The Dreamtrails (102 page)

At the sound of stone grinding on stone, Jakoby’s face became a blank mask. “Go. The overguardian awaits you.” She turned and strode away without looking back.

“What do you seek of the earth?” asked the veiled girl who had emerged from the narrow gap beside the great pivoting stone that was the entrance to the Earthtemple. Her form was slight and not visibly deformed, but she limped when she walked.

“I seek that which the seer Kasanda left for the Seeker, as promised to me by the last overguardian of the Temple,” I replied.

“May you nurture the earth and find harmony,” the guardian said. It was no true answer, for these were words of ritual offered to all who came to the Earthtemple. The guardian gestured for me to follow her, when suddenly I remembered that Maruman and Gahltha were supposed to come here with me for the fifth sign and one of Kasanda blood as well! Was it possible that I was wrong in thinking I had been brought here to get what Kasanda had left me?

“Come,” said the Temple guardian, for my doubts had slowed me almost to a stop. She led me deep into the many-layered labyrinth of tunnels and caves that was the Earthtemple. The air was cold and strangely scentless, though outside the night was warm and fragrant. As I followed the steady, padding footsteps of the silent Temple guardian, I thought of Jakoby’s twin sister, Seresh, dragged weeping and terrified from her beloved sister’s arms. She had been only five, younger than I had been when my parents were burned. How terrified she must have been to be brought into these cold stone corridors and informed that she must henceforth live veiled among men, women, and children all deformed in their own ways. Were the veils ever removed? If so, the deformities of the other Temple guardians would have frightened the little girl, for she had not known that she was
deformed. No wonder Seresh had run away, but where could she have gone, for she could not run away from her deformed face?

The Temple guardian stopped and turned to me, lifting her lantern, allowing me to see the shadowy darkness of her eyes and hair through her veil’s thin gauze. She indicated a narrow doorway cut into the stone behind her, saying, “You must go through this door into the chamber beyond it and wait. I will tell the overguardian that you have come.” She unhooked a lantern from the wall and gave it to me.

I did as she had bidden, knowing what I would see, for I had been here before. Soon I was gazing upon the panels that Kasanda had created and that I had been shown on my previous visit to the Earthtemple. It was strange to think that they had been carved by the laughing, dark-haired, dark-skinned Cassy of my dreams, who had laughed with her Tiban lover and argued with her mother and father.

I went to the first panel, which showed a Beforetime city. I had thought it the city we now knew as Newrome under Tor, but maybe it was another. The city was very beautiful in its queer, angular way, a forest of slender square towers rising impossibly high into the sky. The panel depicting it paid homage to the art and power of the Beforetimers and was in stark contrast to the next panel, which showed the city again, but as a great, soulless, devouring beast that smothered the earth and befouled the waters, killing all living things other than humans. The third panel focused on the skies, showing them clogged with the filth that spewed from hundreds of pipes rising from human buildings. I noticed, though I had not noticed before, that in one corner, the carved black smoke parted to reveal a full moon peering through a torn patch, almost like an eye peeping through a spy-hole. This sly moon eye
made me think of Rushton, his moon-hating ancestor, and my theory.

Later panels showed forests, waterways, the sea, wetlands, and mountains, all damaged and besmirched by humans and the scabrous outcroppings of their cities. The panels’ message was as simple and starkly clear as it had been when I came here the first time: The Beforetimers had used the earth ruthlessly, disregarding everything but their own immediate desires. Their heedless greed and arrogant desire for power had brought the Great White upon the earth. The last panel showed the Great White, and I gazed at it, thinking of Cassy’s father, who had believed the Sentinel project would save humans from themselves, even though his own bondmate had left him because she could not believe it.

I heard a step behind me.

A tall, slender, veiled figure entered the chamber, and I knew it must be the woman who now served as overguardian of the Temple, but I gaped to see Maruman prowling by her side, his yellow eye gleaming smugly.

