Chapter 11 Chapter 10 The Wrath of Darkness

Hearing her say this, the man named Ged put out a hand and took her hands holding the two halves of the broken ring.She looked up in surprise, and saw that smiling face shining with vitality and victory.She was flustered and fearful of him. "We are free, and you have freed us both," he said, "none of us, individually, to be free. Quick, don't waste a moment while we still have time! Lift up the two broken rings. "She had already tightly grasped the broken ring, listened to his request, then let go of her fingers, raised her hand, and touched the broken rings to each other.

He didn't reach for the ring, but stretched out his fingers to cover it; he said a few words, and sweat immediately broke out on his face.She felt a strange vibration in her palm, as if a small animal that had been sleeping there was squirming slightly after waking up.Ged sighed, his tension relaxed, and wiped his forehead with his hand. "Okay." He said, took the ring of Eriyabai and put it on her right hand. It was a little tight when it passed through the width of the palm, but it could still be pushed to the wrist. "It's done!" He looked at it with satisfaction: "It's just right, it must be an armband for women or children."

"Won't it fall?" She murmured nervously, feeling the silver ring wrapped around her slender arm, cold and delicate. "It won't fall off. To repair this ring of Eriyabai, you can't just repair the water pot like the village witch. I have to use the shape and meaning spell to restore it. Now it is restored, as if it was never broken. We We must go, Tenar. I'll get the bag and the water bottle, and you put on your cloak. Anything else?" As she fumbled awkwardly for the keyhole to open the door, he said, "I wish I had my wand." Still whispering, she replied, "The cane is right outside the door. I brought it just now."

"Why did you bring the stick?" He asked curiously. "I wanted to... take you to the gate and let you go." "You can't do that. You have to keep me a slave, or set me free and go with me. Now, little one, take courage and turn the key." She turned the small dragon-handled key and opened the door in the low dark corridor.She walked out of the great treasure room of the mausoleum wearing the Ring of Eriabah in her hand, and the man followed her. At this time there was a small vibration in the rock wall, the floor and the vaulted roof. The sound was not loud, like a distant thunder, or something big fell from a distance.

Her hair stood on end involuntarily, but she didn't stop to think why, but immediately blew out the candles of the tin lantern.She heard the movement of the man behind her, and his deep voice: "Let's leave the lantern, and I can use a witch's staff to make light if necessary. What time is it outside now?" He was so close that his breath blew on her Slightly. "It was long after midnight when I came." "In this case, we must act quickly." But he didn't move.She understood that she must lead the way, only she knew the way out of the Great Labyrinth, and he waited to follow.So she started walking.The tunnel was rather low, and she had to walk stooped, but not at a slow pace.A cool air blew from the invisible fork, and a pungent wet and cold smell floated up from below, it was the dead smell of a huge hollow.When the passage was higher and she could stand up straight, she slowed down and counted the number of steps she took to approach the huge pit.The man followed her not far behind, walking slowly and paying attention to all her movements.When she stops, he stops too.

"Here comes the crater," she whispered, "I can't find the path. No, it's not here. Be careful, the rock seems to be loose... No, no, wait a minute!! It's loose!!" Her feet shook, and she quickly dodged back to keep herself safe.The man grabbed her arm and hugged her.Her heart was pounding. "That trail is not safe, the rocks are loose." "I'll make some light and see, maybe I can fix them with the right words. Never mind, little one." It felt strange to hear a man address her the way Manan was used to calling her.At the end of his wand there was a gleam of light that looked like an ember of wood or a starlight in the mist.He walked up the narrow path beside the pitch-black giant pit, and she suddenly saw a large black shadow not far in front of him.She knew it was Manan, but her voice was stuck in her throat, as if strangled by a noose, and she couldn't scream.

Manan leaned forward to push the man aside from the unsteady stomping place into the huge pit, and Ged looked up in time to see Manan, and with a momentary cry of surprise or irritation, he raised his wand and swung it out.With the cry, the shimmering light from the witch's staff became unbearable, and it directly hit the eunuch's eyes.Manan raised a big hand to shield his eyes from the light, and at the same time he tried to catch Ged, but he missed and fell into the hole. He didn't cry out as he fell.There was no sound coming from the huge black pit, no sound of his body falling to the bottom of the pit, no scream of his death, nothing.Clinging tremblingly to the edge of the step, Ged and Tenar knelt on their knees with stiff legs, and listened intently, but heard nothing.

The light faded to a gray speck, almost invisible. "Come!" said Ged, holding out his hand for her to hold.After taking three steps, he led her down the stepping path.He extinguished the spell light, and she led the way again.She was numb and her mind went blank. After walking for a while, she suddenly thought: Is it the right or the left? She stopped. Ged stopped a few steps behind her, and asked softly, "What's the matter?" "I'm lost, make some light and see." "get lost?" "I...I didn't count how many turns I turned just now."

