“The Tower must be deserted, my lord,” said Mina. She fumbled for his hand in the darkness, glad to feel his touch, hear the sound of his voice. The darkness was so absolute she was beginning to doubt her own reality. She needed to know he was with her. “There seems nothing sinister about it. The fish go right up to it.”
“Fish are not noted for their intelligence, no matter what Habakkuk says to the contrary. Still, as you say, we’ve seen no one come near the place. Let us investigate.” He released her hand from his grasp and was gone.
“My lord,” Mina called, reaching out to him. “My mortal eyes are blind in this murk. I cannot see you. I cannot see myself! More to the point, I cannot see where I am going. Is there some way you can light my path?”
“Those who can see can also be seen,” said Chemosh. “I prefer to remain cloaked in darkness.”
“Then you must guide me, Lord, as the dog guides a blind beggar.”
Chemosh grasped her hand and pulled her swiftly through the water, making no difference between it and air. The water flowed past Mina, washing over her body. Once, tentacles brushed her arm and she jerked away. The tentacled creature did not pursue her. Perhaps she tasted bad. If Chemosh noticed the creature, he paid no attention. He pressed forward, eager and impatient.
As they drew nearer the Tower, Mina became aware that the walls were shining with a faint phosphorescence, greenish blue in color. The eerie light covered the crystal walls, giving the Tower a ghostly appearance.
“Wait here for me,” Chemosh said, letting go her hand.
Mina floated in the darkness, watched as the god drew near the Tower. He ran his hands over the smooth surface of the walls and peered through the crystal walls, trying to see inside. The crystal reflected his own image back to him.
Chemosh craned his neck. He looked up and he looked down and around. He shook his head, profoundly perplexed.
“There are no windows,” he said to Mina. “No doors. No way inside that I can see, yet there must be. The entrance is hidden, that is alclass="underline" ’
He moved along the walls, searching with his hands as well as his eyes. She could see his silhouette, black against the green phosphorous glow. She kept him in sight as long as she could, and then he disappeared, drifting around a corner of the building.
Mina was alone, utterly alone, as if she stood on the brink of Chaos.
She was parched with thirst and hungry. The hunger she could endure; she’d gone without food on many long marches with her army. Thirst was a different matter. She wondered how she could be thirsty, when her mouth was filled with water, except that the water tasted of salt and the salt was increasing her thirst. She did not know how long she could survive without drinking, before the need for water would become critical and she would have to admit to Chemosh that she could no longer go on. She would have to remind him, once again, that she was mortal.
Chemosh returned suddenly, looming out of the darkness.
“Admittedly, it has been many centuries since I last saw this Tower, yet something about it did not look right to me. I have figured out what is wrong. At least one third of it remains buried beneath the ocean floor. That includes the entrance presumably. In the old days, a single door led inside the Tower and now that door is buried in the sand. I can find no other way—”
Chemosh halted, staring. “Do you see that?”
“I see it, my lord,” said Mina, “but I am not sure I believe it.”
Deep inside the Tower, lights winked on. First one. Then another. Small globules of white-blue light appeared in different levels of the Tower—some far above them, near the top; others down below. Some of the lights seemed to be shining from deep within the Tower’s interior, others closer to the crystal walls.
“It is as I remember,” said Chemosh. “Stars held captive.”
The lights were like starlight, cold and sharp-edged. They illuminated nothing, gave off no warmth, no radiance. Mina watched one closely. “Look there, my lord,” she said, pointing.
“What is it?” Chemosh demanded.
“One of the lights went out and then came back,” said Mina. “As if something or someone had walked in front of it.” “Where? Which light?”
“Up there, about two levels. My lord,” Mina added, “you can enter the Tower. You are a god. These walls, no matter if they are solid or illusion, cannot stop you.”
“Yes,” he said, “but you cannot.”
“You must go in, my lord,” said Mina. “I will wait for you outside. When you find an entrance, you will come for me.”
“I don’t like to leave you alone,” he said, yet he was tempted. “I will call you if I have need.”
“And I will come, though I am at the ends of the universe. Wait for me here. I won’t be long.”
He swam toward the crystal wall, swam through the crystal wall. The darkness, warm and smothering, pressed down on her.
Mina kept watch on the star-like lights, focusing on them and not on her thirst, which was becoming acute. She counted eight lights scattered all over the tower, with no two on the same level, if there were levels. None of them blinked on or off but burned steadily.
She missed Chemosh, missed his voice. The silence was thick and heavy as the darkness. Suddenly, quite near her, a ninth light flared.
This light was different from the others. It was yellow in color and seemed warmer, brighter.
“I can stay here, thinking of nothing except the unbearable silence and the taste of cool water on my tongue, or I can go discover the source of this light.”
Mina pushed herself through the water, half-swimming, half-crawling, moving slowly and stealthily toward the strange light.
As she drew near, she saw that it was not a single point of light, as she had first supposed, but multiple lights, like a cluster of candles. She realized that the lights looked different—warmer, brighter—because they were outside the walls. She could see the light mirrored on the crystal surface. She drew nearer, curious.
The series of lights hung in the water as though strung together, like small lanterns hung on a rope. The lights were lined up in a row, jagged and irregular, which bobbed and drifted and gently swayed with the underwater currents.
“Strange,” said Mina to herself. “It looks like some sort of net—”
Her danger flashed before her in that instant. She tried to flee, but movement beneath the water was agonizingly slow and sluggish. The lights started to spin rapidly, dazzling her, so that she was blinded and confused. A net of heavy rope whipped out from the center of the whirling lights and, before she could escape it, settled over her.
She fought desperately to free herself from the entangling folds of heavy rope that fell over her head and shoulders, wrapped around her arms and hands and thrashing legs. She tried to lift the folds of the net, put it aside, shove it off her, but the lights were so bright that she could not see what she was doing.
The net drew in around her, tighter and tighter, until her arms were squeezed up against her chest, her feet and legs trussed up so that she could not move.
She could see and feel the net being dragged through the water with her inside, moving rapidly toward the crystal wall. The net did not stop when it reached the wall and it seemed that she must smash into the crystal. She closed her eyes and braced herself for the shattering impact.
A sensation of numbing cold, as if she’d fallen into bone-chilling water, was all that happened. Gasping from the shock, she opened her eyes to see that she had passed through a kind of porthole that had swirled opened to admit her and was now spiraling shut behind her.