The thread leading to that detail steadied in her mind, and Marsh swept along it until she came to where a column of manlike shapes moved through a grove of tall calla shrooms. Their faces were lit by the faint fluorescence given off by the mushrooms’ broad gills, and Marsh was surprised to find they looked nearly the same as she did. In fact, they looked like any of the folk in the four caverns, just a little taller and heavier, with less angular faces. Marchant frowned, studying them a little longer and noting how their clothes were different than what she was used to seeing.
Where her folk favored tunics over breeches, these men and women wore shirts with slightly baggy sleeves and trousers that hung loosely around their legs. It didn’t make sense. How did they keep their clothing from snagging on things, and why did they need them to be so loose?
That didn’t matter. Although they were dressed differently, they moved with the confidence of those who’d traveled through tunnels before. Even if they were used to the open skies of the surface world, the darkness did not bother them. They had no animals with them, but carried their supplies in heavy packs and bulging satchels slung about them.
And they were armed.
Marsh stared, plucking at the shadows until she found those most connected to their weapons.
“Show me,” she demanded and studied the slightly curved blades, both long and short, that hung from their belts, and the spears they used as walking sticks or carried over their shoulders.
Some had small crossbows strapped to their packs, and quivers of bolts hanging from their belts on the opposite side from their swords.
I don’t think they’re here to parlay, she thought, noting the robed figures scattered throughout the line. These were armed with swords but carried neither crossbows nor spears. Each of them wore what looked like a broad collar from which draped a short length of cloth made of interlinked chain. The odd-looking garment covered the top half of their chests and backs in a circular loop but looked like it would be useless in a fight.
“Shadow mages?” Marsh mused, noting how the chain links had been dulled as though their wearers had made sure they wouldn’t reflect any light. She followed the thread down the line, counting a hundred men and women, a third of whom looked like they were mages. When she reached the end, she worked her way back along the thread and counted again just to be sure.
When she reached the head of the line, she saw the leaders’ lips moving and wanted to know what they were saying. Surely the shadows could give her sound in the same way they could give her pictures? She couldn’t have been imagining things before.
With the belief firmly held in her mind, Marchant searched amongst the threads. This time she did not open her eyes in shock when she heard words to go with the moving lips in the shadow threads’ images.
“Not far, now. We’ll have shelter by the first cycle of night,” said the pale-faced man in the lead.
Despite the comfort he seemed to be trying to give, Marsh noticed a tightness in his expression, a wariness that said something preyed on his mind. His mouth was drawn and his eyes anxious.
The man beside him gave an amused snort.
“You’re not afraid of the dark, are you, Berens? Not missing the sunlit world already?”
Berens scowled.
“Not missing it so much as wanting the feel of solid walls around me. You forget that joffra stalk this cavern, and they come out just as the night cycle starts.”
His partner shrugged and gestured back to the line behind them.
“You think they’d attack a group this large and well-armed?”
“I know they would.”
Marsh saw the look of disbelief that crossed the other man’s face; saw him rally his thoughts to account for this new information.
“Then we will hunt them down as we prepare the cavern.”
Prepare the cavern for what? Marsh wanted to know.
“It won’t take them long to discover we are here,” the first man commented, but again the second man brushed his worries aside.
“It won’t matter. The mages say they have nothing that can challenge a force this size, and we’ll be here and gone in a few short months. We take out Ruins Hall, and there will be no reason for anyone at the Ledge to venture beneath the world.”
At this, the first man turned on him.
“There are those at the Ledge who have family in Ruins Hall or in any number of holdings scattered in between. And here…”Marsh watched as he gestured to the cavern around him, which was mostly obscured by the tall calla and dangling rock formations. “You don’t think someone’s going to notice?”
His partner laid a heavy hand on his shoulder.
“By the time the first traders return, we will be settled. As you said, there is no force that can challenge us, and the master bids us establish an outpost here. These are not the only four townships in the region. Perhaps by the time we empty them, it will be enough.”
Enough for what? Marsh wondered, but her attention was caught by the approach of one of the mages. And there were other towns beyond the Four? She didn’t get far in her pondering before the man walking with Berens lifted his head.
“Someone watches,” he said, and all who heard him looked hastily out at the surrounding shroom forest and cavern.
“No,” the mage added with an emphatic gesture of his hand. “They watch through the shadows.”
Marsh realized he might be talking about her.
The man standing next to the one called Berens lifted his head, his eyes growing dark as he reached out into the darkness around him. Marsh saw him raise his hand as though taking a handful of the surrounding shadow, and then she felt the strand she was using tighten.
“Shadow’s Heart,” she whispered as he twirled his little finger and she felt the shadow thread tangle around her.
She didn’t stay to see what he would do next but let go of the thread, brushing it from her mind as she fled back through the intervening darkness to her place on the mule. Now was the best time to see if the shadows could be made to shelter them, if only she knew how.
