A roar echoed around the cavern. Rémy turned to see a commotion thundering down the stone slope toward them — a whirling rush of faces she recognized, together with some she did not. Thaddeus and Desai led the charge, running headlong toward the platform, side by side. She could see J and Kai doing the same but taking a different route, down onto the cavern floor. There, too, was the jeweled man and some of his soldiers, their faces contorted into the screams and yells of battle as they surged toward the far greater force of the Sapphire Cutlass. Of Upala, though, there was no sign.
Around Rémy, the atmosphere instantly changed. The drumbeat became chaotic as some of the drummers abandoned the rhythm. The men who had been charging toward Rémy faltered, looking up at these new attackers. The Sapphire Cutlass turned in her throne, her attention captured by the noise as Thaddeus and Desai piled into the first row of soldiers. Sahoj, standing at her right hand, raised his arm, and just as if he had issued a silent order, the cult members around them began to run toward the fight, eager to protect their goddess from the onslaught.
Rémy saw a chance at once — with the attention of the cult and its leader elsewhere, a gap had opened up behind her. She grabbed Dita by the arm.
“Come on,” she said urgently. “Dita, we have to go …”
Rémy managed to drag the girl a few steps. Then she felt something clamp down on her arm. Rémy looked to see that Dita had grabbed her and was squeezing so hard that Rémy’s arm was turning white.
“Dita, you’re hurting me,” she said. “Let go.”
Dita ignored her, staring at her with those transparent blue eyes, a sly smile plastered across her face. She squeezed tighter and Rémy yelped in pain. She tried to twist herself free from the girl’s grip, but Dita held fast. Her strength was phenomenal — no matter how Rémy bucked and wove, the girl stood firm. Rémy dropped the cutlass, using her free hand in an attempt to pry Dita’s fingers loose, but it was no good. Dita clamped her other hand over Rémy’s wrist, drawing her arms together so that they were useless.
Rémy couldn’t help but cry out as the pain in her arms grew sharper. Her fingers were tingling, cold — rainbowing from red to blue where the blood supply had been cut off. It felt as if her bones were being crushed under the pressure.
“Dita,” she begged, “please … stop …”
The girl ignored her. Eyes blurred with pain, Rémy kicked out, trying to use her legs as weapons, but Dita parried every blow she struck with impassive ease. Rémy sank to her knees and saw, over her shoulder, her friends waging a losing battle. It’s almost over, she thought desperately. We can’t win this … Almost as if the Sapphire Cutlass had heard her thoughts, she turned away from the scrum to look at Rémy. Dita looked up at her new mistress, their blue eyes flickering with an unnatural common knowledge. The sapphire had crept to the woman’s neck, already tracing its thick lines of stone up her veins to her face. She glittered as she moved, a human body being slowly swallowed by a living, livid gem.
Rémy felt herself tugged forward, her knees scraping against the rough ground as Dita pulled her toward her mistress. Resisting was impossible — Dita’s supernatural strength was overpowering. The Sapphire Cutlass raised herself out of her throne once again, this time with all her attention focused on the woman trapped in Dita’s clutches.
A flurry of movement surged across Rémy’s now-blurred vision. It emerged out of the dimness behind the throne, from the direction of the tunnel from which the Sapphire Cutlass herself had been brought. Rémy, struggling with the rising pain, only realized it was Upala when the pirate woman arrived in front of her, dropping the sword she had been wielding to clamp one hand to Dita’s forehead and wrapping her other arm around the girl’s waist.
Dita screamed and released her hold on Rémy. The girl’s cry was a howl of pain and anguish. She writhed in Upala’s grip, but the woman held on. The Sapphire Cutlass bellowed too, the strange sound of rock grating against rock. The blue bloom of stone had now mottled her face — her lips were pure, undulating blue, her cheekbones were sketched in true sapphire. Upala backed away from Rémy, pulling Dita with her and turning to face the goddess.
