He wasn’t trapped. He wasn’t hurt. This wasn’t one of those nightmares where he grew and got stuck, or fell asleep and got left, or struck the chisel too hard and made the rock overhead start bleeding semen. He was awake, alive, and himself, and if he couldn’t count on his gifts to help him just now...
Well, how would an Eadan get out of this?
They would think of something clever. They would use what they already had to help them get more of what they wanted. They were good at that – always hunting for new things, new ways to use old things. Ah Che felt around him, groping for inspiration – and found it in the skitter of a tiny pebble, a disturbed crumb of earth.
Of course. Of course. Here he was, crying for a trail of breadcrumbs to lead the way home – and dragging a whole box of bakery-sweepings behind him.
In a flash, Ah Che was twisting around, freeing his feet from the rope loops and digging through the trough for the tiniest bits and flecks of ore. He threw one far out ahead, and listened as it bounced away into nothing. Another one, this time out to his right, found the same fate. Another one to his left ricocheted off the ground – and then hit a wall.
Ah Che crawled for it as fast and fiercely as a trout swimming upstream. It might not be the right wall, but it was a wall – a landmark, an endpoint, proof that the space and silence didn’t truly stretch on forever. He felt the ceiling and the floor, and when he found nothing familiar, he started again: a stone thrown out ahead of him, another one behind. By his third iteration, he was getting a vision for the shape of this part of the chamber, and by the fourth, he had found the spot where that one chunk of pyrite had nearly concussed him last week.
Ah Che’s stomach sagged in full-body euphoria. He grabbed his trough and crawled for the winze, scraping and dragging and absolutely overjoyed by the first intermittent sounds of Monk Farley’s lewd recollections.
“... put her hand all the way... until I thought I would... and so I said to her, get this... after my gold teeth, I can think of easier ways to get at ’em!”
Someone else laughed. Ah Che’s hand met the wall. Wally Hen was saying something. Ah Che pulled himself up to stand – by every god, it felt good! – and pushed the trough up out of the hole. He reached up to push himself up and out likewise –
– just as a deafening double boom blasted through the rock.
THERE WAS NO plan. There wasn’t even really any hope. Elim’s world had shrunk down to the size of three facts: the stranger was shooting at him, Hawkeye was calling rocks down on his head, and if he stopped moving for even a second, one or the other was going to kill him.
So he ran blind and headlong into the dark, straining to see over the feverish shuddering body in his arms, praying for a fix he couldn’t even picture – for some divine intervention that would keep him from being shot or crushed or pitched off a cliff the moment he put a foot wrong.
If the hand of the Almighty was present, Elim sure as hell couldn’t see it. But as the wind picked up, the frigid goose-prickles over Elim’s flesh turned into patches of fine brown hair, and the steaming clouds of his hard-charging breath grew just a little more robust, and the growing disagreement in his vision became a lifesaving boon: one eye remained steadfastly human and useless, even as the other took an equine interest in greenish-yellow shapes and edges that now stood out beautifully in the moonlight.
And as the shouts from behind him grew farther and fainter, overshadowed by the crumbling cacophony of the rockslides nipping at his heels, Elim ran on, following the bolting horse’s creed: whatever-it-was back there might kill him – but it would have to catch him first.
IN THE DREAM, Shea was swimming in a choppy freshwater ocean, fighting the tide to get to a black heap lying on the beach.
In the waking world, she was being shaken awake.
It was wickedly cold. Shea struggled up through confusion and torpor, as certain that she had been waiting for something as she was powerless to recall what it was.
It was night. She was cold. She had retreated to sleep in the little pool in the tiny stone valley where she had first brought Yashu-Diiwa to heel with a healthy dose of royal hemlock. There wasn’t enough water to breathe, but at least she wouldn’t be ambushed by one of Jeté’s surviving kin.
Jeté. It hit her sluggish mind like a pillow-muffled punch. He was gone – Día was gone – and U’ru had set out after them. Shea dragged herself out of the water, the deathly chill wrapping weights and chains around her every movement. There was a reason mereaux didn’t live at this ridiculous altitude.
