THE STAIRS WENT UP and up in a long slow spiral, and Aerin followed, turning round and round till it seemed to her she must be climbing the well of the sky and at the end of the staircase she would step onto the moon's cold surface and look down, far away, upon the green earth. For a little while she could hear her friends, who waited restlessly at the foot of the stair; once she heard the thinnest thread of a whine, but that was all. None tried to follow her. Then she could no longer hear anything but the soft sound of her footsteps and the occasional slow stutter of a guttering flame. Her legs ached with climbing, and her back ached with tension, and her neck ached with keeping her head tipped up to look at the endless staircase; and her mind ached with thoughts she dared not think. Daylight had disappeared long since, had gone with the last sounds of her beasts; the light in her eyes was red. In the edges of her vision she saw gaping black doors that led into chambers she would not imagine, let alone turn her gaze to see; and sometimes the soft noise of her footsteps echoed strangely on a stair that opened into such a room.
The silence weighed her down; the air grew heavier with every step up. She recognized the weight, though she had never felt it thus before: evil. Maur's breath had stunk of evil, and its words had set evil tracks in her mind; but she had faced Maur on the earth and under the sky, not in a dark endless airless tower. She struggled on. With each step she felt her ankles and shinbones jar against the floor, and tendons grate across her kneecaps, the heavy thigh muscles twist and curl, her hips grind in their sockets. Her right ankle began to ache.
She was still carrying the surka wreath, and as she thought of Maur she remembered the red stone she had taken with her from its ashes, and remembered that she carried the stone even now. She had a moment's cold dread, wondering if she were carrying her own betrayal into Agsded's lair; but she put her hand into the breast of her tunic, and drew out the little soft pouch where the stone lay. The stone was hot to the touch when she let it fall into her palm from the pouch, and it seemed to writhe in her fingers; she almost dropped it, but she thought of spiders and surka leaves, and held on; then shook it back into its pouch, and curled her fingers around it._
Still she climbed, but she no longer felt alone. Evil was with her; red evil shone in her eyes, rode on her shoulders, harried her heels; waited in the dark doorways where she would not look, fell like ash and rose like smoke from the torches. Evil was all around her, and it watched her, eyelessly, watched for her first stumble. Still the stairs rose before her, and still her weary legs carried her up; she wondered how many days she had spent climbing stairs, and if her army had disbanded by now, and she worried about Talat, who was wearing his saddle and gear. She should have remembered to strip it off before she entered the dark tower.
The red light throbbed in time to her own pulse; she panted in a rhythm begun by its fluctuations; the sweat that ran into her eyes was red, and it burned. And now she had something else to worry about, for where she had touched the tender skin of her throat with her surka-sticky fingers when she pulled at the thong that held the dragon stone's pouch, it burned too. But its throb had nothing to do with the tower. It throbbed angrily and self-consciously, and her mind was distracted enough to think, This is typical. On my way to gods know what unspeakable doom, and I break out in a rash. But it lightened the evil a little; she did not notice this as such, only that she toiled on in a slightly better spirit. Idly she pulled one end of her collar loose and pressed it against the surka rash, which didn't help at all.
Up. And still up. Everything ached; it was impossible to tell the leg cramps from the headache any more; the only thing about her that still bore any individuality was the surka rash on her chest, which was spreading. Up. She had been climbing forever; she would be climbing forever. She would be a new god: the God That Climbs. It was no more improbable than some of the other gods: the God That Isn't There, for example (more often known as the God That Follows or the God That Goes Before), which was the shadow-god at midday. The rash had also begun to itch, and she had to curl her surka-stained fingers into fists to stop herself from scratching the too sensitive skin on her neck and chest. And still she climbed. The heat in the red stone now beat at one hand even through the pouch; and the crisp leaves of the surka pinched the fingers of the other hand.
When she came to the top she did not believe it. She stood dumbly, looking at the black hallway before her, opening from a black doorway like all the other doorways she had straitly passed on her long spiral ascent; but now the stairs were ended, and she must cross this threshold or turn around and go back. There were no torches lighting this hall; the last of them threw their shadows at her from half a dozen steps below. And suddenly those shadows flickered, though there was no draught, and she knew there was something on the stairs behind her, and she plunged forward into the darkness.
She would have said she had no strength left for running, but she did run. Gonturan banging painfully against her ankle, although her feet were numb with climbing. Then she saw that the hall was quite short, for the blackness before her was that of double doors, their frames edged with the thinnest line of red light; and she stopped abruptly a few strides from them, her muscles quivering and her knees threatening to dump her full length on the floor for the thing coming up the stairs to find.
She leaned against the outer edge of one door, her back to the narrow wall where it joined the corridor wall; her breath whined in her throat. Thank Luthe for the thoroughness of my cure, she thought as she felt the thick air surging into the bottom of her chest, being hurled out again, and a fresh lungful captured. The rash on her chest throbbed with extra enthusiasm as she panted, and the skin above her ribcage had to heave and subside more quickly. Well, thorough about the important thing, she amended.