"I'll forget it," he said, walking closer. "After the giant hole, there was a left turn, then a right turn, and then another right turn." "Then it should be another right turn," she blurted out without thinking, without moving her feet. "Create some light and see." "Tenar, light can't tell us the way." "There's nothing to tell us the way. The way is out of order and we're lost." Silence drowned and consumed her murmurs. In the cold darkness, she felt the movement and body temperature of another person.He groped for her hand and held it. "Go on, Tenar. Take the next turn to the right."

"Make some light," she begged. "The tunnel is too winding..." "I can't help it. I don't have the strength to move it to make light. Tenar, they... they know we left the great treasure room, they know we walked through the great pit, and now they come to us. They want to find our will, our The spirit of the world, in order to destroy it, to devour it. I must suppress them, and I am concentrating on doing this. I must resist them, and I depend on your assistance. We must go on." "There's no way out," she said, but took a step, and then another, hesitating as if under each step there was a dark, hollow chasm, and beneath the chasm was the subterranean void.Her hand was in the warm and firm palm of the man.They move forward.

It seemed a long time before they reached the great flight of steps.The steps were no more than grooves in the rock, and as they climbed they found they were not so steep the previous time.After climbing this steep ladder hard, the next step was a little faster, because she knew that this curve was very long and there was no side branch in the middle.Her fingers touched the left wall as a guide and touched a left opening. "Here," she muttered, but Ged seemed to back away instead, as if there was something in her movement that made him suspicious. "No." She whispered in confusion: "It's not this one that turns left, it should turn left at the next one. I don't know, I can't walk, there is no way out." "We are going to the painting room," a quiet voice sounded in the darkness, "how should we go?" "Skip this opening and turn left at the next opening." She leads the way.After completing the long circuit, they jumped over two wrong forks in the middle, and walked to the branch road leading directly to the painting room. "Just go straight." She said softly.Coming here, the long and tangled darkness is no longer so thick. She is familiar with the passages leading to the iron gate, and she has counted the turns on the way no less than a hundred times.As long as she didn't try to think about it, the strange weight on her heart couldn't disturb her.But the further they advanced, the closer they came to the weight, which made her legs so tired and heavy that she struggled to move, and once or twice she even burst into sobs.The man next to her took a deep breath and held his breath again and again, as if a person was trying his best to do something very strenuous.Sometimes he would burst out, uttering a few words or single sounds, sometimes softly, sometimes sharply.In this way, they finally came to the iron gate, but she suddenly raised her hand in fright. The iron gate was open. "Quick!" She said, pulling her companion through the iron gate.Then, she stopped. "Why is it on?" she said. "Because your mistresses have to use your hand to help them close the door." "We're here..." Her voice died before she finished speaking. "Come to the Dark Center. I know, but we're out of the Great Labyrinth. Which way out of this tomb?" "Only one. The door you came in won't open from the inside. The way out is through the tomb, up the passage, and to the trapdoor in the room behind the throne. That's in the throne room." "Then we must go that way." "But there she is," whispered the girl, "in the vault, digging the empty grave. I can't get past her. Oh, I can't get past her again!" "At this time, she left early." "I can't go in." "At this very moment, Tenar, I am trying to hold the roof of the cave above our heads, and keep the walls from closing in on us, and keep the ground from cracking. From the giants who just passed by with their servants watching and waiting After the pit, I have been doing this. Since I can stop the earthquake, are you still afraid to face a mortal with me? You have to trust me like I trust you! Come with me." They move on. The endless tunnel suddenly unfolded.They entered the Tianshan cave under the tombstone, and a wave of open air hit them head-on, and the darkness expanded at the same time. They began to follow the right wall and circle around the outside of the tomb.Tenar stopped a few steps away. "What's that?" she murmured, barely leaving her lips.In the great, dead, dark chamber came a noise, a vibration or jolt that could be heard in the blood and felt in the bones.The wall under her fingertips, those rock walls carved by time, are making soft noises. "Go forward," said the man, his voice sharp but tense. "Quick, Tenar." As she lumbered forward, she shouted in her heart, which was dark and shaken as much as this underground cave: "Forgive me, oh, my mistress of all ages, oh, the nameless one, the longest dead soul, forgive me, Forgive me!" no answer.There has never been an answer until now. They went to the tunnel under the throne room, climbed the steps to the last step, and saw the trap door just above their heads.The trapdoor was closed, as she had always been in and out.She reached for the spring that opened the trapdoor, but it wouldn't open. "The door is broken," she said. "It's locked." He ran over her from behind, butting with his back.The door still didn't move. "The door wasn't locked, it was just held down with some sort of weight." "Can you open it?" "Maybe. I suppose she's