She tried, but the darkness slid from her grasp, and a wave of dizziness overtook her. Startled by the feeling that she was about to fall, Marsh opened her eyes, grabbing for the pommel as she felt herself tilting sideways. Her scramble to retain her balance caught Tamlin’s attention, and he turned in his saddle even as he tapped the sides of his mule to keep it moving forward.
“What did you do this time?” he demanded.
“They know someone was watching them,” Marsh told him. “Not that it’s any of your business.”
Good one, she thought, and you’re supposed to be the grown-up.
Tamlin didn’t seem to notice.
“Do they know who?”
The boy had stopped his mule and let Marsh’s mule come alongside.
“I don’t think so.”
“Then let’s keep going.” He handed her the shroom bread she hadn’t taken that morning. “You need to eat.”
Marchant might have argued with him, except she knew he was right. She did need to eat. Kneeing her mule forward, she raised the shroom loaf to her mouth and took a bite. Tamlin rode beside her and didn’t say anything until she’d finished the small loaf.
“You think they can follow us?”
“They can try, but they’re on foot, and they have to reach the waystation before the night cycle starts. The joffra won’t be able to deal with them all but they’ll try, and they’ll take enough to feed the pack. We won’t have to fret about them tonight.”
“What about shadow monsters?”
Now that he’d started worrying, Tamlin looked like he was trying to find every problem he could think of and drag it out for consideration. At least this one was easy to answer. Marchant waved her hand at the glows lighting the trail toward Ruins Hall.
“Shadow monsters can’t get past those. We’ll be okay.”
She glanced back at Fabrice, Eveline, Aisha, Tory, and Curt. Even though
they seemed to be focused on the dark, she caught it when the older ones snuck glances in her direction.
“We will,” she insisted. “We just have to keep going. We should reach Ruins Hall at around the same time as those people behind us get to the waystation.”
Fabrice nodded and looked over her children and the herd of mouton.
“The traders say it’s a day’s journey to the Hall,” she said, looking worried. “Will we make it?”
“We will push on until we do,” Marsh told her. “As long as there are glows, we will be safe.”
She didn’t add that they would be safe from the shadow monsters, but from other forms of raiders? Not so much. It wasn’t something Fabrice and her children needed to know. She spared a glance for Aisha, smiling when she saw the little girl had copied Curt and abandoned her mule to ride one of the mouton.
At least someone would have a fun journey.
10
Reunion After Ruins Hall
Despite being sure they would make Ruins Hall late in the day, Marchant was pleased to see the soft phosphorescent glow coming from the township’s roofs. With no sky to indicate the time of day and no sun to provide light, the town’s founders had encouraged the growth of lichens over every wall and rooftop as well as planting luminescent fungi along the streets.
Tall calla shrooms spread their caps above street corners, and knee-high fuzzy antler fungi formed two-toned lines down the center of the main street. Guiding the tired mules and weary sheep down one side of the broad avenue, Marsh breathed a sigh of relief.
Not only was she safe, but she was close to being able to make good on the one delivery she could complete. The others were lost to the shadows of the road leading back to Kerrenin’s Ledge. Guiding the mules through town, she looked over her shoulder at Fabrice.
“Which way to your friends’ farm?”
The woman looked up as though Marchant’s question had startled her and Marsh waited. In the end, Fabrice pointed.
“We follow the road out of town and take the second turn-off. You’ll see the marker. It has some kind of tower on it.”
Marsh took her word for it. If they didn’t see the marker, they would have to camp by the side of the road, which wasn’t a good idea for Fabrice and the children. Their journey had shown that the family wasn’t used to traveling. Marsh only hoped it wouldn’t take too long for them to reach their friends’ farm.
As they left the soft light of the town behind them, Marchant took comfort from the sight of the glows lining the road. At least this trail was still guarded. She only hoped it stayed that way.
After leaving Fabrice’s cavern behind them, she had worried that the shadow mages might have some way of destroying the glows from a distance. It only made sense that if she could pull on the shadows to draw pictures and sounds from other parts of the cavern, they might be able to influence the shadows to affect the glows. She’d been very glad to discover she’d been wrong.
With that settled, she’d started worrying about the mages peering along threads of shadow to see who she was and where she’d gone. She hadn’t been able to stop scanning the dark on both sides of the path, glad her eyes could pick up both light and heat and navigate the night of her world. It was hard to imagine being as blind in the caverns as someone with their eyes closed, yet she’d heard of children born that way.
Marsh shook that idea aside. It was ridiculous. Even if she was one of the few who could adapt her eyes to the brightness of the outside world so that it did not hurt to wander beneath the surface world’s sun, she found the idea of having to rely on bright light to see abhorrent. She was glad she had several different ways of looking at the world, and couldn’t imagine what it would be like if she was limited to just one.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a sudden flare of light ahead, and she turned her head toward it.
“There!” Fabrice exclaimed, pointing excitedly in the same direction. “That’s the sign. They do the best cheeses in the district!”
And so they might, but Marchant couldn’t figure out why there would be a picture of a tower standing in the middle of a round of cheese.
The words Under-Paris Cheeses didn’t make much sense either.
“Ooh, pretty!” Aisha said, clapping her hands together. “What dat?”
