Perhaps she hadn't known, either. Or perhaps he had deceived them all.
Perhaps he hadn't even been human.
Michael's thoughts were deeply mired as he stepped up oa the stone. Nikolai and Bek followed, Bek with hands trembling, as afraid of the Sidhe as Michael would have been, once.
And should have been, now. In the instant between stones, he heard voices engaged in conversation. Whether the hearing had been arranged as warning, he was never to know. The voices discussed his status in Inyas Trai, his position with the Ban of Hours, the status of humans in the Realm - and mention was made of the Council of Eleu and of the Maln.
He emerged in warm sunlight. Neither Nikolai nor Bek stood beside him on the stone. Ulath and four male Sidhe in pearly gray waited on the gravel surrounding the stone. Ulath's expression was tense, grim. He could feel her aura pulsing angrily, sense her restrained power.
The male Sidhe were coursers from the Irall. He gathered that much before they became aware of his abilities and sealed their memories.
"I remind you," Ulath said, "that he is protected by the Ban of Hours."
The shortest courser stepped forward and held his hand out to help Michael down from the stone. Michael hesitated, then took the hand, realizing he would exhibit his fear otherwise. He didn't know what he would do next. He doubted he could successfully cast a shadow with so little preparation, and so many Sidhe on alert.
"I am Gwinat," said the Sidhe who had offered his hand, "I am your intercept. You are in possession of a horse of the Irall."
"It was given to me," Michael said.
"That is irrelevant. No one, especially a human, can be in possession of a horse from the stables of Adonna's temple."
"It was the horse of Alyons," Ulath said, glancing between Gwinat and Michael. "You are well aware of that."
"And for stealing that horse, Alyons was sent to the Blasted Plain. That was his punishment. We could not reclaim the horse - he put his imprint on it and it would have been of no use to the temple. Sidhe law does not recognize the return of stolen property, anyway - certainly not horses."
Ulath touched Michael on the cheek. "Alyons' shadow took revenge on you," she said. "After Alyons' death, the horse had to be returned to the Irall, or left to die."
"He gave it to me," Michael said hollowly. Then, suddenly crafty, "And I've come to return it."
Gwinat smiled in appreciation, then shook his head. "You were his enemy, and you killed him, no?"
"I didn't want to be his enemy. I didn't kill him."
"Come." The coursers drew up around him, cutting off any hope of escape. Ulath withdrew her hand and backed away. He probed her fleetingly and found regret but no deep sorrow. "The Irall does not approve of the Ban's policy toward humans," Gwinat informed her.
"The Irall has no power over the Ban. She was appointed by Adonna. What does Adonna say?"
Gwinat smiled snakishly and bowed his head. "We will remove this one. That is the law."
Michael
What? Who is it?
Go with them
He looked at Ulath but she hadn't sent any messages, and it hadn't felt like the Ban - or Death's Radio. Who, then?
He walked between the coursers, onto the stepping stone which led to the streets below, then through the streets to where their horses - and Alyons' - waited. A small number of Sidhe females watched as the coursers allowed Michael to mount the sky-blue horse, mounted their own, and rode with him through the northern gates of Inyas Trai. Gwinat turned to look back through the gates, still smiling.
"I don't see what even a human would find of value in there," he said softly. "The Spryggla took their revenge on us when they built it, just as Alyons took his revenge on you, eh?"
Michael looked straight ahead, down a wide stone road that passed straight as a shadow through an avenue of black stone pillars, and beyond, to the gates of the temple of Adonna.
They were taking him to the Irall.
Chapter Thirty-Five
The Irall loomed, its black central tower smooth and round and featureless, tapering to an anonymous needle point. Around its base were irregular clusters of smaller towers, all inclined toward the center. The towers rose from a smooth dome of silky gray rock.
Gwinat and the coursers led Michael down the dark stone road, between pillars as shiny as polished metal yet as black as night, with gleams buried in their depths like eyes, enjoying his discomfort, his fear.
Nothing the Crane Women had taught him could possibly have prepared him for this.
The entrance was surprisingly small, just wide enough for three horses abreast, and perhaps two heads taller than the coursers riding on either side of Michael. The walls of the tunnel were cupped like the walls of a glacial cave, and the floor was littered with what looked like dried flowers. The air smelled sweet and dusty, not unpleasant, yet not quite pleasant. Suggestive, haunting, like the smell of old roses cupped in hands hidden far beneath the sun petals falling one by one scented, black in always-dark.
The message came through stronger than he had ever felt it before, just as the light from the tunnel's entrance was cut off by a bend in the path. The coursers pushed on, having no need for the light. Michael, trying to listen for the voice again, heard Gwinat dimly: "We're to take you to the Testament."
As Michael's eyes adjusted, he saw the tunnel had broadened and was filled with a faint greenish glow. Ahead, on walkways to either side, two long lines of figures shuffled in single file, eyes staring forward. They were Breeds, and each carried a green ceramic basin filled with black liquid. Michael tried to examine each face as they passed, looking for Lirg, but there were far too many and he wasn't sure he could remember what Lirg looked like anyway.
