Once again, I shuddered.
“Listen, please,” Khara said. “We are lost and intend you no harm.”
Silence from the natites, but I had spotted something. “I think some kind of village elder is coming,” I whispered.
A group of six natites approached from the village. One sat imperiously atop a huge, undulating slug. In another place and time, it might have been a comical sight. But I sensed our lives were in this natite’s hands. Laughter was the last thing on my mind.
Once they’d arrived, Khara again explained that we were lost, passing through, and meant them no harm.
One of the newly arrived natites spoke in heavily accented Common Tongue.
“Behold Lar Camissa, Queen of all Subdur Natitia, Protector of the Sacred Waters, Fire Maker; Lar Camissa, the Undefeated. Lar Camissa, the Mighty. Lar Camissa, Mother of Multitudes. Lar Camissa . . .”
The titles and praise continued for a long time, and it seemed a lot for a creature riding a slug around the shore of a subterranean lake. But Khara waited patiently until the recitation was done before speaking. “I am Kharassande Donati, a simple girl fleeing danger and looking only for peace. These are my companions: Gambler, Renzo, Tobble, and Byx.”
Finally, Lar Camissa of the many honorifics spoke. “Leave my domain immediately or die.”
It was a threat, but my first reaction was not fear, but admiration. She had the most musical voice, layered with sounds, so that her words seemed to come from a dozen instruments playing together.
“Our fondest wish is to leave by—” Khara began.
“Do you insult us?” Lar Camissa demanded.
I noticed, with some shock, that unlike the regular natites with their unusual glowing extra eyes, Lar Camissa had at least four more, two glowing from her lower neck and two rising from tentacles near her shoulders.
“No, Your Majesty,” Khara said. “I merely mean—”
“Is my realm so poor, so worthless, that you come here to demean us?” I could call what she made “speech,” but it was closer to singing, and closer still to lutes and harps playing in unison.
“Your Majesty, we are no threat, nor do we—”
“Threat?” Lar Camissa trilled. Her minions glared hard and fingered their weapons. “You presume that you have power to threaten me?” The music took on a discordant tone.
“No threat,” said Khara, clearly swallowing her impatience, “was made or suggested.”
This went on for many more rounds. Whatever Khara said, Lar Camissa turned it into an insult or a threat. Again and again.
Khara’s face was growing stormy.
“Great Queen,” I said, speaking up despite Khara’s furious look, “I am Byx, a dairne. My people are known for an ability to unfailingly separate truth from lies. I can confirm that my friend Khara speaks truth.”
“A dairne?” Lar Camissa seemed impressed. “I have heard stories about your kind. Hmm.” She cocked her strange head and wiggled her tentacles, considering. “We are intrigued. Come. Join us for a royal meal.”
We exchanged wary glances, unsure whether to be relieved or terrified by her sudden change of heart.
Within moments, the natite guards formed themselves into an escort, and Lar Camissa urged on her vile steed. In her lovely vibrato voice, she invited Khara to walk beside her.
The rest of us followed behind, taking in the odd sights. The natite village was deceptive. We’d assumed we were seeing simple stone huts resting on shale. But as we passed them, we realized we were seeing only the most outwardly visible part of the village. Most of the village was underwater.
At the center of each hut was a pool that led down through the shale and out into the lake. The “huts” were a great deal more like wells than houses.
They weren’t empty, though. Each hut contained a dry space where a natite could sit or lounge. And it seemed to my inexperienced eye that the stone walls were adorned with objects of art, small tapestries of woven lichen and moss.
Lar Camissa’s stone hut was twice the size of most. We entered by ascending a ladder and then climbing down slippery steps set into the interior wall. A large pool of black water filled the central room. Still, the dry space around it was capacious enough for all of us to find a place to sit.
Lar Camissa sat on a rock seat, while we settled on the shale floor. A natite rose up from the water, holding two large blue shells that each contained a pint of water.
