by Paul Stewart
‘One of the riders climbed the wall to the ceiling, pulled back a stalactite lever and released the trap-stone in the floor of the cave, then they all disappeared through the hole beneath it. The stone closed again and, after marking the stalactite, I returned home, my head swimming with thoughts of the white trogs and their hidden world deep in the caverns.’
He turned to his daughter, a smile on his face.
‘I’d already shown you my drawings of slime snails and air shrimps, Celestia. But now I dreamed of the new wonders I’d discover beyond the crystal caverns and the drowning pools; wonders that I would return and delight you with . . .’
Blatch paused and shook his head sadly. ‘But it was not to be. Despite the care I took on my return, making my way through the crystal caverns without a sound, and avoiding the cobweb snare, the white trogs must have sensed my presence somehow. For no sooner had I entered the cave than the boulder rolled into place and the drowning pools erupted . . .’
Just then, the surface of the pool rippled, breaking up their reflections as the sonorous sound of the slime-snail shell filled the cavern once more.
· CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX ·
AS THE SOUND of the snail-shell horn faded, four huge grey spiders emerged from a crevice in the cave ceiling. They scuttled down the wall, and as they descended the white trogs on their backs sent glistening coils of rope shooting down towards the alcoves.
Cade ducked his head. The end of a slime-rope landed on his shoulder with a gloopy squelch. The next moment there was a sharp tug and his stomach gave a lurch as he found himself being hoisted upwards. Beside him, the same was happening to Thorne, Celestia and her father.
For a moment, Cade dangled upside down far above the inky black water, before a powerful hand reached out and grasped him by the shoulders. Cade felt queasy and dizzy as the white trog turned him the right way up, then, tearing the end of the rope from Cade’s shoulder, stuck him unceremoniously to the curved pommel at the front of his saddle, the slime-rope that crisscrossed Cade’s chest holding him fast.
The spider lurched into movement, momentarily winding Cade as it climbed back up the cave wall, its knee joints click-clicking. He felt hot fetid breath on the back of his neck, and heard the rattle of a crystal-shard necklace and the rasp of a snailskin cloak as the trog shifted in the saddle behind him.
The spider entered the crevice in the cave ceiling, and everything went black. Cade heard the click-clicking of knees echoing in the darkness behind him as the other spiders followed.
A rush of cool air blew into Cade’s face as the spider speeded up, and he was pushed back against the pommel of the saddle. Far ahead, he saw a thin sliver of light in the darkness. It grew brighter as they got closer, and the air filled with sounds.
Flowing water. The clatter of tools. The grinding of rock against rock . . .
All at once, they were out in the open again, descending the walls of an immense glowing cavern, the biggest Cade had yet seen. The scale of the place was awe-inspiring. It was as big as the Farrow Lake, if not bigger, the floor a patchwork of canals, rock bridges and immense trenches that were filled with forests of luminescent fungi. Above them, the span of the cavern was crisscrossed with glistening cables of slime-rope, to which boulders had been attached to create a vast network of stepping-stone pathways through the air. Extending far into the distance were stands of jagged stalagmites, as tall as ironwood pines and covered in billowing white clouds of glowing cobwebs, through which Cade could see spiders moving to and fro.
The white trog grunted, his foul breath hot on Cade’s neck as he urged the spider down the cavern wall and onto one of the suspended paths. The landscape beneath sped past.
Cade glimpsed dwellings below him which had been carved out of the vertical cavern wall, dozens and dozens of them, their arched entrances shuttered with hanging snailskin. Suspended by cabled slime-ropes below each dwelling were slabs of flat rock, each one crowned with verdant lawns of moss and lichen, where herds of slime snails were quietly grazing.
And amid all this, Cade could see white trogs. Everywhere. Hundreds of them.
They were harvesting the fungi in the rock trenches; they were tending to the slime snails and herding the cave-spiders. Still more were in work parties, a hundred strong, constructing rock weights and waterwheels to channel water through the canals in the cavern floor and up to the dwellings set into the walls.
