The constrictor seems to realize a new strategy in that moment, and Usha’s fur begins to point directly to the ground, as if blown flat by wind. Still growling ferociously, she drops, belly pressing into the earth.
Auriel uses his stolen power to press Usha harder and harder into the stone, his trapped head dropping along with her. His topaz scale—the one that must represent his gravity power—glitters and glows, giving his head a brown-gold aura. Mez watches her aunt’s eyes open wide, lips and ears pressing into the stones. Through it all, Usha never lets up her grip. There’s a sizzling sound, and the sweet stench of burning fur. Mez has no idea how painful it must be to bite Auriel in his raw-energy form.
Through it all, Auriel continues to thrash, his tail thudding into the ziggurat’s roof, sending up rains of ants and moss and mold and shards of stone. Mez dashes to Chumba’s side, draping herself over her sister’s prone body to shield her from any falling debris. She’s turned herself invisible in hopes that it will decrease the chance that Auriel notices her, but it will be only a matter of time before Auriel’s tail happens to touch her and he suctions her body to the ground, too.
Usha starts gasping in agony from her position flattened on the floor, eyes wide as her jaw muscles clench tight, their straining visible even through her thick fur. While Usha lies there, immobile, Auriel lifts his massive tail and brings it high into the sky, ready to crash down onto Chumba—and Mez.
Desperate, Mez sinks her nails deep into Chumba’s hindquarters and pulls. It’s difficult, but she’s able to drag Chumba along the ground despite the magic pressing her down. Auriel’s heavy tail thuds right where Chumba was a moment before, the impact strong enough to make the ground shudder, setting Mez’s paws to tingling.
The tail rises right over Chumba and Mez. Desperately, Mez drags again, wincing as she does, ready for the strike from above that will end it all.
Only the strike doesn’t come.
A flash of white, then a glimpse of a creature streaking across the ziggurat’s roof. It’s Mist!
He uses the opening to launch himself right at Auriel’s softer underbelly, sinking his teeth in deep. The white panther drapes over Auriel, puncturing with his sharp canines while his back claws skitter across invulnerable scales. Before Auriel can bring his tail down and crush Chumba and Mez, he’s writhing in agony, whipping through the air. Mist has clamped onto Auriel’s underbelly as securely as a tick, and isn’t going anywhere, even as Auriel brings him smashing onto the ground.
Mist. Mist has saved them.
Even as he thrashes, trying to bludgeon Mist against the stones, Auriel keeps his merciless eyes on Chumba.
Chumba’s body begins sliding. Startled, Mez tenses her muscles and digs her teeth into Chumba’s nape. But she’s powerless against the movement. Chumba’s lips draw back from her teeth as she fills with panic. “Mez, what’s happening?”
“I don’t know!” Mez says. But then she sees Auriel still staring at Chumba, and she realizes that he’s using his gravity magic to send the little panther down into the abyss. Down to the Ant Queen.
The thought of her sister tumbling away into the darkness scrambles Mez’s senses. From somewhere above comes Sky’s strident caw: “Auriel! Mez is here. She just became visible!”
All Mez’s attention is on Chumba. There’s only a short distance between her sister and the gaping void, and Auriel’s power is dragging her into it tail-first. Chumba desperately tries to grip into the stone, but neither her clawed limb nor the pawless one can get any purchase, and she’s sliding helplessly, faster and faster.
Mez scrambles and pounces toward her, but it’s too late. Mez is still in the air when Chumba’s eyes widen more than ever, her mouth opens into a scream, and then she whips down into the darkness.
Chumba is gone.
FOR AN INSTANT, Mez is motionless. There’s Sky above, cawing out his warnings to Auriel. There’s Usha, powerful jaws locked behind the constrictor’s head. There’s Mist, clamped onto his belly, digging in as best he can.
Then there’s Chumba, somewhere in that darkness, tumbling into the pit of ants and their queen and whatever is left of the trapped animals.
Chumba, Rumi, Gogi, Lima, the remaining eclipse-born—that’s where Mez’s heart lies. She’ll have to leave Auriel to Mist and Usha.
“I’m coming, Chumba!” Mez cries as she springs toward the opening and leaps in. As soon as she’s falling, she flings her legs out in four directions so she’ll kite in the air.