The tunnel opened onto an immense smoky chamber, its ceiling lost in darkness. The walls on either side were pocked with holes thirty to forty feet in diameter, their lower edges stained by a continuous rusty dripping. The horses splashed in an inches-deep layer of silty liquid rippling across the floor. Alyons' horse - or rather. Adonna's - twitched its ears and withers uneasily.
The next chamber was like the inside of a cartoon beehive, circular horizontal ribs stacked layer upon layer to form a dome. In the middle of the chamber was a depressed amphitheater with yard-high steps leading down to a rusty pool of water. All Michael could smell now was stale water.
The coursers escorted him around the amphitheater and led him down a side hallway. They passed a line of marching Sidhe, dressed only in gray kilts.
All of Adonna's attendants were male, apparently; the Irall was a male sanctuary.
"What is the Testament?" Michael asked.
Gwinat turned to him. "The trial chamber of Adonna's judges. The meeting place of the Maln." He did not need to probe Michael's aura to speak English.
"I thought that was in the mountains," Michael said. Gwinat smiled at the absurdity of trying to correct human misperceptions.
"I mean, that's where you train priests." Michael remained quiet for a few minutes, then said, "It's obvious I'm guilty, under your law. Why should you try me? Isn't the Maln all-powerful? Or is my ignorance some excuse?"
"Your guilt is an excuse," Gwinat said.
Michael had to think harder Shan he had ever thought before. There had to be some way out of the situation, some supreme effort or cleverness the Crane Women had instilled that he had temporarily forgotten.
Ahead, an electric blue glow suffused through the tunnel like a fog. The horses took them through wreaths of bluish mist. The mist curled with sentient gestures, curious, cold.
The air cleared and Michael saw they were advancing across some tremendous open space, the interior of the dome itself; all the other chambers had been contained in the walls of the Irall. Long minutes passed before he sighted a stone table on the otherwise bare floor, and in tall stone seats surrounding the table, four Sidhe in black robes, facing inward.
The coursers led Michael in a circle around the table. The four Sidhe in black watched
him closely. The floor crawled with dim patches of blue mist, shot through with transitory lines of green and black.
"Tra gahn," said one of the four, rising and pushing back the stone chair with a grating rumble. He looked into Michael's eyes and made a gesture to Gwinat. Gwinat took Michael's arm and pulled him from the horse, setting him on the ground with a wrenching pain in his shoulder.
As he turned, he saw that a stone amphitheater now surrounded the table. On the risers stood a crowd of plumed, dazzle-robed Sidhe males. They all stared at Michael and picked at him with a silent chorus of sharp-edged probes, seeking a way through his defenses.
"Do you recognize me?" asked the Sidhe standing at the table. Michael turned, and nodded. "Who am I?"
"You are Tarax."
"And you know your crime?"
Michael nodded again, knowing it was useless to argue.
Tarax removed his black robe, revealing a blood-red cloak. He then pulled back the cloak, unveiling not another layer of clothing, nor his body, but a forest of leaves, as if his head were supported not by flesh and blood but by a tree. Birds flew from the leaves high into the darkness, their wings beating steadily. The wingbeats faded.
Gwinat leaned over him. "Tarax says you are quite guilty," he said, "And that you are the one they want. Even had you been innocent, we would have the authority to take you from the Ban now. Adonna wants you."
Chapter Thirty-Six
They led him away from the table. The risers vanished as quickly as they had appeared, and the beautifully dressed Sidhe with them.
"We are going below," Gwinat said. Michael detected a hint of pity in the Sidhe's voice.
The center of the dome of the Irall was occupied by a pit perhaps fifty yards across at its rim. Concentric steps descended to a narrower opening of ten or twelve yards. Gwinat urged his horse down the steps, pushing Michael ahead. The coursers followed. A cold breeze blew up from the center. "Mount," Gwinat said, extending his hand. Michael took hold and was lifted onto Gwinat's horse, sitting before the Sidhe.
Michael's eyes widened as Gwinat booted the animal's flanks. It tossed its head, reared and kicked off into nothingness. The coursers leaped after.
He closed his eyes momentarily. His stomach twisted and his eyelids fluttered involuntarily, then opened. He blinked against the wind. They plunged down the hole into darkness. Gwinat kept a tight grip with one arm on Michael's waist. To each side, the coursers' beasts stretched out in silvery, elongated poses of leaping, tails twisting and waving behind, manes unfurled and gleaming like fire, lips drawn back from gnashing teeth. They seemed to pull at the air ahead with their teeth, legs straining for solid ground and finding none.
The darkness was broken only by hanging swatches of luminous green moss on the smooth-bored stone walls. Michael turned to look at Gwinat. The Sidhe's teeth were bared; he seemed to be grinning, grimacing and preparing to scream all at once.
Michael shielded his eyes with his hands. The dry wind stung. The stone walls gave way after several minutes to ice as clear and deep as flawless blue glass.
