They had spent almost two days traveling through Skritek territory, when traces of the ruins they were searching for appeared at the edge of the river.
Fiolon pointed excitedly. “Look, there was a village here once. Maybe in these ruins we can find more music boxes—or something equally interesting.”
“I don’t believe there could be anything else nearly as interesting,” Mikayla teased. “Not to you, anyhow.”
“Princess,” ventured one of their Oddling guides, the little Nyssomu named Quasi, “you don’t want to go into these ruins. The ones farther upriver are more interesting.”
Mikayla regarded him suspiciously. “You want us to travel farther upriver through Skritek territory and run a greater risk of encountering them? What’s wrong with these ruins?”
“They look fine to me,” Fiolon protested, “and I want to find out more about the Vanished Ones.”
“And I really want to find some more of those music boxes,” Mikayla added, “and see how they work.”
Traneo, seemingly frightened by something, ventured to say, “The King would be very angry if anything happened you, my lord; he charged me straightly to make certain that no harm befell either you or the Princess.”
“That’s nonsense,” Fiolon said. “The King doesn’t care what I do. I don’t think the King even knows we’re here.”
Mikayla was so appalled by the air of utter conviction with which Fiolon spoke, and the probable truth behind it, that for a moment she could find nothing to say. Then she turned back to Quasi and said, “But you still haven’t said why these ruins might be dangerous.”
“Well,” Quasi said nervously, rolling his eyes, “they’re still alive.”
“Alive?” Fiolon said. “The ruins? Are you telling us that the buildings were—and still are—alive? I’ve never heard that even the Vanished Ones could make buildings live.”
“If anyone goes into them,” Quasi said in quavering tones, “voices come out of the ground and speak in an unknown language.”
“Suppose there are still some devices of the Vanished Ones working in there!” Mikayla said excitedly. “We’ve got to go in!”
“Not now!” Traneo said urgently. “It’s almost nightfall. Please, Princess, don’t do anything hasty. Sleep on it—do not enter until morning—if enter you must.”
“All right, then, let’s find a safe place to make camp,” Mikayla said. “And—I don’t know about you, but I’m getting hungry. Aren’t you?”
Fiolon said, with quiet literalness, “I’ve been hungry for the best part of three days. You were the one who insisted we should ration our supplies.”
“I still think it’s a good idea,” Mikayla said, “because if we run out of food we will have to go home. And I don’t want to do that—not yet anyway.”
“So what do you think we ought to do?” demanded Fiolon.
“I think we should let Quasi and Traneo find a proper campsite.”
Fiolon turned inquiringly to Quasi, who said quickly, “We do not have much time before dark, my lord; but I will do my best.”
They continued upriver for a bit, then Traneo signaled to send the boats to shore on a little promontory, covered with round smooth stones. “We can try this, Lord Fiolon. At least here, no Skriteks could hide in the long grass.”
“They certainly couldn’t,” Mikayla agreed. “There’s not enough grass here to hide anything larger than a meadow-funt.” She jumped out of the boat to search for dried grass to use as kindling for a fire. But the second she set foot on the ground she froze.
“Mika?” Fiolon, still in the boat, looked inquiringly at her. “What’s wrong?”
“Something,” Mikayla said, “but I don’t know exactly what it is. Something feels wrong, something in the ground.”
Traneo had already climbed from the boat and was prowling about, deciding exactly where to set up camp. Mikayla followed him, moving slowly and trying to pinpoint the source of her uneasiness.
She came to the patch of smooth stones and tripped over one. To her astonishment it did not feel hard to her feet but somehow soft and leathery. While she stood looking at it, it began to rock slowly back and forth. Surely she had not kicked it that hard, had she? While she still stood startled, looking at it, it split with an odd tearing sound, and from the widening crack, an ugly green snout appeared, topped by two black and bulging circles.
Mikayla had never before seen a Skritek in the larval stage, but she needed no one to tell her that she saw one now. Its ugly mouth opened to reveal two rows of appallingly long and sharp teeth, although it lacked the tusks of an adult, and was only a seventh of the size of a Skritek fully grown.
