Creatures of Light, Book 3

by Emily B. Martin

  “‘Oh, that day would yet be quenched,’” Celeno recited drily, quoting from the traditional invocation in the twilight before Starfall. Normally it evoked an eager anticipation for the meteor shower yet to come. At the moment, it rang ominously. Heart pounding, I turned and continued around the bend.

  My foot slipped on a loose rock, and I slowed, feeling my way down the slope with the toes of my boots. I was so focused on my feet and so intently trying to ignore the deepening darkness that I didn’t think to look up until Celeno grabbed me by the elbow. I skidded on the slope, unsteady.

  “By the Light,” he exclaimed.

  I looked up and sucked in my breath.

  The glowworms. We had reached their beginning, and there truly had been no exaggerating them. They coated the tunnel ceiling as it arced downward, creating a long, straggling line of shining blue, like splashes of the galaxy painted overhead. Their deadly, silken strings hung down, diamonds on a wire, some drifting gently in the moving air as it rushed upwards toward the cave mouth.

  “That’s . . . not what I expected,” he said. “These are what your mother studies?”

  I nodded, mute. We stood silently for a moment, gazing down the broken rock tunnel. His fingers still clutched my sleeve—I could feel the tremor in them.

  “It’d make a good painting,” he said.

  My stomach gave a tiny twist. I had just been thinking the same thing. It struck me that the best way to capture this sight would be to use similar methods that I used on his thesis. The night sky, glowworm colonies . . . little points of light against an encompassing darkness.

  I shook myself and took a small step away. In response, he dropped my sleeve as if it had scalded him. I cleared my throat and pointed to the nearest larvae.

  “The lures are sticky—try not to let them brush your hair.”

  He nodded, and by the light of the Arachnocampa, we continued.

  The passage was not so much a trail as a rough opening cleaved through the earth—the ground was buckled and broken with old rockfall, and the walls were riddled with holes and rifts. Some of these were barely a hand’s width across, while some were as wide as I was tall, and led away in different directions. But my mother hadn’t been wrong about the way being marked. At every significant side passage, where there may be some confusion, white slashes were painted onto the cave wall, dimly reflecting the glowworms’ light. These small signs of previous human presence eased the knot of apprehension in my stomach.

  A little.

  There was a stream, too, that flowed along the path, sometimes cutting from one side to the other, sometimes simply flowing straight down the middle. This worried me—as the light from the cave mouth grew fainter and fainter, I wasn’t sure that we would be able to pick our way reliably among the rock and water. But before long, I realized we already were—a look over my shoulder yielded no additional light. The glowworms were the only illumination, and though both Celeno and I stumbled far more than once—he more than I—they cast enough light to distinguish looming shapes in the gloom.

  Mostly.

  There was a dull thud, and Celeno swore in pain. I turned to find him clutching his forehead above his eye and reaching out to prod a lumpy shape hanging down from the ceiling that I’d avoided by sheer luck.

  “I thought it was moss or something,” he said. “But it’s stone.”

  I squinted up at the ceiling, where more hanging rocks made patches of darkness in the blue glow. I’d read about these . . . heard about them in geology lectures . . .

  “Speleothems,” I finally remembered, running my fingers over the wet rock. “Cave formations—the running water deposits minerals in different ways.”

  “What’s this one—a stalactite? Or stalagmite?”

  “I don’t remember.” There was some clever turn of phrase my tutor had used to differentiate, but I couldn’t recall what it was.

  Celeno wiped his damp forehead, moving from the first speleothem to another patch of them near the passage wall—unlike the first, which was as fat as my leg, these were thin as reeds. “I wonder what makes them thick or thin—oh!”

  He’d reached out to brush one of the skinny ones, and at the first delicate touch from his finger, it snapped off and landed on the floor of the passage, where it broke neatly in two. I stared at it at our toes, washed by a sudden feeling of remorse.

  “Oh,” he said again. “Does it . . . will it grow back?”