But she would have had to be downright comatose to miss the enormous furry feet waiting for her at the water’s edge. She looked groggily up – and up, and up – at the Dog Lady’s massive moonlit splendor: an ageless canine queen standing robed in brown fur, and crowned with a circlet of twinkling stars.
Well, perhaps not literally. But the view from Shea’s ant’s-eye vantage point never failed to impress, no matter how many times she saw it. The dark silhouette above her was the deathless mother, the great lady, the stunning immortal justification for everything Shea had done and suffered on her behalf. This was the Dog Lady she had fought so hard to revive. This was U’ru of old.
Who was apparently wearing something new. As U’ru bent to collect her amphibious servant, the black mass on her shoulder flinched, flapped, and let out a disgruntled caw.
The bird was huge, even bigger than a raven. Shea squinted and stared in the dark, scarcely able to credit it. That was a royal crow – a child of Marhuk by one of his feathered consorts. It studied her with shrewd bright eyes.
And it sat perched on the shoulder of a blood enemy. To see the crow-god’s herald at the Dog Lady’s side – why, Shea would have as soon expected to see a cat birthing mice.
“Mother?” Shea searched the great lady’s canine face for answers as she felt herself lifted off the ground. “What’s going on?”
The reply was vague, blanketed by questions for which U’ru herself might not have answers – but as she folded Shea into the infinite warmth of her arms and started her long, swift strides up the side of the mountain, her mind’s voice was as calm and certain as Shea had ever heard it. We are invited.
AH CHE, A child of twelve winters, was falling.
He took a breath to cry out, but there was no breath, no air anywhere at all – just a hand over his nose and mouth as he fell sideways through an ocean of sand.
Calm. A foreign feeling bloomed in his mind – a strange, overpowering bliss. Safety. Love.
That was when Ah Che knew he had died.
He still had an urgent need to breathe, though, and when the sand and the hand and the feeling fell away, he was gasping clean, sweet-smelling air – and being carried on a woman’s back.
His hands clasped themselves over her delicate collarbones, his knees pressed at either side of her shapely waist, and for one wild moment he thought of Flory Hayes. Then she turned her head, brushing Ah Che’s face with a perfect whorl of soft, squash-blossom hair, and he knew that he knew her – that she had come for him once in a dream.
Her amusement rippled through his mind. Naughty. He was a rude, thoughtless boy to make her wait so long – to make her come all this way.
Ah Che couldn’t argue. He had been rude and thoughtless and so much more. He hadn’t meant it. He’d tried to choose the right things. Now his body was lying lifeless and buried under a half-ton of rubble, and it was too late to fix anything.
No, the great lady answered – a thought that felt like it came with a smile. It wasn’t too late at all. This wasn’t the end. It was the beginning – the first day of his new life.
Ah Che must have misunderstood. She had come for him. Ten-Maia herself had come for him. What was there to do now but carry his spirit to the Other Lands?
No, she thought again, with the greatest delight. His spirit was nestled safely in his body, and his body was safe with hers.
Then Ah Che realized that yes, actually – there was wind in
his hair, which meant that he still had hair, and flashing shadows in the corners of his eyes, which meant that he still had eyes, and his clothes were plastered and flapping against his skin, which meant that he didn’t even want to think about how fast they were going. But where?
Home, she answered. Then suddenly his senses opened. Through her ageless eyes, Ah Che saw a brilliant blue sky over green-furred mountains, felt beds of gypsum and sandstone running underfoot, understood stone-splitting roots and fresh autumn grass and a deer-track that would become a path that would become a road that would take them all the way home to where the holy songs of the Maia raised white-earthen walls and dug soft seed-keeping furrows –
Too much. Too much. Ah Che shut his eyes and pressed his face into Ten-Maia’s shoulder, holding his breath as he begged himself not to vomit down the back of her cornsilk dress.
Then, mercifully, his second-senses went away, replaced by a sweet, soft chagrin.
Sorry,the great lady thought. But underneath it was that same boundless delight: a missing child was coming home again. His empty place would at last be filled.
