by David Walton
"I do, your Grace. It puts false ideas in the people's minds."
"And will you leave this place and tell the English I am a liar and a fraud?"
Ramos gasped. He bowed his head lower, almost touching the dirt. He was acutely aware of the power of the man before him, and the command he held over life and death. It would be nothing for Philip to make him the next victim tied to that stake. "No, my lord. I beg pardon."
"Will you destroy this weapon or refuse to make more like it?"
"No. It is not my place to question. And yet, I dare to ask, as your spiritual advisor, whether it is wise—"
"Good. We are agreed." Philip crouched beside him and placed his ringed hand on the back of Ramos's neck. Ramos could see his embroidered shoes and smell his perfume. "For those who are faithful, we accept certain irregularities. The presence in a household, for example, of one possessed by a demon, can be overlooked. This is not the case for those who fall from favor."
Ramos struggled for breath, thinking of Antonia sitting innocent and unprotected in his apartment. Though who could protect her from a monarch's will? "Your Grace," he finally managed to say. "I am your humble servant."
The king stood and walked away, leaving Ramos shaking. He lifted his head and caught Barrosa's eye, who gave him a look of pity. "We have no choice, you and I," he said.
CHAPTER 14
THE VOID grew larger, and Catherine beat at it frantically with the beetlewood planks. "I can't control it!"
"Yes, you can," Sinclair said. "I'm almost done."
Vibrations thrummed back and forth along the void's edges, forcing her to take a step back. She tried to slap the planks together and close the void entirely, but it was too late for that. She could no longer reach the center.
Sinclair saw. "Run!" he said.
She stumbled backward, dropping the wood. Sinclair abandoned his work and ran. Maasha Kaatra, however, stood transfixed by the glowing vibrations, not seeming to hear. "Father?" he said.
Catherine tugged at his arm. "Get back!"
His unfocused gaze snapped to her. "Murderer," he said in a terrible voice. "My daughters. You killed them." He gripped her wrist painfully.
She tried to pull away, but he was too strong. "Maasha Kaatra!" she shouted. "It's me, Catherine!" The void was enveloping them. She could see nothing in its darkness. "Let me go!"
She screamed and pulled again, this time yanking her wrist out of Maasha Kaatra's grasp. The vibrating strand reaching into the void blazed like the evening sun and then broke.
The whole room lurched, and she fell. She looked up from the floor in time to see Maasha Kaatra toppling backwards like a crumbling tower. Where he should have struck the floor, the void was there, and he kept falling, tumbling farther and farther, like a rock into a bottomless well. The void collapsed with a pop, and he was gone.
THE SCENE had repeated itself over and over in Catherine's mind for the last year and a half. She had hardly known Maasha Kaatra, though he had traveled with her the whole journey from England. He had been a dark shadow at Sinclair's side, a silent threat, rarely speaking. She didn't know his history beyond the fact that he had been freed from Portuguese slavers by Christopher Sinclair. He had lived a whole life before that, as a prince in Nubia, with two daughters of his own. They were dead now, she thought, though she knew nothing about the circumstances. All she knew for sure was that she had been responsible for his death. And yet here he was, standing on a stone platform deep underground, looking about a hundred years old.
"How can you be alive?" Catherine said. "What happened to you?"
"Look," Maasha Kaatra said.
She followed his pointing finger to the large pool into which the underground streams were all pouring. It seemed to be extraordinarily deep. At first, she couldn't tell what she was supposed to be seeing about it. Then she saw that at one end, where overhanging rock left the pool in deep shadow, a familiar shimmer hovered over the water. It wasn't a shadow at all. It was a void.
Even after all these months of working with them and learning to control them, Catherine found voids disturbing. Aristotle had taught that matter was continuous, but it wasn't. It was made of tiny particles they called atoms, and behind those particles was the void. Nothing. The absence of reality. Opening windows into that void was terrifying, because it demonstrated how tenuous reality actually was. What appeared to be solid was only the interactions of tiny particles at a distance. Change the interactions slightly, and you could slip right through. Lose control, and you might lose reality altogether. Sometimes, Catherine wished Aristotle had been right.
