Creatures of Light, Book 3

by Emily B. Martin

  “What?”

  “I can’t.”

  He looked up. “Why not?”

  I squeezed my hands to my chest, my whole body bloodless. Eight feet or a mile, I could not cram myself into such a miniscule space. “I . . . I can’t go in there.”

  “I think you can make it—somebody else already has, and unless they were tiny, I don’t see why we can’t.”

  My eyes were fixed on that dark void. “You’re not afraid?”

  “I mean, I’m not wild about the idea, but isn’t this the whole point?” He squinted at me in the ruddy light. “Why, are you afraid?”

  “Yes,” I whispered.

  “You crawled through a tarantula-infested cellar just a few days ago.”

  I would take the tarantulas over this—I would take every tarantula in Alcoro over this, and every rattlesnake and scorpion as well. I’d wade a hundred sewers and brave a thousand teeming middens over this lifeless, crushing sliver of dark.

  “I can’t do it, Celeno,” I said again.

  He sat back on his heels. “Well, then, what was the point of everything? Shall I just go through on my own? I thought you wanted to see them, too.”

  I did want to see them. I needed to see them. We didn’t have good transcription materials in our packs—only a single charcoal nib and enough parchment for one rubbing and one copy. This hadn’t been meant to be a research trip. It had been meant to be a survey, to tell us if further examination needed to be done. What if Celeno didn’t copy it just right? What if the wall was wet, like this one, and a rubbing couldn’t be made? What if the parchment tore, or got soaked?

  I needed to see them.

  I let out my breath—not without first savoring the feeling of it in my lungs.

  “All right,” I said.

  “All right?”

  “All right, I’ll go through,” I said.

  “Do you want me to go first?”

  “No . . . I will.” I stared at the shadows. “I will,” I repeated, as if saying it again might make it easier.

  “I mean, the petroglyphs are on the other side, aren’t they?” he asked. “If we want to see them, we have to go forward?”

  “Yes.” I set my pack down by the opening—I would have to drag it next to me. “We can only go forward.”

  “All right, then,” he said. “I’ll follow.”

  I crouched down next to the crevice and peered into it. The light from the lantern, even shielded as it was, washed out the view of the far side, giving the impression of an endless chasm.

  “Douse the light,” I said, my voice steadier than I felt.

  “What? Why—”

  “We can’t drag it through when it’s lit. And besides . . .” I cupped my palms around my eyes, trying to shut out the burning wick. “I think there may be larvae on the far side.”

  He turned down the flame and plunged us into darkness. I blinked a few times. As my eyes adjusted, sure enough, glinting through the gloom was a faint blue glow, perhaps ten feet away. These glowworms. They were survivors, hidden deep in these barren holes, feasting on their kindred. Their light seemed to be magnified in the surrounding rock—was there more calcite here, reflecting the starry hammocks?

  Oddly buoyed—in a grim, desperate sort of way—I lowered onto my seat and lay down onto my back. I almost rolled to my stomach, but I didn’t like the idea of holding my head up off the floor. Without allowing myself any longer to think, I reached up and dragged myself under the ledge.

  At first, it didn’t seem nearly as tight as I’d thought. There was room enough for me to bend my knees and propel myself forward. I hauled the pack alongside me, using my free hand to find purchase in the low ceiling. One push, two, three, four—I was well under the ledge, with only my feet sticking out. I felt Celeno’s hand rest on my boot.

  “Everything okay?” he called.

  I wiggled my foot in response, unwilling to break my concentration with words. I craned my head upwards, straining to see out the other side. There was that little ribbon of bioluminescence, dim and cool. I pushed again. My knees scraped the ceiling, chafing my already battered skin. I splayed them out slightly and moved a bit farther.

  I couldn’t see the ceiling up above me, so it came as a surprise when I craned my head again and my nose brushed cold stone. I drew in a sharp breath. Great Light, it was barely an inch above my face. My body flushed with a hot wave of fright. Trying desperately to ignore the countless tons of rock suspended above me, I pushed forward again. But the ceiling slanted downward, and my knees caught once more. I wriggled until my legs were straight, using my whole body to inch forward like an upside-down snake.

