by J. A. White
Finally she remembered a time she and Lucas had raced downhill after a major storm, slipping through the mud until they slid to a stop at the bottom, laughing gleefully. Although Kara could picture the event perfectly in her head—could even recall the precise pattern of speckled mud across Lucas’s forehead—she was still hesitant to use it. The memory was one of her favorites, and she did not want to give it up.
We need these creatures, Kara thought. I have no choice.
The mind-bridge snapped into place, and the memory vanished forever.
“These are the ugliest birds I’ve ever seen,” said Taff.
There were three of them, with fat, unwieldy stomachs improbably balanced on two thin legs. They walked with a wobbling gait, giving the impression that they were just one misstep from falling over.
“I don’t think they’re birds,” Kara said. “They can’t fly.”
The largest gnostor stepped forward. Kara ran a hand along its umber plumage—not soft like the feathers of other birds but rough like toasted bread. Its neck, long and graceful, split into two parts before coming together again, ending in a small head dominated by perpetually curious eyes.
None of the gnostors were the slightest bit Blighted. She wondered if their innocent nature acted as armor against the dark touch of the Thickety.
“Thank you for helping us,” Kara said.
The gnostor whistled.
“Sounds like a bird to me,” said Taff.
After checking the toy rabbit to make sure they were heading in the right direction, they mounted the creatures. Travel was difficult, the ground uneven and punched with holes. Their progress would have been agonizingly slow had they remained on foot, but the gnostors quickly navigated the unsteady surface by throwing the weight of their stomach from one side to the other.
It’s not fat, Kara thought. It’s a balancing mechanism.
Once they had settled into a steady pace, the trees flashing by in a dark blur, Kara spurred her gnostor next to Safi’s.
“How long have you known that you’re a witch?” Kara asked.
“Since I was six. That’s when I was tested. I opened a grimoire and saw the words to create a soonberry pie out of nothing.” Safi shrugged. “I was hungry.”
“What did Sordyr do when he found out?”
“He didn’t,” Safi said. “I pretended the page was blank. That was what Father told me to do. He said if I saw something in the grimoire and told anyone, the Forest Demon would take me away forever. I was terrified that I would never see Father again, so I lied. I told Sordyr that all I saw was a blank page, and he believed me.”
Kara looked at the girl with newfound respect. “You fooled the Forest Demon. That is not easily done.”
“I thought it would be harder, actually,” said Safi. “Don’t you find it strange? He’s forcing us to make all these grimoires, yet he can’t use them himself. I knew the page in my grimoire wasn’t blank, but there was no way for him to know that.”
“He’s not a witch,” Kara said, but she saw Safi’s point. There are many different ways of destroying the World. Why choose to do it with a weapon you cannot control? A realization lingered there, just out of reach. Something important. Before Kara could make sense of it, however, Safi started to talk again, and the half-formed thought slipped from her mind.
“Things were different after that,” Safi said. She absentmindedly patted her gnostor, which whistled in appreciation. “I started to have dreams where I . . . did bad things. Things I would never think of doing in the real world. And sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and find myself at the storehouses.” She looked over at Kara. “This must sound crazy.”
Kara shook her head. “The grimoire was calling you. It wants to be used.”
“After about a year, the dreams and the sleepwalking stopped. It was like the grimoire just gave up. But then, the night after I showed you the storehouses, I woke up and heard something whispering my name. Not ‘Safi,’ mind you. My true name. I had never heard it before, but I recognized it. How could I not? It was like all the things that are me had been transformed into sounds and strung together.” Safi touched her right ear, as though the word had left a pleasant imprint there. “I followed the voice to the clearing and opened the door to the first storehouse. My grimoire was waiting for me, right on top of the others. White as snow.” She smiled, and her teeth gleamed in the darkness. “The spell to make soonberry pie is still there on the first page.”
Kara glanced at Safi’s satchel, noticed the way the girl’s hand lingered near the opening.
“You can’t use it again,” Kara said.
“It’s mine.”
“It’s evil.”
“Are you sure? How else could we have gotten past the Divide? That’s the reason I took the grimoire in the first place. I would never use it to hurt anyone. Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I said the same thing.”
“Well, clearly, I’m different!”
A moment of silence, fraught with tension, passed between the two girls. Finally, Safi looked away. When she spoke again her voice was soft and compliant. “If you think it’s that important, I’ll get rid of the grimoire as soon as we destroy Sordyr. Until then I think we need all the help we can get.”
Kara wanted to tell Safi that it wasn’t worth it, that she should bury the grimoire in some desolate spot she’d never be able to find again. But her practical nature, deeply ingrained by years in the Fold, intervened. Who knows what dangers we’re going to face? Having a witch by my side could be very useful. It might even save our lives.
“Fine,” said Kara, “but when this is done, you need to get rid of that thing. Promise?”
Safi nodded, her hand on the satchel again.
“Just this one time,” she said. “I promise.”
The trees opened up less than an hour later, revealing the broad expanse of a half-broken mountain with a gargantuan tail sticking out of it.
