Tales of Noreela 04: The Island

by Tim Lebbon

  Chapter Seven

  beneath the ground, above the sea

  THE HOLE STARTED as a bowl-shaped dip in the land. There was a rough path that led into it, worn over time by sheebok and the occasional daring child from the village. All the way down Kel felt horribly exposed, and when the sun was blocked out by the edge of the dip, that feeling only increased. As the hole, and escape, drew closer, the prospect of being discovered grew even more terrible.

  The entrance to the Throat was dark and forbidding, sitting in one wall of the dip and curtained with trailing plants spotted with sharp, bright red flowers. Several bird corpses were speared on these hard blooms, their fragile bones a stark white against the petals. A sheebok’s skeleton lay partially hidden beneath heathers in the bowl’s base, and the ground was soft and boggy. The sun rarely seemed to touch the place.

  Namior was standing back, looking at him uncertainly.

  “It’s the best way,” he said. “If they are looking for us up here and in Pavmouth Breaks, we can be down onto the beach and out to the island before they realize we’ve gone.”

  “If we can find a boat that wasn’t smashed by the waves.”

  Kel smiled and nodded, but said nothing. She was right. The chance of finding a seaworthy craft was negligible.

  He went first, lifting the undergrowth aside, taking care not to touch the birds’ bodies. A faint smell of the sea wafted from the hole, brine and decay brought up from far below. Beneath that he smelled other things he could not quite identify—a stale spicy must, and something rich and meaty. He took a deep breath and entered the tunnel.

  Namior came in behind him, lowering the plant tendrils carefully so that they formed a perfect cover across the tunnel entrance. They shut out a lot of the light, and Kel felt a brief but intense moment of panic.

  He breathed deeply, and Namior stood close behind him, her hands on his shoulders. “We’ll need light,” she said. “Have you even thought of that?”

  “Of course,” he snapped. Namior stepped away, and Kel sighed. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”

  “I’m going.” She turned and lifted the trailing plants again, and in the silence between them Kel heard the clatter of hollow bones.

  “Namior. Please come with me.” The desperation in his voice was not false, and as he spoke he realized just how lost he felt. All the Core training could not change that, and it was because he had found a home and a love. He had settled, and the first thing the Core did to its members was to make them wanderers—homeless and adrift. “If you leave me here, I’m not sure what I’ll do.”

  “You’re the soldier,” she said, but there was no aggression in her voice. “You’re the Core fighter, trained for this.”

  “I’ve changed.”

  “Looked to me back there that you’ve never changed.”

  “Fighting someone is easy,” he said. “Killing, more difficult. But without you, I think I’d only end up fighting myself.”

  She looked at him, truly staring, as though she were trying to see inside him, past the surface where lies and inconsistencies could exist and down deep to his soul.

  “I might be able to give us some light,” she said at last, and Kel breathed a huge sigh of relief.

  He moved on, and a few steps into the tunnel the floor sloped gently into the drop hole, rough stone walls curving down like the insides of some waiting giant’s throat. It looked dark down there, and every few beats there was a breath of stale air, and the sound of something roaring in the distance.

  “The sea,” Kel said.

  “Maybe.” Namior stood beside him, looking down into the darkness. “Maybe it’s something before the sea.”

  “Everywhere like this has stories and legends,” he said, realizing with a smile that he was almost whispering. “Maybe adults start them to frighten their children, or maybe children make them up to scare themselves.”

  “And what about frightening the adults?”

  “It’s just a network of caves leading down to the sea. And we need to move. If they’re searching, they might just look into the mouth of the hole.”

  “Give me a beat,” Namior said, and she knelt on the rough stone floor.

  “I thought the magic … ?”

  Namior looked up at him, the poor light shadowing her smile and making it darker. “There’s magic, and there’s magic.” She held out her hand. “I assume you have a knife I can use?”

