by Ian Irvine
“He let you go?”
“He said I was just a stupid kid…” He gulped.
“You’re not!” Glynnie said indignantly.
“What is it, Benn?” said Tali, reining in.
“I found out later, when it was too late, that he’d put some kind of magic link on me,” Benn said in a whisper. “Before he let me go.”
“What for?”
“So he could have me followed.”
The bottom fell out of Tali’s stomach. “Is it still there?”
“I don’t think so. My head stopped hurting a long time ago… though when Lyf is close by, I know it. When he moves it leaves shadows in my mind.”
“I’d better check.” She put her hands around his head and opened her gift momentarily. It hurt so much that she could not speak for several minutes. “I don’t sense anything, not that it matters. Lyf will soon know where we’re going. Why did he want to follow you?”
“He must have been hoping I’d lead him to Rix, but I didn’t know where Rix was…” Benn’s voice died away. He drew in a desperate breath.
“But?” said Tali. “What happened?”
“I joined the Resistance. Just cleaning, running errands, taking messages…”
“And the link led Lyf’s soldiers to the Resistance.”
“Yes. They killed dozens of Resistance fighters, and it was all my fault.”
“No, it wasn’t!” Tali said sharply. “How could the link be your fault when you didn’t know about it?”
“It was me who led them there.”
“It was Lyf’s link that led them there. You’re just a little boy, Benn. It’s Lyf’s responsibility, not yours.”
“I might be little,” Benn said soberly, “but I’ve seen more bad things than most grown-ups see in their lives. I’m not a boy any more.”
CHAPTER 53
Tobry had not come near Rannilt since that brief hug last night, nor would he allow her to approach him, and she ached with the loss—and the rejection. Did he not want to be healed?
“What are you so scared of, Tobry? Are you scared I’ll fail, and your shifter side will break out and kill me?”
She was preparing another fish dinner on a rock ledge above the stream, miles further underground. There was no driftwood here to fuel a fire and she would have to eat her catch raw, but she did not mind—hungry slave girls could eat almost anything. Rannilt filleted the little fish and sliced the fillets into slivers, so they would last longer.
“Or are you scared I’ll succeed?”
He crouched on a higher ledge thirty feet away, arms hanging over his knees, watching her every movement. He was salivating, but did not move.
“You’re lookin’ scrawny,” said Rannilt. “I don’t reckon you’ve eaten nothin’ since that horrid hare’s head.”
She picked up the filleted fish, her dinner, and the head and bones, his meal, carried them a few yards towards him, set everything down on a rock and backed away. Tobry stared at the food. Rannilt watched him from the corner of an eye. Her empty stomach was grumbling but she swallowed her saliva and waited, praying that he would not gobble the lot. It had taken her hours to catch three small fish.
After a few minutes he sprang off the ledge, crossed the distance in a few bounds, bolted the fish heads and bones, and disappeared up the tunnel. Rannilt ate the fillets, extinguished the light and lay down to sleep.
Later that night he returned to the ledge. Rannilt did not move, nor make any finger light. She lay perfectly still, trying to sense out his mood.
At last she said, very softly. “Tali’s waitin’ for you.”
He made no sound but she knew he was listening. Shifters had cat-keen hearing.
“She’s achin’ for you, just as much as you’re achin’ for her.” Rannilt did not know if this were true; Tali was a strange one and she had never truly understood her. But every iota of Rannilt’s romantic little soul hoped it was true. “You’re the love of her life, and she’s yours. You were born to be together and if you don’t come back, somethin’ will die in Tali. I know it will.”
He let out a sudden, single howl of grief, startlingly loud in the empty cavern. It echoed back and forth, sounding like her name, Tali, Taaaalllii. Cat claws scraped on the soft limestone and he was gone again.
Rannilt sighed. It was all so hard! She was afraid she had failed this time, but she wasn’t giving up.
The days passed, each like the one before, as they went deeper under the mountains. The rock changed from limestone to green slate and then to a shiny mica schist, and later to other kinds of rocks she did not recognise because they had not occurred in Cython.
