Cracks shivered across the wizard-light. For the first time since Sharina's capture, she could see objects in their own colors instead of through a filter of sullen red.
She crawled through the slot in the rock. It was a tight fit, even for her, but she would have squeezed out even if it meant flaying herself on the way.
Sharina understood now what it meant to be free. She'd never imagined restraint as complete as the queen's imprisonment. She'd rather die than undergo that again.
She swung out, clinging to the sides with both hands as her right foot felt for a ledge. She was on the carved outcrop in the center of the crater. A lifetime ago she'd seen it with Hanno and Unarc.
The two hunters were running toward her now. They must have waited on the crater rim instead of looking to their own safety after she was captured. Seeing them, Sharina wondered that she'd ever thought they might flee.
Cashel lay on his back at the base of the outcrop; an ape was capering about him. He wasn't moving. "If he's dead..." Sharina whispered as her hand tried a knob of rock; it broke off under her weight.
The outcrop was porous and well weathered. Sharina's toes found a crack that supported her body long enough for her to get her fingers into it as well. She let herself down her body's length, fumbling for another grip.
Sharina laughed. Cashel wasn't dead. He wouldn't leave her that way.
The outcrop shook violently. Sharina flattened herself against the rock face by instinct. Chunks from higher up bounced past her.
The floor of the crater split across. The ground on one side lifted while that on the other sank; the portions twitched at different rhythms. Magma winked in the depths of the crack.
A ledge jutted out a dozen feet beneath her: the knee of the squatting statue. It was a long drop to a hard surface, but there wasn't much time.
Sharina jumped, landing safely on flexed knees. The crater shook again. The ledge slid away, carrying Sharina down with it in a rush and a roar.
She kept her feet, spreading her arms for balance. Dust and pebbles cascaded ahead of her. Hanno and Unarc had lifted Cashel between them. They—a big man and two huge men—lurched farther from the path of the landslide. The ape followed on its hind legs, carrying Cashel's staff in its hands.
The slab finished its thunderous skid to the ground. The choking cloud of the rock's destruction rose over Sharina; fragments from higher up were still falling. Sharina ran out of the snarling chaos, using the rush of her descent to speed her feet.
Chips pelted her. Sharina knew that if she tripped, the scree of sliding rock would bury her at least until the eruption turned the crater into a sea of fire.
She didn't trip. Her face emerged into sunlight before her screaming lungs forced her to breathe dust thicker than a sandstorm.
"Lady, I bless You for Your mercy!" Sharina cried. "Oh, Cashel, I knew you'd come!"
And as she heard herself say the words, Sharina knew that they were true.
Cashel couldn't have stood without Unarc's help, but his eyes were open and he held his head up. Hanno had started back toward the shattered outcrop, but he stopped when he saw Sharina already free.
"This way!" screamed the ape, gesturing toward the crater wall with the quarterstaff. "We can get to the passage before—"
A shock fiercer than those before shook the crater. It threw them all to the ground, even Sharina, who'd ridden a landslide without falling. More cracks ran across the bowl; throbbing, yellow-white lava began to ooze up from below. The queen's wizardry had checked the volcano's anger. Now that wizardry had failed, nature was reasserting itself with a vengeance.
"Let's go!" Hanno said. Unarc sheathed his hooked knife. Hanno tossed his spear to the bald hunter and took over supporting Cashel.
The ape loped toward a ring of ruby light at the base of the crater's wall. He was using three limbs now, dragging the bouncing staff behind him with the remaining hand.
Hanno pulled Cashel's left arm over his shoulders and gripped Cashel's wrist with his own right hand. Linked, the two big men broke into a lumbering trot. Even somebody as strong as Hanno couldn't have carried Cashel for any distance unaided, but Cashel was able to stumble along with the other man's help.
Cashel looked dazed. He smiled when his eyes met Sharina's, though.
She paced the three men. She could have outdistanced them easily, but the last thing she wanted was to be alone. Safety wasn't a place. Safety was friends.
"Is this your friend Nonnus you talked about, missie?" Hanno shouted. His face was set, but he looked as though he could keep running at his present pace until the sun froze.
Sharina's left hand rested on the hilt of the Pewle knife, though the wide belt gripped the sheath tightly enough that it didn't flop when she ran. "No," she said. "He's my friend Cashel."
