Child of Flame (Crown of Stars 4)

But Alain would never have left the dogs behind. Nor would he ever abandon her.

As soon as they were all safely to the bottom, the guide extinguished the torches anxiously, as though their light was a forbidden luxury. Laoina whispered prayers, and Alain spoke softly to the dogs in his own language. Deep within the earth, the sweat cooled on her body and she shivered as a breeze brushed her face. As warm as dragon’s breath and just as sulfurous, that breeze made her light-headed. To think even for a moment of the mountain of earth above her was to panic. How could air alone hold up heavy rocks and the weight of spans of earth? Surely it must all come tumbling down on top of her head. Fumes danced around her head. Spots of light flashed into existence and winked out, disorienting her.

In the instant when one of those lightning flashes illuminated the night, she saw the guide kneeling before the cliff face as though he prayed. He made a strange movement with one arm. Chimes rang out high and sweet.

Light flooded the chasm.

She shielded her eyes, blinking furiously, blind. As abruptly, the light vanished. The dogs barked. A body bumped into her.

“Holy One.” The honorific sounded much the same in any language, even squeezed by fear as it was now. He slipped an armband over her hand and up past her elbow.

“He says, you must give this to what creature comes to the summons, and tell them of Horn’s wishes.” Laoina’s voice shook as she translated. Adica had never heard her sound so frightened. “Then they must do as Horn wishes. That is the bargain.”

“What creature—?”

He scurried away without answering. She heard him scrambling up the ladder.

“He abandoned us,” whispered Laoina hoarsely.

“What does he fear?” asked Alain out of the darkness.

The air eddied around them as unseen things set in motion whirled into life. The sulfurous breath of the underground wind blew hot in her face, and she coughed until her eyes watered. Light bloomed. That glow came in part from the armband she wore, twin to the armband now gleaming softly on Alain’s arm.

“Skrolin,” she whispered.

“Look!” Laoina stood clearly visible in the soft light. The beads woven in her braids gleamed eerily. She pointed toward a low tunnel so smoothly faced and perfectly ovoid that fear kicked Adica in the gut. This was no natural tunnel. Someone had shaped it.

Sorrow and Rage growled, standing stiffly, ears alert. A bubble of light expanded out of the tunnel. No human creature held that lamp, and no flame known to human folk or their Hallowed Ones burned within the globe the creature carried, dangling from a chain. Laoina dropped to her knees. The dogs lunged, but Alain caught them by their collars and dragged them back with all his strength, straining and cursing.

Adica had seen so many marvels that one more could not jolt her. She had known since she was a child that many strange and unknowable creatures walked the Earth, and that humankind was young to the land. She had glimpsed the skrolin in the tunnels when the Cursed Ones had kidnapped her, but she had never seen one as close and as clearly as she did now.

The grotesque figure came to a halt before them. Bent and gnarled, it did not have skin as humans had skin, nor was it scaled like the lizards and snakes that crawl along the ground. Its skin glittered the way granite did when caught in sunlight; leprous growths more like crystalline rocks or salt cones than a scabrous disease encrusted that skin. The pale bulges that seemed to be its eyes clouded and cleared as if mist boiled within. Bent and gnarled, it wore an assortment of chimes and charms which rang softly as the spherical lamp swayed back and forth at the end of its chain.

She found her voice. “We have come from my sister, known to me as Horn.” She extended her arm to display the armband. Without any acknowledgment, the creature turned and walked with a rolling gait back into the tunnel.

“So much unknown to me lives here in this country,” murmured Alain. As the light receded, they followed down this smoothly surfaced tunnel road. Adica had never seen a path so straight and so easy. The creature leading them did not look back. They walked for a long time until without warning the tunnel ended on a ledge bordered by a railing that brought them up short.

Nothing in her life or experience, not even that one sight she had had years before of the great city built by the Cursed Ones, had prepared her for the vista that opened before her now. The skrolin lived not in dank and dark caves in the ground but in a city so vast and complicated that it made the great temples and palaces and gardens built by the Cursed Ones look like crude models fashioned by children. Just as mice might gnaw a maze of tunnels through a round of hard cheese, opening up the very heart of the cheese as they nibbled outward, so the skrolin had fashioned their city into and out of the rock itself, that made up the heart of the Earth.

