Fascinated, Silk watched as the door opened in a swirl of petals, seeming to create the lofty green corridor beyond it. "It took me a while to identify the sensation," he confided to Mamelta, "but I placed it eventually. It was the feeling I'd had as a small boy when my mother had been holding me and put me down." He paused, musing.
"And now we're in another place altogether, much deeper underground. Truly extraordinary! Is there a way to prevent Hammerstone's following us down in this thing?"
Mamelta shook her head, whether in negation or merely to clear it, Silk could not have said. "So strange . . . Is this another dream?" "No," he assured her. He rose from his seat. "No, it isn't. Put that thought from your mind entirely. Did you dream much, up there?"
"I don't know how long it was. Suppose I dreamed once each hundred years . . . ?"
Silk stepped out into the corridor. There was a well in it not far from the petaled door: a twilit shaft descended by spiraling steps. He set off down the corridor to examine it, felt something through the worn sole of one shoe, and stopped to pick it up.
It was a card.
"Look at this, Mamelta!" He held it up. "Money! My luck's certainly changed since I met you. Some god smiles on you, and smiles on me, too, because I'm with you."
"That is not money."
"Yes, it is," he told her. "Did you have money of some other kind on the Short Sun Whorl? This is the sort we use in Viron, and traders from foreign cities accept it, so I suppose they must use cards, too. This would buy a nice goat for Pas, for example-even a white ewe, if the market were depressed. Chop it into a hundred pieces, and every piece is one bit. A bit will buy two large cabbages or half a dozen eggs. Aren't you going to come out? I don't believe that the moving room is going to sink any farther."
She rose and followed him into the corridor.
"Maytera Marble remembers the Short Sun. I'll try to introduce you to her. You'll have a great deal in common, I'm sure."
When Mamelta did not reply, he asked, "Do you want to tell me about your dreams? That might help. What did you dream about?"
"People like you."
Silk leaned over the coping of the shaft to peer down. The first six steps bore six words:
HE WHO DESCENDS SERVES PAS BEST
"Look at this," he said; she did not, and he asked, "Who were these people in your dreams?"
She was silent so long that he thought she was not going to reply; he went through a gap in the coping and down to the first step. "There's writing on all of these," he told her. "The next series says, 'I will teach my children how I carried out the Plan of Pas.' There must be a shrine of Pas's at the bottom. Would you care to see it?"
"I am trying to ... think of a way to tell you. We did not speak. Words. I have to remember to speak words now. I say something. But you do not hear me unless I move my lips. To move my lips and my tongue .. . while I make this noise in my throat."
"You're doing very well," Silk told her warmly. "Soon we'll have to go back up again, but not in that same little room since I'd assume it would take us to the place we left. I have to get back into the tunnels under Limna, however, and find the ashes from the manteion there. I'm not at all sure that we ought to take the time to look around this shrine and recite prayers and so forth. What do you think?"
"I . . ." Mamelta fell silent, staring.
"Patera Pike-my predecessor, and a most devout man-used to call out in dreams," Silk told her. "Sometimes he'd wake me in the next room. I think you may be afraid to speak, believing that this, too, is a dream; and that you might wake other sleepers. It isn't, so you will not." .
She nodded, the movement of her head barely perceptible. "I may have called out in the beginning. One was small, the Monarch's second daughter. The one you used to see dance."
"Moipe?" Silk suggested.
"I remember seeing her often at home, dancing through my dreams. She was a wonderful dancer, but we cheered because we were afraid. You saw the hunger in her face for the kind of cheers the others got."
"It may be Pas who favors you," Silk decided. "Indeed it probably is, since the moving room carried us straight to this shrine of his. If so, he'll certainly be offended if we don't visit it, after all that he's done for us. Won't you come with me?"
She joined him on the uppermost step, and side-by-side they descended the spiral, seeing the footprints of those who had preceded them in the thin dust on the treads, and shivering in the cool air of the shaft, which narrowed and grew darker as they descended.
They were less than halfway down when a faint odor of decay set Silk's nostrils twitching; it was as though an altar had not been properly cleansed and purified, and he (assuming that the shrine he anticipated included such an altar) resolved to purify it himself if need be.
Mamelta, who had lagged behind him by a few steps, now touched his arm. "Is that a hammerstone?" Silk looked back at her. "Hammerstone? Where?"
"Down there." She indicated the bottom of the shaft by a vague gesture. "Moaning? Something is moaning."
Silk stopped to listen; the sound was so faint that he could not lie certain he did not imagine it, an eerie keen- ing, rising and falling, always at the edge of his hearing, and often threatening to fade away altogether.
It was no louder at the bottom, where the soldier lay. Silk gripped the dead man's left arm and rolled him over, in the process discovering that he was no longer as strong as he had been. There was a ragged hole the size of his thumb in the dead man's blue-painted chest.
When he had recovered breath he said, "You'd better stand back, Mamelta. Chems seldom explode once the moment of death is past, but there's always a risk." Squat- ting, he employed one of the steel gammas forming the voided cross he wore to remove the dead man's faceplate. When bridging connections with the gamma produced no arc, he shook his head.
"How . . . ? Mamelta is my name, and I told you. Have you told me yours?"
"Patera Silk." He straightened up. "Call me Patera, please. Were you about to ask how this man died?"
"He is a machine." She was looking at the dead man's wound. "A robot?"
"A soldier," Silk told her, "though I've never seen a blue one before. Ours are mottled-green, brown, and black-so I suppose he must have come from another city. In any case he's been dead a long time, while someone in the shrine is alive and in pain."
A massive door in the side of the shaft stood ajar. Silk opened it and stepped into the shrine, finding himself (to his astonishment) in a circular room a full thirty cubits high, with padded divans and glasses and multicolored readouts on its ceiling, its floor, and its curving wall. Every glass was energized, and in them all bobbed a tattered, skull-like thing that was no longer a face, wailing.
He clapped his hands. "Monitor!"
Gabbling sounds issued from the face. An irregular hole opened and closed; the sounds rose to a piercing shriek and a trapdoor in the center of the room flew back.
"It wants you to go into the nose," Mamelta said.
Silk crossed to the opening in the floor and stared down. At its bottom, fifty cubits away, swam three bright pinpricks that moved as one; irresistibly reminded of similar lights at the bottom of a grave he had dreamed was Orpine's, he watched until they vanished, replaced by a single spark. "I'm going down there." "Yes. That is what it wants."
"The monitor? Could you understand him?"
She shook her head, a minute motion. "I have seen this. Going to the ship that would lift us off the Whorl."
"This can't be any sort of boat," Silk protested. "This entire shrine must be embedded in solid rock."
"That is its berth," she murmured, but he had dropped to the floor already and swung his legs into the circular opening revealed by the trapdoor. Rungs set in the wall permitted him to climb down to a lucent bubble through which he looked across a benighted plain of naked rock. As he stared at it, a nameless mental mechanism adjusted, and the sparks swarming under the concave crystal floor were not merely distant but infinitely remote, the lamps and fires of new skylands.