He drew in a breath, gathered his courage, and walked through the low passage.
He stood before a maze of twisting little passages, all alike, and they were filled with the sticky cobwebs of dreams. The tattered ends of discarded wishes danced in a breeze that never touched his flesh, and the tunnels were thick with dreamshifting and sorcery, a trap for the unwary. The web was hung with globes like silvered pearls, each of them endlessly reflecting everything. Daru looked away from the sight of his own eyes watching him watching himself watching him. That path, he knew, led to madness, and he did not want to get caught in the web, trapped like a fly for Eth to feed on.
Which way to go? he wondered. He let his ka unfurl, but just a little bit, because none of the dreaming webs were familiar to him. Some were probably just the remnants of innocent dreams, and those would dissolve at a touch, but others might be anchored in nightmares, or laid down with sorcery, and none of them felt like Hafsa Azeina’s work. The last thing he needed was to get caught up in someone else’s nightmare, or to have his soul ripped to bits and gobbled up by an Arachnist.
Those passages that glowed a faint greenish color he dismissed out of hand. He did not know what the color meant, but it looked sickly and filled him with unease. That left three passages tall enough and wide enough for him to pass through easily. The middle path was widest and tallest, and seemed the easiest way. The left-hand path had a gentle upward slope, and this passage was the one that smelled most strongly of cinnamon and yeast. The right-hand path looked to be the oldest and least used of the three. It angled sharply downward and had a neglected feel to it.
His feet, especially the bare one, wanted him to take the easiest path. But he had heard enough children’s tales to know that was a bad idea. Daru figured that if he were a soul-eating sorcerer, he would set his trap on such a path. An image came to him, unbidden, of Sulema with her hands full of honey-cakes, her golden eyes full of laughing mischief. “If in doubt, Daru,” she would have said, “follow your nose.” He took two hesitant steps toward the left-hand path, and his empty stomach roiled at the thought of fresh spice bread.
Pip piiiii, trilled Pakka, and her sharp little feet stung as she clutched at his skin. Peeeee-oh.
He stopped. “No?” he asked her. “Why not?”
Dream-Sulema mocked his indecision. Are you afraid to face the hearthmothers, then, little boy? She brought the spice-bread to her mouth and tore at the soft loaf. Honey spilled from the corner of her mouth to drip, drip, drip down her chin. Daru felt as if his stomach was trying to gnaw its way through his spine, and made a hungry little noise in the back of his throat as one foot dragged itself forward. Hungry…
PEEEEEEEE-OHHHHHHHH! Pakka shrieked and bit his ear, breaking the spell.
Sulema’s face dissolved into a wretched mask with maggoty eyes and blood dripping down its chin, and then broke apart into a mass of shadows. Hungry, they reminded him. Hungry. One of them tried to smile at him, showing a mouth full of pointed cat’s teeth. Follow your nose. Hungry.
Daru reached up and touched his stinging earlobe. His fingers came away wet, and the shadows hissed at the smell of his blood.
“Hungry?” he asked.
They waited, rustling in the darkness like a dead man’s clothes.
Daru took off his remaining sandal and threw it at the shadows. “Eat my shoe!” he shouted at them. Disappointed, they melted from his sight. Thus emboldened, he turned and walked down the right-hand path, careful not to brush up against any of the tattered webs with his ka. He reached up and gently untangled Pakka from his hair.
“You bit me,” he told her.
Tit-tit-titta-pip, she agreed.
He laughed, and his heart lifted as his steps took him down into a darkness too thick to see through even with his dreaming eyes. Bits of rock stung his feet. The air did smell cleaner in this tunnel, and he imagined that there was a little breeze. Surely it would come out somewhere in the fortress, and then he could ask the outlanders to help him find his way back. Surely a boy would not be lost forever in the…
…dark? He spun as a light bobbed next to his head. What trickery was this? The light spun with his movement, and as Pakka skreeked in protest, the rose-colored light flickered and dimmed.
“Pakka?”
The little light flickered again, and she peeped in his ear. She was glowing.
