"But not willing to be a prisoner. Why, Roland?" Turning she met his eyes. "Why should they want him handed over? And why should you?"
"I don't." He was quick in his defense. "I am only thinking of your welfare. Belamosk a ruin, the land ravaged, the herd slaughtered, and for what? Haven't enough men died as it is? If he loves you-"
"If?"
"-he will not want you to suffer. He will sacrifice himself for you as I would. And, after he has gone, things can be as they were." His hand tightened a little on her arm. "And I shall be with you, my dear. I shall never leave you."
"Neither will Earl."
"No?" He shrugged as if at the unthinking stubbornness of a child. "How can you be so certain of that? He is a traveler, restless, impatient to move on. What is he doing now? A thing of madness. To try and meet the Sungari and enlist their aid. To break the Pact and hope not to be destroyed. Fortunately the chances of him doing what he hopes to achieve are small. He could even die trying and, if he did, what has he gained? How can you trust that such a man will remain at your side? It would be best to forget him."
"That is impossible."
"So you may think, my dear, but you are wrong. Time is a great healer and the passing days erase even the strongest of memories. Soon after he has gone, it will be as if you had never met. Then, like a dream--"
She said, impatiently, "Roland, you are a fool. I am carrying his child."
"What?" He fought for breath. "No. You are mistaken."
"Time will prove me right." She missed the hurt in his eyes, the pain, too occupied with her own pleasure. "Be glad for me, my friend. You can see how impossible it is for me ever to forget him? Each day, each hour a part of him is with me."
"Does he know?"
"I hinted but I think he is convinced I was teasing. But soon he will have no doubt."
She smiled, thinking, imagining, the swell of her belly which would announce the coming life, the kick of barely formed, the stir of impatient life eager to be born. Boy or girl? A son or a daughter? No matter which, either would be an anchor to hold him fast. And there would be others to keep the first company.
"Lavinia, I am glad." She felt his hand resume its pressure on her arm and, looking at him, saw an emotion in his eyes she did not recognize. "As you say Earl will always be with us. His child if nothing else. Together we could watch it grow and teach it the old traditions of the Family."
"We, Roland?"
"If Earl does not return. If something should happen to him." His eyes searched her face. "Are we to pretend it couldn't?"
As she had pretended during the long night when, alone, she had thought of him sitting, brooding over his maps, forming a plan.
A chance, less than one in a thousand, but a chance all the same. The only one he had if he hoped to escape the Cyclan and the trap he was in.
The caverns of the Sungari were unknown. They were a legend from the past. A scrap of history distorted, possibly, into fable. The things which killed in the night had never been investigated. The entire story could have been invented to protect the early settlers from the nocturnal threat.
And yet how often had he been told that Earth did not exist-and of all men he knew as well as any that it did.
And there were clues; a crevass containing a dead beast and a dead man, smoke which had stung his eyes and which had held a moving shape, a foal which had trotted from the smoke to vanish.
To vanish where?
He had been ill, dying, toxins flooding his body, the smoke catching his lungs and blurring his vision. A movement which had taken on the shape of a foal. But foals did not run alone and no mare had been close.
"There!" Roland pointed. "The raft, returning."
But without Dumarest. Lavinia watched as it landed and Gartok, jumping out, came towards them. Pearls of moisture glinted on his helmet and armor.
"Kars?"
"He found an opening, my lady. A cavern of some kind or a natural fissure. Earl wouldn't let me enter it with him. Said to come back and take command of the men." He glared at Roland. "I take it there's no argument?"
"From me? None."
Lavinia said, "Is there anything we can do to help?"
"We can pray, my lady. I'm not much good at it myself, but I'm willing to learn."
Chapter Thirteen
There were rasps and drips and small, rustling sounds, the somber beat of a drum and a liquid gurgle which could have been the pound of surf but which was, as Dumarest knew, the roar of blood in his ears.
As the drum was the beat of his heart, the rasps and rustles the scrape and movement of boots and clothing. The drips alone came from the outside world, the slow fall of moisture from the roof, its soft slide over time-worn stone.
A cavern which had opened from a tunnel which had led from a smaller cavern which he had reached by a winding fissure. Miles of endless turns and twists and descending floors. The weight of a world pressing in around him.
Darkness broken only by the ghostly shimmer of converted energies, residual forces amplified by the mechanism bought from the entrepreneur which he wore clamped to his eyes. In its field he saw the life-pattern of a lichen, something which moved and crouched against a wall, a shower of tiny motes which provided food for the lurking predator and which fed in turn on things too small for him to spot.
Water splashed as he pressed on his way. If the Sungari were here surely they would have noticed him by now. If the Sungari existed. If he were not plunging hopelessly into the empty world of caverns and tunnels which lay beneath the mountains.
And yet the flying creatures had come from somewhere.
There had to be a hive.
He stumbled and fell and climbed carefully to his feet. The apparatus on his eyes confused him a little but, if he should break it, he would be lost in total darkness to wander blindly through an unknown world. Halting he touched his waist, found the laser holstered there and drew it. Closing his eyes he fired at the ground directly ahead. Adjusting the gain from the light-amplifier he peered from between shielding fingers.
And looked at a palace of marvels.
Light streamed from the place which had received the bolt of energy, the stone still radiating in the visible spectrum, blazing like a sun in the infrared, emitting energy which was caught and retained by the walls and roof to register as a host of scintillating rainbows, each node a sparkling gem, each irregularity a vortex of luminous wonder.
A signal to the Sungari if they should exist.
Dumarest stood waiting, wondering if again the signal would fade to linger as a ghostly luminescence long after he had moved on. Another failure which would join the others he had placed along the path from the upper air.
And then, in his brain, something turned.
It was a numbing pressure which shifted as a worm would shift in loam, as butter would slide over butter, a wave move in the ocean, a hand turn in a hand. A thing which sent him to his knees, head bowed, sweat starting from face and neck to fall and sting his eyes to gather in droplets beneath his arms.
He heard the crying, the thin, pitiful wailing which seemed always to be with him.
And, abruptly, he was in space.
It was there, the stars, the fuzz of distant nebulae, the sheets and curtains of luminescence unhampered by the dulling effects of atmosphere. The void was all around him and he floated, alone in the empty universe as the air gushed from his lungs and the eyes bulged in their sockets and his internal organs began to burst under the pressure of boiling blood.
Dying as he had once died before.
As Chagney had died; died and still drifted, his empty eyes staring at blazing stars, his skin burned by the kiss of blasting radiations, dehydrated, frozen in stasis, still living, perhaps, somehow still aware.