waiting outside the door. Does she have a valet?" "Dubi and Uto, and possibly other administrators—men are not allowed in the Throne Hall—" "I can't cast the opening technique, block the people waiting outside, and at the same time resist the will of darkness." He was thinking, and his voice was calm: "We have to try the other door, the rock door I came in. Does she know that door can't be opened from the inside?" "She knew, she let me try once." "Then she might ignore the door. Come on, Tenar!" She had already fallen down on the stone steps.The stone steps buzzed and vibrated, as if someone was pulling a huge noose violently deep in the ground. "The shock—what's the matter?" "Let's go." His voice was so reliable and determined that she couldn't help but climb down the stone steps and return to the terrifying cave.At the entrance, an unseen but terrible weight of resentment weighed on her, as heavy as the earth itself.She flinched and couldn't help shouting, "Here they are! Here they are!" "Then let them know we're here." The man said, a bright white light burst out from his wand and two hands, like sea waves breaking through the sky under the sun, colliding with the roof and walls thousands of times. complement each other.The two ran across the tomb in this bright light, their shadows running among the white veins and glowing crevices of the rock, into the empty open tomb.They ran to the low door, into the tunnel, bowing forward, she leading, he following.In the tunnel, the rocks rumbled and the ground beneath them shook, but the bright light stayed with us.Just when she saw the dead rock wall in front of her eyes, she suddenly heard a series of words from the man beyond the thunder of the earth, and she couldn't help falling to her knees, while his witch's staff flew over her head and hit her tightly. The closed Red Rock Gate.The rock burned white-hot as if on fire, and then burst open. Outside is the sky, with the fish belly white before dawn, and a few white stars hang high in the sky lonely and cool. Tenar looked at the stars and felt the pleasant mountain wind on her face, but she did not rise, but fell on her hands and knees, between heaven and earth. In the misty light before dawn, the man's figure turned into a strange shadow, and the shadow turned around and reached out to pull her arm to make her stand up.His face was dark and twisted like a demon.She cringed to get rid of him, and cried out in a hoarse, high-pitched voice that was not her voice but a dead tongue moving in her mouth: "Don't! Don't! Don't touch me—leave me— Go away!" She struggled to move away from him, to shrink back into the collapsing mouth of the lipless mausoleum. He loosened his grip a little, and said in a quiet voice, "By what you're wearing on your wrist, I want you to go, Tenar." She looked at the star-studded silver ring on her forearm, staggered up, and kept her eyes on the silver ring.She gave him her hand to hold, and followed him.She was unable to run fast, and the two could only walk down the mountain.A long, long roar came from the black hole between the rock piles behind them, full of resentment and regret.Rocks rolled down around them, and the ground shook.They continued walking, she still stared at the starlight on her wrist. The two walked to the dark valley to the west of the location and began to climb the mountain.Suddenly, he told her to turn around: "Look——" She turned around to look.They had now crossed the valley and climbed to the level of the tombstones--the nine great steles that stood and lay over the great cavern full of diamonds and graves.She saw that the standing tombstones were shaking, like a ship's mast slowly twisting and tilting.After this tossing, one of them seemed to get taller, but it collapsed immediately after a shudder.Another piece followed, hitting the first piece hard.Behind the tombstone, the low and short dome of the Throne Hall looks black against the yellow light in the east. Even it is vibrating, and the walls of the hall gradually collapse. It disintegrated instantly, and fragments and dust flew in all directions.The land in the valley is undulating and pushing, like waves driving straight to the foot of the mountain.There was a huge gap between the tombstones, and the huge gap seemed to be looking at the dark ground while spit out dust like smoke.The tombstones still standing fell one after another and were swallowed by the giant crack.Then, as if responding to the sky, the cracked black lips rumbled and closed again, and the hills returned to calm after being shaken for a while. After witnessing the frightening earthquake, she turned to look back at the man beside her.She had never seen his face in daylight before. "You quelled the earthquake," she said, and her voice was as high and thin as a breeze among the reeds, having just heard the roar and roar of the land so powerful. "You suppressed the earthquake and the wrath of darkness." "We have to keep going," he said, turning his back on the sunrise and the ruined mausoleum: "I'm tired and cold..." As he stumbled, she helped him.Neither of them could walk fast, at most they could barely drag their pace.They trudged up and down the big slope of the hill, like two little spiders on a big wall.The two stopped when they climbed to the top of the dry land. The rising sun dyed them golden, and the long sparse shadows of the sage grass streaked them.West Mountain towered in front of the two of them, only a purple halo could be seen at the foot of the mountain, but the upper part of the hillside was golden and clear.After the two stood still for a while, they climbed over the top of the slope and continued to move forward. The location of the mausoleum behind them disappeared from sight, and all of this disappeared.