“I’m fine,” Nett protested. “I just—it’s too quiet down here. I can’t even feel taproots anymore.”
Sena took in the dark circles under Nett’s eyes. “You’re fine, and I’m a rooster,” she said, as she grabbed Nett’s arm and put it around her shoulder. “Take his other side,” she ordered, and Claire hurried to slip Nett’s other arm around her.
“Get moving, lily pad,” Sena said to Nett. “You plant people are as delicate as your garden flowers.” But beneath the sting of Sena’s words, Claire heard a deep concern. She tried to push back her own worry as the three of them lurched into the darkness.
Nett must have been heavier than his slight frame appeared, because Claire found herself struggling to breathe a few minutes later. Claire hoped it was because Nett was heavy, and not because they were running out of breathable air. Without the moonmilk, it was impossible to know what was truly safe.
Trying not to panic, Claire focused on drawing the damp air in through her nose and pushing it out through her mouth. It left an earthy taste in the back of her throat.
Nett suddenly stopped. “Look up,” he wheezed.
Claire did as he said, and saw another splotch of red fuzz, this time tipped with a fine white powder. Nett’s head fell back down, his breathing shallow.
“Why isn’t he getting any better?” Claire asked Sena. “There are plants everywhere! Don’t plants produce oxygen?” She thought she remembered a teacher mentioning that.
“Not … plants …,” Nett wheezed. “Mold … white dust is spores … poison. Can’t breathe.”
“I knew we should have gone right,” Sena muttered. “Useless …”
The Forger’s words felt like punches. “Then why did you follow me?” Claire retorted. “Why did you listen to me if I’m so useless?”
Nett let out a low moan, and both girls looked at the Tiller. His chin was resting on his chest. Claire adjusted her grip on his arm.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered to him.
“Sorry isn’t going to help,” Sena said, her red braid whipping as she turned. She began to walk again, practically dragging Nett and Claire behind her. “We need to get out, now!”
“Sena, slow down,” Claire said. “I’m going to—” Her foot caught on something. She stumbled, but managed to steady herself before she brought all of them down.
“Nett. The light?” Claire asked, and Nett handed the marimo to her.
She shone the light on the ground, and for the very first time in her life, Claire wished it were still dark.
Because the marimo’s pearly light shone directly onto a rib cage. A large, very human rib cage. And a skull.
Claire screamed. And screamed. And screamed.
Flinging herself away from the splayed skeleton, she took a heavy step toward the cave wall, twisting onto loose soil. No, not onto—through.
Claire was falling!
She thought she heard Nett and Sena falling beside her, but it was hard to tell in the sudden thunderstorm of rock and grit. Long moments later, Claire’s breath rushed out of her as she landed on something spongy.
“Nett! Sena! Are you okay?”
“Fine.” Claire heard Nett’s voice a little to her left, faint and barely audible above the last plinks of pebbles falling down the hole.
“Sena?”
“Slug soot, slug soot, slug soot!”
They were all okay! If Claire’s ribs didn’t hurt so much from the fall, she might have laughed with the sheer relief of it. She saw the marimo shining a few feet from her and scrambled to pick it up.
Her eyes adjusted slowly. They had fallen into a vast cavern with dagger-sharp stalactites reaching down toward them like teeth. Some were so long that they had fused with a few stalagmites shooting up from the ground, forming large columns of rock.
And everywhere—above Claire, below her, and around—there was more red mold.
It pulsated slightly, making it seem as though the cavern had a heartbeat.
Claire gasped—and immediately wished she hadn’t. The mold’s powder trickled into her lungs, and she began to cough. Hard coughs, the kind that made her think her ribs would break. No, she couldn’t think about bones! She almost retched.
Claire felt something soft being tied over her mouth and behind her head. She started.
“Relax,” Sena murmured, as she pulled the knot tight. “It’s just some muslin we … use to collect … seeds.” She spoke slowly and with great effort, sucking in breath. “It’s not perfect, but it … should help filter.”
Sena took the marimo from Claire and handed it to Nett, who appeared somewhat recovered. He, too, had a cloth over his mouth and nose. Then Sena drew her sword.
