Keeping It Real (35 page)

both on dry land, though they moved with the slow grace of divers and had to push the water's weight

around them. They did not
float
and they did not
drown.

Lila and Dar walked slowly, wading, slightly afloat with every stride, like swimmers who reach for the

ground with their feet, each stride a bound, their hair in clouds around their heads, the water like a heavy

air they could breathe, though it
was a struggle to breathe it
.
The water itself was green and the light

which fell through it
was quickly smothered, leaving them in a khaki umbra where all colours became

green. Lila saw the silver shapes of fish dart close in curiosity and then flash as they turned their sides and

flicked away with a snap of tailfins. She felt her boots catch in clumps of weed as they slowly trod a

stone-paved road, sinking ever further by its guidance down and down into the depths.

Soon it
was so dim that Lila had to use infra-red to enhance her vision. As she turned it
on she felt

Tath's permanent
low level of contempt for her vanish in a moment of surprise. Dar saw well, even in low

light his elfin vision had a much greater range and colour capture than Lila's, but
by the time they reached

a huge stone door that
barred their way Lila could tell by the way his movements grew more tentative

that
he was finding it hard. The barrier before them was a smooth block of stone, a monolith carved and

decorated with a low relief of animals and plants and words in an old form of elvish that
even Lila's AIs

didn't
recognise
.
But
they did recognise the simple frame and its scale as something that
must
be a door, though there was no sign of a handle or a keyhole or even anywhere for a guard to look out.

Lila watched Tath's pale, aethereal hair sliding around her face though she could not
really feel it, and

gave Dar a questioning shrug as they came to a halt
one arm's length from the stone.

Dar said something and his words went
up in bright
bubbles from his mouth. Lila heard a soft sound,

felt
a vibration that
seemed to come out

of the stone under her feet. It was an ominous sound, and soon it came again. She felt Tath's focus

attenuate - his listening felt like her nerves expanding and lengthening into the cold water that pressed

them on all sides. It
made her nervous. But she remembered that Dar had told her to show no fear and

so she stood and did nothing, concentrated on relaxing and tuned into her AIs. The vibration soon

became dis-tinguished enough for her to identify it as the drumming of more than one drum. Together

three instruments wove a syncopated beat
which she could feel passing through into her body from the

water. As the drum beat became stronger the water shivered.

A shadow, darker than the simple sedimentary gloom, crossed them with a distant
cold touch as a

large, sinuous, long body slid past
somewhere above their heads. Lila felt
the turbulence of its wash

press her clothing against
her. Movement, infra-red and heat-based vision fed through her AIs and told

her in a clean readout at the left of her vision exactly what
she'd guessed just
by the size and power of

the creature. A water dragon had passed them by. Its sensitive whiskers would have picked out

everything it needed to know from their scent in the water, the disturbance they made in moving, the

sound of their breath and heartbeats, the magic or lack of it
that
ran through them. Lila glanced at
Dar,

but
he was watching the door. Tath's
andalune
prickled throughout her body. She wanted to scratch,

but she wouldn't have known where to start.

The door moved, the hairline gap between it and its frame suddenly darkening as it shifted position,

moving straight
back into the stone itself before rolling aside. Before them a circular entrance led into a

new subaquatic darkness which none of Lila's senses could penetrate. She wanted to object, to confirm

the impossibility of there being such a space but
Lila didn't
need to. Tath did it
for her,

Do
t
ry, you w
on't
succeed,
he said, silently, from his safe place inside her heart.
Your hesi
t
a
t
ion will
only make her
t
hink you unwor
t
hy.
T
he magic
t
ha
t
guards
t
he palace is primal magic and no
t
even your mechanical appendages wi
t
ll serve
t
o do wha
t
i
t
will no
t
allow.

He was pleased when she believed him - and she had to, because she would have felt it if he lied. She

felt his pleasure in her fear which rose up suddenly at his words and made her shiver in a tiny, convulsive

motion she couldn't help. Lila knew the water was simply transmitting everything she did to all the

watchers hidden in the silty murk. She

didn't
feel that she could cope with dragons, internal hostile agents and ! the rest of it all at once.

Tath in particular was in too close a contact to her true feelings all the time. She decided, with misgiving,

to allow her Al-self to execute the routine to bypass her emotional centre and replace its decision making

finesse with cold calculations.

Wha
t
was
t
ha
t
?
Tath demanded, able to feel the change but
not
understand it. He had no links to

her AIs. Well, that was something, she thought. A red warning icon flashed in her upper right vision,

to remind her that this was strictly an emergency procedure and that she should return to normal as

soon as possible to avoid lasting psychosis. It was very distracting against
the black background of

total nothing in front of her. Lila switched it off.

Dar led the way inside. As they stepped through the circle they passed out of the lake and into air.

Lila found herself unexpectedly plunging forward into the dark as the resistance fell away. She

quickly got
control of her feet and then stood firm on the stone road.

'Now we follow the air,' Dar said from a short distance away. 'The entrance to this palace is via

the primary elements. Water is the first. Void will lead us to the Air Gate. Air's the third.'

