The Warslayer(29)

Had this ever been an natural cave? Or was it, first to last, an engineering project that made the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall look like a game of Pick-Up Sticks? Done with magic? Done with mirrors?

She could hear the faint sound that caves made—it was like holding a seashell to your ear, only in this case the seashell was a lot bigger, and she was standing inside—and, somewhere in the distance, Glory could hear the faint, definitive plashing of water. Looking down the length of the cavern, she saw a flight of steps that led up to a doll-small temple set at the end of the cavern. The structure glowed with opalescent fire along its pillared face, and at the foot of the stairs was the source of the water music. A wide round fountain, its bowl glowing with the sun-saturated green of a butterfly's wing, splashed and rang with falling water.

She turned to say something to Belegir, but the Allimir mage was already striding toward the temple and fountain. Glory followed reluctantly. She'd expected, maybe, a touch of claustrophobia when she'd decided to go caving with Belegir. Agoraphobia had been the least of her worries.

The temple was farther than it looked, and as she trudged toward it, the whole scale of the place shifted in the weird mutable way of something without any built-in reference points. Things that she'd thought were small surged and billowed like a Disney cartoon on acid. The doll's-house temple became enormous, its smallness an effect of distance and her inability to put it into perspective, then shifted again; looming and dwindling as her mind fought to make sense of its surroundings. The effect, while not frightening precisely, was dizzying.

Finally they were close enough to it that their own bodies provided the perspective cue, and Glory realized why this place looked so naggingly familiar. Either the Allimir mages had used their dimension-hopping powers back in the Time of Legend to take in a large number of Busby Berkeley musicals, or it was another of those wacky trans-universal coincidences, because the wide shallow half-moon stairs leading up to the portico built in no Earthly style were surely designed for bevies of sequin-clad lovelies to dance down. And whatever they'd been carved from, they sparkled now as if they'd been dusted with sugar.

The travelers stopped at the fountain.

"Here we will leave the animals, and go on alone, into the Oracle's inner sanctum," Belegir told her.

"You're sure it won't mind?" Glory asked uneasily. It had been easy to dismiss talk of the Oracle as primitive superstition on the plains above, in the daylight. Here, in the middle of stupefying proof of Allimir skill—at magic or engineering, it didn't really matter when you came right down to it—it was a lot harder to disbelieve, or to take the Oracle's power lightly.

"She who called you will hardly object to your presence," Belegir answered with easy faith. "And we must have answers."

Damn right, Glory thought grumblingly. She drank from the fountain, then helped Belegir unsaddle the packhorse, unrope the animals, and strip the other two ponies of their remaining tack. He tossed Kurfan the last of the cold pasties, and left the horses with a meal of grain and some of the windfall apples gathered from the orchard at Mechanayas. Apparently the beasts were to be left to wander as they chose in the chamber, but with Kurfan to guard them, they shouldn't wander out.

He made a neat bundle of the tarp and several of the larger baskets and left it tucked against the side of the fountain. The remaining bundle—the tea-kit and a few other items—he rolled into several blankets crisscrossed with ropes, making a sort of crude backpack.

"You ought to let me carry that," Glory said. She had her bag slung over one shoulder, and was holding Gordon.

"It is no trouble, Slayer," Belegir answered, shrugging it onto his shoulders as he straightened up. "A warrior, so say the old chronicles, does not labor like a beast of burden."

"Nice work if you can get it," Glory muttered under her breath. She was still humiliated about losing her temper with Belegir earlier. She had tarnished some heretofore-unsuspected good opinion she had held of herself, and was feeling ashamed. It wasn't a pleasant feeling, and like so many unpleasant things, could easily turn itself into anger if she let it. Anger would make her feel better, for as long as she could fool herself, only she couldn't fool herself forever, and then things would be worse.

Too bad I can't find something around here that deserves to be hit. Because when I do. . . .

The steps were harder than the whole rest of the day had been. Fine for making grand processions up and down, scaled to Allimir legs, they were hell for someone Glory's size to get up briskly. And there were a lot of them. Eventually, puffing more than a little, she got to the top.