“I don’t see any way out,” she announced. “The walls are too steep, and it’s too dark. And the sunlight in the marimo is going to run out soon.” The pearly light wavered, as if agreeing with the Forger’s words.
“Well,” Nett wheezed. “At least it can’t get … any worse.”
Grrrrrrrrrrrrr.
A low growl echoed around them.
Sena immediately raised Fireblood.
“What was that?” Claire asked.
“Shh.” Sena planted her feet, staring into the shadows with Fireblood raised.
Wraiths? Claire gulped, and followed Sena’s gaze but didn’t see anything. She felt Nett shift slightly next to her.
A moment later, Claire thought she heard a slight rasp coming from the other side of the cave. She turned.
Suspended high in the darkness were two glowing eyes.
Claire screamed.
Nett swerved, twisting the marimo hard. The plant burst into a hard light that lit the entire side of the cavern—as well as the creature that half-slithered, half-flew down toward them.
“Wyvern!” Sena yelled. “Nett, don’t let the light die! Claire, hide!”
At first glance, Claire would have said it was a dragon, except she’d never heard of a dragon with only two legs, both at the front. Its hindquarters resembled a snake’s body—long and whiplike. Delicate, narrow wings jutted from its shoulders, too fragile, it appeared, to lift the giant creature from the ground. It propelled itself forward with its body, swaying its wings from side to side to keep its balance as it charged straight down the cavern wall, long front claws gripping the rock like it was soft cheese.
Claire watched in horror, too frozen to move, as the dragon—wyvern—hissed, tucked its sleek wings into its body, and dropped to the bottom of the cavern.
“Go!” Sena yelled, holding Fireblood up. Finally, Claire shook loose from her terror, and ran.
In the dark, she almost darted straight into one of the cave’s natural columns. She quickly dove behind it. From the other side of the pillar, Claire heard a high-pitched scream followed by a loud crash that shook the entire cavern.
Her stomach curled. Was that Nett? Sena?
Claire placed her hand against the rough column to brace herself—and the hum that had left her flooded her again. But whatever she had felt before was a kitten’s purr compared to the lion’s roar that now rushed through her.
With hands splayed against the column, Claire was suddenly aware of a deep resonance that ran beneath her feet, rose into the pillar, and into her. She realized that the hum had never come from her bones—it had come from the rocks around her. She lifted her hands, and the hum lessened. She placed them back against the rock column, and the vibration surged again.
She had the sudden sense, wild as it seemed, that she could actually feel the constant, perfect push and pull of millions of crystal structures that formed the geological base of Arden. Crystals that she knew from science class linked together to form rock. To form a cave. To form a column.
With her fingertips, Claire found a weakness in the column, a hairline fissure that broke the crystalline pattern and created the tiniest of cracks.
There was another crash and a deafening clatter as a few stalactites plummeted to the cave floor.
She tho
ught, strangely enough, of Kleo Weft, the Spinner girl on the boat, and how she’d managed to control her magical rug just by knotting a thin thread in her hand. Claire didn’t know why that image came to her, but it reminded her that something small can set off something bigger.
Time moved like honey. Without fully understanding why, but knowing she must, Claire pulled her pencil from her trousers’ deep pockets and lodged its point firmly into the split in the stone. With her left hand, she held the pencil steady, and with her right, she quickly felt around her feet for a palm-sized rock.
With the power of the cave humming through her, Claire swung the rock like a hammer, and drove her pencil deep into the stone.
The column buckled, sending tremors high up into the cave’s ceiling. The next moment, the world trembled as dozens of stalactites broke loose from the ceiling and crashed down onto the rock floor with the fury of an earthquake.
Claire screamed and fell to the ground, her arms over her head. The hum began to fade and the noise quieted. Still, she remained motionless, exhausted and too scared to look. But she had to look.
Scooting to her hands and knees, Claire peeked around the column.
The tree-sized stalactites had fallen in a perfect circle around the wyvern, forming a sort of rock-cage. The creature growled and thrashed angrily, but the prison held.
