Clarion

CLARION 139

William Greenleaf

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considered the possibility. "Why should he? He has a life outside now."

"Is it a life he wants?"

"You'll have to ask him about that." Paul pushed himself to his feet, suddenly weary of the conversation. "Guess I'll try to get some sleep now." The next morning they ate a breakfast of dried poca and water, then bundled the gear back into their packs.

The tube still held the chill of the night, and Paul fastened the jacket tight around him. He felt distanced from his surroundings. Karyn's question kept surfacing in his mind: Do you think he'll stay here when this is over? He had slept little. When he did fall asleep he'd had bad dreams. Some were about Lord Tern. Others were like bittersweet memories of a woman and a young girl he'd never met. They walked the short distance to the access port where Tube Four intersected with Fara's Tube. Jacque got out his rope ladder and they pulled themselves up, one by one, to the platform. When they descended the spiral tube, they found themselves in an area of vegetation that was so heavy it all but obliterated the ruins. The sound of rushing water was close. The air was crisp.

Dorland stood beside Paul, looking around.

"See anything familiar?" Paul asked. Dorland shook his head. "It was a long time ago."

"Let's move down closer to the river," Karyn suggested.

They spent a few minutes looking for an opening in the dense growth, and it took them another half hour to hack their way through to the river. The water ran fast enough to form little frosted crests as it rushed over hidden boulders. Paul looked closer and realized that not all the obstructions under the water were boulders—he could see a large curved section of pink wall, and piles of pink rubble. The river had changed its course after the city was abandoned, and had driven a channel through an area that had once been populated.

"The edge of the city is down that way," Karyn said, pointing to the left. "It's in pretty bad shape."

"There were quite a few domes still standing in the area my father and I explored," Dorland said.

"We had gone into several of them before we found the square building."

"We'll go this way, then," Karyn said, inclining her head to the right. "We'll run into it eventually." Luck was on their side. They had worked their way along the riverbank for barely half an hour when Dorland stopped so abruptly Paul almost bumped into him.

"There it is," he said, pointing. Paul could barely discern the building through tangled vines and underbrush. The spire had toppled into the river, and twenty meters of it lay underwater. Even though heavy vines covered the structure, its shape was outlined clearly enough to reveal that it was not a dome. It was a large square building like the temple.

Karyn led the way down the mossy bank and

stopped several meters from the building.

"Let's look around," she said. "No need to rush into this."

She sounded edgy, and Paul couldn't blame her. He felt the tension, too.

As far as Paul could see, the building was designed and constructed exactly like the temple. It looked to be in remarkably good shape except for the side near the river, where the crumbling bank had undermined the building's foundation. The resultant settling had opened a gaping crack in one wall, and the roof sagged. A walking path or narrow roadway had once come up to the building but was now all but obliterated by trees and underbrush William Greenleaf

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that had grown up through the broken surface. Vines covered the open archway, obstructing their view inside.

"Is it safe to go in?" Paul asked. Beside him, Jacque was already using his knife to cut away the heavy, clinging vines. He grinned at Paul and said, "Guess we'll find out." They hacked their way through and stepped

cautiously into a room that smelled of damp stone and fungus. Rubble from a fallen section of the ceiling was strewn across the floor. Vines had crept in through the archway and the crack in the far wall to spread across the floor and up the walls, clinging to broken stones and chunks of debris. One interior wall had collapsed, and the high ceiling sagged.

"In here," Karyn said. She had gone to a low archway and was looking into another room.

Jacque remained in the outer corridor as a sentry while Paul and the others followed Karyn through the archway. If the interior layout of this building was the same as that of the Holy Order's temple—

and Paul knew it would be—then this room would be equivalent to the sacred chamber in the temple. Inside, they found the same pattern of clustered pedestals that Paul and Dorland had seen in the sacred chamber. Vines had crept over them to create eerie hummocks of vegetation. Light filtered through a jagged crack in the wall.

Paul turned to say something to Dorland, then realized that Borland's attention had gone to something in the center of the room. Following his gaze, Paul saw an outline of something that was nearly buried under crumbled debris, clinging vines and centuries of accumulated dust.

"It's another chauka" Dorland said in a strained voice.

The general shape was right, and the object's position 'would put it in the same place as the chauka's in the sacred chamber.

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