“He’s here,” she sobbed, her struggles slowing as they streamed through the narrow tunnel, racing the eruption, wriggling like an overgrown eel as Nikko dodged and twisted up each tight turn. “Let me go. Nikko! Let me go!”
Her protests were useless. He did not relinquish his grip on her, and she no longer had the strength to fight him. She felt a desperate flush of fever welling up inside her, burning like her hand had burned, and her consciousness was fading by the time they burst out of the slim crack in the mountain’s face, the whole world shaking as plumes of ash spewed ferociously from the peak.
The water was as dark as sin for a hundred miles around as the volcano’s rage breached the face of the sea with a throaty roar, blotting out the clean, sparkling light of the sun. It was abysmally hot and impossible to breathe, but Megrithe somehow found the strength to cry inconsolably as she peeked under Nikko’s arm at the convulsing edifice while they shot away as quickly as they could.
She had never heard a sound louder than the volcano’s final explosion, a torrent of white-hot fire spurting upward as the entire bulk of the ocean’s floor slipped to one side, untold tons of bedrock shifting, cracking, crumbling, collapsing in a mushrooming of dust and grinding boulders and gritted sand, sending Nikko careening sideways when the shock pushed the water away, stampeding towards Niheba’s ignorant shores, building into a wave that would sweep the harbor inland and drown half the city.
“He was there,” Megrithe wept, burying her face in Nikko’s shoulder as he used all his remaining stamina to try to outrun the force of nature, to warn the city what was coming, to get them somewhere safe. “Oh, gods have mercy,” she whispered as she was carried along, spent and numb. “He was there.”
CHAPTER NINE
The light from the packet of burning powder cast harsh shadows on the sheer rock face as Nievfaya climbed and climbed with Arran clinging weakly to her neck like a sick child, silent and barely breathing. She could feel his forehead against the crook of her neck, and where his skin met hers, it burned like smoking acid.
The Queen had touched him. She had used the gemstone in her hand to burrow deeply inside him, tucking a terror into his soul that would grow and grow and grow until it consumed the world. Arran would die, surely, but so would everyone else if the little kernel of hate and evil and dank, sweeping dusk was allowed to blossom.
There was no hope for him, she knew, trying not to cry as she placed her grasping fingers into the shallow hollows in the wall. The only thing she could do now was to ensure that the Queen couldn’t feed on the nectar she was brewing in his poisoned heart by taking him as far away from her as possible.
She had a notion that perhaps her oughon friend Rodnei might do something – he had saved Arran’s life once already, and perhaps he could do so again – but the chilling wetness that cascaded down her back, drenching her shirt and making her trousers chafe uncomfortably against her waist as she climbed, made her wonder if she could even get him to Niheba before he finally succumbed to his wounds. Without the protection of the Siheldi’s bezhaka, he had an hour or two at the very best, she was sure.
Her calves were crying out at her, begging for rest as she planted her toes firmly before levering herself upwards, again and again. Her arms spat hatred at her, scraped knuckles and cramping fingers competing with her straining shoulders to complain the loudest. She didn’t know how high she had to go. She hadn’t even reached the bottom of the ocean yet. A sob hitched in her throat as she kept her eyes firmly on the stones, no more than a hair’s breadth from her nose. She was strong for a human – she was strong for a neneckt, but there was a limit even to the endurance of the sea people, and she was fast approaching it.
There was no relief in pausing, a clinging limpet terrified to relax her grip even a little, but she did so anyway, hoping her lungs would thank her for the short respite with a renewal of their energy.
“I’m sorry, Mum,” Arran whispered, the words slurred into meaninglessness for anyone who hadn’t uttered the same words themselves in the small night hours when grief reigned unchallenged. Nievfaya had said such things, uncountable thousands of times, but the dead couldn’t ever hear her.
“Hold on, Arran,” she said. “Just a little while longer. Hold on for your mum.”
His barely awake sigh shifted into a hacking cough, and Nievfaya reached up to find the next handhold. If she could just get to the water, they would be all right. Once they found the water, they would be safe – for a little while.
“Hold on,” she said again. “We’re almost there.”
But they weren’t. And even when they reached the seabed, what then? Arran had no ychauyad left in his stomach. As soon as the salt water hit him, he would drown. She had thought that she would be fast enough to get him to the surface in time to let him breathe, but she wasn’t so sure now. She wasn’t sure of anything, but she continued to climb.
Nievfaya found herself humming a tune as she let the work take over, pushing her discomfort back into a tight little ball like she used to do when laboring in the fields of her clan. The tune was more suited to the up and down motion of planting kelp seedlings, dipping into a wide canvas sack at her side, stooping down to push the roots into the sand, straightening and bending and pushing, over and over, until the waters changed from bright, sunny sapphire to a deep, smoky jade and it was time to gather at home for food and a short night’s rest.
But the insistent stresses of the rhythm made her climb faster than before. Faster, but no one was fast enough to outrace fire. She heard the rumbling before she felt anything, but trying to peer down between her knees only meant that her face was exposed to the inexorable rush of scalding air that nearly dislodged her, throwing her off balance as the heat sucked all the breath out of her. She felt Arran’s hands start to slip.