“Clever girl,” he murmured, and stroked her gently, mindful of the delicate wings. It was just a little light, really not enough to see by, but it cheered him nonetheless and he stepped livelier. After a while the floor became smoother, to the relief of his feet. The broken tunnel took on a more tended look, and it grew wider, the roof arching farther and farther from his head until it seemed he was walking down a great hall. It no longer felt as if he were walking downward, either. Though he could not be sure, it felt as if he were turning always a little to the left, inward and inward as if he were inside a giant snake that was coiled in upon itself.
A snake—or a sleeping dragon.
Then the floor dropped out from under his feet, and he fell.
…and fell…
He tumbled headlong into the dark, rolling through the air like one of the acrobats in that fools’ troupe he had so enjoyed watching. Pakka fell away from him without a sound, and her flame was extinguished. The top of his head cracked sharply against something as he tumbled boneless and breathless, and there was a hungry roar from below, a foul wash of carrion-eater’s breath hot on his face. His outflung arm hit something, hard, and he heard a dull snap like Hafsa Azeina breaking a big piece of kindling.
He opened his mouth to scream, but the shadows swallowed him whole.
FORTY
Some of the more elegant citizens of Atualon had cultivated a new and peculiar fashion, that of worshiping divines.
These elevated beings were seen as intermediaries between the human realm and Atualon herself. If a citizen were devout enough, wore the correct clothes, said the correct words—and spent enough coin in the process—a divine might be persuaded to favor the supplicant’s cause and present their wishes to the sleeping dragon in the form of a dream.
Divination was just another Atualonian fad, but after this day, Leviathus would be sore tempted to burn a candle of sage and burrberry to Snafu, patron divine of fuckups and lost causes.
The day began well enough, all things considered. He emerged from his borrowed tent wearing borrowed clothes. The billowing sky-blue robes and headdress were cumbersome and unfamiliar, and too short for his frame, though the Zeeranim were kind enough to hide their grins behind polite masks.
The short bow was unfamiliar to him as well, and riding a churra was a jarring experience in more ways than one. But he was young and fit, by Atualonian standards, and seemed to be healing well, though his face was still swollen and tender to the touch. He would have to trust that the Zeerani man had set his nose straight. The one time he had asked for a mirror, the barbarians had laughed hard enough to split ribs, and he had not asked again.
As he approached the churra pens a stiff breeze kicked up, sending a swirl of sand and blue silk into his mouth. He coughed and spat, and then winced at the pain in his face. His thoughts darkened, and he marked another debt toward whoever had done this to him.
“Our istaz used to say that if we made an ugly face, it would get stuck like that for the rest of our lives,” Askander remarked. “You have only to look at my face to know this is true.”
Leviathus turned and smiled. That hurt, too. “How do you keep this… pfffft—” he spat “—out of your mouth?”
“For one thing, try not to get your nose broken, so you do not have to breathe through your mouth.” The man reached up and touched his own long and somewhat crooked nose. “Where are you headed on this fine day? Back to Atualon?” His eyes were full of wry mischief.
“How far would I get, this time?” He would have snorted. “No, Ja’Sajani, I thought I might go hunting. I promise to play where Mama can see me.”
<
br /> “First Warden,” the man corrected gently. “Mama has said I am to accompany you… for your protection, of course.”
“Of course. It is good of you to explain such things to me. Otherwise I may begin to feel like a prisoner.”
Askander said nothing to that. He simply nodded to the girl guarding the churrim, and held up two fingers. She scurried off to catch and tack up two of the ornery creatures.
Leviathus had never seen churrim before coming to the Zeera, though every child who had ever heard a night-time story about Zula Din and her troupe of merry fools would have recognized them at first glance: long-eared, long-legged beasts with enormous, thickly-lashed eyes, soft clawed feet that splayed flat upon the sands for traction. Half again as tall as the sleek desert horses and twice as powerful, churrim were nearly as important to the survival of the Zeeranim as salt and water.
Obnoxious to handle and uncomfortable to ride, they also bit, and spat, and kicked, and they bore a strong, vaguely cinnamony smell that was pleasant enough at first but permeated one’s self and belongings before much time had passed. Small enough reason, he supposed, to be grateful for a broken nose.
