by Jim Butcher
"You forget. I'm going to die anyway." He frowned. "But it might be just as well. I don't want to lead a girl into that kind of danger."
The Marat girl scowled. "As if I am any less able to defeat you now than a few moments ago."
Tavi shook his head. "No, no, it isn't that."
"Then what is it?"
He shrugged beneath the blanket. "I can't explain it. We just-we don't treat our women the same way we do our men."
"That's stupid," said Kitai. "Just as it is stupid for us to pursue the trial. If neither of us comes back with the Blessing, the trial is inconclusive. They'll wait until a new moon and hold it again. You will be Doroga's guest until then, valleyboy. You will be safe."
Tavi frowned and swallowed, thinking. Part of him had all but let out a shout of relief. He could get out of this bizarre chasm with its alien creatures and return to the world above. It wasn't a friendly one, among the Marat, but it was living, and he would at least be kept alive and unharmed until the next trial. He could survive.
But the new moon wouldn't be for weeks. The Marat would move long before then, attack Garrison and then the steadholts in the valley beyond, including his own home. For a moment, Tavi's imagination conjured up an image of returning to Bernardholt to find it deserted, thick with the stench of rotten meat and burned hair; to open one of the swinging gates and see a cloud of carrion crows hurtle into the air, leaving the bodies of people he had known his whole life ravaged and unrecognizable on the
cold earth. His aunt. His uncle. Frederic, Beritte, Old Bitte, and so many others.
His legs started shaking-not with cold, but with the sudden realization that he could not turn his back on them now. If returning with that stupid mushroom meant that he would gain his family even a better chance to survive what was coming, then he could do nothing less than everything in his power to retrieve it. He couldn't back down now, he couldn't run now, even though it meant he might go into mortal danger.
He might wind up like that crow, sealed into the croach, devoured alive. For a moment, the pale, colored eyes of the Keepers haunted his mind. There had been so many of them. There still were, gathered all around the now-guttering fire, crawling mindlessly over one another in all directions, their long, knobby legs falling feather-light onto the surface of the croach. Their leathery shells made squeaking sounds as they crowded close, rubbed against one another. And they smelled. Something pungent and acrid and inexplicably alien. Even as he realized that he could smell them, Tavi felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle up, and his shivering increased in reaction.
"I have to go," Tavi said.
"You'll die," Kitai said, simply. "It cannot be done."
"I'm going."
She shrugged and said, "It is your life to waste. Look at you. You are shaking hard enough to rattle your teeth." But her odd, opalescent eyes stayed on him, intent, curious. She didn't speak the question, but Tavi all but heard her ask: Why?
He took a shuddering breath. "It doesn't matter. Doesn't matter that I'm afraid. I have to get that mushroom and get out again. It's the only thing I can do to help my family."
Kitai stared at him in silence for a long moment. Then she nodded once, an expression of comprehension coming over her features. "Now I understand, valleyboy," she said, quiet. She looked around them and said, "I do not wish to die. My family is not at stake. Freedom from my sire is useless to me if I am dead."
Tavi chewed on his lip, thinking. Then he said, "Kitai, is there any reason that we can't both get the Blessing? What happens if we both get back with it at the same time?"
Kitai frowned. "Then it will be assumed that The One tells us there is
merit in either side's argument," she said. "The headman will be free to decide on his own."
"Wait," Tavi said, his heart pounding faster. "You mean that you'd get out from under your father, and he would be free to lead your people away from the battle with mine?"
Kitai blinked at Tavi and then smiled, slowly. "By The One, yes. That was his plan all along." She blinked her abruptly shining eyes several times and said fiercely, "The problem is that Doroga does not seem to be clever. No wonder my mother loved him."
"Then we work together," Tavi said. He offered the girl his hand. She glanced down at his hand, frowned at him, and then mimicked the gesture. Her hand was slim, hot, strong. Tavi shook and said, "It means we agree to work together."
