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IX

When we'd topped the first mesa, and reached the foot of the smaller one, the Guide reined up. He drove his staff in the earth and hitched the hounds to it, under the Snake's guard. With a gesture, he told us to follow him, and began to climb the rocks.

Defalk's worst agony had barely subsided. He no longer raved aloud, but he kept wiping his hand across his face and jabbering rapidly, in the barest whisper, like a man speaking spells he doesn't want overheard. He scarcely had his legs under him, and the rockface was hundreds of feet high and not far off vertical. There were deep seams and chimneys to climb in, and we kept him between us, but I thought a dozen times he'd topple out, and waste all our toils in a single plunge.

But I'm damned if his giddiness came of fear or a slack will. The man was fighting off the drunkenness of pain and shock. He was in a fierce hurry to clear his head, and soon he was shaking off our hands when we reached to help him. He got steadier as he struggled. Hate and remorse drove him, I suppose. Rack me, Barnar, if I didn't admire poor Defalk then. I even stopped feeling sorry for what I'd had to do to him—I'd brought him his finest hour, you see. He meant not to be dragged before Dalissem. He meant to walk up to her like a man. So he clawed and clutched his way upward, like a daw with a torn wing fighting its way into the sky. I suppose actually he was like a draggled jag, with his fine clothes all rumpled. As for his face, it was something very different now. The soft, self-loving man was gone. What was left was a gaunter face, a vision-troubled face, a bit like a prophet's or a seer's. A smudgy line of blood ran from his puckered lids down to his jaw.

Visions no doubt he was having, images of the place we were now so close to. For I know I was hearing it as we climbed. The cleanness and simplicity of that sound!—the sound of fire and wind. And there was something else, fleeing through that roar, obscured within it, but recognizable. It was a multitude of voices. Voices, I say, not the croaks and chuckles of soultrash, but bursts of thought and passion. I was hearing speech from entire and vital souls celebrating some cryptic, furious triumph. The space and clarity in that sound was intoxicating here in this world of foul, drear pain. I saw Haldar rub his arms and smile with a kind of recognition. Defalk climbed with growing vigor. When we reached the top, and stepped out onto the plateau, he was as firm on his legs as we.

I mean to say we expected to step out onto a plateau. In fact, what we'd had premonitions of was closer than we knew. It's a rare shock to put a gulf behind you, rise up, stride forward, and find a gulf a thousand times as deep before you, and you on its very edge. Plateau there was none. We'd mounted the rim of a giant crater.

Just for a moment, as you looked down into it, you thought that the crater's bottom was covered by a glittering black lake. But the wind that came dodging up out of it, and the roll of echoes through chambers past measuring, taught you to see better. The lake was a hole broken in the crater's bowl. Beneath was a dark cavern system, endlessly deep, where powerful winds drove clots of fire like a blizzard underground.

A flight of stairs cut from the stone descended the wall of the crater—it was a long flat-arching flight, and the steps were narrow. The Guide was halfway down it already, and be waved us after him impatiently. We started down.

There's no conveying how light and breakable you feel, stepping into a dim cauldron of gales like that, and on such a slender track. It was like following an icy goat path crossing the Imau Mountains in a winter storm. But here the winds wrestled and surged and blew in constant contradictions. You scarcely dared brace yourself against them for fear of leaping off with the next shift.

Our downward progress did not reveal much within the gulf. The infinite traffic of fire there showed you flashes of ragged vaulting, or tunnelmouths. The fire itself seemed like a fabric. It flew in mighty banners or was caught in crosswinds and torn to tatters, and we had glimpses of the pit's inhabitants whenever their flight was entangled with the flames. They were too swift and deep to be more than wheeling shapes, smaller than moths to the eye.

Some half-dozen of the last steps marched past the brink and formed a ramp down into the void. The Guide stopped well above this point, and bade us pass him.

"It is for you to call her—stand down."

We eased past the immortal—Haldar was first, Defalk between us. My friend stepped down the last steps, and I thought he moved with an uncanny assurance, a steadiness that did not dread this depth.

"Dalissem!" he shouted. His voice was as nothing in the wind. "Dalissem of Lurkna Downs. Approach. Defalk is delivered to your hands!"

The puny words were erased even as they left his lips, but a freezing updraft followed them like a response, an icy column of wind that pushed against our faces without wavering. Very deep, but directly below the last step's broken edge, there was a small and constant movement. It grew. It was a figure swimming upward.

And that's how she came to us, Barnar, clawing upward out of the dark, her eyes stark, raving bright, her hair twisting in snakes upon her shoulders, her nakedness like a torch in the pit.

Here, movement was no labor to her. She sprang upon the foot of the stairs as light and lithe as a winged cat. She stood arms akimbo, and after nodding to the Guide, she grinned at Haldar and me, and seemed not even to see the man we had brought her. He called to her—his voice had a crack in it: "Dalissem! Forgive me, and take me!"