“No, no, no,” she cried as his head rolled back, swinging her sideways. Her fingernails dug into the tiniest cracks, splitting painfully as his weight wrenched her away from the wall.
“Please,” she gasped, terrified of the fall, the remnants of the black powder’s light all but lost in the distance between them and the ground.
She didn’t know how she managed to keep herself clinging to the stone, but Arran’s limp skull struck the nape of her neck as she arced her back and tried to shift him forward, sliding him down so she could take hold of one of his sleeves between her teeth, a last effort to keep him from tumbling into nothingness if he loosed his locked fists around her.
It was nearly impossible to breathe with only her nose free, but she kept climbing. There was nothing else to do.
“The Irithi Athdra are coming,” Arran muttered, and suddenly Nievfaya stopped stock still, heedless of the debris that was raining down on her as the mountain shivered and shook in its distress.
“What did you say?”
“They are coming,” he whispered. “They are free.”
Nievfaya wanted to say that they couldn’t be coming, because there was no such thing as the Irithi Athdra. There couldn’t be. They were nothing more than a pervasive myth woven through the fabric of neneckt legend, linked always to the Siheldi Queen, but Nievfaya didn’t know that humans had ever heard the same tales.
Arran was in no state to argue with her, much less to lie to her. He could not have known it unless he was speaking the truth – the Queen’s truth – and the words struck a fear into her heart that could not be equaled.
“Sun Mother save us,” she said as she redoubled her efforts, shaking pumice and ash from her hair. The stories said that the only thing worse than the Queen of the Siheldi were the broken pieces of her power, defeated and imprisoned long, long ago.
Some called them her sons; others said they were merely servants; some even said they were the remnants of a long lost consort and King. But all had celebrated the end of the Siheldi’s unbridled butchery when the Irithi Athdra had been entombed in strong bezhaka, warded by the wisest and more powerful of the neneckt, wrapped around with invisible chains of
deep and unbreakable sorcery time and time again to keep them from making their mother whole.
There was no prison in any realm of earth or sea that could hold back the full might of the Siheldi if the Irithi Athdra were unleashed upon a feeding ground as rich as Paderborn. The spirits would be weak, and they would need to fatten up significantly if they were to help the Queen break through the last of the seals that held her in check.
If they were smart – and Nievfaya had no doubt that they were – they would flee to the outskirts of the city where the poverty-riddled peasants had little red iron to sting them, and they would feast to their hearts’ content before gaining enough strength to gorge themselves in Paderborn proper. If even half the tales were correct, Nievfaya could not think of a single thing – not even all the contents of all the Guild’s vaults – that could form an effective defense against them once they were fighting fit again.
The old stories told of a champion, of course, to keep the black defeat at bay, but she had never heard of a prophesy’s promises that had ever come true. She had never seen the point of putting hope in them, not as a youngling and not now. Her family had barely even been able to feed itself, and no gods or warriors or good men seemed to care. What was the use in foretelling a hero who would save the whole wideness of the world when something as simple as a full belly for a single child was always so far out of reach?
“Where are they?” she asked him.
“They are coming.”
“Coming for us?” she asked, glancing down between her feet again.
“They are free.”
Nievfaya bit her lip to stop herself from lashing out at him for repeating himself. He couldn’t help it. It probably wasn’t even Arran who was talking. His mind would not be his own for much longer, if there was any of it still left at all.
“Keep quiet,” she said, giving up for the moment. “You need to conserve your strength.”
Nievfaya started humming again to distract herself from the overwhelming confusion of her alarming thoughts, but the song had changed. She didn’t know the new strains she was singing. She had never heard the melody before, but all of a sudden there was no other music in her head, no matter how hard she tried to wrench herself away from it.
It wasn’t a neneckt song. It didn’t sound like a human song. It was something else entirely, and it was coming out of her mouth with words she didn’t understand – words that hurt her like the snap of a whip and the blow of a mallet – and they frightened her even more than Arran’s mumbled phrases.
“Stop it,” she said to herself, taking Arran’s sleeve into her teeth again to keep her mouth clamped shut, but the song kept running past her, forcing her onward, forcing her upwards, as the mountain shook again. It was more deeply compelling than her quest for her freedom, than her urge to live, than her desire to die. It sank through the very bones of the stone colossus beneath her: a song of a world that should never exist; a song to make the giant dance.
Before long, just as Nievfaya thought she saw the faintest shimmer of daylight above her, the mountain reached the limits of its restraint. Another belch of overheated air brought with it an inverted rain of scalding dust that scoured her flesh and burnt tiny pinprick holes into the fabric of her clothes. It was impossible to think or talk or draw a breath in the middle of the maelstrom, and no matter how fast she thought she was moving upwards, her body moving jerkily forward despite her blank despair, the mirage of sunlight had disappeared, and there was nothing left but a nightmare.
“I must be free,” Arran whispered urgently in her ear, but her only response was a broken whimper. She was trying to save something beyond saving. She always had been, long before she had ever met Arran Swinn.