The linked caves and tunnels weren’t natural any more. They had all been excavated out of the native rock, though Rannilt could not imagine why people would have gone to such enormous labour. There was no sign that anyone had passed this way since the passages were constructed.
Tobry still watched over her at night from a distance, but she seldom saw him during the day. He was always well ahead, leading her who knew where. Whenever she stopped to rest, he soon appeared out of darkness at the furthest reach of her finger light. He would stand there, facing away from her and spreading his arms as if to embrace the winged terror, whatever it was. As if to embrace his doom.
Rannilt’s euphoria at her first steps in healing had faded long ago. What was she doing wrong? She redoubled her efforts, and kept talking about her own feelings and trying to articulate his, but it wasn’t working. The shifter curse was fighting her all the way and she had no idea how to combat it.
Could anyone?
No one has ever healed a full-blown shifter.
“Well, I’m goin’ to!” she shrieked, spraying needles of golden light in all directions. They reflected back at her from a million crystal facets in the walls and roof of the cave. “You’re not stoppin’ me.”
She looked up and he was standing on a fallen slab of rock, not twenty feet away, watching her. His eyes were mostly yellow now, which was a bad sign. He turned away and she did not try to stop him. Rannilt never did. She was his defender and his healer—she did not want to be his master.
In this awkward and frustrating way they continued, day after day, deeper under the mountains until they came to an area where the tunnel branched, again and again, and she realised that Tobry was no longer sure which way to go. He kept stopping at junctions, looking frustrated, and sometimes he backtracked for miles before he found a way that seemed, or smelled, right to him.
The next morning—Rannilt insisted on calling it morning when she woke, and night when she lay down to sleep—she roused in a high-ceilinged cavern to see him standing at a three-way intersection. He sniffed the first tunnel, and the next, then the third before going back to the first.
Rannilt picked up her sandals and went soft-footed towards him. She did not creep—that was likely to alarm him. This time he allowed her to approach within a few feet before leaping aside. She sniffed the three openings.
“Limestone all the way,” she said of the first.
Having grown up in Cython, she knew many rocks and minerals. All the slaves did but Rannilt had another unique gift: she could tell them apart by licking the rock and tasting it, and she could distinguish many kinds of rocks solely by smell. It had been handy when she had run away from the bully girls into the unlit tunnels of Cython. It enabled her to know where she was, and to find her way back.
“And lots of water,” she added. “Flooded, maybe.”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Lime shale,” Rannilt said of the second opening. “Also greywacke, marble and layers of schist in the knotted heart of the mountain. But dry. No fish in there.”
Tobry was utterly still, and she sensed that he was waiting for something. Waiting for her to test the third passage?
She sniffed, frowned, sniffed again.
“It’s warm,” she said after a minute or two. “Warm and humid. There’s water… lots of water, but it smells
funny. It reminds me of the chymical level in Cython…” That gave Rannilt pause. She did not want to go anywhere near such a place. “And I can smell a great jumble of rocks all twisted and ground together: serpentinite! Marl! A funny kind of basalt! Quartzite!”
Her eyes widened. She took another sniff. “There’s precious ores, too. Rich ores: I can smell cinnabar, realgar, native silver, native bismuth, sulphur—lots and lots of sulphur! Galena—that’s where lead comes from…” Rannilt paused. She probably shouldn’t mention lead to a caitsthe. “Even pitchblende, and that’s the strangest of all—when it’s really rich ore it glows in the dark.”
Rannilt took a final, questioning sniff, because all those scents were overlain on another, one she did not recognise, though it made the hairs on her arms rise up. No, she could not place it.
She glanced at Tobry, whose eyes had turned grey again. He let his breath out with a whistling sound and turned to stare at her. There seemed to be a question in his eyes, almost as if he were asking her opinion.
She did not want to give it. She did not like the smell of the third passage—it raised her hackles—though the others felt like dead ends to her.