  When the rock pressed my nose again, I stopped, my heart racing. I had no space to look for the opening. The panic I had somehow ignored before rose, sudden and strong, like storm rolling over the canyon rim. With the panic came a flush of memories—thick, sticky air, the smell of musty wood, a body I couldn’t shift or move or even feel, my muscles seizing and cramping . . .

  Slowly, I turned my head to the left and slid forward again. My right ear brushed rock. At first I tried to blink away the tears that sprung to my eyes, but after a moment I simply let them fall—I couldn’t see anyway. I tried to relax my body, but the ceiling was crushing me now, front to back, squeezing me from temples to breasts to thighs. I was caught, moving in barest increments. The pack wedged in place, unable to squeeze through the scant inches of free space.

  “Are you stuck?” Celeno asked.

  I couldn’t answer, couldn’t shake my head, pressing against the wood—rock—praying someone would open the door . . .

  And then, the realization.

  We would have to go back.

  Even if I got through this alive, we would have to turn around and go right back under.

  Gone were the last threads of lucidity, replaced only by an ambient terror. It crippled my body, made it tighten and swell in the shrinking space. I writhed, kicking and choking, my muscles rigid and strangled. I couldn’t draw breath, couldn’t force air past the block in my throat . . .

  Why hadn’t my mother told me?

  The answer rushed to me along with the dizzy memories. She hadn’t told me, because she hadn’t been this far, and she hadn’t told me, because she hadn’t thought it would matter this much.

  This dread, this horror—this had all been born after she disappeared.

  This had all been born because she disappeared.

  “Gemma?” Celeno’s voice bounced off the rocks. “I’m going to push you.”

  My voice broke from me. “No,” I rasped, using my last slips of air. “No, don’t—”

  He put his feet against mine and shoved. My face scraped along the rock, peeling off a layer of skin on my cheek. I gasped, lost in a crush of panic, but he pushed once more, and to my surprise, breath rushed into my lungs, inflating them like crushed bellows. I sucked in another draught and cracked open my eyes. There, high above me, were tiny blue points of light, sparkling in jeweled strings. Even the walls seemed to gleam—not just the dull glint of water on rock, but a faceted, gem-like shine. Shaking, devoid of strength or thought, I dragged my hand out of the darkness and grasped the edge of the ledge. With a hollow-limbed pull, my chest broke free of the squeeze—indeed popping off a clasp on my bolero—and then I was through.

  I lay panting on my back on the jagged stone, staring up at the glimmering ceiling and walls, my fist still clenched around my pack strap like a lifeline. I heard the scrape and puffing of Celeno following after me, the lantern rattling along with him.

  “Damn,” he grunted, his voice muffled. “Damn.” A scuff, a slide. “Can you reach in and hook my pack? It’s not wanting to come with me.”

  My body felt encased in sand, but slowly I rolled off my back and crawled to the opening. His head was about a foot below the ledge, waggling as he wedged his body through the gap. Numbly I slithered my leg back into the crevice and prodded with my toe for the pack.

  “No, that’
s my cloak—there, you’ve got it. I’m letting go.”

  I hooked the strap with my boot and hauled it toward me. He placed both hands on the floor and pushed. The pack caught on a nub of rock, and I tugged at it. After a short resistance, it popped free, accompanied by the crack and shatter of glass.

  “What was that?” Celeno puffed, his hair emerging from beneath the ledge.

  “One of the shields,” I said, dragging the pack the rest of the way out. “One of the lantern shields broke.”

  “Oh well.” He grunted, and his forehead appeared, coated with sweat and grime. “By the Light.”

  I reached in and gripped him under his shoulders. Between the two of us, he slid free and sagged against me. We both lay for a moment, splayed on the stone.

  After he’d caught his breath, he lifted his head. “Moon and stars, that was awful. Did we make it? Is this it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I couldn’t seem to raise my shoulders off the ground—what if we’d only gone partway, and there were still more horrors in front of us? I realized I was still crying—distantly so, the tears just seeping from my eyes like it was my natural state of being. Stress crying. Stress crying forever.

