‘You know what I am?’ she whispered, peering at him in curiosity.
‘Yes. The Focals told me. Actually I guessed it before then.’
‘And you don’t mind?’
‘Why would I mind? I’ll love you whatever you are, Samiha. If you’ll still have me, I’m the happiest man alive. I realised that during the trial. I was a fool in Sheb. You’re mine, and I’m yours, and nothing will ever come between us.’
‘Let’s not speak of the trial,’ she answered. ‘Those were hard times.’ But the smile lingered on her lips as she walked, weightless by his side.
He was almost floating on air himself, buoyed with joy. He hardly felt his fatigue or injuries any more; he felt as if nothing could hurt him now. One final comfort, however, eluded him. He could not help wishing he could throw his arms about Samiha, press her close as he used to do.
‘It’s most frustrating,’ she murmured after a moment, echoing his thoughts. ‘I want to hold your hand.’
‘Why not try?’ he asked, halting in the corridor.
He said it without premeditation, though the thought did give him a slight, surreptitious thrill. He did not really expect anything when he held up his hand, and Samiha reached out hesitantly to brush it with her fingers. But there was a very faint sensation when she touched his skin, an intimate burr, as if the touch came from within him. She held his gaze a moment, her own eyes growing wide with surprise.
‘Well, we won’t be getting very far with that,’ he laughed in an effort to dispel the tension.
Then Zero caught up with them, mumbling a complaint about the speed of spirits, and the moment was over. They walked on in silence. Tymon’s heart beat quickly, thumping against his chest. He could not forget that faraway, static touch.
‘We’re carrying provisions for a week,’ he said to Samiha. ‘More, if we stretch it. We can search a fair number of tunnels before then.’
‘It won’t be difficult,’ she assured him. ‘You’re right. I think I can tell which way to go.’
They continued walking together down the main tunnel for several minutes, until Tymon saw that the passage was rapidly narrowing to a rough-hewn hole. They had reached the end of the mine-tunnel, encountering their first major hurdle on the journey. The way ahead was blocked. Before them stretched an undulating wall of wood, gouged out here and there by tools, the passage clogged with miners’ utensils and carts. It looked as though the workers had left everything behind them in their hasty exit; Tymon’s elation at being in the presence of Samiha was slightly dampened at the thought of the core-miners, who must have tried to escape by a different route from the one he had taken with the Saffid. They would have been safer staying inside the mine, he realised regretfully.
Samiha was adamant that the right direction was onwards, and deeper. ‘Keep looking,’ she beseeched Tymon. ‘You’re bound to find a hidden crevice somewhere, some access way.’
But there were no side-passages leading off the tunnel. The ceiling was low here, and the air was stale, lacking the promising movement of the upper levels. After searching the jagged end-wall with Zero’s help for some minutes, and finding no sign of a continuing passage, Tymon began to lose patience.
‘It’s not in the mining levels,’ the Samiha-vision insisted, urging him on. ‘It’s somewhere lower, older. There’s something under here. Maybe another set of tunnels they don’t know about in Chal —’
At that moment, her words were abruptly cut off, and Tymon found himself surrounded by darkness. Samiha had disappeared, unable, as he guessed, to maintain the Sending. In her absence his joy and energy ebbed. It was as if all his fatigue had caught up with him at once; he felt a moment of blank despair and noticed for the first time that Zero was drooping with exhaustion. He admonished himself for reacting like a fool, and paying so little attention to his faithful companion.
‘Let’s take a break,’ he said to Zero. ‘You must be as hungry as I am. If the Kion doesn’t come back soon, I can do a Reading and figure out where to go from here.’ He was sure Samiha would return when she was strong enough. Or when he was.
They sat with their backs against the gouged face of the end-wall and, opening one of the Freeholders’ food packets, began to gobble down the food. But although they had not eaten for hours, the tried and trusted combination of dried fruit, bread and cured meat tasted strange and bitter to Tymon. He wondered if the Freeholders’ food was tainted, though it had been only a few hours since they had bid farewell to Noni. He had meant to launch a trance after the meal to determine their best course, as well as keep his promise to the Focals. But he was either more tired than he thought, or else they had walked through the mine longer than he supposed, for after a lapse of time he found himself awakening from a nap he had never meant to take.
