Chapter Twenty-Four #3
“No.” She was already unpinning her hair wrap, her curls falling out in perfect ringlets. She took one sad look at them, then braided them back in a long plait from her crown. She ducked into her bedroom and continued talking from there. “I assume we’ll be joined by the rest of your friends?”
“My cryptography cohort, yes. Meet us in my rooms in an hour.”
She made a noise of agreement, and Daziel and I headed out.
He went through the mirrors to wake Yael, Stefan, and Gidon.
I woke Leah, since someone should know our plan.
Just in case. Jelan heard the commotion and came out, which meant Gilli was also awake.
They came to my rooms, and when élodie arrived, she brought Birra.
By midnight, ten of us crowded in my living room, listening gravely as I explained the situation.
“If the Ziz is dead, we’re screwed.” Stefan spoke through a yawn. “And if there’s an egg—what, you want to cast the spell on it instead?”
“We should be prepared to,” I said. “The spell is supposed to make the Ziz more itself, to keep it strong and healthy. Hatchlings usually have parents to feed them and tend them, and this one won’t. The spell might give it a fighting chance.”
“We can’t cast the spell,” Gidon said in his worried way. “We don’t have the magic.”
“We do,” I said, hoping to put an end to this line of questioning. “It’ll be fine.”
Yael’s head jerked up. élodie exchanged a look with Birra. All three of them had been at the beach at the Rocks. “Naomi, no.” Yael sounded like my mother.
“It’s illegal,” élodie whispered.
“And dangerous,” Yael said firmly.
I remembered how Daziel’s magic had torn through me. How it had threatened to consume me, had been almost impossible to let go. Surely it would be different this time with the betrothal complete.
“What are you talking about?” Gilli asked. Then her gaze caught on Daziel’s, and I could see her rewind back a few moments to me saying We do regarding having magic.
Everyone seemed to be coming to the same conclusion, mouths parting and stances stiffening. I had only told Leah, who gave me a much-needed supportive nod.
“You’re not serious,” Gidon said. His voice squeaked. “You’re going to bind him?”
“It’ll give us the power for the spell,” Daziel said. “We need four casters for the four points of the compass, so Naomi can focus on handling the magic.”
I nodded, deciding Daziel’s strategy—simply moving on—was the best. “Yael, Gidon, Stefan—you know the spell best. élodie, you’re the best caster in our year. If you’ll come with us, we might have a shot.”
“I should come too,” Birra said stubbornly. “You should have a healer with you.”
“Two,” Gilli said quickly.
“None of you are trained in any sort of protective or combative magic,” Jelan said. “I’m coming too.”
Leah, looking entirely unserious in her pajamas bearing penguins wearing knit hats, shrugged. “If they’re going, I’m going.”
A laugh scraped out of me. “This could be a fool’s errand. I don’t know how to navigate the caves. We could get lost. It might not be safe.”
“We’ll cast a hook spell at the entrance to guide us back,” Jelan said.
“The cave system’s supposed to be massive,” Gidon said. “How are we supposed to canvass the entire place? Find an egg no one has ever heard of, which might not even exist?”
I had no idea. But we only had one night before Daziel’s father dragged him back to the shedim lands, so I would give it my damnedest effort tonight. “We try. We try, and we hope.”
“If the egg’s fall formed Talum,” Leah said slowly, “shouldn’t it be in the center of the caldera? Or—not a caldera, technically, but the point of impact between the islands, what raised the main island and the islet from the river.”
“So really, we need to calculate the location, then find out how to get there,” I said.
“It should be possible to write a spell on a compass,” élodie said. “To find a path to exact coordinates.”
We set to work. We noted the longitude and latitude of the center point between the islands.
élodie and Yael altered a preexisting spell to direct us toward the coordinates via a path with oxygen for as long as possible.
If we went deep enough into the caves, it should lead us through them instead of aboveground.
They carved the spell on the back of a compass. “We can try it here,” élodie said, “but it might tell us to walk to the river’s edge, sail to the center of the caldera—then dive. Which won’t be helpful if the egg is in the caves, not the riverbed.”
Sure enough, when we cast the spell, the compass needle spun and spun, then finally settled with a wobbling point to the west. Since we were so close to the shore already, Yael took the compass outside and tested following it while the rest of us scrambled to put supplies together.
Fifteen minutes later, Yael returned, windswept and out of breath. “It took me right to the water’s edge,” she said. “We should try casting it in the caves and hope it will show us a different path there.”