“It’s the Eiffel Tower,” Fabrice told her. “They say it used to stand in the middle of the city and that people came from all over the world to see it before things went bad.”
Before things went bad—like that hadn’t been a long time ago. Marchant took another look at the tower on the sign, wondering how any tower could have been built from latticework and yet have visitors come from all over the world to see it. Rather than say anything, she turned her mule onto the side road and shivered when she noticed the lack of glows lining the path.
How did they expect to stay safe from anything on a path as dark as this one? Even knowing it was there, Marsh had trouble picking it out.
“Give it a minute.” Fabrice’s voice made Marsh pause. “The lights will come on soon.”
What lights? Marsh wondered, staring hard at the shadowy edges of the path, but the road answered her question as patches of lichen slowly glowed to life.
“They react to the vibrations of the moutons and mules walking beside them.”
Marsh stared.
Well! That was certainly new. She hadn’t seen this kind of lichen before—and neither had her mule, she realized as the creature stopped short and snorted, its head lowered and ears pricked forward as it stared at the ground in mild alarm. Marsh reached out and stroked its neck.
“Easy there,” she told it, nudging it forward with her heels. “Easy there. It’s not going to eat you.”
She hoped that last bit was true but figured the lichen would have been killed off long ago if it had a habit of eating anything that came along the path. The mule didn’t know she had doubts. It just flicked its ears back and forth a couple of times and obeyed the tap of her heels.
Marsh was glad to see that the lichen seemed to be interconnected as more of the soft fuzzy growth lit the edges of the side road ahead of them. Glowing a soft blue, it marked the trail until they saw the outlines of the farmhouse proper. At first, Marsh was afraid that this farm had met the same fate as the farms in Fabrice’s cavern. There was no light at all in the dwelling, not even the faint glow of a banked fire.
The windows remained dark until they had reached the gates leading into the front yard. Marchant slipped from the saddle and led her mule over to them, glad when she caught sight of Tamlin doing the same thing. They stopped at the gate, trying to work out how to open it.
In the end, Marsh handed Tamlin her reins and lifted the metal loop holding the gate in place. He followed her through, the ram and ewes hooked to his saddle coming after. Marsh stood by the gate, watching as the moutons flooded into the field after them, well aware she could see very little of the cavern beyond the glowing lichen lighting the path. When the last moutons had passed through and Tamlin had led them a little farther into the field, she closed the gate behind them, making sure to secure it again.
“Fabrice?” she called. “It might be better if—”
Light blazed around them, scattering the moutons and startling the mules into bucking and braying with fright.
“Shadow’s Heart!” Marchant snapped, shielding her eyes, which watered with pain.
She was glad she wasn’t holding a mule when she heard Tamlin shout in alarm. She tried to brush away the tears obscuring her vision so she could see what was going on.
“Curt!” Fabrice shouted as the boy’s shrill shriek split the dark. “Hang on tight, sweetie. I’m coming.”
“Aisha!”
Marsh turned away from the light, blinking rapidly in an attempt to clear her vision. She was aware of movement on the stone veranda surrounding the house and could hear booted feet moving behind her. She placed her faith in Fabrice’s claim that these were friends and focused her attention o
n finding where the mouton had carried Aisha.
Just as she started to make out shapes and color in the brightness, a whistle split the air. Short and sharp, it was followed by a series of shrill chirps that Hugo answered with a deep bark. Marsh heard the big dog run past her, followed by the eager patter of smaller paws, and knew Scruffknuckle was still shadowing the farm dog’s every move.
She raised a hand to wipe her eyes and felt a large warm palm descend on her shoulder.
“Stay there. We’ll see to the sheep.”
“The children…” Marsh began, and the man chuckled.
“Them too. We’ll bring them back. You just let your eyes adjust.”
“Who are you?”
“Didn’t Fabrice tell you?”
“She told me you were friends. I was helping her reach you. Why did you…” She stopped and gestured briefly at the well-lit home paddock before her.
“Hit you with bright glows?”
Marsh nodded, sniffing as her nose ran in sympathy with the watering of her eyes.
“We were making sure you weren’t shadow mages.”
Marsh snorted in disbelief and waved at the animals being brought back together by the dogs. Hugo wasn’t working alone. He and Scruffknuckle had been joined by several other large dogs, and between them, they were making short work of bringing the scattered herd together.
“Didn’t you see the moutons?”
“We wanted to be sure.”
It was an answer that made Marsh wonder what had gone on in the caverns to make these men so cautious.
“I thought the local shadow mages were friendly.”
The hand patted her on the shoulder, then moved to the center of her back and guided her toward the veranda steps.
“The local shadow mages are okay, and they take no for an answer. It’s the new ones who have me worried.”
Fabrice gasped when she heard him and Marsh turned her head to watch the woman approach, carrying a teary Curt in her arms. Behind her, Eveline carried Tory. Fabrice’s dark hair was wild from the day’s journey, her eyes ringed with shadow and her face pale.
Trading into Shadow (The Magic Beneath Paris Book 1) Page 9
