Court of Fives

by Kate Elliott

  “Look! This is the mark for Pillars.” I point to overlapped right angles incised to the right of this passage. “Like start gates on a Fives court.”

  “This is not a Fives court, Jes,” says Kalliarkos, hands extended as if calming a crazed person. “We are buried underneath the City of the Dead. But Ro and I have found stairs—”

  “Don’t you see?” Like my mother I’m feverish, but it’s an idea that consumes me, not illness. I begin to sing the song that announces each new Fives run: Shadows fall where pillars stand. Traps spill sparks like grains of sand.

  To my surprise Ro-emnu joins me, slipping into harmony: Seen atop the trees, you’re known. Rivers flow to seas and home.

  Kalliarkos whistles sharply to interrupt us. “You both need to drink something and sit down. You’re dizzy.”

  “No, she’s right about the marks.” Ro-emnu’s agreement comes so unexpectedly that I actually smile at him. “And there were sparks that turned to sand.”

  “I didn’t see any sparks,” says Kalliarkos.

  “You’re not Efean,” says Ro-emnu. “Go on, Doma.”

  The pattern has seized me. It’s like watching Rings unfold on the court. “You said you climbed a lot to get to us. So you entered the underground complex in Trees, right?”

  They glance at each other. “We entered next to a pool and crossed some streams,” says Kal.

  “Ah! Then you entered in Rivers. Even better! But the passage here that’s marked with Rivers is blocked, so we can’t return that way. What if you climbed through Trees to get to the tomb, and then we all crossed Traps together? The way the bridge was constructed is kind of a trap, right? If the stairs you found lead to Rings, then they won’t take us to the surface but into the heart of the complex. We’ll be stuck underneath the kings’ tombs. So we have to go through Pillars to circle back to Rivers. Doesn’t that make sense?”

  Ro-emnu shakes his head. “This can’t be a Fives court because Fives isn’t an Efean game. The Saroese brought it here with their other festivals.”

  “How do you know the Saroese brought it? You weren’t alive then. Your grandparents weren’t even alive yet.” Hands on hips, chin up, I challenge him. “Look around! Obviously this is not a Fives court because it isn’t the game we play. But I will wager you anything you wish that if we enter the passage marked like Pillars we will end up in a maze.”

  “It’s our lives we’re wagering with,” Ro-emnu retorts.

  “With chalk to mark the dead ends and false turns we can get through it and back to Rivers and thus to the place you came in! Do you have a better idea?”

  Of course they don’t have a better idea!

  In the silence, a sound flutters like wings above us. When I glance up, shadows twist along the ceiling even though the lamp isn’t moving. If sparks spill in Traps, then shadows haunt Pillars. Fear runs cold through me. But I know better than to hesitate.

  “Get everyone up. We have to go now.”

  We have four lamps. I lead the way with one, but we leave the other three unlit so that Kalliarkos must guard the rear with dark shrouding him. As we pick a route along the tunnel, the smoothness of a stone walkway gives way to a rumpled floor of awkward ropy ridges and bumpy protuberances. The ceiling is too high to touch; the walls are rough.

  Maraya says, “These tunnels don’t seem like they were chiseled out of rock. In the Archives it’s said rough tunnels like this were made long ago by fire burning a path.”

  Ro-emnu breaks in. “These passages are the veins of the land through which ran the blood of the Mother of All. Hers is the blood that wells out of the earth’s heart. In ancient days before people lived here, the Queen’s Hill and the King’s Hill were lakes of molten fire.”

  “Like the Fire Islands,” she replies. “Yes, that’s what the Archivists teach.”

  “It is the dames who kept this knowing knitted into the hearts of the people. Not your Archivists.” His look challenges her. “Everything you Saroese have you have stolen from us.”

  “We have no time for this,” I say. Mother sags like a sack of grain over Ro-emnu’s back. Her eyes are closed, and there is blood on her legs. She will die if we don’t get her to a safe place and a healer. “Keep moving.”

  Ahead, the path branches, and I find that my heart feels the same. All that I am has come unmoored. The mask I have worn my whole life is cracking, and what shines up from beneath will scald our eyes.

