"Marble," the Cap said and pointed down.
The cave seemed to go on forever. It split off in sections — rooms — almost like Gift's father's palace.
And the walls …
The walls were covered with swords.
Real swords that gleamed in the light.
"I guess you didn't need all those weapons after all," Gift said to the Cap.
"These are mine," he said, hand on his swords. "Those could have some religious significance. They could hurt us."
"Look," Leen said, and pointed to a spot near Gift. The wall behind him — the wall beside the cave's mouth — was covered in chalices. They all sat on their own ledges, carved out of the same white stone.
The walls farther back seemed to have still other items on them, items that Gift couldn't identify from this distance.
It was, truly, one of the most miraculous places he'd ever seen.
He took a step down, and the Cap put out an arm, stopping him. "We still don't know what this place is," the Cap said. "Let us go first."
Leen seemed to shake herself from her awe and took a step down, followed by the Cap. Gift let them go first, knowing it would make little difference.
He still felt no threat from this place. Its warmth and light and fresh air made it seem like a haven. Its decor seemed to come alive, just for him.
The steps were chiseled into the white stone. It was slippery beneath his feet. He took each step at a time, waiting until the Cap and Leen had taken it before proceeding farther.
The floor below was flat. Pedestals rose, items on them unrecognizable in the soft light. Toward the back, a table had been carved out of the white stone, and where the room split, a fountain spewed water into a basin. The sound was faint and soothing.
And he was thirsty.
But he knew better than to drink it untested. He had been trained to stay away from water on Blue Isle, especially when it was surrounded by icons of the Isle's religion.
The other two reached the main floor and nothing happened.
Gift stepped down the last step. The floor, up close, was not pure white. It had swirls of gray running through it. He looked up. The ceiling was so high that he could barely see it. In the top center was the source of the light throughout the room. It was round and large and glowed beautifully.
Then he heard footsteps. He whirled.
No one stood in the cave's mouth.
No one stood at the opening to either corridor.
The Cap and Leen were staring at him as if he had suddenly gone mad.
"Did you hear that?" he asked.
The footsteps were drawing closer. They were light, barely audible above the bubble of the fountain.
He turned again. Sound was hard to pinpoint in this echoey space.
"I don't hear anything," Leen said.
"Me either," the Cap said.
Then a woman appeared behind the fountain. Gift squinted. There were stairs there, stairs he hadn't seen before. She was standing on the top of them.
She looked familiar.
She looked Fey.
When she saw him, she smiled. She ran down the steps lithely, like a woman who was still young.
He couldn't move. His heart was pounding.
She took a path around the fountain.
The Cap and Leen didn't see her. They were watching the other openings, looking as if they were trying to listen for something, something they couldn't hear.
"Gift," the woman said. She held out her arms. She was wearing breeches, boots and a leather jerkin, Infantry clothes from his Grandfather's army. Her black hair was braided down her back.
Gift didn't move. He was staring at her face.
He had seen it twice, both times in a Vision.
In his first Vision:
She had been standing beside a man with yellow hair and pale skin. Then her face melted.
And then in the second Vision, the day he had nearly died. The day Coulter had saved him by Binding them both together.
The day she had died.
She ran toward him and put her arms around him.
She felt warm and real and very much alive.
"My Gift," she murmured.
"Mother?" he asked and let her pull him close.
THE MYSTERY
TWENTY-EIGHT
One of the men shouted an all-clear.
Adrian laid down his pickax and almost groaned with relief. His blisters had burst in the middle of the morning, and now his hands were bleeding. He had kept working, though, through the meal break, the hot sun of the afternoon, and into the twilight. He had to remain after the discussion he'd had with the quarry owner and that strange man, the man from the village.
The man who was looking for Gift and Leen.
Adrian hoped Scavenger and Coulter made it back to the hiding place all right. After they had left, he worked this small section of the quarry by himself, breaking down the rocks into fist-sized stones that could then be polished and shaped for building materials. It was backbreaking, difficult work, and it didn't engage his mind at all. Farming always had, with its constant changes, the cooperation between man and soil, man and weather, man and crops.
Here there was nothing. Nothing except the muscles in his arms and back, in his shoulders and spine, in his legs and waist.
He ached everywhere.
And he was worried.
He'd had the entire day to worry. What if they hadn't made it? What if the townspeople had found their campsite?
Why did they hate the so-called tall ones, and what did it have to do with the Fey?
He stretched and heard the bones in his back crack. The pain was exquisite. He had done physical labor on his farm, but nothing like this, nothing this repetitive. Not even planting was this kind of work.
The other day workers were threading past the main table, picking up their mark and getting their pay for their day's work. He made his way slowly in that direction. If he hadn't known that people had worked the quarry all day, he would have thought nothing had changed.
Bits of broken stone lay across the ground, next to larger rocks and boulders. A few wheelbarrows were resting in the center of the quarry. Small bits of rock were piled in the center, to be broken down even farther later. The locals here used the tiny rocks as road covering, something Scavenger had called a travesty. It hurts people's feet, he had said as they were walking over the tiny rocks. Better to have the flat dirt.