He sat up and stretched his joints, annoyed at himself for sleeping. His head ached dully, an unpleasant burning sensation in his temples. Zero’s torch sputtered where they had left it, wedged between two upturned barrows. The Marak boy was slumped on the floor nearby, softly snoring. Tymon stared at him in a daze, feeling faintly sick.
‘Bad air,’ he suddenly gasped, jumping to his feet.
He could taste the acrid bitterness on his tongue, the dry, warning odour of stagnation. He realised there was not a single sap-soaked torch of the kind carried by Zero among all the paraphernalia cluttering the end of the passage. Nothing but candles could be used in the very deepest mines, he recalled belatedly, dredging up some forgotten piece of lore from his seminary lessons. Other light sources would use up the air and cause the workers to suffocate. The torch was slowly killing them.
He grabbed a piece of sacking from the floor and smothered the flame, so that the mine-passage was plunged in impenetrable gloom. Then, half-choking, he bent down over the spot where he remembered Zero lying, found his friend’s shoulder and began to shake him awake.
‘Spirits help us,’ wheezed the Marak boy, when he finally understood Tymon’s agitated explanations. ‘We almost lost our evil again.’
The dousing of the torch certainly saved them from disaster. Tymon blamed himself for not thinking of contingencies, for Zero was clearly unable to do so. He could not rely on Samiha to warn him at every juncture, either, faced with her faulty Sending connection, though he did wonder at her selective powers of foresight. Her last words to him had been to persist, to keep looking right here, where they had almost died. He took a long, shuddering breath. In any case, the moment of danger had passed. After a while, he started to breathe more easily, though the acrid smell still lingered faintly in the air. He only regretted, crouched in the dark passage beside Zero, that he could not search for the workers’ candles as substitutes for the torch, now that they were left in absolute gloom. When Samiha was with him, her trance-form shed enough light for Tymon at least to see by. But she was not always present.
Over the next few minutes, however, as he sat whispering to his friend in the tunnel, discussing their next stop, Tymon realised that his surroundings were not entirely obscured. He began to see faint points and threads of light in the wood-grain of the walls, unnoticed before. At first he blinked, thinking his eyes were playing tricks on him. Then he understood what he was seeing.
‘Core!’ he burst out to Zero. ‘It’s everywhere!’
They were surrounded by faint traces of the precious substance, the glittering, secret wealth of Chal. Pink and orange starlight bespeckled the walls and ceiling of the mine-tunnel, promising greater lodes beneath. Tymon could have laughed at the bitter irony: all of Lord Dayan’s riches were useless to them now.
‘The workers called it “fire of the deep”,’ said Zero. Tymon could see his friend’s silhouette, faintly outlined against the gleaming core. ‘Someone from the upper levels would have had his eyes put out for seeing this, Syon. It’s a good thing there aren’t any guards here.’
The thickest lodes of petrified sap stretched in diagonal bands down the end-wall, and were already half-picked out by the mineworker
s’ tools. They all led — flowed, thought Tymon — in a similar direction, descending in a sweeping arc towards the right-hand corner of the wall. He rose and followed them, tracing his finger along them, feeling his way past the obstacle course of invisible objects jumbled and heaped haphazardly on the tunnel floor. The bands ended in a soft swirl of colour. He pushed a heavy cart out of the way to better see the design they made when they converged.
But the pattern had been gouged out. A large beam had been removed from the wall at this point, evidently rich enough in core to merit being dug out in its entirety. The horizontal passage it created would have been wide enough to crawl through, had it led anywhere, but the space, Tymon saw in surprise, was no longer empty. It had been blocked by a beam of similar size, though slightly different in shape and lacking the telltale core-lodes. The end of the replacement beam stuck out a few inches from the wall, as if it had been shoved in hurriedly.
