Garnet’s eyes were closed. “Kiss me, Aton.” Death was as close to her as his lips.
“The crime that budded in effigy had to blossom in reality. I touched her lips.” He kissed her, carefully. “And I hurled her—”
Garnet’s feet left the edge as Aton’s brutal strength lifted her out. She swung beyond the drop, and sank, and fell, and came to rest beside him, lying on the floor.
He stroked her hair. “And she said, ‘I knew you could not do it, Aton—not when it was real.’ And I could not. And love made death an illusion.”
He held her there, still and mute. “There is no song about you, Garnet,” he said. “But if I were to love you, the song would come, and you would perish, for only the minionette rules me.”
“The minionette,” Garnet whispered.
He held her, feeling her terror. “And my planet, my home, my Hvee world, it sold me to Chthon, because I loved her. Now I return.”
“We’ll all die, Aton.”
“I have no choice, you see,” he said, and kissed her again on face and breast and left her.
12
The Hard Trek, Aton thought, the Trek has taken us from the world of the rushing winds where we tarried so long in what we did not know was comfort. It has shown us the world of the furnace heart, where the generative gasses fling their essence into the wider system, as Earth herself flings hers, without abatement and without compassion, to flame briefly and flicker out and return at last, tired, only to be blasted forth again. And now it shows us the last of its mighty elements, the world of water.
He stood at the edge of the river, looking into it and dreaming. It had been spurned before; would it now, like a woman, show them its vengeance?
Miles below, downstream, the party had gathered and was resting while two men reconnoitered, one upstream, the other downstream. Each would leave tokens behind, marking his trail; the rest would follow the one who did not return. This was logicaclass="underline" what man, finding freedom, would venture again into the caverns? What man would risk the loss of a hopeful path by turning back? Only defeat would make him welcome his fellows.
Thus Aton found himself alone, tracing the source, because his urge to escape was the strongest. He was armed, and he had a pack with rich red meat, and he had a vision. Bedside had come this way, perhaps, and Bedside had escaped. Somewhere there would be a sign.
The glow was brighter, here by the water. Aton stooped to dip his fingers in the clear liquid and touch the shining fringe at his feet. The surface of the path was smooth and a trifle slimy. His passing contact left patches of darker stone, as though he had crushed the vegetable beacons eating at the rock. The green luminescence came up through the water, casting its energies into his face with surrealistic beauty.
There was a narrow channel along one side of the stream, a kind of raised pathway about eighteen inches deep that clung to the upright wall. Aton followed it, since it was uncommonly convenient. The alternative was to wade waistdeep through the swift flow, trusting his naked feet to whatever lurked beneath.
He took the path, but did not trust it. Never yet had Chthon offered a gambit that was safe to accept. The walkway had to be used by something, and that thing was bound to be inimical. He moved quickly, not so much because time was short—though this might easily be the case, if the distance to the surface were far—as to confound any stalking creature behind him. Or surprise anything lurking ahead.
A mile passed, and more, but there was nothing. No vicious pit animal barred the way. No sudden precipice appeared. The patch continued, firm and level, and the water flowed beside it passively. At length the walls began to spread, allowing the river to slip over its marble banks to decorate a tumbling landscape. The path remained, winding steadily over and around rivers of stone, and occasional debris.
The caverns began to show their variety. Stalactites came into view, great stone icicles aiming at the floor, stalagmite columns rising like monster teeth to meet them. The river shaped itself into brief rapids and quiet pools, and all about it the stone was polished in restful hues. The gentle light, refracted from both the water and shining stone, lent an eerie loveliness to all of it.
Aton went on slowly, struck by the unfamiliar surroundings in much the way he would have been affected by a beautiful but unknown woman. These caverns were still; there was no wind here, and its absence was subtly disquieting. The flexible chambers widened and narrowed and widened again in serpentine rhythm, carpeted with slippery flowstones and walled with mineral tapestries. The columns dropped commandingly, forests of them, parting only for the winding river channels and for the even path he followed.
It was suspicious. This was not the deadly underworld he knew. Where were the salamanders, the chimeras? Where was the owner of the path? Where the red tooth, the claw?
Movement! Aton gripped his fragment of stone and stalked it, for if it did not flee, it would soon be stalking him. Behind the curtains of stone he saw it fleetingly: a huge hairy body, gray.
Hairy? In the caves?
Was this the sign that the exit was near?
He brought the thing into sight. It was not hairy after all. It was an enormous lizard, rapping at the wall with strong buck teeth: a stone chipper, not a carnivore, eating the green glow. Probably harmless after all. Surely the chimera had preyed on something before it had discovered man.
Aton came at it from behind, studying for a vital spot beneath the leathery scales. The creature was large, the size of a man, standing on its two hind feet and bracing its front members against the wall. It did not turn; either it could not hear him, or did not consider him dangerous.
He plunged the makeshift blade in under the right fore-leg, where the scales were thin. It went in easily, ripping through soft flesh. The chipper fell to the floor soundlessly, not understanding, clutching at the wound with the opposite claw. Dumbly it tore itself open, trying to stop the pain, as Aton stood and watched, breathing heavily. After a while he cut out its eyes and left it, struggling yet, stirring its own gore into the green stone.
The walls closed in again, and the river and the path resumed. This time he saw shapes in the water: eyeless, rubbery fins, flexing about from side to side along the bottom. Marine life, at last.
The miles passed uneventfully. Abruptly the passage ended. The water plunged from a tall vertical tunnel, bubbling in a circular pool and flowing on into the bed he had been tracing. The path circled this small pool and diverged. Through the rock it bored, a round passage.
Aton looked down that sharply cut passage and saw nothing. He put his ear to the wall and heard a distant tapping, a heart-beat. Something was at the other end. Something large.
He looked into the pool and saw a strange globular jellyfish deep below, perhaps a yard in diameter, balanced in a pothole just out of the striking falls. He craned upward and saw—light. Daylight.
The wall of the shaft was rough. The severed strata defended themselves in concentric circles, some reaching an inch or more in toward the glassy column of plummeting water. One side was comparatively smooth, as though the water had eroded it clean during some capricious house-keeping effort; but now there was a foot or more of space on every side, between wall and water.
Aton removed his water-skin—a ludicrous impediment in the circumstances—parked it with his other supplies, and prepared for the most difficult climb of his life.
The diameter of the shaft was about a yard at the bottom, and it appeared to expand slightly at the top. Aton braced his back against the smooth side, spread his arms in a semicircle against the wall at shoulder level, and lifted one foot around the devastating center column to find a purchase against the opposite side. He brought the other foot into play and began to climb, letting the river plunge harmlessly between his spread thighs. With his arms he lifted his back away and up; then took two baby steps up the far side. Again and again, advancing two or three inches at a time.