by Sarah Remy
Chapter Six
AVANI RESISTED FIVE days before curiosity won out. On the sixth day she rolled out of bed, swathed herself in layers of wool, and stomped into the warmest pair of boots she owned. She tucked Faolan’s limestone fragment into a pocket alongside Smith’s key, then wrapped a scarf around her face and neck. She strapped her sword around her waist, checking once to make sure it was easy in its scabbard.
Outside her cottage it was well past dawn, her ewes and their babes grazing peacefully. Her one stud, kept away from the lambs in a separate pen, rumbled a low greeting as Avani pulled her door to.
The morning promised to be warm; already sweat sprang up beneath her scarf.
She walked up the slope and into Stonehill. Everin was gone down into the valley three days past to drop off her rugs and retrieve any city correspondence. He’d pretended to make the trek as a favor, but Avani knew he and the latest Mors Keep lord had become fast friends over winter. She suspected the visit was more about dice and gossip than anything else.
She’d meant to wait until he returned, but she’d become unaccountably restless the last two evenings, dreaming the first night of dark sails and deep water, of earthquakes and sinking islands and her mother floating lifeless atop the sea. The second night she’d slept not at all, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling as her heart bumped against her ribs.
She thought at first she was suffering from spring lurgy, not uncommon in the changeable weather. She drank her teas and rested on the grass alongside her sheep. But the uneasy prick along her spine only grew worse, until she caught herself scratching at her wrists and along the nape of her neck, leaving marks where she could find no rash, and so she decided on distraction as a cure for anxiety.
She’d promised Everin she’d not venture below without notice. As the big man wasn’t on the Downs, she left him a note beneath a brick inside the shepherd’s tent he’d made home once the snowmelt had run away into the river. The tent was larger on the inside than she would have guessed at first glance. He’d spread one of her rugs on the grass beneath the canvas roof, and the bedroll atop the rug was neat as a pin. A festival candle, unlit, sat atop a large wooden chest. He kept a cracked pitcher next to his pillow, presumably for water, and next to the pitcher a well-thumbed copy of the theist Book of Pledges. She pulled the curtain tightly shut as she left, feeling unaccountably as though she’d intruded without welcome.
She strode past the inn and down the hill behind. New spring grass grew where before the soil had been blackened and sullen. Purple clover flowers dotted the landscape. Already a narrow path rubbed grass to mud: Everin’s track from the rear of the inn to the Widow’s vegetable shed and back again. Halfway between, the trail forked toward the narrow patch of garden Faolan and Everin so enjoyed tending.
The vegetable shed was closed, padlocked against an unlikely thief. Avani thought Everin was extraordinarily careful with their food supplies; she wondered if that caution was a remnant of time spent prisoner underground.
Just beyond the shed, down a second slope, a narrow rocky outcrop grew out of a copse of gorse and holly. Avani knew the rock hid a door; she’d watched Faolan outfox Mal’s warding cant, but she’d never attempted the seeing herself. She ran her hands along the ridge and felt only stone, even though she thought the opening was there. She slapped the outcrop where she knew the tunnel entrance must be. The rock stung her palm and when she lashed out in frustration, it scraped her knuckles, making them bleed.
Her mind and her body were well certain the outcrop was solid stone.
Avani rubbed her hands together, scowling. Faolan used a glyph to temporarily banish the magic, tracing a sigil onto the stone with his thumb, setting the mark alight with a murmur. Mal hadn’t needed even that. He’d set the spell with word and thought, and it stood firm still.
Avani had neither the knack of sidhe sigils nor Mal’s training to fall back upon. She had her own version of witchery, which was well and fine when it came to imbuing herbal teas or binding dyes, but without her jhi, her familiar, she felt disconnected, walled away from her ancestors’ wisdom and favor.
She knew without a doubt the opening was there, a mere hands-breath from the tip of her nose.
“God’s balls!” Mal’s favorite curse seemed less impressive on Avani’s tongue. Her Goddess had little patience for true blasphemy, but the flatland deity seemed immune to insult.
