Wizard (45 page)

She listened intently, keeping her eyes on the level of acid covering the floor a few meters from her. If it began to rise even the tiniest little bit, she would teach the glowbirds a thing or two about flying.

But the voice of Crius had been faint—hardly a sound to reach down acid-filled tunnels—and though Tethys had sounded louder, it was probably because she had been so frightened, hanging on every word. There was no reason to think Thea could speak any louder than the others.

Robin shouted again, listened, heard nothing. She had not counted on this. She had expected trouble in a million variations but had never thought she might be unable to make Thea aware of her presence.

“Thea, I am Robin of the Coven, a friend of Cirocco Jones, the Wizard of Gaea, Empress of the Titanides, and …” She tried to recall the titles Gaby had rattled off in a bitter moment back at the Melody Shop, but had no luck.

“I’m a friend of the Wizard,” she finished, hoping the assertion would be enough. “If you can hear me, you should know I come on the Wizard’s business. I need to speak to you.”

She listened again, with no better result.

“If you’re talking to me, I can’t hear you,” she shouted. “It is very important to the Wizard that I be able to speak to you. If you could lower the level of the acid so I could get closer, it would be much easier for us to talk.” She was about to add that she could not harm Thea, but something in Cirocco’s attitude when addressing Crius made her change her mind. She had no idea if it was a dangerous thing for her to assume any of the airs Cirocco had put on. It might be the worst thing she could do. Yet it was equally possible that Thea understood nothing but strength and would slaughter her the moment she showed weakness.

That thought almost made her laugh, frightened as she was. What did she have but weakness?
It was possible she would lose control of herself while in Thea’s presence and lie helpless while the huge being decided what to do with her.

Never mind all that, she thought. She would get nowhere but back to the far end of the corridor, back to the darkness of bitter defeat, if she kept thinking like that. She must do what she had to do and ignore the trembling in her hands.

“It is necessary that I speak to you,” she went on firmly. “For that to happen, you must lower the level of acid. I tell you that the Wizard will be displeased, and through her, Gaea, if you do not do as I say. As you love and respect Gaea, let me approach. As you
fear
Gaea, let me approach!”

It sounded so hollow, it rang so falsely in her ears. Surely Thea would hear it as plainly as she did, the fear lurking behind her words, ready to betray her.

Yet the level of acid was receding. She approached it cautiously and saw that where there had been a few centimeters of liquid there was now just a slippery, fuming film.

She sat down quickly and opened her pack. Into her boots she stuffed rags from a shirt ruined many hectorevs ago. Her toes were cramped when she put them back on. She tied the rest of the shirt and a corner of her blanket around the outsides of her boots. Then she stepped forward onto the wet floor. She examined the blanket after taking a few steps. It looked as if the acid was not strong enough in that concentration to eat away the material quickly. She would have to chance it.

Thea was being cautious, too. The acid withdrew with painful slowness while Robin danced with impatience. The corridor sloped downward. Soon the walls were dripping acid. Drops began to fall from the ceiling. She drew her blanket over her head and walked on.

At last she came to stand on a ledge identical to the ones she had seen in the lairs of Crius and Tethys.

“Speak,” came the voice, and she had never been closer to turning and running than at that moment because the voice was the same, the same as Tethys’s. She had to remind herself that Crius had sounded like that, too: flat, emotionless, without human inflection, like a voice constructed on an oscilloscope screen.

“Do not move,” the voice continued, “on peril of your life. I can act much faster than you suspect, so do not rely on past experience. I am within my rights to slay you because this is my holy chamber, given to me by Gaea herself, inviolate to all but the Wizard. It is only my long friendship with the Wizard and my love for Gaea that have brought you this far alive. Speak, and tell me why you should continue to live.”

She’s not one to mince words, Robin thought. As to the words themselves … if they had come from a human she would have thought the speaker insane. And perhaps Thea was insane, but it hardly mattered. “Insanity” was a word the connotations of which were not broad enough to cover an alien intelligence.