Far ahead - below - a tiny dot of dim rainbow-colored light appeared, then rushed toward them. Michael prepared for destruction. He felt the horse's muscles relax beneath him. He leaned close to its neck and clasped its mane with what must have been a painful grip, but the animal didn't protest. The walls of the hole vanished; they had fallen for at least a quarter of an hour and now glided over a maelstrom of cloudy, turbid light.
They were now beneath the bottom of the Realm, beyond all solidity, into darkness and terrifying creation. The horses navigated through an upside-down forest of ice stalactites with bases hundreds of yards thick. Below, small brilliant globes of indefinite size flitted over the maelstrom.
Michael silently prayed; not that he would have been heard above the rush of wind which filled the void, pasting his hair to his head and threatening to tear him from Gwinat's grip. "Lord," he mouthed, "I thank you for all I have lived, all I have seen. I am sorry I never acknowledged You, and I hope this is not all for nothing - - -If I die now, I know I have done nothing worthwhile, and have brought pain and death-" He thought of Eleuth's spinning, fading shadow in the Between, and then of the Ban of Hours' accepting, forgiving arms. "I know I am nothing in the face of this, and that this is nothing before You." He was repudiating all his weak attempts at disbelief, and all of his young materialist philosophies. And he was doing it clumsily, with inelegant words and far too many repetitions of the word "nothing." He was half-crazy with fear, and yet he realized he was editing his own prayers, his own supplications. He was worried about style in the face of extinction.
Gwinat tightened his hold as Michael began to tremble, then shake. With some surprise, the Sidhe realized that the boy was laughing. Tears blew back from the human's face and struck Gwinat's, streaming across his cheeks. For a moment, the Sidhe felt it might be best to simply drop the human into the maelstrom and be done with him. There was something weird and dangerous in this laughter and weeping, something he could not fathom. But he held on and the boy became calm after a time.
The horses pitched downward, away from the ice pillars. Michael was through praying. He was filled with a wordless, profound silence. Only one thought crossed his mind as they dropped away from the Realm's underside: This must have been the way the Sidhe crossed between the stars. Taking their own wind with them in the emptiness of space, traveling in hordes of millions, so many they would have seemed like a comet's tail from far away, glittering like pearly motes against the stacked razor's-edge blackness.
Ahead, drifting over the Maelstrom, was an oval object like an elongated bean. The bean-shape clarified into a cylinder about twice as long as it was wide. Spinning slowly on its long axis; it appeared to have been lathed from a solid piece of brass. The cylinder pointed down toward the maelstrom, irregular blotches of verdigris rolling along with its outer surface.
They approached the top. The flat expanse loomed like a wall, pierced by an irregular gaping entrance at its center. Michael wasn't able to get an impression of its size until the very last, just as they entered the hole.
The cylinder was perhaps a mile in diameter.
For a moment there was confusion. One of the coursers got ahead of Michael and Gwinat. His animal's hoof twitched a few feet from Michael's face, then swung back and caught Michael on the side of the head. He was knocked from Gwinat's arm and fell away, seeing nothing but warm, mellow red, dimming rapidly to deep brown___
Michael's awareness returned in stages. First he smelled dust, acrid and irritating. He sneezed. Then came the pain. His forehead felt on fire. His eyes were open, but he couldn't see until the darkness irised and revealed another, even more profound black. He was in chains.
His wrists and ankles were shackled to a brass bar with a ring on each end. Chains extended from the rings to another bar a few yards away. Shackled to that bar was a skeleton, clothes and dried skin floating in tatters on its translucent yellow bones.
He was weightless. All around was the ineffable presence of something huge, moving. Within a feeble gray illumination Michael could see nothing but chains, bars and more bodies.
He was floating in a graveyard. He shut his eyes and probed outward to the limit of his range. Only uncertain murmurs came back to him. The impressions were strong enough to convince him that he was at the center of the brass cylinder, and that the cylinder was an outpost of the Maln - an extension of the IraJl.
Michael probed again, and suddenly withdrew cringing as a voice blasted him. He threw up his shields, but they were not strong enough to mask the power, and the hatred.
"For your crimes, antros, for all the creatures that have died that you might eat their flesh; for all that have loved you and been betrayed, for all the so very human things you have done. Together we face a mystery, antros."
It was the voice of Tarax. The Sidhe emerged from the darkness, standing on a brass platform.
"Who are you?" Tarax asked, white hair
floating in a nimbus around his head.
"I am a poet," Michael said, feeling none of the hesitance or awkwardness he would have once experienced on naming his occupation, his obsession.
"That means nothing to me. Who are you, that you should be protected, that I am prevented from killing you." Now even Adonna requests you. Frankly, I am puzzled. Who are you?"
"What does Adonna want?" Michael's throat was dry from inhaling the acrid dust.
"I do not know. I have served Adonna for a long, long age, and kept his secrets, and admired his creation-"
"His?"
"You are his now. I do not need to be discreet with you. In fact, I have only one function to perform, and since time means nothing to Adonna, I do not need to be hasty. I know these things about you: that you are an evil; that your worst crime is not the theft of a horse. It is being human. and helping the one who calls himself Isomage. You would bring a Song of Power to him, would you not?"