Look carefully, deeply, Mal had challenged so long ago, when he’d first introduced her to his cold room. Tell me what you see.
And that was the most important part of being magus: the ability to reinterpret the senses, see the truths beneath the trickery.
Avani stared hard at the stone that wasn’t stone, widened her eyes, then squinted until her head began to throb. The stone remained stubbornly a stone. She closed her eyes again on a puff of irritation.
“I see a bloody great rock,” Avani told the back of her eyelids, and the memory of Mal she kept closest to her heart, a treasure taken out and examined in the dark of the night. “A bloody great rock and boughs of holly, all thorn and berry.”
Use your island wits, Mal-who-wasn’t Mal retorted. Tell me what you see.
“Ai, impossible man.” But Avani opened her eyes again. She took three steps back away from the outcropping, tried to see the stone afresh.
“Not graystone,” she reported. “Not limestone, either. Local quarry, moor rock. Smooth, no seams for a door, moss and fern all about, and the purple gorse. Holly, thorny holly, green and fresh and bright with berry—oh.” She stopped. “Oh! Ai, and there it is, Avani, right in front of your nose. It’s the wrong time of year for holly fruit. Blossoms, not berries. Blossoms!”
The sense of vertigo that came with the realization set spots on the horizon. When she blinked them away, the holly bush was gone, in its place a narrow, dark hole, a mouth in the rock, the truth beneath the trickery.
She had to unbuckle her sword and carry it in one hand, and wrap the folds of her wool cape tight about her waist, and even then it was a tight wiggle face-first through the hole. Just past the entrance the tunnel widened enough to allow for hands and knees. The roof scraped the top of her head. It was dark, and close, and though she had Smith’s matches in her pouch, she’d not be able to crawl and keep the light at the same time.
Avani wasn’t frightened. Lately she’d spent most of her precious free time beneath the skin of the earth, walking dim stretches with Faolan, or standing in the great cavern, making charcoal rubbings off carved limestone pillars while the aes si watched and waited, still and silent. She wasn’t frightened, but she couldn’t pretend a light wouldn’t be welcome.
The tunnel sloped straight down into the earth. The first brush of unseen fern against Avani’s hand made her squeak, and then curse herself for a fool. The barrow passageways were near-covered with green and white fern, and vining roots thick as serpents. Tiny streams and miniature waterfalls fed the underground forest, and even midwinter the air in the tunnels was warmer than the air above.
In spring it was grown near humid.
She ran headfirst into the sidhe gate, and had to bite her lip to keep from yelping. Her fumbling fingers closed around metal scrollwork; she pulled and pushed but the gate was locked, as she knew it would be. Now she had to have the light.
She balanced on her knees and one palm, and with her free hand drew one of the blacksmith’s long matches from her pouch. She scraped the widest end against the gate, pleased when the match head burst into blue flame. She passed the light carefully back and forth across the bronze gate until she found the near-invisible keyhole; barely a pinprick in the center of a stylized metal flower.
She’d hung the blacksmith’s key on her chain against Vocent Andrew’s yellow ring. It took some twisting and scuffling and a good bit of luck to manage the light and the key. In the end she had to lie on her belly in the dirt, and hold her breath to
keep her fingers from shaking. When the key slipped at last into the lock, and the tumblers turned, she was sweating with effort.
Avani shoved the gate open with her palm, retrieved her key, and slithered through. She caught a glimpse of a high ceiling and curving walls before her match broke and went out. She steadied herself, clinging to the gate as she climbed to her feet and resettled her sword. She shuffled sideways until her knuckles brushed the soil and stone, then followed the curve of the tunnel wall onward.
As she paced forward, the underground night turned to twilight. Soft white light stretched thin fingers along the tunnel, breaking the black to flickering shadows, then turning shadows to wall and ceiling, moss and vine, and then all at once the tunnel was bright as day. Avani’s eyes watered; she had to blink moisture away as she approached the mouth of the sidhe chamber. Sweat trickled down the back of her neck. As she’d traveled deeper into the earth the air had grown from pleasantly warm to steamy.
