The Gods Return (27 page)

She turned and started down the rope backward. The linen filled her mind with memories of terraced fields rising from a broad brown current—not the North River, at least not the North River of the present. The sun was bright and hot, and little blue flowers nodded from long, kinked stalks.

It was good to have the rope to touch, because it insulated her from the narrow rock about her. Below, waiting for her, was ancient death.

But for now, flax flowers smiled at the sun.

* * *

"Since you have an oracle here . . . ," Liane said.

"Please sit down, milady," Amineus said, gesturing to the cushions along the left wall of the single round room. He must've been sitting on the other side, for the table there had a bowl of fruit, a wedge of deep-yellow cheese, and a lidded silver flagon with matching goblet. "Ah, would you like some refreshment?"

The door across the room had three lock plates in it, all set together in the middle. The panel looked heavy enough to be the street door in a city where folk had to worry about robbers smashing their way in.

"There's no need of that," Liane said, flicking the suggestion away with her left hand. "Nor time, I dare say. My colleagues and I need to question the Tree Oracle. And what I was saying—"

She froze the start of the priest's protest with a raised finger.

"—is that since you have an oracle, you are aware that the Worm is approaching Dariada. The city is doomed unless we stop the creature."

Other than the second door, the room didn't have much to see. Solidly joined storage chests sat along the walls, two and two, and above the cushioned seats the plaster'd been frescoed with pictures of fountains. Cashel liked paintings; they were the one thing he'd found in cities that he'd have regretted missing if he hadn't left Barca's Hamlet. There didn't seem much reason to paint a fountain when you might've had the real thing about as easy, though.

"You don't understand the difficulties in what you're saying," Amineus said, shaking his head in slow frustration. "The College of Priests—all three of us, not just me alone—has to consider the petition and—"

"I don't care about the difficulties," said Liane, slapping the words out. "I certainly don't care about your procedures—and neither should you, since you and your whole city will be destroyed unless my associate Lady Rasile—"

She gestured to Rasile, who grinned but kept her tongue inside her long jaws.

"—who is a wizard, is able to find a solution. To accomplish this, she believes she needs to see the Tree."

"A
wizard
?" Amineus said in amazement. He stared at Rasile, then back to Liane. "You mean this—"

"Stop!" said Liane. "If you use the word 'animal' again to refer to a friend of mine, Master Cashel will knock you down. You can do that, can you not, Cashel?"

"Yes ma'am," Cashel said. A cudgel would be handier, but short-gripping the quarterstaff would do the job too. He figured he could probably handle the big man without a weapon at all, but wrestling around inside chanced squashing the women like shoats when a brood sow rolls over.

"As to your question, yes," Liane continued more calmly. "Rasile is a wizard. Now, take us to see the oracle."

Amineus sighed and set the bread and knife down on the low table. "You may as well," he said. "It's improper, but what does that matter if the danger's as bad as we think? As bad as you say, milady. But I warn you—"

He looked around the three of them.

"—we've tried ourselves, following all the rituals. And the Tree has told us nothing. Nothing!"

"We'll go now, if you please, Master Amineus," Liane said. She wasn't near as harsh as she'd been a moment before, but she didn't expect an argument.

"Yes, yes," the priest said tiredly. He turned to his servant. "Ansco, go tell Masters Hilfe and Conwin that I'm taking a noblewoman and her retinue into the Enclosure. If they want to join us, they'd best hurry."

He paused, frowning. "Better see Conwin first," he said, correcting himself. "I can't imagine Hilfe will be willing to tear himself away from his counting house so early in the day."

The servant nodded and trotted off. From his look of disappointment, Cashel guessed the fellow wanted to watch whatever happened next.

Amineus lifted the key he wore chained to a heavy leather belt. Cashel expected him to go to the back door, but instead he knelt beside one of the storage chests.

"The priests of the Tree are elected to three-year terms, you know," he muttered as he fitted the key to chest's lock. Maybe Liane knew that; Cashel certainly didn't. "One a year, and the senior man is high priest. I took it for an honor and thought it worth the trouble, but this business now . . . ."

He lifted the lid. There was nothing in the chest but three more keys.

"
I
don't know what to do, none of us do!" Amineus said. "An army of ruffians coming toward us with a monster—everybody says they're coming for the Oracle! We've got refugees from Telut, they tell us what's going to happen. I'm responsible and I don't know what to do!"

He rose with the three keys in his hand. They were the kind that had thin pins sticking out from the end to fit and turn in arcs cut in the face of the latch plate.

"We're each supposed to keep our key with us at all times," he said, "but the gardeners have to go in and out at any hour. That's, well . . . . There's always one priest in the office. That's inconvenience enough."

"You're doing what you needed to do, Master Amineus," Liane said firmly. "You're putting the problem of the Worm into the hands of those who may be able to solve it."

The priest sniffed. "Am I?" he said, fitting the three keys into the locks. "Well, I hope you're right, but it doesn't really matter. Since I don't know of anything else to do that would be better."

He turned and looked at Liane. From his expression, he might've just learned that his whole family had died.

"I don't know anything at all to do!" Amineus said. "Except run, and I won't do that."

Liane stepped past the big priest and turned the keys one after the other. Each bar withdrew with a solid
clack
.

She looked up at him. "We won't run either, Master Amineus," she said. "That's why we're here. Now, lead us to the Tree."

Instead of pushing the panel herself, Liane gestured and stepped aside. Amineus smiled crookedly and opened the door, leading them through. Beyond was what seemed like another room, only this one was as big as a stadium and the roof was the branches and leaves of trees growing around the inside of the wall.

