by S. S. Taylor
It seemed to take an awfully long time, all of us waiting, the mine so silent that I could hear our breathing, but finally we heard the sound of Halla searching for the trapdoor and we saw it start to open.
“I have food for you,” she said from above. “Everybody put their hands up where I can see them.” She appeared on the stairs, the bow out in front of her and the backpack on her back. I glanced at Sukey. She looked determined, her chin thrust out, her amber eyes fixed on Halla.
The door closed and out of the corner of my eye I saw Sukey move.
A second later, the mine was plunged into darkness.
Forty-four
It was hard to tell what was happening. I heard the clatter of something wooden—Halla’s bow, I assumed—and then the sound of someone falling to the ground. Halla called out and I heard Sukey’s voice cry out in pain and then Zander saying, “I’ve got her!” and Sukey’s voice saying, “That’s me, you idiot!” and then the sound of someone hitting the floor. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I sort of launched myself toward where I thought they were, and when I felt the long fabric of Halla’s dress, I tried to feel for her hands but kept getting knocked over by someone—Zander? Sukey?—who was also scrambling around on the ground.
“The light!” Zander called and I heard someone knock against the torchbox on the wall and suddenly the room was full of light again. My glasses had fallen off in the confusion and it took me a minute to find them and look around.
Zander, Sukey, and I were sprawled out on the floor and Halla, the bow back in her hands, the arrow in it pointed right at us, was across the room, aiming her weapon at us and glaring as though she really wanted to let it fly this time. The backpack had opened up in the scuffle, spilling out leather packages of meat and cheese and fruit.
“That was not a smart thing to do,” she said after a minute.
“Not as far as we’re concerned.” Sukey sat up, rubbing her elbow, which must have gotten hurt in the scuffle. “You were going to kill us.”
“I wasn’t going to kill you,” Halla said. “I found out about your sister. And I brought you food and water.” She gestured toward the backpack. “See. You might as well. It’s just going to go to waste otherwise.”
“Where’s M.K.? Is she okay?” Zander and I both jumped up, sitting back down when Halla tightened her grip on the bow.
“She’s alive, anyway,” Halla said, watching us carefully. “One of the Keedow’s guards found her. She had been attacked by the cat, but I heard someone say she’d defended herself with a knife and done more damage to the cat than it had done to her. They said she had a bad infection on her arm, but they treated it and she’s going to be healthy again.”
I felt relief wash over me. “That’s our M.K.,” Zander said. “Where is she?”
“They’ve got her in a locked room in the city,” Halla told us. “I couldn’t figure out a way to get to see her without making everyone suspicious. They saw your firewood and the plants you collected and they’re convinced someone came with her. They’re looking everywhere in the canyon. I’m not going to be able to keep you here very long.” She pushed the food toward us with her foot. “Eat something. Whatever happens, you’ve got to have something to eat.”
“She’s right,” I said, feeling a little guilty now. “It’s been hours and hours since we ate. If we’re going to find M.K., we’re going to need energy.”
“Don’t they lure rats into traps with food?” Sukey muttered. “Cheese. Peanut butter. Isn’t that how they get them to go in? It’s probably poisoned.”
Zander thought about that for a minute. “No. There wouldn’t be any reason to poison it,” he said, looking up at Halla. “Let’s eat.” I was so hungry I found it pretty easy to take the peach he offered me, along with a couple of swallows of water from a leather pouch, a slice of bread, and some cooked meat cut into strips. We sat down and devoured the meal and it wasn’t long before Sukey came over and started eating, too.
“Thank you,” I said finally, looking up at Halla, who was now watching us with an annoyed expression.
“You’re lucky you’re still alive, you know,” Halla said after a minute. “What was your plan here, anyway?”
No one said anything so finally I told her. “The plan was that you were going to help us get M.K. and then show us how to get out of the canyon.”
“And when you get to the other side, you’ll tell everyone about the canyon, right? Without a thought as to what would happen to us when the rest of the world found out about us?”