She looks back as she falls to see Sky still screeching away his warnings, Mist hanging on tight to Auriel, teeth bared as he tries to find a spot to bite down.
Then Mez hits the bottom, yelping and shaking the pins of pain from her ankles. She is in a cold and cavernous space, full of scents of metal and old air with dank undercurrents Mez has never encountered before. Since she can’t see in this pitch black, she has to rely on scent to find Chumba. She picks up a trace of her sister not too far off and approaches, hesitantly slinking forward, not daring to speak.
The floor crunches underpaw, almost like it’s covered in old leaves. But it does not smell like leaves. Each step brings up the sharp, two-toned scent of . . . not bone, quite, but something like it, plus acid and guts. Ants, Mez realizes. I’m crushing ants! Even as she pauses and scents the air, she can feel them in her fur, climbing around her ears. Maybe I’m wrong, she tells herself, unnerved. Maybe this is my imagination.
The last sigil has gone out, which means the Ant Queen is probably free, could be anywhere around them. Shivering in the frigid air of the ancient ziggurat, Mez creeps toward Chumba’s fear scent.
Why can’t I hear any of the other eclipse-born? she wonders. Are they dead? She wants to call out their names, but knows the Ant Queen could be listening.
She feels something brush her nose, and seizes in panic until she picks up the scent underneath and realizes that it’s Chumba’s tail. Chumba doesn’t say anything out loud, but continues to run her tail under Mez’s chin, silently acknowledging her sister’s presence. As she huddles near, Mez’s sensitive whiskers tell her Chumba is looking up, and she follows her gaze skyward. Stars wink within the rectangle of open sky. They can hear the fighting growls of Mist and Usha, but there’s no getting back up to join them. Unless there are pawholds carved into the walls, the sisters are trapped below.
As they slink blindly through the pitch black, Mez tries to adjust to her new and strange-smelling surroundings. With every pawfall the ground crunches, each step bringing with it the smell of sap and insects. She’s squishing a horde of ants as she goes. At least they don’t seem to be biting back or singing any creepy Ant Queen–inspired songs. For now.
Suddenly Chumba halts, her whiskers beside Mez’s own. Her voice is the slightest whisper: “Mez, over here. I felt a monkey foot.”
Heart sinking, Mez follows her sister through the dark. Sure enough, there’s a monkey’s foot. Only the foot. Stranger still, it seems to be floating in midair. Her whiskers sense the five toes, the warm pad in the center, but as she moves around it the monkey . . . ends. Not into thin air, though—there’s rock surrounding it. The monkey has been embedded in rock!
At least its flesh is warm. At least it isn’t dead. Soft toes dart under Mez’s whiskers, like the monkey is responding to a tickle, and she hears the faintest hint of a cry. Gogi.
A glow begins within the stone. At first Mez thinks she’s seeing a glint of starlight within the rock. Impossible. Then she realizes that Gogi’s making his fire within his prison, sending glitters across the surface of the nearby rocks.
Mez swivels, knowing that the scant light Gogi’s glow has cast will be enough for her darkvision to take in more of her surroundings. When she sees what’s around her, she cringes back in shock.
The ziggurat is hollow all the way down from the open stone doors, and the walls around her are covered in vines and dirt, all of it swarming with ants. The floor, too, is teeming with them. Ants crawl over Mez and Chumba, the
y crawl over the vines, and they crawl over the walls themselves, up and along the runes carved into the massive stone doors suspended from the ceiling.
In the walls, embedded in the stone, are animals. Many animals.
Beneath the growls and smashes from the fighting on the roof above, Mez takes a closer look. The animals aren’t chained up in any way—it’s more like they’ve been pressed into the stone while it was soft, and then it set around them. There are no faces visible, just a wing here, a claw there, the entire back of Sorella. The submerged animals continue around the entire cavern, evenly spaced, except at the end, where there is a gaping hole, shards of rock all around, ants swarming even those. It’s like that imprisoned animal has been forcefully yanked out.
There’s no way to be sure, but Mez thinks she knows what she’s seeing—Auriel trapped all the eclipse-born here in the ziggurat, and he’s taken one out already and constricted it. Or fed it to the Ant Queen. He’s probably planning on working his way through all the remaining animals in time.
Auriel is still above. But where is the Ant Queen?