As the spider sped past, the white trogs looked up from their work. Cade flinched. Their jaws were set and their eyes blazed. Some of them shook their fists; others raised crystal-shard spears menacingly above their heads.
Behind him in the saddle, the white trog blew into his snail-shell horn. The long booming call was answered by another in the far distance.
The stepping-stone pathway descended towards the cavern floor and, looking down, Cade saw that they were approaching a large lake, its waters as black and forbidding as the pool beneath the alcoves. The spider’s clicking gait slowed and it came to a halt at the lake’s edge.
The trog behind Cade reached forward and wrenched him roughly from the pommel of the saddle. He then grasped one end of the strand of slime-rope that crisscrossed Cade’s body and tugged it violently. With a tearing sound, the adhesive rope came away, leaving a ghostly white mark on Cade’s jacket. The trog coiled the rope around in his fist, which, Cade saw, glistened with a thin film of grease, then threw Cade to the ground.
He landed heavily on his hands and knees, which were tingling with pins and needles. Next to him, he heard thuds and grunts as Celestia, Thorne and Blatch were thrown to the ground in turn. Thorne rose to his feet, rubbing his arms to get the blood flowing once more, while Celestia helped her father up. Blatch looked dishevelled and confused, and Cade saw that his notebook and several instruments had been torn from his jacket when the slime-rope had been removed.
In the eerie silence, none of them spoke.
Before them, a thin aerial bridge formed of stepping-stones stretched out towards a flat island of rock situated at the centre of the dark lake. The island was fringed with a barricade of spiked rocks. At the top of each one, crystal spears gripped in their hands, were trog females. They were larger than their male counterparts, with more prominent ridge crests and dark pigment smeared around their eyes.
Cade felt the spear tip of a spider-rider nudge him in the back and he stepped onto the bridge, which dipped and swayed under his weight. With every step he took, the bridge threatened to tip him into the black water below. And when the others followed, the lurching of the line of suspended rock slabs grew more violent. Cade struggled to keep his balance. Behind him he heard Thorne curse with annoyance as his boot-heel skidded, and Blatch Helmstoft calling out to his daughter to take hold of his arm.
At the far side of the bridge at last, they stepped through a gap in the rock-spike barricade and onto the island. It was flat and circular and studded with upturned snail shells that were filled with burning slime-snail oil, the bluish flames flickering on the impassive faces of the trog females who stared down from the barricade. At the centre of the island was a high-backed throne of dark rock, its polished surface intricately carved with representations of snails and spiders: spirals and coils and circular eight-spoked waterwheels. A fan-shaped spray of gleaming crystals stuck out from the back of the throne like the rays of the rising sun.
‘Incredible,’ Blatch muttered, reaching for a notebook that was no longer there. ‘The whole cavern . . . a marvel . . . I had no idea that the white trogs were so . . . so advanced . . .’
Cade glanced round at Celestia. He saw the mixture of fear and defiance in his friend’s clear green eyes.
‘What do you think they’re going to do with us?’ she whispered.
Cade shrugged. He’d been wondering the same thing himself.
Just then, the sound of a snail-shell horn boomed across the water from an entrance in the cavern wall on the far side of the lake, which was connected to the island by a second stepping
-stone bridge.
‘I have a feeling we’re about to find out,’ said Thorne darkly.
The next moment, the snailskin at the tunnel entrance was swept aside and a tall figure dressed in voluminous white robes that shimmered brightly stepped out onto the swaying bridge. Cade stared as the figure came closer, passing effortlessly over the stepping-stones and striding onto the island.
This white trog female was taller than any of the white trogs Cade had seen so far. She had a broad, curving ridge-crest and deep-set eyes, the lids picked out in vivid red. She wore a long cloak of bleached snailskin festooned at the shoulders with clusters of snail shells, drilled with holes that emitted hollow, haunting tones as the wind blew through them. At her throat was a necklace; on her heavy brow a crown, the pair of them made from shards of crystal, needle sharp, which caught the light and sparkled in the glow of her spidersilk robes.
