But did he really dare venture downwards in search of it?
The stairs were dark. The steps, hollowed by many feet, reminded him of the bottle's great antiquity. It dated back to the Long War against the Swarms, thousands of years before his birth. It might well contain dangers unknown to the age he had been born into.
He did not hesitate. He had no choice.
He descended the darkened stairs.
On reaching the bottom, Miphon found himself in a huge room bigger than any of the chambers above. The dim light from floor and walls showed him the room was empty.
Prince Comedo had been indulging in histrionics when he had sobbed that inside the bottle it was 'so jolty sway'. There was no trace of motion inside the bottle. The horizons were always the same. The fluids within the inner ear were as quiet and steady as the silent waters of a landlocked underground sea. The bottle was a self-contained world where the air felt dead and lifeless, as if nothing had stirred in it for centuries. The dull green glow from the walls, like the eye-vein patterns sprawled across the floor, had nothing to do with the world outside; the illumination was a property of the bottle itself, giving no hint of night or day. The temperature was constant, cool but not chill; neither sun nor frost in the world outside could alter it.
Miphon tried to remember his days in the sunlight -which already seemed a long time ago. He tried to remember the bottle swinging from Blackwood's belt. It widened from the neck for a third of its height, then for the next two-thirds it tapered very slightly to a flat base. Since the rooms were still getting larger, he could not have descended more than a third of the way to the bottom, if that.
Someone's tracks showed in the sparse scattering of dust on the floor. Miphon followed them to the next stairway and descended. He guessed Valarkin had left the tracks, as he doubted that Comedo would have cared to explore this bottle on his own – and the tracks had all been made by one person.
Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Miphon entered a room where the walls were almost lost in the misty green distance. He followed dusty footprints till he was close enough to the walls to see the chairs, desks and shelves of books that were arrayed there. Valarkin, judging by the tracks, had lost his nerve and turned back at this point. And no wonder. The silence was enormous.
– This is what it will be like after the death-stone kills everything.
Miphon shivered, and went on.
Had this place been a library? A prison? A holding pen for hostages? Or a refuge in times of fire, flood, war? It could have been used for conferences, allowing wizards of different orders to meet, safe in the knowledge that none could use magic on the others. Perhaps Miphon might be able to find a ring that would let him leave the bottle.
Otherwise, the only way out was by a drop-hole, which was suicidal. Anything thrown into a drop-hole was subjected to tremendous acceleration; climbing down, one would be torn from the walls by that acceleration and spat out at the other end at a considerable velocity. Even if Miphon could, by a miracle, have got safely to a drop-hole's exit under the overhang of one of the wizard towers, he would have needed a second miracle to survive the difficult climb to the top of the battlements. If the fates denied him a double miracle, the drop-hole promised only a death in the flames of the fire-dyke.
So: no ring, no escape.
On a table was a chess game, which had been abandoned at a difficult stage. Miphon puzzled over it for a while, then placed a wizard aboard a dragon to be ready for flight or attack. He walked around the board to look at it from the other side. Now the counter to that move…
Miphon shook himself.
A Rovac warrior caught in this trap would have been 270 tearing the room apart to find some ring or key or tool or clue that would secure release. No Rovac warrior would have given up without – at least! – ransacking this vast room. Could a wizard do any less?
Part of the problem was that Miphon, like any wizard of Nin, had always had that comforting thought at the back of his mind: if the worst comes to the worst, if there is no other way, then I will begin the rites of recall. I will recall the powers too terrible for a human being to be trusted to live with: I will open the book of Nariq.
But here in the green bottle, his magic would not work. He had no more resources here than any mortal man. Nevertheless: he had the room to search. He began.
Much later, he found the ring, which lay on a page of an open book. He put it on the ring finger of his left hand, then twisted it experimentally. It was only as he twisted it that he noticed the red bottle that stood on a nearby bookshelf. The ring turned full circle and Miphon was sucked into the red bottle.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Fear is the mind-sharpener.
A shadow wheeled over rock and sand. The men scattered. They dived for cover, and lay still. They could hear the creak of wings labouring through the sky. The shadow lurched over the rocks, once, then again. The dragon was circling overhead. Then they heard it alight on a bluff overlooking the ground where they were hiding.
It was hot. Hot and quiet. Morgan Hearst lay in an anorexic shadow in the lee of a rock. The desire to look up almost overwhelmed him, but to move could be death. Instead, he concentrated on his hand. He flexed the fingers: they were his own. But he saw the hand in all its strangeness, as though taking his first look at the paw of an alien species. i've got cramp,' said Erhed, a young man who had the weakest brain of any of Comedo's soldiers.
'Shut up, Erhed,' said Hearst.
'But I've got cramp!'
'Shut up!' hissed Hearst. i've got -'
Alish closed the distance in a convulsive leap. Smashed Erhed with a chunk of rock. Silenced him. Hearst lay still as death. Would that movement attract the dragon's attention? Would this be the end? He waited. And waited. And the dragon: did not swoop.
So Alish had saved them. Alish, hearing Erhed so close to panic, had acted. And Hearst had not: had been afraid to move, even though he had seen that Erhed was about to panic and run, bringing disaster to all of them.
In the Cold West, men had rightly called Hearst fearless: he did not remember being afraid in those days, not even at Enelorf when the troops of the Stormguard broke and ran in panic. Morgan Hearst, son of Avor the Hawk, had been bold to the point of recklessness, scorning fear and doubt.
However, when the chill of the Cold West had begun to get to his bones, Hearst had lost the absolute certainty which had previously characterised his every action. He remembered how they had been skirmishing outside the walls of Larbreth when the joints of his right arm had begun to seize up. He had wielded his sword left-handed while he made his escape. He had known fear then; and many times since.
And knew it now.
Where was the dragon? Was it still high on that bluff, or was it moving softfoot down to the killing ground where the men lay hiding? Could a dragon move softfoot? Was it playing a game with them, as a cat will play with a mouse? How long could the men lie there in the shadow of fear? Sooner or later one was sure to panic and run.
Hearst heard the dragon take to the air. The wings creaked. The shadow plunged overhead. Where was it headed? Was it gaining height, ready to dive down to attack them? 'It's gone,' said Alish, in a voice Hearst remembered from the Cold West: the voice of Bloodsword, He Who Walks, Our Lord Despair. 'On your feet,' said Alish. it's gone. Come on. Up! You, and you: carry Erhed. He's stunned.'
As the men slowly got to their feet, Hearst consulted with Garash. i thought dragons only flew by night,' said Hearst.
'No law tells them to,' said Garash. 'They may choose otherwise here.'