Storm of Ash

by Michelle Kenney

  ‘You and Eli, did you know each other there?’ I added, still caught up in the shadows her words had stirred.

  ‘Eli was always with … Prince Phaethon,’ she responded, eyeing me carefully.

  I nodded, recalling the intense night at the lake. Eli and Prince Phaethon – it was so unlikely, and yet Eli’s eyes had shone in a way I’d never seen before.

  Aelia shot a swift look behind us before leaning closer.

  ‘The Oceanids have existed since the time of the Voynich, in deep oceans and lakes undisturbed by mankind, but there were meetings of the War Council while we were there. Phaethon has been watching Cassius, and his army hasn’t seen battle since ancient times, but he’s gathering his warriors, Tal.’

  I stared at Aelia, the watery echoes of a beating drum reaching through the murkiness in my head.

  ‘He wants Cassius stopped at all costs,’ she finished.

  ‘I … made him a promise,’ I muttered, recalling my trade at the lake.

  She nodded. ‘And I promised to help you.’

  I stared at her elfin profile in the darkness, at the familiar jut of her proud jaw.

  ‘That was my trade, come what may. Course … I would have helped you anyway, just didn’t fancy trading my memory,’ she added nonchalantly.

  I stared at her in amazement.

  It was almost comical, Grandpa’s words being repeated by an Insider on a mission set by an underwater mythical regent.

  ‘He has an army?’ I asked swiftly.

  She frowned, reading my thoughts.

  ‘Yes. But the Oceanids don’t make promises; they just extract them. He also seems to place the fulfilment of the Voynich legacy above all else, but I guess we can hope he notices if we make a right mess of things.’

  There were so many questions on the tip of my tongue as a new noise interrupted the momentum of our feet, making Unus freeze and listen intently. My skin started to crawl as it came again.

  ‘Molossers?’

  Therry appeared out of the gloom suddenly and gripped my hand. ‘Or the rat-owls. Unus rumble, warn them off!’

  I held my finger to my lips, and shot a look at Unus who’d turned his head enough for me to read his grim profile. I recalled only one creature willing enough to take on the strix.

  ‘We stick together,’ Aelia whispered, looking pointedly at me.

  ‘Did Eli take anyone with him when he disappeared?’ I urged, needing to know everything before I said it.

  She shook her head. ‘He left early without Unus. Think he knew we needed him more? He took food and blankets though,’ she added placatingly.

  I nodded, unruffled. It was just like Eli to go looking for a volatile, mythical chimera trusting only to his whispering skills. Somehow I still knew he was OK.

  I shot a look down the dark tunnel ahead. It was silent again but for how long?

  ‘Lia, you know there’s no time for debate,’ I rushed, my mind made up. ‘We all leave Pantheon now and we’ll be running from Cassius for the rest of our lives.’

  I gazed at the courageous, exhausted faces gathering around us and felt my words falter. They’d just risked everything, but in reality there may never be another chance.

  I drew a deep breath.

  ‘Cassius will be expecting a single escape party, and his attention will be on all the tunnel exit points, not the tunnels beneath Isca Pantheon.’

  Aelia’s expression was growing darker by the second.

  ‘There’s a new camp? Of survivors?’ I pushed on, so conscious of time.

  ‘A few, yes. It’s on the south-western border of the Dead City … Your mum is waiting there,’ she filled in suspiciously.

  ‘And you’re convinced, the charioteer we watched fight Max wasn’t …’

  She stared at me, eyes half-closed. ‘Octavia’s favourites always had a test series. Cassius would have only needed to programme his behaviours in August’s absence.’

  ‘Unless he isn’t absent,’ I filled in meaningfully.

  ‘You think he’s here? In Isca Pantheon?’

  My breath quickened, as I threw another glance down the tunnel. It was a huge hunch but one I was willing to stake my life on. If August had returned to Arafel to find it razed, wouldn’t he have come here? To confront Cassius? Wasn’t that what Cassius had meant about having something I wanted?

  A faint clattering reached through the eerie silence. The strix weren’t far away now. Unus reacted instantly, filling the tunnel with a deep rumble that sent the creatures on far enough for the moment.

  ‘Maybe,’ I answered grimly, ‘he’s been gone for months and …’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I made him feel he wasn’t wanted – in Arafel.’

