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It was nigh on two days, they told her later, before Arha emerged from the Undertomb. Before the panicked priestesses, running from the Big House and the orchards upon feeling the earth quake beneath them and hearing the shattering of rocks, had searched all of the Place and failed to find her, and so had turned their attention to the ruins of the temple and excavated the tunnel that had once been closed by a red rock door.
Before she had heard their voices, and the scraping of their hands, she could not make count of the time. All about her the earth had heaved and bent, and she had been cast to her knees upon the strange and flowing stone floor of the Undertomb, its pools and rivulets perpetually frozen, and she had heard stones fall and crash from the tunnels, in the Room of Chains, in the Labyrinth from which she had come. Arha had cowered and hidden her head beneath her arms, even knowing that it would be of no use should the roof of the Undertomb crumble as well and drop upon her. Her bones would be as dry twigs against the anger of the dark places under the earth, the anger that had swelled against the sorcerer and herself with every step they had taken out of the Treasury and up towards the surface.
But the Undertomb had not destroyed her. Its arched roof had sheltered her, and once the earth was finished trembling it had left her alone, in the dark, in the silence. She heard nothing but her own heartbeats, and felt herself blinking with no change to the darkness. She wept, the tears which had begun when she had wrenched her hand out of Ged’s and drawn back into the tunnel, back away from the daylight. She wept in the knowledge that everything had been changed, and by her hands as well. She wept that she did not know now what was right to do, or even what she wished to do. And most of all she wept from shame, as the gods did not even deign to destroy her for all her transgressions against them. Instead, they turned their thought away from her, and left her alone with the choice of what to do in response to that silence.
When she had danced the dances of the dark of the moon, or poured out the sacrifices upon the stones, she had thought she knew what it was to be in the presence of the gods, what it meant to be their servant among men. The hot, sticky blood had dried on her hands, so eminently present in its coppery scent and heavy texture; the heady herbs had filled her mind with pleasure and awareness of every movement of her muscles and with the imagination of the ghosts of endless ages crowded into the Hall to watch and sing with her. She had thought that that was the quintessence of holiness: to unquestionably feel, to unshakably know, that the gods were there.
But now, to their servant who had been offered the light and had rejected it, to Arha whom the Inner Lands had refilled the emptiness of and who had poured herself out again in despite of that, the Nameless Ones granted the greatest blessing that the unnameable darkness could offer: they gave her their absence.
The stone upon which Arha lay was just stone. The air that rasped through her throat was just air, and the cold that seeped through the wool of her robes, that cramped her fingers and toes with crushing pain and then with numbness, was only the traces of the winter seeping down. It was not their punishment. It was not their curse. It was not evidence of their power or of their hunger. It simply was.
Arha had been reborn ever as herself since the very earliest days, when the islands of the Kargad lands had been but new-risen out of the sea. And yet in days to come, it would be said that never had she known the truth of the Powers more fully, more surely, than when beneath their shattered temple, and in their empty tomb, they left her alone, for time to pass unmarkedly by.
And then a voice echoed from the direction of the tunnel, faint and hesitant, but there. “Hallo? Does anyone yet live below?”
“I am here,” Arha said, and had risen and made her way to the wall, and running her fingers over the sharp forms of the crystals that lined it she had hurried to the mouth of the tunnel, repeating, “I am here.” And as she stepped into the tunnel she found that it was grey within, and the corners of the rough-hewn walls and floor could be distinguished by eye and not just by finger, and glancing up she espied a glimmer of silver sky. Hurrying up to it, she heard the voices raised again in oaths and cries of gratitude, and dark forms before that sky shifted and became women’s figures. One of them reached in and pulled a cabbage-sized stone from the rim of the opening as she watched. They had been digging, she realized: digging to release anyone who had been caught in the Undertomb or the Labyrinth when the gods had borne down the stones.
The gap they had made was nonetheless small, barely the width of her shoulders; Arha had to twist sideways to get out, crawling with an animal’s indignity and scraping her back and hands and shoulders. The hood of her cloak was tugged back off her hair to catch at her throat, and the hands of all the other priestesses seized her as soon as they could, pulling, guiding, passing her along until she got her feet beneath her again and could blink in the opalescent half-light of an evening hurrying to night.
And then another set of footsteps ran up, and the hands passed her towards them. “Oh, Arha!” Penthe cried, and embraced her, enveloping her in warmth and the grit of broken stone. She too had been helping to dig, Arha presumed, as her chin was crushed against Penthe’s shoulder. “Oh, you are all right! I had feared that you were in the Hall - we just heard a terrible rumbling, and when I ran out from the Big House we saw the Hall had fallen! And I could not find you, or Kossil - but if she is not with you, and she has not come back - but -“ Penthe gripped her even more tightly, and swayed back and forth, as though to finally fully loosen Arha from the grip of the earth the way one might loosen a turnip from the garden.
Finally, she released her and stood back reluctantly. “I am so glad you are unhurt, Arha. I do not know what I would have done if you were buried. What happened?”
“My masters are displeased,” she said, and that was true enough. She had felt their displeasure, been terrified of it until it had briefly seemed to her preferable to flee from them entirely, to follow the sorcerer and his empty promises out and away from the Place entirely, from Atuan entirely to their strange and hostile lands. But at the threshold she had mastered herself; she had been true, and had turned away from the false dawn of his offering back into the dark and her true lords. And they had not ended her life, not even as the Undertomb had trembled around her and the earth had rent itself above. They still had need of her; there was service they still wished to come from her hands, and not those of the Arha who would be born after her.
A sage-scented breeze picked up the hems of her robe, and her hair, and drew them both outwards as black banners against the opal sky. Arha turned and faced the ruins of the Hall of the Throne, its shattered stone and great splintered trusses of ancient cedar brought low. The arm-ring she wore bit coldly at her wrist and through the roughspun wool over her stomach as she clasped her hands in front of her. “For too long,” Arha said, “have the Lands and their people neglected the worship of the Dark, and forgotten the fear of the Powers of the Earth. For was it not true that of old, all corners of the nation would come, and send tribute, and pay homage to the Nameless Ones? But now the Godking sends no sacrifices but criminals he wants forgotten, and the Hall of the Throne was allowed to decay until its fall is less distasteful to my lords than its standing.”
“And this is the will of my masters, who have spoken to their mistress in the empty places beneath the hill. Anew shall their temple be built and their stones be raised, and anew shall their worship be kindled, from Karego-At to the furthest reaches of Hur-at-Hur. Anew shall sacrifices be made to them, in the four corners of the land; all shall relearn the fear and the awe of the Powers. Such is the word,” said Arha, who had twice been eaten, who had twice known the beauty of light and life and turned away from it to the enduring truth of the dark, “and such is the will that I bring from these last days.
“High priestess and first servant of the God-King,” she addressed Penthe, who blinked, as though in sudden curtain-thrown daylight. Clearly she had not spent much time over the last two days contemplating her role, now that Kossil had been devoured by the Dark Ones just as she had been cursed to do. “You must go to Awabath, to be thus ordained. And when you do so, I too shall come. And together,” Arha said, her hands weighed down with silver, and her shadow streaming out black from her across the hills as the sun fell, “we will reawaken the lands to the worship, and the powers, they forgot.”