“If this is the way you want to go,” she said, pointing down the third tunnel, “then you should go.”
He shot past her into the dark. Rannilt headed after him, tasting the air every time she thought of it. It smelled just as worrying.
The path was rough. She stubbed her toe and sat down to put her sandals on. The more she sniffed, the less she liked the place. She felt that it had a toxic air. Was that why he had sought it out?
On she trudged, limping now, every so often raising her hand to light the way immediately ahead. Her golden light wasn’t as bright as before, probably because she was half starved. She hadn’t found any fish yesterday and there would be none today, now they had left the underground stream.
After a mile or so she smelled cleaner air. Rannilt thrust out her hand and her finger beams lit up two tall stone statues, at least twenty feet high—stern old women who looked like the Matriarchs of Cython. Rannilt had seen the Matriarchs once, when she was four, and had never forgotten them. Cranky old witches, she had thought.
The statues looked ancient; they were covered in dust and brown stains where seeps had dripped on them for aeons. The women had been carved with their arms extended in front and their hands upraised as if to say, You cannot enter.
Magery! Rannilt couldn’t do it any more, but she could always sense it. There had been powerful magery here once, to prevent people going past, and these stone women were there to warn them off. Warn her off.
Tobry emerged from the darkness beside the left-hand figure, walked past the front of the right-hand one, then stood between them. He took a deep sniff, reached forward with his right arm and felt the air ahead of him, as if sensing for traps.
There had been traps here, Rannilt knew instinctively, but they must have failed long ago.
He took a step, his left arm now extended. Another step and another and another. Then suddenly he was through. He looked back at her, his teeth flashed white, as if in triumph, then he ran.
She allowed her finger light to die down to a glimmer that only lit the floor one step ahead, and went after him. But she had only gone a few yards when the strangest thing happened—she sensed an opening in the wall on her left, though to her eyes it was solid rock.
Rannilt felt the stone, back and forth, and up as high as she could reach. It was solid everywhere, though when she closed her eyes she saw a great opening there, intricately carved around the sides in the ancient Cythian manner, like an enormous gate. She moved back and forth. What was the gate for? Where did it lead?
She could sense nothing beyond the gate but miles of solid rock, so why was it there? Was it just a decoration? She did not think so. There was something secret about it. Something hidden.
She opened her eyes suddenly. Nothing! She closed them and turned around three times, so fast that it made her dizzy, followed by a fourth time, slowly. For a fraction of a second she saw through the gate, not solid rock but all the way to a ruined stone temple she had never seen before, set in a park with fallen stones in the background. Then the image was gone and nothing could bring it back.
Rannilt shrugged and went after Tobry.
After several hours the passage began to wind down and down, as if they were inside a spiral that grew wider the deeper it went. It was warmer, too. Ever warmer, and the worrying smell she had detected hours ago had thickened. Every time she caught a whiff of it, she shivered.
The passage began to open out. The floor sloped down before her and the roof rose up to form a vast open cavern, her faint finger light twinkling off millions of facets—no, more like droplets—up there. She extinguished her finger. She could not see the cavern now, but she could sense lots about it.
It was humid, sticky, sweltering. A vast, gloomy chamber hundreds of yards across and half as high. The dripping roof was festooned with crystals. The floor was covered in sluggish pools, one of them silvery, others tar-black, and heaps of broken rock. And in the centre—
Rannilt’s heart stopped.
Now, now she understood.
This was it. Life and death and dissolution.
The winged terror Tobry had been looking for all this time.
CHAPTER 54
It wasn’t a gauntling though, nor any kind of flying beast Rannilt had ever seen. It was a wyverin, and it was enormous.
Rannilt knew that Rix had painted Lord Ricinus standing by the fallen beast, his sword thrust into its heart. But this wyverin was so vast a sword could never have reached its massive heart. No warrior’s weapon could have killed it; no steel could have pierced its adamantine armour. It was a hundred and fifty feet long, maybe more, and twenty-five feet high. It seemed too big for the world.