"So, more than a year ago, when you fell out of the world . . ." She struggled to understand what he was implying. "You fell back in through that void right there? Have you been here ever since?"
"I do not know how long I fell." Maasha Kaatra's expression grew distant. "Days? Years? But at the end was water, deep water, and drowning, until finally, I emerged on this shore. I wandered through endless caves, exploring, losing my way, but always finding myself back here."
"What is this place?"
"Hell, or Purgatory, or whatever name men might choose. The place where all paths lead. I thought I might find my girls here, but I have called long and searched deep, and have not found them. Perhaps they went to another place, a happier one, where there is laughter and good food in the perpetual bright sun."
"You've survived all this time, just wandering in the caves?" Catherine said. Is there no way out?"
He arched a scabbed eyebrow. "Out?"
"Out. Back up to the surface."
He was silent.
"This isn't Hell, not really. We're underground, deep in the mountains. It's very far down, but perhaps there's some way out."
Maasha Kaatra looked up, and she followed his gaze. Directly above them, high in the ceiling where the spirit lights gathered, was another cave shaft. It led upward, straight as a line. It was very high, but since it was also very wide, she could see the opening far, far above, and through it, the stars. Not more spirit lights, but the real stars—she recognized the constellation Aquarius.
"Never the sun," Maasha Kaatra said. "Only stars and darkness."
"Well, yes, of course," Catherine said. "Unless the sun was directly overhead, the light couldn't penetrate this deep. It probably does shine all the way down the shaft, but only twice a year, and for a few minutes at most."
Maasha Kaatra gazed at her, uncomprehending, or perhaps just not listening. She looked back down to see that the crowd of salamanders was much closer. "Maasha Kaatra?"
A deafening sound, both deep and shrill at the same time, echoed through the cavern. Catherine covered her ears. "What's happening?" she shouted.
The salamanders turned to face one direction, and Maasha Kaatra did the same. Something began to force itself through one of the largest of the tunnels carved by the streams of water. A gigantic black creature, slick with moisture. Its flesh rippled and seemed to burst out of the hole as it shoved itself through in rhythmic pushes, bellowing its terrible cry. Finally, it emerged.
It was a salamander, but a hundred times larger. It had the same fat, glistening body, the same face, the same open-mouthed gape, but its front legs had grown stubby and formed into fins; its back legs had fused into a massive tail; and most disturbing of all, its snout had lengthened, and in that open jaw were dozens of teeth as tall as a man. It was not pink anymore, but jet black. She had seen a creature like this before.
"Leviathan," Maasha Kaatra said in tones of worship, his voice dark and rich. "He is the god of this land."
"It's not a god. It's just a really big fish," Catherine said. A member of this species had attacked and nearly capsized their ship on the way to Horizon.
"It's the devil himself. You should not be here, Catherine Parris."
She glared. "I don't want to be here either, when it comes down to it. You don't know a way out, do you?"
"Hide yourself." He closed his eyes and raised his hands. His s
kin began to glow white. "Our epic struggle begins."
Catherine looked around, trying to understand. Epic struggle? Had Maasha Kaatra gone mad from a year of living alone underground? When the leviathan attacked their ship, it had been attracted to a glowing quintessence pearl that her father had in his pocket. Once he realized what the leviathan wanted, he threw it into the water, and the leviathan ate it and left them alone. Which made sense—salamanders were ravenous for sources of quintessence, so if leviathans were just another stage in the life of the same creature, it stood to reason that they would be attracted to the same food.
The leviathan surged forward with surprising strength, opened its jaws and slammed them shut into the crowd of salamanders. Three of the soft, pink bodies were crushed in its maw. Those nearby squealed piteously, but made no move to get away.
Catherine recoiled and took a step back. "Why don't they run?"