Across the cavern, two pairs of eyes—one amber, the other brown—stared at Claire from above dirty muslin masks, blinking in surprise.
CHAPTER
22
A thousand questions exploded like fireworks inside Claire, each one sparking off another that left her dizzy. So she asked the simplest one first. “What just happened?”
There was a crash as the wyvern threw itself against its rock bars. It howled in anger, but the cage held.
“Well,” Nett said with a nervous glance toward the beast, “you just captured a wyvern.”
Claire turned to look at the wyvern, which was pushing its large, scaly head through the bars. Now that she wasn’t running away, she could see it a little better. It was massive, and Claire could clearly make out a ropy black scar cutting across its chest and the milky white of its rolling eyes. The creature was blind.
“I don’t understand,” Claire said. Shock made her voice surprisingly steady. “What is it?”
“They are the Gemmers’ war pets,” Sena said. Still holding Fireblood tightly in her hand, she walked over to Claire. Nett stumbled after her. “They can only be killed by drowning,” Sena continued. “Their stone hearts make them sink. The oceans, rivers, and lakes are littered with their bodies.”
The wyvern strained, its shoulders pounding against the rock-cage. To Claire’s dismay, the wyvern’s scales seemed to be chipping away at the bars, widening the space little by little with each forward thrust.
Claire looked back at Sena and Nett. They were staring at her like she was a stranger.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Sena said. “It’s just … lucky the stalactites fell when they did. And how they did.” Something strange lurked beneath her words.
“Did you help?” Claire asked, surprised. An uncomfortable thought began to prowl the corners of her mind. “Was it magic?”
But Sena’s face stayed carefully blank. “I’m a Forger. I don’t do rock stuff.”
“Sena,” Nett rasped, his voice muffled by the muslin cloth. Exhaustion had carved shadows beneath his eyes. “You know that there … is sometimes … metal in rock. You must have been … too scared to realize … you crafted something.”
Sena stared hard at Nett. “That must be it,” she finally said.
At her words, Claire should have felt relief. And maybe she would have, if she believed Sena. She glanced at the fissure. The only thing that remained of her best pencil was a small wooden circle around a gray dot.
For a second, the cave was quiet. The wyvern was mountain-still. Then the creature erupted, its shoulders slamming the rock bars one final time.
They cracked.
The wyvern whipped out with a scream, wings tight against its body as it streamed toward them like an avalanche.
“STOP!” Claire screamed as she threw her hands into the air above her head. She squinched her eyes tight, waiting for the beast to make contact with her soft body, grinding tissue and muscle into the ground.
But impact never came.
Slowly, she opened her eyes. Two white orbs like clouded marbles peered into hers. The wyvern’s legs were twice as long as Claire was tall, but its neck curved down like a question mark so that it could stare directly into her eyes.
Her hands shook as she slowly lowered them to her sides. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Nett and Sena standing absolutely still.
The wyvern snapped its teeth and emitted a sound like crunching gravel. Suddenly, an image of a small tree balancing on the edge of a rock popped in Claire’s mind. Its roots squeezed around a boulder, its fibrous hairs stretching, feeling out the rock’s weakness, breaking it into crumbs, and then finally—dust.
“I—I think she’s scared,” Claire said slowly.
“She?” Nett asked.
“Yes,” Claire said. The wyvern opened her jaw, and again spoke in her crunching language. This time, Claire saw pickaxes streaking through the air as they hollowed out the mountain. Fear and anger from an unknown source whipped through her. She took a quick step back from the creature.
“I don’t think she likes Tillers or Forgers very much,” Claire said slowly. “I think—I’m not sure—but I think she can smell the plantness and metalness that runs in your blood.”
Nett and Sena stared at her.
“Plants and metal can both destroy rock,” Claire said with an apologetic shrug. Then, turning to the wyvern, she added, “They won’t hurt you. I promise.”
The wyvern dipped her head.
“You are talking to it—her—aren’t you?” Sena said, adjusting the muslin cloth around her nose and mouth. “Nett, have you ever heard of something like this? Why can Claire talk to it?”
