative vision expanded around us like a soap bubble. Behind us, shrouded in a black sky, stood half a dozen bright figures. One figure’s arm was raised. Arcing a foot above him was a white shaft. I had only a fraction of a second to guess that it was foreshortened by perspective. I forgot all caution, pressed my hand to the night-door and spoke the key aloud. I don’t know how close the Far spear was to our backs when the night-door carried us away.
We fell again, now backwards but only a little ways, onto soft, mossy earth. I lay there panting. Quibble rolled off me, sat up, and rubbed her ankle with both hands. She was still grimacing in pain.
“I don’t understand,” she said, stifling a sob. “Why did they attack us?”
“Far sah obey their nah,” I gasped. “If the nah says kill, they kill.”
“We were going our own way! We weren’t any threat!”
I heaved myself up, leaned back against the cliff wall below the night-door, and collected my thoughts.
“Our cloaks,” I admitted. “Far hate Zeros, or Djer as they call us. They don’t ask us where we’re going or what we’re doing. They just drive us away.”
“Why?”
“They have good reason to fear us.”
“Why didn’t we just take off our cloaks, then?” Quibble demanded to know.
“All my glasses are in my cloak. I couldn’t risk their loss. How’s your ankle?”
“Twisted.”
“I’m sorry. Can you walk?”
Quibble let out a heavy sigh, pursed her lips, got to her feet, hobbled a few steps. “I think so,” she said. “Well enough, anyway.”
I rose and gazed at the peak above us. Rust-colored, the mountainside bore the gray scar of a long-ago rockslide which tapered off near the needlelike summit, untold thousands of feet up. I laid a hand on the rockface and gave Quibble my blankest look. “Then you should be able to manage a climb,” I said.
Her look at me was sheer poison.
I held her gaze, then sank to the mossy ground and laughed, suddenly giddy and glad of it. I lay back and let spasms of laughter overtake me.
“And I can’t choose the right time for a joke?” Quibble snapped.
It was so good to laugh. Unable to recall the last time I had done it, I abandoned myself to delight. The stitch in my side returned, but still I couldn’t stop. Quibble was on her feet and ready to press on before I was.
“All right, enough,” she said, helping me up. “Lead the way, vision.”
We skirted the foot of the cliff on a gentle downhill slope for fifty or sixty yards. No guidance from the amber: I knew this rockface by touch and could have found the night-door with my eyes closed. Arriving, I placed my hand in the onyx circle first, and without a word Quibble covered it with hers. Then I spoke aloud to the door, holding nothing back, letting her hear this key too: “Illuminate, regression, genesis.”
Together, we catapulted through night.