The girl returned with two beasts, and handed over the reins with hardly a smile. It was rude to mock a guest for being so poorly mounted.
Leviathus sighed, for the thousandth time regretting the outlander status that made it… khutlani for him to touch one of their pure-blood horses, and death for him to steal one. He and his mount, the slant-eyed black-and-tan male he usually rode, eyed each other with growing antipathy. Leviathus stepped close and tapped its side, indicating that it should kneel and allow him to mount. The beast snaked its wedge-shaped head back toward him and snapped its tusks together, rumbling with threat and menace.
“Sheta! Yeh ghabbi!” Askander slapped the thing’s bony rump, hard, and it grudgingly folded to its knees. His own churra, a cream-and-red doe with gentle eyes, knelt quietly as if she wished nothing more than to please her human master. Leviathus shot them all a sour look and clambered atop the colorful padded mat that served as a saddle. The churrim lurched to their feet—his own with a chorus of grunts and groans and angry whistles—and ambled off into the desert.
One of the Ja’Akari winked at him as they passed, but he pretended not to notice.
“Where to?” he asked his nanny-guard. He had planned on hunting near the river, but they had turned eastward, away from camp and water both. “Would there not be more game near the Dibris?”
Askander showed a full set of strong white teeth. “There would be fine hunting near the river, ehuani, but we would not be the hunters.” As if on cue, a long, low bellow sounded from the west, and was answered from the south. “There are few vash’ai this far from the village… best to stay away from the Dibris unless you are with a strong group.”
“So, how do you find enough water for your horses?”
“Oh, the water is there, waiting for us to find it.” The older man shrugged. “You let your ka loose, and feel for the water. That is all.”
The animal beneath him lurched front-to-back, side-to-side.
Leviathus held tight to the pommel of his strange saddle with one hand, the thick leather reins with his other.
“I cannot,” he said. “I am surdus.”
Askander twisted in his saddle and frowned. “Surdus is… deaf? It means you cannot hear, am I right?”
“Exactly. I am deaf to atulfah.”
“Ah. I see. But the ka, it is not magic. It is part of you, like breath and blood. Ka is the breath of your spirit, just as sa is the breath of your heart.” He said this as matter-of-factly as he might have said that the sun is hot, or rain is wet.
“This is not what they teach in Atualon.”
“Of course not. Your rulers would make a man beg for air to fill his lungs, if they could.” His face as he said this was smooth as old wood, but his eyes were canny. Leviathus was not sure how he was meant to react: should he laugh at the insult? Ignore it? Perhaps he was expected to challenge the other man to a fight? Never mind Askander’s absent vash’ai, the man himself was as sleek and quick as a cat.
He chose to shrug off the words. “What are we hunting, then?”
Askander grinned, and his eyes lit like a boy’s. “Ridgebacks.”
“Ridgebacks?”
“Yes, russet ridgebacks. They are about this big,” he gestured with his hands, “a bit heavier than a large hare. I saw one earlier, and where there is one ridgeback, there are thousands. They live in warrens under the ground. Not bad eating, though it is the eggs you want.”
Eggs? “I… see. What should I be looking out for, then?”
“There will be little mounds of sand scattered about, very hard to see at first. There is always a sentry on top of one of the mounds, watching for danger. From a distance, they look a little like a hare with its ears sticking up.” Askander held two hands up above his head, like a rabbit’s ears. “You want to shoot the colony’s sentry as soon as you see it, before it sees you and sounds the alarm. Otherwise…” He shook his head.
“They are dangerous, then?”
“This is the Zeera, man. Everything is dangerous.” He grinned, again like a boy full of mischief, and Leviathus could not help but return it, aching face or no. “You look this way,” he swept his arm to the west, “I will keep my eyes toward the river. We should not have to go too far.”
* * *
Some small irregularity in the sand caught Leviathus’s attention, and then he saw it—a reddish shape hunched on top of a little sand hill, twisting its long ears back and forth. It was larger than a very large hare, but it did not seem to have noticed their presence.