But not better, Adrian supposed, in the rainy season. Here, where the land was naturally hilly, many roads trailed along hillsides. They would become impassable mud in the rainy season or slide away altogether. At least the gravel prevented the roads from becoming mud.
Nothing could stop them from sliding away.
The line moved slowly. None of the other workers looked as exhausted as he felt. Few of them, though, were newcomers. Most of them chose this day labor as a living. It had surprised him. He would have thought that most people would want to be their own masters. But then he had looked around. The rocky hillsides and the thin topsoil made farming difficult. Work here was for the hardy, and a lot of the food came from downriver. Adrian wondered how long that would last, now that the Fey were in power.
The townspeople here seemed blissfully unaware of that problem.
He wished he could be.
The entire day, the entire past week, he'd felt as if time were running out. He wasn't sure what kind of training the nonmagical Scavenger could do for Gift, and he knew that Gift and Coulter had to repair the rift between them. He still didn't completely understand it. They had tried to explain it to him, using words like Link and Binding, but he knew they had to be talking about a physical concept, and he only knew it as an emotional one.
Emotional ties were not severed by an outside party.
He finally made it to the long stone table that sat at the front of the quarry. He had to make a small mark in a bowl of dirt to prove which marker was his. The man behind the table handed Adrian hi
s marker and three gold coins.
The owner was standing beside him.
"Good work today," the owner said. "Will we see you tomorrow?"
Adrian had no idea. He felt as if the question were a trick and he was too tired for tricks. But he made himself smile.
"Of course," he said.
He clutched the coins in his bleeding hands and walked to the gate, as straight as his aching back would allow. He could use some water and some food, but there was none here.
The sun had set behind the mountains, but the sky retained just a hint of color. That would be gone soon. It would be full dark by the time he had to go up the mountain.
But he could feel the owner's gaze on his back. If he went up the mountain, he would look even more suspicious.
Adrian sighed, and kept walking with the other workers, trudging down the main road, heading for town.
TWENTY-NINE
Pausho leaned against the boulder that marked the entrance to the quarry. She hated the quarry, even though it brought the bulk of the work in from the town. The quarry was old, and it had been cut deep into the mountainside as the years progressed. When she looked at the mountain from Constant, she could see the bowl the quarry made, the bowl where part of the mountain had once been.
It was as if they had cut from the mountain's living flesh.
She rarely climbed the path to the quarry, but she felt she had to this afternoon. She wore her darkest sweater, leggings, and heavy boots. Fyr was beside her, nearly hidden in the boulder's shadow. Zak stood even closer to Pausho, his hand on her shoulder.
The growing darkness helped keep them from view of the quarry workers. Not a one had glanced at them. They trudged down the hill, their bodies bent from their labor, their minds clearly focused on the evening ahead.
Quarry workers had some of the roughest jobs in Constant. They worked for days, sometimes weeks, and received a lot of pay. Then, when the needed rock was formed, they had no work until someone started building again.
Sometimes quarry workers were without jobs for months.
One of the Wise Ones had been a quarry worker. He had explained the system to Pausho with a touch of nostalgia. He had liked the hard work, and thought the decisions of the Wise Ones were simple compared with his day labor.
How she missed Wise Ones like that.
How she longed for such simple times.
Now that she had kicked Tri out of the group, she had the dilemma of finding someone to take his place.
But not until she found the tall ones.
She wasn't sure what she would do once she found them, but she had to know where they were. They couldn't lurk near Constant. If she allowed that, she was hurting her vows. She had to solve this problem first and get them as far away from the town as possible — by whatever means necessary.
Zak was watching the passing workers carefully. Most were their neighbors. The faces were familiar to Pausho, the stances, the hunched-over walks. A number of the older men had fathered tall children, and brought them to the Wise Ones, tears streaming down their faces. Those men couldn't look at her any more.
But she could look at them. They had put the good of the community ahead of their love for their children.
Some of the men had had other children, but most had not. They had left their families and lived off the land, finally re-turning to Constant and getting whatever work they could. Tall ones disrupted lives from the moment they took a breath.
And she hated it.
Finally, Zak's hand tightened on her shoulder. He was watching a man at the stone table. The man was sunburned and blond, no taller than the rest of the workers. But he was a stranger. Pausho did not recognize his face.
"That one," Zak whispered.
He had spoken to the stranger who had come to the quarry with the tall ones. Zak hadn't believed everything the stranger had told him. The man appeared to be too calm. A stranger being questioned like that, Zak reasoned, should have been nervous. But this man spoke as if nothing bothered him whatsoever.
The tall ones had been turned away the day before, and his other companions were missing, although Ome, the owner of the quarry, had sworn that they had arrived with the stranger that morning.
He would lead them to the tall ones. She knew it. Oh, he had been cunning enough to fool a lot of people. They would have thought his calmness a sign of his innocence, and the fact that he alone remained in the quarry a sign of his lack of attachments, but she knew better.