“Drink with us and be welcome,” Lar Camissa said, with a pleasant smile.
My friends and I nodded uncertainly. The Queen’s earlier threats still rang in our ears.
She took one shell goblet. The rest of us passed the second one around, each taking a tentative sip. The water was delicious and strange, as cold as ice, as clear as air, like winter’s first snowflake on the tip of your tongue.
With the water drinking done—though I’d have loved more—we listened to Lar Camissa share the tale of a furious split between her people, Subdur natites, and another group of natites. The Subdur natites had gone into exile, fleeing for their lives, and had found this miraculous place of life-giving water.
While she spoke, servants rose from the water to bring us colorless raw fish and boiled seaweed. Khara recoiled from both but managed to get some down and show a shaky smile. Tobble ate the seaweed contentedly. Renzo devoured his food with relish, as if he’d been served his favorite dishes.
I didn’t have a strong feeling about raw fish one way or the other. My small band of dairnes had often been hungry. We’d learned to eat whatever we could, whenever we could.
“Now, tell me why you have come and what you wish of us,” Lar Camissa said as she chomped away. Evidently, talking while eating was normal for natites. She glanced at me and added, “The dairne will tell us whether you speak true.”
“We were trying to climb the mountain pass when we were attacked by razorgulls,” Khara explained. “We escaped into a cave and finally came to Your Majesty’s realm.”
“It’s true,” I chimed in. “You can see the cuts from—”
I gasped. I’d held out my arm to show one of my own stinging cuts, but it was no longer there. Had it been on the other arm?
I touched the other wounds I recalled. All were gone.
The Subdur Queen laughed, and it was like hearing a chorus of flutes. “You have drunk of the waters. They speed healing.” She looked sly. “Why do you think we stay hidden? If the secret of the waters were known, all the world would come against us and take what is ours.”
Instantly, the mood went tense. Gambler’s tail flicked. Renzo stiffened.
“Which brings me to our problem. How can we be sure that you will not tell the world our secret?” Lar Camissa demanded. “And lead them to us?”
Khara seemed caught off guard, and for several seconds, we sat in silence.
It was Renzo who spoke up. “We’ve seen only one way into this place, Great Queen. If you sealed up that opening, we would know of no way in. And when we leave, you can cover our eyes and guide us out.”
It was the sort of solution a clever thief might come up with.
The translucent Queen looked thoughtfully at him, then searched our faces one by one. “That is agreeable,” she said at last. “But first you must perform a task for us, a task we cannot do ourselves.”
“How bad could that be?” Tobble whispered to me.
Then she told us, and we had our answer.
7
The Queen’s Demand
I’ve ridden horses. I’ve even ridden—for a short time—a stampeding garilan, a six-legged herd animal with a crimson body, a golden tail, and an inexcusably long neck.
Neither came easily to me. We dairnes trust our feet (or, in an emergency, our glissaires).
So it was with more than mere trepidation that I climbed atop a slimy white slug pony, with a boost from a helpful natite. The pony was taller than a horse, though his head—if a tube ending in a squeezing-and-releasing sphincter can be called a
head—was held low to the ground.
In order to get astride the creature, I had to climb, even with the natite’s help. I dug my fingers and toes into what felt like cold jelly and scampered up, coating my front with slime in the process.
He was not my favorite steed. Without a saddle, being astride was like sitting in a puddle of goo. He moved in a rhythmic pulsation that made me nauseous.
On the other hand, he and the other ponies seemed unshakably calm. They did not stray or take alarm, but oozed along steadily.
Lar Camissa, who did not join us, gave us three guides, one of whom, Daf Hantch, seemed to be of high rank. He was dour and quiet, and his voice had none of Lar Camissa’s music in it.
We rode around the lake, then veered off into a side tunnel that went steadily downhill. The air temperature rose as we advanced. Our escorts looked weary on their mounts, as if we were marching through a desert under a pitiless sun.