Ah Che let her joy wash over him. He breathed deep from the hollow of her neck, relaxing into the smell of fresh soil and sweet corn, and hugged her shoulders closer. It wasn’t too late. He wasn’t ruined. He was safe now. Everything would be all right.
But he was forgetting something. There was a reason he hadn’t gone home yet – something undone, something he’d been waiting for. What was it?
Nevermind, Ten-Maia thought. Much better to rest his mind on harvest songs and hot curling-bread fresh from the stone, on holding a pot up to catch warm autumn rain, and pulling blankets close to sit before the sweet mesquite smoke of the feast-fire. His aunties were waiting to fuss and exclaim and make him fine new clothes, and his father would teach him the things he needed to make himself worthy of a wife –
Wife. Ah Che held that thought and followed it like a silver-bearing vein. Marriage. He was waiting for a marriage – for Flory Hayes – for Wally Hen.
The bottom dropped from Ah Che’s stomach. What about Wally Hen?
A conspicuous emptiness lingered in his mind – and then reassurance rushed in to fill it. Wally Hen didn’t need Ah Che to worry about him. He was with his own people.
No,Ah Che thought. That wasn’t good enough. If Wally Hen was hurt, then Ah Che needed to help him, and if he wasn’t, then he needed to tell him what had happened. No matter what, he had to find him. He couldn’t just vanish.
“Stop,” Ah Che said aloud. “I have to go back.”
Ten-Maia did not stop, but the eye-watering speed with which she glided over the ground slowed in deference to Ah Che’s distress. I’m sorry. Her thoughts were slow, as if she were hand-picking each word from Ah Che’s mind. There is nothing to go back to.
And through the touch of his hands on her shoulders and her bare maiden’s feet on the ground, their combined earth-sense ran all the way back through the earth, through dozens of miles of trackless wilderness, to the mountain, down the shaft, to the galena chamber where he had been working. To a collapsed gallery. To a wall of rubble. To fresh limestone dust drifting down to settle on broken rock and broken tools and still, broken bodies.
Ah Che stopped breathing, speechless with horror.
It couldn’t be. There was no reason for it. It was too early in the day – the powder hadn’t been set. There was nothing different, nothing out of the ordinary.
Nothing except Ten-Maia.
Ten-Maia, who had beckoned to him in his deepest dreams, before he smothered them with tarré. Ten-Maia, who had sent his father to fetch him, and would have seen him return empty-handed, bearing stories of a two-colored brother who could not be left behind. Ten-Maia, who was the maiden mistress of the red earth and all its fruits – who must have realized that Ah Che would not leave of his own will – who could shatter stone as easily as Ah Che would crush a dried leaf.
NO. The word echoed like thunder in his mind. She loved him. She would never hurt him, nor anything dear to his heart. She had waited for him, even as he defiled himself, even as he joined in the rape of the mountain. She sent her messages and messengers, and when he refused, she waited with grace and patience for him to finish with his white life – and now he had. The chamber where he had been working was gone. The hole he had been climbing only seconds ago was a rocky ruin. The grave of Ah Che’s old life was marked by a rope-looped trough, smashed to flinders under four tons of limestone.
But all he could think about was how Wally Hen had left his bed unmade that morning. “... how?”
Ten-Maia did not have his understanding of the mine – but her earth-sense told him everything. A thin hole drilled into limestone, stuffed with sulfur and charcoal and saltpeter. An iron drill twisting inside, digging out the foreign substances. A strike from the iron, igniting the contents of the hole first, and then the drum beside it.
Ah Che’s heart forgot its rhythm. The black powder. Monk Farley and Wally Hen were working that wall. They must have thought it had misfired at the end of the last shift. They must not have realized that it was still potent. Ah Che wanted to rail and scream, shout at them for trading their coarse, silly jokes instead of being careful with their work. They weren’t supposed to use iron tools – they were supposed to have copper-coated ones for safety. They were supposed to dig a fresh firing hole. They were supposed to keep the powder kegs at least twenty feet away.
