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“I just want to understand.”
Daniel sighed. “Do as you will. Travel t
he red path. But I wonder whether what is good and strong in you will outweigh the weakness and selfishness.”
“I don’t know what—” But he was gone, and my final two words were said to the air. “—you mean.”
The red path. I was at once at its base. Above me I could no longer see the diamond-topped temple for the massive bulk of the mountain that stretched from the far left of my view to the far right, so that to see anything else I had to turn my back on the mountain. And yet, when I did, I no longer saw the endless sea of desiccated mud. I saw only the yellow mist, mocking me, denying me even the sense that I had come to this place of my own free will. Had that whole long walk been an illusion? Was this black and sinister mountain the same?
The path was a darker, deeper red upon closer inspection, and made of rectangular flagstones six feet long and half as wide. They were each translucent, with suggestions of shapes and forms I could only glimpse buried down within them, like flies caught forever in amber. I peered closely, but the shapes within only suggested and never revealed. Yet I felt certain that something that had once been human was within each of those terrible stones.
I stepped onto the path, and at once I felt a rush of grief and sadness. There was loss and pain and guilt. And though I saw no face, still less any human action, I felt there was something specific about the stone, something individual.
The next stone was similar but not identical. Here the emotion that seemed to rise through my feet and legs to touch my heart was darker, less of grief than of rage.
I knew at a glance that I could not climb this entire path encountering such disorientating feelings with each of the thousands of steps it would require, so I called again on the power that messengers—and their apprentices—can control, and propelled myself more quickly along. Even then I felt a seething sea of emotion vying for the attention of my heart, like a tide dragging at a weary swimmer.
I rushed up that path and passed a woman. She did not see me, moving in a trance like a sleepwalker, crying softly to herself. I passed a man, and later a child, and later still a very old man, and each person looked through me, and each sighed or cried or moaned. I stopped once to look back down the path, and saw that the mist, my faithful if unwelcome companion, was swallowing the path behind me. I seemed now to be on a peak that rose from cloud. Above me I saw the pyramid and indeed it did seem to have been carved or blasted or compressed out of the very mountain itself.
Still I climbed, and passed more hopeless souls, and came finally to what I had expected to find: an arched doorway large enough to allow an elephant to pass through with room to spare.
And above that door were letters. They were in a script I had never seen, but somehow I understood their meaning. Iron letters twenty feet tall spelled SHEOL.
I almost laughed, for of course the pronunciations were so very close. Shoals. Sheol.
Except that one meant a dangerous and concealed peril beneath the surface of water; and the other was an ancient word, a Hebrew word, though I suspected it had come down to them from more ancient peoples still, from cursed, forgotten cities at the edge of wastelands.
Sheol.
In English: hell.
20
MESSENGER HAD TOLD ME THAT THOSE WHO WON the game walked away. Those who lost the game endured punishment. Those whose minds survived the punishment were free. And those whose minds did not survive the game descended into madness and were brought to the Shoals.
To Sheol.
He’d also said—or was it Oriax—that there were those who escaped this place. But how? I did not know.
I entered the gate and there, as if the thought had summoned her, stood Oriax. Ah, but not quite the Oriax I had known. At first glance she might be mistaken for the old Oriax, but as I looked I saw that her beauty, the flawless skin, the Victoria’s Secret body, the bewitching eyes all felt thin, like a layer of paint applied over something very different. The image of beauty kept fluctuating, growing lighter and dimmer, clearer and then more fractured, like trying to get a TV signal on an old set with nothing but a wire coat hanger antenna.
“Well, well, if it isn’t mini-Messenger. I must confess: I did not expect to see you here so soon.”
It was her voice, but not, for the irresistible seduction was absent. That slithering, insinuating, fingers-stroking-bare-flesh voice was ragged now, roughened, coarsened. This was the voice of barely contained rage, not the voice of promised pleasures beyond imagining.
She advanced on me, but stopped quite suddenly. I believe it was because she saw that I was not responding. I believe absent her magic, Oriax knew she had no power over me.
“Why have you come, Mara?”
“To find Ariadne, if she’s here.”
She laughed, but oh, it was not Oriax’s wry mockery, but a parody of same, a parody performed by a less-than-convincing actor.
“Madness lies within. Do you seek madness, Mara?”
“Your hooves are showing.”
They were. The boots flickered in and out, a bit of computer graphics trickery when the software has been hacked. Oriax was the green screen onto which visual lies had been projected, but the special effects no longer quite worked.
