by Andre Norton
There seemed to be no catch or knob on this inner side. Well, she could use more of the charge of the Rod to burn her way through. But that she would rather not do. She did not want to further deplete its energy.
However, when she set flat palm to the door, its surface shifted slightly so that she inched it forward, listening all the while, hardly daring to breathe lest that faint sound cloud her hearing.
Now that the crack was wide enough, she could see a slice of darkness beyond. After waiting a very long moment more to make sure there was no sound at all, she slipped through.
There was darkness facing her and not too far away, but both Key and Rod radiated light enough for her to see that she was now in a narrow hallway that ran into deeper darkness both left and right beyond the range of the talismen’s glow.
She had two choices and no guide as to where each might lead. Not only was there no sound, but, Ashake decided, there was a queer emptiness here, as if all that which made life as she knew it had been barred.
Left—right … Her head turned as she quested for some guide as to which way would lead her back to the world she knew. Finally she faced right, holding the Rod and Key before her to give the best light possible, and started on.
There was no other break in the wall after she left the door of the laboratory. Also the hall narrowed. The way was very dark and there was a queer heaviness in the air. She might be approaching some very ancient tomb which the living had not troubled for a long time. Then the hall ended abruptly in a flight of stairs that led down into a thicker dark, far beyond any radiance of the Rod or Key to pierce.
So she had chosen wrongly. Her path should have been left rather than right. Could she retrace her steps, or might her escape be already discovered?
Tallahassee was deeply tired, in spite of the energy she drew from the talismen. Her hunger was an additional weakness. To go on down into this dark was folly. Back.…
Somehow she inched around, looked back. Now a sound reached her. Footfalls, echoing from sandaled feet, where her own bare ones made no noise. There came a flare of light—though it was very small and far away. Someone had flung wide open the door of the laboratory. She was cut off, with only the dark descent left as a way of escape. Khasti!
Her heart beat faster. What strange weapons he could command she had no way of guessing. That he would pursue her, Tallahassee had no doubt at all. But there was one thing.…
Steadying her hands with all the control she could summon, she turned fully to face that distant door, raising Key and Rod. She moved them through the air, drawing invisible lines of force, while she recited under her breath the Words of Power. Let him come then. He would meet with something that might not entangle his body, but would strike at his mind, alien though it might be.
Then, with foreboding, she began the descent. The hall above had felt dry and chill, but as she went carefully from step to step downwards, the chill became damp. The air about her, in spite of that odd dead quality, held a touch of moisture.
New Napata was on a river. Did this warren run down close to those sites where the river had been long ago covered over and hidden? She listened, both for an outcry from behind, and for any sound below. What she had done to seal this way in her own defense had drawn from the store of energy in the Rod and Key. Now their radiance was faded, did little more than light a single step ahead. Smells assaulted her nostrils—of wet, or rot, of nauseous things she could not set name to. Still the steps descended into the heart of a dead-black pit. Who had wrought this way and what use it had been in the past she could not imagine. At least it had been unknown to Ashake before.
On the steps led, down and down. Tallahassee was so tired she trembled from head to foot. Only her will kept her mind clear. Clear enough to—
She halted, her feet together on a step slimed with moisture, and raised her head high.
“Akini?” There was a presence here again. No, more than one! They were pressing in against her, as wayfarers in a desolate land might press inward to warm their hands by a camp fire. And what drew them were the talismen!
She was right, one of those was Akini. But who were the others? If she could only communicate, discover what they wanted, for their emotion touched her mind, grew in her thoughts. They were avid. As her own bodily hunger gnawed at her, so did some greater hunger tear at them—a hunger that was centered in what she bore. They did not even seem to be aware of her, only of what she carried.
“Akini!” Again she tried to reach that one presence she could put name to.
“Give—us—the—life.…”
Only a flutter of thought, so faint and far away that she could barely pick it up.
The life? Did the Rod and the Key mean life to these wisps of identity?
“Life!” The word was no stronger this time, but more imperative.
Ashake took firmer hold on the talismen. It seemed to her that the presences were trying to clutch at what she held, drag them from her grasp. But they were too weak to achieve that.
She took a deep breath and then made her answer: “Guide me hence, if you can—and I, who use the Power, will also try to give you life!” Could she bargain with these lost things? And if she did strike such a bargain, then how might she fulfill her part of it? She did not know. But there were Zyhlarz, Jayta—the others of the Upper Way—surely among them all they could give these wraiths either life or eternal peace.
That weak plucking at the talismen quieted. But they were not gone. She took heart from that. Perhaps they had understood. If they were creatures of this darkness, they surely knew the ways below.
“Akini?” She made a question of that thought.
There was a touch on her wrist. She started and glanced down. A threadlike tendril rested there. And through it came a thought.
“Forward.”
She could only trust in this. If it were a true bargain, she had won. But, since there was no turning back, she must accept what came. Down and down she went. The Akini presence was there, the others too, but they had withdrawn a little, trailing behind her.