  Perhaps Celeno noticed, because he looked down at me where I lay staring at the starry ceiling with blurry eyes. “Are you okay?”

  “I lost my head,” I said softly. “I’m sorry.”

  “I can’t say I’m looking forward to going back under,” he said, and then paused. “But I forgot—you never liked small spaces, did you?”

  “Not really,” I whispered. It had never come up all that often. When did one go around squeezing through spaces too small to stand up in? Stairs-to-the-Stars was massive and airy, and any cramped quarters—carriages, ship cabins—had windows. Doors. Moving air.

  A means to get out.

  Again my memories swirled around me—that tiny cupboard in the twirly house, the one where we kept the basket of sweet potatoes, the ones we’d dug and washed so carefully the week before. Mother had pulled out the potatoes and thrown them haphazardly in the corner. Hide, she’d said. Hide, and don’t come out until I come get you. It was a little space, barely big enough for a knobbly eight-year old to sit with her knees up at her chest, adobe wall on one side, the cupboard door on the other.

  And I’d hidden. And I hadn’t come out, because the door wouldn’t open.

  When it finally did, it wasn’t Mother on the other side.

  In the dim light, Celeno shifted. Hesitantly, it seemed, he laid his hand on my arm.

  “Are you okay?” he asked again.

  I shook myself, trying to banish the memories and panic and feeling of being crushed in the belly of the earth. “I will be, once this is over.” I felt in the shadows for the lantern, wary of the broken glass. One side had been dented in the break—I hoped it hadn’t affected the oil reservoir. Retrieving another fire capsule—we had seven left, I should be more judicious with them—I crunched one in the pliers.

  The space around us blazed white, bright as a lightning strike. Celeno and I both yelped in unison, flinging our faces into our elbows.

  “What happened?” he asked, his voice cracked. “Did the something ignite?”

  There was no heat or crackle of flames beyond the little flare at the end of my pliers, and I hadn’t even held it to the wick yet. Slowly, blinking tears out of my light-starved eyes, I lowered my arm.

  “Oh!” I gasped.

  Celeno looked up, his lashes wet, and squinted through the shine.

  “Crystals,” I said.

  The chamber we had crawled into was long and narrow, the far end lost in shadow. Around us, growing like jeweled mushrooms from every wall and crevice, were clear, translucent crystals, some as big as my foot. They thrust in all directions, their perfect surfaces mirroring and diffusing the little flame in my pliers.

  “By the Light,” Celeno exclaimed, twisting his head this way and that. “Are they diamonds?”

  The fire dimmed, having burned almost all of its paper, and quickly I held the last flickers to the lantern wick. The glow around us turned red, save for the side with the broken shield, shining a beam of white through the little hall. I turned the wick as low as it would go to avoid blinding us and set it near a cluster of egg-sized crystals. Gently, I prodded one. It was slightly warm to the touch, and almost silky, denting easily under my fingernail.

  “Not diamonds,” I said. “And not calcite, I think.” I racked my brain for the handful of geology lessons I’d had, as well as the briefings I could remember from the few operational mines left in Alcoro. “Gypsum, maybe? I think it can create crystals like this, though I thought they had to develop in water. Perhaps this route used to be flooded.”

  “Are they valuable?” Celeno wiggled one spar the size of his thumb, and it broke off near the base. He held it in his palm, the light flashing off the cut surfaces.

  “I don’t know, maybe as a building material—don’t break any more off, Celeno,” I said as he reached for a bigger spar. “Don’t—they’re probably ancient. Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years old. Please leave them.”

  He withdrew his fingers from a bloom of the moon-white minerals. “I just thought, you know, wealth and prosperity, and all that. If we’ve been guided here by the Prophecy, who’s to say it’s not some kind of fulfillment?”

  I was about to reply, when his shifting shadow drew my gaze up the wall behind him. My forming words fell apart into a sort of squeak. Drawing in a breath, I nodded to the wavering shadows. “Because we’ve been guided here by that instead.”