  Did Lord Ottonor’s shadow try to crawl into my body? Was my brother merely caught in a deep sleep that we mistook for death or did a spark give life to his dead flesh?

  What lies buried beneath the City of the Dead? Is this the corpse of old Efea, the secret at the heart of the land?

  You know the lies they tell you but you don’t know the truth, so Coriander said to me.

  I rest my right hand on the right-hand wall of the right-hand passageway. I am the tomb spider, anchored to the stone, spinning a way out of this maze. “Kal, you have the chalk.”

  “I’ll mark the junctions, Jes,” he calls forward. We both know how to unravel a maze.

  I pace with slow sweeps, checking for pitfalls and traps. The ragged rock scrapes at my fingers but my gloves protect my palms. Our light reveals the mark of tools scoring the walls, places where long-dead workmen smoothed a sharp edge or erased the mark another maze traveler carved in the rock to show their path. Suddenly an unseen creature crawls over my hand and I shriek.

  “Nothing,” I say, although my heart pounds twice as fast as before. “It was just a bug.”

  “I’d have smacked it with my slipper,” says Amaya. Her words give me the courage to go on.

  Twice we pass a cleft that leads to an air shaft. In the first the shaft is partially collapsed. In the second we smell a fetid aroma, and the mark on the shaft indicates it is the tomb of a lord who passed, Maraya says, eighteen years earlier. Perhaps his oracle and her attendants have died.

  We reach a circular space like a distended gourd. There are three possible exits. Ro-emnu sets Mother down with meticulous gentleness. She is unconscious and does not wake even when the babies fuss hungrily. Cook and Maraya let them suck broth off their little fingers. Coriander rests against a wall. The oracle stares so blankly I wonder what she sees.

  Amaya sinks to the ground with head on knees, next to the opening that is the first to the right. According to my own plan we have to keep going to the right, yet the opening isn’t even tall enough to walk upright. Its sloped confines hook away into the rock. What if the tunnel closes and we are stuck and can’t turn around? How can Mother crawl if she can’t even wake up?

  I sit with her hand in mine. Her pulse is a fragile thread.

  Kalliarkos crouches beside me and clasps my other hand. “The leftmost opening is another air shaft,” he says. “It’s clear of debris, and it doesn’t stink. I’ll climb it. There’s a chance we can get out more quickly that way. Everyone needs a rest anyway.”

  He vanishes up the shaft, taking no light, climbing blind. Doubt digs its teeth into my heart. If I am mistaken in thinking this complex to have anything in common with a Fives court, then I may have doomed us to dying of thirst, lost in a maze.

  Coming up beside me, Ro-emnu smiles the way a tomcat prowls. “What is your next command, Captain Jessamy? How is your campaign strategy proceeding?”

  “I would like to see you do better! Since you seem to believe you know so much!”

  Coriander’s eyes pop open. “Ro knows more than any Archives!” she says stoutly.

  “Kori, hold your tongue.” His is the tone of an exasperated older sibling, one I recognize.

  “I won’t! Ro is trained as a poet in the Efean way, to speak only the truth. That’s why the king’s agents arrested him.”

  “For murder!” The instant the words leave my mouth I’m sorry I said them in front of everyone else.

  Naturally he laughs. Cook shifts away from him. Maraya measures him anxiously. He seems so big and threatening here in this clos
ed space where we can’t run.

  Coriander makes a rude gesture with her hand, right at me. “He was arrested for the play he wrote. The one the king’s agents closed the night it opened.”

  “The Poet’s Curse? The one that murdered the king’s reputation? What is it about?”

  With a chuckle he rubs the stubble of his hair. He has a laborer’s callused hands, nothing like the soft skin I associate with a daydreaming poet sitting at a window gazing over a reed-choked lakeshore where egrets hunt in the misty distance. “The story may shock you, Doma.”

  “I’m not afraid of the truth, if that is what you mean,” I retort.

  “You don’t have the sense to be afraid.”

  “Either tell me or stop boasting, I beg you.”

  By the way he stares at me I can tell he is about to refuse, just to spite me.