Mez gets Gogi’s foot between her teeth and tugs as gently as she can, but he yelps, stuck tight in the rock. “Come on,” Chumba whispers beside Mez. “Now that there’s light, the Ant Queen can probably see us. We should hide.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t need light to sense us,” Mez whispers back, shivering. “But hiding definitely sounds like a good idea. Where?”
“Wherever it’s darkest, obviously,” Chumba says, for a moment sounding just like Usha. She leads them toward an edge of the chamber, where wall meets floor. They slink along and keep their hackles low, so they’re half hidden in the shadows at the chamber’s edges.
Mez takes advantage of the pause to take another look around. There are the feathers of the trogon, peeking out over the surface of the stone. There’s Sorella’s lustrous tail, knobby after, she’d once confided, it had been broken in a squabble with another uakari. Where each animal is embedded in the rock, there is also a blank bubble within, glowing in shades of brown from Gogi’s fire. Mez figures those air pockets must be to keep each prisoner alive until Auriel or the Ant Queen consumes it. Every embedded animal has a bubble prison, except one. The ocelot.
The cat’s tail dangles limply beside Gogi’s foot. Mez can’t see a bubble, though—it’s like the stone has been filled in. Alert to any movement of Auriel from above, or any movement of the Ant Queen from here below, Mez stalks nearer to get a better view.
The filled interior of the air pocket throbs rhythmically. It’s hard for Mez to make out exactly what she’s seeing, but it looks like a giant knobby heart, breathing in and out. Slowly she’s able to make out more details—it’s like a frozen combat in there, like the ocelot was battling some other animal before they both got trapped in sap.
Then Mez sees the shape of two mandibles locked around the ocelot’s neck. Realization comes in a rush: This is the Ant Queen. Feeding. She’s twice the size of the cat. Even if he weren’t trapped inside the stone, the ocelot would have had no chance of defending himself against her.
“Oh, Mez,” Chumba says. At the sound of the panther’s voice, Gogi strengthens his fire, and the ruddy glow casts ribbons of light into the thin stone, illuminating it like a mud pool in a sunbeam. Mez can see the ocelot’s body now, limp within the embrace of the giant insect, head lolling to one side.
“What’s she doing?” Chumba asks out of the side of her mouth.
“I think she’s . . . eating him,” Mez says, shuddering.
The Ant Queen begins to move within the stone, one leg and then another lifting and lowering. The stone surface begins to shiver.
“And it looks like she might be on the move again,” Mez says. “We have to come up with a way to get the trapped animals out, now!”
Instinct brings the two sisters low to the ground, legs tensed and tails thrashing. “Maybe if we surprise her . . .” Mez says, but her voice trails off. Two inexperienced panthers against a giant armored insect—they don’t stand a chance.
The glow intensifies, and then the stone crackles, sounding like a bush after a lightning strike. Rock shards rain on the panthers, clattering on the stone around them. As one, Mez and Chumba go still.
After the hail of stone bits, the next thing to tumble out is the ocelot. He pitches headfirst, and Mez expects to see him hit the ground on all fours, like any cat would. But he slumps right where he strikes the stone, his legs making unnatural angles. The ocelot is dead.
Mez has no time to think about him. The Ant Queen will be the next to emerge.
There is no hesitancy to her movements—this is a creature who has never had need of fear. The Ant Queen lifts her heart-shaped head, antennae dabbing the air while her mandibles open and close. The stiff yellow hairs that sprout along her head and abdomen only accentuate the unbroken invulnerability of her plate armor. She is as large as Usha, but has none of the softness of a mammal. The only way Mez has ever known to kill an insect has been to crush it. But how can she crush an insect that’s bigger than she?
The broken body of the ocelot reminds her how impossible the task before her is.
Mez wills herself to be as stealthy and unnoticeable as she can, and sure enough, her paws disappear beneath her. She doesn’t know if the scent of her pantherfear will be enough to warn the Ant Queen, but she can’t do anything to control that.
“Chumba, stay hidden here for a moment,” Mez says. “I’m going to use my invisibility to ambush her.”
Mez expects Chumba to protest, but instead her sister’s words are cool and confident. “I love you, Mez. I’ll join the fight as soon as you start the attack.”
