The churning increased, moving to Lāākē’s right and he prayed whatever waited there, blending in with the blue-stone bottom, preferred fat phantel to cyan and blue.
Water swirled dung from his chest. Lāākē threw a fistful of stones. They thudded harmlessly on the lizard’s snout, but he bellowed with rage and stomped forward, his front feet entering the water. Echoing his bellow, the female left the chamber entryway, moving to stand by his side, her tongue whipping blindly.
Lāākē backed up, shoulder deep. Again and again Aleesha plunged beneath the surface, bringing up handfuls of stones. Lāākē pelted the phantels with them relentlessly. Their enraged bellows echoed through the chamber and they sploshed farther into the water, the tips of their tongues lashing air, the tips of their tails thrashing sand.
Aleesha continued to dive and deliver, Lāākē to barrage. The water to their right churned. The lizard’s middle and back feet entered the lake.
An eel-like leviathan with pebbled flesh as blue as the lake bottom sprung from the water, massive jaws gaping. Its long neck shot forward. White sand exploded with the impact of its strike.
Aleesha screamed. The male phantel fled. The leviathan’s body snaked rapidly from side to side as a punching bulge rippled down its throat. Then the monstrous creature sunk slowly back beneath the rippling waves. The female lizard was gone.
Aleesha swam for the beach, but Lāākē caught her and held her tight against his chest.
“That way is sure death,” he said gently against her ear. Her gaze whipped from beach to blue-pebbled lake and back to the beach again. She stopped struggling in his arms, but her heart continued to pound against his chest.
The male phantel settled, huffing, at the chamber entrance, clearly determined to wait for them to come ashore or for the lake to dispose of them.
Aleesha’s eyes searched the seemingly empty waters. “It has fed, so perhaps it’s gone,” she said, her voice reedy with hope.
“We must go before it returns,” Lāākē said.
“There’s nowhere to go.”
“There is if we have the courage. A thing that large doesn’t live in a place this small.” Lāākē knew of only one lightning lake near where they’d entered the phantel burrow. It would be deep. All lightning lakes were. But the geyser at its center was strong. If this chamber was not too far above the lake bottom, they might have a chance to make it there and ride the geyser to the surface.
Eyes never leaving the hissing phantel, Lāākē held Aleesha closer than was necessary and spoke careful instructions. Then he looked at the phantel. There would be worse creatures swimming in these waters. But they had little choice.
It took three dives to find the tunnel entrance on the chamber floor. On the third one, Lāākē was certain he felt the water churning. Perhaps Aleesha felt it too. She came up clutching a blue stone in her fist.
“We may need light,” she said.
He knew they wouldn’t. But her knuckles were seized white around the stone, so he simply took her other hand in his. “Take a deep breath and don’t let go.”
***
They swam out of the chamber and into a wide stone-speckled tunnel. Twice Lāākē felt the wake of something large pass them and once saw a creature so fearsomely spiked a dozen men could have been impaled on its tail alone. But they were allowed to pass unmolested, and quickly emerged from the tunnel.
When Lāākē headed down rather than up Aleesha resisted, but he firmly pulled her on, and she came. The beach chamber had been deep. Too deep to swim the distance up with held breath. They would drown before they reached the surface. The only way out was to ride.
Among the Wasobi, lightning lakes were celebrated for many things: crystal clear water; their energy-boosting properties; and the cool, effervescent geysers that spewed from the bottom of the lake to the top with enough force to create fountains at the surface. It would be a rough ride, but it was their only chance.
Lāākē followed the muted pound of the rushing water, ignoring the distressed insistence of his lungs for air. By the time they reached the geyser’s base his lungs were ready to burst. The silent panic on Aleesha’s face told him she too was near her limit.
He motioned for her to curl into a tight ball as he’d instructed earlier, then towed her as close as the force of the geyser allowed and propelled her into it. She vanished upward in a rush of white water. He moved to join her. And went nowhere.
