The Carnelian Throne

by Janet Morris

  Sereth held a key of black metal in one hand and Mahrlys-iis-Vahais at arm’s length with the other. She struggled vainly, furiously, and I made sense of their interchange only briefly above the wehr-rage. It seemed Mahrlys had succumbed to her fellow creatures’ influence at last.

  And then Chayin urged me within and Sereth dragged Mahrlys by the hair. With a soft hum the metal slab began its descent. When it was half down, the wehrs surged inward, no longer impeded by Sereth’s will. But none reached the descending iron slab but one, and he left his hand within, only.

  I saw the ossasim hand severed; heard the scream, and then all was silent and dark as the space between the worlds.

  I picked out Mahrlys’ ragged breathing, heard a rustle that clanked and by that identified Chayin. I was on the verge of speech, having decided that we must make our own light, when Mahrlys’ laugh, throaty, triumphant, rang in the dark space.

  “Now it is done,” she chortled. “There is no way out of here, save Othdaliee. I have died, but Dey-Ceilneeth might yet live.”

  I reflected that had we not been able to obviate space we might indeed be concerned by whatever unknown danger lay ahead.

  There came to me in the dark a feral snarl, and a scratching sound like chalk on slate, followed by the sound of bodies grappling.

  I did not ask, but closed my eyes and concentrated on enclosing some suitable constituents of the air in a circular pocket I conceived above my head. In making a miniature sun such as the one I constructed there, one utilizes emotion, almost as if thought were the catalyst for the controlled incandescence which technically is achieved by splitting a paired particle and not allowing the halves to form another pair by the spinning motion that the particle-pair conceives as balance. Instead, the halved particle rotates more and more frantically in its space, striving in vain to throw off a replacement twin. But instead of allowing the recreative force to culminate, we drain it off, and use the energy we thus milk for our purposes. This is the Shaper way.

  The miniature sun, bobbing calmly above my head, twinkled brightly in the square, regular tunnel whose angle led downward and whose end was not in sight.

  Mahrlys, crouched against the wall, had her face buried in her hands.

  Chayin stood over her, nursing a bloody arm.

  Sereth looked at them, shook his head, and gestured that we should continue down the corridor.

  Chayin started to speak, thought better of it, and raised the girl. The corners of her mouth were dotted with froth.

  I sidled past them in that corridor barely wide enough for three to stand abreast. My minuscule inferno bobbled behind me, throwing long distorted shadows down that rectangular channel driven deep into the earth.

  I was just about to say that it seemed not a fearsome place to me, only dull, when on Chayin’s very heels a second rectangular slab thundered downward. When it hit the stone, the ground quivered.

  Mahrlys, leaning heavily on Chayin’s arms, giggled.

  “Cahndor, before I walk another step into this, I would hear some answers,” said Sereth. In his anger, he seemed to loom huge against the green-black stone. The tiny sun drifted toward him and rose to the ceiling behind his head.

  “As you wish, Sereth,” said Chayin stiffly, distracted, his attention and concern upon Mahrlys, who drew away from him and turned her face to the stone.

  “Wehrdom,” said Chayin, “is a society whose price of admission is first the ability to perform as a wehr, and second the severance of all other ties. A wehr who is a ptaiss has no kin altruism for other ptaiss, but for Wehrkin.”

  “Chayin,” Sereth said warningly. “I am no supporter of Khys’s catalysis genetics.”