In one massive hand, she held a ceremonial dagger of solid crystal. On the other was perched a hairless, white-skinned cave-bat, which flapped its papery dry wings as, with her back straight and her head held high, the white trog queen moved towards the throne. Not only was she tall, Cade saw, but her movements were sinuous and graceful as she swept up her shimmering train of lustrous spidersilk and took her place on the throne.
She turned her head and surveyed the female trogs looking down from the rock-spikes. Her mouth opened and she emitted a series of loud clicks and clacks with her tongue. In her massive hand, the tiny cave-bat flapped with agitation. She looked down at it, petting it, tickling it beneath the chin. It quietened down, its huge eyes pulsing and snout trembling.
She click-clacked a second time.
Behind him, Cade heard the female trogs emit click-clacking calls in reply.
The white trog queen nodded, the light flashing on her crown and necklace of crystal shards, dazzling Cade and forcing him to look away momentarily. When he looked back, she had turned her head and was staring down at the four of them. The expression on her face was impassive.
‘You do not belong here,’ she said. Her voice was clear and level, and set the fan of crystals on the throne-back behind her resonating. ‘You have dared to enter our realm.’
Next to him, Blatch cleared his throat and was about to speak, but she continued without waiting for any response.
‘We do not trespass into your world,’ she said, her tone cold. ‘The lands-of-the-sky are of no interest to us . . .’
Again Blatch tried to speak. But he was silenced by the white trog queen, who pointed at him with the dagger, her eyes blazing.
‘We saw you creep through the crystal caverns . . . Release yourself from the flooding cave . . . Force your way into our underground domain . . . In doing so you have angered the ancient ones.’
She glanced down at the small cave-bat in her grasp, its papery wings fluttering uneasily at the sound of her raised voice. She stroked and lulled it for a moment, and the creature’s eyes widened with delight. Then she looked up again, her deep-set eyes glittering with an icy fury.
Cade swallowed and he felt Celestia’s hand reach out and find his own. He squeezed it tightly.
‘You have violated our world and caused the spirits of our ancestors to desert us . . .’
She inhaled deeply, her breath shaky with emotion.
‘Their spirit-blood no longer bathes the walls of the High Cavern.’
The white trog queen’s voice rose to an eerie scream that set the crystals at her neck, crown and throne humming.
‘So instead,’ she pronounced, ‘we shall bathe the High Cavern in your blood.’ She turned to her attendants. ‘Take them away.’
· CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN ·
CADE’S LEGS SHOOK as he crossed the stepping-stone bridge from the island to the entrance in the cavern wall. The bridge climbed steeply and the gaps between the suspended boulders grew increasingly wide. Cade had to leap from one swaying rock to the next, praying to Earth and Sky each time that he wouldn’t lose his footing and fall.
Looking down, he caught sight of his reflection in the deep dark water below. He looked scared.
‘We shall bathe the High Cavern in your blood . . .’
The words of the white trog queen rang in his ears, and Cade’s sense of dread mounted. It was the dread he’d felt when, as a small child, his mother was suddenly and inexplicably no longer there for him; the dread that had overwhelmed him when his father had come to his bedchamber to warn him of the danger they were both in from Quove Lentis, the High Professor of Flight.
In your blood . . . In your blood . . .
A trog female jabbed him impatiently in the back with the point of her spear, the crystal shard piercing the leather of Cade’s jacket and pricking the skin beneath. With a yelp of pain, Cade jumped hastily across several stepping-stones and down onto the ledge in front of the curtained entrance.
Behind him, he heard Celestia encouraging her father, whose breath was coming in short, wheezing gasps. And behind them, Thorne, who was cursing under his breath and grunting with effort.
The trog female escorting him reached past Cade and swept the snailskin curtain aside, before urging him on with the tip of her spear. Cade stepped through the entrance from which, earlier, the white trog queen had emerged, and found himself in a narrow passageway. The walls showed signs of having been worked on with picks and chisels. It was cool and dark, the passageway twisting up in a spiral that, after several turns, began to make Cade feel dizzy. Behind him, he could hear Blatch muttering to himself. Without his notebook and leadwood pencil, the explorer seemed to be attempting to commit his observations to memory.
