The Warslayer(30)

Belegir, of course, wasn't even breathing hard.

Must be the damn corset. Has to be. If I thought I was actually going to have to be doing any dragon slaying, I'd be worried.

She looked around. This was a pillared portico suitable for the making of grand pronouncements. Near the fountain, the ponies dozed, looking bored. She could look across the square and see the ribbon-friezes of heroic-scale Allimir all marching toward the open bronze doors.

She could see something else, too. All over the enormous floor of the cavern, there were thin silvery lines, inlaid against the dark stone, that she'd crossed before without noticing. She'd thought they were just meaningless random decoration, but from here, they were more than that.

They made a map.

"Belegir?" she called, taking care this time to keep her voice soft and friendly, "Tell me what you see," she asked, pointing at the cavern floor.

He came and stood beside her, looking where she pointed. "I see a map of the world," he answered, sounding faintly puzzled. "There is another inside, in color, and I think there may still be some maps on velum here as well."

Oh.

She gazed down at the shapes laid out on the ground below—continents, oceans, which were which? She couldn't tell. But somehow seeing them did as much to make the Allimir real as this whole temple had. With every image she saw, the world became wider and more vivid, more real.

More dangerous.

A fantasy couldn't hurt you. In proper stories, the hero always won—and certainly Vixen came out on top in every episode of The Incredibly True Adventures. But Glory wasn't fool enough to imagine those rules held true for real life. She supposed that somewhere in the back of her mind, for sanity's sake, she'd been holding on to the hopeful notion that this was all some sort of role-playing, with everyone improvising their way toward a foreordained outcome that let the hero win.

But despite magic, despite long pink robes and funny-sounding names, despite weird-looking livestock and strange Oracles, there weren't any certainties. The only thing that was looking more certain with every heartbeat was that stupid unfair things could happen just as easily here as in the world she'd left.

Which meant she could die. And as far as she could tell, the Allimir were the only ones in this brave new world who'd taken an oath of pacifism.

She sighed, feeling tireder than she had a right to, and followed Belegir into the temple.

She'd expected to see a lot of pomp and circumstance—thrones and altars and whatnot—but what there was instead was a large anteroom that led immediately into a sort of hiring hall space. Here the walls were unornamented, covered with a plain coat of homely whitewash, the worn stone floor set with rows of polished wooden benches soft and smooth with age and use. At the top of the room there was a dais with two deep stone cisterns (now empty) flanking it. Obviously, everyone who entered the Oracle Temple came in here. But where did they go from here?

Along the sides of the room ran a series of narrow archways. Glory ducked into the nearest one and looked around. It led down a long close hallway. Along one side there were rows of small cubbies, each barely large enough to hold (as it did) a meager Allimir-sized bed.

"On his tenth birthday, every Allimir child comes here to the Oracle to drink her waters and dream of his purpose in life. So also come those troubled in spirit, or who seek counsel only the Oracle can give. All sleep—slept—here, and took the dreams sent by the Oracle's waters," Belegir said from behind her.

"I hope you don't reckon I'm going to," Glory said dangerously. "Sleep here, I mean."

Belegir chuckled. "Of course not. We go to the living source itself."

With one last look at the series of tiny sleeping cubicles, Glory followed Belegir back out into the hall. The wall behind the dais was cleverly carved—from straight ahead it appeared solid, but in fact its face concealed a passageway . . . one wide enough, she imagined, to accommodate endless rounds of Allimir apprentices carrying the buckets needed to fill the two cisterns. She and Belegir eased through it, and found themselves in a much larger and more elaborate space, as different from the asceticism of the hiring hall as a Quaker meeting house from the Vatican.

From the central court, passages (built God knew when) led off in a dozen different directions. Though there could have been no particular need for them from a structural perspective, the courtyard space was ringed with pillared archways. The pillars were colored marble, which she was pretty sure hadn't grown down here naturally, and the floor underfoot was a mosaic done in brightly colored stones—its center another map just as Belegir had promised, a circle about five meters across, with greens and blues for water, and golds and white and greens for land, and a bright border of gems set in gold. There were ships (out of scale) on the water, and coiling sea serpents, and small golden towns set at various places on the land. The whole effect managed to transcend weird, alien, and unearthly and move right along to vulgar, garish, and over-the-top. Tastes must have changed (and improved) for the Allimir to have moved the paying customers out to the other set-up she'd seen.