‘I think I’ve found our lost passage,’ he said to Zero, triumphant. And once again he felt a tingle of confirmation, vindicating his faith in the vision. Samiha had been right about the existence of other tunnels! He should never have doubted her.
The two youths worked the beam out gradually, first using their fingers, then prying the section loose with the hardwood tools they found scattered on the floor of the passage. Their eyes had become sufficiently attuned to the dim phosphorescence of the corewood to permit an educated guess as to what they were doing, though they stubbed their toes and pinched their fingers more than once in the process. The beam had not been meant to stay in as a permanent block, and after a sustained effort they were able to pull it loose with a shriek of splintered wood.
Light welled out of the empty passage beyond, accompanied by a fetid odour. The luminescence was so unexpected that Tymon and Zero stared at the pinkish glow in astonishment, before going down on their hands and knees to investigate the opening. The glow, so bright to them after near-total darkness, was in fact only a stronger pool of phosphorescence. As they crawled along the passage, dragging their packs behind them, the acrid smell Tymon had noticed earlier grew ever more sharp. The crawl-space came to an end and the passage opened out into a natural chamber in the Tree, a hollow bubble about fifteen feet in diameter with a smooth, slightly concave floor.
The walls of the chamber were a dazzling mass of core, scored with rivers of petrified Treesap. In the centre of the space lay a heap of bundled objects Tymon could not immediately identify: it was a pile of darkness, a dark lump within the circle of leaping orange. The acrid tang was now very strong, and he fought the impulse to gag.
He scrambled upright to find himself standing in the middle of a womb of pink and orange starlight. It was the remains of an ancient sap-sack, he realised in awe. The chamber was clearly part of the hollowed-out vascular system of the Tree, millennia old. He remembered similar tunnels beneath Sheb; this one had a similar, natural exit, a chute leading out of the wall opposite to plunge steeply downwards. There was less core in the floor than in the walls and ceiling, or else it had been obscured. The surface beneath his feet, Tymon noticed with growing unease, was stained dark.
‘Syon,’ murmured Zero in distress, at the same time as Tymon saw with prickling horror what was actually piled at the centre of the chamber.
Bodies lay heaped on top of each other on the floor. The core-glow glinted on their yellow hair and sunstarved skin. From what Tymon could tell, staring in dismay at the scene before him, about twenty Nurians had been brutally murdered in the chamber, their throats slit and their heads bashed in with hammers. And it had not happened long ago. The stink of blood and faecal matter filled the air, and there was a dry, day-old stain at his feet. The coreworkers must have been killed by their guards when the tremors started in the mines above, rather than being allowed to leave and seek safety. The cruelty of the action, the venality of the Lord’s policies that maintained secrecy even in the face of total ruin, astounded Tymon. His stomach curdled and he looked away, telling himself that he should have expected such a thing. There was little satisfaction in the knowledge that neither the guards nor their master had in all probability escaped the mine collapse.
‘I’m so sorry you had to see this,’ whispered Samiha, at his side.
The vision was there again, a reassuring presence. He fixed his eyes on it instead of the murdered people, the sight of that luminous and familiar form assuaging his heart-sickness. Only Samiha could make sense of such brutality.
‘I hate to say it, but I fear we can’t stay here long,’ she continued with a sigh. ‘The Sending is growing more difficult for me every time, and we still have far to go.’
Tymon could not help feeling slightly shocked as she turned away from the bodies without another word, and walked to the mouth of the glittering, core-lined chute. As with her reaction to Zero, Samiha seemed to have lost her sensitivity to human suffering along with the use of her physical body. He told himself sternly that she was right, that their current mission should take precedence over all else, even the dead workers. Samiha, too, might slip through his fingers if he did not hurry. Roused by this thought, he nudged Zero towards the chute. But the Marak lad dragged his heels, lingering over the murdered Nurians with his head bowed.
‘All too good,’ he said. ‘They were all too good.’
‘I thought you used to say your countrymen were evil,’ Tymon replied.
He spoke brusquely, because he felt ashamed: despite the reek of decomposition in the chamber, it seemed heartless as well as disrespectful to be abandoning the workers so soon. But they were beyond his help now. He could not even give them a proper funeral, sending their bodies into the Void.