He nocked an arrow from the quiver at his side, drew back and aimed with one smooth motion—not so easy from the back of a lurching beast—and let the missile fly. His arrow flew straight and true. There was a small, audible thump of impact, and then the ears toppled to one side and were still.
Leviathus whooped and kicked his mount. Were it a horse, the thing would have responded with a brisk trot. As it was, the wedge-shaped head whipped back and the thing bit his knee hard enough to make him yelp. Askander jogged past on his placid doe, grinning, and Leviathus flailed and cussed at his divines-cursed churra in a vain attempt to hurry it along.
They got there eventually. The stupid beast plodded to a stop beside the smaller doe and flopped down with a grunt, nearly unseating him.
Askander stood a bit to one side of the small hill and gestured magnanimously to Leviathus.
“Your kill,” he insisted.
Had Leviathus known the Zeeranim better, he would have been more cautious. As it was he bounded to the top of the mound, wincing a little at the pain in his ribs and face. He bent to retrieve his arrow, which had pierced the little beastie right through its middle. It took a minute for his mind to register what his eyes were so desperately trying to tell him.
The thing that he held skewered like a kabob over a spit was no rabbit, not even close. What he had mistaken for long red ears were the thick and hairy forelegs of a spider the size of his head. When those legs gave a twitch and began to uncurl, Leviathus did what any proud soldier-trained son of a king would do.
He flung the fucking thing as far as he could, arrow and all, and screamed like a little girl.
A rumble grew in the belly of the Zeera. Faint at first, the slightest tickle beneath his sandals, it quickly grew to a roar, a hissing, growling, earth-shaking roar not unlike the sound of a waterfall after a hard rain. The churrim lurched to their feet, ears stiff and quivering, before turning to shuffle off, bleating and gnashing their tusks. Askander’s eyes grew wide and he slung his bow over his shoulder.
“Now you have gone and done it!” he shouted. “No, do not run. Stay still, it is your only hope. For the love of Atu, do not move!” Then, contrary to his own words, he sprinted away, puffs of yellow sand kicking up in his wake.
The next few moments would haunt Leviathus for the rest of his lif
e. A hundred mouths opened along the flesh of the Zeera, and those hundred mouths vomited out thousands—tens of thousands— of reddish-brown spiders. Some were no larger than the palm of his hand, while most, like the one he had impaled, had bodies roughly the size of his head. A few of them, red-striped giants with eyes as big as grapes, might have been as large as a small child. They poured from the earth like a felldae plague from the old stories, wave upon wave upon wave of the chittering, skittering, monstrous things, and Leviathus felt a shriek rising in his throat.
One of the larger ones climbed his leg and up his back before launching itself from his shoulder, and Leviathus felt the blood drain from his face. The only thing that kept him upright was the image of a hundred thousand legs crawling over his prone torso. Facing certain death was one thing—facing a million spiders was another.
Then, just like that, they were gone.
The last of them poured forth from the ground and they thinned out, an ever-widening circle that expanded and expanded, ever out and away from him, until only the faintest smudge of them was visible against a far horizon.
Askander, who had not gone far at all, began to laugh.
It was not a polite chuckle, either. The First Warden bent from the waist, tears streaming from his eyes, mouth open wide enough to swallow a damn horse as he howled with laughter. Leviathus stomped over toward the churrim, which had not gone very far. When Askander caught the look on his face, he only howled louder.
“Not dangerous, are they?” He thumped the side of his churra. When the thing turned to bite him again, he gave it a good knock between the eyes. It blinked at him for a moment, grinding its flat tusks together, and then grudgingly settled to the ground.
“Harmless, unless you are a mouse.” Askander walked over to his own doe, wiping tears from his face. “Are you a mouse, outlander?”
Leviathus did not deign to answer, but readied to mount his stupid churra.
“As I was saying, ne Atu,” Askander sketched a mocking little bow, and then turned to dig into his saddlebags, “russet ridgebacks are good eating, if you can get the little buggers. But they are so fast, it is almost impossible to get enough for a meal.” He turned, and when Leviathus’s eyes fastened onto the pair of shovels in his hand, his grin widened even further. “It is the eggs you want.” He threw one of the shovels to Leviathus, who caught it almost without thinking.
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