“If you mean to turn and run,” Thea went on, apparently getting suspicious, “you should know that I am aware of what occurred when you visited Tethys. You should know that she was unprepared, whereas I have known of your approach for many kilorevs. I do not need to flood my chamber; beneath the surface of the moat is an organ capable of propelling a jet of acid powerful enough to cut you in half. So speak, or die.”

It occurred to Robin that Thea’s threats were a hopeful sign, in the same way that her willingness to speak at all was unexpectedly meek for a second-string God.

“I
have
spoken,” she said, as firmly as she was able. “If you were listening, you know the importance of my mission. Since you apparently were not, I will repeat it. I come on an errand of great importance to Cirocco Jones, the Wizard of Gaea. I bear information she must hear. If I do not reach her to give it to her, she will be greatly displeased.”

As soon as she said it, she wished she could bite her tongue out. This was Thea, an ally of Gaea, and the information she was bringing to Cirocco was that Gaea had murdered Gaby. That would not have mattered but for the possibility that Tethys, who must have been involved, had bragged to Thea. Since Thea seemed to know a lot of what had happened in Tethys’s chamber, it was clear there was some
communication.

“What is the information?”

“That is between me and the Wizard. If Gaea wishes you to know it, she will tell you.”

There was a silence that could not have been more than a few seconds. It was enough time for Robin to age twenty years. But when the jet of acid did not come, she could have shouted for joy. She
had
her! If she could say a thing like that to Thea and still live, it had to be because Thea’s respect for Cirocco was a pretty powerful thing.

Now if she could only keep it up for a few more minutes.

She began to move slowly, not wishing to startle Thea. She had gone three steps toward the stairs she could see on the south side of the chamber when Thea spoke again.

“I said you should not move. We have things still to speak of.”

“I don’t know what they could be. Will you impede one who carries a message to the Wizard?”

“The question may not be relevant. If I destroyed you—as is my right; indeed, my obligation under the laws of Gaea—there would be nobody to tell tales. The Wizard need never know you passed this way.”

“It is not your obligation,” Robin said, once more muttering prayers under her breath. “I myself have visited Crius. I have been to his inner chambers and lived to talk about it. It requires only the Wizard’s permission. This I know, and you must know it, too.”

“My chambers have always been inviolate,” Thea said. “This is how it must be. No creature but the Wizard has ever been where you stand.”

“And I say to you that I have seen Crius. There is no one more loyal to Gaea than Crius.”

“I bow to none in my loyalty to Gaea,” Thea said virtuously.

“Then you can do no less than Crius did and let me leave unharmed.”

Possibly this was a difficult moral dilemma for Thea; for whatever reason, there was another long pause. Robin was bathed in sweat, and her nose burned from the acid fumes.

“If you are so loyal to Gaea,” Robin prompted, “why have you been speaking to Tethys?” Once again she wondered if she had said the right thing. But she was possessed by a maniacal urge to play the charade out to its end, come what may. It would not do now to grovel or plead. She sensed that what chance she had lay in putting on a strong front.

Thea was no fool. She realized she had committed an indiscretion in revealing what she knew of Robin’s experience in Tethys. She did not attempt to deny it but instead replied in much the same vein Crius had when confronted by Cirocco.

“One cannot help listening. It is how I am built. Tethys is a traitor. He persists in whispering heresy. All is promptly reported to Gaea, of course. From time to time it is of some use.”

Robin concluded that Tethys either did not know what Gaby had told them or had not told Thea. With all the talk of Gaea’s eyes and ears, Robin had not been sure just how far Tethys’s own senses might reach. She suspected that the threshold to his chambers, five kilometers above him, was too far for direct spying on his part. But Thea did not know, for it was certain that if she did, she would have passed it on to Gaea, who would not be eager for Cirocco to learn the circumstances of Gaby’s death. And in that case Robin would already be dead.

“You still have not answered my question,” Thea said. “What is to prevent me from killing you now and destroying your body?”

“I’m surprised to hear you speak so disloyally,” Robin said.

“I said nothing disloyal.”