Where there had been nothing but rocky lake bottom, a plant now squatted, its spikey yellow foliage wrapping his ankle. All around him similar plants scuttled across the lake bottom, speeding toward him. Lungs screaming for air, vision blurring, Lāākē pulled his knife and slashed the foliage pinning his ankle. He sheathed his knife, flattened his feet against the bottom, and bent his knees in a deep squat. His vision went black, his lungs screamed for air. With his last shred of consciousness he thrust upward, somersaulting into the blasting white water.
He was floating. A warm arm encircled his chest. Sweet charcoal air stung his lungs. His heels furrowed mud. And then he was lying on his back, looking up at the dusky afternoon sky, with Aleesha, collapsed and panting, beside him.
An hour later, scrubbed clean and re-vitalized by the lightning lake, Aleesha and Lāākē sat in the afternoon dusk. They’d spread their clothes to dry and Lāākē had plucked them each a popie fruit. They ate in silence, save for the low moans of pleasure the popie made as it was consumed.
“Why do the Wasobi want Cerrelean heads?” Aleesha asked when the quiet between them had stretched too long. “What harm have we done them?”
“Why do the Wasobi live in the Hell Hollows where even the plants try constantly to kill them? Why do the people of the mountains live where, if they bend to inhale the fragrance of a flower, they need not fear it will bite their noses off?”
“I don’t know why our lands are so different.”
“Nor do the Wasobi. But they do know that you may enter their lands, while they die if they enter yours. So perhaps they feel entitled to your heads if you trespass.”
Aleesha finished her popie. She picked up the blue stone that had survived the ride up the geyser clutched in her fist. It was a stone of unusual clarity and depth of color, teardrop shaped and polished smooth by the lightning lake. She took her pink stone from around her neck and removed one of the two chains before returning the pink, now on a single chain.
Silver glinted in the light of the twin suns—one a disk, the smaller a ring—as she began bending the pendant wire attached to the remaining chain so that it caged the blue stone. Lāākē watched her work and something lumped in his chest.
She was ripe to go. To choose. The curve of her waist, the flare of her hips, even the fading pink swirls painted on the creamy blue-white skin of her forearms declared it. She was of an age to be companioned. In a few hours, when the ring sun aligned before the disk sun, a path would burn through the Hell Hollows. By tomorrow morning the ash would be cool enough to allow passage. Then the people of the northern and southern mountains would be free to travel without fear of the terrors waiting within the Hell Hollows. Free to do commerce, to visit loved ones, and—for those who were Ripe and uncompanioned—to choose and be chosen, to exchange pink and blue. Lāākē stood and cast his unfinished popie into the forest. It smacked hard on a distant trunk.
“Before—” He took a deep breath and willed his voice calm. “Before, when you stood on your side of the Cleaving…did you see me?”
Her eyes were on the blue stone, now securely attached to the silver chain. “I did not,” she said slowly. “But…I can’t explain it. I think I sensed you.”
She moved to stand squarely before him, so close that though she did not touch him, the warmth of her was like a caress. He breathed in her delicate, soul-searing scent. Lifting the chain with its blue pendant high, she placed it around his neck. For an instant the stone felt cold against his bare chest. Then she pressed her palm to it, and both he and the stone warmed.
“I must go soon.” It sounded like an apology. Her hand dropped away from his chest.
He closed his eyes just long enough to allow himself to step back from her. “Get dressed. We will go and watch the Burning.”
Their clothes, still damp when they put them on, were dry by the time they reached the chick-chick tree. It was the only chick-chick near his lodge, and Lāākē had been feeding it regularly since he was a child. They would be well-tolerated guests.
He climbed the tree ahead of Aleesha, showing her the best hand and foot holds. She exclaimed repeatedly over the mammoth branches and purple elephantine leaves sturdy enough to build a lodge on. Of course the chick-chick would never allow such an intrusion.
By the time they neared the top, they were well above the forest canopy, and wonder and anxiety were alternating in Aleesha’s eyes. Lāākē settled them on a flat leaf facing the line of the Path and they sat gazing out over the bleak forest.