Luthe. She had not thought of him, had not quite said his name even in the dimmest, most private recesses of her mind, since she had left him. She had said she would come back to him. Her breathing eased; even the evil air seemed to taste less foul. Luthe. She looked down the hallway, but saw nothing coming toward her. Perhaps it is Nothing, she thought. Perhaps that is what follows here. She looked down at her hands. She could not open the doors behind her - supposing they opened in the usual fashion - with both hands full. She knelt down, kicking the tip of Gonturan to one side so she jammed up into a corner and gave Aerin's armpit a sharp poke with her hilt, and put the hidden stone and the green wreath on the stone floor. Slowly she upended the leather bag, and the hot red stone spilled out, burning in its own light, long red tongues of that light snaking down the corridor and up the walls. It made her dizzy. She prodded the wreath and made a small hollow in the twined stems, hastily picked up the stone as it tried to scorch her fingers, and dropped it in. It sizzled and hissed, but the surka seemed to quench it, and the red light subsided. Aerin pulled the leaves back over it again, shook the wreath to be sure it could not fall out, and stood up.
By the wings of the mother of all horses, her rash would drive her mad soon. She rubbed it helplessly, the heel of her hand chafing it against the inside of her shirt, and it responded gleefully by feeling as if it had caught fire; but as she dropped her hand again and then tried to bow her shoulders so that her shirt and tunic would fall away from the infected skin, she stopped thinking about what might be creeping up the stairs behind her. Bowing her shoulders did no good either. Irritably she turned to face the door, her free hand pressed flat against her chest again with shirt and tunic between; and pushed at the doors with the hand that held the surka. The leaves rasped against the inside edge of the doors, and the doors exploded.
There was a roar like all the thunder gods came down off their mountain to howl simultaneously in her ears; and winds spun around her like endless spiral staircases, bruising her with their edges. There was torn redness before her eyes, rent with blackness, clawed with white and yellow; she felt that her eyes would be hammered out of their sockets. She staggered forward, still clutching the wreath, the hand that held it outstretched. She could not see floor nor walls nor ceiling, nor anything; only the shards of color, like mad rags of cloth streaming past. Her other hand fell to Gonturan's hilt, though she knew she hadn't a chance of drawing her in this vortex of storm; still it gave comfort to clutch at her.
The wind lifted her entirely off her feet for a moment and dropped her again and she stumbled and almost fell, and so the wind seized her yet again and threw her to one side, and only luck let her fall feet first the second time. This will not do, she thought, and braced herself as best she could. I'll probably lose her - and with a wild heave she pulled Gonturan free of her scabbard.
Blue fire blazed up and whirled around her, and the winds and thunders backed off. Aerin gave Gonturan an experimental swoop, and she sang, a shrill grim note, and the shards of red and black and claws of yellow and white disappeared into shadows and became a floor and five red walls and a ceiling overhead with things painted on it, fell things of red and black, with fangs and yellow claws.
And at the far end of the chamber stood a man dressed in white, with a red sword girt at his side, and she knew him at once, for she had seen his face often enough in her mirror.
She opened her mouth, but no words came out. He laughed, her own laugh, but greater, deeper, with terrible echoes that made tangled harmonies, and those harmonies found the places in her own mind that she had never looked into, that by their existence had long frightened her; that she had hoped always to be able to ignore. The air reeled over her in thick waves, and Gonturan's blue fire dimmed and flickered as her hand trembled.
"Well met, sister's daughter," he said. His voice was low and soft and courteous; a thoughtful, philosophical, wise, and kindly voice, a voice anyone might trust; a voice nothing like Aerin's own.
"Not well met," Aerin said at last in a strangled voice, which seemed to cut ugly holes in the air currents between them, which destroyed the harmonies that still hummed in her mind; but by the sound of her own voice she felt she had lost something treasured and beautiful that might have forever been hers. "Not well met. You killed my mother and you would kill my people and my country."
He raised his shoulders, and his white robe rippled and fell in long graceful folds that glinted softly, like the petals of spring flowers. His hazel eyes blinked gently at her; her own eyes, but larger and set more deeply beneath a higher brow. "And why, my dear, should you care? You never met your mother, so you cannot miss her. I may have done you a favor; many daughters would be glad to have escaped the tender ministrations of their mothers.
"And when has your land ever cared for you?" His voice sank lower yet, purring, and he smiled Aerin's own smile. "They call you witch's daughter - and so you are, and more, for your mother might have been given the mage mark had she not fled too soon - and they should revere you for it. But in their small vicious way they choose to revile you.
"Your father is kind - why should he not be? You have never been any trouble - you have never demanded your rightful place as his daughter and his only child; and lately you have been of some small use, slaying dragons, so that he need not send out his valuable men on so inglorious a task. You have kept to the shadows, and he has let you stay there, and has done nothing to deny his people's voices when they whisper, witchwoman's daughter.
"And Tor?" He chuckled. "Honest Tor. He loves you, you know. You know that. So does everyone. They all say that you are your mother's daughter - I think even the worthy Arlbeth wonders just a little, sometimes - and your mother was a witch; never forget that. Tor himself is, of course, not in a position to do much thinking about this. And as you are your mother's daughter, even when you do not remember it ... " He smiled her smile at her again, but it seemed very full of teeth.