"You got some right impressive friends, girl!" Hanno said. He bellowed with laughter.
The shimmering ruby had dissolved starting at its center, so now only the top of the crater's rim still shone with unnatural red purity. Even that vestige vanished as the group neared the rock walls. The tunnel mouth was the only remnant of wizardry in the volcano's sunlit bowl.
Instead of simply trembling, the ground rippled like a blanket being shaken out. Hanno stumbled; Cashel touched a hand down to keep them both upright. Cashel and the hunter still clung to each other, but they were more like oxen in yoke than an invalid and a nurse.
The ape reached the mouth of the passage and turned. His eyes looked up and he opened his mouth to shout. An enormous, wet plopping noise overwhelmed all other sound. The ground billowed and the crater wall itself split to the sky.
Sharina looked over her shoulder. The central outcrop which the Hairy Men had carved into their own likeness sank into a bubbling pool of lava. Blazing rock spewed high in the air.
Within what had been the idol's head, now bobbling on the lava like a bladder in a millrace, was a sphere of ruby light. There was a figure within.
Sharina saw the queen raise her staff in a desperate attempt to stay the inevitable. Rock fountaining from the depths of the earth flung the ball of wizard-light in a wild career. No one could stand, let alone chant in such a dance.
"Sharina, come!" Cashel cried. He stood at the mouth of the tunnel, holding his free hand toward her. Hanno looked back from his other side with a worried expression.
The ruby sphere sank into the sea of lava. Sharina expected it to bob up again. Instead livid rock sprayed outward in all directions, the way the water of a swamp does when a bubble bursts.
Sharina plunged into the tunnel with her friends.
Cashel and Hanno were directly ahead of her, filling the passage. They clumped forward in a way that transcended human effort.
Sharina had thought the tunnel led down—there was no other way to go from the point in the crater wall where it opened, after all. But the tunnel, like the bowl of light where the queen had made her lair, was separate from the geography of the waking world. She and her companions were climbing, or at any rate they expended the effort they would to climb.
Sharina felt the air compress with a dull thump. She glanced back. The lava that had followed them into the passage blazed behind her. For the moment they were staying well ahead of it.
She didn't say anything to her companions. There was nothing to do except what they were doing, after all.
Anyway, she'd outlived the queen.
Something changed ahead of her. Sharina had glimpsed Unarc and the ape occasionally between the legs of Cashel and Hanno. They disappeared. Hanno shouted; then he and Cashel too were gone, and Sharina sprang out into cool air and lamplight.
Tenoctris was kneeling before a pentacle on a dank stone floor. She swayed, dropping the sliver of wood she'd been using in her art. Sharina caught the old woman before she could hit the stone.
For a moment Sharina saw the end of the tunnel from which she'd just emerged. It glowed, as real as the basalt walls which it interpenetrated but did not touch. The light dissolved into sparkles, then nothing at all.
"I couldn't hold it open any longer," Tenoctris whispered. "Was it long enough? Cashel, is the queen...?"
"No," said Sharina in a tone too grim to be triumphant. "The queen isn't anywhere, Tenoctris. The queen is gone."
"Begging your pardon, missie," Hanno said, "but there was lava coming after us a few steps back. I don't think I want to wait here to see if it still is."
Tenoctris smiled, though her eyes were shut and she didn't open them for the moment. "This passage is closed," she said, cradled in Sharina's arms. "If there was anything in it when it closed, well, it won't vanish—it'll find another place to exit. But it won't come out here."
She opened her eyes and glanced with a bemused expression at those with her in the cellars. Sharina grinned back; they were an assorted lot, certainly.
"We should get back to the surface, though," Tenoctris said. "There's still the Beast to deal with."
A low tremor shook the building. Tenoctris started to rise; Cashel and Hanno together lifted the old wizard from Sharina's lap.
"If it isn't too late," Tenoctris said, though her face was calm.
A serpent head on a neck thirty feet long bent toward Garric from his left side. Compared with the creature's huge body, the head looked oddly small—not much larger than that of a horse.
Of course the Beast had three heads to feed with.
