by David Walton
Exhilarated, she ran on. The forest changed, becoming darker and wetter. Straight clean lines turned to sinuous curves and massive trunks with protruding buttresses. The ground became slick. Fungi pushed up through wide, decaying leaves. Soon her bare legs and feet were filthy.
She came upon what looked like the statue of a large bear: hairy, broad, and clawed, but without a bear's protruding snout. She suspected it was neither a bear nor really a statue. It was made entirely of stone, but she didn't trust it to stay that way. She gave it a wide berth and traveled on.
She didn't have a beetle. That meant that not only did she not know where she was going, she didn't know how to get back. The thick forest blocked the sun, stealing all sense of direction. She became gradually aware of presences in the trees around her. They moved quietly, invisibly, so that she didn't so much see or hear them as realize, slowly, that she was not alone.
PARRIS and Joan heard shouting. Their cell door rattled. Joan's head came up, and her eyes betrayed her terror.
"Stay back," Parris said. He clambered to his feet and stood in front of the door, arms crossed. He wondered if Sinclair and Gibbs had been tortured already, and, if so, what they had revealed. They would want to know how Catherine had been resurrected. They would want that power for themselves.
The door banged open. Vaughan stood in the opening, his face working with fury, flanked by soldiers. "Where is she?"
Parris thought he meant Joan. "She can't help you," he said. "She doesn't know anything."
"Tell me."
"She's right here, but it's me you want, not Joan. What ever you need done—"
"Don't play with me, cousin. I'll have your tongue out. Where's your daughter?"
"Catherine?"
"Do you have another? Move aside."
Vaughan pushed through, and Parris let him pass, confused. They searched the cell roughly, though there was almost nothing to see, and certainly nowhere to hide. Vaughan yanked Joan to her feet and moved her aside, as if Catherine might be hiding under her skirts.
Parris stepped between them. "What are you doing?"
"I told you. Looking for your daughter."
"You should know where she is. You took her. Did you lose her?"
"She walked out through the bloody wall!" Vaughan's face flushed an angry red. "You've been holding out on us, you stupid fool. Tavera knows it now. He can get secrets out of anyone." He flashed a brutal smile. "And I'm going to be right there to watch."
Chapter Thirty-one
IT was as close to drowning as Parris thought he could physically come without actually dying. Tavera's soldiers held his head in a barrel of water until his lungs burned and he thrashed in panic. He thought they would pull him out again, but they didn't. He fought against his own muscles, forbidding his throat to open, but his body screamed for air.
They had to pull him out, didn't they? He couldn't give them any answers if he was dead. He twisted his body in violent jerks, but he was bound tightly, and they held him fast. His throat muscles spasmed open, letting in a little water before he clenched them shut again. A powerful urge to cough nearly mastered him. He was choking.
They were taking too long. They weren't going to let him out. He was going to die right now, in only moments, and he wasn't ready. Instead of the peace he thought he might feel at his own death, he felt only panic. Blackness crept over his consciousness. His throat opened against his will and he felt the water rushing in. . . .
A hand slapped him across the face again and again. He was doubled over on the floor, and a soldier was striking him. He retched up water, then turned onto his hands and knees, coughing and gagging and breathing in great gasps of cool, sweet air.
"I can do that as many times as it takes," Tavera said. "I'm very good at it. I know just the right moment. My subjects rarely die, though occasionally I lose one. Would you like to try again?"
Parris shook his head, shivering and shuddering uncontrollably. "I'll help you. I'll tell you what ever you want."
"That's very good," Tavera said. "So tell me. Where is your daughter?"
"Truly, I don't know."
"That's not very helpful. Once again, please."
Parris thrashed as they grabbed hold of him again, but he couldn't pull away. He hadn't even caught his breath from the last time, and they didn't give him a chance.
WHEN they finally threw him back in his cell, Joan was there to take him in her arms. When he could breathe again, he repeated to her the questions Tavera had asked about Catherine. If she truly had escaped through a solid wall, it meant her resurrection had changed her in some fundamental way that none of them had predicted. It meant she was free, though, and he prayed they would never find her.
Joan put his head in her lap and ran her fingers through his hair, crooning softly. "Do you remember when she was born?" she said.
He remembered. Joan had been in her confinement for the months preceding the birth, keeping to her bed in a darkened room to reduce any risk of harm to the child. Peter was four years old, an active boy who drove the house hold staff mad with his energy and propensity to run through the hallways and spill or break things. Parris had insisted on being in the room with Joan, and Peter was left in the charge of his governess.
Catherine was born, to Parris's great amazement and delight. Peter slipped his governess's care and burst into the room. He was quickly removed, but not before he had seen his sister— not crying, her eyes still shut, and slick with blood. When his governess dragged him out again, he solemnly informed her that the baby was dead. The news spread through the servants and out of the house hold before it could be corrected, and Parris had to present the healthy, bright- eyed child to many neighbors before they believed she was alive.