  But it is Maraya who speaks. “I would like to know if the Archives are wrong. Isn’t it better to chase the truth and catch it if you can?”

  He glances at the oracle slumped on the ground. A glint like avarice gilds his expression, as if he sees her—the oracle—as a pot of honey that he means to slurp up before anyone can stop him. “People hide all kinds of stories,” he says. “Let me tell you one of them, Doma Maraya, for I believe you truly do wish to know the truth, unlike your sister. Maybe someday you can write your own Archives.”

  A mask settles on his face, one that makes him look both new and ancient. As he begins the story, shadows gather like ravenous beasts around our wavering lamp.

  “In the days of heaven and earth and sea and wind, the heart of All was planted in the fertile fields of Efea. So the land prospered beneath the rule of balance, a king to oversee soldiers and fieldwork and laborers and a queen to oversee diplomacy and the marketplace and artisans. But sweet food sours if left out in the sun too long. There came a bitter war for succession between two factions within the royal clans. Into this battle sailed a foreign prince, Kliatemnos, a refugee from the broken empire of Saro.”

  Shadow and flame weave in and out of his words. I sense something terrible crawling out of the dark as if his tale gives it life. What if death steals Mother? But her hand in mine is warm, and her heart is beating. I will anchor her in the world of the living.

  “The young Efean queen took Prince Kliatemnos as her husband. With his troops to aid her, her faction won the battle and defeated her rival. In this way he became king to rule beside her.”

  Cook mutters, “Impiety! That is not how it happened!”

  His story marches on. “After this, she gave birth to four daughters. The Saroese invaders became restless. They wondered if the gods had turned against them because there was no male heir according to the way these men measured rulership. Yet despite his council’s demands, the king refused to put his Efean queen aside to marry a Saroese woman and try for a son. He could not, for she was the source of his power. So it came about that when the king sickened and died, his cunning and jealous sister invoked the law of the oracle, that a woman must be killed so her last prophecy would accompany the dead emperor into the afterlife. She drugged the queen and the queen’s daughters and walled them alive into the king’s tomb, claiming they had begged to attend him into death. Afterward she took the queen’s name for her own, calling herself Serenissima the First and ordering that the chronicles erase the existence of the Efean queen. She placed a Saroese prince on the throne as King Kliatemnos the Second, saying this youth was the heir, the son of her brother by the last living daughter of the dead Saroese emperor, a woman who never existed.”

  When he pauses to look at me, the poet’s heavenly mask falls away to reveal a gloating smile. “That is how your dynasty was founded. On murder and treachery.”

  “It’s not true!” exclaims Cook. “Kliatemnos married the last living daughter of the dead emperor of Saro.”

  A knife-line of doubt creases Maraya’s pale forehead. “The Archives say Kliatemnos the Second was the last living grandson of the empire. There is no mention of a queen of Efean descent.”

  His look is a jab. “What do you think, Captain?”

  I want to refute him, but I no longer know what to think.

  A thump startles us. Kalliarkos scrapes into view, shaking dust from his short hair. It is obvious he hasn’t heard a single word of Ro-emnu’s scandalous story.

  His dour expression reveals his expedition’s failure. “It’s a sealed tomb. I heard women talking. We can’t get your mother out through an air shaft if it’s like the one in Lord Ottonor’s tomb.”

  “Can’t we free them?” Maraya asks. “Bring them with us?”

  For the sake of the living a captain must leave the dead behind. It’s what Father would do. “Their oracle may refuse and tell the priests. We can’t take the chance.”

  “Jes! It’s sickening to leave them trapped there, not even give them a choice.” Maraya looks around at the others for support. Her eyes widen, and she leans forward. “Where is Amaya?”

  “She was sitting right here by me!” I say with alarm.

  A ghastly scream echoes out of the low tunnel, filling the space until we cower as it winds around us. With a kiss of drafty air and a curl of moving shadow, the lamp flame gutters out.

  “Amaya!” I shout frantically.

  A strangled cry twists out of the tunnel. “Jes! It’s swallowing me!”

