There was stone under her hand when she pushed herself to her feet, stone above her and all around her. She couldn’t see it, but she knew it was there: a crushing weight above and to every side. This heavy darkness was the shadow the stone cast, she understood suddenly. That was why it weighed so heavily, because there was so much stone… She understood as well, and just as abruptly, that she was still dreaming.
Over the past days, Nemienne had learned to summon first warmth and then light into the commonplace darkness that lay in an ordinary unlit room or outside under the high stars. But she had never yet been able to break through the heavier darkness that lay under stone.
She was embarrassed by her failure, though Mage Ankennes was patient. Nemienne was grateful every day for his patience, but she resented the fact that he needed to be patient. Mage Ankennes said she would learn. He said she had been born to be a mage. Nemienne was determined to make sure he was proved right. But still she could not learn to summon light into the darkness.
But it seemed unfair—silly, even—that she should not be able to summon light in a dream. In a dream, you should be able to do anything. In the dream, then, Nemienne lifted her hands and tried again to call light. Or not call, exactly. She found she was more searching for light that might already be here, light that would not do battle with the surrounding darkness, but would exist in companionable peace with it.
And light came. But not any familiar light. Not the clean white light she’d wanted. This was a pale greenish light that clung to her hands and illuminated… well, very little. Nemienne knew she stood on stone because she could feel it underfoot. She knew that somewhere far away water was dripping into a pool from somewhere very high above. But the light she had found did not press back the darkness very far, and she could see nothing else.
Then a glimmer, up ahead of her, turned out on a second glance to be Enkea’s white foot. The cat was just visible, standing like a statue at the farthest boundary of Nemienne’s light. She turned her head and looked at Nemienne over her shoulder, and her eyes flashed green as the light—greener: green as the shade under beech leaves, green as the light that filtered through the sea… The slim cat turned again and walked away into the dark.
Nemienne walked forward, following the cat through her dream. The pale light that clung to her hands trailed behind her as she moved, ribbons of light that undulated through the dark like waterweed through the moving sea. Nemienne felt that she herself drifted like that through this dark, as though it had as much substance and body as water and she almost swam through it rather than walked.
It occurred to Nemienne, as she followed Enkea, that behind the dripping of the water, she could once more hear the breathy, delicate sound of pipes. The music was not loud, but the pipes possessed a pure fragile voice—no, two distinct voices. One was pitched low, to match the weight of the surrounding darkness. The other was pitched high… to match light? No, of course not, she realized at once. The higher voice of the pipe was pitched to lay a path through the dark, but not a path into light… Nemienne hesitated, drawn to follow that strange harmony and yet doubting suddenly where that path might lead.
Ahead of her, Enkea turned her head again and mewed, a thin sound that slipped through the dark without disturbing it. Nemienne hurried forward after the cat. In the way of dreams, she was suddenly running… She no longer felt the stone under her feet, but the sound of each water drop striking into whatever pool hid in the darkness echoed around Nemienne like the stroke of a brazen bell.
Ahead of her, she suddenly saw someone. In the way of dreams, she knew at once who this was. As though this knowledge brought her through all the darkness and across all the distance that separated them, she found herself immediately at her sister’s side, reaching out to grasp Karah’s hands. She was only tangentially aware of someone else, another presence, a man, a stranger… but whoever he was, she did not know him, and while she clung to her sister’s hands, he walked away from them both, following the music of the pipes into the darkness.
Karah, Nemienne knew, had also been following the voices of the pipes. And, without understanding why, Nemienne knew her sister must not follow that music. That neither of them dared follow it, or like the stranger, they would vanish along the path the music laid down into the dark. As though the very realization broke some strange spell, the sound of the pipes faded into the distance… faint and fainter, and then gone. And as though the vanishing sound of the pipes took confusion away with it, Nemienne realized that she was awake.