We all looked at each other. We couldn’t deny that’s what we had been planning to do. But when she put it like that, it sounded pretty bad.
“Well,” I said finally, “if it’s true that only a few people know about you, it is a pretty amazing archaeological find.”
“There are species of animals no one’s ever seen before,” Zander said. “I owe it to science to…” Halla rolled her eyes and he trailed off.
“And the gold,” Zander went on. “Don’t you know how much it’s worth? I mean, this is an incredible place. People will want to see this…”
But as he said it, I could almost hear Dad’s voice, railing against the governments that had looted the New Lands for resources. “They don’t care about the discovery. They only care about the money they can squeeze out of it!” he’d ranted. “And BNDL doesn’t do a damned thing to stop it. It’s criminal!”
Zander looked worried and I knew he was thinking the same thing that I was. What would happen to the people in the canyon when everyone came to get the gold? When the Nackleys came? When Mr. Mountmorris got here? When ANDLC decided to extract all the gold?
None of us said anything and Halla watched us for a minute before saying, “How did you get here, anyway? No one’s supposed to be able to get anywhere near the caverns.”
“Because you kill everyone who gets anywhere close, right?” Sukey’s voice was very quiet.
I was staring at all the gold, Dan Foley’s gold, and thinking fast, remembering the thought I’d had when I’d first seen the city.
“No,” I said after a minute. “Not everyone. They didn’t kill Dad.” I hesitated for a moment, trying to keep the thoughts clear in my head. “Dad didn’t get killed. For some reason Dad didn’t get killed. Dad came here and maybe he was looking for the treasure, but then he found this. He found the gold and the city. And he must not have told… he must not have told anyone.” I looked at Halla and lowered my voice. “He didn’t want us to tell anyone. That was what Dad’s secret map was about. That’s why he hid it for us to find. That’s why the man with the clockwork hand gave the book to me. Dad did want us to come here.”
I sat there thinking for a minute, trying to get it all straight, and then I started talking more quickly, my words racing to keep up with my thoughts. “I think he wanted us to see this, to see your city, but I think that he didn’t want us to tell anyone about it. He wanted us to keep it a secret the way he had.”
“He didn’t tell anyone,” Zander added. “We would have known if he had. Raleigh would have known.”
Halla and Sukey were watching us.
“He must have convinced them—” I looked at Halla— “must have convinced you, your people, that he wouldn’t tell. And they must have let him go.”
She nodded just a bit, a movement of her head so slight that it could have been a twitch. But I didn’t think so. “What?” I asked her. “What do you know? Did you know him?”
“She couldn’t have known him,” Sukey said. “You said he was here twenty years ago. She’s our age.”
Halla just listened.
“What?” I asked her again. “What do you know?”
She looked from me to Zander, studying Zander for quite a long time before she said, “Tell me about your father.”
“He was an Explorer and a mapmaker,” I said. “He’s gone now, dead, but we found a map of Drowned Man’s Canyon. And we heard a story about treasure. So we came looking.”
&nbs
p; “We had no idea you were here,” Sukey said. “Honestly. It was just about the treasure.”
“Other people have come looking for the treasure,” she said. “We can’t understand why. It’s just aurobel.” She shrugged. “There’s so much of it here.”
“Well, outside the canyon it’s worth a lot,” Zander told her. “A lot.”
She looked at Zander, studying him again for a long moment.
“What was your father’s name?” she asked finally.
“Alexander West.”
“What are your names?”
Zander looked confused. “I’m Zander. This is my brother, Kit, and our friend Sukey. Our sister’s name is M.K.”
“What was your… what’s the word? Nickname. What’s your nickname. That your father called you?”
We all looked at each other. “He called us ‘the Expeditioners’,” I told her finally.