‘It’s the living who need to be evil,’ Zero answered sadly. ‘The dead, Syon, have none of that left. All the evil has run out. They’re done with life — or they’re hungry.’
‘Your friend,’ put in Samiha, from her post by the chute, ‘is a trove of interesting contradictions. But we really need to get going.’
‘I know,’ Tymon mumbled in answer to both of them. He tugged on Zero’s arm until the boy reluctantly allowed himself to be led away.
‘He’s also a very sweet fellow,’ Samiha added when they had joined her at the chute, as if she sensed Tymon’s turmoil. ‘I’m glad you brought him. He’ll help us.’
‘Do you have a better idea of where we’re going now?’ he asked her, as he ducked after her into the dark mouth of the exit.
‘This passage links with another series of Tree-tunnels,’ she said, her glow drifting ahead of him down the sloping, narrow tunnel.
The passage was about the height of a man, starting off level but quickly plunging downwards. After a moment Tymon was obliged to take his eyes off Samiha’s glow and concentrate on the steeply sloping floor at his feet, lest his descent turn into a headlong slide. The grain of the wood was silky, treacherous.
‘I think these hollow passages will take us all the way to my body, though it’ll be a long journey.’ Samiha’s voice echoed ahead of him as he inched his way down the chute, followed by Zero. ‘Days, maybe. It’s somewhere deep down.’
‘What happens when you can’t do the Sending?’ Tymon asked, slithering a little on the smooth floor. He had to brace his arms against the ceiling, which had steadily grown lower as they descended. ‘Do you wake up and see where you are?’
‘It’s dark.’ The answer drifted back. ‘I could be awake, I don’t know. There’s darkness, and pain.’
‘We’ll get there as quickly as we can,’ he assured her, overcome by remorse at this revelation. He craned his neck to see Zero, carefully negotiating the passage behind him. ‘Won’t we, Zero?’
‘Yes, Syon,’ said the youth obediently.
Tymon did not articulate the other concerns that now occurred to him in swift succession. Even if they were lucky enough to locate Samiha’s body, he realised, they would still have to find a way to spirit her away from their enemies. It would be far harder to climb the smooth Tree-conduits
than to slide down them, especially carrying her weak or injured body; they would have to find another way up, or out, of the Tree.
The ancient sap-course soon became a near-vertical chimney, steep and unbroken. Thankfully it also narrowed at that point, allowing the two youths to descend by pressing their backs against one wall, and bracing their legs against the other, using the regular ripples and ridges in the grain as toeholds. The vertical portion did not last long, and they emerged after perhaps a quarter of an hour of slow descent into a larger, more gently graded passage. Although the core lodes here were fewer, merely bespeckling the walls with points of light, Tymon was heartened to feel a steady flow of cold air on his face. He could See Samiha clearly again in front of him, her ghostly form throwing a faint glow on the walls and floor of the passageway. Zero risked lighting another torch, and their journey became easier, well lit and following the downward course of the conduit as it plumbed the depths of the Tree.
Cut off from sunlight, they could only guess at the lapse of time by the rate at which Zero’s torch was consumed. One sap-soaked cord wound about the tip of the handle equalled an hour’s worth of illumination, and in the course of their journey that afternoon they used up four of these, out of a store of thirty-six. It was Tymon who tired first on the long march. He had not realised that he was so fatigued; it must have been early evening outside when his bruised limbs simply buckled under him, and he knelt down on the floor of the sloping passage, unable to move. By then, the gradient of the conduit had grown steep again, and Zero declared the Syon unfit to negotiate another near-vertical descent. When Tymon was inclined to agree to his companion’s demand for food and rest, Samiha assured them that the passage would be passable a little further on, and urged them to keep going. She possessed a Born’s foreknowledge of details like the character of the passage, Tymon thought, but seemed oblivious of the merely human requirements of food, rest and breathable air. Again he put that down to her unusual out-of-body state, making excuses for her lack of empathy.
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