They reached the foot of the stair and stood in a place of evil smells and air so thick that she gasped as she went. But she did not have to travel far. On the wall to her right that thread, which had touched her wrist, centered on a block of stone that the radiance showed faintly.
Ashake held closer the Key and the Rod. Here was the line of an ancient arch, but it was filled with blocks of stone, wedged in to seal what once opened there. Ashake raised the Rod, willed its power higher. She tapped with its tip against the top stone, and as she did so she muttered the old chant of the Builders. This she had never done before. She was not even sure that she knew all the words that released such power. And in the days when the Builders had wrought with the Talent, then there had been a number together wielding their wills into a single strong force.
But the stone was moving. Slowly Ashake drew the Rod back toward her, and the stone followed, to fall at her feet. So much force expended to loose a single stone! Could she achieve the withdrawal of another? She was not sure, but once more she lifted the Rod and whispered the chant. And once more a stone obeyed the summons of her Talent.
Three more blocks were so dislodged. She could not do it again! As she stood she wavered on her feet, her eyes blurred. But there was a hole—large enough to crawl through? It would have to be!
Her single flimsy garment was torn, there were bleeding gouges in her skin, grazes on her arms and legs which burned. But she had won through, to stand in yet another dark way. But this lacked the dampness of that other, and there was now a current of air blowing about her, enough to hearten her.
Ashake limped forward on bruised and bleeding feet, weaving from side to side of that narrow way, until first one shoulder and then the other scraped painfully along the stone. But the straight path was very short. Again she faced steps, very narrow steps, leading up into the dark.
She pulled herself up from one to the next. All the world had
narrowed for her to that one rough staircase. And she was not aware, until she came upon it, of a landing some four steps wide. In the wall to her right, a little below her eye level so she had to stoop a fraction to gaze through it, was a peephole from which came a wan light. She could see only a small fraction of what lay beyond, but it was enough to both startle and encourage her. For she gazed into the inner courtyard upon which fronted Naldamak’s own suite in the Inner Palace!
There was no sign of a door here, and anyway she had no wish to come blindly into the open—not until she knew more about the situation that might face her. Up again …
Tallahassee did not count the steps, but here was another landing. No, it was the end of the stair itself. And when she peered through another hole it was into the dark, as if this hole was covered. Taking Key and Rod both into one hand, she felt along the wall before her. Surely there lay some way of opening it!
Her fingers dropped into a hollow in the stone, which was barely perceptible, even when she held the talismen close to it. And it was her sagging weight as she leaned forward that must have released the hidden catch.
Ashake tumbled out through a narrow opening, to become entangled in a hanging which she nearly ripped from its high wall fastenings as she fell. Her head and shoulders lay on the carpet of the room she had entered so secretly, and the smell of delicate perfume, the freshness of good air filled her nostrils, cleansed her lungs of the foulness filling those dark ways below.
She was so spent that she did not even try to move for a space. Khasti himself could have stood before her at this moment and she would not have been able to summon the strength to face him.
It was a frightened cry that brought back her wits. She lifted herself a little, with one arm braced under her, and looked up hazily into a face she knew.
“Sela—”
“Great Lady! But where—”
“Sela,” she forced out the name again with her remaining strength. “None—must—find—me.…”
Naldamak’s old nurse—would she, or could she, understand?
“No—one—Sela … The—Candace is in danger.… No—one—must—find—me.…”
“Great Lady, none shall.” It was an old voice, thin, and weak, but there was the same decision in it Ashake had always heard. “Lady, I cannot carry you; can you walk?”
The words were very far away. Ashake fought to get to her knees.
“Hungry—so hungry.… No—one—must—know.…”
The Key and the Rod—they lay where she had dropped them on her fall. Now she drew them to her.
“Sela,” she said to the woman bending over her. “A cloth—for the precious things. They must be hidden!”
“Yes, Great Lady.” There was a soothing in that voice. The age-hunched figure was gone and back again, before Ashake could move, over her arm a long strip of finely embroidered stuff, the cover from a table. She knelt stiffly before Ashake and spread it out, sitting back then on her heels as the girl, making slow work of it, rolled the talismen into a tight bundle.
“Sela—where?…”
“Great Lady, trust me—safe they shall be!” Sela had gotten to her feet and into her outstretched hands Ashake thankfully surrendered her trust. If there was one faithful soul in all of New Napata, it was Sela for whom Naldamak was and always had been the whole world.
Ashake did not remember how she came into the bed. But when she awoke it was dark in the room save for a distant lamp. And beside that Sela sat on a stool, nodding.
“Sela.” Her own voice was hardly more than a hoarse whisper but it brought the nurse hurrying to her side.
“Lady, Lady,” she patted Ashake’s shoulder where a dressing of soft ointment was spread to take some of the sting out of the graze that had burned there. “Do you remember now?”
“Remember?”
“You talked so wild, and words I did not know. All the time I fed you the soup and wine—and you did not seem to recognize me. And your poor arms, your legs. Lady, what happened to you?”
