“Lookit, lookit!” but only one or two were willing to step onto the beam so long as that blue fire burned.
The beam curved around to the outside of the bowl, entering it, as was the tradition, from seaward. Diverus ran, looking, seeing only an unoccupied bowl. With each step his anxiousness swelled.
The brown tiles continued as a motif into the refurbished bowl, circling it in a pattern that Diverus recognized immediately as a maze. And lying in the depressed center of the maze was Leodora, on her back with her red hair fanned out like blood around her head.
He ran across, unheedful of the maze pattern: He wasn’t entering the bowl to capture the gods’ goodwill; he didn’t care.
He slid to his knees beside her. Her face was flushed or sunburned. He touched her, and she was warm as with a fever. Warm, which meant alive. He rejoiced, at the same time trying to recall if he had been similarly affected, but all he could remember of it was confusion upon awaking.
Behind him at the entrance to the bowl, Soter collapsed—peripherally Diverus saw the old man spiral into a heap like a broken puppet clinging in anguish to the wall. Soter’s crust of pomposity fell away and revealed his true concern for Leodora. With a sharp stab of pity, Diverus said to him gently, “She’s only sleeping.” Soter glanced sharply up. The agony in his expression was slow to allow hope.
“It lit up,” he said, “the gods—”
“The gods have favored her,” Diverus replied, adding, “At least, if they haven’t driven her mad, they have.” He recalled that not one of the others who’d been in the Dragon Bowl with him had walked away sane.
“And if they have?” Soter asked, clinging to his misery.
Diverus had no answer for that, saying only, “We should move her off the beam before that crowd comes out here and picks her apart. They will, as soon as the blue fire dies, and they won’t be reasonable.” Already the strange fire was dwindling.
Soter cast him a peculiar look, and it was only then that he realized he was explaining situations, giving orders. Where the information came from, he had no idea. There had been no blue flame when he’d been in the Dragon Bowl of Vijnagar. Why would he possess such authority and foreknowledge? Right now there was no time to ponder it.
Quickly, then, they each took one of her arms and placed it over their shoulders, supporting Leodora between them. Diverus, as he did this, saw a chain dangling from her loosely closed hand. He tugged gently upon it, and a gold object slipped from between her fingers. In the same instant her eyes opened and gazed blankly at him, closing again almost as fast. Soter could not have seen it. He took a step up the bowl, but Diverus cried, “Wait!”
“What is it?”
“I think we have to walk the pattern out of here.”
Soter seemed to consider the maze for the first time. “Did she walk it coming in?”
“I don’t know. But I think we have to if we’re to take her out, to protect her. The gods embedded it, we have to assume it applies.” He glanced toward Colemaigne; the blue glow along the rail was flickering out. “And we’d best hurry.”
Supporting Leodora between them, they walked the brown-tiled maze from the center out, around and around the bowl, out to the edge but looping in closer to the center again. Finally, on the fifth tier of lines, they arrived at the lip where the brown tiles led onto the dragon beam. Before they could even step onto the beam, the first and most daring of the citizens blocked their way, not menacing but anxious. “Is anything in the bowl—she have anything on her?”
“No,” Diverus lied. “But the pattern has appeared, you see?”
“Then . . . oh, my.”
“You should walk it,” Soter suggested, but the man wasn’t staring into the bowl. He was gaping at the view beyond it, at the span itself. Soter and Diverus craned their heads to follow his gaze, discovering that the row of buildings lining the sea-lane, all of which had been ruins before the blast of light, now stood whole and gleaming, newly formed.
“The gods did come! We’re blessed again!” the man cried, and leapt past them into the Dragon Bowl. Disregarding Diverus’s advice, he charged into the center of it across the lines of the maze.
Soter and Diverus wasted no more time, but carried their unconscious friend