“Please don’t tell me that’s Niersook,” Taff said.
“What else could it be?” asked Kara.
She dismounted her gnostor and looked more carefully.
Niersook must have crashed into the rock face at incredible speed; its body lay hidden beneath a mountain of stones. Only the tail was visible, as tall as a tree and covered by rich carmine scales that cast strange, shimmering reflections in the near darkness.
“How are we going to get the venom,” Safi asked, “when we can’t even see the mouth?”
“Should we climb over the rocks?” Taff asked.
“They’re too unstable,” Kara said. “One wrong step and they could collapse beneath us.”
“What about going around to the other side of the mountain?”
“We don’t have time,” Kara said. “Besides, even if we make it to the other side, who knows if the mouth is out in the open? It might be buried beneath rubble, or too high for us to reach.”
“Or crushed completely,” Taff said. “In which case, there’s no way for us to get the venom at all.”
“I don’t think so,” Kara said, pointing to the mountain. “Look carefully. You can see flashes of red here and there, like Niersook is just underneath the rocks. I think it crashed into the top of the mountain and slid down.”
“Well,” said Safi. “If we can’t go over the rocks and we can’t go around, how are we going to get there?”
Taff smiled and shook his head. “We’re going through it, aren’t we?”
Kara nodded.
“We’re not really, are we?” Safi asked.
“Of course we are,” Taff replied. “We just have to find a way in.”
He approached the tail, which even at its shortest point was five times as tall as him. Taff tried to pry a few scales away from their moorings, and when that didn’t work he withdrew his wooden sword and struck one. A deep metallic sound reverberated throughout the trees, like a gong calling long-dead armies to battle.
“Hmm,” he said, tilting h
is head to one side. He struck the next scale, producing a similar sound. “Hmm,” he repeated.
“Are you sure that’s the best idea?” Safi asked.
Kara placed a hand on the girl’s back. “You can wait here if you’d feel safer. No one would think less of you. You’ve more than proven your bravery by coming this far.”
“But you might need my help,” Safi said, and Kara saw her hand stray to the satchel.
She’s looking for an excuse to use the grimoire.
“We won’t,” Taff said quickly, before Kara could reply. He struck another scale, resting his hand on it in order to feel its vibration. “Besides, it’s probably way too scary for you inside. Trust me. I have experience with these sorts of things.”
“I’m sure it’s not scary at all,” snapped Safi, “if you can do it.”
Taff shrugged. “Guess you’ll never know.” He moved to the next scale. When he struck this one the sound was no more melodious than an anvil striking stone.
“Here!” he shouted, waving them over.
Using all their strength, the three of them managed to peel the scale away from the tail. Behind it a narrow opening led deeper into the darkness. Mucus-like strings stretched between the scale and segments of pearl-white bone, shockingly pristine.
Before Taff could squeeze into the opening, Safi pushed past him.
“I’m not scared!” she exclaimed, vanishing into the darkness.
“I might have convinced her to stay behind,” Kara told Taff. “I hope you’re happy with yourself.”
“Do you want to leave her alone with that book?” he asked, his voice suddenly serious. “She’s better off with us.” He winced at the smell coming from the opening. “You first,” he said.
Kara turned her body so she could squeeze behind the scale. As she slowly inched her way through the darkness, Kara tried not to think about the soft, moist walls pressing against her, the stomach-churning smell that fouled every breath she took.
Finally she stepped into nothingness and fell, rolling down some sort of hill and onto a hard surface. Taff followed a few moments later, accidentally slamming his elbow into her neck.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Safi?” Kara asked. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” Safi said. Kara heard the sound of flipping pages. “Ah, this should do the trick!”
Safi murmured a few foreign words and suddenly a glowing globe of light hovered above them, illuminating their surroundings.
Though not as big as Imogen’s cavern, the chamber still dwarfed the children. Arches of bones held the scales in place, and a network of translucent veins, each large enough to walk through, weaved above them like a system of roads.
Thousands of bones littered the floor.
“What are these?” Safi asked. The ground cracked and snapped beneath her feet as she looked for a bone-free place to stand.
“Maybe this was its stomach,” Kara said. “These bones must be what’s left of its prey.”
“But I thought its only prey was Sordyr,” Safi said. “That’s the whole reason it was made in the first place.”
Kara shrugged. “Everyone has to eat.”
“I don’t think so,” said Taff. He held up two skulls, each smaller than a human’s but with exaggerated eye sockets. “Look at these. What do you notice?”
“They’re the same,” Safi said.
“Exactly the same.”
“So?” Kara asked. “Niersook was bound to eat two of the same type of animal at some point.”
“True,” said Taff, picking up a third skull. It was completely identical to the first two. “But these skulls should still look a little bit different. Smaller, bigger—something!” He picked up a fourth skull, compared it to the others. “This is so strange,” he said.
Kara scanned the floor and saw dozens of identical skulls staring up at her with those oversize eye sockets.
“What does it mean?” Safi asked.