Avani thought the great cavern below was at least as large as the village above. Limestone teeth grew out of the ground and from the ceiling, reflecting brilliance. Avani knew the pillars almost as well as she knew her sheep; she knew their every lump and bump and swirl, had memorized their decoration, had mourned the few that the passage of time had broken, leaving little more than snub stumps behind.
She touched the teeth as she walked through the chamber, brushing them with her fingers as she had the tunnel wall. The warm, white light seemed to ooze from the cavern walls. Avani recognized it for what it was: a magic similar to cants Mal used to keep his laboratory cold.
Every other time she’d walked the chamber, Faolan had paced silently in her wake. The aes si had promised her his protection, but Avani knew his motives were his own. Faolan allowed her access to the pillars for her studies, and to the sigils carved on the walls, but when she’d inquired about the branch of passages at the cavern’s widest point, he’d been reticent.
“The barrows run unchecked beneath all the earth.” He’d shrugged, as if he found the implication unimpressive. “Many of the passages are blocked, unused. We are not what we were, to make use of our roads. The ways and means that were once common knowledge are now forgotten.”
That might be true, but Avani wasn’t fooled. She knew the particular tunnel Faolan used to travel back and forth between the Stonehill and the coast, simply because she’d observed his footprints in the soil around the entrance. She also knew either the tunnel or Faolan moved outside of time. A man on a good horse could travel between Stonehill and Whitcomb in four days. Faolan often walked the distance and back between sunrise and moonset, and Avani had once made that journey at his side, slipping through days in mere hours.
Despite the heat in the chamber, Avani shivered. She hadn’t much enjoyed the experience, and hoped never to repeat it.
She passed the Whitcomb tunnel, flinching a little as she crossed the center of the cavern, remembering dead Siobahn standing over Liam’s unconscious body as flat-eyed barrowmen bent over the boy, carving marks into his skin with claws and tooth. Avani sketched a quick warding in the air, avoiding the blotch of brown on limestone where Liam’s blood had stained.
The warding cant sparkled silver in the white light before fading. Avani smiled. The simple magic was one she’d found within herself over the winter, aided only by Mal’s notes and written teachings. He’d been trying to train up a vocent. Avani, who wanted no part of tying her life to a flatlander king, still couldn’t help herself. She found the learning of new things irresistible. Mal was a detail-oriented instructor, and unlike Faolan, seemed to have a knack for teaching the ways and means of power.
She’d accomplished several of the cants he’d tasked her with, learned how to coax the spark of each from her center, and if the magic hadn’t come easily, it had eventually come, and Avani couldn’t help but be proud of every small accomplishment.
The warding passed across her skin, a shudder of power, causing the tiny hairs on her arms and legs to stand up. She sighed a little with the relief of it, and increased her pace, eager to reach the other side of the cavern. Spring melt left new, odd puddles on the limestone floor, blue and pink and green. Fat drops fell from the cavern roof, shattering surface rainbows.
Avani meticulously avoided the puddles even as she kept her gaze pinned to the tunnels beyond. Four arched doorways, mouths dark against the cavern’s glow. The doors had once been gated off; pieces of scrollwork hung in places from limestone, large bronze hinges, not dissimilar to those on the blacksmith’s cellar door, littered the ground, metal turned crusted with age or damp. When Avani nudged one with her foot, the hinge slid, leaving a green patina on the limestone.
She rubbed her palms on her thighs, thinking.
“Beneath the river, he said,” she murmured, eyeing each of the four openings in turn. Her fingers tapped a rhythm against her trousers. “Is it as simple as knowing the lay of the land?”
Jacob would know, but even if he was in a mood to be helpful, Jacob was leagues away, keeping Mal company in the city, and Avani was trying her hardest not to resent her jhi’s desertion.
The river ran in a deep valley to the south and west of Stonehill. Avani sniffed suspiciously at each tunnel, hoping for a clue in the scent of the passage beyond. She could taste damp, and vegetation, and limestone, but nothing of any particular help. Nor could she hear the rush of whitewater; she was far too high up above the valley for that.