Ten-Maia couldn’t tell him which of the men had made the fatal mistake. It didn’t matter. Through her earth-sense, Ah Che found the last of his answers: a pair of triangle-pattern hobnail boots, lying fifteen feet apart under the rubble.
Ah Che buried his face in Ten-Maia’s shoulder and cried.
And the great lady received his grief, his tears disappearing into her skin like rain soaking into fresh earth. I’m sorry,she thought again, full of empathy and understanding. I’m so sorry.
Ah Che clutched her tighter, sobbing until his breath came in shuddering, lightheaded gasps. “Why did you take me?”
He was distantly aware of Ten-Maia slowing, her steps degrading from an effortless glide to a labored loping gait. But in that moment, the feel of her cheek caressing his was infinitely more real.
I love you, she answered. Ah Che was important. He was a survivor. He was Maia. And she would not be satisfied until all of the lost ones found their way home again – until all of the people were together again.
Ten-Maia suffused him with her compassion and conviction, her sorrow for his sorrow and her need for him. She showed him his link in the sacred, unbroken chain of thousands of generations past and future, of all the great-great-grandparents who had brought him into being, and all the great-great-grandchildren he would bring in turn. She showed him his place in the fragile, precious, irreplaceable part of creation that knew itself as Maia. She saw him as he had never seen himself: as a man imminent, complete and worthy – as a person of vast, unutterable value.
Ah Che did not know how to think of himself in that way. He repeated the ideas to himself, making the thoughts into discrete words. He was alive because he was important. A survivor. Maia.
Yes, she answered, her heart brimming with gladness at his understanding, even as her back stooped under his weight. Her bare feet carried two people – over wooden planks, by the sound of it – and from somewhere down below came the sound of rushing water.
She wobbled, and Ah Che instinctively circled his arms more closely around her neck, even as her thoughts strove to reassure him: they were safe, and soon he would be home. His father was waiting to see him.
Father. The idea sprouted in Ah Che’s mind, roots and tendrils striving in half a dozen directions. The strength in his hands. The stern, sad tone in his voice. The words that had broken Ah Che’s heart. If you care for him, you will leave him here.
Ah Che was alive because he was important. A survivor. Maia.
Wally Hen was not important. He was not Maia. So he had not surv
ived.
Slowly, almost absent-mindedly, Ah Che’s arms tightened around Ten-Maia’s neck.
Be calm, she thought, reassuring him with blooming, effusive certainty: they were almost across the bridge, and everything would be well.
The truth is, I came only for you. That was what Father had said. That was what Ten-Maia had done.
She could move mountains and shift the earth, but there was no room on her back for Wally Hen. She could have dissolved that blasting powder into three-colored sand – but there was no place in her world for two-colored Maia. She could have done anything... but she had chosen to do this.
Ah Che pulled on his elbow, crushing delicate flesh in the hollow of his bony arm.
Ten-Maia staggered. STOP, she commanded, her voice ravaging his mind like boiling water poured over an anthill. But it was daytime, and she was mortal – and her feet, perched weakly on nothing but a few planks of dead wood, had no purchase in the earth.
Ah Che’s old words welled up fresh in his mind; his grip turned iron-tight. If he can’t go, then neither will I.
She dropped his legs to claw at his arms – but that only left his whole weight to hang like a hundred-pound albatross from her neck. She threw her head back, her squash-blossom hair beating his face as soft and gently as a powder-puff. Her tongueless mouth choked. Her shapely knees shook. And when she finally collapsed, Ah Che found himself falling again – not sideways through sand, but straight down, through empty space and the distant roar of water.
“COME ON, BUDDY,” Elim grunted, struggling to divide his breath between reassuring the man on his back and feeding the hunger in his lungs. “Come on – hold tight. We’re gonna make it.”
Really, he was talking to himself more than anything else. This part of the trail was far too narrow for his liking, with a mound of soft, treacherous dirt on one side and a long, long drop on the other. He wouldn’t have liked his odds even at high noon, in his own clothes, with only himself to watch out for. Now he took every step in the dark, in slippery-soft moccasins, with an extra hundred-thirty-pound weight on his back – one whose next jerk or kick promised to kill them both.
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