Their guide fingered a series of bumps and grooves carved into the railing; a gate swung open to reveal a stairway carved into the cliff. Down these steps they descended into a labyrinth of pillars and archways clothed in jewels. Caverns spun one off the next as though an ancient hand had woven thread into stone. No surface was unpolished, and so many patterns and markings had been incised into every sloping wall that she thought it must be a language read by fingers. Indeed, their guide kept a hand in contact with these surfaces, its fingers rubbing and tapping in a complicated code.

They did not walk far before their guide steered them to a vessel that looked like a giant shell scoured clean and fitted out with pearlescent benches. It took all three of them to hoist up the dogs, and they clambered in uneasily after. Their guide hopped over the high side with unexpected grace to take its place at the stem of the vessel.

The vessel lifted right up off the ground. Laoina yelped in surprise. Alain gasped out loud as he steadied himself on the backs of the dogs. Adica bit her lip rather than make a sound; she didn’t want their guide to think that she, a holy woman, was awed by their magic.

But she was: stunned and even terrified as they floated through the cavernous city. It seemed to stretch on forever, winding corridors, lengths of dark tunnel that opened at intervals into caverns born out of a thousand prickling lights or streaked with veins of gold and copper. This was mystery and power displayed on a scale so vast she could not comprehend it.

How had she ever thought the Cursed Ones powerful? They were as children, compared to this.

The guide’s eyes—if they were eyes—remained turned away from them. Even their awe did not interest it. Yet Adica did not feel unwatched. The many adornments, bits of metal, rods of silver, square plates of gold that flashed and winked when any light diffused over them, seemed alert. Adica sensed magic hoarded within them, a mute life, aware but unspeaking. A few of the skrolin they passed halted to regard them as one might a curiosity, but most hurried on their way uncaring. She saw none performing any manner of work she recognized: no one scraped hides, gutted fish, wove baskets, built pots, or chipped obsidian into tools. She saw nothing resembling the magic of the smiths, who worked with fire blazing as they wrought sorcery into copper and tin. She saw no fields, nor flocks, but when they came at last to a vast river whose banks were chiseled out of the rock itself, she saw a thing she could finally recognize, built on such a vast scale that it took her breath away.

“Truly,” Laoina muttered, clenching her hand until her knuckles whitened, “there is more to this world than I ever dreamed.”

Adica knew a market fair when she saw one. The wood henge was the market for all the Deer tribes, where they gathered at the great festivals, three times a year. Peddlers and merchants might linger for days or even weeks at the Festival of the Sun as people gained time free from their fields and flocks to trade. One time, when Adica had been a child, the Horse people had come to the midsummer fair. Their tents and wagons had made of the henge a vast fair unlike any other she had seen, exotic and colorful, and folk had lingered there long past the usual seven days of meeting, but soon afterward the first of the raids made by the Cursed Ones had come, and the Horse people had never traveled so far west again. Adica had also seen the lively market of Shu-Sha’s city before it was burned by the Cursed Ones, and she had seen, from a distance, the great slave market where the Cursed Ones sold and bought human slaves.

rotesque figure came to a halt before them. Bent and gnarled, it did not have skin as humans had skin, nor was it scaled like the lizards and snakes that crawl along the ground. Its skin glittered the way granite did when caught in sunlight; leprous growths more like crystalline rocks or salt cones than a scabrous disease encrusted that skin. The pale bulges that seemed to be its eyes clouded and cleared as if mist boiled within. Bent and gnarled, it wore an assortment of chimes and charms which rang softly as the spherical lamp swayed back and forth at the end of its chain.

She found her voice. “We have come from my sister, known to me as Horn.” She extended her arm to display the armband. Without any acknowledgment, the creature turned and walked with a rolling gait back into the tunnel.