In the end she chose the leftmost tunnel, because it made the most sense in the flatland map she kept in her head, and because it felt right.
A few strides in, and Avani knew she’d chosen correctly. As she left the light of the great chamber behind, the path turned slick and steep, cutting almost straight down into the earth, more of a wide stair than a smooth slope. She lit another long match, groped at the wall for support, and when she did saw the imprint of other fingers into the muddy wall. The impression of fingers and palm were fresh, and not human; the joints stretched too long and thin.
“Aha!” She grinned and increased her pace.
The tunnel began to twist clockwise, curving sharply over and over again, like a spiral stair. Avani held her light over her feet. The ground became muddy, swimming with small streams. Water rained from above, catching in fern, rolling across feathery fronds to the tunnel floor.
Her match sizzled and went out, snuffed by the surrounding moisture. Avani tried twice to rekindle the flame, then gave it up for lost. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the gloom, but the darkness remained complete, as thoroughly black as the back of her lids.
She almost turned around. She imagined tumbling into unseen pits, tripping off the edge of a broken passage and falling to the very center of the earth, drowning in a bottomless puddle. She cursed herself for a coward.
Avani put her hand in her pocket, brushing Faolan’s limestone fragment. The etchings in the stone caught the edge of her thumbnail, a promise.
She took a deep breath and walked on, pressing close to the wall, following the curve of mud, shuffling one foot forward at a time. Moving in slow half circles seemed less dizzying in the dark. Underground rain hit her scalp and shoulders. Twice she kicked a stone, and the resulting echo made her stop and shiver.
At last she heard the rushing of the river. It grew from the low whisper of wind across treetops to the dull roar of waterfall cataracts. The tunnel wall vibrated beneath Avani’s palm, the passageway leveled out and ran straight. Avani’s feet were chilled through her boots. She stopped long enough to strike the match, and in the flash of brief spark she saw the tunnel floor had become a wide, gentle stream.
She stood still, frozen by the sudden realization that she might have missed a turning in the dark. The sound of water echoed from all directions. Shaking, she struck the reluctant match a third time, quickly scanning the walls. Before the flame snuffed she caught a glimpse of at least one more handprint in the
wall.
“Goddess bless,” she said, hopeful. She sloshed onward.
The eddy of water rose to her shins. Things floated on the lazy current, bumping her legs and feet, causing her to squeak and curse. She imagined flotsam and jetsam, then rodents and bones and finally, foolishly, entire corpses from memory: Stonehill’s walking dead.
Corpse hands, reaching up from the mud and water, ready to drag her down into the smothering earth.
She stopped, shaken, gasping at the damp air, breathless. She blinked wet from her eyelashes, hugged her arms tight to her ribs. She wouldn’t waste a match just to chase back memories and nightmares. She was island stock: practical, stubborn, strong. She would not let herself fall prey to the tricks of her sensory-deprived imagination, lose herself as little more than an animal in the dark.
It was the warding cant that brought her back from the edge of panic, the bright sparkle of silver past the corner of her eye, a warning. She jerked around, but the glitter remained out of direct sight, a nimbus of power, just out of reach.
Out of reach, but no longer invisible, which meant the warding had been triggered. Avani had her sword unsheathed and in her hand before she quite realized it. She stopped moving and waited, knees slightly bent as Everin had taught her, balanced against the bump of water.
When the barrowman grabbed, it came not from the ground, but from the wall. The warding cant flashed, silver light burning bright enough to sting Avani’s eyes, and illuminated the tunnel and her foe.
No larger than a child, little more than a bundle of fur and claw and fang, the barrowman screeched as though burnt, and pressed back against the tunnel wall. It had flat, black eyes. Those eyes reflected back the silver of the ward even as it snarled.
“Get back!” Avani warned. “Stay away!”
The creature flexed sinew and claw, but didn’t shift from the wall. Avani glanced up and down the tunnel, but saw no sign of any other sidhe. She was wracked by a horrified certainty that an army of its kind lurked just beyond her silver light, ready to swarm and tear and bite.