  I looked up at the patch of fragile speleothems. A tiny bead of water gathered in the little crater left by the broken formation. As Celeno lifted his head, the droplet shivered and fell through the air, catching the faint blue light before it splashed onto his face.

  “Eventually,” I said as he wiped at the water. “But . . . maybe don’t touch any more.”

  “No . . . no, I won’t.”

  We continued. The passage leveled out, following the stream as it glimmered under the glowworms’ light. After a while, the floor began to cant down toward it, making a slippery pitch that landed us both in the chilly water several times. Before long, I was soaked up to my knees.

  We didn’t speak. I tried to logically attribute it to the need to concentrate on finding our way in the gloom, but in reality, the deep loneliness of the cave seemed to quash the desire to talk. A few times, the stream flowed off into some hidden channel, leaving us without even the soft chatter of water. During these times, the silence seemed as solid a feature as the rock itself—a natural state of this place. Like the fragile speleothems, neither of us wanted to break it any more than necessary.

  Mercifully, there were no cramped squeezes like there had been in the escape tunnel. I was able to keep a hold on my looming unease, taking marginal comfort in the high ceiling and wide walls. Still, I was shaky and tense, often finding myself holding my breath for no reason. At least the space smelled of wet stone—not stale air and dust, not dry wood, not the sweat drying on my skin . . .

  There was a slow scrape and a splash. I jerked my gaze over my shoulder, jumpy. Celeno was on all fours in the stream. He coughed and got to his feet, shivering.

  “Slipped,” he said. “Kind of light-headed.”

  I tried to calculate the passage of time in my head, but it was impossible to know how far we’d come or what time it was outside. “Maybe you should eat something. If we find a good flat spot, we can stop. How’s your stomach?”

  “Bearable. Oh, look.” He pointed above our heads. “Supper.”

  Several of the Arachnocampa lures started to swing wildly, the glittery strands wrapping around some doomed insect. As we watched, the larvae slid from its spittle hammock and began to draw up its thread.

  Celeno cocked his head. “What do they eat? I mean, I see it’s eating an insect, but it’s winter, and we’re deep underground. If they’re trying to lure in flying bugs—and there’s no others that I see—what do they eat?”

  It was too dim to make out what insect had met its demise in the shining snare, but I didn’t need to see it to identify it. “Each other,” I said.

  “Their own species?”

  “The adults—once they pupate, they’re just another flying gnat.” I watched the insect twitch as the larvae drew it in. “Killed by their own kin.”

  He gazed up at the ceiling. “How morbidly ironic.”

  My laugh burst out of me—taking both of us completely by surprise. I choked it back, leaving the ragged end echoing off the stone. He stared at me as I pressed my fingers to my lips.

  “What’s so funny?”

  My lips twitched behind my fingers. “Drowning cicadas.”

  His gaze dropped to the space between our feet, but not before I glimpsed his cheeks rounding into his own smile. I was filled suddenly with the memory of that day, lying in the shade of the cottonwoods on the canyon rim, the treetops thick with the drone of cicadas.

  “I was trying to ask you to dance with me at Starfall . . .” he began, as if reluctant to dredge up the memory.

  “. . .
and I didn’t realize it,” I said. “I was collecting data for my thesis . . .”

  “. . . and making me hold the vials while you shoved the poor wiggling things into the alcohol.” He fought to get his smile under control before he looked back up. “It did affect the romance of the proposition.”

  It was my turn to look down. That afternoon was the first time our friendship had inched toward something more intimate. We’d gone in increments—from mere acquaintances to students sharing a library table, and from there to assisting in each other’s research. Friendship happened somewhere along the way, and then . . . that afternoon, filled with sun and awkward realizations and blushes and finally laughter, breaking the fumbling misunderstanding.

  When I looked back up, his smile ghosted away, his gaze somewhere over my shoulder. “We didn’t dance, though.”

