by D. H. Dunn
Kater had killed Jang, killed him in cold blood. Why should that bother him? Wanda wasn’t here to ask that question, but she might as well have been. Drew had been wondering about it all day during the descent, but the truth was he didn’t know. Jang certainly would have killed him, he had no doubt of that.
“You seem preoccupied,” Merin said, handing him his next anchor. They had spoken little in the hours since leaving the ledge. Normally, Drew would be happy to have the company. Today, he was grateful for the silence.
He took a short step down and to his left. Another solid foot hold, his boot catching into one of the many cracks in the rocks easily.
“Yes,” Drew said. “I apologize. I know you must have a lot on your mind as well.”
“I do,” Merin said. “I’m sure we all do. Perhaps we could unburden ourselves to each other.”
“Of course. That’s only fair.” Drew struck the anchor into the rock, giving it a few test taps with his hammer. The stone gave way too easily. Drew pulled it out and began searching for another spot. “How about you first? What’s on your mind?”
She slid over, her left foot finding the same hold Drew’s right had just vacated. “I am preoccupied with the future,” Merin said. “Right now, our goal is clear and plain: reach Upala in her library, where she will open the portals.”
“How does that work, though? Kater hasn’t really been forthcoming with what happens once we get to his sister.” Having found a more solid location, he hammered the next anchor in, leaving it twisted to make it easier for Nima to thread the rope through when she and Kater followed them.
“One of my concerns as well. I suggest we follow up with him on that subject when we make camp tonight.”
“Agreed,” Drew said, looking down the face of the chasm. The next ledge was about six feet below, it was tempting to jump to it. He thought better of it, finding a new boot hold about three feet down. Slowly he inched his way down.
“Suppose . . .” Drew paused for a moment, leaving one hand gripping the shaft above his head as the other hung at his side, resting. “Suppose this works. Kater somehow gets his sister to unlock the portals, sends us all back home. What does that look like for you? What do you do?”
“Does Upala still live?” Merin asked.
“I take it your answer changes depending on the answer to that?”
“Quite a bit,” Merin said. “Without Upala, some amount of anarchy is likely. There are many who would claim leadership in her absence, but no succession hierarchy was set.”
“I suppose when you are immortal you don’t worry about that sort of thing,” Drew said.
“Yes,” she said. “Without the spell-queen, things might be better, or they might be worse. Maybe a lot worse. What does this mean for our children? I think on it. I think on it without ceasing.”
In essence, Merin was dealing with the same issue his own mother had―the thought of her children far away and out of her ability to protect them. In the end, this worry had crushed his mother. Merin seemed so much stronger. Merin had Kad, he reminded himself, whereas his mother had only had his father.
“And if Upala lives and accompanies you back?” Drew asked.
“Anarchy still may have occurred in her absence,” Merin said. “Additionally, Upala’s reaction to events can be hard to predict. The spell-queen I knew gave little care for the security of her people, so long as her research was not threatened. Our lives may be restored to what they were before, or things may get worse.”
“Either way, it sounds like it will be a difficult time for you.”
Merin shook her head. “Being a world away from our children, being unable to help them or our people,” she said, “that is a difficult time. Right now, we fight to get to them. Soon we will be able to fight for them, and that is a fight my Kad and I are ready to take part in. Eager even.”
Again, Drew was brought back to the contrast with his own parents. Even before he and Artie left for the war, they had sniped at each other in times of stress, yelling in the kitchen while he and his brother played in the yard. All four of them pretending he and Artie didn’t hear.
“But what of you, and your burdens?” Merin asked, handing him a fresh handful of anchors. He could see her supply was getting light, hopefully the campsite Pasang had mentioned would present itself soon.
Drew dropped down to the next ledge, landing deftly on the thin scrape of rock. He pondered her question for a moment. He was not sure he understood his own burdens.
“I guess I’m preoccupied with what the cost has been for all this,” Drew said. “The people who have already died, both at the refugee camp and the Others. Ham, now Jang. I wonder if there were other ways, other choices.”
“Your companions, Nima and Wanda, they don’t seem as . . . preoccupied,” Merin said.
“They have goals, and I think those goals help them find balance with it,” Drew replied, kneeling to look for a foothold underneath the ledge. “Nima’s here to save Pasang, Wanda is looking for ways to help her country.”
“But you, you look to help everyone, eh?” Merin said, smiling. “Even someone like Jang. More than a bit like my Kad, you are. The one person you don’t have a goal for is yourself.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Drew said, immediately shocked that he had allowed himself to open the door. With everything else in front of them, his own desires seemed selfish. Yet they were there, as clear as the golden thread that danced in the air before him.
He waited for Merin to follow up on his statement, but she did not. For a moment, he thought about just banging another pin into the stone and letting the issue rest. But instead he started speaking again, the release of pressure impossible to resist. “I’m looking for someone; someone special to me.” He allowed himself a little movement, shuffling his feet along the ledge. “It will sound crazy, but I think she is in here somewhere, or the path to her is.”