The Beast's movement was a feint. Garric turned toward it as if completely fooled, his sword lifted and his buckler out as though to fend off the hissing maw.
The Beast struck very quickly from the other side. Garric jumped back and slashed at the ridged yellow throat scales as the serpent jaws clopped shut on the air where he'd stood a moment before.
The snake heads jerked away, hissing like a pair of mill races. The dog head roared, losing the rhythm of the incantation. Purple blood leaked from the long gash. It looked black in the rock's ruddy glow.
Garric laughed, but he held where he was for the moment. The Beast's necks couldn't be as flexible as the snakes they resembled. They had to hold their own considerable weight and that of the head in the air, while a snake has the ground to support it. Nevertheless the heads could strike from both sides together. Garric didn't want to get so close to the Beast's gigantic body that he couldn't keep all the heads in his vision at the same time.
"If I were that big," thought one—it could have been either—of the personalities in Garric's body, "I'd stamp a man into the stone instead of worrying about his little sword, but this one isn't me."
"Bow to me, human!" the dog head said. "I am your god! I am immortal! Look at the way this wound heals!"
The purple blood vanished like water sinking into the sand. The severed scales had bent upward on either side of the wound, drawn by their own resilience. Now they flattened again like lips of heat-softened wax, reforming with only a seam to show the injury—and that smoothed as well.
Immortal the Beast might be, but it wasn't invulnerable and it felt pain. More important, the Beast feared pain. By twisting its nose ring, a man can master a vicious boar hog three times his size, though its tusks could tear him in half if they ever closed on his body.
"Come then!" Garric shouted. "If you like the experience so much, let's do it again!"
The serpent heads swayed. It was like watching trees topple. Neither was a serious attack. Garric didn't bother to react.
Laughing he cried, "It doesn't matter if you're a god. To get past me you'll have to prove you're a man!"
"We've crossed the bridge, Garric," Liane called in the clear, dispassionate voice of a noblewoman summoning her carriage across a crowded courtyard.
The head on Garric's left struck hard and fast. He stepped into the attack, slashing. His blade crunched through scales and light bones, cutting half again its own depth in the serpent snout.
That was almost too deep. The shock of the blow numbed Garric's hand.
The Beast snatched back its wounded head with such screaming violence that it nearly pulled the sword from his grip.
The other snake head struck, more in reaction to pain than from calculation. Garric ducked under the blow, swinging his buckler instead of risking a cut before his hand had stopped tingling.
The shield was small but as sturdy as three birch crossplies and iron reinforcements could make it. The spiked boss bonged against the fanged lower jaw. It felt to Garric as though he'd batted an oak tree, but he heard bones in the snake head break.
The Beast recoiled. If a thunderstorm could be angry, it would sound like the hissing roars of the creature's three heads.
Garric glanced over his shoulder, then skipped backward to the middle of the span. "Chant your spell!" he shouted to the wizards. "Break the bridge!"
"Betput," Halphemos called in a clear voice, "baiai borbar..."
Heat hammered Garric's body. The bridge had been wider than Garric could reach with outstretched arms when he first glimpsed it. It shrank into itself, narrowing and providing less of a shield against the lava blazing below.
"Barphor kolchoi tontonon...," Halphemos said. He knelt beside Cerix at the far side of the bridge. It must be very nearly as hot for the wizards as it was for Garric at midspan.
Ilna stood with the wizards, throwing and retrieving the sash. Liane was beside her, touching the other girl's shoulder with her fingertips. Liane had no need to stay here. Lava lighted a tunnel rising behind her. She might as well have run up it.
"Phriou rigche alcheine...," Halphemos said.
Garric felt his skin crack. His tunic must be singeing; would it burst into flame?
He laughed, both halves of his person again. If only that were all he had to worry about!
"Rouche!" shrilled the serpent heads. "Dropide tarta iao!"
The bridge had shrunk to little more than the width of the felled tulip poplar that crossed the gully north of Barca's Hamlet. As the Beast spoke, the span widened again by a finger's breadth.
That was on the track to Seckler the Butcher's yard....
"Before I kill you," boomed the dog head, "I will tear your females apart piece by piece. I will lick up their blood, I will grind their bones between my teeth!"