Tall ones were cunning.
Wise Ones had to be even more so.
The stranger had taken his marker, and Ome's assistant had placed coins in the stranger's hand.
"You're sure?" Pausho whispered.
"Positive," Zak said.
She nodded and beckoned Fyr to come forward. Then she pointed at the stranger.
"That's the one we follow," she said.
"The one getting his coins?" Fyr asked softly, her voice trembling slightly. She was now the newest Wise One, now that Tri was gone. Pausho had brought her along because she was young and would be able to follow the stranger as far as he went.
"Yes," Zak said.
Pausho put a hand on Zak's. "You can go now," she said, "Fyr and I will take care of this."
"You'll need me with you."
Pausho smiled at him. They had been friends a long time, she and Zak. They had gone through more than any two people should have. But Zak was older and getting frail, even though he probably didn't realize it. He didn't need to spend a night trailing a man who might mean nothing to them.
"Fyr and I can do this," Pausho said.
"Actually," Fyr said. "I can do this alone."
"It's better to have two," Pausho said.
"It's better to have one," Fyr said. "Less noticeable."
The stranger had gone through the gate. He paused for a brief moment, his head almost turning toward the mountain. The movement was slight, and if Pausho hadn't been looking for it, she might not have seen it.
Then he trudged in the same direction as the rest of the workers.
"It's better to have a man," Zak said, watching him go.
Pausho understood his argument. All the other workers were men. A woman would be conspicuous.
If she were visible.
Which Pausho was not planning to be.
"All right," she said, knowing they had no real time to squabble. "Zak, follow the workers down. Fyr and I will remain out of sight. If he veers away from Constant, we will follow him. If he goes into town, you will."
Zak's hand left her shoulder. He slipped past her without a word, and mingled with the men on the trail.
"He's not going to stay with the workers," Fyr said.
"I know," Pausho said.
"Let me go," Fyr said. "I'm more agile."
Pausho put an arm around Fyr's waist. "You're more agile, but I know how to treat tall ones. Let's share the danger."
"Do you think there will be danger?" Fyr whispered.
"Yes," Pausho said, and keeping to the shadows, followed the stranger down the hill.
THIRTY
Con stood on top of the platform of crates and placed another on the pile. His arms ached, and his back was sore. Sweat ran down his face and made his robe stick to his skin. He had never been so filthy and tired in all his life.
Sebastian was still agitated, forcing them to work faster than Con would have liked. Sebastian himself was moving at what seemed to be his fastest speed — almost the speed of a normal person's casual walk. Twice Sebastian had tripped over his own feet and fallen on the crate he carried. Once he'd smashed it open, sending potatoes skittering across the stone floor of the catacombs. He kept looking over his shoulder, making sure there was nothing behind him.
He did say the strange light was gone.
But he was afraid it would be back. He claimed that it was the magickal change he had felt on the other side of the bridge.
Con felt that the sooner they got out of the catacombs, the
better. He was beginning to get nervous himself. A short time ago, he thought he heard thumps in the back tunnel, but Sebastian had said nothing. If there had been noises, Sebastian would have gotten even more nervous.
The darkness wasn't helping, either. When they had started work, light had filtered in from the hole above. Apparently that was where the doorway used to be, and since the Tabernacle had burned, the sunlight fell directly into the hole. Now the sunlight was gone. It hadn't provided a lot of illumination, but it had provided enough to make Con feel as if he was going somewhere.
Right now, he felt as if he were building a tower to the sky.
And an unstable one at that. The crates were different sizes, and they wobbled on top of each other. He had hoped that the higher up he got in the passage, he would discover that parts of the stairs remained. But none did. The fire must have burned very hot.
He knew they would get out, but he was discouraged just the same.
He didn't tell Sebastian of his discouragement, but he felt as if Sebastian knew. Sebastian was working as hard as he could. Every time he fell, he apologized profusely, and then tried to work even faster. Con had finally asked him to take his time. Sebastian's accidents were taking too much of Con's efforts, and much as Sebastian tried to help, Con was essentially building this stairway up alone.
He had gone back, just once, after Sebastian had mentioned seeing the tiny light. Sebastian had screamed after him, then burst into tears, but Con had continued. He had gone back as far as the bridge tunnel and gazed up. It would have taken very little effort — compared to building this monstrosity — to boost Sebastian back into that tunnel and to go back to the cavern. But as Con stood there, he had felt a distinct unease. It was almost palpable. He put a hand on the tunnel's ledge and a shudder went through him.
Perhaps that was the still small voice warning him away from that path. Perhaps he felt, on an entirely different level, the change in magick that Sebastian had talked about
Or perhaps it was simply no longer safe to go back and he knew it deep down. There was nothing for them there, except to wait. The Fey would eventually discover the tunnels, and if Con and Sebastian stayed in the cavern they would be caught — again.
The Resistance: The Fourth Book of the Fey (Fey Series) Page 19