In the greenish glow of light clinging to Nemienne’s hands, Karah blinked, shook her head, and blinked again—much as though she herself was waking from a dream. A shape half hidden by her hair stirred, and Nemienne saw that her sister carried a kitten on her shoulder. The small animal seemed made of silver and smoke. Its eyes were green as water. It peered down from Karah’s shoulder toward Enkea, who sat with her tail coiled around her feet and blinked up at it in calm disdain.
“Karah?” Nemienne said, and was surprised by how self-possessed she sounded. Almost as if she spoke with someone else’s voice, someone older and much more experienced. She could not, after all, decide whether she was dreaming or awake. She pinched the skin of her wrist between her fingernails, blinking at the sharp pain.
“Nemienne?” Karah said in return. She gazed, bewildered, at her sister and the greenish light, and then around at the powerful darkness that surrounded them both. Then she scrubbed her face with her hands, shook her head again, and asked, “Where are we? What is this… place?” The last word sounded doubtful.
The kitten leaped down from Karah’s shoulder, dashed toward Enkea, flung itself flat on its side, slid across the stone, and wound up nearly underneath the adult cat, reaching up with one little paw to bat at her nose. Enkea drew herself up to her feet with an affronted hiss and stalked away, pausing only to glare back commandingly over her shoulder at Nemienne.
“Um…” Nemienne did not know how to answer her sister. Instead, she drew Karah around, never letting go of her hand, and tugged her after the cat. The kitten dashed after them, making little forays out into the dark but always circling back to the girls. Several times Nemienne nearly tripped on it, until Karah finally picked the little creature up and put it back on her shoulder. Then it hid itself in her hair, peering out with eyes that reflected the green light like emeralds.
“Where did you get the kitten?” Nemienne asked at last, because that was a question that might actually have an answer.
“Oh, she was a gift,” answered Karah, and blushed—actually blushed, visible even in the strange light, which made Nemienne laugh. Karah laughed, too, a warm chuckle that invited her sister to share her delight not only in the gift but also in the fact of the giving.
“You’re already receiving gifts! And from whom? Is he wonderful?” Nemienne asked, teasing.
“He might be. Maybe he is,” Karah said, laughing again, seeming both happy and embarrassed. But then she at once turned the subject: “And your cat? Where did you get her? I think Moonglow is special, I mean really special, not just special to me. But your cat must be special, too, don’t you think? She certainly seems to know where she’s going.”
“Oh, she’s not mine,” Nemienne said, and started to say that Enkea belonged to Mage Ankennes. But then she was not sure this was exactly true, either, and so she said instead, “She always does seem to know where she’s going—and she always seems to think I should follow her, usually into uncomfortable places!”
“As long as she leads us out again,” Karah said, glancing around once more at the surrounding darkness that pressed in on all sides.
Somehow Nemienne didn’t think this was the right time to explain that the last time Enkea had led her into the dark, the cat had not in fact led her back out.
Trails of green light rippled behind them where they had passed, brightest near at hand and trailing out to invisibility about twenty steps behind them. “That’s so strange,” Karah said, glancing
back, and echoed Nemienne’s own thought: “That light of yours looks like undersea plants stirred by the current. But a current through, I don’t know, darkness instead of water. Where are we, exactly?”
Nemienne began to say that she didn’t know, but what came out was, “I think, beneath the mountain. Kerre Maraddras, I think.” She paused, hearing this answer echo away into the dark. Hearing the truth of it. She said, exploring that truth, “I’ve been here before—there’s a way into this place from Mage Ankennes’s house. At least one way. But this time I only woke up and I was here. I think I came here this time because you were here. But however did you come to be here, Karah?”
Her sister answered slowly, “I was asleep, too, I think. I think, in my dreams, there was piping.”
“Piping!” Nemienne almost thought she might have heard pipe music, too, just as she had woken into the darkness here, but she was no longer sure.
“Yes. I followed the music. I didn’t walk through darkness, not then. It seemed I walked through a marvelous place, but I can’t remember anything of that place now. Or maybe it only seemed that the piping was leading me somewhere marvelous… Then you caught my hands and I… woke up.” She glanced around doubtfully, probably wondering whether she was truly awake after all.