Near the lake, the phosphorescence lit our way, but in the depths of the tunnel, the only light came from the glowing eyes of our natite guides.
“I wonder if we can trust them,” Gambler murmured as he trotted alongside us. “They could be taking us somewhere to abandon us in total darkness.”
After a while I detected a new light ahead of us, a soft orange glow that seemed to brighten as the temperature rose. Our guides gasped for breath and the slug ponies oozed along ever more slowly. It was warm, but only about as warm as a mild spring day. Nonetheless, the temperature was obviously putting a great strain on the natites and our rides.
We took a sharp turn. The stone walls, which had been rough and dripping with moisture, had grown dry and smooth.
Daf Hantch called a halt. “We can go no farther,” he said, wheezing.
Khara climbed down from her slimy mount, and I happily did the same. “Then you’d better explain your Queen’s demand,” she said. “What exactly are these objects she wants us to retrieve?”
Daf Hantch took a long breath. “When we fled persecution and came to live beneath the ground, we took with us our most sacred objects: the Crown, the Shield, and the Eye. The first among them, the Crown of Beleeka, was a symbol of Lar Camissa’s noble birth. Second was a less important but still venerated object, the Ganglid Shield. Finally, there was the Eye, a toy of no great importance, except that it was a childhood gift given to the Queen by her mother.”
Khara crossed her arms over her chest. “And?” she asked.
“A traitorous band of the Queen’s soldiers tried to abscond with the objects soon after our arrival here. As they escaped, there was a violent volcanic eruption. The gods, no doubt, were angered at their betrayal.”
“No doubt,” said Khara, and Renzo hid a smile.
“The soldiers were buried in magma, and the treasured items lost to us.”
“And you want us to get them back?” Khara asked.
Def Hantch nodded. “If you continue on, you will find a stream amid streams, pools within pools, peril and promise. Within the inner pool at the bottom of the unscalable height lie those three sacred objects.”
Khara glanced at me, and I gave a subtle shake of my head. He was lying by omission, leaving out details to outwit me, to fool my senses.
“If we bring you these objects, you will let us go freely?” Khara asked.
“The Queen has said so.”
No, she had not, actually. She’d made no promise, just a request. Once again, Daf Hantch was being evasive.
Khara didn’t need me to tell her that. Still, she nodded along, as though she believed the old fraud.
“We shall wait here,” Daf Hantch said, still struggling for breath. “There is no other way in or out.” He flinched as he said it and shot me a look that I pretended not to see, just as I pretended not to have heard this new lie.
Let him think we believed him.
We left the natites and our slug ponies and advanced on foot. It was hot even for us, midday-summer hot—not unbearable, but not pleasant, either. The light continued to intensify, and soon we saw the source.
Before us lay a large cavern crisscrossed by streams of magma. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The magma also trickled from the cave roof, a slow rainfall of drops so hot they could burn through clothing and flesh. Our goal was at the far end of a hundred yards of falling death. There the cavern wall went up and up, a stone cliff disappearing into gloom.
At the base of the cliff was a rectangular pool encircled with stone. A small stream of water followed a channel cut into the stone face, refilling the pool and sending up a column of steam. The overflow from the pool drained away in a serpentine path, weaving its way between streams of magma, boiling in places where it came too close and steaming along its entire length.
Between us and the pool we hoped to reach were great plopping drops of molten rock, a network of magma rivulets, a stream of steam, and beneath it all, a crusted black floor.
I gulped. I suspect everyone did.
“Do these natites think we’re invulnerable to falling lava?” Khara demanded, laughing in disbelief. “We can’t cross that!”
Renzo, however, was studying the situation. I watched him, the way he searched carefully, left to right, up and down, taking in every detail. He took his time about it, nodding to himself as he considered and ignoring our expressions of irritation and disbelief.
Finally he said, “I can do it.”
“You can do what?” Khara asked.