  Kel handed her a blade and watched, fascinated, as she gave them light. A sprinkle of something from a pouch in her pocket onto the knife’s keen blade, a dribble of spit, a rough scrape of the metal against stone, and the whole blade began to glow. The light grew, expanded, and when she held it out they could see down into the sloping tunnel. It did not illuminate far, but Kel could see enough to make out the floor, walls and ceiling close by.

  “So if that’s not magic …?”

  “The eggs of fire kotts. They live on beaches. Usually only hatch when something heavy walks over them. Then they attach themselves to whatever woke them, burrow in, and eat it.”

  Kel stepped back slowly, even though he knew Namior would have an answer.

  “We soak them in rotwine for three moons before they’re ready for use. Makes them … sleepy.” She stood and held out the knife. He could see vague movement on the blade, as though the metal itself were flexing in extreme heat.

  “Very clever,” he said, smiling.

  “I’m not a slave to magic.”

  Kel leaned forward and kissed Namior on the cheek, so glad when she did not back away. She tasted of fear, and excitement. It was a taste he knew of old.

  IT WAS MORE a series of small caves than one long tunnel. Sometimes the floor was almost flat and they could walk, stepping over or around ridges, taking care not to break their ankles in holes or the open throats of crevasses that seemed bottomless. Other times they had to climb down steep inclines, and the rock was so rough and unweathered that its sharp edges scraped their skin and drew blood. There were no signs that anyone else had ever ventured so deep. With the pressing darkness, the breaths of breeze, the rhythmic roar that rose from far below, and the smells—still strange, still strong—it felt like somewhere removed from the world.

  Kel had once ventured into the beginnings of a fledge mine in the Widow’s Peaks. He had heard many tales about the drug miners who preferred to live their whole lives belowground, and rumor had reached him that a Stranger had hidden herself away in one of the mines. But he had not gone deep. He’d heard talk of the creatures that supposedly lived in the lowest seams of the drug. Some called them fledge demons, others had named them Nax, and it was said that when they were woken, none of the miners involved ever escaped. A foolish myth, he had thought, one born of minds driven mad by the pressures of such depths and darkness. And half a day after entering the first crevasse that led to a deep mine, he heard such terrible sounds echoing up at him that he immediately raced for the sunlight. There were screams, made ghostly and inhuman on their journey through the mines, caves and cracks in the land. And there were roars.

  The path they followed felt the same. The smells were different—none of the distinctive fledge taint—but the weight of Noreela around him was dreadfully familiar. After the fledge mine he’d had a series of terrible dreams, perhaps brought on by the drug fumes he had inhaled, or maybe by what he had heard and imagined happening down there. The dreams had convinced him that the Noreela that was meant for humans was the surface of the land. Deeper down, in the cracks and caves and crevasses, lay other things.

  He could not share any of his thoughts or fears with Namior. They were foolish, like the superstitions of someone who knew nothing of the world.

  The roar that sang up to them … it was the sea, washing against the beach and cliffs below.

  The strange smells…minerals found only underground, degrading in the darkness.

  He tried hard to see beyond the weak light issuing from the knife. But the darkness before him was deep.

 
HOW LONG WILL the light last?” Kel asked.

  “It takes a while for the kotts to die. Maybe a day.”

  “Long enough,” he said. If we’re down here for a day, it’s because we’re the dead ones.

  They came to a sheer drop, and though Namior leaned out with the light knife, the bottom remained in darkness. The thought of climbing down into something they could not see disturbed Kel, and it was with a jolt that he realized he was afraid of the dark.

  “Do you have any of those things left?”

  “A few.” Namior took a pouch from her pocket and opened it, showing him the tiny, pale pink kott eggs.

  Kel pulled a throwing knife from his belt and handed it to Namior. She went through the process again, and when she scraped the knife harshly across the stone, the sound echoed both up and down. Kel held his breath: the atmosphere in the caves suddenly seemed loaded, the echo fading into silent expectation.

  “I feel like I’m being watched,” Namior said.

  Kel tried to smile at her, but she turned away, and he knew it had been a grimace.