Maasha Kaatra was paying no attention. His body was blazing with light now, and she could hardly look at him. Then it occurred to her what that meant. He was making himself the most brilliant source of quintessence in the room.
The leviathan looked toward them, the light reflected in its black eyes. It was clearly a sea creature, unsuited for life on land, but its whole body was a spring of hard muscle. It slapped its tail and propelled its huge bulk, awkwardly but effectively, directly at them, its giant mouth open wide.
Catherine screamed and threw herself off the platform, heedless of the salamanders. The leviathan landed like a falling tree, smashing the rock and crushing salamanders underneath it. Maasha Kaatra disappeared into its mouth.
Catherine struggled to stand, crying despite herself. She had been so glad to see Maasha Kaatra, alive after all this time. Together, they might have found a way to the surface. Why would he commit suicide in this bizarre way just moments after meeting her? He seemed to have planned it for some time, perhaps even constructing that platform somehow for the purpose. He must truly have gone mad.
She scrambled out of the crowd of salamanders, who seemed equally intent on self-destruction, and cowered along the wall of the cave, gasping for breath. What would cause a living creature to sit still while it was devoured? Every animal in her experience—or plant, for that matter—did everything in its power to survive. It made no sense for the salamanders to sit there, unmoving, while their older brother ate them whole.
An idea struck her. What if, when eaten, the individual salamanders did survive? Just as two manticores could share a bond of connected consciousness through quintessence threads, perhaps two salamanders could share a more direct bond, the smaller one contributing both its flesh and its consciousness to the larger. The whole salamander group would live on, part of one large body, which would then slip into the deep pool, and from there, find its way to the sea. Perhaps this was how it had grown so large in the first place—by eating its own kind. If she only had some skink tears, she could have seen whether it was true. If it retained the quintessence anchors of those it devoured, she would be able to see them, and that would prove that the leviathan was in fact not a single creature, but many, sharing the same body.
A breeze fluttered her hair. Swirls of dust eddied at her feet. The wind picked up, blowing steadily along the rock wall. She looked up and saw that the spirit lights were caught in it, too, propelled around the cavern in counter-clockwise circles. Dark clouds began to form. A deep rumble echoed through the cavern. A rain storm, underground? Catherine huddled into a niche and held her knees as lightning flashed from cloud to cloud over her head.
A glow appeared in the cave shaft above, its rays shining through the swirling dust straight down onto the leviathan on the circular platform. Its illuminated sides heaved with its labored breathing. The crowd of salamanders was similarly still. The swirling wind intensified, rippling Catherine's clothes and sending her hair streaming out to one side. Curiosity got the better of her. She stepped out of her niche and staggered through the wind, back toward the center of the cavern. From this vantage, she could see straight up the shaft to the stars. At the center was the nova. The hole in the sky.
But how could that be? It was Aquarius she had seen through the gap, not Gemini. Half a day would have to have passed for the nova to become visible. Either time itself had passed with impossible speed, or else a second nova had formed.
Now that she thought of it, she could see that this one was different. It was smaller than the other, more like when the other had first appeared. How long had this second nova been there? She hadn't seen it when she first looked up through the shaft. Had it formed just at this moment?
Oddly, the leviathan itself seemed the only thing illuminated by the stars. The crushed platform around it, the other salamanders, and the rock floor all remained dark. It was almost as if the leviathan was sucking the light down out of the stars, instead of just being shined on. It grew brighter, and she could hardly look at it.
A brilliant shock of lightning tore out of the clouds and struck the monster, sending up liquid sparks like molten metal. The wind gusted, nearly knocking Catherine down. She pushed through it back to her niche and held on to the rock, peering out at the unfolding scene.
Lightning struck again and again, like a blacksmith's hammer falling in a forge. The leviathan drew the light down from the sky, making the nova pulse and the stars dim, and all at once, Catherine realized what was going on.