She was entirely unprepared for the quickness with which the ugly thing moved. Although it was not more than a foot high, it seemed almost to grow larger as she looked at it. It crawled with appalling haste in their direction, seized Traneo between its claws, and started dragging him toward the water. To her horror it began to devour the Nyssomu without even killing him first. Traneo shrieked.
Mikayla did not believe the creature could see yet—a leathery white film still covered part of the bulging eyes—but even while she stood, half-frozen in shock, it finished biting the Oddling’s head off. Traneo’s scream was cut off in midhowl, and only a splash showed where the Nyssomu had been dragged under by the horrid Skritek hatchling.
Mikayla jumped backward, tripped over a rock, and measured her length in the sand. Terror surged through her; she had faced death before while hunting, but never in such an ugly form. She tried to scramble hastily to her feet, but another of the eggs wriggled under her foot, throwing her to the ground before another emerging Skritek larva. She had landed flat on her back and the breath had been knocked out of her, so for the moment she lay helpless in the sand. The small Skritek had actually opened its mouth when a stone came flying from behind her and struck the Skritek on its extended snout. It staggered back and fell sideways.
Sobbing with relief, Mikayla scrambled to her feet, and fell against Fiolon, who with more roughness than gallantry dragged her into a boat and pulled away from the shore. In midstream, Mikayla recovered a little of her self-possession. She was still crying for Traneo—nobody should have died like that, literally being eaten alive—but at least she was no longer hysterical, and she was able to release her grip on Fiolon’s arm, which made it much easier for him to control the boat.
“I take it that—that thing was a Skritek, and those round things like stones were Skritek eggs,” Fiolon said.
Quasi, in the boat behind them, holding on to their stern, grimly assured them that this was indeed the case. Mikayla shuddered and looked at the shore.
“I can cope with the adult Skritek, but not with those things! I like them even less now I have seen them at such close range,” she remarked. “That’s definitely as close as I ever care to get to one. If that was your stone, Fiolon, thanks; I think you saved my life. What should we do now?”
Fiolon said in a shaky voice, “I think we should go back to the ruins. I’d rather have strange voices than hatching Skritek.”
“I agree,” Mikayla said. “Look at those eggs!” Onshore, other eggs were rocking and splitting asunder; as each emerging hatchling lurched toward the rest one of its new-hatched fellows fell upon it, gnashing the dreadful teeth, and tore it to bits. Soon the entire shore was a mass of tearing, clawing, and rending hatchlings, strewn and smeared with their ugly greenish-black blood. The remaining party in the stream turned away their eyes in disgust as the boats slipped rapidly downriver.
For a few moments all was silent in the boats; Fiolon stood in the bow, steering between the darkening shores, while Quasi still held the boats together. Mikayla, still shivering a bit, moved to help Quasi. She had, of course, seen the famous Drowners before, but with the few she had met, she had always been able to make herself understood. Creatures she could not communicate and reason with were quite another story!
Mikayla and Fiolon both woke up with the daw
n, ready to go explore the ruins. Quasi wasn’t enthusiastic at all, but since his choices were to stay behind alone or accompany the children, he went with them, grumbling all the way.
They picked their way carefully along the overgrown path to the ruins, watching carefully for any stonelike eggs, but finding none.
“I guess their nesting site was upstream, and not here,” Fiolon commented idly.
“We hope,” Quasi said darkly.
“I don’t feel any danger here,” Mikayla remarked. “Quasi, you said that folk coming in here heard voices—but are there any stories of any of the Folk being harmed here?”
“Most people, Princess, have sense enough to run when they hear strange voices,” Quasi said tartly.
“In other words,” Mikayla translated, “no. Nobody has ever been harmed here.”
“That we know of.” Quasi did not sound happy.
“We’ll just keep an eye out for skeletons, then,” Mikayla said, feeling much more cheerful in spite of the Oddling’s dire warnings.