“Are there others in the trees? Watching?” she asked.
“Multitudes,” Lāākē said. Few could afford a chick-chick, but secreted among the lower trees the whole of the Wasobi people would be waiting with varying degrees of anticipation and bitterness.
They wouldn’t have long to wait. Already the yellow disk of the larger sun hung above the northern mountain, bathing it in golden light. That light skipped across the Hell Hollows without illuminating them, twisted away by the vast energies? magics? of the Cleaving, but lovingly bathing the southern mountain in that same golden glow. Already the smaller, ring-shaped sun had begun its eclipse of the larger. When it reached the center, the rays of the larger would pass through the ring’s center, and the forest would ignite.
Lāākē leaned back on his elbows and crossed his boots, but his shoulders tensed. Beside him Aleesha’s hand encircled her pink stone.
“Why does your uncle wish to prevent you from choosing?” Lāākē asked.
Aleesha’s eyes remained on the skyline. “My parents are dead. I was their only child. Eeloos is my guardian. He controls all that is my birthright. Until I wear the blue.”
“Why does he not kill you and take what is yours?” Lāākē’s voice ticked with alarm.
“He is not of my blood. He is the Chosen of my mother’s sister. He has no direct claim. If he kills me, all I own will pass to a cousin.”
“So to control your wealth, he must keep you alive. And a prisoner.” Lāākē wished one of the arrows he’d loosed across the Cleaving that morning had found her uncle’s heart.
“Alive and uncompanioned. When I take the Path tomorrow and attend the Choosing, when I exchange my pink for blue, I will be free of his guardianship.”
“And what if he simply kills the man you choose, the one who gives you a blue stone?” Lāākē’s hand rested momentarily on the hilt of his knife.
“There would be no point. Even if my Chosen were to take only a single breath wearing my pink and I his blue, Eeloos would still lose all he now controls.”
“A single breath and you are free?”
She nodded.
“And what your uncle controls? Is it so important to you?” He looked at the fine fabric of her pink gown, a dress fit for a princess, not a lodge in the Hell Hollows. The lump in his chest returned.
“It’s my birthright. All that remains of my parents. Protecting it is what kept me moving forward when I lost them. Without it and the connection it brings to them, I am lost, alone.” Again there was soft apology in her voice, and melancholy as well.
He nodded as the first scent of life burning wafted over the tree canopy. The eclipse was total, the small ring centered on the larger sun. A broad line of incandescent orange cut through the Hell Hollows, slashing a path from the base of the northern mountain to the base of the southern. At the very center of the path, midway between the mountain-islands, a larger circle burned like a fiery ball balanced at the center of a blazing stick. A mournful chant rose, Wasobi voices accompanying the pop and sizzle of trees and animals incinerating.
When it was over, only gray ash and steaming mist remained. And a silence pregnant with malice. Somehow, once again, Aleesha’s hand rested in Lāākē’s.
The climb down the chick-chick was somber. Aleesha followed patiently as Lāākē checked nearby traps before heading for the lodge. Neither spoke.
Dusky daylight was giving way to twilight when they approached a grove of sentinel bushes growing so close together that even the thinnest wrapper could not have passed between. Aleesha exclaimed at the sweet fragrance and beauty of the red flowers covering them and reached to pluck one. Lāākē caught her hand.
“They are not friendly to strangers,” he said. From his satchel, he pulled several of the rodents he’d taken from his traps. The entire grove shimmied in anticipation, perfuming the air with the scents of fruit and flowers. He tossed several rodents into the foliage and the branches parted to reveal an ornate wooden door.
They entered and he hung back a little, grinning at Aleesha’s coo of pleasure as she saw his home. The gray stone lodge was three stories high and built in a pleasing style that combined the best of Wasobi strength and Cerrelean elegance. Balconies graced the second and third floors, and the glass windows were lit by bluestone lamps. To one side of the house was a garden. Filled with medicinal plants and vegetables in well-tended rows, a stone path through them led to a smokehouse and kitchen rooms. On the other side of the house an elegant stone bench was surrounded by peaceful flowers and greenery. And visible above the wooden fence that enclosed the house and yard rose the green foliage and red flowers of the defending sentinel grove.