Rémy struggled to her feet, grabbing Upala’s sword and throwing herself between the Sapphire Cutlass and the pirate woman. She traced the air between them with swift slashes, but the Sapphire Cutlass barely seemed to notice. Her forehead, now almost entirely gem, wrinkled as she frowned, her mouth open in a roar of anger that showed teeth and tongue of solid, moving stone. She dashed away Rémy’s sword with nothing more than the back of her hand, as if she were swatting away a fly in the midday heat. She advanced, one firm stride at a time, and Rémy found herself forced back, still aware of Dita’s weakening cries behind her.
The Sapphire Cutlass moved swiftly, glittering a trail of light like bursts of fireworks as her hard heels sparked off the stone beneath her feet. Rémy heard a soft thud behind her, and a moment later, Upala was at her side.
“Take the girl,” she said breathlessly. “I will deal with this.”
Upala grabbed the sword and Rémy let it go. In the fraction of a second before she turned away, the pirate woman fixed her with a fierce look.
“Make sure Kai leaves,” she said. “He will want to stay. Make sure he understands — I do not want him to.”
Rémy had just enough time to nod, and then Upala was gone, her hair whipping out behind her as she wheeled toward the fight.
Dita was lying on the ground, her eyes closed, her face impassive. In two steps Rémy was standing over her, wary of being caught again.
“Dita?” she asked, but got no answer.
She looked over her shoulder to see Upala and the Sapphire Cutlass facing each other. Upala raised her sword and spun into a slicing blow that glanced off the woman’s armored upper arm, casting sparks into the musty air. The Sapphire Cutlass merely reached out and grasped the blade, closing her gemstone fist around it as if it were nothing more than a blade of grass. She pulled Upala toward her, gathering her into a deadly embrace.
Upala did not resist. Instead she took the goddess by surprise. She hurled herself forward, straight at the once-woman’s chest, so quickly that the Sapphire Cutlass had no chance to defend herself. Upala raised her free arm and opened her palm, slamming it against what had once been the woman’s forehead.
The sound the Sapphire Cutlass made was more of a bellow than a scream. It roared out of her, sharp and deep, the noise of sheering stone, of an avalanche. A movement shot through the stone of the cavern itself, rippling the air like a flame. The scream went on and on, and Rémy watched, open-mouthed, as the gemstone figure began to shudder and convulse.
A sudden hush fell as in one single, charged second, every member of the goddess’s cult realized what was happening. The change was instant. They no longer cared about the men they were fighting. All they saw was their goddess in pain.
“Go,” Upala shouted at Rémy, her voice vibrating as the shaking of the Sapphire Cutlass juddered through her being. “Get out!”
The tide of cult members turned. Roaring, screaming, yelling, they all rushed back toward the platform — toward Upala and their screaming goddess.
Rémy spun toward Dita and saw the girl’s eyes were open.
The sapphire hue had gone.
“Dita,” she said, crouching at the girl’s side. “You’ve got to get up. Can you move?” She tugged the child upright and into her arms. Dita’s head lolled against her shoulder, and if not for the fact that her eyes were open, Rémy would have thought she was asleep. “Wrap your legs around me, and hold on.”
She staggered upright, taking Dita’s weight with her, and ran. Behind her, the sound of pounding, running feet echoed along with the war cries of the cult and the screams of the Sapphire Cutlass. She felt Dita lift her head.
“Don’t look,” Rémy told her. “Dita, don’t look.”
{Chapter 29}
Thaddeus saw Rémy scoop Dita into her arms. Between them, the worshippers of the Sapphire Cutlass were separating, scattering in their confusion and fear.
“Rémy,” he shouted, cupping his hands to his mouth to make himself heard over the din.
At the sound of his voice she looked up, their eyes meeting across the distance. A smile bloomed on Rémy’s face, blotting out the exhaustion that had shadowed it a moment before. They ran toward each other, ignored by the last straggling cult members that had not converged on the throne.
Rémy staggered under Dita’s weight as she reached him.
“Let me take her,” Thaddeus shouted, hefting Dita from Rémy’s arms.
“What’s happening?” she shouted back. “What’s Upala doing?”