"She was beautiful," he said. He wanted to add, And you as well, but he didn't know what Joan would say to that. It had been a long time since he had shown much in the way of affection toward her. In fact, since Peter died, he'd been so caught up in his own tormented sense of personal failure that he'd hardly paid any attention to her at all. So he just let her hold him and marveled that it should take a threat to their lives and a voyage to the end of the world to bring them together again.
THEY appeared all at once, dozens of red tamarins, some in the trees above Catherine, some standing within arm's reach. Despite the fact that she had known they were there, she shrieked. She hadn't realized there were so many of them, so close.
They converged on her. She didn't struggle. What seemed like hundreds of tails lashed her arms and legs and body, then lifted her clear off her feet. They placed her in a woven sling and carried her as they swung through the trees. It was surprisingly gentle, and she felt secure, despite their speed and distance from the ground. She could distantly remember being carried this way before, as a baby perhaps, and she recognized the feeling as coming from Chichirico's memories. She made herself as light as possible. Somehow, she knew that besides those who were carrying her, there were others ranging ahead, scouting for danger.
The tamarin village looked like a clutch of rolling hills. It sat in a sunny clearing. Catherine wondered if the tamarins had cleared it, and how they kept the forest from encroaching. Each "building" was a dome of living wood. Hundreds of vines grew out of the ground, twisted together, flattened, and seemed to grow into each other to form an unbroken surface which sprouted tiny pale leaves. Many tamarins were visible on the roofs of the buildings or in the trees.
The living buildings were large, no taller than one story, but some wide enough that she imagined a network of rooms. The tamarins set her down gently and she followed them inside. There was no door or opening, but she passed through the wood just as easily as they did. Inside, it was brightly lit and cool. She looked around for the source of the light and saw a conch- shaped seashell softly glowing. She guessed there was a Shekinah flatworm inside, its light diffused by the shell into a more pleasant glow. Much better than trying to wrap it in cloth. Why hadn't the settlers thought of that?
Chichirico was waiting inside. "You're alive!" she said. "I was afraid they had killed you." She wanted to run and hug him, but his face was inscrutable. Was he angry with her?
"We must go," he said in English. The tamarins set off again through the wall of the building, dragging her with them. Chichirico took the lead. They flew through the forest in another direction with Catherine towed behind them.
This trip took longer. As they traveled, the rumbling from deep underground that was constantly present grew louder. The trees began to shake visibly, not with wind, but as if the earth they were rooted in had grown unstable. Eventually they broke into a clearing, and Catherine saw that they were at the Edge, at a spot along the cliff face she'd never seen. The sun was setting, a blazing red orb so large and close it seemed that a running jump off the cliff would land her right in its fiery depths. Clouds boiled away. Sweat broke out on her face.
As she watched, a piece of the cliff face the size of a house sheared off and tumbled away out of sight. The ground between her and the cliff was traced with a web of cracks. It was just as Bishop Marcheford had said. The island was steadily sliding off the end of the world.
How long would it take before the whole island was gone? Before the human colony went over with everything else? Another chunk slipped and fell, larger than before.
The tamarins set her down. They still didn't say anything, but watched as Chichirico began to dance. They pushed her forward, toward him, and she approached apprehensively. The dance was slow and deliberate, more a series of poses than movement. When it was over, he leaped onto her, flipping over to her back in one fluid motion. Instinctively, she made her body heavy so he didn't overbalance her. She knew what was coming. He plunged his tail painlessly into her back, and she gasped. The familiar connection returned, and she realized how much she had missed it.
Her surroundings became normal and comfortable. She knew the island and its creatures. She knew how to get back to the human settlement, but it was no longer so important. This was her forest. This was home.
Chichirico spoke into her mind, and she interpreted it as English words. He told her how her resurrection had put the world out of balance, and how only she could set it right.
"Is there no other way?" she said.
His silence told her there was not.
"I can't," she said. "I can't leave my family and friends to be tortured or killed. What good does it do to save the island, if I leave them to Tavera?"
"Soon it will reach our homes," Chichirico said. "It will threaten my family, my friends. We will move and rebuild, but it will not matter. The whole island will be destroyed."
"I'll do it, but you have to help me first," she said. "Help me rescue my family, and then I'll do what you want."
"We will help you. But we must act fast. Today."
"How long until the island is gone? Weeks?"
Chichirico shook his head in imitation of the human gesture. "It moves ever faster. By tomorrow night, there will be nothing left."