“I don’t know … much about wyverns,” Nett said, his voice still weak. “There aren’t many left.”
Nett’s eyes tracked the wyvern’s flicking tail. “Maybe it’s … because you’re not from here,” he continued. “Maybe all people from where you’re from can speak to wyverns, they just have never … had the chance to meet one …”
“Maybe,” Claire agreed.
“This isn’t a time to speculate,” Sena said, not taking her hand off her hilt. “We need to get out of here.”
“But how do we do that?” Nett looked up into the cavern. “The only entrances are above the hole we fell through … in the ceiling … and the wyvern’s exit. The rock face is too steep for us.”
Claire’s eyes darted to the wyvern, a plan forming. “There is the obvious way—”
Nett stared at her blankly, and then his eyes widened. “You can’t be serious.”
Standing up, Claire walked over to the wyvern. The creature’s nostrils flared as she neared, and she took a deep breath to steady herself. How did one address a wyvern?
“Excuse me.” She bobbed her head in a kind of half bow. The creature tilted her head, and Claire knew she had her attention. “Would you be so kind as to lead us to the exit?”
The wyvern’s growl rolled and crunched again. Claire closed her eyes, trying to make sense of the cadence, to latch on to an image. And when she finally did, her eyes opened with wonder.
The wyvern had stretched her neck along the cavern’s floor.
Cautiously, Claire laid her hand on the wyvern’s bumpy neck. Its scales weren’t smooth like those of a fish, but knobby, as if river-worn rocks had been glued onto it.
Swinging a leg up and over, she settled just in front of the two wing joints and gripped two scales in front of her. The wyvern’s wings rustled like paper bags as she adjusted for Claire’s weight.
Giddiness swept through Claire and she had to hold back nervous lau
ghter, scared that if she started, she’d never stop. After counting to three—once for Mom, once for Dad, and once for Sophie—she looked at Sena and Nett. “Coming?”
For once, Nett had no answer.
Sena sheathed Fireblood. Gingerly, she pulled herself up onto the wyvern, too. On the ground, Nett seemed to be having an inner battle with himself. His tousled hair was a storm cloud above his head. He muttered something that Claire couldn’t quite make out, but after checking the straps on his pack, he placed his hands on the wyvern’s scales and scooted on, behind Sena.
As soon as he stopped wriggling, the wyvern rose to her feet and began to run. Unlike horses, which move in a straight line, the wyvern’s serpentine body whipped from side to side as she picked up speed. The cavern’s wall loomed suddenly out of the darkness—they were headed straight for the rock face!
Claire screamed. They were going to crash!
But at the last moment, the wyvern jumped, launching itself up and toward the wall, clawed feet outstretched.
THUMP. It grabbed on to the cavern’s side.
The wyvern’s body swung like a pendulum, and Claire shut her eyes tight against the image of sliding back, all the way down the wyvern’s tail and into the dark, red world below.
But the wyvern’s claws hung tight, and as it unfurled its wings, the world stopped swinging. Claire had only a second to catch her breath before the wyvern leaped again. Wind stung her eyes as they bounded up the cave’s wall. The sensation was like sledding, but if you sledded up. It was the same wild, out-of-control exhilaration that could end in a split second of catastrophe.
The wyvern crested over the last outcrop and surged into a wide tunnel that gleamed white. Moonmilk!
Claire tore off the bit of muslin cloth and gulped in the cool, clean air, free of mold dust. It was too much, too fast, and her head throbbed as though she’d slurped a milk shake too quickly.
From behind her, she heard a feeble moan. “I think I’m going to be sick,” Sena said.
Again, the wyvern picked up speed, and they hurtled through twisting passages. Keeping her wings tucked tight against her sides, the wyvern bounded with the flexibility of a slinky, narrowly missing jagged crystals and dripping stalactites. The world within the mountain was just as varied as the one outside. At one point, Claire even thought she saw an entire side passage of deep blue light that must have been sapphires, but the wyvern twisted down another path before she could take a better look.
The Unicorn Quest Page 17