“She has an opal,” Thaddeus told her. “She’s our last chance to stop Aruna’s transformation.”
They struggled back up the slope as Kai made his way toward them, limping badly. The fight had worsened his injury and now blood was seeping down his leg, drops of it rolling in the dust of the cavern floor as he moved. He didn’t seem to notice — his gaze was fixed on the fight below. Upala was still locked against the Sapphire Cutlass, her grip refusing to waver even as Sahoj attempted to pry her away with his bare hands and the cult members swarmed her like ants. Blue sparks were exploding in the air above the two women, fizzing and spinning as they arced away from where Upala’s brave hand ground the opal against the goddess’s sapphire skull.
The ground began to shake. For a second Thaddeus thought it was just the chaos around him, the weight of a thousand pairs of frantic feet pounding on the cavern’s floor. But then came another tremor, then another and another, each greater than the last.
“An earthquake,” Desai shouted. “It is the power being released from their struggle.”
The tremors increased. A tearing sound ripped through the cavern. Below them on the cave floor a split appeared, zigzagging through the rock, a black void opening into the ground. One by one the burning torches fizzled and spat their last, until the only light left spun from the blue trails of electricity thrown from the Sapphire Cutlass.
“We have to go,” said a voice. “This place is tearing itself apart!”
It was the raja. The jeweled man looked disheveled. He was breathing hard and his tunic had been slashed by the blade of a sword. Blood ran down his arm from a cut across his bicep. Behind him, his men were fleeing into the darkness, swallowed up by the mouth of the tunnel they had driven Thaddeus and his friends through earlier.
Another rumble of cracking rock and a split appeared in the cavern’s ceiling, sending chunks of stone plummeting down into the cavern.
“I’m not leaving without Upala!” Kai shouted over the din. “Go. Go on, all of you. Run. But I’m not leaving her.”
Rémy grabbed his arm, turning him to face her. “She wants you to leave,” she told him, voice shaking with the vibration of the earthquake. “Upala knew you would want to stay. She wanted me to tell you — she doesn’t want you to.”
Kai frowned. “I can’t just leave her. Not now. Not here — not like this.”
“She wants you to live, Kai. She’s doing this so you can live. We can’t save her. You know that. But if you live — so will she. In here. Yes?” Rémy moved one hand to place it on Kai’s chest, right over his heart.
Kai wrenched himself away as the others fled for the archway. Rémy waved Thaddeus off as he tried to pull her away.
“I will follow,” she said. “I promise. Get Dita out of here.”
“We’ve gotta go, Mr. Rec,” J yelled. “We’ve got to go now!”
Thaddeus turned and ran, cradling Dita against his chest as chunks of gray rock rained down on them. When he reached the archway, Thaddeus chanced a look back. To his relief, Rémy and Kai were following.
* * *
They staggered along the corridor, straggled out in a wide line behind the raja and Desai, Thaddeus carrying Dita with J by his side, and Rémy with her arm around the hobbling Kai. They made their way through the mountain, shuddering along with the stone itself as the earthquake went on around them. They passed room after room of antiquities that were being shaken like dust from their places.
“I tell you,” said Kai, breathless, “if I had known this place was here, they would have lost all of these years ago. What a waste.”
Rémy tugged him onward. “Don’t even think about it.”
Kai stumbled as a tremor shuddered the ground beneath their feet. He braced himself against the wall, casting a grim look at Rémy.
“Think about what?” he asked. “The fact that there’s no way we’re going to get out of here alive?”
“Don’t say that,” Rémy ordered him, forcing him onward.
“I should have stayed with her,” Kai said, his dark eyes angry, though Rémy sensed the rage was mostly aimed at himself. “We’re going to die in here anyway. I should have died with her.”
“We are not going to die,” Rémy hissed, her own anger surging as she struggled to keep them both moving forward. “And Upala wouldn’t thank you for staying.”
Kai gave a bark of laughter. “She rarely thanks anyone for anything. She doesn’t have much to be thankful for.”
“She has you,” Rémy observed.