  I can’t even see my hand in front of my face. Fumbling, I find the flint and the last taper tucked into my Fives jacket. Flame licks up the little torch. The light barely illuminates but in contrast to the darkness everyone’s face looks startlingly clear. Kalliarkos at once hands me another lantern. I light it and then hand him the taper as I crouch-walk into the low tunnel.

  “Amaya! Don’t move! I’m coming!”

  My head bumps against the ropy ceiling, and the scarf tied over my hair catches and pulls down on my eye so I have to yank it back up. Parallel ridges along the floor make the footing tricky. I hold the lamp out with one hand and balance with the other.

  My shadow distends along the walls, and as if alive, it separates into two shadows and then into four. What should be my head and my limbs become horns and claws. A jaw gapes as if to devour me but I drop to hands and knees to change the angle of light. Rippling, the shadows retreat. Goose bumps come out all over my skin.

  The meow of a cat whispers up the tunnel. My chest tightens with hope: if a cat has made its way down here, then we can find our way out. As I scramble forward my bare wrist scrapes the rock, a hot burn along the skin.

  The tunnel curves sharply and drops into a round space like a bubble of air popped amid the rock. At first I think there is no exit but then I see a gap so low I will have to wiggle forward on my belly. I raise the lantern.

  “Amaya?”

  She’s not here, but the ceiling heaves as if liquid impossibly flows along it. Shadows elongate off the ceiling, stretching until they drip onto the floor. A shadow exactly like a crocodile hinges open vast jaws that curve along the walls as if to consume me. Hastily I turn the lantern, and it transmogrifies into a jackal’s shadow gathering itself to pounce. Raising up the lantern breaks the shadow’s leap into shards that skitter away like bugs. The feathery crawl of tiny legs brushes along my neck. With a shriek I flick a bug off me and jerk forward onto my knees, dropping the lantern and slapping my head to make sure nothing else is crawling there.

  My moving light cuts new pathways across the chamber’s smooth floor. I see another way out: a downward shaft as black as a well filled to the brim with pitch. But the moment I take one hesitant step toward it, the surface of the well slurps darkness over its rim. The shadow of a huge articulated spider’s leg emerges, then a second leg and a third: a tomb spider as big as I am pulls its head and body up until it fills half the space. Its six eyes are voids, sucking away my courage.

  I begin to whimper in aching, mindless fear. Its forelegs probe, their long shadow descending toward my face. With a gasp I desperately knock the lantern forward. It tips, ove
r-balances, and my reflexes kick in: I catch it before it crashes over.

  When I look up the spider’s shadow is gone and I face the giant shadow of a hissing cat, ears flat, back arched. But now I know what to do. Grabbing the lantern, I leap to my feet and sweep its light all the way around to shatter any more that are forming.

  And there Amaya is, where she wasn’t a moment before. She has curled up on herself, lips pulled back to show her teeth, head hunched, arms drawn up as if she is ready to claw at me. The hazy golden light makes a mask of her face, reminding me of the cat mask she briefly wore in the carriage on the day we went to the Ribbon Market. For an instant her pupils look slitted.

  “Amaya!”

  She blinks with her ordinary eyes. “Jes?”

  “What happened to you? Why did you go off?”

  She snivels the way she always does when she is being accused of something. “I didn’t! I was resting by the opening. A shadow ate me, Jes! It was a big cat and it just ate me in one gulp! When you shone the light on me it vanished.”

  I can’t explain what I saw. The song people sing before each trial winds through my memory again: Shadows fall where pillars stand.

  The only thing I really want is to get out of this awful place. Now that I can breathe again because Amaya is safe, I realize I smell water. I shine the lamp down into the shaft, mostly to make sure no spiders linger there. Light catches on a glimmer of water flowing sluggishly below. After so long in these dusty passages, its moisture tickles my nostrils. Escape surely smells like this.

  Movement scratches behind us. I whirl, but it is Kalliarkos, not a tomb spider, who crawls out of the tunnel. He has pursued us without a lantern, braving the darkness. He gives me a meaningful look that I can’t answer in front of my sister. “Thanks to the gods you are both safe.”