“Yet the Wizard is an agent of Gaea, and you propose deceiving her. We can leave that question for a moment and consider only the practical side. The Wizard, if she lives, knows—” She coughed, trying to make it look like the effects of the fumes. Robin, she said to herself, you have a very large mouth.

“You do not even know if she lives?” Thea asked, and Robin thought she detected a menacingly sweet overtone to the question.

“I did not,” she said hastily. “But of course now it is obvious that she does. We would not
be talking if she did not, would we?”

“I concede the point. She lives.” Red sparks chased themselves over Thea’s conical surface. Robin would have been alarmed if she had not seen a similar display when Crius was chastised. Thea was having a painful memory.

“As I was saying, then, the Wizard knows I went down the stairs with my friends. They are still alive and quite likely to remain so. Sooner or later the Wizard will come and find them and …” There were more sparks, and Robin wondered what she had said. She thought she might be treading on dangerous ground, then realized it was odd that Cirocco had
not
been down to look for them. Of course, she could be lying drunk on the front porch of the Melody Shop, but the implications of that in Robin’s current situation did not bear thinking about. And apparently Thea was still sufficiently cowed by the threat of a search by Cirocco to keep on listening.

“The Wizard will come looking,” she resumed. “When she finds them, they will tell her I came this way. You will object that I might have become lost in the maze to the west, but do you think the Wizard will be satisfied until she finds my body? And not only that, but a body dead by natural causes, not burned with acid?”

Thea was silent again, and Robin knew she had said all she could. Having posed that last question, she was no longer sure it was such a good one.
Would
Cirocco come looking for her? Why had she not done so already? Surely she would not abandon Gaby. She wasn’t that far gone, was she?

Thea did not think so.

“Go then,” she said. “Leave quickly, before I change my mind. Carry your message to the Wizard, and may you never have a day’s luck with it for the impudent desecration of my chambers. Go. Go swiftly.”

Robin thought of mentioning that she would never have come here if there was any other way out, but enough was enough. The acid was rising already, and she began to fear Thea might still engineer a plausible accident. She hurried to the stairs and took them five at a time.

She did not slow down when she was out of sight. She did not intend to slow down at all, ever, but eventually exhaustion overtook her and she stumbled, fell to her knees, and lay gasping, sprawled across three steps.

She had escaped, but there was no elation this time. Instead, there was the impulse she by now knew all too well: the overpowering urge to cry.

But this time the tears did not come. She shouldered her pack and began to climb.

* * *

The entrance to the Thean staircase was clogged with snow. At first Robin did not know what it was and approached it cautiously. Books had told her snow was soft and fluffy, but this was not. It was hard-packed and drifted.

She stopped to put on her sweater. It was nearly pitch-black now that the wild glowbirds were gone. Her last glowbird in the rebuilt cage was nearly dead. There had been no chance to catch another in her hurried ascent of the stairs.

The first order of business was to get out in the open. If it was not overcast, she ought to be able to see the Twilight Sea and thus establish which way was west. Beyond that she was unsure. She tried to recall the map she had studied so long ago. Did the central Thea cable touch ground to the north or south of Ophion? She could not be sure, and it was important. Gaby had said the best way to cross Thea was on the frozen river. Once oriented, she would strike out to the south, and if she seemed to be rising, she would turn around because she did know the cable was very close to the river.

Before she was even out of the strand forest, she had to stop and put on all her clothes. She had never imagined such cold. She wondered uneasily if it had been a mistake to discard the bulky parka Chris had insisted she take. It had made sense at the time; the thing had taken up nearly half the space in her backpack, had made her unbalanced and awkward, and she had been sure the two sweaters, the light jacket, and the rest of her clothes would be enough for anything. But he had told her to keep the parka.
He had been quite emphatic about it.

At least she had her boots. They had been handy in the roughest stretches of climbing, though she had torn out the fur padding that had made her feet sweat. Like everything she owned, they had seen a lot of wear but were well-made and still intact. She rubbed snow over the acid-marked toes, hoping the corrosion would go no further once the stuff was diluted with water.