Kai said nothing to that. Rémy twisted her aching neck to glance at him. The look on her brother’s face was closed. There was something excessively sad about it.
He loves her, Rémy thought to herself. I wonder if he ever told her so?
Kai looked up and met her eye. He opened his mouth to say something, but whatever the words were, they were lost in the catastrophic rumble of another huge tremor. The force was enough to jolt them apart — Rémy lost her grip on Kai’s arm and fell back against the rough rock wall of the corridor hard enough to knock the back of her head against the stone. She slipped to the floor, jarring her tailbone as she blinked, trying to clear the sudden blur in her vision. Kai ended up on his knees, his sharp cry echoing along the passageway as the impact tore at his already-injured leg. Blood spattered from the wound and Rémy saw him clamp one hand over it in an attempt to stop the bleeding.
Another huge tremor immediately followed, shaking Rémy like a dog until her teeth rattled against each other. Ahead of them, Thaddeus was struggling to keep his balance while he held on to Dita, shielding her head with his hands as he tried to brace himself against the shuddering, shaking wall. J had fallen at his feet and was on all fours, trying to get back up. Rémy did the same, but every time she made it to her feet, another seismic wave sent her off kilter again. Kai had curled into a fetal position, one arm trying to protect his head from reverberating off the rock floor, while the other clamped uselessly against his wound.
Rémy shut her eyes. The noise was deafening, as if they were standing inside the barrel of a cannon at the second that its fuse connected with the gunpowder. It rolled around and around, combining with the shaking of the mountain until Rémy no longer had any idea whether she was on her feet or on her back.
Then: nothing.
The quake stopped. In the space of a whip-crack, the world went so still and so dark that Rémy thought she must be dead — dead and floating in the void between whatever comes between now and after.
Seconds that felt like hours stretched into the void as Rémy’s hearing slowly returned. At first she thought she was surrounded by silence, but then she realized she could hear breathing — and not only her own.
“R-Rémy? Are you there? Are you all right?”
Thaddeus’s voice floated to her out of the darkness. The sound of it flooded her with relief.
“I’m here.” Rémy realized she was lying on her side, her cheek against the dirt floor. There was dust in her nose and her cheekbone throbbed with a dull ache — she must have cracked it against the rock as she fell. Coughing
, she slowly sat upright, testing her body as she would if she had fallen from the wire. “I’m not hurt.”
Beside her there was the sound of fabric scuffing against stone, then a groan that resolved itself into a cough.
“Kai?”
“I’m all right,” he said.
There was more sound of movement as they all began to pull themselves upright.
“J?” asked a faint voice.
“Dita!” there came the sound of a match being struck, and flame flared in the darkness, illuminating J’s eager face. It lasted a few seconds before dying. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” said the little girl, her voice barely above a whisper. “What — what happened? I — I cannot remember …”
“Don’t you worry none about that for now,” J soothed. There was the sound of tearing fabric, and then of another match being struck. The flame flared again as Rémy got to her feet, her eyes searching for Thaddeus. The light lasted longer this time — J had torn a strip from his shirt, setting fire to it.
Rémy reached Thaddeus as he got to his feet. She pulled him to her, and he tucked her head under his chin.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
“No, just winded. Desai,” Thaddeus asked, raising his voice and turning slightly to look at the older man, “is it over?”
Desai was looking past them with a frown, down the dark passageway through which they had fled. “Possibly. I suggest we keep moving, just in case.”
“I agree,” said the raja. “We should not wait around to find out.”
“Well,” Kai said, dragging himself to his feet though his leg was still bleeding. “The quake seems to be done with. I’m going back. Upala might still be alive.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Rémy, pushing herself out of Thaddeus’s arms to turn to her brother. “You can’t, Kai. Even if the Sapphire Cutlass is dead, not all of her followers will be.”
Her brother gave her a steady look. “Then I’ll take them on. Now that the ground’s stopped shaking, it’ll be easier. Besides, with their goddess gone, they will be leaderless.”
The Sapphire Cutlass Page 18