“You built this?” Aleesha asked, and his chest expanded at her tone.
“My parents and I did, while they were still alive.”
He was still smiling when she yelped and began to dance wildly, engulfed in a whirling blue cloud. He reached in to grab her hand, and the demonkin that had descended without warning from the open air above bit at him as well. Lāākē laughed as it chased them to the front door, swirling around them, nipping and stinging until they slammed the door on it. Through a window, they watched as it dervish-danced about the garden. Then it leapt into the air and spun away.
“What was that?” Aleesha rubbed her arms, looking for bite marks. There were none.
“A demonkin, a minor demon, called the Blue Breeze.” Lāākē smiled. “It has touched you before.”
“No. I would remember.”
“I watched it ruffle your skirts just this morning.” He lifted a dark lock of her hair and laughed at her expression. “It only stings here in the Hell Hollows. In the light of your mountain it gentles and becomes…” He hadn’t realized he’d moved too close until his hand caressed her cheek and desire surged. He stepped back.
“It felt alive.” Her cheeks had blushed violet. “Like it was biting me intentionally.”
“It is alive. And it was.”
She frowned. “But you said it crossed into the light this morning. I thought nothing living here could cross the Cleaving.
“Nothing in the Hell Hollows that has life: animals, plants, rocks—”
“Rocks?” She looked with alarm at the walls of the stone lodge.
“Not these,” he grinned and his gesture took in their surroundings. “But some.”
“But if the Blue Breeze is alive and nothing that lives in your land can cross into mine, then how?”
“The Blue Breeze is the exception. No one is certain why. Some say it’s because the breeze belongs to neither the light nor the darkness. Others say it’s because it belongs to both.”
He moved across the room, stilling the temptation to touch her again.
***
They spent what remained of the Hell Hollows twilight in the garden picking vegetables which they roasted in a stone stove in the kitchen building. When they returned to the house, he led her to the bedrooms on the second floor, pausing overlong before a door carved with graceful Cerrelean dancers. When he would finally have o
pened it, she stayed his hand.
“Your parents’ room?”
“I haven’t disturbed it since they disappeared. Everything is exactly as they left it.”
“Then let it remain that way.” Her voice was gentle. “If my uncle had allowed it, I would have done the same with my parents’ things.” They moved on.
There were no beds in two of the remaining rooms. There’d never been any need of them. So he took her to his bedroom and remained in the doorway as she entered.
“You will find sleeping shirts in the drawers,” he said.
“You own shirts?” Her teasing smile almost brought him out of the doorway.
“Mother made Father and I drawers full. We never understood the need.”
They stood awkwardly for a time, until finally he said, “If there is anything you need, I will be nearby. Sleep well, Aleesha.” He started to close the door.
“Wait,” she said, though her exhaustion was obvious. “We haven’t discussed tomorrow.”
“We have.” He watched her from the doorway, every instinct within him wanting to keep her here. Not to mount her head on his wall, but to bring life to this lodge, to him. “You say you must go to the Choosing.”
“I must,” she said. Did he imagine the mournful note in her voice?
“I will leave at first light,” she said.
“We will leave at first light,” he agreed. And with a thousand times more will than it had taken to enter the phantel’s burrow, he closed the door between them. He sank to the floor and leaned against the wall. Exhaustion as great as any he’d ever known claimed his body, but it could not quiet his restless heart.
In every corner of the Hell Hollows tonight men and beasts, agitated by the burning, would be on the prowl. Tomorrow they would watch the mountain people parade through their land, displaying their prosperity and happiness. And when the people of the northern and southern mountains met at the reflective stone near the center of the Path, a thousand felonious eyes would peer at them from the darkness, and watch the Choosing with simmering fury.
All These Shiny Worlds Page 31