“What is crazy here?” Merin asked with a chuckle. “The Under works by rules I do not understand. There are many doorways here, paths to other outs. Perhaps one of these portals leads to the woman you seek?”
“Maybe,” Drew said. It makes sense, but Kater had said there were hundreds, or even thousands, of portals in his sister’s library. Was he prepared to search through all of them?
“One thing to me is certain,” Merin said, handing him another pin, “a man who cares about other’s lives so much, even the life of one such as this Jang, deserves some happiness himself.”
Deserve? The ghosts of Artie and his shipmates, of his mother and the mothers of all those he had doomed, they knew more about what he deserved than Drew did.
Drew peered several yards up into the mists above them. He could clearly see Nima and Kater running ropes through the anchors that had been set, the pair working silently. Knowing Kater they hadn’t been silent at the beginning, but he doubted Nima had much to say to the old man.
Beyond them, he could see the shadows of the second team. Pasang on point, guiding the group through the ropes, followed by an unsteady-looking Perol. Wanda was at the rear of the trio, with Kad’s smaller form off on his own, farther up the chasm wall. He appeared to be kneeling and collecting something. It was hard, at this distance, to see what Kad was placing into his pouch, one hand holding on to the guide rope. Pasang kept looking back to watch the smaller man, likely as nervous as Drew was.
“Merin? Is your husband . . . gathering mushrooms?”
“No doubt,” Merin said. “He is always gathering something; it’s in his nature to explore. Poking and prodding, half the time when I turn around he is gone. He is constantly finding new ways to combine what he has found here. He’s saved all of our lives more than once, and yet nearly destroyed us all as well.”
Drew looked down the chasm face. In the distance, he could finally see the remains of a campsite packed onto another ledge, about half the size of the one they left. He pointed it out to Merin.
“I’d say we’re about an hour to that
ledge and camp. Why not tell me the story of how your husband almost got you all killed?”
Merin laughed. “I can think of no better tale to tell. I only wish Kad were here, he would tell it better and make himself look even more the fool!”
Drew laughed at this as he started his next descent. His own favorite stories were the ones that poked fun at himself. Perhaps when Kad was around he’d share the story of how he and Artie caused their ship to miss its mail delivery.
“It was a simple thing,” Merin said as she slowly followed him. “Not long after we came to the Under, Kad found us a large cavern we began using for a camp; the same one we brought you to. This was before Ham joined us, and we had seen only signs of the worms but not yet the worms themselves.”
Still descending carefully, the ledge with the former camp on it was now in dim view below him. Drew could make out the tiny forms of three makeshift tents, all scattered and strewn. He wondered what could have knocked them down so soon after Kater’s last team had used them.
“Starting out in the Under, that must have been very difficult,” Drew said, taking another small step down, feeling in the low light with his boot for a foot hold.
“It was, very much so,” Merin said. “We were low on food and had started eating the mushrooms already. There were some unfortunate mishaps as we discovered which ones were safe to eat, and how to tell when they were ripe.”
“None fatal, though?” Drew asked, taking another step down and scanning the rock for a good anchor point.
“No, fortunately. Though some claimed they wished they had died. Still, over time we worked out how to eat a safe, if bland, diet. That may have been enough for some, but not for my husband.”
“Ever the explorer, eh?”
“Exactly,” she said with a laugh. She passed another anchor to him, and Drew caught the glint in her eye as she spoke. “Give my husband a cup of water and he will try to swim in it. It is his way. So, he started to experiment.”
The pair continued to work their way down the sheer face, Merin describing the various combinations Kad had discovered using the mushrooms with each other, as well as some of the indigenous mosses and weeds. Over time, according to Merin, her husband became overconfident.
“In the end, what got him in trouble was combining the green ones with the red. The green is rare, but the red ones are the most common we’ve seen down here. Look, there’s some of the red right there.” She nodded to a small clump of red fungus to the right of Drew’s hand, most of the caps no bigger than his thumb. “Once he crushed them together the ground began shaking almost immediately. Suddenly, what seemed like hundreds of worms burst into the room from all around us. They came through the floor, the walls, everywhere. All of them headed straight toward Kad.”
“What happened?”
“He’s a quick thinker, my husband. And he was lucky. There was an old worm hole right next to him. He tossed the mushroom paste he had created down that hole and rolled out of the way. The worms followed it down the hole, widening it in the process. He got a few burns from worm spit for his trouble, but he escaped alive. I was horrified, but he thought it was hilarious almost immediately.”
“I can picture him laughing at that,” Drew said. Kad, with his near constant optimism, reminded him of a few of the older sailors on the Machias. Now that he thought about it, Merin did as well, despite the gender differences. People who had seen some of the worst life had to throw at them but maintained their strength and hope. Those grizzled older sailors had gotten him and Artie through more than a few general quarters, helping them learn to focus their fear rather than be controlled by it.
People like Merin and Kad were how wars were won, and having them both on his team made him feel a little better, a little safer. Maybe, they might just get home after all.
Now Drew just had to figure out which home it was he wanted to get back to.
20
“And joy is, after all, the end of life.”