  Namior dropped the knife over the ledge. It soon clattered from protruding rocks and hit the bottom and, comforted that it was not too far down, Kel sat, turned around and edged himself onto the rock face. There were plenty of handholds. He started down, slow and methodical, and glanced up to make sure Namior was following.

  Something touched his leg.

  He gasped, almost losing his footing as he kicked out at whatever was there.

  “What?” Namior whispered above him. She was still just leaning over the ledge, holding the light in one hand and aiming it down at Kel. He reached for it, shook his head, not knowing what to say.

  Namior handed him the knife.

  The thing touched him again, a soft, provocative caress on the bare skin between his trousers and boot. He did not kick out this time, but moved the shining knife quickly down, realizing just how useful a light that doubled as a weapon could be.

  There was nothing there. Only the rock face, and the darkness that surrounded it, driven back grudgingly by the weak glow.

  “Maybe it was my trouser leg, a breeze,” he said, but he heard Namior draw a sharp breath.

  “You felt something?”

  “I thought something touched—”

  “There are wraiths down here.”

  Kel leaned against the rock face, breathing hard. “You’re going to start telling me all the old stories your mother and great-grandmother told you?”

  “All the wraiths from Pavmouth Breaks that haven’t been chanted down, and those that existed here even before the village began.” She climbed down carefully, pausing beside Kel and waiting until he looked at her. “So they say.” She smiled. But he could see her doubt, and her fear, and she was staring at him too fixedly for comfort. She doesn’t want to look down.

  He felt a sudden chill, and his surprised exhalation condensed in the air before him. No breeze, no sign of where it had come from, but the air in the cave seemed to drop sharply in temperature.

  “We should keep moving,” he said. And when Kel resumed his descent, he left the cold spot behind. He was not even sure that Namior had felt it.

  Holding the glowing knife in one hand, it was difficult to maneuver from one handhold to the next. But lower down there was a slight slope to the rock face, and when he leaned in against it, he could relax his weight.

  Arms and legs aching, using muscles that had grown lazy and weak, he continued down. A touch against the back of his neck, a kiss of cold air against his stomach … He climbed through them, breathing hard, concentrating on counting each step closer to the bottom.

  The light exuded by the dropped knife drew him down. By the time he reached the base of the small cliff, he had seen nothing that could explain the sense of being touched. He held the knife up for Namior, and while she finished her descent he scanned the rock, looking for cracks in which cave creatures might live, or the waving fronds of strange, dark-loving plants.

  Namior jumped down beside him and picked up the second knife. “They’ll avoid the light,” she said.

  “It was just these!” Kel grabbed his loose trouser leg and shook it, waving it against his shin. But even through his anger, he knew that touch did not feel the same.

  The rhythmic sound washed over them again, a distant roar, or breathing from close by.

  The drop hole sloped steeply down, the ceiling dipping very low and the walls opening outward, changing from a tunnel to a wide crack. Even with two knives smeared with glowing fire kotts, the illumination reached neither extreme, and Kel and Namior descended in a bubble of light. The floor was difficult to negotiate. There was no erosion there, and whatever violent forces had made the holes had left them filled with danger. The edges of cracked rock were sword-sharp; the spaces between promised broken ankles for the unwary. Kel even saw the unmistakable rancid smears of rock rot. He’d seen a man die from rock-rot poisoning in the rainbow-passes of Marrakash Heights, and he had no wish to go that way.

  Namior paused to his left, lying sideways on the slope and looking at something in the rock. “Kel …” she began, but she seemed speechless.

  There were fossil traces in the rocks around them. And when Kel went to her and looked, he saw the petrified remains that had caught her attention: curves of huge shells; the cracked dome of a skull, long and unidentifiable; a clawed seven-fingered hand that could have enveloped his head. He found them unsettling, but they were not what troubled him most. His fear was reserved for the unnatural things buried and fossilized with them. The hardened leather of a fighting helmet. The rusted metal of something that must have been a weapon.

