Ahead of her, the tunnel began to slope downward, and she could make out more—a great deal more—of the moss’s greenish light at its far end. It seemed to stare up at her like a gleaming octagonal cat’s eye. She strained her ears, trying to gauge where the Reavers were behind her, but she heard nothing.
The tunnel’s slope became suddenly steeper and she lost her grip. She fell onto her stomach and began sliding head first downward, gathering speed as she did.
Shit…shit…shit…
She crossed her hands over her head, memories of sliding into the boards flashing crazily through her mind.
With a cry, she reached the end of the tunnel and tumbled out onto more rough stone. Her shoulder hit the ground hard, and for a moment, the pain was so intense she feared she’d broken something. She lay gasping as the seconds passed, blinking in the sudden illumination and only dimly aware of the warmth and dampness in the air.
Slowly, the agony in her shoulder faded to a dull ache, and she got back to her feet, her heart hammering so hard she could feel every beat at her throat.
The chamber was enormous, and thick white clouds of steam swirled all around her. Glowing moss clung to the walls and ceiling in huge luminescent curtains, its light reflecting in a series of pools that dotted the floor. The greenish light and shimmering mist gave the entire chamber a ghostly, netherworldly quality.
She moved forward, desperately peering through the steam for another tunnel—any kind of way out. There was nothing she could see—only mist…and rock…and moss.
Cautiously, she stepped onto a narrow bridge of stone between two of the pools of water, wincing as the steam stung her cold cheeks. The sudden change of temperature, combined with the faint stench of sulfur, was making her feel lightheaded. Probably the lack of a decent meal in days was contributing to that too, and the burst of energy she’d gotten from the combination of Celine’s healing and the knowing had nearly evaporated.
Her gaze fell on a circular dais of polished stone in the center of the chamber. Eight evenly spaced gems around its edge—rubies?—glittered wetly, their faceted surfaces dripping with condensation. She stepped toward it, wondering if it perhaps concealed another exit—perhaps another set of steps…
“Go no further, human,” a voice rattled behind her, and Emily spun around, taking several steps backward toward the dais as she did.
Through the swirling mist, two Reavers appeared like phantoms, standing on either side of the small tunnel like mummified sentries in an old black-and-white horror movie. She could just make out the scarlet glint of their eyes from between the strips of cloth that wound around their heads.
“You have no more places to run,” one of them said, but she couldn’t tell which.
Emily took another step backward and felt her heel hit the edge of the dais. Neither of the Reavers made a move toward her. She drew the dagger again, raising it before her as if that meager weapon could protect her from these…things. Perhaps Maddy or Mona, both of whom were skilled with daggers, could have caused some damage—but not her. Marcom had never had a chance to teach her how to use them, and the knowing had never given her any inkling that she could really fight with one. Slicing wildly at nets was one thing; this was another entirely.
The seconds spun out as they stared at one another across the steaming hot springs.
“Your buyer has already arrived,” the Reaver went on. “Your antics have doubtless driven up your price. Thank you.” The words were devoid of any emotion, and yet Emily still detected the mockery in them through the chittering clicks and scratches.
She took another step backward, up onto the dais, her eyes flitting from side to side, still searching for a way out.
One of the Reavers spoke rapidly in a lower voice, but none of the sounds it made were words Emily could understand. Its companion interrupted, shaking its head. Both fell silent, watching her watch them.
It was pointless; there was nowhere to go. She was trapped. She’d never intended to escape anyway—not really. Giving Corbb and the others a chance to get away was always the best she could hope for. And yet, there was a steely streak deep inside her—the part that had always kept on playing her hardest even when the score was 5-0 in the third—that would not let her give in now.
Was it the knowing, nudging her once again? Was it just an errant swirl of mist that caught her attention and held it a second too long? Just dumb luck? Whatever it was, Emily’s gaze flicked upward, and something new caught her eye.
Hanging from the ceiling above her, nestled amidst great mossy curtains and nearly hidden from view, was another one of those nets—this one all but bulging with its burden. Tiny droplets of water glittered in the strange light as they ran down its thick cords, collecting at its bottom before dripping down into a shallow octagonal depression at the center of the dais.
A sound reverberated through the chamber, and she looked back at the Reavers. They’d come a few paces closer, but stopped as they realized her attention had returned to them.
“Stay away,” she said, and the sound of her own voice surprised her; it sounded stronger than she felt.
“Come quietly. Fighting is pointless.”
There was too much truth in those words. Again, Emily scanned the room around her, searching in vain for somewhere to run.
One of the Reavers started forward again with those quick, almost robotic movements. Its companion shouted something to it, but it ignored the command and tore through the mist toward her.
And there it was—the knowing.
As the Reaver reached the dais, Emily sidestepped, swinging the dagger like a ludicrously undersized sword. It shouldn’t have worked. It shouldn’t have done any damage at all, but the blade sliced through the Reaver’s wrappings and struck something hard underneath. The creature pulled back instinctively, and Emily dodged around him, letting the knowing guide her feet as it so often did.