  No, we didn’t. Because that was the week his father died, and the country was plunged into mourning. Official Starfall celebrations were canceled, and the palace was draped in undyed linen. Instead of gowns and music and dancing until the meteor shower started, he and I lay silently on the gazing bench in his star patio, silent. He’d cried. I’d cried. We’d held hands, and when we both stopped crying, we had kissed for the first time.

  The glowworm had reached its prey and was beginning to feast. Celeno let out a stilted sigh and wiped his brow—still sweaty, still with a shake to his fingers. I shuffled a bit, thrown by the unexpectedly intimate memories, and turned back around.

  “I think there may be a wider chamber coming up,” I said. “Maybe we can stop there for the night.”

  “‘Oh grant me not a starless night.’” He gave a small, joyless chuckle behind me. “And what a night it is, full of stars that devour their own kind. There’s probably significance in there somewhere, don’t you think?”

  I was struck with an image of a sister imprisoning a sister, of a king executing a queen, of a country trapped by its own divine intent. A flash grenade on the riverbank.

  “Or maybe they’re just bugs,” I said, turning away from the swinging lures.

  Silently, he fell into step behind me, and we continued down the passage, leaving the cannibal larvae to its feast.

  “Gemma.”

  “What?”

  “What if it says a different king?”

  I had just taken my star band off and looked up. We’d been silent for almost an hour, since pausing under the glowworms. We’d trudged on until the sloped ground rose into a kind of platform, curtained by speleothems, labeled the Roost on the map. It did feel like a little perch, well above the stream we’d been following. We’d set out our bedrolls with enough space for a bison to lie between us.

  “What if they say the sixth king, or the tenth?” he continued, chewing on a corn biscuit. “What if they say the seventh queen?”

  I turned my star band in my fingers, the three gems catching the glowworms’ light. “Maybe you shouldn’t engage in speculation until you’ve seen them.”

  “Aren’t you engaging in speculation?” he asked. “Surely you must be thinking about it. Go on—what do you think they might say?”

  I threaded my fingers through my hair until I’d separated three distinct locks. “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, come on. We used to live for scholarly debate.”

  “This has more impact than cicadas or meteors,” I said. “And besides, I don’t want to offer a suggestion and then have you cast it aside simply because it came from me. Leading language.”

  I started twining my hair into a braid—even trying to avoid the Arachnocampa lures, my hair had still gotten caught and tangled more than once. He was silent, chewing the biscuit. At least he was eating something. We’d taken the risk of lighting the lantern, and in the red-shielded glow, I could see the dark circles under his eyes and the sweat still glazing his forehead. I caught the scent of it, too, when he moved around, tangy and sharp.

  “You seem to have no problem thinking I don’t trust you anymore,” he finally said. “You’re not trying to deny anything or argue it away. You’re just accepting it as fact.”

  “Maybe because I know there’s no point in denying it,” I said. “I acted against you.”

  “You threw a flash grenade.”

  “Yes.”

  “To let Queen Mona and Queen Ellamae and that Cypri rebel escape.”

  “Yes.”

  “He kicked me, you know,” Celeno said. “In the head.”

  I did know. I’d watched the bruise form with my own horror.

  He gazed at me a moment longer, chewing his biscuit. They were dry and crumbly, and he had to take a swallow of water before he could speak again.

  “What are you not telling me?” he asked.

  “A lot of things,” I admitted, finishing the last few strands on my braid.

  His brow creased in the ruddy light. “Why?”

  “Because we have to see them first, Celeno.” I tied off the end of my braid and let it fall down my back. “Nothing else matters until we see them ourselves.”

  He sighed in irritation. “Fine, then.” He brushed off his hands and lay down, kicking off his boots. “Fine, we just won’t talk about it until they’re right there in front of us, and I hope that satisfies you. When will we reach them, tomorrow?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “We got a late start today, and we’re moving slowly. It might take longer than we thought.”

  He huffed as he slid down into his bedroll. “Forgive me if my wretched body isn’t taking well to wintertime mountaineering and corn tack. By the Light, I want my evening tincture.”