Even Haldar was surprised enough to tear his eyes off her and look back at Defalk. For my part, when I'd grasped what he'd said, I gaped at him. But Dalissem spoke as if nothing had been said.

"You have brought him then! I chose my men well. Truly, you two are among the greatest of your brotherhood, to have accomplished this!" (I promise you, Barnar, those were her words to the letter.) "Alas, good henchmen, who will ever believe you, if you tell them of this exploit?"

Haldar answered her with a tremor of feeling:

"Lady, for myself, the payment of the exploit is this second sight of you. And I here renounce the Key—let it be wholly Nifft's. Please deign to receive this tender of my chaste and absolute love."

She laughed. "Chaste and otherwise, Haldar Dirkniss. Oh, I'll receive this tender, and far more! As for the key, there is none to renounce. You were deceived with a simulacrum." She laughed again, with ravenous long looks in Haldar's face, and gleeful looks in mine. She was a beauty in truth, with her fat paps, and her loins' black patch, as charged with energy as a cat's hackles. Defalk made a drunken movement but said nothing. I think he was dazed a bit, with the shame of her ignoring him. I was fairly fuddled myself with a shock that was half recognition—the fulfillment of a suspicion I hadn't known I had.

Dalissem raised her arms triumphantly above her and grinned skywards: "Oh, how I've outwitted you, King Death! Great Thief, you are not half so sly as poor Dalissem, poor Dalissem dead these seven years, cheated of love she paid her life for. For look now what she's done! She sneaked back, Your Majesty, and stole the love she had a right to. Oh dear little hawk-faced mortal. Your life on earth is at an end. I chose you instantly I sensed you through the portal of my dying-place, and instantly I knew how much you'd love me. You're mine now—admit the truth!"

"Yes!" cried Haldar, and his voice rang like the harbor bell of Karkhman-Ra.

Then Defalk cried out in his turn:

"Dalissem! Will you speak to me? Will you take me? I was less than you thought—you were more than I understood! But take me now. This man is nothing to you. Remember how we were!"

He looked quite fine then, Barnar, with his one red tear-track, and a new uprightness in his body. He put me in mind of an aging dolphin I once saw sporting, making clumsy leaps out of the water. Defalk's soul was just such a fat old fish, yet here this fleshly fop was managing, with supreme feeling, to heave himself up, and catch a flash of sun upon his back. Dalissem looked at him then. Perhaps she had meant not to, and now gave him this much tribute.

"Well, it is you Defalk! This is pleasant luck, to find you here. I am as you see me."

Defalk hung his head. "I was a little man who assumed he was great. I learned better!"

"But what is this, Defalk. You ask me to take you? You ask me to receive you to my love-in-death? Can it be your spirit does not thrive? Can it be you've weighed your life of kissing arse and crouching before fat purses, and have found it wanting? Can it be that your lady's paintpots and her witless rodent's chatter oppress you?"

"She is a small woman, Dalissem. I am small, and I have not helped her to be more. I ask you to forgive—"

She cut him off: "I readily forgive what is forgotten. You are forgotten, Defalk, now that I have the two minor things I wanted from you: your self-contempt and your jealousy. Thus I am released from the shame of having loved you. Now, Haldar Dirkniss, stand nearer, for I mean to take you to me."

My friend nodded, and stepped down. He wore leather and stout wool, but she put her hands to his chest, and tore away his clothes, and they rent to tatters as easily as dead leaves. She stripped him babe-naked and looked on him with smiling lust and pride. My friend was in a manly state. So, indeed, was I. She gave off desire that pressed physically against you, fierce and steady as the wind. She clasped her hands behind his neck and sprang backwards.

Her leap carried them both far—impossibly far out over the blizzards of fire. They didn't fall, but drifted out, as if gliding on ice—and he mounted her. Then, coupling, they fell in wide, smooth sweeps, wheeling as they slid, then banking, diving, gone.

There was a shout as deep as a bull's. Defalk slowly raised his fists overhead. He roared again, wordless, as if merely trying to break the instrument of his voice. Then he jumped out into the gulf.

Surely the rage of that last cry should have gained him entry into that furious place. But the firestorm did not receive him. As he sprawled out upon the void he did not drift, but hung there, bouncing and jolting and skidding horribly upon the invisible surface of the wind. He could not enter it—the gale's cold, speeding mass erased his substance as he jounced atop it. His hands vanished in a smooth smear of white; his face was rubbed to nothing in an instant; he was gone.

I turned to face the Guide. Slowly but firmly, I climbed to stand before him.

"Lord Guide," I said, looking up into the smoky craters of his eyes, "a great swindle had been worked upon two of the age's foremost thieves. One of them is cheated of his life, though he would not describe it so. But as for me, my lord, I believe some further time up in the sunlight still belongs to me, before I must see your face, and your servant's, a second time. Let this much faith be kept, at least: take me back now to the world of living men."

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Framed