"Very well," Kitai said. "What do you think we should do?"
Tavi shot a glance back to the Keepers, who were slowly, randomly dispersing again, crawling away in different directions and at different speeds.
"I have a plan."
An hour later, Tavi, covered with the soaked and chilly blanket, moved in silence over the smooth surface of the croach, his pace never varying. He kept count to himself as he walked, one pace per count. He was near five hundred. A Keeper walked perhaps ten feet in front of him, on a slow and steady pace toward the great tree at the center of the chasm. Tavi had followed it for several minutes without it turning to look at him or giving any indication that it sensed his presence. He had become more confident that he had determined how the things would detect him. So long as he was careful to be quiet and moved smoothly, he was effectively invisible.
The enormous tree loomed closer and closer, though the more Tavi could see of it, the less certain he was that tree was the right word to describe it.
Though the rest of the forest was covered in a sheath of the greenly glowing croach, this one tree, smooth sided, branchless, straight, was only covered to a height of ten or fifteen feet. The trunk was enormous, fully as big around as Bernardholt's walls. It didn't look like it had any bark at all-just smooth wood that reached up to a height of more than a hundred feet before ending in round, irregular edges, as though the tree had been snapped off by some giant hand, then had its rough edges smoothed by time.
At the base of the tree, there was a cavernous opening, a sloped and irregular triangle where the trunk parted, allowing entrance to the interior Tavi paused and watched the Keeper he had been following It paced slowly into the tree's interior, and as it passed within, another Keeper moved out on the other side of the opening, as though it were a tunnel in the causeway
Tavi stopped for a few moments and watched Shortly, the Keeper he'd been following or another like it came out of the tree in exactly the same place Still another came creeping in from another direction and entered the tree in exactly the same manner as the first, emerging again a few moments later
The Keepers must have been taking something into the tree But what' Something small, if they were just scuttling in and out, like ants in and out of their hills Food' Water' What did they carry'
Tavi shook his head and touched the blanket with his fingertips Though it was still cool, it didn't feel as cold as it had a few minutes ago The air down here in the chasm was just too warm He had to hurry, he knew, because with each passing moment his method of concealment became less effective
Tavi struggled to calm the pounding of his heart What if these bugs were smarter than he thought' What if they had only allowed him to come this far because they wanted him there anyway' What if they just wanted to get him to a place where he could not escape and would then leap on him and devour him'
And what, he thought, could possibly be there inside that tree' What would be there that the Keepers would be carrying something to' If they were like ants, existing in a colony, where some carried food, and some fought, and so on, would they have a queen, like ants did' If so, would she be inside the tree, at the heart of their domain'
A dozen more questions flicked through Tavi's mind, before he realized that he was doing nothing but wasting his time He didn't have any answers to any of the questions, and he wouldn't get the answers standing in place- all he would get would be warmer More vulnerable
He kept counting in his head and reached five hundred
Tavi all but held his breath, poised to flee if the plan went wrong, though
he knew that his chances of escaping from the heart of the chasm were slim indeed Tavi waited And waited Nothing happened
He felt his heart begin to race as panic crept over him. Had Kitai abandoned him and her own part of the plan? Had something gone wrong? Had she been found and killed before the time limit was up? Could she even count to five hundred? What had gone wrong?
Tavi remained still and kept counting, deciding to give her another hundred counts before he fled.
Then the stillness and silence of the Wax Forest dissolved into a symphony of whistling shrieks. If Tavi had not seen it happening, he would never have believed that so many of the Keepers could be so close to him without his knowledge of them. They erupted from everywhere, from every surface where the croach glowed, ripping their way up out of the waxy forest floor, dropping from the glowing branches of the twisted trees, boiling out of the interior of the great tree trunk itself. Hundreds of them appeared, and the air itself shook with their whistles and clicks and the squeak of shell rubbing on shell.