“Greetings, Seeker,” the overguardian said before I could beastspeak Maruman. It was a young voice for all its cool poise, and I remembered that the previous overguardian had been little more than a child as well. How was it that the guardians chose a child to set above them?

“Most overguardians are children,” said the thin formal voice. “Age brings experience, it is true, but experience does not always bring wisdom. Often it brings complacency or confusion or anxiety. But you are mistaken in thinking that the overguardian of the Temple is chosen by the previous overguardian. We are not chosen. We are foreseen.”

With a little shock, I realized the overguardian had answered a thought that I had not voiced!

“I am a kasanda,” she said composedly.

“Do you think it courteous to listen to my private thoughts?” I asked aloud, a little sharply.

“I would think it discourteous, if I had the means to prevent myself,” she said tranquilly.

There was nothing to say to that. I drew myself up and said, “Why did you have Jakoby bring me here? Is it because I am to collect whatever Kasanda left for me, because if it is, the last overguardian told me I was supposed to come here with Gahltha and a companion who has Kasanda blood, as well as Maruman. Perhaps he meant you, when he spoke of a Kasanda blood, and Maruman came here before me, but even if I summoned Gahltha, he could not fit in here.”

“By here, the overguardian may have meant Sador, rather than the Earthtemple,” she responded mildly.

I clenched my fists, feeling almost as irritated as when I spoke with the Futureteller guildmistress at Obernewtyn. I wanted clear answers! “The overguardian made it seem like it had been predicted that I would come here, but in fact, you sent Jakoby for me. Why didn’t the last overguardian tell me that I would be summoned?”

“Perhaps when he foresaw what he did, the strongest likelihood was that you would come here of your own accord, but something changed, which brought to me the revelation that Jakoby must be sent after you.”

“Why didn’t you just send her to find me?”

“I knew that you would come here and that Jakoby had some part to play in your future that was vital and important, but much in my foreseeing was unclear. It seemed safest to do as I did, sending Jakoby to the Moonwatcher and allowing the rest to unfold as it would, thereby leaving you free to come here if you chose.”

“What is the fifth sign?” I asked, suddenly weary of mysterious talk.

“It is not a thing to be told,” the overguardian said. She reached out and laid her hand on the final panel showing the Great White. With a faint grinding sound, the whole panel suddenly swung outward on a pivoting stone to reveal a narrow passage behind it. The overguardian made a gesture for me to go through. I did so and Maruman followed, but the overguardian did not. Seeing or maybe hearing my puzzlement, she said, “None may walk here, save the seer who made this place, the Seeker who seeks it, and the Moonwatcher.”

There were a thousand questions to ask, yet I knew that I would receive no proper answers here. As I turned to follow the narrow passage, my heart quickened at the thought of finding some communication from Kasanda awaiting me.

“What made you come here?” I asked Maruman as we made our way along the narrow tunnel.

“I came because I dreamed I came,” Maruman said dreamily.

The passage ended in an entrance to a large cave with nothing in it, save a slitlike opening in the wall opposite the passage. Maruman was already moving toward the opening, and I hastened to catch up with him, wondering what the overguardian had meant by saying “the seer who made this place.” Surely she did not mean that Kasanda had literally carved out the passage and the cavern. The opening was truly more a slit than a doorway, and I had to turn sideways to get into it. Feeling uneasy, I pressed forward, and two steps later, I stumbled into a wider space that immediately blazed with a shimmering, coruscating purple radiance that completely blinded me. After a moment of blinking and squinting, my eyes began to adjust, and I realized that the blaze of brightness was nothing more than the light of the lantern I carried,
reflected from a thousand shining jagged surfaces.

