Unable to stifle a gasp, Conor put a hand to his sleeve. The gray creature had been just past his elbow the last time he’d checked. Once it finished its climb, would he end up like one of those monsters?
“We’ve lost all contact with the other cities of Sadre,” Xanthe said. She swallowed, and when she spoke again her voice shook. “Our fear is that they’ve all succumbed to the infection. Phos Astos might be the last remnant of our civilization.”
Meilin fell back a step so that, out of Xanthe’s view, she could squeeze Conor’s hand. Her message was double: It’s going to be okay and Don’t say anything.
“Oh!” Xanthe said as she sighted something in the distance. “We’re nearly there. Now’s when we stop going forward and start going down.”
“Down?” Conor asked, stomach tightening.
“Down?” Takoda repeated.
“Yes, down,” Xanthe said, breaking into a sudden sprint. “Like this!”
She glided forward into the darkness, her white skin and hair shining long after her black shift had merged into the surrounding gloom. Then, in an instant, she dropped away. She simply disappeared.
“Um, can anyone tell me what just happened?” Takoda asked.
“I don’t know,” Meilin said, creeping forward. “Xanthe? Are you there?”
Torch brandished, Conor took the lead as they eased toward the spot where Xanthe had disappeared. “Oh, wow,” he breathed.
Warm air rushed upward in front of him, like in a chimney. They were at the brink of a chasm, glossy black stone extending down as far as the torchlight went. Conor closed his eyes and smiled; the rising air smelled vaguely like the hot stones his mother had once used to warm his bed when he’d come back from shepherding during the brutal Euran winters.
“She just jumped?” Takoda asked. “Into this stream of air?”
“Maybe …” Meilin said, finger tapping her lips as she puzzled it out. “My tutors taught me about air currents. If the upward draft can compensate for a body’s downward acceleration due to grav—”
Meilin broke off, dumbfounded, as Takoda pivoted so his back was to the chasm, cheerfully waved good-bye, and let himself fall backward. He was there, and then he was gone, as simple as that.
Conor and Meilin stared at each other, beyond words.
Takoda’s voice rose up through the hum of the updraft. “Guys, this is amazing!”
“We’ve all gone crazy,” Meilin said. “Maybe there’s some gas in the air that’s making us all—”
Conor stepped off the edge. “Bye, Meilin!” he called up against the hot wind.
At first he fell rapidly, but the moment he let his arms out wide, the updraft caught him and it was like he was barely falling at all. His torch winked out, leaving him in darkness as he gently descended.
“I can’t believe you just did that. I’ll kill you once I catch up!” Meilin shouted down.
Conor smiled as he imagined her outraged expression. As he continued to descend, he made out Takoda’s voice: “Conor, is that you? You’re about to hit a net. Xanthe and I will get you out.”
Conor rolled over so he was looking down. The dark air wavered in the heat, but very far below, like at the waking edge of a dream, he saw a muted glow. The horizon was a soft, gauzy pink.
Clearly Conor’s floating was about to end, but he wished it wouldn’t. He hadn’t realized how oppressive the squat tunnels of Sadre had been until they’d opened up. There was so much space around him now, and so much clean air—he never wanted to go back to that claustrophobia.
“Okay, see him?” Xanthe said somewhere in the darkness.
Black lines began to trace themselves over the glow from below. They grew bigger and bigger until Conor was caught in some sort of net, a lattice of the same woven material as Xanthe’s shift. As soon as he hit it, slender hands reached from the side to grasp him, and then before he knew it Xanthe and Takoda had pulled him off.
They were seated on the far edge of the net. The open spaces between the mushroomy rope led to the ground far below, but the net was sturdy enough that he didn’t feel afraid.
“Isn’t this amazing, Conor?” Takoda asked. “To think we’re the only people from the surface to have ever seen this place!”
In his excitement, Takoda lost his balance. The rope netting pouched beneath his feet, sending him sliding into Xanthe. Both muttered flustered apologies, and Conor noted with amusement how extra vivid Xanthe’s blush was against her pale skin.