Nemienne had no doubt of that. Not anymore. She only wished she knew exactly what it meant, to be inside the mountain. And she wished she knew how to get out again. She had a sudden, vivid idea that she might perhaps walk with her sister, through the dark, forever. How long would it be, if they could not find their way out, before they left their bones here, surrounded by stone, to whiten in the dark where no one would ever see them?
The sound of dripping water had become much louder, and the sound had gained a reverberant echo that was somehow disturbing. They were going toward it, Nemienne realized, and for no reason that she understood, she felt a jolt of terror at the thought. She stopped in her tracks.
Karah, still holding Nemienne’s hand, perforce drew to a halt as well. “Nemienne?” Karah asked, not frightened herself. Or not yet.
Nemienne, unable to explain her own fear, stood wordless.
Ahead of them, Enkea turned and gazed back over her shoulder at them, her green eyes glowing like small lamps. Karah’s smoke-and-silver kitten slipped out from Karah’s hair again and jumped down to the stone. This time the kitten didn’t dash about and play but stepped solemnly forward to join the older cat. She looked like a puff of silver steam next to the nearly invisible Enkea, but her eyes were the same glittering emerald, and her air of not-quite-patient waiting was the same as well.
“We don’t have to follow them,” Karah pointed out, “if you’d rather not, and if you know another way out.”
“They’re not leading us out of the dark at all,” Nemienne answered, though not knowing how she knew this. “They’re leading us toward something else…”
“Really? What?”
Nemienne only shook her head. She remembered perfectly well the homely, everyday light she’d held in her mind previously, when she had stepped out of the dark and into that remembered light. She could do that again, probably. Probably she could even bring Karah with her. She was sure she could. That kind of ordinary light glimmered around the edges of her mind and memory in implicit invitation. But if she took that way out, she’d never know toward what goal Enkea and the kitten were leading them. And she was curious as well as frightened. What was it that lay beneath stone, within Kerre Maraddras, at the heart of darkness?
“I’m not sure we should follow them, if they’re not showing us the way out,” Karah said. Her tone was still reasonable, still matter-of-fact, as though this were some practical decision they had to make. “It’s terribly late, I think—or terribly early. I’m sure I should be back in Cloisonné House by the time everyone’s stirring. And you…” Her eye fell worriedly on her sister.
Nemienne shook her head, though a moment ago she had been the one frightened, the one who had wanted to turn aside. “It’s not a question of what we should do. It’s a question of what we need to do.” This came out more confusing than she’d intended, but she didn’t know how to put what she felt into words. She took a step forward again. Ahead of them, both cats immediately started forward again as well. Enkea’s white foot flashed with her steps, and the kitten’s pale form flickered at the older cat’s side like a silver fish swimming through dark waters. Nemienne had not released Karah’s hand, and so her sister was drawn after her.
Ahead of them, the endless darkness was in fact ending at last. Uneven walls of pale stone became visible before the girls, glimmering with a subdued light that seemed to pass through them, as the light of a candle might pass through a translucent screen. Like the light that clung to Nemienne’s hands, this light was green tinged. The green light seemed less to push back the darkness than… accent it, somehow. Nemienne suspected that this was not the sort of light Mage Ankennes had in mind when he tried to teach her to summon light as a defense against the dark.
And yet, now that they were able to see them properly, the caverns were unexpectedly beautiful. On all sides, glistening pale stone folded into curtains and pillars. Powerful stalactites and delicate spines descended from unseen heights, each beaded with moisture that slowly gathered at its tip before dripping to the moist stone beneath. But these drops of falling water were not what had haunted Nemienne through this darkness.