PARRIS couldn't sleep. Joan had finally fallen into a fitful slumber, but he was afraid to close his eyes, lest he wake to find his head held underwater again. When his mind drifted, it was to panicked dreams of being unable to breathe. He knew it was psychological torture, a ploy to wear him down, but it was working, anyway. He wondered if the drownings had done permanent damage to his mind.
He heard a click at the door. It eased open quietly, and the soldier who unlocked it admitted Christopher Sinclair. "Tavera thinks you're ready to talk," Sinclair said.
Parris sat up, suspicious. "What are you doing here?"
"I'm cooperating. There's no way out. If you don't talk, they'll torture you until you do, and if you convince them you don't know anything, they'll kill you."
"But I don't know anything more than I've told them!"
"I know. But I do."
Parris's head spun. "What are you talking about?"
"Did they tell you about Catherine?"
"They said she escaped by walking through a wall."
"She must have." Sinclair told him how she'd pulled her arms out of her chains, and how he'd made her lighter with the Samson- mouse gloves.
"But where is she now?"
"Someplace where they can't get her. They haven't found any trace of her, and I'll tell you, they've looked. Tavera is furious with Vaughan; he's holding him responsible. Vaughan might be the governor, but he's going to find himself on the wrong end of an interrogation before long."
"I don't understand. How did Catherine get these powers?"
Sinclair sat on the floor facing Parris. "I've been thinking about it. We all have quintessence running through our veins."
"From the water."
"Right. The tamarins and all the creatures here have more than that, though. Somewhere in their bodies, they have a pearl, which can either channel the quintessence they use for their special talents, or else open a window to the void."
"But Catherine doesn't have a pearl. Does she?"
"When I pulled her soul back into her body, I wrapped a mesh of quintessence strands around her body. I think that mesh might be acting like a pearl. Even better, in fact— every time she moves any part of her body, she moves one of those strands. Once her mind started to associate her movements with the changes in the quintessential world around her, she could learn to control them. We don't consciously think of how to coordinate our legs and arms, or focus our eyes— her mind could be learning to use quintessence in the same way.
"The animals on this island all use quintessence to some degree or other to find food, escape from predators, or procreate. We thought it was something special about this island— that God created them differently. But what if they're not different? What if, over time, a partial mesh— a twist or turn around an animal's claw or horn or one its bones— formed accidentally, through chance, giving that animal some control over the type or substance of its body? That animal would be more likely to thrive, and it might teach its young how to do the same thing. Over a long period of time, all the animal species would develop such a skill, just like Catherine. Only Catherine's is wrapped around her whole body."
Parris was skeptical. He felt worn to breaking, and Sinclair's senseless talk wasn't helping. "This is pure fancy. An animal might chance to learn a behavior. It might possibly teach it to its young. But the boarcat has special claws, created for the purpose of manipulating quintessence strands. The seer skink has tears that let it see the strands. It's not just something they figured out on their own."
"Remember the beetlewood trees," Sinclair said. "Living things do what they must to survive."
"There's a limit. I can't grow two new arms to help me swim faster, no matter how badly I need them."
Sinclair waved the argument away. "The important part is that what I did to Catherine, I could do again. It wouldn't need to be a resurrection. I could wrap a mesh around a living person to give him Catherine's powers."
Parris smiled without plea sure. "Then they've been torturing the wrong man."
AFTER Sinclair left, Parris finally slipped into a fitful slumber. When he woke, it was still dark, and Joan was awake. In fact, she was gently shaking him. Everything hurt, especially his head. When he tried to move, stars burst in his vision. Then he saw the angel.
It was a white figure, pale and shimmering in the dim light. He was hallucinating. He waved his hand at it, as if to disperse smoke.
"Father?" The voice spoke clear and sharp in the silence. Parris opened his eyes wider. It was not Joan who was shaking him awake, but the angel.
A light flared, blinding him. He cringed and covered his eyes. As he blinked away the initial glare, the light took definition as a softly glowing seashell. He studied it, bemused. What made it glow? Finally, his sluggish brain realized that someone was holding the shell. His eyes followed the slim hand up to the face.
"Catherine!"
She breathed a sigh of relief at his recognition, and then engulfed him
in her warm embrace. "Oh, Father, what have they done to you?"
"Water," he said. "Food."
She helped him to his feet, and Joan was there, supporting his other side. Catherine plunged both hands into the curved wooden wall that was the outer hull of the boat. She traced a rough circle, sliding her hands through the wood like it was water, until her hands met again at the bottom. She kicked, and the circle of wood fell out, revealing the bay and the dark sky. They were right at the waterline, and a stream of water began to flood into the room through the hole.
Parris might have thought he was dreaming, but the water running over his feet was wet and cold. He scooped up handfuls and drank greedily. How had she done that? Just passing through the wood wouldn't have carved a hole. Though if Sinclair was right, quintessence was now a natural extension of her mind and body. Who knew what would be possible?