  I’d said it, sort of.

  Aelia was silent for a moment, filling in the gaps. ‘The party of hunters, Komodo and Lynx he journeyed with returned separately,’ she mused.

  I looked at Aelia sharply. This was new.

  ‘I didn’t tell you before now because they said he mentioned one last community to rally. On his own. I took it to mean another Outsider community but the fact he went alone … perhaps he was really talking about one closer to home – if he felt he had nothing to lose?’

  ‘Isca Prolet,’ I breathed.

  We stared at one another, feeling the truth of it all. It was just the sort of thing he would do, knowing Cassius to be responsible for Aelia’s death, knowing he was slowly erasing every free-thinking Prolet that ever existed and believing I didn’t care any more.

  And I have something you want, Talia.

  My stomach rolled over. Perhaps, for once, Cassius really had been telling the truth.

  Another eerie sound, like end of a howl, reached us through solid rock and this time it was close enough to send the strix clattering, their thick, sharp claws making a hollow raking noise as they panicked. One glance at Unus’s hunched shoulders told me we’d done enough hesitating.

  I shot Aelia an intense look – a question. Her iris-blues, so dulled by the circus dust, lit up instantly. I smirked, shaking my head.

  ‘We’re kinda on a promise anyway.’ She shrugged.

  ‘And even if we weren’t,’ I muttered darkly.

  She smiled then and the decision was made.

  Two feral heads. Grief fuelled. Arafel, the Prolet tanks, Ludi, Lake, August, Max, everyone we ever cared about … Livia said emotion made us weak and predictable. But she’d forgotten a basic rule of nature, that flesh once torn often binds tighter and stronger than before.

  I reached a hand forward to touch Unus’s quivering warm arm, indicating a fork just up ahead in the gloom. His whole body was tense as he inclined his broad head towards me.

  ‘Big … dog?’ I whispered.

  He dipped his great head once towards the right, as another faint howl echoed through the rock walls. It was faint but unmistakable, and this time there was no clatter of strix claws – even they’d had the sense not to hang around.

  ‘Not … far … That … way.’

  ‘And the exit is that way, Unus?’ I pointed left.

  He nodded again, his large cerulean eye pale with fear.

  ‘Then take everyone that way,’ I instructed, ‘as fast as you can!’

  ‘Tal … no come …?’

  His eye dilated with gentle hurt. He knew, of course he knew.

  I shook my head briefly, and wasn’t deaf to the collective murmur as my small band of loyal warriors gathered around, their eyes shining like outside stars.

  ‘If I come with you now, Cassius will hound every last one of us until we are dead.’ My voice was low and urgent. ‘Outsiders will no longer exist. He will win … But if Aelia and I split with you now. There’s the tiniest, remotest chance, we can stop Cassius once and for all … and give the outside a real future.’

  My voice was surprisingly steady, hiding the grief welling up inside.

  Was this the last time I would see any of them again?

  And then acquiescence. None spoken,
but in the glint of their eyes, and shuffle of their feet. They understood. It was a last chance for all of us.

  I turned back to Unus and wrapped my arms around him fiercely. He responded in kind and silently, I swore I would wear his courage and friendship like armour.

  ‘I’d like to offer my services? If they can be of use?’ a familiar voice drawled.

  Rajid loomed forward out of the darkness.

  I raised my eyebrows at Aelia who just nodded once. Another pair of hands was always useful, if Rajid could just remember whose side he was on.

  ‘I’ll take the rear,’ Saba volunteered, ‘if Unus can get us through.’

  ‘Yes, now go!’ I encouraged, smiling with so much more conviction than I felt. ‘Tell the others we’re alive, that there’s a plan and they must stay hidden at all costs.

  ‘We’ll join you – when we’re through here.’

  Unus rumbled, handing me his bat lantern. ‘I come back … Rat-owls no like dog …’rember trick.’

  I gritted my teeth, refusing to let him see how much it was costing me to be left behind in the flickering darkness with the creatures of my nightmares. Knowing I was saying goodbye to our best chance of getting out of the tunnels alive.

  ‘No don’t risk it, Unus,’ I whispered. ‘We’ll find another way out. Just get them out, look after everyone … till we get back.’