“Look!” Fiolon said, so suddenly that for a moment Mikayla thought he had indeed found a skeleton. “That building ahead—it looks intact!” Both children rushed forward, Quasi scurrying unhappily after them.
The building was indeed intact, and as they crossed the threshold the voices Quasi had mentioned started.
“They don’t sound threatening,” Mikayla remarked, stopping to listen.
Fiolon was listening intently. “I think that they’re saying the same thing in different languages—some sort of welcome or announcement, perhaps. Listen to the cadences; do you hear how similar they are?”
Mikayla listened until the voices fell silent, but shook her head. “I’m afraid I haven’t your ear, Fiolon, but I’m sure you’re right. Come, Master Musician, let’s see if we can find you another music box.” She hooked a hand around his elbow and dragged him farther into the building.
The building was stone, made up of large rooms, with large latticework windows that had let in lots of daylight. Even now, with vines twining through the lattices, it was still light enough that they did not need torches.
“I wonder if this was a school,” Mikayla said as they passed through a room full of benches and tables.
“Maybe it was a theater.” Fiolon had preceded her into the next room. “Look how the benches are on risers around the stage.”
“Yes,” Mikayla said, “this does look like a picture of a theater I saw in a book at home. But couldn’t a school have its own theater?”
“It would have to be a very rich school,” Fiolon pointed out.
“Maybe, compared to us, the Vanished Ones were rich,” Mikayla said. “Even some of what must have been small trinkets to them are beyond price for us.” She poked her head into a smaller room behind the stage. “I think this is some kind of storeroom, but it’s dark. Do you have a torch?”
Quasi reluctantly produced a torch and tinderbox, while grumbling that perhaps some things weren’t meant to see the light.
Mikayla ignored the grumbling, but thanked him as she took the torch from his hand. Together she and Fiolon entered the room and gasped in astonishment. The room was full of racks and shelves and cupboards. Fiolon went back into the theater room to get a second torch from Quasi while Mikayla began to examine the shelves. The first one was full of face masks, stylized, but definitely human faces in shape and color. They had holes for eyes so that the wearer could look through them, and a smaller hole as part of the mouth, obviously to breathe and speak through. Next to the shelf was a rack of costumes, but when Mikayla tried to take one off its peg, it fell to pieces in her hand. She gulped in dismay. “What did I do?”
Fiolon lit his torch from hers and fingered through the fragments on the floor. They crumbled still further at his touch. “You didn’t do anything, Mika,” he reassured her. “This is some kind of silk, and silk rots as it ages. Anything that touches it would make it fall apart.”
“Oh, good,” Mikayla said. “I’d hate to think I was wantonly destroying valuable history.”
Fio shrugged. “You can’t touch this stuff without destroying it. I’m going to check the cupboards. If there are music boxes in this room, they’d have to be in one of them.”
“Or we’d be hearing them now,” Mikayla agreed. “I’ll take a quick look at the rest of the racks, and then I’ll start on the other end of the cupboards and we can meet in the middle.”
Fiolon grunted in acknowledgment, already opening cupboards in a methodical fashion. Mikayla passed the rest of the costumes, being careful not to brush against them, and then came to a rack full of silver spheres about the diameter of her thumbnail. Each sphere had a loop set on the top of it, and they hung from different-colored ribbons, made of some sort of material Mikayla had never seen before. Judging from the length of the ribbon, they were intended to be some sort of pendant, and they seemed to come in paired sets. Mikayla touched one gently with a fingertip and it chimed softly as it swung back and forth.
Soft as the sound was, it caught Fiolon’s attention. “What have you got there?” he asked, joining her.
“I don’t know,” Mikayla said, “but they’re pretty, aren’t they?”
Fiolon was already testing for pitch up and down the line. “The different colors are different tones,” he said absently.
