“Consider that Antea is waging war the way that a horse leads a cavalry charge. It seems to me it is being ridden by men like myself. Perhaps Antea will rise and spread across the world with the goddess at the reins. Or it may founder and be abandoned for another champion or some number of others. When you look at Antea, you see the enemy. I see the first among victims.”
“Odd kind of victim when you get all the power from it.”
“I don’t fear this high priest as much as I do his first enemy within the temple,” Kit said.
“How do you figure that?”
“We were pure when we were in one village in the depth of the Keshet. Every day, we heard the high priest’s voice. Now there are temples that are weeks to travel between. New temples being built. New initiates, I would assume. If not yet, then certainly soon. And the new initiates will bring their own experiences. Their own prejudices.”
“I thought your goddess ate their minds.”
Kit laughed. “Think of who you’re talking with, Marcus. I am not the only apostate in history. I see no reason to think I’m the last. But the next one perhaps will understand some piece of doctrine differently. Instead of finding doubt, he may honestly and sincerely believe something that other priests in other places don’t, and none of them will have a single voice to keep them from drifting apart. What the spiders do—let’s not call it the goddess—is erase the ability of good men to question. They eat doubt. And when there are enough temples far enough flung from each other, and their understandings drift apart, it seems to me there will be a war of zealots and fanatics that will churn the world in blood. And I don’t see how Antea or anyplace else will be immune.”
“I’m not having a great upwelling of optimism about this, Kit.”
“I think we are living in dark times,” Kit said. “As dangerous, I would guess, as any since the fall of the dragons. But the world is unpredictable, and I take a great deal of comfort from that.”
“Glad someone does,” Marcus said.
The other actors—Mikel and Cary, Hornet and Smit, Sandr and Cary and Charlit Soon—were all spread along the shore from the ice-choked waterline to the edge of the land. All of them walked slowly and carefully. And by and large, they found nothing. The waves pressed slowly closer, driving them together in a smaller and smaller space. If whatever it was they were looking for was out near the low-water mark, they would walk by it and never know better. If it was lost among the stones or the caves and outcroppings near the shore, they had a better chance, and ignorance made one strategy as good as the next.
“I thought it was interesting that Dar Cinlama didn’t know what he was looking for,” Marcus said. “Do you think your old friends do?”
“I don’t know, but I would suspect that they have some idea, even if one that’s warped by time and misunderstanding.”
“You don’t think they just made it all up?”
Kit looked pained.
“Sorry,” Marcus said. “Didn’t mean to step on a sore toe twice.”
“I believe that you’re right that something drove them back to the temple, and that fear of it became a prison of sorts, until something happened that gave them a kind of permission to return. A story that made coming back into the world a better thing than hiding.”
“But what that was?”
“I can’t guess.”
Near the shoreline, Smit stepped out from a small cave and put his hands to his mouth, shouting to be heard over the roar and crackle of the surf. “Think I found something.”
Marcus turned and started making his way over, Kit following close behind. If it was another false find, it was still getting close enough to sundown that they’d need to decide whether to end the day’s search or press on. The other players gathered around as well, until all of them were in a semicircle by a cliff face at the shore. Marcus had the feeling of a group meeting being called, which wasn’t quite what he’d been hoping for.
“What am I looking at, Smit?” Marcus said. “Apart from another hole in the ground, I mean.”
“I went down a bit. The stone changes down there. Gets smooth. Like someone worked it.”
Marcus eyed the darkness and sighed.
“Well, it’s not as though we had a better plan,” he said.
It took the better part of an hour to send Mikel and Hornet back to the cart and have them return with lanterns. Marcus went first. The first thing that surprised him was how deep they had to go in the cave before the walls changed. Either Smit had night vision like a Southling or he was braver than Marcus had given him credit for. And the second thing that surprised him was when they did. The roughness of the tunnel was smoothed, and distinct walls appeared. A slightly vaulted ceiling. A floor that would have been smooth and even if it hadn’t been for generations of debris building up on it.
“Kit?” Marcus said, scraping the wall with his thumbnail. “Does that look like dragon’s jade to you?”
“It does, a bit, yes,” Kit said.
“Don’t suppose you’re at all curious what’s at the end of this.”
“In point of fact, I am a bit,” Kit said.
They moved forward slowly. Cautiously. Marcus kept his torch high and behind him to keep the flames from spoiling his vision. After almost a hundred yards, the passage began to open and widen, and Marcus and Kit stepped out together into a great chamber. A massive black shape lay curled before them. Its snout was tucked under a massive wing like a bird in cold weather. A profound awe made Marcus drop to one knee. Awe and soul-pressing fear.
The animal was magnificent. Even covered by dust and lichen, the scales seemed almost to radiate darkness. Their torchlight fell into it the way it did into the great bowl of the night sky.
“Kit?” Marcus said in a whisper.
“Yes?”
“That’s not a statue, is it.”
“I don’t believe it is.”
The chamber the dragon slept in was massive. Images and writing covered the walls. None of it was anything Marcus could make sense of, but it was familiar all the same. The way a child knew to back away from a precipice, Marcus knew those images. They had been burned into instinct that had lasted for all of human history, and he felt himself responding to them now. Red-black streaks showed where iron sconces had been in the walls, the metal rotting away over time until there was nothing of them left but a stain.
“Follow me,” Marcus said, and moved off slowly, walking the perimeter of the chamber. On the farther side, there was a small alcove with a cistern in it that looked as though it had been collecting mold and mist for centuries at the least. When they had completed their circuit of the room, Marcus sat as still as he could manage, watching the great ribcage until he was certain that the slow rise and fall wasn’t the product of his imagination. It was breathing. Marcus felt himself trembling.
“Well,” Marcus said, his voice low.
“Yes.”
“If you have any thoughts you’d like to share about this, I’d be open to hearing them.”
“When I was at the temple,” Kit said, “we were taught that the dragons were an abomination. That the goddess preceded everything, including time and the world, and that the dragons, in their pride, had tried to claim the world for themselves, taking it from her. The fall of the dragons was supposed to have been the last great struggle between the goddess and the dragons.”
“So the one thing we can be sure of is that whatever happened, it wasn’t that.”
“Yes,” Kit said, “and still, there may be some grain of truth to it. The dragons, at least, were real.”
“Some evidence for that, yes.”
“And there was a fall. And the priests of the spider goddess disliked the dragons. Possibly they even feared them.”
“So maybe that glorious bastard over there is the natural enemy of the spiders.”