What she had heard… what echoed through the caverns here… was the sound of fat drops of water falling into a deep pool of black water that, as they came around one last curtain of stone, lay unexpectedly before them. Though the water was black, it seemed to glimmer with a light of its own, and each drop of water that fell into the pool glowed like a live ember. And when each drop fell, it seemed to Nemienne, it struck the black pool with a reverberant liquid chiming, as though a bell was somehow ringing under the water.
Beyond the pool… and this took time to grasp, for it was so unexpected and so vast that at first the eye did not focus on it… but beyond the pool lay, carved in deep relief from the pale stone, a dragon. Nemienne at once recognized the long serpentine form as the dragon from Mage Ankennes’s harp. In the book by Kelle Iasodde that Mage Ankennes had given her to study, Nemienne had found images of dragons like this one, drawn in fine black inks and illuminated with gold and crushed pearl.
But this dragon had been carved in more detail than any little image engraved in ink. Indeed, it was so detailed that it might have been living, except it was half embedded within the stone of the cavern. The dragon was enormous. If it could have torn itself out of the mountain and taken to the air, it would surely have shaded half of Lonne with the shadow of its outspread wings. But here, within the mountain, those wings were folded.
Water gathered, drop by drop, along the carved edge of one great wing and fell, glittering, into the black water: plink. Ripples spread out on the surface of the pool every time a drop fell, and each ripple seemed to run up against the shallow edge of the pool with a not-quite-audible sound of its own, like the vibration that lingered in the air after the note of a plucked kinsana string had faded. This was the sound that had so troubled Nemienne, and now that she saw its source, she could believe she would hear that sound in her dreams forever, that she would never be beyond the reach of that persistent vibration.
The dragon was curled in a loose half circle against the vast wall of the cavern, with the pool of black water spreading out between it and the girls. Nemienne felt a strange relief that the pool was there, as though the water was somehow a protection or a barrier between them. As though they needed that protection.
The dragon’s head and part of its neck had been carved free of the far wall. Its head, huge enough to engulf a small house without difficulty, was nevertheless surprisingly graceful. Stone antennae rose in supple curves above the dragon’s eyes, more delicate than even the finest cave formations. Behind the head, the dragon’s sinuous neck melded imperceptibly into the wall of the cavern. So
me distance farther back, the great muscled bulk of its shoulder swelled again out of the wall, leading in turn to the suggestion of a deep chest. Far away along the wall, the dragon’s tail looped in and out of the stone of the cavern like a reiterated melody, disappearing and reappearing as though the stone carvers had wanted to suggest infinite length.
“Oh,” Karah breathed.
Nemienne knew how her sister felt. She herself felt half dazed by the size and beauty of the carving. A king must have commanded it done. Several kings. Surely this dragon was too vast to have been the work of just one king. How many generations had it taken to carve this dragon in the heart of the mountain?
“How beautiful,” Karah whispered. “How splendid.”
Nemienne glanced at her sister. Karah was transfixed, her hands gripping each other, her head tipped back, staring at the dragon as though she would never be able to look enough. She did not seem frightened at all.
Nemienne, in contrast, felt as though they stood on the edge of a great height, where a sudden gust of wind might press them forward and send them tumbling through clouds to the unseen rocks far below; or as though they stood underneath a vast avalanche that was poised to roar down toward them. Stunned by the dragon’s magnificence, she was also frightened of it, though she could not guess what peril it might pose to them. “We… I don’t think we should be here,” she whispered. She was afraid to speak too loudly, as though too loud a voice might loose the avalanche.
Karah put an arm around Nemienne’s shoulders and hugged her close. “You’ll find the way home,” she said, not as though she was offering reassurance, but confidently, as though she sincerely believed this.
Nemienne shook her head. She was flattered by her sister’s confidence, but she didn’t know how to explain that she wasn’t afraid because she thought they were lost. It wasn’t even fear she felt, exactly. Not really fear. It was more like awe. She thought there were depths to the darkness here that her sister didn’t see. But she saw those depths, or at least guessed they were there. She said again, almost in a whisper, “We shouldn’t be here.” Then she added, “This isn’t a place for men at all.”
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