As the two carefully extracted themselves, Conor looked down through the netting. Now that the updraft wasn’t marbling the air, he could see more of the vista below.
They were suspended at the top of a glittering cavern, the ground at least a hundred feet below. The soft pink glow was from mushrooms—many, many mushrooms. The tallest soared as high as Euran oldwood trees and were ringed by shorter mushrooms, which were ringed by even shorter, until the ground at the edge was dusted with a fringe of fungus. All of them gave off the same dull pink light that illuminated the people walking below. The sheer majesty of the cavern was enough to take Conor’s breath away.
“Xanthe,” he breathed. “This is Phos Astos?”
Xanthe gave him a sly smile by way of an answer, then sat up on the net, expertly swinging her body so that she bounced along with her hands gripping the edge. Heedless of the hundred-foot drop, she leaned far over the side. Seeing her close to tumbling into the wide open space, Conor reeled with vertigo. There was so little separating him from the air below—just these slim black filaments.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Xanthe said, watching his expression. “There’s another net below this one. Just watch me, and then do what I do. Ready? One—” She was interrupted by a familiar voice.
“Conor?” called Meilin. Conor turned in time to see her float down the stream of hot air. She face-planted into the net, then turned to glare at them furiously.
“Hey, Meilin,” Conor called. “Hold on, we’ll come bring you over.”
“Stay where you are,” she called warningly. “I’ll come to you.” Meilin looked down and shrieked when she saw the open space beneath her. She began to creep along the netting, nervously testing her weight on each section of the net before proceeding. Once she’d reached her friends, she closed her eyes and held her knees tight to her chest, keeping herself as compact as possible. “How do we get down?” she asked in a small voice.
“Are you scared of heights, Meilin?” Conor asked. At first his tone was mischievous, but became serious as he realized how scared she was.
“I just want to be on the ground,” she said, not opening her eyes.
“We’ll be on solid ground in a moment,” Xanthe said, smiling encouragingly. “Let me warn my people that you’ll be arriving.”
Putting her delicate fingers to her mouth, Xanthe let out a high-pitched whistle.
To Conor’s surprise, more people began to emerge from the mushrooms themselves, revealing wide openings in the trunks that towered over the cave floor like great trees.
Their skin was the same luminous white as Xanthe’s, and they all had short hair of the palest blond. They held still at the entrances, staring up at Conor and the others with startled pink eyes. There were hundreds of them already, and more were emerging every second. Men and women, children and elderly, tall and short—all looked up in wonder.
“Don’t be afraid!” Xanthe called down. “These people have come from the surface! They’re friends!”
Shocked whispers went through the crowd, then more and more of the Sadreans emerged from their mushroom homes. “Tayne,” Xanthe yelled to the nearest, a small, pale boy peering out an opening at the top of the tallest mushroom, “go tell the elders! We’re coming down.”
The boy waved at Xanthe, then nodded and called something in an unknown language. He then clambered ably down rungs that had been carved into the mushroom flesh. Wherever he placed his hands, he blocked some of the mushroom’s pink glow, sending flickering patterns of light onto
the cavern’s obsidian walls.
Xanthe smiled at the companions’ awestruck expressions, obviously pleased by the effect Phos Astos was having on them. “Take it all in,” she said. “You won’t get a better of view of it than from way up above.”
Pink was the city’s dominant color, but as Conor’s eyes adjusted he saw that there were greens and yellows, too. The mushrooms had some other colorful fungus growing upon them, so that great swaths of glittering color spread all the way up the largest bulbs. The overall effect was that the air shimmered everywhere Conor looked, like he was peering through a fly’s wings.
In the center of the city was an open hole leading into the earth, from which the warm air rose up to pass through the ceiling of the cavern. It must warm the whole city, Conor realized. It was certainly a welcome change after the chill of the tunnels.