If the Beast could speak the Yellow King's Key unaided, it wouldn't need to face Garric's sword now. But—
The Beast strode forward thunderously, keeping its three heads high. The attack didn't completely surprise the part of Garric which had survived a hundred battlefields, but the Beast's enormous bulk was as hard to stop as an avalanche.
"Apomche moz—," Halphemos began. One of the serpent heads swung over Garric. The jaws slammed closed on Halphemos.
The Beast's right foreleg swung toward Garric. The foot was a broad pad with five blunt toes, each the size of a human torso. Garric stabbed between two claws, driving the blade into the flesh above the pad of cartilage which supported the monster's weight.
The Beast's cry of triumph changed into a deafening scream. It lurched back on its haunches, jerking Garric forward because he wouldn't release the sword hilt. No human strength could snatch the weapon free when the Beast's injured muscles had spasmed tight on the steel.
Garric held for a moment. Halphemos dangled from the jaws that had struck him; long teeth driven through his skull from both sides had done instantly fatal damage. The other snake head twisted toward the corpse and tore off a mouthful of flesh for itself.
The Beast kicked its injured foot. The weapon remained imbedded in the sensitive flesh, but Garric flew clear. He dropped the buckler and grabbed for the bridge with both hands.
He almost caught himself, but "almost" was the difference between life and death. Garric's fingers brushed the stone but couldn't grip it.
Ilna's noose settled over his outstretched arms and jerked tight. Instead of plunging straight into the blazing lava, his body swung like a pendulum against the far side of the chasm. The shock and the heat knocked him into openmouthed collapse. All Garric saw was concentric circles of red and white glare, expanding to fill the universe.
Garric couldn't use his arms. He felt his torso scrape over the lip of the fiery moat, then hands rolled him away. Merely being sheltered from the lava's radiant heat felt like a plunge into a spring-fed pool. He could see again.
The noose slipped off. Both women bent over him, Ilna with the noose wrapped around her waist to help anchor Garric's weight. She and Liane must still have surprised themselves to have been able to lift him clear.
"Sothaoth agog katochoi!" Cerix shouted. He wept as he spoke the phrases he'd transcribed for his dead friend. "Kleidia phuschi choroi!"
A lot of people were surprising themselves this day.
Across the chasm, the Beast started forward again. When the huge right foot touched the bridge, it drove Garric's sword deeper. Screaming from all three mouths, the Beast flinched back. "Tharona perpo zoile!" the cripple cried.
The span dissolved like dew in the sunlight, leaving the moat clear. Lava slapped and gurgled; droplets of white-hot rock spattered over the edges of the trough. One splashed a finger's length from Garric and quivered as it cooled, giving off a sulphurous stench. The liquid rock was about to overflow its channel.
"Run," Garric said, barely whispering. He tried to stand; Liane's hands gripped his upper arms. "We've got to get higher."
Cerix weighed more than Ilna did. She lifted him anyway and staggered up the passage. Garric could move his legs, but without Liane he wouldn't even have been able to crawl.
He glanced over his shoulder. Lava flooded from the moat for as far into the distance as Garric could see. The Beast howled words of power as it retreated, but the river of glowing rock continued to widen.
Garric and his companions were out of sight of the domed chamber when the screams began. They were inhuman, penetrating Garric's brain as no sound alone could have done. They went on until the flow of rising lava had filled the passage behind the escaping humans—
And even then, Garric thought he heard the wails of a thing that could not die though all its substance had burned away.
"I'm too heavy for you to carry," Cerix muttered. Ilna wouldn't have heard him except that his lips were so close to her ear. "You can leave me here."
"No," said Ilna, "I can't. Not if I want to sleep nights, at any rate. If you want to do something useful instead of whining, you might clasp your hands around my neck and take some weight off my arms."
The wizard obeyed immediately. That helped, though not as much as Ilna would have liked. Her thigh muscles quivered with the strain and her forearms—her hands were locked under Cerix's buttocks—had gone numb. A pity that Cerix wasn't a midget instead of merely a cripple.
The passage seemed interminable. Since there was no light, Ilna kept her course straight by touching the stone wall occasionally with her elbow. There were no seams. Either the tunnel was lined with enormous slabs, or it had been cut from the living rock.
"Alos did it," Cerix said in a weak whisper. "He killed the Beast."