Fian had once shown me a small dull-looking boulder, which, when cracked open, turned out to be a hollow stone shell lined in tiny perfect crystal spikes. He told me that the Beforetimers had called such a thing a
thunder egg
. What I had entered now was part of a giant thunder egg lined not in white quartz crystals, but in dazzling purple amethyst. Some seemed to reflect the lantern light blindingly, and only after studying the walls for a moment did I realize that some had been cut into diamond-like facets. Indeed, it seemed there was a pattern in the polished stones. So absorbed was I in trying to make out what it was, I did not at first notice something gray and square sitting on the floor.

I knelt down and gazed at a flat rectangle of plast the size of a tea tray and as thin as two of my fingers. Atop it was a black glass panel like a window, but I could see nothing through it. Setting the lantern down carefully, I leaned closer and noticed that there was scribing on the plast. Not gadi words, but some language that I did not recognize. There was also a join all about the edges, which suggested that the rectangle was some sort of case, but there was no lock or keyhole or any sort of handle to open it. I touched the case warily, but it felt merely cool as anything kept long in a cave would feel. I touched the glass, and when nothing disastrous happened, I tried simply prizing the case open with my fingers.

It would not budge, but the case was very light. I sat down cross-legged, lifted it onto my knees, and examined it minutely. I had not noticed before a small recessed shape, almost invisible in the side of the case, alongside a small square gap. Remembering the recessed hand shapes on Norseland and in the Westland, I pressed a finger carefully into the space. Nothing happened, and the sickening thought came to
me that perhaps the key that was supposed to have been left in Jacob Obernewtyn’s tomb, along with his and Hannah’s bones, would have opened this case. That was the first time it occurred to me that just as Ariel could not see all, neither must Kasanda have been able to do so. I set the case back on the ground and stood up, wondering if all of Kasanda’s careful plans and sacrifices had come to nothing because she had failed to foresee that Hannah would not be at Obernewtyn when the Great White came.

Maruman gave a snarling hiss, and I turned to see that his fur was standing on end and crackling with static energy in a way that would have been comical had it not been so unnerving.

“What is it?” I asked him, and then shuddered as I felt it too—a frisson of prickling power that ran about the glittering chamber and over my skin till I felt my own hair stand on end. A low-pitched hum filled the chamber. It took me a moment to realize that it was coming from the plast case, and I saw with a shock that the glass panel on the top now glowed with a greenish light. Then there was a faint click. I knelt down and looked closely at the case. The recessed place had now come level with its gray surface.

Heart pounding, I touched the recess. There was another distinct click, and the case split open at the join and lifted open smoothly of its own accord, revealing a set of small raised squares scribed with letters in the bottom half of the case and a glowing white screen in the top.

Seeing the now familiar rows of small squares and the screen, I realized with incredulity that I was looking at a small computermachine! And unlike the computermachines under Ariel’s residence, this one was working. Or at least, it was being powered, somehow, by the amethyst chamber. But how
to learn what it contained? I studied the little squares, which Reul had once told me were also called
keys
. He had shown me how to tap on them to create scribed commands that the computermachine would obey if it could. More recently, Jak had shown me that a computer could be questioned as well as commanded, but he had added that communications with a computer must be framed in a way and in words that the computer would understand.

I licked my lips and realized my head was beginning to ache. I forced myself to concentrate on the computermachine as I carefully tapped in letters to ask what was required of me. The words appeared in neat perfect black letters on the white screen, but nothing else happened. I tried several other questions, and they appeared one after another on the screen, but the computermachine offered no response. Perhaps the computer needed a code word or a series of numbers that would allow me to communicate with it. Another sort of key. I chewed my lip and then tapped in my name. That produced no effect, and I thought of Jak saying that it would be impossible to guess the code word of any Beforetime user of a computermachine, for they and their world were utterly unkonwn to us. Except that Cassy was not unknown to me. I typed in
HANNAH
and
JACOB
, and when they did not work, I racked my brain for the name of Cassy’s Tiban lover and wrote
SAMU
. Still nothing. I tried
CASSY DUPREY
and nothing happened.