“I like this one.” Mikayla picked up one of the pair with green ribbons and put it around her neck. “Here,” she said, dropping its mate over Fiolon’s head, “at least we’ve found something musical.” She ran a finger over the ribbon around her neck. “And whatever this ribbon is made of, it’s a lot stronger than silk.” She moved to the far end of the cupboards. “I’ll start on my share of the cupboards now.”
Fiolon shook the chiming ball next to each ear, then tucked it into the front of his tunic, before returning to the cupboards. After he explored a few more, there was a cacophony of sound as he opened one. “Look, Mika!” he shouted.
Mika laughed. “I don’t have to look, I can hear. They certainly sound strange all playing at once, don’t they? How many are there?”
“Seven,” Fiolon replied, stuffing several into his belt pouch. Mikayla joined him and put the remainder into her own pouch. Silence fell as they were removed from the light.
“Can we go now?” Quasi’s voice came from outside. “Please?”
Mikayla and Fiolon exchanged long-suffering glances. “Well,” Fiolon admitted, “I guess we can. I’m not sure, Mika, but I think we’ve even got a duplicate here.”
“And we don’t know how many of those wretched larval Skritek survived and if they’re likely to come downriver,” Mikayla admitted. “We can always come back when it’s not their hatching season.”
“Good,” Quasi said in heartfelt tones. “Let’s get out of here—I’d like to get home in one piece!”
Mikayla tucked her little sphere down the front of her tunic so it wouldn’t catch on things on the path back to the boats, and they put out the torches and returned to the river.
Quasi surveyed the boats sadly. “We’d better leave one here,” he said. “We can all fit in one, and we’ll get home much more swiftly if we’re not trying to manage two boats among the three of us.” The children agreed, and they quickly transferred their remaining supplies to one boat. They pulled the other one high up on the shore and turned it upside down.
“We can retrieve it next time we come here,” Mikayla said.
Quasi snorted, and pushed them off from the shore.
The river carried them quickly downstream, and soon they were approaching the point where the Golobar emptied into the Lower Mutar River. Mikayla squinted, trying to get a better look at the water ahead. “The current looks much faster than it was when we came up it,” she remarked intently.
Quasi looked up and gasped. “Stay low in the boat and hold on tightly,” he ordered, but as the children moved quickly to obey him, the boat entered the Lower Mutar River and was flipped over like a child’s toy boat in a str
ong breeze.
4
Fortunately the boat had been almost to the opposite bank of the Lower Mutar when it capsized, and the current carried its three occupants in that direction. Fiolon found his footing fairly quickly, grabbed Quasi, and shoved him up onto the bank.
Mikayla, however, had come up under one of their blankets, which was floating on the surface. Her first attempt to breathe got her a mouthful of blanket, so she quickly spat it out, ducked back under the water, and punched upward with both fists as she stood up. This left her standing in a pocket of air defined by her hands and her head. Walking carefully backward and keeping her hands up in front of her, she kept the airspace intact until she came out from under the blanket to find Fiolon staring at her.
“That looked really strange,” he said. “For a moment there I was afraid you were going to drown.”
“No,” Mikayla said, “but it felt as if I were going to inhale that blanket.” Together they dragged the blanket out of the water and spread it over a branch to dry, knowing they’d need it when night came.
“Look at the bright side,” Mikayla said, wringing water out of her dripping braids. “At least we’re out of Skritek territory.”
“And not all that far from home,” Fiolon added. “Quasi, can you bespeak your village?” Some of the Oddlings could speak mind to mind over short distances, and Quasi was quite talented at it.
But Quasi was staring dumbstruck at the sky. The children followed his gaze and saw two enormous birds descending toward them.
They were at least three times as large as any bird Mikayla had ever seen in her life, but as they came closer she realized that they were even bigger than she had thought at first. They had white bodies which were almost the size of a fronial’s and wings banded black and white, but their necks and heads had no feathers on them and were about the same color as Mikayla’s skin. Their eyes were black and had a look of intelligence Mikayla had never seen in a bird before. Their beaks were dark brown and had a hole in each side near the top of the beak.
Lady of the Trillium Page 3