“I don’t know,” said Kara, “but we have more important things to worry about. We have to find the venom and get back to Kala Malta before sunrise. Time is growing short.”
They tried Mary’s rabbit first, hoping it would lead them to the venom’s precise location, but when Taff whispered his request, it refused to move at all.
“I guess it only works on big things,” he said.
They headed in what they all agreed was the general direction of the mouth, thinking that it would be relatively simple to walk from one end of the body to the other, but after a few turns they became hopelessly lost.
“We need a different plan,” Safi said. She withdrew her grimoire. “Maybe I could—”
“No,” said Kara. “Emergencies only.”
“How is this not an emergency?”
“Because nobody’s screaming.”
They journeyed through long passages and tall rooms, the surface littered always with the strangely identical bones, the large-eyed skulls. They found a tube that had collapsed onto the floor and followed it upward; it emptied into a room covered with a taut, fleshy material that began to tear the moment Safi stepped on it. Despondently, they retraced their steps to the previous chamber.
“What are we going to do?” Taff asked. “This is like finding a needle in a haystack, except you don’t know how big the haystack is, and you don’t know what the needle looks like.”
“I think I can make the—” Safi started.
“No,” Kara said. “I have a different idea. These bones—I don’t think they’re here because Niersook ate them. If that were the case, we’d only find them in its stomach, not everywhere.”
“So what were they?” asked Safi.
“I think they were part of Niersook. Like workers. That’s why they’re all identical. Because Niersook”—she struggled with a way to explain the next part—“grew them, just like we grow nails and hair.”
“Even if that’s true,” Taff said, “what good does it do us? If these creatures were alive, maybe you could ask them for help. But they’re all dead.”
“I know,” Kara said.
She remembered Mary’s warning: You must never use your powers on the dead. The old woman had not gone into more detail than that, but the very idea was so obviously wrong that Kara didn’t think it necessitated further explanation.
“Kara,” Taff said. “Don’t even think about it. There must be another way.”
“There might be,” Kara said, “but time is running out and this is the best thing I can think of.” She picked up a skull. “If anything bad happens, make sure you . . .”
Kara hesitated. The skull dangled from the crook of her fingers.
“What?” Safi asked. “What should we do?”
“I have no idea,” said Kara.
Holding the skull between two hands, she pressed it to her forehead.
Kara listened closely for the skull’s hidden language and heard nothing at all, no clues to help her build a mind-bridge. Because it’s dead, a nagging voice in her head said, and nothing you do is going to change that. Pushing this doubt aside, Kara tried constructing a bridge from memories of those she had loved and lost. She remembered Constance holding Kara’s locket in her hand, and Mother, always Mother, plucking weeds from their garden beneath a steady drizzle of rain.
Kara felt Taff’s hand on her shoulder and realized she was crying.
“It’s fine,” she said. “Leave me be.”
Taff withdrew.
The mind-bridge Kara had constructed was a strong one, but there was a major problem: It didn’t lead anywhere. Since she was unable to locate the voice of the dead creature, Kara had no idea where the other side of her bridge should set down.
Because it’s dead. . . .
Kara had never given much thought to ghosts, which had been a forbidden topic in De’Noran. Nonetheless, she had heard her share of spooky stories during Shadow Festival, but these had always seemed a little silly to her. Specters—the ones in the stories, at least—didn’t see
m to do much other than linger in the middle of cornfields or the rafters of old barns, wait for an unsuspecting child to make an appearance, and say some variety of “Boo!” Kara believed that half the reason ghosts appeared in the first place was because the foolish characters in the stories were convinced they were being haunted. They had welcomed the dead back to the world through their own curiosity.
Maybe that’s it, she thought. Maybe the dead need an invitation. I don’t have to put the other side of the bridge anywhere. I just have to make it welcoming enough and wait.
Kara set the mind-bridge down, anchoring one side in her mind, and lit it with memories of sunshine and warmth. She hoped the light of the bridge would be like a beacon in the fog, and waited for the owner of the skull to follow it.
She did not have to wait for long.
An old taste, like wagon wheels left moldering in the back corner of a barn, fuzzed her tongue. Kara felt a certain shifting inside her mind, and a weight like a painless headache throbbed behind her eyes. She exhaled a cold plume of air that was not her own.
“Hello?” she asked.
I will help you.
The words were high-pitched and delivered with brisk efficiency.
“You know why I’m here?”
Your thoughts circle in the darkness like glowflies. Pretty. Let me find the one I need.
She felt an odd sensation just behind her forehead. It didn’t hurt, but it was hardly pleasant either, like walking on gravel in her bare feet. It’s sorting through my mind, she thought, and while Kara didn’t like the idea of some dead creature having access to all her secrets, she supposed it would make matters easier if she didn’t have to explain anything.
You seek the elixir. I will help you. Hurry! Hurry!
The skull felt warm in her hands. She stared into its sockets, half expecting them to begin glowing with fire, but nothing happened.
“I don’t know where to go,” Kara said.
Just walk. You will know the way. There was a brief hesitation, and then the voice added, I am part of you now.