  I let out a breath, feeling like a waterskin that’s been filled too full, ready to slop its contents at the slightest nudge. I settled my star band back in my hair and spread out my mother’s map in my lap, looking over our route. We’d made it partway down Glowworm Avenue. If my estimation was correct, we would reach the Ball of String early the next day, a critical confluence of several smaller passages that led in every direction, including up and down. It would be imperative to follow the right one—the wrong passage would lead us into the tunnels my mother’s team hadn’t yet mapped. No blazes, no trails.

  No guarantee of an exit.

  I pulled off my own boots and wriggled down into my bedroll, the vellum packet shifting in my shirt. I thought briefly of my mother—had she managed to lead the soldiers away? What if they’d caught her? What if she couldn’t make it back to Callais, or couldn’t convince anyone to listen to her?

  I puffed out the lantern and settled on my back, staring up at the patches of dim larvae colonies. Their moon-blue light glistened off the lines of the speleothems fringing the platform, catching in the occasional drip from the pudgy ends of the stone formations.

  “Tight,” I said.

  Celeno shifted and lifted his head. “What?”

  “I just remembered,” I said. “Stalac-tites cling tight to the ceiling. Stalagmites are on the ground.”

  He set his head back down and rolled over, putting his back to me. “Well. At least we have something figured out.”

  The Ball of String was aptly named, a massive dome-shaped hall riddled on all sides by passages, some large enough to send a cavalry through, others barely big enough to fit a jackrabbit. Several of the passages had blazes next to them, made up of specific shapes. I did a final double-check of the map.

  “We want the single X,” I said, looking for the right blaze across the hall.

  “That passage there.” He pointed. “Under the thing that looks like bacon.”

  The formation did look exactly like a piece of bacon, a giant ribbon of rock streaked red and white. It wasn’t the only one—our little lantern gave glimpses of huge stone curtains sweeping from the ceiling. We craned our heads back as we passed underneath them, a hall of tapestries frozen in rock. I itched for my sketchbook.

  The glowworms disappeared in the Ball of String and didn’t reappear in the passage on the far side—we must have finally gone outside their ha
bitat range, where even cannibalism couldn’t sustain them. I lit the lantern again and held it out in front of us, trying to keep it from whacking against the slippery mounds of stone in our path, slowing and laboring our pace. Finally, after what felt like hours of clambering over and around lumpy stalagmites that rose like anthills from the floor, we stumbled into a much wider, straighter course. I blinked in the dim light—the floor shone like the surface of the moon in the lantern’s reddish light, a perfect, flat trail meandering into the darkness. Even without looking at the map, I knew exactly where we were.

  “Great shining Light,” Celeno said in awe. “What is that?”

  “The River of Milk,” I breathed. “I didn’t realize . . . I didn’t think it would be so . . .”

  “It’s incredible,” he said, crouching down beside it. “Like . . . snow. What is it, salt?”

  “Calcite, my mother said.” I crouched down, too. “Calcite deposits left behind by running water.”

  “Moon and stars.” He peered into the distance, where the unmoving river ran straight and silent out of our lantern’s reach. “Reveal to me your light-led way.”

  “You’ll have quoted the entire invocation by the time we get out of here.” I stood and edged toward the ledge that paralleled the River of Milk.

  “It just seems so relevant.” He paused. “Funny, that the Light should seem so present in such a dark place.”

  A few moments of silence passed. I set my feet carefully—the ledge wasn’t entirely flat, and the wet rock was slippery. Though it was hardly a long fall into the dry creek bed next to us—only a few inches—I didn’t want to land in the calcite. The surface was perfectly undisturbed, and the idea of marring it for all eternity rattled me.

  “I wish we had known about this place before Cyprien,” Celeno said.

  I lifted my head. “To give us a route to Lumen Lake, you mean?”

  “To what?” His pack scraped on the rock. “These go to Lumen Lake?”