The ants continue to surge toward their queen, collecting into streams and rivers, their teeming bodies rising to Mez’s belly and entangling in her fur as she picks her way along. The Ant Queen remains motionless, head raised and mandibles outstretched, antennae waving while she senses the world around her.
Then she makes a shriek, an otherworldly grating sound, and her legs undulate. She skitters around the chamber, her ant minions swarming her and raising up their strange harmonic song as she goes. Chittering all the while, she sprints toward a soft furry body trapped in a stone pocket, lit by the ruddy light of his fire. Gogi.
Oh, no you don’t.
Fury gives Mez speed, and she can’t help but release a low growl as she nears the Ant Queen, now only a few panther-lengths away. Double-checking her invisibility, Mez edges closer. Closer.
The Ant Queen whirls toward Mez, mandibles flaring, but they snap over open air. She doesn’t seem able to detect Mez, at least not yet. The Ant Queen scurries the last few paces toward Gogi.
Where will Mez try to bite? She settles on one of the narrow joints where the three sections of the Ant Queen’s body join. Those seem weakest. Mez’s mouth, which usually waters when a successful kill is ahead, is fully dry, proof of how hopeless this is.
Closer. Closer.
The ants raise their ghostly song—if they’re making words, they’re lost in the echoes of the chamber. The Ant Queen lifts her forelegs to the stone and begins to clatter her sharp mandibles against it.
Mez maneuvers so she’s approaching behind the Ant Queen’s head, hoping that being out of view will give her more chance of staying undetected. She fixes on the joint where head meets abdomen.
Now’s the hardest part: the tide of ants has risen around their queen, and Mez will have to ford through them. She gingerly places one invisible paw into the stream of ants, then another. Whether unaware of the panther because of her invisibility or too much in thrall to their queen, the ants don’t bite Mez, even as they get crushed under her paws. Her covering of insects must make her more visible, but hopefully the same layer of ants will help mask Mez’s scent.
She’s near enough to the Ant Queen now for her sensitive nostrils to pick up the sharp scent of the acid wetting the queen’s mouth. Her massive rear section pulses, and for an irrational moment Mez think
s it’s the spirit of the ocelot, still moving inside her. But then she realizes that she’s probably seeing eggs form, already in motion within their mother, ready to be laid by the millions.
Why haven’t the ants informed the queen that Mez is stealing toward her? Maybe her invisibility has them confused—whatever the reason for this stroke of luck, Mez knows she must take advantage.
She gets into position, standing on her back legs in the middle of the swarm, jaws open as wide as possible. To reach the Ant Queen’s height, Mez has to balance precariously while proceeding. She’s near enough now to hear the creaking of the queen’s armor, could reach out and swat the Ant Queen’s antennae with a paw if she wanted to.
Mez looks back toward Chumba, who is still in her hiding place, staring in her sister’s direction. I love you, Mez beams. Then she cranes forward and clamps her jaws around the Ant Queen’s neck.
Instead of feeling the acid tang of exoskeleton crackling under her paws, the moment Mez contacts the queen the chamber is gone, Chumba is gone, the ziggurat is gone. It’s all replaced by a void, the Ant Queen floating in the space, facing Mez, her legs curling and uncurling in waves, up one side and down the other.
Mez tries to growl, but no sound escapes her. Her limbs swim through open space.
While the Ant Queen’s shining black eyes in their crimson armor stare right at Mez, words appear inside the panther’s mind: I wish to talk to you, Mez.
Mez looks down at her own body. She’s suspended in the void too, paws outstretched. Air does not exist anymore. But neither is she suffocating. She thinks her response. Don’t hurt my sister.
I might let her live. If you obey me.
Why are you killing us?
Auriel killed the ocelot. He constricted him to seize his power. I had just awoken from my long sleep and made the climb up from the watery lower reaches after the two-legs’ foul prison finally released me. I was famished, my eggs were withering with my starvation, and the ocelot was dead. I did what I had to. Auriel is the murderer here: if it didn’t take him time to recover after each constriction, all the eclipse-born would already be slain. Forgive me for eating a dead cat. I am sure it disturbed you. But you are a hunter too. Those teeth and claws of yours have killed many an animal. My unborn children would have died if I hadn’t consumed the ocelot. If you really consider it, I do not think you will find that much that needs forgiving.
The Lost Rainforest Page 20
