Wizards At War

They followed Kit in, and for a good while simply walked around and tried to get a feeling for the size and structure of the place. Dairine quickly realized that, on a first visit, this was going to be impossible. It was too complex. Tunnels led into tunnels, into archways and galleries; ramps led up and down between levels, up into the spire and down into dug-out galleries and arcades beneath ground level. We’d better not get lost, Dairine said silently.

I am saving everything we see and all the paths we walk to memory, Spot said. Even if manual functions are not able to build us a more complex map, at least we will know where we’ve been, if not always where we’re going.

At least Filif was right, Kit said, also sounding relieved. You don’t have to do the claw thing in here.

Probably there’s not a great deal of room for it everywhere, Roshaun said. And these people seem quite rigid, very regimented … so what can’t be done everywhere inside isn’t done at all.

Regimented is right, Dairine said as they walked. Look at all the rules.

Darkness had fallen as soon as they’d entered, but there was no need for artificial light: the Yaldiv saw by heat, and so everything glowed, or seemed to, more or less brightly. The walls were no exception. In infrared, their rough-paper patterning showed up every change in texture. But what also showed was a never-ending flow of words and phrases and instructions and diktats written on the tunnel walls in scent, and woven into the structure of them in mile after mile of papier-mâché bas-relief. Some of these were quite graceful, even beautiful… but the sentiments expressed made Dairine even uneasier than she’d been to begin with. The Commorancy is the world. The world is the Commorancy’s. Everyone should be like us. Everyone will be like us. All who will not are the enemy. Whoever is not with us is against us. There were hundreds of other mottoes and maxims, but they all came down to the same thing: the only purposes of the Yaldiv were to build the city greater or dig it deeper, to make more Yaldiv, to kill their enemies; and by doing all these things, to honor the Great One.

Three guesses who that is, Dairine said silently.

No need to guess, Ronan said. Dairine couldn’t see much of his expression, but the tone of his thought was more than usually angry, even for Ronan.

It’s all too familiar. It was the Champion’s thought this time, and though it, too, was angry, there was something challenging about the emotion. All too often I’ve seen this kind of thing, in other shapes and styles. The places where a species’ Choice has gone wrong and we’ve lost the fight.

But you keep coming back, Kit said as they kept walking deeper into the spire.

Someone has to, said the Champion. Someone has to go down to the souls in prison, down in the dark, and try to bring them the fire—even just a spark of it, just enough to light a candle and find the door. No matter how many times they’ve rejected it, no matter how many times It catches you sneaking in and chucks you out, we have to keep trying—

Through Ponch’s mochteroof, Dairine could see his head suddenly go up. Do you smell that? he said.

Dairine sniffed. It wasn’t so much a smell he was describing but a change in the air, and the Yaldiv senses in the mochteroof immediately knew what it meant. The guards have sealed up the door-tunnels for the night, she said. Unless we gate out, we’re stuck in here.

That’s no problem, Filif said. Even in here we should be able to find somewhere private long enough to gate.