A girl rose out of the mist and flame. She was white-skinned with long black hair, but unreal, a two-dimensional creature, drawn around with a dark line. She moved her arms and head, dancing, and a snake came winding toward her, a cameo of cream and gold with a silver darting tongue. The snake, too, was unreal, and so was the golden-yellow man who followed it. The fire trees turned gradually to red, the mist to purple like a great storm cloud, the fountains ran like blood, and seemed to swell. The figures in the arena were growing in size, and changing as they entwined with each other. The snake coiled and twisted with a woman’s head; the man moved languidly, the head of the snake replacing his own; the woman slithered between them, headless, the man’s face growing under her breasts.
As the figures grew larger, the alterations became more complicated and bizarre. The purple cloud mist was pulsing from the oval space, filling the terraces with a heavy opiate smell, while the tableau rose up toward us, the things in it ten feet high or more. Delighted cries came from parts of the theater. The woman, serpent headed, bent backward, the man, his phallus replaced by the enormous thrashing tail of the serpent, leaned over her, inches from my face. My lover’s hand was on me again, and I did not now push him away, but leaned nearer. ...
A loose stone went from under my feet, rattled, struck, and plunged into the arena. The theater was chill, and broken, and empty. The wind tore my hair, and I was dankly cold. The moon was lifting. The light seared my eyes clean of what I had been staring at.
But I was not alone. I sensed it, and looked across the theater. I was lucid then, not particularly feverish or dreaming. A street or so away stood a tall tower. What was left of it was little enough—one open side and the staircase winding round and round like a twisted spine. After I had seen these, I suppose the lucidity ran away out of me. Something drew me to the tower, strong and insistent.
I will fly there, I thought. I felt a swift splitting pain in my back. I say pain, but in a strange way it was pleasant. I have heard men, whose arms or legs were lost in some fight, swear that they still felt them there, tingling and twitching to be used. This is what the wings felt like as they grew from my shoulders, and put down their roots into the muscle and bone of my back, like limbs I had lost but were still there, tingling and twitching. I moved them, and this was strange. An extra pair of arms would have been more familiar. Even in my fever-dream, I was amused by my first efforts at flight. No baby bird was ever so clumsy. But it came to me in the end, and I lifted. Then I felt the power of them. Each strong beat seemed to come more from the pit of my belly than from my spine. I held my legs firm together, and arms crossed under my breasts, as I had seen them do in my other dreams. It was only a short way to the tower.
A stone altar stood there, and I knew it well enough. In the white bowl there was a flickering and a shadow. But I was not afraid.
“So Karrakaz Enorr,” whispered the no-voice in my brain, and I knew which tongue it used, now that I had heard the dream ghosts speak it. “I am Karrakaz. The Soulless One. You do not think you know why you are here, but you are here because Karrakaz is here, and we are one thing, you and I. I have grown since the volcano. You have fed me well. I will destroy you, but first we shall be one thing. Let me give you Power to rule these Shlevakin. They are only little things and much beneath you. But how dangerous the little poison ants who will eat you alive. You will not find the Jade, so I will give you a little Power, Princess of the Lost, before your Darak turns from your cursed face, and the jackals tear you.”
It seemed good to me. The word Karrakaz had used—“Shlevakin,” the filthy dregs, the mud and excrement of an inferior people—so right to call them that, they were so far beneath me, what I was and what I might have been. But before I could stretch out my hand and say, “Give it to me,” some elemental thing took hold of me, and shook me. I clung to the stone of the tower before I could be shaken down, and screamed furiously, “Let me alone!”
“Kill it,” the no-voice said.
My hands found a huge loose tile, and I grasped it and thrust it out toward what seemed to be tormenting me.
There was a crash, loud as thunder, in my right ear. The tower disintegrated and I fell.
I seemed to fall, but not far. I opened my eyes, and was lying on the red and green stones of the theater steps. A hand got my arm, and pulled me up again almost immediately. It could be no other hand but Barak’s.
His face was pale and angry in the moonlight.
“You woke and followed me,” I said.
“And found you standing here like a block of stone with your eyes wide open. I shook you and you didn’t wake up. If you have these fits, you’re a fool to walk up so high.”
It was Darak, then, who had kept me from the evil in the tower. Yet I could not have been in the tower after all. The wings were gone for sure.
“You’re coming back now,” Darak grumbled. “This place is as safe as the Pit of Death. A tile fell from nowhere just now and nearly brained both of us.”
I could see where it had smashed. He had pushed me clear, and I was bruised to prove it. I felt weak and stupid and afraid. I was glad he dragged me away, across the ruined city, back to the camp.
The fires were still alight, but mostly men were asleep. A few sentries prowled.
Darak set me on the rug bed, and pulled off my boots.
“I imagine you still have your woman’s trouble,” he said to me. I nodded. “So I don’t even get a reward.”
He arranged us for sleep with an endearing selfishness, his head on my shoulder.
But I did not sleep. I lay, stiff and cold, waiting for the morning, waiting to be away, yet glad to be awake, for I feared the dreams the city would give me now.
It was near dawn. There is a different scent in the air at dawn; one could tell it blindfold. There came a faint drumming under me. I thought I imagined it, but it grew.
“Darak!” I hissed.
He woke and growled at me. But then the earth moved beneath us.
In another second we were flung apart and together. Weapons in the tent, chairs, the brazier, tilted over, and the poles went too, bringing the hide, down on top of us. Spilled coals licked at the rugs, and caught.
In a moment the tent was blazing. It seemed incredibly difficult to get free now that there was no longer any obvious opening. The flames on our heels, we hacked and scrabbled a way out. The ground was still sliding sideways. Stones flew by, and bits of paving lifted and went down.
It settled as abruptly as it had begun.
I stood up. A pillar had fallen across the road, crushing three tents, and putting out a fire or two. The tents, for some reason, were empty.
“We have earthquakes in the hills, too,” Darak said. “This wasn’t so bad.”
Maggur and Kel came running up, and another man who flung water on the burning hide.
I stared back over the city, and felt a pent-up anger and hatred swelling at me, for the moment impotent.
“Darak,” I said, “we must ride now. Quickly.”
He glanced at me, and nodded. “As you say.”
But he made no great hurry about it, and the men, as always, took their cue from him. Even the nervous dallied. After all, they had spent a night here, and were still unharmed; a little more delay could make no difference.
Finally, the caravan moved, and the sun was up, burning a round white hole in the sky. The horses were restless, frightened by the quake, and still uneasy. Men ate as they rode, throwing back bones to lie among the bones of the city.