Tavi froze, panicked. It was everything he could do to keep from bolting at the sheer speed with which they had appeared. One of the Keepers swept past him, almost close enough to brush against his soaked cloak.
They all swarmed off in the same direction-that opposite of the one that lead back to the ropes to the world above. Kitai had done her job, Tavi decided. She must have been keeping a slower count than Tavi had. She had used half of their remaining oil and the firestones to light a blaze that would draw the Keepers. If she was all right and had kept to the plan, she would even now be huddled beneath her blanket, moving for the ropes out.
The last of the Keepers in sight fled, vanishing into the glowing trees. All that remained was for Tavi to accomplish his part of the plan.
A lump crept up into his throat, and his knees felt like someone had simply slipped the muscles and tendons out of them. He thought that they might abruptly buckle and pitch him to the surface of the croach at any time, he was so afraid. He struggled to keep his breathing slow and quiet, to make sure that his trembling didn't result in any twitches that the Keepers would see as sudden, jerky movement, and stepped forward, into the trunk of the tree.
Inside, the croach wasn't in a smooth layer on the floor and walls-it was spilled and dumped and heaped and piled like wheat in a granary. Great swirling loops of it twirled up the walls or wound intricately through one
another like the guts of some great and glowing beast Tavi stared at them for a moment, in confusion and incomprehension It was beautiful, in a bizarre, alien way-strange and unsettling and fascinating
He jerked his eyes from one of the more intricate structures and moved closer to a wall, where it would be less likely for a newly entered Keeper to simply bump into him, looking around, struggling to orient himself according to Kitai's description
He paced deeper into the eerie stillness inside the tree, around a mound of whirled croach that looked like an anthill and forward through a small field of lumpy croach, which could have contained another thousand Keepers, silent beneath the surface
He found the mushrooms in a ring at the center of the field, just as Kitai had said They grew at the base of a glowing mound twice the height of a man, as big around as a small house The mound pulsed with greenish light, and Tavi thought he could see the shadow of something dark, something slender within
He drew closer, a sensation of raw dread flowing over him like an icy bath, even worse than the soaked blanket he wore as a cloak His knees grew weaker, and his breathing, despite his best efforts, became ragged
Kitai was rather -pretty, he thought Though she was a savage, there was something about her face, her eyes, that he found intriguing If she wasn't dressed, up in a ragged smock (which really was shamefully short now that he thought about it), she might look more like a girl, less wild Of course, he had begun to see her without the smock If he had told her to get more into the water, she might have taken it off altogether The thought made his cheeks burn, but lingered in front of him, enticing in its exotic appeal
Tavi shook his head abruptly What was the matter with him? He had to be careful and get the Blessing of Night The dark mushrooms had some kind of spiny thorns on their undersides, Kitai had said, which had pierced her hand once and left welts that lasted for months
He glanced up and around him, but saw no Keepers That could be an illusion, he knew There could be a dozen within arm's reach But no matter how afraid he was, Tavi had to press on
That was the history of his people, after all The Alerans had never let fear or the odds of failure deter them from overcoming, prospering Their oldest histories, his uncle had once told him, reached so far back into time that the hide and vellum and stone they had been scribed upon had worn away They had
come to Carna from, another -place, a small hand of only a few thousand, and had found themselves pitched against an entire -world. They had overcome the Icemen, the Children of the Sun and their stronghold in the Feverthorn Jungle, had repelled the Marat and the Canim over the centuries to claim the land of Alera as their own. They controlled the seas around their home, had walled out the Icemen in the north, overcome the Marat through sheer, savage fighting. With their furies and their furycrafting, the Alerans dominated the world, and no other race or peoples could claim mastery over them.
Tavi shuddered and blinked his eyes several times. He must have stood there, his hand extended toward the first of the mushrooms for nearly a full minute, not moving. What was the matter with him?
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled up more sharply as he reached for the nearest mushrooms. He hurried, breath rasping, picking one, then another, careful to put them into the pouch at his belt.