  He turned in place, following my gaze to the bare place in the rock where, whether by geology or supernatural intervention, the crystals failed to grow. Scratched into the wall, faded by the slow seep of water, the faint traces of petroglyphs flickered in the shadows.

  We both stood at the same time, our boots sweeping scuff marks in the grit on the floor. I held the lantern high, directing the unshielded beam sideways across the marks to sharpen their appearance.

  For an endless minute, we both simply stared. The silence crowded in around us, so intense I thought I could hear the pounding of his heart along with mine. I read the cyphers, and then read them again, and again. My gaze went from tracing a recognizable pattern to simply darting this way and that, as if searching for new meaning in serendipity.

  E . . . RE . . . EATURES . . . F THE LIGHT, it began.

  “No,” Celeno said, as if in surprise. “No, these . . . Gemma, these are . . .”

  Useless. Utterly, agonizingly useless.

  E . . . RE . . . EATURES . . . F THE LIGHT

  ND . . . OW . . . ERFEC . . .

  D . . . EIG . . . SEVENTH KIN . . .

  W . . .

  “Gemma,” Celeno said again, this time a little louder—was it panic, or anger? “Gemma, these aren’t almost complete, or even a little bit complete. These say nothing!”

  Numbly, I moved forward, as close as I could to the wall without clambering over the beds of crystals. I reached out and brushed the nearest cypher.

  “All this way,” Celeno continued behind me. “All this time, all the chaos we’ve caused back at home—Gemma, Alcoro’s probably in crisis without me—all that for this?”

  “There’s something here,” I said, my heart in my throat. “Something before the seventh king.”

  “Those cyphers could mean anything! I’m not entirely convinced that one on the left is more than a divot of missing rock!”

  “It’s real,” I said, tracing it. “It’s a d root, here’s the stem, and the dot above . . .”

  There was a shattering sound behind me, and a few fragments of crystals skittered my way. I jerked around to see Celeno standing over a broken pile of gypsum, scattered outward where he’d kicked a mound of the spars. He was staring down at the pieces, his face screwed up in frustration and pain.

  Anger, then. Anger and panic.

  “Celeno . . .” I said softly.

  “I shoul
d never have come with you,” he said, still gazing unseeing at the destroyed gypsum spars. “I should never have left Callais.” He dragged both hands over his face and left them there. “And now we have to go back with nothing to show for it.”

  “It’s . . . not nothing, Celeno—at least we’ve seen there are actual fragments,” I said. “That’s something. And we know there are more—if we can find them, compare them . . .”

  “Aggregated field research isn’t going to save us, Gemma!” he said sharply, his hands still over his face. He groaned through his fingers. “For some stupid reason I thought all this might change things, that it might give me something for the council, something to stop them arguing about your sentence . . .”

  “But if we can—” I stopped halfway through my next plea. “To stop the council arguing? What’s there left to argue about?”

  He tossed his hands into the air, baring his pale, haggard face. “Oh, I don’t know, only the warrant for your execution half of them have been hounding me with since Dismal Green.”

  “But,” I said, my mind foggy with too many new variables. “But . . . you signed it already.”

  “Signed what?”

  “The execution order!”

  “I haven’t signed it,” he said, bewildered. “Axa and Telleceran have been after me for weeks, jumping out at me from every corner . . . that’s half the reason I fled Callais with you.”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “You needled me about it, in the bedroom. Something about attending your hanging. I thought you knew they were trying to get me to sign it.”

  “I thought you had signed it,” I said in disbelief. “Shaula had the document with your signature on it. She was sending it out to the generals for when they recaptured me.”

  “I never signed a death warrant. I’ve been slipping them for weeks, trying to figure something out, but I kept hitting dead ends. I thought maybe this would give me something to negotiate with.”

  The air resonated with silence. I faced him with lips parted and eyes wide, holding the lantern high as if it might make things clearer. He gazed back, his brow furrowed—I could actually see the thoughts turning over in his mind.