She darted behind her attacker, lashing out with the dagger clumsily with wide, wild swings. The knowing could tell her where to go and what to do, but there was no skill with this weapon. Apparently, she’d never learned to use one of these properly in any of her other lives. The blow did less damage this time, but more of the wrappings began to unwind, revealing something black and covered in coarse hair beneath.
The Reaver turned toward her, reaching up with lightning speed to grab a fistful of her hair.
Bright pain exploded across her scalp as she was drawn up short. A cry escaped her lips, but she twisted, gritting her teeth against the agony and struck out again with the dagger.
The thing twitched, attempting to avoid her attack, but it stumbled as it became tangled in the strips of cloth that were unraveling ever faster, revealing its true form beneath.
As Emily yanked herself free again, the Reaver shook the bandages free of its arm—only there wasn’t a single arm there, but two spindly appendages covered in coarse black hair that glistened in the greenish light.
The Reaver tore free of its wrappings as Emily backed away toward the dais, and more of its grotesque form emerged like a monster in the mist. Two spindly limbs hidden amongst all that cloth for each arm and leg. The mummy-like bandages had only ever served to supply an illusion of something human beneath.
Horrified, Emily stared as the cloth fell away. The Reavers weren’t people at all; they were enormous spider-like creatures out of the worst of childhood nightmares.
“Enough!” The order came from the second Reaver who had hung back. “You look like a fool.”
Her attacker hesitated, seeming to vibrate, its monstrous limbs twitching in a weird kind of dance that produced a sickening sort of rapping on the dais’s stone surface.
The knowing receded, leaving only empty cold in its wake, and Emily tried desperately to cling to it; it was all she had.
“She is no threat to us.”
…No threat…no threat…no threat…
The words echoed in her mind, and suddenly Emily was angry. She wanted to l
ash out; she wanted to hurt these bastards the way they’d hurt Daniel, the way they’d hurt Celine, the way they’d hurt a thousand others who had come before them.
She didn’t know why she did it—perhaps it was the last vestiges of the knowing guided her, perhaps it was just desperation.
In one smooth movement, Emily bent her knees and leapt upward, swinging the dagger over her head, her eyes fixed on the net hanging from the ceiling above the dais.
The Reaver with whom she’d been fighting let out a blood-curdling screech, a sound more of rust and metal than anything living. Her blade sliced through the netting with a loud rending sound that seemed to fill the chamber.
Thousands of smooth round stones the size of baseballs rained down onto the dais—and onto Emily. They struck her head, her shoulders, the back of her neck. One bounced off her wrist, hard, and her fingers went numb. The dagger fell from her grasp and disappeared into the growing mounds of polished stones.
She fell backward, feeling some of the stones give way and break apart beneath her weight. The world was filling with loud, chittering cries—the scraping mating calls of cicadas, katydids, or a thousand other insectile creatures.
And then she felt them—first dozens, then thousands of tiny legs crawling over her arms, her hands, her face. She was suddenly staring out between multitudes of slender black legs and bloated hairy bodies, all at least as large as sparrows, and all crawling over her with those terrible, alien movements. She felt the sting of their bites again and again on her exposed flesh, more painful than any spider she’d ever known.
Rough—hands?—seized her shoulders and pulled her up and out of the stones as others carefully brushed away the clinging creatures. Her eyes snapped open, and she found herself staring up at her attacker, its face, visible now, was mere inches from her own—eight faceted red eyes gleaming from features dominated by a pair of glistening pincers.
Still screeching, it bowed its head toward her neck, but the second Reaver grabbed hold of its companion and hauled it away.
“No! We have our orders!”
“But the young!”
“Most will live if you stop trampling them! Enough!”
The second Reaver yanked Emily farther away from the piles of stones—eggs, she thought dazedly. They’re eggs…
Then they were dragging her back through the mist and away, and for a time, Emily gave into the pain and let darkness swallow her.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Shocking cold brought Emily back to herself, and she spluttered and gasped as wet snow was ground, none too gently, into her face.
“There she is,” a voice said with satisfaction—but it was a human voice, not a Reaver one.
She blinked and shook her head. Icy water ran into her eyes, making them sting and blurring her vision. Firm hands clutched her arms and must have been keeping her upright for a while, judging by the throbbing ache in her shoulders. Instinctively, she tried to pull away, but those hands tightened in warning.
“None of that,” the voice scolded, and Emily blinked again. Finally, the world snapped into something close to focus.
They were out of the crater now, standing in the snow on the volcano’s slope, she thought, and sheltering behind one of the numerous outcroppings of rock that dotted the mountainside. Brilliant sunlight reflected, too bright, from the ice and snow, dazzling her. Distantly, she could hear the bustle of activity and the rasp of Reaver voices, but the terrain blocked anyone else from view.
The man before her was clad in camouflage army fatigues. A rifle—the biggest Emily had seen in her life—was strapped to his back, and his heavily muscled arms were crossed over his chest. A tattoo of a nude woman ran the length of one from wrist to elbow; on the other, a sequence of blue-black letters and numbers underscored an absurdly large bicep. He was so out of place—so wholly different from anything she’d seen since leaving Minneapolis, that for a long moment, she couldn’t quite process what she was looking at. Was she still unconscious? Dreaming?