'What's the second?' Lila asked, hearing Tath's voice speak where hers should have been. It

almost
died completely in the strange space they stood in. She expected to feel uneasy but she felt

nothing, only a calm kind of mild interest in what was going on, the all pervasive calm of Nirvana. In

spite of her orders the AIs signalled her regularly to turn it off - Nirvana was highly psychologically

addictive, bad for the brain, bad for the nerves and with many other possibly unpleasant
effects

including sudden death. But
Lila wasn't
alarmed, of course. She tried to use the echo of her voice to

map the space so that
she could locate Dar but
all her readouts came back zeroed, even though she

could hear him perfectly well.

'It is the Void,' Dar said in answer to her question. "The nothing in which you now stand. It is the

fundamental in-between, the gap between one breath and the next, between last
and first. Tath

would know more about it. Necromancers must cross the Void to enter Thanatopia.'

Lila had been studiously ignoring Tath. She found that
at
maximum capacity on all sensors and

using as much power as she dared she was able to use her sonar system to trace a picture of Dar

when their voices bounced off his body. She could also decipher a large hole not
far in

front
of them. It
was an irregular and ugly shape. Paths which seemed to offer good passage to either

side quickly became useless ledges and smooth wall. There was a way across, set
in widely spaced

stepping-stones which moved in a snaking trail through the empty space although they seemed to be

floating in mid-air. In Nirvana, this was all right.

'There's a big hole here,' she said confidently, noting Tath's annoyance. T can see it.'

T can feel it.' But
Dar did not
object
when she moved closer to him and touched the edge of his hand.

'We can go this way, to my side,' Lila said. 'As long as we keep talking, I can see the edges. There is a

path of stones.'

T have been here before,' Dar told her coolly. 'But if you like you can go first' She heard him getting

something out of the bandoleers and then heard the tones of a chain of softly sounding glass chimes.

Immediately, the sensitive nerves in her skin began to decipher the strange pathway much more clearly. It

looked almost
like a computer rendition of a series of platforms. If elf ears could pick that
up without

technology or magic then they were much more sensitive than she'd thought.

Lila led the way out. The steps were sturdy, but
no matter how hard she tried to, she couldn't
see

anything between them. 'What
if you fall here? Do people fall here?'

'I don't
know,' Dar said. 'Nobody came back to tell us.' He sounded tense and Lila left
him to the

chimes and concentrated on her footing until she was across. As she waited for him she peered into the

hole, which was beginning to look much less like a hole and more like something perfectly flat. She

thought she could detect the slightest
traces of electrical activity, either big and far away or very slight
and

close at
hand, but
then Dar landed beside her and they were safe. His
andalune
touched hers and Tath's

briefly and, with a keenness as though it
were her own, she felt
the truth of Dar's fear in the contact
.
It

pulled at
her, as though he wanted to catch hold of her, Tath flared on the instant with a brief, victorious

contempt and Dar instantly stepped aside as though burned.

She ignored them. "The air,' Lila said in a strong voice to counteract the Void's giant swallowing mouth

that strove to eat the sound. The Nirvana icon blinked at her, scarlet, alarmed. Whatever emotions she

denied now, using its artificial bypass, had not gone away. They were

simply active in a place where she couldn't
feel them
.
After a certain load stress, if she did not
re-engage

her experience they would begin to emerge in unpredictable ways
.
The red light
was telling her that
this

moment was not far away. She glanced at the numbers and deleted it. Even if she went back right now

she didn't think she'd stay as frosty as Dar could, not
with Tath waiting like a scatter of crows to descend

on her every weakness. 'Which way?'

'Wherever the elemental is,' Dar said. His voice was composed, cool and confident, nothing like what

she'd felt
second-hand through Tath.

Lila turned her face this way and that. There was a distinct
wash of air moving in a steady, cool stream

which she could easily follow.

'Not that
way,' Dar said as she set
off.

'You said . . .'

'An elemental is a being,' Dar said. 'And we need its help to get through the Hall of Fire. Air and fire

work together here.' As he was speaking, Lila began to see him with her own eyes. The presence of light

made her search for the source and she saw that
the walls and roof of the cavern they were in were

giving off a faint, lichen-like, glow. Behind them, where the Void had - had not - been, there was a flat,

ordinary rock floor. Their stepping stones were scattered boulders lying on it Dry sandy earth spread

between them like any ordinary piece of ground. In the gloaming, Lila saw Dar reach into the bandoleer

he wore again and bring out a whistle. It
was fashioned from a pebble which had been hollowed and

carved with a patience Lila could barely imagine into a slender ocarina shape with a perfect
mouthpiece

though it
had no finger holes. Dar blew it
and it
made no sound.

'What is that?'

'A whistle for bringing down the wind,' he said. 'Blow hard enough to hear anything and you get a

hurricane.' He started to put it back.

'Can't I see it?' Lila stepped towards him, holding her hand out.

'No,' he said.

'Well, who made it?'

They're not made, they're found . . .' He glanced meaningfully at her. 'Are you quite all right?'

'I'm fine,' she said. T was just curious, that's all. No reason. I never saw one before.'

Dar narrowed his long blue eyes and his ears flattened close to his

head like a horse's do when the horse in question is feeling vicious. 'As you say.'

'What
do you mean by that?' she asked, intent on becoming very clear about everything before

matters progressed any further
.
Was Dar being deliberately obtuse? Tath glowed like a smug beacon in

her chest.