  “How old?” Namior said quietly. “A thousand years? Ten thousand?”

  Kel grabbed her arm and tried to haul her upright. “Namior, there’s no time now—”

  “But this could be—”

  “Whatever they are, they’ll still be here tomorrow.”

  Namior nodded, and as she stood she ran her hand across the stone curve of a fossilized thigh.

  They had to hurry. The sighs or roars from below were marking the passage of time, and he knew that, if his suspicions about the Komadians were correct, the search would be spreading.

  Between blinks, something stroked his cheek.

  Kel slipped, scraping his leg on a spur of rock and dropping his knife. He went down on one hand, breaking his fall, but driving a spike of sharp stone into his palm. He gritted his teeth and groaned, Core training keeping his pain silent.

  Namior was beside him, lifting his hand and checking it in the light from her knife. “It needs healing,” she said, her voice flat. She could not heal without magic.

  “Something touched me.” He wiped at his face with his other hand, expecting to see a spiderweb or some other physical trace. But there was nothing there … only the memory of the touch. So intimate.

  So intelligent.

  Namior bent across him, and for a beat he thought she was trying to protect him from something, and he drew in a sharp breath. Then she knelt up again, shaking her head.

  “Knife’s fallen too far.”

  Kel saw that his dropped knife had slid into a crevasse in the floor, and leaning sideways he could stare straight down. The crack was barely as wide as his hand, and the knife was at least a dozen steps down. As he watched, the light from its coating of fire kotts was blanked out.

  “Its light has gone,” he said, climbing unsteadily to his feet.

  “The kotts last for—”

  “It’s gone. Swallowed. We have to move quickly.” He started down the slope again, crouched so that he did not strike his head on the sharp stones of the rough ceiling. Blood dropped from his fingertips, and he wondered what could smell it, what could taste.

  “Kel!” Namior called, her voice a harsh whisper. She caught up with him and grabbed his arm, but all she wanted was contact.

  They moved together, taking it in turns to hold the light before them. Kel glanced back only
once, and wished he had not. The darkness behind seemed to be pushing at them, advancing with every forward step they took, testing the weak light from the remaining knife as though ready to consume it, as it had the one he had dropped.

  He tried not to blink, but his eyes stung.

  He thought Namior was panting, but then he realized that she was whispering something as they moved, an urgent chant that echoed from sharp rocks and filtered away into caves no human would ever see. It’ll do us no good! he thought. They’ve done something to the magic, and nothing she’s learned can help us now. But when Namior looked at him and smiled, he realized that her chant was doing her some good. Perhaps sometimes, that was what magic was all about.

  The tunnel twisted suddenly to the right and opened up into a wide, tall cavern, shockingly illuminated by weak light filtering down from several cracks in the high ceiling. Some where up there, other holes led from the cliff top and down into this hidden place.

  “I think we picked the right Throat,” Namior whispered. Her face shone with perspiration, her hair hung awry, and her eyes were wide. She grinned.

  He glanced back into the tunnel from which they had emerged, little more than a crack in the cavern’s vast wall. Darkness waited there, but filtered daylight held it at bay. Whatever might have been following them, rolling and billowing with the darkness, had reached its extreme, and Kel felt a brief rush of exhilaration at having escaped.

  “Just the dark, Kel,” Namior said. He nodded and said no more, because that was all they would ever know.

  A terrible smell wafted by, carried on a slight breeze issuing from a hole ahead of them. He knew rot when he smelled it, and the scent of older death as well, musty and mysterious. Beneath the smells hung a red, meaty scent, almost strong enough to chew.

  “That way?” He pointed across the cavern into the mouth of a large, conical tunnel. A roar filled the cavern then, and with it came the unmistakable smell of the sea.

  “Any way where it doesn’t smell like this.”

  Kel held up his hand, urging Namior to remain still and silent. He exhaled slowly through his mouth, listening for any sounds or signs of pursuit. He heard only the rhythmic growl of the sea.