But of course, she wasn’t. Out of the corners of her eyes she could see the Reavers who were holding her fast—a different pair, she thought, from the ones in the—
Her thoughts broke off as the memory of thousands of crawling black legs washed over her, bringing with it a wave of intense nausea. The dozens of bites on her body and face throbbed in sympathy, but those messages were distant, dulled by the numbing cold.
“Have we a deal?” the Reaver on her right buzzed, and Emily felt its grip tighten further on her arm.
“Not up to me,” the soldier said with a shrug. “That’s up to the Preacher, and he wants to see her first.”
“He can see her here.”
“He can see her wherever he damn well pleases, given how much you want for her.”
There was a long pause.
“Very well.”
“Have you checked her for any more weapons?” The soldier’s gaze ran up and down Emily’s form, before latching on to the pouch that still hung, miraculously, from her belt. “What’s she got in the bag?”
One of the Reavers snatched the pouch, fumbling to get it free, then tossed it into the snow at the soldier’s feet. He stooped and picked it up, apparently unperturbed. “Let’s see … ”
Emily watched silently, anger welling up inside her at her helplessness as the man tugged the draw strings loose and pulled open the bag. How dare he…how…
He pulled out the puck first, frowning at it, then shrugged and dropped it back inside. Her iPhone was next, and this he looked at with considerably more interest, running his fingers over the cracked screen as if he could almost see the icons that would be there if he turned it on.
“This yours, girl?” he asked, his gaze moving back and forth between her and the phone. Reluctantly, Emily nodded, grinding her teeth. For a moment longer, the soldier frowned speculatively down at the little rectangle of glass, then shrugged and dropped it back into the pouch as well.
“I think the Preacher’s gonna want to see that.” He hung the pouch by its drawstring from a hook on his own belt. “All right, I’ll take her from here.”
Wordlessly, the Reavers passed her over, and the soldier took hold of her upper arm and began steering her away down the slope.
As they rounded the large outcropping of black rock, a small cluster of vehicles—real ones—came into view, grouped in a loose circle around a camp a few hundred yards down the slope. They didn’t really look much like the trucks and trailers she remembered from her own time and place, but they were close enough that there could be no doubt what they were. Rusting, beat-up grills grinned above dented and broken bumpers, sunlight winked off of cracked windshields, snow clung to huge black tires. Most were painted in camouflage patterns; a few were just black or the dull gray of old metal. Radio antennae stuck up from their rooftops, and dozens of soldiers were busying themselves, apparently preparing for departure. Each and every one of them were armed—most with rifles like her captor’s. The whole scene looked as strange as an alien invasion after weeks spent in this world of swords and sorcery.
Who were these people?
It seemed to take an age to work their way down the mountainside to the camp. Several times, Emily slid on patches of ice, but the man beside her kept her on her feet and moving. He wasn’t gentle with her, but neither was he particularly cruel. He could have easily let her fall into the snow, but he didn’t. Somehow that calmed her a little. She didn’t exactly trust these people—not least because they were prepared to purchase her like a side of beef—but she couldn’t be much worse off with them than she had been with the Reavers.
That thought brought her friends back to the forefront of her mind. She hoped they’d managed to get away; she hoped Corbb wasn’t planning something stupid, like coming after her.
As they came into the camp, a couple of the soldiers nodded at her captor and eyed her with interest, but no one stopped them. The smell of gasoline and gunpowder grew thick, almost cloying, as they wended
their way between the trucks; it mingled with the lingering tang of smoke and cooking meat. Shouted orders drifted across the snow, rising above the murmur of voices that conferred with and cajoled one another.
The soldier pulled her up short at a crooked and dented door on a small trailer. The outside of it had been black once, but the paint had flaked away, leaving a rust-speckled pattern of dull gray patches. Two small windows high up on either side of the door sported cracked and dirty panes of glass, and above them, just visible on the trailer’s roof, some kind of tiny satellite dish pointed its single finger toward the cloudless blue sky.
The soldier reached past her face and rapped briskly on the door.
“I’ve brought the girl,” he called, and then waited. There was a long silence.
“Bring her in,” a voice responded calmly, and the soldier yanked the door open and shoved Emily ahead of him up a pair of steps and inside. She stumbled on the threshold, blinded for a moment by the comparative gloom of the trailer’s interior.
“The human one, I see. Very good.” The voice was calm, cultured, pleasant. “And the other? The flyer?”
“The Reavers will bring her down to us within the hour. She’s a little thing. We’ll have no trouble with her, sir.”
“Good…good.”
Emily blinked, trying to pierce the shadows and seeking out the speaker. Across from the door, a small bed was bolted to one wall, and beyond it, a table, its top covered in papers, filled the back half of the space.
But she didn’t register any of these things; at first, she didn’t even see the man seated behind the table with his hands steepled primly in front of him. Instead, her gaze fastened on another object lying, seemingly ignored, atop a mound of scattered papers.
Gleaming in the feeble light that filtered in from outside, not six inches from the man’s right elbow, was her crystal sword.
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