She could just let go, if she wanted to. She could just fall, and the baking oven of burning rock would kill her before she hit the bottom. She could just let go. It would be the easiest thing she had ever done.
Nievfaya tucked her chin down to try to give her a space to breathe as another queasy tremble threatened to take the choice away from her. On her back, Arran coughed again, and she felt his arms tighten ever so slightly around her neck.
“Faidal?” he croaked, his voice little more than the shadow of a thought. It was his voice, though. She could tell. “You need to let me go.”
“Why would I do that?” she asked, hauling herself up another few inches.
“There’s something – something inside of me.”
“I know.”
“Please,” he said, and he sounded frightened. “Please don’t let it get out.”
“I can’t leave you to the Queen,” she said. “I’ll kill you later, all right?”
“Promise?”
She didn’t reply.
“Faidal –”
“That’s not my name.”
“Please. Promise.”
“Arran, I didn’t come all this way just to leave you at the top,” she said firmly.
“Are we at the top?”
“I don’t know. I really hope so.”
Arran fell silent again as Nievfaya tried to muster the last of her willpower. She had seen the water. She really had. It was up there, and she must be getting close to it by now. She might not believe in prophecies, but she did believe in her own eyes. There was nothing else left to have faith in.
She had stopped perspiring by the time her head poked up into cold, cold wetness. There wasn’t any moisture left in her after being buffeted by the desiccating heat for so long, and any tears of relief she might have cried would have been lost to the ocean waters in any case.
She crouched just below the end of the tunnel, hoping to give Arran a few more minutes to breathe before she ventured further upward. She would need to be incredibly quick if she hoped get him to the surface before he ran out of air, and she didn’t know if she could manage it. The whole long climb might have been for nothing after all.
“Arran,” she said, nudging him with her elbow and startling him awake. “I need you to take a very deep breath. Do you understand?”
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. There’s someone on Niheba who can help you,” she said, trying to give him something to hope for. “My friend Rodnei, remember? The one who made your medicine. He can help. You just need to get there. All right? Promise me.”
“I –”
“Promise,” she snapped, and she felt him nod. “Good. Are you ready?”
His first attempt at holding his breath ended in a painful moan as his wounds stretched and strained, but after a few agonizing moments of trying, he seemed to succeed. It was as good as it was going to get, and Nievfaya couldn’t wait any longer. There was a terrible humming sound, a constant vibration of pressure that traveled through her body and continued down into the roots of the mountain. The Sea Father was ready to breathe fire.
“We need to go,” she said, pausing until she felt him fill his lungs and hold the air inside. With a prayer galloping through her head and a strange crackling tingle running down her spine, she sprang through the invisible film that kept the Siheldi apart from the world above. It made sure the spirits stayed in while keeping the water out, but it couldn’t keep her away from her native element.
Instead of the wildly disturbing chant that had been flowing through her during her journey, her whole being was singing with the unparalleled joy of returning to the sea after too long away. There was no time for a true celebration, let alone the common rituals of rejoining, but she let the pleasure of the swift bubbles streaming along her flanks lend her speed as she pointed her face upward, allowed her human flesh disappear, and cradled Arran close as she quickly made for the pale glint of sun.
Barely a moment later, the volcano erupted with such staggering force that it nearly deafened her. With the enormous blast ringing in her ears, she desperately dodged to and fro, narrowly avoiding collisions with smoking boulders and barely cooled clumps of lava, the leading edge blackened and smoothed before the molten rock burst into hissing dro
plets when the natural ordinance hit a target.
The sea was black, all of a sudden, and all her relief was gone. It was taking too long – there were bubbles coming from Arran’s mouth, and she knew that he would not survive the twisting, weaving path she was being forced to take. She pushed blindly through the ashes, and the sudden, searing heat, ignoring the tormented cries of sea and stone that writhed and wrenched themselves to pieces.
She couldn’t see the peak of the mountain itself – she knew the tunnel they had exited was somewhere on the lower slopes, but there was nothing visible in the murky water except brief flashes of red lightning that flickered all around her, disorienting and dim.
It took an age and a half to reach the surface, but reach it she did. Hoisting Arran’s head above the water forced her to waste her energy taking the form of human flesh again, but she tilted him back and pounded on his chest to get his heart working, relieved laughter mixed with more than a few tears as he gasped and spit and coughed out red-tinted water, his eyelids barely fluttering open as he gulped the relatively pure air.
Blood instantly gathered in a ruddy pool around him, mixing with the volcano’s silt to form a thick soup of filth. Sharks were too smart to stay around when they felt the rumblings of the earth below them, but she wasn’t about to tempt them into being foolish when she was too exhausted to do anything about it.
“Just lie flat,” she said, making sure he could float on his back while she got her bearings. There was an immense plume of smoke and dust pouring from the ocean’s surface less than a mile away, a glinting swath of smothered fish bobbing up to the surface like prizes in a children’s game. They had to leave if they didn’t wish to be similarly boiled alive. It would be a long way to Niheba, and she would need to stay above the water, swimming as slowly and laboriously as a land-dweller if she was to keep Arran living, ducking under for quick bursts of speed only as long as he could hold his breath.
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