“I was a prisoner—for a while.” She had spoken words Sela did not know … that other part of her memory began to stir. She was Ashake—no, she was someone else. Who? Tallahassee! So that part of her was not forever buried as she feared that it might be.
“The Candace?”
Sela’s face wore an expression of worry. “Great Lady—they will tell me nothing! And since you came I have stayed within these walls. There is a maid servant—she is new come since you lived in Napata—but she is of my home village and her I can trust. It is she who brought us food. And she says that there is talk that the Candace has been—lost! Over the desert when a storm arose. This is whispered widely in the city. But”—she raised her chin defiantly—“I will not believe it. My dear Lady—she is wiser, very wise. And she has good reason to watch even shadows. Also she had with her the Sworn to Sword—twelve of them—though they went disguised in the dress of lady-in-waiting or maidservant. Think you such would let her come to harm? I do not think she was lost in any storm, rather that she hopes her enemies will believe that. But you—Great Lady—what happened to you whom we thought were safe at Gizan?”
Tallahassee gave an edited version of what had happened since she had been kidnapped from the villa. Sela drew in her breath with a hiss.
“That there is a secret way now open to this room! That is evil, Great Lady. But you have brought the Precious Things safe out of danger and when the Candace returns—then there will be an accounting!” She nodded her head vigorously enough to send the edge of her sphinx headdress flapping.
“This maid of whom you speak—” Tallahassee sat up in bed. Her sore and bruised body protested every movement so that she felt she, for one, was not in her present state prepared to take on battle with anyone—let alone an enemy as strong as Khasti. “Can she find a way to reach the villa. I do not know whether Jayta and Herihor still live—”
“They do, Great Lady. You slept for two days and three nights—you seemed to drowse even when I brought food and fed you. So you do not know. The Prince General holds the northern roads, all of them. He summoned his own regiments of command and four others which are loyal and to be trusted. I think he strives to keep open a path for the Candace. And the Daughter-of-Apedemek has come before the walls of Napata and formally demanded entrance—she was seen by many. But the Temple—it is shut by some vile sorcery of this demon from the desert, and none has seen or heard of those who were so locked within.
“The Prince Userkof is said to be suffering from a fever, so his Lady commands in his household. And no man or woman knows where Khasti hides himself or what mischief he plots.” Sela sounded out of breath as she finished that rush of words.
“Can a message be sent to the Prince General?”
“Great Lady, there is some strange wizardry set upon the gates. They stand open but no one can pass through. And the people are greatly afraid of this thing. But—Lady—there is something …” Sela twisted her robe in both hands. “I saw this for my own self when I went upon the outer balcony watching for the Candace—to see if perhaps her flyer comes.”
“What is it?”
“That man cannot pass whatever barrier the vile one has put there at the gates, but animals may. It was a fruit seller’s donkey that broke from its master as he argued with the guard. And it passed beyond the gates as if there was nothing there but the empty air we see. But when the master would run after it he could not follow. And the donkey went on down the road.”
“An animal can break through.” Tallahassee considered the point. “And a bird?”
“Those in the garden fly high,” Sela answered. “But how can an animal serve your purpose, Great Lady?”
Pigeons could—if this was her own time, Tallahassee thought, and she had a convenient coop of trained ones. But a wandering donkey, even a horse, who might stray through the gate could not be a reliable messenger. It was a silly and baseless idea, yet her mind clung to it.
Had she been able to r
each the Temple, she believed that there would have been no problem. There were a few trained in the Talent who could travel outside their bodies—visit other places. Such a one could reach Jayta and pass a message, for their training was aimed in part toward such encounters. Unless Khasti had foreseen that also and erected some barrier such as the cage he had imprisoned her in until the wraith—
The wraith—Akini!
She turned to Sela. “Sela, you know much of the palace and all those who dwell within it. Have you ever heard the name Akini?”
It was if she had reached out her fist to thump the attendance gong.
“Akini! Great Lady—what do you know of Akini? Does not his mother come daily to sit in the outer court waiting for him? She has wept until she has no more tears in her, but still she will not believe that he has gone without a word to her. He was fan bearer to the Prince Userkof and between two days he was gone! None know where—only his mother will not believe that he went off with the barbarian—”
“The barbarian? What barbarian?”
“He was one who came to New Napata with a message for the Candace, but she had already gone north. By our laws, as you know, he could not stay past three sunsets. But the Prince Userkof received him, and it is said that the barbarian took a liking to Akini and offered him good payment to return to the coast, speaking for him with those peoples through whose land he must go. But the mother swears that Akini had no intention of doing such a thing, and she has petitioned that Candace’s officers find what has become of her son.”
“This barbarian—what manner of man was he?”
“Great Lady, as you know, the northern barbarians are not like us—they have hair of different colors and their skins are very light. But this man was different yet again. He might have been one of the Old Ones out of Khem, for he looked akin to those ancient statues which are kept in the Palace of Far Memory. He spoke our language badly, and ever he looked about him as if he found all to be strange indeed.”
“Did he seek out Khasti?”