The one tree. Each trunk was joined to the trunks on either side, just like it'd looked from outside the wall. The limbs arched overhead like the beams of an impossibly great hall, linking to one another in a wooden spiderweb.

"This way," the priest said, taking them to the left around the curve of the enclosure. "The Stone of Question is across the enclave."

The ground was bare, dry and packed from ages of exposure. The only undergrowth Cashel saw, if you wanted to call it that, was moss in places where rock had broken through the top of the dirt. The soil under these leaves and branches didn't get any more sunlight than it would on a thatched porch; that was why it was barren, not because the gardeners Amineus talked about had dug out everything but the Tree's own roots.

Though the roots were everywhere. Amineus kept wide of the boles by longer than Cashel could touch with his staff; even so it was like they were walking on a floor of ridged wood, the roots lay so thick. Cashel would've avoided stepping on them, but there wasn't any way he could; and the priest wearing leather-soled sandals—Cashel was barefoot—didn't seem concerned about it himself.

The reason for going around the side of the enclosure was to avoid what was left of a building in the center. It'd been a temple, Cashel guessed, but not a very fancy one even before it'd all fallen in.

A foundation course of rough limestone showed a rectangle three times a tall man's height on the long sides and not quite that wide on the front and back ends. There'd been two stone pillars framing the doorway at the front, but extensions of the side walls had carried the ends of the porch roof.

There wasn't any sign of a roof or the rest of the walls, either one. If there'd been a statue, it was gone too. All there was inside the base course was a litter of fallen leaves and husks from the Tree's seedpods.

"Sir?" Cashel asked. "The temple there in the middle? What is it?"

Amineus had been lost in his own thoughts. He gave Cashel a look that was peevish if not quite angry.

"That's no matter of ours," he said. "It's a temple, yes, but it's very old. Nobody knows who it was dedicated to."

He cleared his throat. "We avoid it," he added, "out of courtesy for those who worshipped here in former days."

"You're afraid of it, Master Amineus," Cashel said, as polite as he could be while calling another man a liar. It wasn't something he often did, but he couldn't take the chance that Liane and Rasile would mistake what was going on before they spoke to the oracle. "It sticks out all over you. I'm sorry, but it does."

Amineus stumbled but caught himself the next step. His face went red, then white. He didn't say anything or even look over his shoulder at Cashel.

"He is right to be afraid, warrior," said Rasile calmly. "There is much power focused here, power that could turn this universe. Power enough perhaps to put the very cosmos into a spin."

Her tongue lolled in laughter. Either she thought the priest was smart enough to understand she wasn't slavering for his blood, or maybe she didn't care.

"When we came beneath the walls of this great place made of stone," the wizard continued, "I thought the great power I saw was the oracle. It made me doubt our success, for power like that would make nothing of such as me. It was too great for any person, of the True People or of the Monkey People. Who are true in their own way, as I now see."

She cocked her head to look at Amineus. He must have felt her foxlike sharpness, but he didn't turn to meet it.

"But it is not your tree that has the power, elder," she said. "The tree has grown here because of the power of the temple in its center. And you fear it."

"The temple is very old," Amineus said softly. "Its walls were mud brick. They've been gone, crumbled to dirt, from long before records. And the records of the priesthood of the Tree, the questions and responses, go back to the age before the age before the Old Kingdom."

He stopped and turned to face the three of them. "I didn't lie to you, Master Cashel," he said. "We know nothing about the temple beyond what you yourself see. And if you prefer to think that I would not act respectfully to a site of ancient worship if I didn't fear it, then you go ahead and believe that. But you're wrong."

Cashel felt uncomfortable. He wasn't sorry for having brought the business out in the open, but it now seemed that the priest hadn't had any bad intention in not wanting to discuss it.

"I don't think that, sir," he said. "You've showed yourself polite to us, for which we thank you."

"Yes," said Amineus, "but perhaps less forthcoming than a man in fear of his life should be to his rescuers, eh? My pardon to all of you."

He turned again and gestured with his left hand. "Milady," he said. "This is the oracle itself."

Cashel hadn't known what to expect. There was an aspen grove in Cafardstown, three days north of Barca's Hamlet. Folk said that if you slept in it, the Lady would speak to your dreams in the rustling of the leaves. Cashel had never seen the grove or cared about it one way or another, but he knew folk who'd made the journey.

Some said they'd got their answer, too. Widow Bassera had asked the trees to pick between her suitors, then married young Parus or-Whin instead of a settled man her own age. The match had worked out well, but Bassera was a clever one who might've decided to get the Lady's support for the choice her own wits had made.

Here at Dariada . . . .

A flat stone was set into the ground. It was polished black granite an ell across, not local limestone like the foundation of the old temple. Though the stone had been cut to be round, the surface was etched with many figures inside each other, from a triangle up to something with more sides than Cashel could count with both hands.

Describing the Tree would make it sound like the stands of mangroves that Cashel had seen in his travels. That was nothing like what it really looked like, though, because these individual boles were as thick as the trunks of live oaks.

Slanting up from the nearest trunk was a branch thicker than Cashel could've spanned with both arms. From it a seedpod hung almost to the ground in front of the granite slab. This pod was huge, bigger than Cashel in every dimension. Its casing had turned a brown as dark as walnut heartwood, and the seam running from tip to stem was almost black.

That seam had started to split open at the top. Inside the pod was the face of a man with his eyes shut. It was the same deep brown as the casing around it.

"I've brought you to the oracle, milady," Amineus said, turning his hand toward the pod. "The querent always asks his—or her—own questions. We of the priesthood merely make the administrative arrangements."

"Thank you, Master Amineus," Liane said. She seemed a little taken aback. "Which . . . which of us is to do the questioning?"