—George Mallory
Wanda was the last to arrive at the campsite. As she lowered herself down from her final foothold, she reached above her head and hooked her prybar around the anchor Drew had hammered into the rock earlier, pulling the metal hoop out of the stone. She dropped it into the pouch on her belt, where it clinked as it joined dozens of its brothers.
There was simply not enough rope and anchors to keep the path active, forcing them to remove it as they descended. Burning their bridges behind them, there would be no going back. A controversial decision with Perol, but Kater had assured her that once his sister was free, a means to reach and save the remaining soldiers of the Others would be his chief concern.
Perol had accepted this without question, as if Kater’s word were above reproach. Wanda wondered what he could have possibly done to earn such loyalty.
The small rock ledge was little more than an outcropping in the chasm, one of dozens they had seen during their descent. The width of the huge hole in the Under was sufficient that the side opposite their climb were shrouded in darkness and shadow. There could be better routes or stronger paths available to them, they just couldn’t know.
The only thing she had seen Merin and Kater agree on was that they were running out of time. The portals that had been pulled into the Under along with Upala’s library were dying, each death another door slamming shut. If the route they had chosen did not lead to Kater’s sister, there would likely be no time for a second attempt.
Kater made his way through the camp, pretending to be some kind of leader, feigning empathy. One by one she watched Kater check in with each member of the climbing teams. He knelt to check on Pasang and put his hand on Perol’s shoulder. He made attempts at conversing with Drew, then tried to talk with Nima. He even crossed over to Kaditula and Merin before the tall woman’s glare sent him away. Everyone but her.
Wanda wasn’t fooled by his display with the others. While he may have removed them of Jang, one prudent decision did not a commander make. He had lied to them, manipulated them, and now expected them to fall in line behind him.
Even now, he was regaling Nima on the merits and flaws of his sister, as always taking as many words as possible to make his point. To her credit Nima was barely listening, sitting instead with her head turned toward her brother, looking bored.
Wanda strode the short distance to where they sat, passing Drew and Kaditula who were trying to repair the three shredded tents left over from Pasang’s previous stop there. Kater had avoided her all day, but now he literally had nowhere to go, and she had lots of questions she wanted answers to.
He now attempting to pull a bored-looking Merin into his conversation: “You remember her, Attendant. As cold as she was powerful, filled with the potential for life and beauty, she instead drowned in her obsessions with―”
“Your sister may not even be alive,” Wanda interrupted. “She may have died when her library was . . . ‘translated’ here. She may have died in the fall. We are all here, risking the one life we have on your assertions about your sister. This could all be for nothing!”
Kater turned, his smile framed by his thin beard. “Ah, the esteemed Miss Dobrowolski. Always with an edge to your voice, your words always a blade, eh? First, it is indeed all for nothing if she is dead. If my sister is dead, then we are just passing the time we have left here. I may have more time than the rest of you, of course, but I have no more means of getting back home than you.”
“Please get to the second part of that thought, Kater.” Drew had come over as Kater was speaking, Kaditula behind him. To their right, the tents were repaired and stood tall in the dim light of the chasm.
“You know, my own people are much more respectful,” Kater said with a sigh. “Anyway, yes, there is a second part. To wit, my sister encased herself in what we call an asan-rasha. The closest translation would be ‘blood cocoon.’”
“I have read some minor lore of this,” Merin said. “I did see Upala just before the translation, red crystal was f
orming around her body. It looked solid, impenetrable.”
“Impenetrable by most means,” Kater said, nodding. “A family trick, if you will. As I said, something of a last resort though.” Wanda watched him as the man’s eyes moved from person to person, his hands clasped together tightly.
“This is a lot to wade through Kater,” Drew said. “So, basically your sister is inside an unbreakable crystal, buried somewhere down there.”
“That’s correct.”
“An unusually succinct answer,” Wanda said. “So, you have the means to release her or this would be for nothing.”
“Obviously, Miss Dobrowolski. Just as obviously, I’m not going to tell you how. You wouldn’t need me much after that, now would you?”
Drew scowled back at Kater.
“There’s no end to your lies and secrets, is there?”
“Lies are merely words as tools.” Kater took a step closer to Drew, his eyes narrowing. “As to secrets, I have many. I intend to see most of them stay that way. We are working together, but you and I are not on the same side. I understand that as well as you do.”
Drew shook his head, holding Kater’s gaze. Wanda recognized the same intensity in the American’s eyes as when he berated her for trying to kill Jang and his men. A pacifist perhaps, but she did not doubt his willingness to fight.
“Not good enough,” Drew said. “You have to give us something to go on, Kater. Something to trust you by.”
“I’d argue that our current arrangement is trust enough,” Kater said, his hands reaching out to point at the darkness of the chasm. “Each of us at the end of the other’s rope, my life depending on yours.”
“Once we get to your sister, you won’t need us anymore,” Nima said. “It’s the same thing you said to us. Maybe we should stay here. You can’t reach your sister without us.”
“Well, young miss, I’d say you have a lot less time than I do to wait this out. It’s tempting to explore that further with you, but in the interest of trust I will concede. Ask me a question.”