As the wyverin moved in its sleep, rock cracked beneath it. Its breath was a rush of wind one way, stirring the hair on the back of her head, then a heavy gush in her face, hot and metallic.
And if it woke, it could gobble her and Tobry down in a single gulp.
He was standing a few yards ahead, quite still, leaning forward as if yearning towards the creature. Yearning for what? Rannilt had to see more, but she was afraid to wake it or disturb it in any way. She wrapped the fingers of her left hand around the middle finger of her right, made a glimmer of golden light from her fingertip and stopped the enclosing fingers down until only a tiny ray emerged from the hole.
It revealed the parts of the cavern floor ahead of her, though not the wyverin itself. Just ahead was a thick, oily pool, skinned on top, as black as the inside of a mountain. It reeked of tar. Further on were puddles like pools of silver metal, mirror shiny.
Yellow clouds hung around the wyverin’s nostrils, moving in and out as it breathed. Its eyes, which were only open a crack, were inflamed; tears drip-dripped continually from them. They must have been watering for ages, because twin stalagmites three feet high had formed where the tears fell.
She crept to Tobry’s side, reached up and took his hard hand. To her surprise he did not resist her. She tugged on his hand but he did not budge.
“Come away,” whispered Rannilt, pulling harder.
She might as well have been pulling on a rock.
“How did the wyverin get here?” she said quietly. “Where did it come from?”
He made no sound, though she knew he was listening.
“The wicked Cythonians call it the Sacred Beast,” she added. “The One That Heals All.”
His fingers clenched around hers, then relaxed.
“They say it eats up the old world and makes it new again. They say it burns all foulness away, turns everythin’ to its elements.”
From the stories that had been rife in Cython, Rannilt remembered another alarming fact.
“And when it wakes from its enchanted sleep… they say it has to restore its magery by eatin’ a magian’s flesh, and drinkin’ his blood.”
Could it restore its magery by eating him? Was that why he had sought it out? To end the agony of being a shifter the only way he could?
Suddenly its vast head moved and lifted. Rannilt bit down on a scream. Tobry thrust her behind him, shielding her with his body, holding her tightly.
She peeped around his middle, her mouth open, gazing at the awesome sight. The wyverin’s heavy-lidded eyes did not open as its head rose in the air, thirty feet on its long neck, and swung around to the left, towards the side wall. The rock or slag that was its bed cracked and crumbled. Its nostrils glowed the colour of fire, illuminating a thick vein of scarlet ore.
The great mouth opened and crunched through the solid rock, biting out half a wagon load of ore. The neck swung back, the head settled. The jaws moved, crushing the rock. The wyverin swallowed. The crushed rock settled audibly in its innards and she heard liquid flowing over it, and a distant churning and hissing and rumbling. The wyverin lowered its head and went as still as it had been when they’d arrived.
“Now that’s weird,” whispered Rannilt. “Of all the things I ever imagined, I never thought of a beast that ate rock. Cinnabar, that red ore is—quicksilver ore. There were veins of it in Cython, beyond the heatstone mine, and if you or I ate a bit of it, we’d go mad and die.”
The beast began to breathe heavily, then its nostrils gushed a scalding yellow vapour that ignited in the air, producing thick white fumes. Burning sulphur! Every slave in Cython knew what sulphur was, and the ways it could be used. It was one of the most important elements in Cythonian alchymie. For instance, she remembered, if you dissolved those acrid fumes in water you got the corrosive oil of vitriol, which had all manner of useful, though dangerous, purposes.
The wyverin’s hindquarters heaved. It urinated a heavy stream of silvery metal that settled in the silver puddles on the floor.
“It’s piddlin’ quicksilver!” whispered Rannilt. “And quicksilver is deadly poison—even just its fumes.”
Tobry’s hand went over her nose and in a single movement he turned, lifted her off her feet and carried her away up the spiralling tunnel. It was half a mile before he put her down, in an embayment off the tunnel that had ventilation holes to either side.