More and more of the Sadreans emerged from hiding. As they did, they looked up at the newcomers and froze, astonishment slackening their faces. Conor heard gasps echo throughout the cavern. After letting her people gawk at them for a minute, Xanthe whistled and called out something in her language, waving them along. They didn’t budge, though.
Conor felt his face flush as the dozens of Sadreans staring up became hundreds and then thousands. Right in front of his eyes a dignified woman holding the hands of two children fell to the ground and broke into sobs of joy. A large bat hung from a fold of the woman’s shift—it seemed some Sadreans had spirit animals, too.
Down at the base of a mushroom tree, a Sadrean woman stood before a pen in which a number of fuzzy white spiders were crawling over themselves to eat the teeming beetles the woman poured from a bucket. She held it slackly as she stared in wonder at the outsiders, the insects flooding the floor of the pen.
Spiders as livestock. Conor shuddered.
Meilin opened her eyes, and seemed to be just as stunned by the sight of all these people paused in the middle of their everyday lives miles under the earth, staring up at them; her mouth hung slack and her hand curled around Conor’s elbow in awe.
“Phos Astos means ‘the city of light,’ ” Xanthe said, surveying her home as she gripped the netting. “Sadre has always protected Erdas from the Wyrm. We were the guardians you didn’t even know you had. Now I fear this city is all that remains of us.”
Takoda kept his face emotionless, but he cocked his head at Xanthe. “I’m sorry.”
She laughed quietly, a light, silvery sound that ended sooner than Conor expected. “It isn’t your fault.”
“Does your family live in one of those homes carved out of the mushrooms?” Meilin asked.
“Yes,” Xanthe said, her eyes going proudly to one of the smaller mushrooms on the city’s edge. “In that one there. I will look forward to introducing you to them. But first you should meet the elders. Now that they know you’re here, they’ll assemble at our teilidh—our mural chamber. Come, follow me.”
Without further preamble, Xanthe swung around the edge of the net and let go, dropping twenty feet or so until she hit the next one down. She let the rebound pitch her off the edge and drop her to the last net. Patting her hair flat in the pink light of the glowing city, she gracefully stepped off onto Phos Astos’s stone floor.
Takoda was the first to the edge of their net, placing his hands in the same position Xanthe had. “How are you so comfortable with all this?” Conor asked.
“Cliff diving is a very popular hobby in Southern Nilo,” Takoda said with a wink, before swan diving to the net below. He folded into a cannonball at the last moment and took a gigantic bounce to the next net down, hooting in glee the whole time. An admiring cheer rose from the watching Sadreans.
“Our man of mystery,” Meilin said in amazement as she watched Takoda stride forward and introduce himself to the nearby Sadreans. “Shy with us and assertive with everyone else.”
Conor held out his hand. “Here. Since you’re scared of heights, do you want to go together?”
Meilin nodded, biting her lip, and gratefully took Conor’s hand. “We’ll wait until you’re ready,” Conor said.
She peered over the edge. “I—I don’t know if I can do this, Conor,” she stammered.
“Of course you can,” he said, kneeling beside her on the swaying net. “Just—”
“Ha!” Meilin yelled, then with one expert movement pushed Conor over. He fell twenty feet, screaming his head off, belly flopping onto the net below. He lay still, hands over his face while he listened to the giggles of a few thousand watching Sadreans.
The net surged as Meilin landed beside him, chuckling. “I’m not afraid of heights, you dummy,” she said.
“Are you pleased with yourself?” Conor asked, shaking his head.
“Yes, very,” she said.
Reaching over, Conor slowly and deliberately placed a hand on Meilin’s back and unceremoniously heaved her off the net.
By the time they’d stepped onto the city’s rock floor, Conor and Meilin were breathless with laughter. That stopped quickly, though, once they saw that the assembled residents of Phos Astos were still staring at them.
“Come,” Xanthe said as she began to weave a passage through the mushroom buildings. “The elders will be waiting.”
When the Sadreans didn’t move out of the way, she made a clicking noise in her throat and waved her hand to shoo them away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It must make you uncomfortable to have them ogling you like this.”