And then he thought he saw something in the great mound in front of him move.
Tavi jerked his eyes up to it, flinching, and felt an immediate, hot pain in the fingers of his hand. The thorns on the next mushroom had pierced him. He jerked his hand back, and droplets of his blood flashed out and arced through the air, sprinkling the glowing mound in front of him.
Tavi stared at the mound, the droplets of his blood on it. The surface of the glowing croach abruptly pulsed, bulged, and then rippled beneath the droplets of his blood, moving like the skin of some hideous, enormous creature and making Tavi's own flesh crawl in response. He watched as the droplets of blood vanished into the mound, sinking into the surface of the croach like snowflakes into a still-melted pond.
And the shadowy shape within the mound abruptly shuddered. And moved. A slow unwinding of limbs, languid, liquid, as though from a sleeper that had, after an endless passing of seasons, finally awakened. It moved, and Tavi felt its movement, felt a vast, bewildering awareness that swept over him like the gaze of some ancient and horrible beast.
Terror flooded over Tavi, raw and hot rather than cold, terror that set his limbs on fire and burned any thought from his mind, save one: escape.
Tavi spun on his heel and, heedless of the danger in revealing himself, broke into a panicked sprint.
He would remember little of his run, later. One or two chirruping whistles, perhaps, echoed through the trees after him, but they were sparse, and
he left them behind him, his steps light on the surface of the croach, terror lending him more speed than he would have credited to himself before that night
He flicked one glance over his shoulder as he ran and saw something through the glowing trees, at the base of the monolith, the opening he'd fled through He saw something tall, glistening-alien It stood just within the central tree, just behind the doorway Tavi could not quite see it, but he could feel it in a way both horribly intimate and beyond simple description
The lower-pitched whistle that went out through the trees felt, to Tavi, like some sort of hideous, mocking laughter
Tavi fled and did not look back again
He ran over the croach until his legs were burning and his limbs felt as though they would be ripped apart by the demands he placed on them
He almost didn't see the strip of blanket that he had torn off and tied to a low tree branch before he left to mark his way back He headed for it, and from that flag spotted the next, and the next, laying out his escape route back to the ropes at the base of the cliff
"Aleran'" came a voice from before him Kitai dropped from a tree branch ahead of him "Do you have it'"
"Got two'" Tavi yelped "Couldn't get any more'"
Kitai extended her hand, and Tavi shoved one of the mushrooms into it "Run! Go, go go'"
Kitai nodded once, then stooped to the ground Tavi hesitated behind the girl, dancing in place as he looked back over his shoulder "Hurry," he panted "Hurry, hurry, hurry "
Kitai drew out the firestones smoothly, her expression cool, and struck them together Sparks fell from the stones onto the oil-soaked blanket that lay on the croach before them Kitai watched the flames leap up, then moved quickly, reaching up to grab the end of the fishing line that Tavi had soaked in the icy water before he left She jerked the line toward her, hand over hand The other end of the line looped up over one of the higher branches of the tree, up where living leaves grew above the grasp of the croach, and then fell back down to where it was tied at one corner of the oil-soaked blanket Kitai hauled the line in, and the blazing blanket rose up into the tree's branches and snagged among the living leaves
Fire leapt up from the tree in a blaze, sudden and high, and once again, from the direction of the central spire, whistling shrieks rose up in a solid
wall of terrifying sound-one underlaid, this time, by that deeper whistle, one that overrode the shrieks and continued over the silence
Kitai stared at Tavi, her eyes suddenly wide "What is that?"
"I don't know," Tavi said "But, uh I think, uh I think I woke it up "
They looked at one another once more and, in silent accord, turned together and fled toward the ropes a few yards away, toward the safety at the top of the cliffs To either side of him, Tavi saw the Keepers flooding toward the fire through the trees, closing on them in a carpet of glowing eyes and knobby limbs and leathery shells