‘Spiral tunnel. Cut through vertical seam of seemingly soft, dark rock towards what trog queen referred to as “the High Cavern”.’
‘We shall bathe the High Cavern in your blood . . .’
At the top of the winding spiral, the tunnel came to an arched opening. The trog females jostled and pushed Cade through into a cave that was far smaller than the main cavern, but immeasurably taller, almost like a great chimney, a hundred strides or more high, with hairless cave-bats fluttering in the shadows above their heads. The dark walls glistened with patches of luminescence, while the floor seemed to be coated in something shiny and hard, like varnish.
Thorne looked up. ‘Air,’ he said. ‘Fresh air.’
He was right, Cade realized. Gentle currents of air were touching their faces, cold and crisp and pure. Cade closed his eyes. The air tasted wonderful, and he realized just how stale the atmosphere of the other caverns had been.
Four rough-hewn blocks of rock stood in a row in the centre of the cavern. They looked newly made, their sides chipped and chiselled with tools. In front of the blocks was an immense carved stone bowl that, judging by the track marks on the floor, had been dragged into place. And propped up against the bowl, its curved blade of crystal glinting in the half-light, was a long-handled axe.
The white trog females escorting them pushed Cade and the others towards the stone blocks. Cade looked up to see one of them, tall and powerfully built, looming over him, her cold, hard face bathed in the faint glow of the cave. Her sunken eyes betrayed no emotion as she shoved him in the chest and forced him to sit.
All at once, from the far side of the cavern, there came a curious squelch-squelch sound. Cade glanced across at the entrance to the cavern and saw an enormous slime snail emerging from the darkness. Like the ones Cade had seen grazing outside the trog dwellings, the creature had an opalescent curled shell and a forest of long rubbery feelers snaking out from its head. Those snails, however, were small in comparison to this monster, which was easily the size of a bull hammelhorn.
As it slithered into the cave, Cade saw that there were two trog males behind it. The taller trog was holding one of the snail’s rubbery feelers in his hand, and had a stone bowl wedged under his arm. As he walked, he pulled on the feeler, sending a spurting jet of oily liquid into the bowl. The other trog had a long-handled broom which he dunked into the bowl time
and again, before sloshing the grease over the glistening trail of sticky slime left by the snail. As he did so, the slime trail dulled, so that when the two trogs walked over it, their feet did not stick . . .
‘Fascinating!’ Blatch exclaimed. ‘They’re neutralizing the effects of the slime with a secretion from the snail itself. The very substance that prevents the snail gluing itself to the ground . . . The same grease they put on their hands to handle the slime-ropes,’ Blatch muttered. ‘Ingenious . . .’
The snail paused for a moment next to Cade. Its feelers probed his legs, then it continued. Behind it, the two trog attendants stood back and watched.
Slowly, steadily, slurping and sloshing as it went, the giant snail slid over Cade’s feet, secreting a thick slime. Cade shuddered. The slime flowed over the tops of his boots, ran down his legs and pooled between his toes. It was warm, and the sickly sweet honey-like smell made his stomach churn.
The snail slid slowly over Celestia’s feet, then Blatch’s, then Thorne’s, before continuing across the cavern and climbing up the cavern wall, disappearing into the shadows above. The two trog attendants stepped forward and resumed coating the slime trail with the grease in the bowl. At the cavern wall, they stopped and put down the bowl and broom, then walked back to the entrance. Without uttering a sound, the trog females followed them down the spiral passageway that would take them back to the bridge.
Cade glanced round at Celestia again; she was slumped forward on the rock seat next to his. She was staring down at her feet.
‘They’re stuck fast,’ she said.
‘Mine too,’ said Thorne.
‘Quite remarkable,’ Blatch muttered beside him. ‘The amount of slime that a snail of such immense size must generate . . . And to think I underestimated the extraordinary properties of these snails’ secretions . . .’