  “Nor of Wehrdom. I can excuse the one no more than the other. You are catalysis genetics. Estri called you an atavist. That is true, in part. You are an altruistic atavist, so admixed that kin altruism predisposes you to all men; since few hold stronger relatedness to you than a total stranger. But you are deaf to truth. The catalysis cycle hinges upon the concept that man becomes progressively more gregarious until he has outstripped evolution’s ability to suit him for living with the restriction of such an altruistic overload. Then he either destroys that culture or leaves it by means of more accelerated technology that he may satisfy his mounting xenophobia, his territoriality, and the need to own and dominate which is ever paired with the genes which predispose to creativity. In a society of warriors, the pacifist may become for a time successful, for he will not be killed by the warrior by reason of his very reluctance to fight. Thus he will be evolutionarily successful in that he will reproduce. More and more the pacifists enter that society, until they outnumber the warriors and begin to constrain the very making of war. But when this happens, the warriors resurge, because in any fight they will triumph over the pacifist, who is neither disposed to fight nor very good at it. When the warrior is threatened, he fights; in fighting, he culls the pacifists. Only the most atavistically oriented, war-capable pacifists remain. The warriors become dominant in the gene pool, and the cycle starts again. It is vastly more complicated, of course. One must take into account what predispositions each group has in breeding, and the individuals capable of deception to the extent that they can for a short time triumph and themselves become dominant, until they are found out, at which time they recede—”

  “Chayin!”

  “Learning lessens no man,” retorted the cahndor, to Sereth’s exasperation.

  “I want to know why you were willing to let us rot in Dey-Ceilneeth and why you are dragging us to Othdaliee. I could care less about what offal you learned from those old ladies at the Lake of Horns.”

  I had learned the same offal. Though I thought Chayin had not studied Sereth’s inversions, in my opinion he was not too far off in the rest of it. So I said:

  “He is trying to tell you that Wehrdom is in a strategic flux; it is experiencing something akin to the passing of power that occurred when you took the Lake of Horns. There is sometimes a violent flipping between opposite-seeming but equally stable hierarchies. Violent when viewed in evolutionary time. But what exactly does that have to do with us?”

  “It is the Curse of Imca-Sorr-Aat.” Chayin grinned. Sereth stared.

  “No, truly. Once in a thousand years the interface called Imca-Sorr-Aat changes. Which creature holds that position determines how the next millenium will develop; what strategies, even what factions of Wehrdom will be dominant. Man has done poorly here this last thousand years. In fact, he is nearly extinct. He is merely food for Wehrdom, and his artifacts are but curiosities. In another Imca-Sorr-Aat’s rule they might have provided him a secure place. The manlike wehrs, because of a drastically limited gene pool, make fewer and fewer appearances. And the ossasim, who provided the last Imca-Sorr-Aat, have almost succeeded in establishing themselves as a species. If an ossasim should again hold the interface known as Imca-Sorr-Aat, the man-wehr will certainly become extinct.

  “What men are left will be like those we saw when we watched adults kill their own children. That place is called Nehedra, and its folk provide not only fields to be grazed and stores of grain for droughts, but fresh meat and a good chase. And they cull not only their weakest in those forest trials the children take, but their strongest as well: any child who precedes the bulk of them, and all who reach the town’s gates before sunset, are slain. So it has been under the last Imca-Sorr-Aat, and so it will be under the next, if he be ossasim, or ptaiss, or any other creature but man himself. You see, the creature of Wehrdom recall what man did to them, and they would not risk a recurrence. Their methods are, I suppose, resonable coming from species who witnessed the pinnacle of technological man, and fear his works.” And the cahndor leaned forward and wet his lips.

  “But it does not sit well with me. And I was given a chance to better the fortunes of those whom I call kin here. Could you, Sereth have resisted such a call?”

  Sereth blew out his breath, and did not answer, but instead crouched down before Mahrlys.


  “He has told us what he thinks is happening, and how you enlisted him. Now you tell me the truth. You think you have us trapped; it should not matter to you if we know, your designs.”

  “Aah, you are a quick one, manling,” she said on a shuddering breath. Her eyes were no longer wild, though triumph gleamed therein. “All he thinks is true, as far as it goes. It is a difficult thing to lie in the wehr-wind.”

  “But it can be done.”

  “Indeed, Sereth crill Tyris, it can be done. But there was no need to lie, only to be circumspect with what information we made available. I did not tell him that Imca-Sorr-Aat decreed this flight of yours to Othdaliee, if I could not kill you. Die here, die there, it is no different to me.”

  “Mahrlys!” exploded Chayin.

  “Chayin, I told you they would die chasing that stupid sword, and they will. And you will live to make Wehrdom safe for another thousand years.”