“I can get to the pool and grab whatever’s there.”
“You’re daft,” Khara said.
“That may be,” he answered with a wide grin. “But I am also a very good thief. I’ve made my way in and out of the homes of wealthy people with high walls, furious dogs, and hard men-at-arms. I can do this.”
Khara frowned. “All right, Renzo the very good thief, what do you see that I do not?”
“Some theurgy beyond anything I know is at work here. The floor is sloped up, causing the magma drops to run down the channels before they can cool and stick, but even so, the fashioning of those channels was not done without theurgy. No degree of slope could keep those channels free of accumulated magma. No, there is magic at work here, ancient and very deep magic.” He gave a rather smug smile. “But in addition to theurgy, we have mathematics.”
Gambler jerked his head up with un-felivet-like surprise. “You know of mathematics? It was one of my areas of study on the Isle of Scholars before I . . . well, before I irritated the wrong people and ended up in the dungeon where you found me.”
“I pick things up here and there.” Renzo pointed. “There are seventy-two distinct drips landing in seventy-two spots. At first, it seems random: there would be no way to avoid being burned. But I see a pattern, which could be explained more easily if I had a scrap of paper and a pen. . . .” He looked around, as if expecting someone to offer him these things, then noticed the exasperated impatience on Khara’s face. “Or I could discuss the mathematics with Gambler at a later time.”
“Probably best,” I agreed.
“The point is, there’s a rhythm, a mathematical pattern. It won’t be easy, but I think I can do it in twelve jumps. The fourth and ninth jumps will be the hardest.”
“If you survive to reach the pool, the water is billowing steam,” Gambler said. “You’ll boil your hand.”
“Indeed. I would need something to fish out the objects. Something that could withstand the heat.” He looked meaningfully at Khara’s sword.
“No, no, no,” Khara said. “This is the Light of Nedarra! This belongs to my family and always will. It’s priceless.”
“Yes. And I am a thief.”
Khara pursed her lips, scowling. “Yes or no, Renzo,” she said. “Right where Byx can hear you and judge your truth. Yes or no, will you steal my sword?”
Renzo made a small smile and tilted his head impishly. “I won’t answer that, Khara. Either you trust me or you don’t. You are the leader of our little ragtag band, and we trust your instincts. So what do
your instincts tell you about me?”
Khara did not look pleased, not at all. A sound not unlike an animal growl rose from her throat. She took a threatening step forward, hand on the hilt of her sword. But Renzo never stopped smiling.
For a long time they stared at each other, Renzo amused, Khara furious and suspicious. Finally, she drew her sword. For a split second I was not at all sure she wasn’t going to slice off his head.
“Take it,” Khara said, thrusting the hilt toward Renzo.
“Thank you, Khara,” Renzo said, with only a trace of mockery.
Khara’s answer was something like “Grrrrrr.”
8
A Masterpiece of Careful Planning and Flawless Execution
We dairnes aren’t great dancers. Nor have I ever had the pleasure of watching professional dancers display their grace and skill. Still, Renzo, I suspect, would have put them to shame with his moves.
He waited, nodding his head to a rhythm I could not perceive. Then he leapt high and wide, landing astride a channel just as a big glop of burning stone rolled past.
Another leap, and he found himself in a narrow spot where two channels passed within inches of each other. He leaned back as a drop skimmed his chest by a hair, then forward as another drop came even closer to his posterior.
A pause, then leap number three. Renzo landed, sure-footed, in a space where no drops were falling. Finally, he could catch his breath.
It was terrifying to watch. And yet we couldn’t look away.
As Renzo had predicted, the fourth leap was one of the worst. He had to use Khara’s sword, swung sideways, to bat away a drop of magma.
It took Renzo half an hour of leaping, twisting, and bending before he reached the pool, having suffered what must have been a painful burn down his left arm, a burn that left his shirtsleeve in tattered black ash and the flesh beneath an angry red.
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