  He stared at me, his huge moon-face dulling with sadness as he leaned close to whisper. ‘Tal … have heart of Cyclops …’nyway.’

  Then he turned and lumbered away, and one by one our small band of friends followed.

  Leaving the three of us alone in the breathing black.

  Chapter 18

  There was a strange prophetic irony to it. Stealing through the tunnels beneath Isca Pantheon – inked Cerberus out in front, flesh-and-blood hellhound somewhere behind.

  And I still wasn’t sure who I trusted less.

  Rajid had signed his own death warrant by publicly siding with the insurgents, but the image of him standing behind Cassius in the cathedral would never fade either.

  You’ve the memory of an elephant, Tal, the longest in the animal kingdom.

  I could hear the smile in Grandpa’s voice even now.

  Aelia was a step behind me, her steady breath a comfort among the nightmares. I’d never felt so vulnerable, and the odds were so stacked against us it didn’t pay to think about them. And yet, if there was the remotest chance we could tip the balance …

  Astra inclinant, sed non obligant. The stars guide us, they do not bind us. He was right about that.

  My mind kept replaying the moment August’s body collapsed beneath the brutal delivery of Max’s blow. Again and again I watched the sinews of Max’s treehouse-building arm tightening with intent.

  Was it Pantheon that delivered the blow? Or Max? Or me? Had I killed August through words and inaction?

  Not dead. Not dead. He couldn’t be dead.

  ‘Tal … Tal?’

  Aelia’s strained whisper brought me back to the moment. We’d been running stealthily for several minutes now, and had reached another dark fork in the tunnels.

  ‘It’s right – we should keep right for the laboratories,’ she hissed from behind.

  Rajid glanced back, surprisingly calm, as though facing his own gruesome death was an everyday occurrence. But then it probably had been of late.

  He nodded, his blackened tooth appearing even more grotesque in the flickering bat-light, before veering towards the right-hand tunnel. I gritted my teeth. The walls seemed to be compressing and space almost airless. The dirty, gaunt faces of the Prolet children ran through my head. They’d survived for weeks beneath the Dead City on nothing but mangy rodent and rainwater run-off. And now they were paying for having dared dream of another life. They spurred me on.

  Moments later we approached another fork. Rajid hesitated only briefly before selecting the right tunnel. I shuddered. This one was even narrower.

  ‘OK?’ I whispered over my shoulder.

  ‘It’s the right direction,’ Aelia mumbled. ‘Rajid knows these service tunnels better than me, but there’s always a risk …’

  ‘Of running headlong into strix,’ I hissed.

  ‘Of not running headlong into strix,’ she returned. ‘That way we know we’re in trouble.’

  I glanced into the darkness behind us both. It was quiet, but in Pantheon quiet never meant empty. The hellhound was on our tail, of that much I was sure. The only question was how much tunnel – or wall – stood between us.

  ‘The narrower the tunnel, the harder we are to follow,’ Rajid threw back, squeezing past a shelf of chest-height, protruding rock.

  I swallowed, recalling the moment Unus and I had faced Cassius’s Cerberus in these tunnels. Nothing could have prepared me for the slathering jaws, sinewy necks and blood-lusting eyes. It was a fitting demon for Cassius to call his own, with a tangible hunger that made my skin scrawl with the march of a thousand fire ants.

  I closed my eyes and pushed past the same shelf, following Rajid’s lead down a putrid tunnel that felt like the fetid entrails of Pantheon’s underbelly. By my rough calculation, we had to be directly beneath the central domestic dome, connecting Pantheon to the laboratories.

  Which meant we were also close to Isca Prolet. Or what was left of it.

  I pressed my teeth together as I recalled the empty shell of an underground world, through which Pan, Max and I had been chased by a swarm of hungry basilisk. Back then the entire Prolet population had been rounded up by Cassius as retaliation for the young Prolets’ rebellion. Now Arafel and all Outsiders had all but been exterminated, and with the new obedient Prolet army growing silently in the laboratories, how much longer before the rest of the existing Prolet population were deemed unviable? Rajid and Aelia’s people. They had to know the clock was ticking.