"He was a brave man," Ilna said. She didn't want to talk about Halphemos, but other people had different ways of dealing with unpleasant situations. "We couldn't have succeeded without him."
Garric stumbled along close behind; on Liane's arm, Ilna supposed. His burns were terrible. Ilna had blisters on the backs of her hands just from leaning over to pull Garric out of the flaming chasm.
"Alos did it!" Cerix said, as close as he could come to shouting. "He did it!"
Ilna trudged onward. The wizard began to cry again.
Ilna had started to say, "No, Master Cerix. If there was any one person who killed the Beast, you were that person when you closed the bridge over the moat."
But Cerix didn't want praise: he wanted to be forgiven for living when his friend had died. Ilna could understand the feeling very well.
It was odd that people thought it mattered what things cost. A perfectly woven panel was no better or worse whether you bought it for a few coppers or spent a purse of minted gold. Halphemos had done certain things. The things were of the same importance whether they were easy or if they cost him his life.
As they had.
And perhaps there were worse things than lies. "Yes," Ilna said aloud. "Halphemos did kill the Beast."
"Ilna?" Liane called. "There's something ahead of us. I see light."
"Light" was too strong a word, but a square of the blackness in front of them was less absolute than the neighboring portions.
"I see it," said Ilna; and because she was Ilna, she added, "Now that you've pointed it out."
"I'll go see what it is," Garric said. His voice rasped like that of a mummy dug from the ancient sands.
"Yes, and maybe Cerix will run alongside to give you company!" Ilna snapped; and immediately regretted it. Garric wasn't posturing. There was almost nothing left of him but his duty, so duty had spoken.
There wasn't much left of Ilna either, she supposed. In a mild voice she added, "I'd rather we stayed together, Garric."
"I hear voices," Liane said quietly.
They were no longer in a tunnel through rock. A forest of pillars supported arches overhead. Ilna had thought the sounds she heard were echoes of their own voices, their own footsteps, but Liane was right.
Ilna smiled tightly. Liane was right again.
A group of people came toward them from the side. Sharina was in the lead, holding a lantern. Behind her were three men—one of them Cashel and another as big as Cashel, which was something Ilna hadn't seen very often.
And the ape Zahag; and Tenoctris.
Somebody else could carry Cerix now. Ilna knelt and lowered her burden carefully to the stone floor. Physical relief washed over her, though the immediate result was that she felt so wrung out that she almost fell over.
Garric supported Ilna's shoulder with the hand that wasn't around Liane. "Sharina," he called, "I couldn't be happier to see you—all of you. Tenoctris, we've—the Beast is gone."
Cashel, looking wobbly but not weak—never weak, not him—walked to Ilna, lifted her, and gave her a hug. "What are you doing in the queen's mansion, Ilna?" he asked.
"Thinking that we need to get Garric to a healer," she said, squeezing her brother hard before she broke away. The parched skin of her face pinched when she smiled. "And the rest of us too, perhaps."
"Are we in the queen's mansion?" said Garric, looking back from where he stood with Tenoctris. Liane was close by, ready to catch him if he fell. "I've got to join Attaper and Waldron before the Hairy Men attack."
Tenoctris looked worn, but hearing that the Beast was dead made the old wizard beam like the sun. "The Hairy Men aren't a danger without the queen," she said. "Without her art to rule them, they're just a herd of poor, terrified creatures. They'll starve or drown."
Ilna supposed "dead" was the word for the Beast.
Tenoctris shook her head sadly. "I regret that," she added, "because they were really quite innocent."
"As were the many young girls fed to the Beast over the years," said Garric. "We can't change what's happened; but we can rule the Isles in a fashion that prevents it from happening again."
"Does anybody else want to get out of here?" asked the big man wearing leather. "Because I surely do!"
"Yes," said the youth who was clearly Prince Garric. "Tenoctris, will you lead us? Because I'm going to do well if I manage the three flights of stairs by myself, let alone remembering directions. I'm not in good shape."
Cashel lifted Cerix. The wizard was crooning a song of parting, but he'd ceased to blubber.
"Fortunately for me and the Isles," Garric added as they started in the direction Tenoctris indicated, "I don't have to do things by myself."