She checked off the things she knew or guessed. One: When shekinah flatworms were full-grown, the largest of them ate the others and grew into salamanders. She hadn't actually seen this happening, but it stood to reason based on what she had seen. Two: When salamanders were full-grown, the largest of them ate the others and grew into a leviathan. That meant that a leviathan represented the combined spirits of thousands of shekinahs, and all their quintessence power. The growth of all of those creatures culminated in a single, magnificent predator that ruled the seas.
It fit with the rest of the island's ecology. Humans tended to think of spirits as inherently individual, one spirit for one body, but that's not how things worked on Horizon. Manticores split and connected their spirits. Boarcats intentionally sacrificed their spirits, then brought them back from the void. As Christopher Sinclair had taught her, everything that animals and even plants did was for a purpose. The purpose of this was clear: presumably the deep pool actually provided a route to the sea, and once the salamanders were all eaten, the leviathan would slip into the depths and spend the rest of its life prowling the oceans, too large and powerful to be harmed by anything.
But the most important realization was that Maasha Kaatra had not committed suicide. He had allowed himself to be eaten, just like the others. He was joining the leviathan.
What about the lightning storm? And the nova? She didn't know. Was this a normal part of the birth of a leviathan? It didn't seem so—the novas were a recent phenomenon, and she suspected the fierce storms that had plagued the island since the first nova appeared might have had their origin in this storm as well. That implied that the nova and the storm were not naturally connected to the formation of a leviathan, but were connected instead to Maasha Kaatra's interference with it.
The lightning strikes increased to such a rapid rate that the leviathan appeared to be connected to the clouds by shifting, jagged lines of light. The noise was deafening, and the sharp smell of burning air filled Catherine's nostrils. The creature's skeleton glowed red through its flesh, like a log in a cookfire burned down to char. Finally, its body exploded, fountaining ash into the wind. The storm boiled and swirled, then rushed upward into the shaft with a roar, spiraling up and out of the cavern. For a brief moment, there was utter darkness, then the shaft cleared and the light from above shone down again.
Spirit lights traced gentle circles around the ceiling, only now there seemed to be more of them. In fact, hundreds of new spirit lights were drifting down from the shaft, filling the room. The new ones darted and zagged, full of energy, like fireflies. Many sought the ca
ves from which the streams spilled and made their way up. Other flitted about the ceiling and into nooks and niches. Finally, when all the lights and smoke and ash and cloud had cleared, she saw Maasha Kaatra.
The leviathan was gone. The salamanders were gone. He stood alone on the platform, strong and proud and erect. The posture and gait of an old man had left him; he was young and powerful now. His muscles bulged, and he moved lithely, like a stag. The chalky lesions and scabs had disappeared. Instead, his skin glowed with a pure white energy. The platform, crushed and broken by the weight of the leviathan, was whole again, its sides straight and true.
"Catherine Parris!" Maasha Kaatra roared. His voice echoed through the cavern. She stood, afraid. "Come," he said.
She approached slowly, unsure what to expect. Closer, she could see that the light moved like fire under his skin.
"Now I have power, for a while," he said. He pointed to one of the rocky spikes extending down from the roof. Lightning fired from his pointed finger and struck the spike; it shattered and fell to the floor in explosions of falling rock and powder.
Catherine gaped. "And this power will fade?"
He nodded solemnly. "But it is the only way to survive."
She looked up through the empty cave shaft, and saw the newest nova, larger now, a great gap in the sky where the quintessence had been torn away. "The novas," she said. "You made them."
How long had he been doing this? The first nova had appeared six weeks ago, but Maasha Kaatra had been here more than a year. Had he been killing leviathans all this time, but only recently learned how to draw the power from the sky? Or perhaps he had first been eaten by salamanders, before learning how to entice and then defeat the leviathan itself? Catherine shuddered to think how close she had come to being similarly devoured. How had he discovered this as a means of survival? Surely he hadn't allowed himself to be eaten on purpose the first time. Perhaps it had been an accident, simply an exercise of his will to survive as an individual spirit among the thousands inside.