She watched us for a long time. I couldn’t believe how beautiful she was, like a princess or a mythical queen, standing there with her bow, her black dress all around her, her hair hanging down around her face from the scuffle, her eyes intelligent, wondering. When she turned them to me, I felt as though she was trying to learn about me by watching me, by staring at my face. My glasses were slipping down on my nose and I pushed them up, embarrassed for some reason.
“I have something to show you,” Halla said finally. “There’s something you really have to see.”
Forty-five
“What is it?” Zander asked.
“I think you should wait and see it for yourselves.”
“She might be tricking us,” Sukey said. “This might just be her way of turning us in to the guards.”
Halla hesitated. “It’s about your father.” She nodded at Zander. “When I first saw you, I thought you looked, what’s the word… familiar.”
“But you couldn’t have met him,” I said, then grinned. “Unless you’re a really young-looking thirty-five-year-old.”
She smiled. “No… but I think you’ll want to see this.”
“Then how do you know what he looks like?”
“I have to show you. And I think we can find your sister. It’s dark now. We can sneak into the city while everyone sleeps. The guards will have given up on finding you during the night. They figure the cats will get you if you’re still out there.”
Sukey didn’t say anything. But Zander and I nodded at each other and then at her, and somehow, without saying a word, we all agreed.
“Follow me,” Halla said. “Stay right behind me and do what I say. If I see the guards coming, we’ll have to hide.”
“All right,” Zander said after a minute. We didn’t have any choice. We’d decided to trust Halla. M.K.’s life might depend on it.
Sukey hesitated, but the rest of us got up and followed Halla up the stairs. The sun had sunk behind the canyon walls while we’d been down below and we climbed into the now-dark night, the stars overhead and distant flickering torches from the cliff city the only lights we could see.
“I can’t risk lighting a torch and being seen,” Halla whispered, “but I know the way. Just follow me and we’ll be okay.”
We started into the black emptiness of the canyon, the lights from the cliff city a distant goal.
Forty-six
It was strange, walking along in the dark behind her, not knowing what was ahead. I searched the sky for Pucci a couple of times, but if he was out there, I couldn’t see him. We walked for fifteen minutes before we found ourselves looking up at the city from below.
“The guards are posted up on the top of the buildings there,” Halla whispered, pointing to the central part of the city. “If we stay right against the walls, they can’t see us.”
“What’s the city called?” Zander asked in a low voice.
Halla hesitated for a moment and then said, “Oh, you mean… Ha’aftep Canyon,” and it struck me how strange it would have been if some kid had come up to me all of a sudden, while I was standing on the road outside our house, and said, “So, what country is this?”
“There was a council meeting in the main part of the Keedow’s administration,” Hala whispered. “It must have gone late. Once they’re gone, we’ll be able to get in.”
“What’s the ‘Keedow’?” I whispered. “You keep talking about that.”
She hesitated for a minute. “He’s in charge of the canyon. He’s the one who decides whether people can build and what they can grow. Whether they can marry. He makes all the decisions about when the ceiling closes and everything.”
“And about what happens to people who wander into the canyon?” Sukey asked.
“Yes, I suppose he does. The old Keedow believed that there were some people we could trust with our secret. But the new one…” She hesitated again. “Well, he doesn’t think we can trust anyone.” She stopped. We were now almost directly underneath the cliff structures. “The thing I want you to see is in a part of the council administration that’s been locked for a long time now, but I discovered it one day when I was exploring.”
Halla looked both ways and pushed on a section of the wall. We heard the grinding of gears, stone on stone, then a door slowly opened in the rock. I stopped to inspect the gear mechanism so I could tell M.K. about it. They looked like huge, stone clockwork gears, the carved surfaces clicking against each other as the wall moved. Beyond the doorway, we could see stairs carved into the golden interior of the wall. Halla went first, lighting her torch once the door was closed behind us. Zander and I found our lights and put them on. As we climbed the stairs we could see that the white and golden walls had been carved with beautiful designs, suns and moons and stars and trees and birds. I stopped and stared. The symbols were the ones Dad had used in the code that had led us to the map.