  There was something in the way she said it which made me know that what Chayin expected to do and what she had in mind for him to do were two different things. The key and the answer were there, in what she said, but they did not see. Perhaps only another woman could have marked it. And yet, even knowing, I could not pierce the wehrveil and determine how the thing would fall out. I saw what I had seen in the Eye of Mnemaat, and tried a wild guess: “What has Deilcrit to do with all this?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all,” said Mahrlys sweetly. “He was given the trial of Imca-Sorr-Aat that he might die mercifully. You will doubtless reclaim your sticker from his corpse. In all the days of my reign, none have ever completed the trial and returned.”

  We have a creature, in the west, like a ptaiss but winged. It is called a hulion, and with her green eyes shining yellow in the miniature sun’s glow and that puff-cheeked smirk on her face, she reminded me of one, when the kill is sure and the hulion can take time to batter its prey.

  “You predict, then, that I might live long enough to see Othdaliee,” I replied in the same sweet tone.

  She shrugged delicatedly. “Let me rephrase that: Chayin will reclaim it.”

  “You would do well as a forereader, with that tongue,” said Sereth. His fingers toyed with the hilt of his knife. His eyes measured Chayin’s concern. Then he rose and stretched and said, “I gave you your life once. Do not make me take it back.”

  And he motioned that Mahrlys and Chayin should precede us down the featureless, sloping corridor into the dark.

  “What think you?” Sereth subvocalized, while in front of us Chayin took up a low dialogue with Mahrlys and their backs receded before us down the steady incline of green stone.

  “I think,” I replied, my lips at his ear, “that things are not so simple as the ‘man-wehr-facing-extinction’ story. How does Chayin’s visit to Othdaliee make Wehrdom safe for a thousand years? And why is Mahrlys so anxious to help the reins of power change hands when she stands so high in the present hierarchy? And if kin altruism is in effect between those sharing the communications gene, why is there strife in Wehrdom?”

  The miniature sun sent dizzying shadows dancing across the low ceiling. I steadied it.

  Sereth’s gaze searched the crannies in the stone. “I know nothing of communications genes and kin altruism, and care less. But I know women. Her plan was that we enter this passage without her. She objected quite strongly to being dragged down here. If she could have convinced me that her own creatures sought her death, so that I left her to their mercies, she would have been much pleased. She says she is dead, yet she walks before us. She celebrates our demise—I feel very much alive. And I intend to stay that way. She calls on Chayin to make Wehrdom safe for a thousand years; he could not keep himself safe from her clutches.

  “I will hazard that she has not yet drawn back for the kill. All this has been foreplay.”

  “She fought realistically enough when we changed her plan.”

  “And yet she did not break. She is too haughty for one who faces death. Real satisfaction is a difficult emotion to conceal.”

  “My reading of her agrees with that”

  He looked at me askance. “What do you draw from Wehrdom? All I can dredge out of those mists are wordless songs and clicks and whistles and the taste of warm blood. I come away feeling like I want to eat something raw.”

  “The Stoth priests maintained that all of time, owkahen’s entire extent, is but a function of volitional consciousnesses. Wehrdom is a multifaceted unit: one consciousness. Thus Wehrdom is not really volitional individuals interacting in owkahen as possible futures.”

  “Which means you get nothing from it either.”

  “That is what I just said.”

  “Estri, does all this lead you to conjecture anything?”

  “What?”

  “I read Wehrdom only when it brushes events in which I am physically concerned. The same must be true of you. And yet it is out there, wrapped around the time-coming-to-be. The woman flaunts us, admits she has lied, chortles over the fact that her attempts to kill us have, to her mind, succeeded. And my reading gives me nothing but some splinters floating on the top of Wehrdom’s fog.”

  “You see those? Deilcrit, and Se’keroth, and Chayin?”

  “Yes, but over what, I cannot ascertain. It is not knowing enough to deduce a motive from a displayed moment of culmination that is the problem. Wehrdom is there, but its methods of symbolizing and its concerns are different from ours. It makes them dangerous. Their machinations do not show on owkahen’s face.”

