A great face of the crag had fallen, and within, Aerin saw stairs winding up into the black mountain, red with torchlight; and her army turned its eyes on her, and panted, and many of their mouths dripped pink foam, and many of their feet had torn and bleeding pads. Talat was grey with sweat. With the wreath in her hands, and Gonturan banging lifelessly at her side, she stepped carefully through the rubble, and through the ranks of her army, many of whom touched her lightly with their noses as she passed them, and set her foot on the first stair.

THE STAIRS WENT UP and up in a long slow spiral, and Aerin followed, turning round and round till it seemed to her she must be climbing the well of the sky and at the end of the staircase she would step onto the moon’s cold surface and look down, far away, upon the green earth. For a little while she could hear her friends, who waited restlessly at the foot of the stair; once she heard the thinnest thread of a whine, but that was all. None tried to follow her. Then she could no longer hear anything but the soft sound of her footsteps and the occasional slow stutter of a guttering flame. Her legs ached with climbing, and her back ached with tension, and her neck ached with keeping her head tipped up to look at the endless staircase; and her mind ached with thoughts she dared not think. Daylight had disappeared long since, had gone with the last sounds of her beasts; the light in her eyes was red. In the edges of her vision she saw gaping black doors that led into chambers she would not imagine, let alone turn her gaze to see; and sometimes the soft noise of her footsteps echoed strangely on a stair that opened into such a room.

The silence weighed her down; the air grew heavier with every step up. She recognized the weight, though she had never felt it thus before: evil. Maur’s breath had stunk of evil, and its words had set evil tracks in her mind; but she had faced Maur on the earth and under the sky, not in a dark endless airless tower. She struggled on. With each step she felt her ankles and shinbones jar against the floor, and tendons grate across her kneecaps, the heavy thigh muscles twist and curl, her hips grind in their sockets. Her right ankle began to ache.

She was still carrying the surka wreath, and as she thought of Maur she remembered the red stone she had taken with her from its ashes, and remembered that she carried the stone even now. She had a moment’s cold dread, wondering if she were carrying her own betrayal into Agsded’s lair; but she put her hand into the breast of her tunic, and drew out the little soft pouch where the stone lay. The stone was hot to the touch when she let it fall into her palm from the pouch, and it seemed to writhe in her fingers; she almost dropped it, but she thought of spiders and surka leaves, and held on; then shook it back into its pouch, and curled her fingers around it._

Still she climbed, but she no longer felt alone. Evil was with her; red evil shone in her eyes, rode on her shoulders, harried her heels; waited in the dark doorways where she would not look, fell like ash and rose like smoke from the torches. Evil was all around her, and it watched her, eyelessly, watched for her first stumble. Still the stairs rose before her, and still her weary legs carried her up; she wondered how many days she had spent climbing stairs, and if her army had disbanded by now, and she worried about Talat, who was wearing his saddle and gear. She should have remembered to strip it off before she entered the dark tower.

The red light throbbed in time to her own pulse; she panted in a rhythm begun by its fluctuations; the sweat that ran into her eyes was red, and it burned. And now she had something else to worry about, for where she had touched the tender skin of her throat with her surka-sticky fingers when she pulled at the thong that held the dragon stone’s pouch, it burned too. But its throb had nothing to do with the tower. It throbbed angrily and self-consciously, and her mind was distracted enough to think, This is typical. On my way to gods know what unspeakable doom, and I break out in a rash. But it lightened the evil a little; she did not notice this as such, only that she toiled on in a slightly better spirit. Idly she pulled one end of her collar loose and pressed it against the surka rash, which didn’t help at all.

Up. And still up. Everything ached; it was impossible to tell the leg cramps from the headache any more; the only thing about her that still bore any individuality was the surka rash on her chest, which was spreading. Up. She had been climbing forever; she would be climbing forever. She would be a new god: the God That Climbs. It was no more improbable than some of the other gods: the God That Isn’t There, for example (more often known as the God That Follows or the God That Goes Before), which was the shadow-god at midday. The rash had also begun to itch, and she had to curl her surka-stained fingers into fists to stop herself from scratching the too sensitive skin on her neck and chest. And still she climbed. The heat in the red stone now beat at one hand even through the pouch; and the crisp leaves of the surka pinched the fingers of the other hand.

When she came to the top she did not believe it. She stood dumbly, looking at the black hallway before her, opening from a black doorway like all the other doorways she had straitly passed on her long spiral ascent; but now the stairs were ended, and she must cross this threshold or turn around and go back. There were no torches lighting this hall; the last of them threw their shadows at her from half a dozen steps below. And suddenly those shadows flickered, though there was no draught, and she knew there was something on the stairs behind her, and she plunged forward into the darkness.

She would have said she had no strength left for running, but she did run. Gonturan banging painfully against her ankle, although her feet were numb with climbing. Then she saw that the hall was quite short, for the blackness before her was that of double doors, their frames edged with the thinnest line of red light; and she stopped abruptly a few strides from them, her muscles quivering and her knees threatening to dump her full length on the floor for the thing coming up the stairs to find.

She leaned against the outer edge of one door, her back to the narrow wall where it joined the corridor wall; her breath whined in her throat. Thank Luthe for the thoroughness of my cure, she thought as she felt the thick air surging into the bottom of her chest, being hurled out again, and a fresh lungful captured. The rash on her chest throbbed with extra enthusiasm as she panted, and the skin above her ribcage had to heave and subside more quickly. Well, thorough about the important thing, she amended.

Luthe. She had not thought of him, had not quite said his name even in the dimmest, most private recesses of her mind, since she had left him. She had said she would come back to him. Her breathing eased; even the evil air seemed to taste less foul. Luthe. She looked down the hallway, but saw nothing coming toward her. Perhaps it is Nothing, she thought. Perhaps that is what follows here. She looked down at her hands. She could not open the doors behind her—supposing they opened in the usual fashion—with both hands full. She knelt down, kicking the tip of Gonturan to one side so she jammed up into a corner and gave Aerin’s armpit a sharp poke with her hilt, and put the hidden stone and the green wreath on the stone floor. Slowly she upended the leather bag, and the hot red stone spilled out, burning in its own light, long red tongues of that light snaking down the corridor and up the walls. It made her dizzy. She prodded the wreath and made a small hollow in the twined stems, hastily picked up the stone as it tried to scorch her fingers, and dropped it in. It sizzled and hissed, but the surka seemed to quench it, and the red light subsided. Aerin pulled the leaves back over it again, shook the wreath to be sure it could not fall out, and stood up.