The temptation was too much. Gathrid glanced at the ruby.
Ahlert moaned and reeled back, throwing a forearm across his eyes. Gathrid swayed. He almost fell from his saddle. For an instant he felt a great vacuum sucking at his mind.
They exchanged stares. Ahlert's men withdrew to a safer distance. The Toal moved nearer Gathrid. A
shadow fluttered along the ground. Gathrid glanced up at the flyer.
Then he examined Ahlert more closely.
He had expected an elderly caricature of Gerdes Mu-lenex. What he saw instead was a thirtyish, lean, dark man with mouth corner quirks suggesting a rich sense of humor. But the man's dark eyes were cold, calculating, the windows of a nighted soul, of a man of boundless ambition.
Gathrid found him reminiscent of Yedon Hildreth, particularly in the aura of stubbornness he exuded.
Ahlert spread his hands again. "Come down, Sword-bearer. Let's talk."
Daubendiek quivered hungrily. Loida begged, "Kill him while you have the chance. He'll trick you."
"No doubt. Or I might fool him." He believed he was safe. The Mindak had something on his mind.
Conquering his memories of Kacalief, Gathrid said, "Speak."
"Here?"
The youth glanced around, understood. "Into the Library, then. You and me. Alone together." He met Ahlert's eye, squeezed Daubendiek's hilt. "Maybe only one of us will return."
Gacioch laughed again.
"The Library?"
"The underground city. The place where you dredge up these horrors." He indicated the Toal.
"Ah. Ansorge. Come along, then." The Mindak seemed to be a man of few words.
Loida was not pleased. "Don't leave me here! They'll sacrifice me."
Gacioch leered and jeered.
The Sword, though undrawn, made itself felt. Gathrid could summon no emotion concerning the girl's welfare.
"No one will harm you." The way the Mindak spoke, while surveying his officers, made that sound like a statement of natural law.
Gacioch wanted to go, too, but argued with no special vehemence. "Don't buy any cats in a sack, boy," he said by way of parting.
"You're certainly a puzzle," Gathrid told him.
"Glad to hear it. Glad to hear it. I'd stop being fun if I was predictable."
The Toal, too, wanted to go. It asked no permission. It dismounted, took lance in hand and began to follow.
"Begone," Ahlert ordered. "Mohrhard Horgrebe, I command you. Go you forth, whence you came. This I command in the name of Great Chuchain."
The hairs on Gathrid's neck stirred. Chuchain. Where had he heard that name? Something Rogala had muttered. An entity the equal of Suchara. Sometimes her ally, more often her rival.
The Toal came on.
"I was afraid of this," the Mindak said. "The break is complete."
"The name of Chuchain may be impotent, but is the Sword of Suchara?"
"Never mind. Let it come. There's another one here that can't be kept out. It's discorporeal."
Gathrid shrugged, followed the Mindak. The Toal Mohrhard Horgrebe did likewise. Then it stopped.
It seemed to listen. After a few seconds in that attitude, it took three jerky steps to one side and seated itself on a boulder.
Instructions from Nieroda?
Ahlert led Gathrid into a tunnel that showed signs of recent mining. He strode a dozen steps inward, halted, intoned, "The Child of the Father, Great Chuchain, and He Who Bears the Wrath of the Mother, Suchara of the Sorrows; He Who Slew the Son. I say three times, let us pass! Let us pass! Let us pass! In the Name of Great Chuchain."
Something stirred. Something caressed Gathrid's face with spider's silk, with the light, nimble fingers of elves. Unbidden, words formed on his lips. "In the Name of the Mother, Suchara Beneath the Sea.''
The fingers of gossamer withdrew. "Come," Ahlert told him.
It was not a long passage, and hardly as miserable as his subterranean trek with Rogala, yet Gathrid was relieved when they departed the tunnel. The sense of presence there, of unseen, hungry things watching, was overpowering.
"Ansorge," the Mindak said. "City of Everlasting Night. City of the Night People. The ones remembered as elves and trolls in your legends. They're all dead now. An unfortunate after-effect of the Brothers' War. Only their guardians remain. Their last project was to collect the wrack of the war. They didn't survive long enough to finish. Daubendiek and the Shield of Driebrant were their most noteworthy oversights."
For a minute Gathrid was just an awestruck sightseer. The cavern and city it contained stretched as far as he could see. Countless thousands of balls of light drifted around, mostly on aimless currents of air. Some bounced and dodged like playful butterflies while others swooped and darted like swallows on the hunt. They came in every color. Occasionally one changed hue.
"What are they?" Gathrid asked.
"We don't know. My best people have studied them. They might be alive, or magical. Or both. They won't hold still for a close examination. If you cage them, they die, and leave behind nothing you can dissect. Maybe we'll find out once we learn to decipher the underpeo-ple's writing."
"You can't read their records?"
"Only their pictographs. The exploration has been haphazard. We're like barbarians looting a temple. Like the Oldani and Hattori during the Sack of Sartain. We're probably missing the most interesting things simply because we don't recognize them." He stopped walking. "Earth. Air. Fire.
Water. And this. A fifth vision, perhaps? Greater than the others? But it was neutral. Always neutral. And now it's dead."
What was the man talking about? "You brought me here for a reason."
The Mindak resumed walking. "You asked. I came. We're here together. Chuchain and Suchara have moved us. We pawns can but go to our squares."
"A quote cribbed, no doubt, from Theis Rogala." Gathrid surprised himself with his boldness. He did not feel bold. He wondered if all self-assured men were just nervous, frightened boys hiding behind well-schooled facades.
"There is Purpose in our coming together," Ahlert told him. "The hourglasses have turned. The tides have shifted. I'm not the man I thought. I'm no general. I'm not much of a leader. I excel only at thaumaturgy. I'll tell you something, Swordbearer ... though you'll learn it for yourself, the way we all do. All ambition is self-delusion. It comes. You overreach. Then you find yourself in a death-struggle, just trying to hold onto what you had at the beginning."
Ahlert reminded Gathrid of his boyhood teacher. "Nieroda has challenged you," he said.
"Nieroda, the Toal, and men whom I believed were loyal captains. Because I showed so poorly in the west. No. I didn't fail there. I could've won. But I was too timid. And I didn't get the help I should have from Nieroda. It puzzled me then. I understand now.
"I was frightened of Yedon Hildreth. I thought I could handle him easier by stalling because he couldn't avoid politics. I didn't realize that I couldn't avoid them either. Then, too, there was what you did at Katich. It made me Doubt." He said the last word as though it were the name of some dread deity.
"That, too, is something you'll have to face to understand."
Self-revelation was not what Gathrid had expected. Argument or conflict, perhaps. Or a settlement of the debt of Kacalief. But not having his enemy talk to him like a brother. Nor his own willingness to listen.
"While they were enemies, they were reconciled," he said, quoting something he had heard from Plauen.
"Perhaps. Before foes with whom there can be no conciliation. But not forever." "Suchara would disapprove," Gathrid murmured. Ahlert smiled thinly, nodded. "Nieroda was another of my mistakes.
I believed I could master her, against all the evidence of history. No one, not even Bachesta herself, can control that daughter of Hell. I realize that now.''