  Aelia’s steady step was doing much to calm my erratic thoughts, even though my arm wound was aching again. She’d always been such a logical, unapologetic rebel. Our friendship had seemed so unlikely at the start and yet here we were together. More than survivors and friends. We were kin.

  Rajid paused, holding up a hand, and we all froze, listening to nothing and everything at the same time – the hollow echo of mineral run-off, Aelia’s shortened breath, the rub of my fingers. It all sounded overloud and accentuated in this tight, oxygen-less space.

  ‘Strix?’ I breathed, almost hopefully.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he whispered before creeping forward again, more stealthily this time.

  I was too numb to feel scared, almost as though I’d trodden on Eli’s Dead City scorpion, and its venom had slowly erased every last nerve I possessed. There was only guilt and a promise, and while I was anxious for Aelia, I felt nothing for my own fate. Or Rajid’s.

  The air around us had fallen suspiciously quiet. Even the low, uneven rock ceiling seemed to have stopped dripping. And my head was losing its fight against the logical impossibility of passing through these tunnels without detection by its flesh-eating occupants.

  ‘It’s too quiet,’ I mumbled over my shoulder at Aelia.

  Her face was strained, her hollow eyes sculpting the contours of her skull in the low light. ‘I know.’

  Then we all heard it. A scratching. Beyond the tunnel, but getting louder. It was too consistent to be a pack of strix, and the sound was getting steadily louder. I only knew of one monster with claws powerful enough to tunnel through solid rock.

  ‘It’s digging!’ Rajid whispered with a curious, fanatical smile. ‘It can detect our scent through solid stone wall … three times the tracking ability of a wolf … beautiful!’

  He reached out, entranced, and placed his palm against the dank, mouldy walls, and as if in answer, they began to tremble. Tiny shrapnel-sized pieces of stone began to crumble off the ravined rock above our heads.

  ‘Your beautiful hellhound is going to bring it all down,’ I hissed. ‘Move now!’

  And at that precise moment the whole tu
nnel started to cave in.

  With fresh adrenaline flooding our limbs we pelted into the darkness ahead. There was no hiding our approach now, but a pack of rat-owls suddenly seemed the least of our problems. Dust, debris and rock showered us as we sprinted, sucking up any remaining air and making us choke and struggle for breath. My eyes streamed amid the dust and grain particles and finally, just when I thought my chest was going to explode, we spilled out into some sort of large underground cavern.

  Coughing, we leaned back against the new solid rock wall, taking a moment to wipe our eyes and clear our lungs. It was quieter and cooler in here, with thicker walls all around. It felt like a temporary haven, until Rajid held up the bat lantern.

  Prompting a silence of the worst kind.

  Because a sea of yellow, predatory eyes were looking straight back at us.

  I sucked in a small ragged breath as the bat lantern revealed our mistake. A whole crowd of giant black rat-owls, perhaps as many as two hundred, pressed together in one living, breathing mass of matted feathers and calcified beaks. We’d stumbled straight into their lair, and judging by the way the frontrunners were fixing us with their beady carnivorous stares, they weren’t unhappy about dinner presenting itself.

  ‘Don’t … make … any … sudden … movements,’ Rajid whispered somewhat ironically, his lantern softly swaying from one side of the herd to the other, with a telltale rusty creak. And we might have considered his whimsical advice, had the silence not been broken by low, furious snarling.

  ‘OK … change of plan … move.’

  And as hundreds of hard, yellow orb eyes swung towards the tunnel mouth from which we’d emerged, we seized our cue and sprinted along the cavern wall, searching desperately for a recess or exit, anything that might provide shelter from the bloodbath that must surely follow.

  A hateful cawing and shrieking started to fill the void, raking over my eardrums and stretching them until I thought they must burst. I shot a look over my shoulder and regretted it instantly. The dim light from the tunnel entrance was slowly being engulfed by an ominous black shadow that was spilling out on the cavern floor before pushing upwards into a terrifying reality. Three looming black wolf-heads, each the size of a molossus dog, with ravenous, bulbous eyes and sinewy, darting necks. Even the strix herd paled next to the hellhound slowly squeezing the last of its muscular haunches out of the tight tunnel, its coarse hair making a hideous rubbing noise. I clenched every muscle I possessed. It looked even more grotesque than I remembered in the dancing bat-light.