Even though most of the Sadreans reluctantly returned to their business, as he hesitantly started forward Conor caught the eyes of no fewer than a dozen who were still staring at him. When they saw him looking back, the Sadreans startled and turned to other tasks, pretending they hadn’t been gaping. Conor watched them with interest as he passed. Some were sharpening spears made from resin, or swords fashioned from crystals. Others were slivering a large black mushroom, separating wafer-thin layers that another Sadrean was sewing into patchwork cloth. Entranced, Conor realized with a start that his friends were already a dozen paces ahead.
“The reason Phos Astos has been able to hold out against the Many for this long,” Xanthe was explaining to Meilin as Conor caught up, “is that our city is surrounded by a plain of flat glacier stone that extends half a mile wide and is as smooth as a mushroom. Once, a black river passed over it, and we had to raft across to reach this cavern. But now we’ve discovered how to dam the river and walk across the dry riverbed. The Many may be powerful, but when they become infected, they lose their memory and their reason. When they attack, they surge across the plain without any caution, filling it like the black river once did.”
They lose their memory and their reason. The words rattled around Conor’s head.
“And that’s when you release the dam!” Meilin said.
Xanthe shrugged humbly. “It has worked in the past. But it’s not a perfect system. The pressure of the water is strong enough that it takes us days to muscle the mechanisms back into place and drain the trap, leaving us vulnerable in the meantime. And we only have one shot—we have to time the flooding perfectly when the Many are all on the plain itself. If we miss any, then they can still get across after the initial flood sweeps the others away.”
“Still,” Meilin said, shaking her head in admiration and stepping around a Sadrean child with his thumb in his mouth, staring up at her in awe. “It’s a stroke of genius. I’m impressed.”
“Thank you,” Xanthe said, clearly pleased with herself.
The tunnel sloped downward, and to continue along it they had to turn sideways, pressing the edges of their boots sharply into the rock. Xanthe kept cutting backward glances, obviously still fascinated by the outsiders. In one of her distracted moments, she tumbled—and it was Takoda who caught her. He flashed out one hand and ably grabbed hold of her shoulder, righting her without losing his own balance. Xanthe smiled shyly and thanked him.
As he walked, Conor turned Xanthe’s words over in his mind. Maybe the Many weren’t as mindless as everyone was
assuming—which meant they were more dangerous than anyone thought.
“Careful, now,” Xanthe said. “We’re approaching the dam’s mechanism.”
The slate all around them began to shine as Conor’s torch streaked light along its surface. The tunnel sloped down before giving out onto a black plain. They were at a ledge ten feet or so above it, at the top of the dam. The mechanism to open it was simple: Thick bands of corded rope were wrapped around two great wheels of iron, with handles evenly spaced along each.
“These wheels connect to a large door damming the river upstream,” Xanthe said. “By turning them, we can control the amount of water flowing out.”
“And wash out the Many,” Conor said.
“Underground locks must have been difficult to build,” Meilin said approvingly.
Xanthe held her finger up to her lips to quiet them, then paused, her head tilted in the air. Then she shook her head. “I thought I heard something,” she said. “But it’s nothing.”
She knelt at the ledge’s lip. A small mushroom was growing there, gold in color and shaped like a bell. And, like a bell, it rang out when Xanthe flicked it. “These are what we call screamers,” she said proudly. “We’ve cultivated them over the centuries as a warning system. If the Many approach us, they’ll have to cross through tracts of these. The mushrooms set off a chain reaction all the way into Phos Astos, ringing so loudly that they wake everyone up. Come, this way.”
Xanthe made a quick turn, disappearing into an opening in the slate wall. Remembering the tight tunnels they’d been in when the jabbering horde had attacked, Conor quailed. But after watching Meilin and Takoda calmly enter the passageway, he followed, too.
The glowing pink-and-green dust was back, coating the walkway. Conor watched, transfixed, as it swirled around the ankles of his companions, whose paces left foot-sized patches of clear slate behind them.
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