“How was all this constructed, anyway?” I asked as we walked along.
“A lot of it was done by hand, in the early days, anyway. But now they have drills.” Halla pointed to more of the decorative carvings in the wall. “And other, how do you say… technologies. These were done four hundred years ago, when our people retreated into the canyon and made the hidden city.”
“And what about the ceiling. Gears?” M.K. would have had a field day, figuring out how it all worked.
“That’s right. There are over seven hundred that make the ceiling open and close.”
We climbed the stairs and waited at the top until she looked out to make sure that there was no one coming. When she ducked back in and gestured for us to follow, we crept slowly along the hallway and followed her through a stone door that swung out into an enormous hallway.
The hallway was also carved out of the marbled golden rock, and there was a railing along one side. When Sukey and I peeked over we were looking down into a huge open area. There were fifty or so people down there, including ten or more guards, holding bows and arrows like Halla’s and wearing black uniforms decorated with the bright bird feathers. We immediately ducked back.
“Follow me,” Halla hissed, leading us into a small closet and shutting the door behind us. It was full of stone buckets and receptacles, like some kind of cleaning-supply closet. “We’re going to have to wait until they’re gone. Stay here and don’t move or make a sound. I’m going to see if I can find your sister. Someone said she was being kept in the Keedow’s quarters, so I’m going to check there first.” She slowly opened the door, looked outside, and then went out, shutting it carefully behind her.
“How is she going to get us past all those guards?” Sukey whispered. “I don’t like this. Even if we find M.K., it’s going to be impossible to get out of here alive.”
“So what do you suggest that we do?” Zander asked her. “I don’t think we have any choice here.”
“I can’t believe I let you crazy Wests talk me into this. My mother doesn’t even know where I am and now I’m never going to see her again.” She turned away, pretending to be looking at the wall, but before she did, I could see that there were tears in he
r eyes. I felt a deep knot of guilt in my stomach and I reached out to touch her shoulder. Zander frowned.
Suddenly we heard voices outside, speaking in the same language I’d heard through my spyglass. It didn’t make any sense to me, but I could tell that they were coming closer and I put a finger up to my lips to tell the others to be quiet.
Then we could hear voices just outside the closet. We looked desperately around but there was nowhere to hide. I grabbed a stone bucket and Zander and Sukey did the same.
The door opened.
Two guards stood outside the door, looking in surprise at the three children hiding in the closet. “Tafmay!” one of them said. The other one turned his head and opened his mouth as if to call out, but before he could, we heard a loud thunk and he fell to the ground, the metal pot that had hit him on the head clattering to the floor and rolling away. Another one came down on the head of the other guard and he fell down, too, his head smacking against the stone floor. They were both out cold.
We looked up in surprise.
Standing behind them, holding her knife out in front of her, was M.K.
“I figured you’d be coming to rescue me,” she said with a big grin, “not the other way around.”
Forty-seven
“But where have you been? How did you get out?” I asked her once we’d dragged the two guards into another closet and hidden ourselves again.
We couldn’t stop hugging her and finally she got tired of it, pushing us away and rubbing at a patch of dirt on her cheek.
“This huge cat attacked me,” she said. “I got a couple good jabs in it with my knife, but before I could get back to you, some of those guys saw me and captured me. They took me through these secret tunnels in the walls of the canyon and brought me back here. By then I wasn’t feeling very well. I was really hot and my arm was throbbing and I was so hungry I was feeling sort of dizzy. They gave me food and water and—this is the weird part—this guy wearing these long robes and all these feathers came in and looked at my arm. I don’t know what he said, but someone brought him these little rocks, kind of like crystals, and he put them on my arm. It got very hot, almost like he was burning me, and then all of a sudden it was better. Look.” She pulled up her sleeve and showed us the wound. The skin that had been swollen and infected only a couple of hours ago was now smooth and healed. You could see where the gash had been, though, because the surface of her upper arm was now strangely shimmering, as though her skin had been embedded with gold glitter.