  “As if they were not creatures of time. The Shapers and the Mi’ysten race have that exemption. But Wehrdom is composed of time-space creatures. They, too, must inhabit owkahen.”

  “Our owkahen? Or a part of it not natural to our use? Wehrdom is concerned with things that do not concern owkahen as we know it. They have not yet the capacity to inject their will into that arena in which all intelligent beings contest. Which means, obviously, that they are a greater threat than they would otherwise be because we cannot preguess them; and, not so obviously, that they may be a self-extinguishing threat. If owkahen does not acknowledge them, it may be that they will not survive long enough to be acknowledged.”

  I murmured a noncommittal reply, thinking that Sereth was reading his preference into the time; that he, himself, was the most likely reason Wehrdom might not survive long enough to be acknowledged by owkahen. It rode his words, sat behind his tight jaw. I knew then that if he lost Chayin to Wehrdom it would not be Chayin whom Sereth would blame. Wehrdom would feel for his grief in a rage the like of which they had never dreamed.

  I was about to comment that even Khys, who had ruled previous to Sereth, had had the grace to let this shore go its own way, when Mahrlys and Chayin, with an exclamation of surprise, suddenly dropped from sight. The cahndor’s grunt hung momentarily in the air; then it too disappeared.

  Slowly, cautiously, we approached the edge, wholly invisible in the uncertain light, over which they had plunged.

  Sereth crouched down, a hand on my arm. “I should not have let them go so far ahead. Send your sun down there.”

  And I did, into that sudden fifty-five-degree angle of descent. Sereth, most carefully, for the floor on which we squatted was itself angled downward, called Chayin’s name, leaning over the steepened incline. When no answer drifted up from the dark, he ran his palm along the stone floor where it abruptly changed to a black glassy material. “Frictionless,” he pronounced. “The Beneguans no more built this than Dey-Ceilneeth. See if you can drop the light lower.”

  So I did, and my little fireball hovered ever farther down that corridor that plummeted into the depths of the earth. We saw the walls and floor and ceiling converge in a trick of perspective. All we could determine was that the passage kept the same relative dimensions but for the steepening of its angle.

  “Well?” I asked when he had been long silent.

  “Take my hand.”

  I did that.

  “We are just going to slide down it. Unde
r no circumstances tense up. Try to keep your head uppermost, but do not stiffen your legs. It should be a fast descent, and if at the bottom the rock continues, you could break a limb on impact if you are not very careful.”

  “Sereth!”

  “Now, you are not afraid of a little slide like that, are you?”

  And his tone told me that there was no arguing, so I said that I was not afraid and sat back on my haunches and extended my legs and muttered a quick prayer to my father, who had certainly not put me on Silistra to have me end in a pulped mass of flesh and bone in the well-forgotten belly of Dey-Ceilneeth.

  Then I thrust my little sun downward, and Sereth said “Ready?” and I nodded and we slipped down into Dey-Ceilneeth’s well.

  There was a rising of my stomach, a hissing of wind in my ears. My eyes watered and burned and saw only a blur of stone. Then blackness: we passed the miniature sun as if it were hovering unmoving, and plummeted on into the darkness.

  The feel of the black, frictionless material was like liquid ice, a strip of cold under me, and yet there was no sensation of weight, as if our speed had outstripped gravity itself.

  Sereth, drawing me closer by his arm wrapped around my waist, shouted in my ear: “Get your light down here.”

  I closed my tearing eyes and called it, trying not to think of how long we had been falling, nor how fast we must be traveling to have so quickly overtaken the little sun.

  “I used to kite-jump off the Nin-Sihaen ridge,” he confided loudly, as my hair whipped around me and the rushing pursuit by my miniature star made it seem that we were rising and my stomach threatened to leap out of my mouth.

  I was still thinking of a reply when Sereth rumbled: “Look!”

  And I did, and remedied myself for whatever glowed with its own light up through the dark beneath us.

  Closer and closer came the other light, until the glow rushing toward us showed itself white water and the light of the little star was swallowed in a dull luminescence and I braced for the concussion.