“No,” Esemeli said, “we can’t. All this road into the heart of the Earth is permeated by Druvah’s power.” She smiled a secret, rather uncomfortable smile, which Nita could just make out by the faint gleam of Kit’s wizard-light. “He made sure that anybody who was going to follow him on this road would have to go through exactly what he did when he first found his way to the world’s kernel. Even if it was going to be the wizards who would repeal the Choice he oversaw— they would have no easier time of it. He wanted to give them plenty of time to have second thoughts.”
I’m having plenty of them right now, Nita heard Kit thinking.
Not just you, Nita thought. “How do you know where he hid the kernel?” she said.
“I watched him do it,” the Lone One said. “He was using the power that I gave him at the time. And at the time, that made it impossible for him to hide his whereabouts from me.” She was smiling, amused again.
They came out of the tight, close tunnel into a slightly more open area. Kit had to stop and get his breath, and for a moment he stood bowed down with his hands on his knees, gasping. Nita wiped her fore head. It was definitely getting warmer. She tried to work out how far underground they might have come, but she wasn’t sure exactly how to tell. I could look in the manual, she thought. But at the same time, she found herself thinking that even that wasn’t likely to do her any good. There was a strange sense coming down over her as if this journey was not exactly a physical one, or not merely a physical one…
She looked up to find the Lone One gazing at her with that amused expression. “Yes,” It said, “you do feel it. I was wondering if you would.”
“We’re not exactly inside Time,” Nita said. “Or outside it. This is one of those ‘complex states.’”
“Yes,” Esemeli said. “I’m afraid that, as wizards go, Druvah was fairly
expert.”
“Which has to be bad for you,” Kit said, straightening up, “and good for us…”
The Lone One threw him an annoyed look. “Let’s get moving,” It said. “We’ve got a ways to go yet…”
They moved on, downward again. Kit dropped back toward Nita a little. “Neets, this is weird,” Kit said under his breath. “It isn’t like the real inside of a planet…any planet. This is more like another dimension.”
“It could be a little of both,” Nita said. “There are ways to make a place’s mythical reality coincide with the physical one…or make one temporarily a lot more powerful than the other.” She shook her head. “But normally you need a kernel to mediate that kind of overlap or substitution.”
“That, at least, means we’re on the right track,” Kit said. “You’ve been doing a lot of reading. Are you thinking about changing specialties? Maybe turning into a research specialist, like Tom?”
“I don’t know,” Nita said. “Things are changing, all right…but into what, I’m not entirely sure.”
Kit nodded, moved ahead again. For her own part, Nita was relieved to find that the path they took widened out a great deal. But the passage was always downward, and the weight of millions and billions of tons of rock continued to weigh on her. At least she was able to partially distract herself with the splendor of their surroundings: for the chain of complexes of caverns through which Esemeli led them in the next hours—or what felt like hours—would have been a first-class tourist attraction on Earth. One after another they passed through gigantic multicolored arenas and caves of stone, festooned with stalactites, or growing great crops of stalagmites like petrified forests. There were some caverns in which the stone itself glowed, and there was no need for wizard-light at all; they wove their way among pillars and chandeliers of down-hanging, luminous rock, their shadows stretching in ten different directions, or abolished entirely by the glow. But always the way led down, and down, and further down.
It was getting warmer all the time as they went. But this didn’t reassure Nita; it wasn’t nearly as warm as it should have been underground, and she knew that they were, indeed, not entirely in the physical world anymore. She had done some reading in the manual about these so-called “complex states,” in which normal space was blended or “affiliated” with constructed spaces that could be based in myth, or one mind’s delusion, or some commonly held belief. Such complex-state spaces could have physical realities that mirrored some old fairy tale or ancient legend…or a physical reality that had once existed but was now long gone. As they passed out of one deep cavern and into another, always with Esemeli leading the way and Kit following It, Nita’s misgivings grew, despite the Binding Oath she had made the Lone One swear. It was very old, and very wise…and entirely too clever. But it was hard to know where she might have gone wrong. We’re just going to have to rely on the manual for the moment, and try to keep our eyes open, Nita thought, as they went down, and down, and down…
The walk through the caves began to seem more and more like a dream that had always been happening, and always would. In front of her was Kit, with his wizard-light; in front of him, Esemeli, a white shadow that never paused, never got tired. Not like me, Nita thought. She was beginning to regret not having eaten at least something for breakfast that morning. And when was this morning? she thought. How many hours ago? How many years? It was becoming increasingly difficult even to believe in “this morning,” except as something that had happened in a dream a long time ago.
The way before them opened out again, the sound of their footsteps echoing against distant walls as it hadn’t done for some time. Esemeli stopped for a moment, and Kit behind It, and the three of them stood still on the shores of a vast cavern lake under a huge, high-domed ceiling dripping with more stalactites, which glowed. The water was a strange, milky blue color in Kit’s and Nita’s wizard-lights; and everything was absolutely still, not the slightest ripple of air touching that water. It was like blue glass, as solid-seeming as the crystalline surface of the Display had been.
“It looks too deep to wade,” Kit said.
“Indeed, I don’t know that it has a bottom,” Esemeli said. There was something strange about Its tone of voice. Nita glanced over at It and was surprised to see the uncertainty in Esemeli’s face and stance, normally so self-assured and lazily mocking. Maybe even It’s a little out of Its depth here, she thought.
But the next moment, Nita reminded herself once more that this was the Lone Power, or a fragment of It—immensely old, immensely powerful, and absolutely not to be trusted, no matter how secure you thought your hold over It might be. And just how sure am I about that? Nita thought.
There was another issue, too, one that she hadn’t mentioned to Kit, but that she suspected was going to come up in the near future and probably make him yell at her. Such strictures as the Binding Oath could not be one-sided; there was also a price to pay by the one doing the binding. What is bound eventually breaks loose, the manual said; the power of the binding is directly proportional to the power of the backlash. Sooner or later, Nita thought, this is going to come back to haunt me. Later, I hope…
And down they went through the darkness, and further down. Slowly, though, Nita noticed something strange beginning to happen. She had been starting to slow down, so that every now and then she would have to force herself to hurry to catch up with Kit and Esemeli, who had moved ahead. But now she was having less trouble keeping up, and this confused her. It’s not like I’m any less tired. I’m not! But walking was less trouble. And the further downward they continued, the less of a problem it became. Stranger still, she was starting to become aware of light filtering up from below them, as they continued downward through the caverns and passageways in the depths of the world. The caverns seemed brighter, somehow, though there was none of the glowing stone they’d seen earlier—