Wrapping ourselves in our sweaters and blazers, we set out for the Rocks. It was deep in the night, past two bells, and the moon glowed with a lavender cast, unusually large and low in the sky. The trams didn’t run this late, so we hired two dodgy carriages whose drivers didn’t ask questions.
Once more, we scrambled over the glossy black rock.
There was little vegetation out here, but a few scraggly trees broke through and swayed triumphantly against the wind.
My gaze snagged on one where the silhouettes of a dozen small kingfishers stood out against the darkness.
I glanced wildly at Leah, who gaped at me.
The birds were back. Surely that was good?
We reached the Rocks, climbing halfway down the sleek stairs to the cavern where we’d sheltered several weeks ago from the awful storm. Before us, the river spread out far to the south, disappearing into inky blackness.
Inside the cavern, we activated our glow globes, casting stark shadows against the obsidian walls.
Stefan led us to a crack in the stone at the very back.
“This leads to the rest of the cave system. I’ve gone a fair way down.
I’ll go first.” His voice echoed in the large, damp cave, and he didn’t sound as confident as usual.
“There’re stairs people built at some point and caves people use for smoking and hanging out, but after, it gets less… safe.”
I shivered.
A hooking spell had already been carved into the wall, and Jelan activated it so we’d be able to find our way back.
Then, single file, we followed Stefan down the rough stairs.
The air here cooled, seeping through our layers, and the dark became more complete.
Our glow globes struggled to push it back.
élodie tried the compass again, but it suggested we go back to the surface.
“This is as far as I know,” Stefan said after five minutes of walking, stopping in a cave with a few lanterns and boxes. “There are more—I know some people who have gone farther—but not me.” He nodded at the empty blackness in the far wall, indicating a tunnel leading on.
No one moved. No one wanted to, I realized, including me, but I had set this mission in motion. Taking a deep breath, I stepped forward.
Our progress slowed as we wound our way through the dark, rough caves.
We tried to pick ones winding toward the river and slanting deeper into the earth, bracing our hands against the wet, slippery wall as we crept along.
Our glow globes formed a bobbing line. Daziel walked beside me, emitting a warm, burnished light illuminating half a dozen feet on either side of him.
Even so, I felt the weight of the caves and earth above my head.
How deep had we gone? How deep did we need to go to reach below the river itself?
I shivered, the cold reaching bone deep, and inched closer to Daziel.
Every few minutes, we checked the compass.
My heart sank each time it pointed back the way we’d come.
If we couldn’t get it to work—couldn’t get it to lead us through the caves themselves—this whole expedition would be for nothing.
What would we do then? Try to rent a boat to take us out onto the river, dive down, and see what we could find?
I had very little faith in my diving abilities.
élodie inhaled sharply, and I spun. She’d tried to spell again, and the compass needle whirled, as though confused. Then it settled, pointing deeper into the caves. “Finally,” she muttered.
Some of the worry drained out of me, my shoulders lowering. We could reach the center of the caldera from the caves.
We kept walking for another twenty or thirty minutes—time felt endless—before puddles started to show up on the tunnel floors.
At first we jumped over them, but they became deeper and more frequent as we went on.
The first time we couldn’t leap across and had to step in icy water reaching our ankles, everyone let out sounds of protest. Cold water submerged our shoes, and I grimaced, trying not to shiver.
After a few minutes I became used to ankle-deep water, but then it rose, until we routinely encountered stretches where the water reached our knees.
We took off our shoes, slinging them by their laces around our necks.
Sometimes the tunnels angled up, and we’d be dry for a while but never long.
The sound of dripping and sloshing water echoed around us.
We’d stopped talking some time ago when our tunnel opened up into a vast cavern, the largest we’d seen yet. We stood at the entrance on dry rock. It sloped down into a massive black pool of water, which filled two-thirds of the chamber.
“Now what?” Leah whispered.
Daziel raised a hand, and from it a light shot up, illuminating the whole cavern. On the far side, where water touched the rock wall, a deeper black circle indicated an opening. A tunnel to another cave.
I looked at élodie’s compass. It pointed toward the opening.
“We need a boat,” élodie said, the usual bell tone of her voice somewhat subdued.
I shook my head. No time or way to get a boat. “We’ll need to swim.”
Daziel looked miserable. “Must we?”
“We should have brought goggles,” Gidon said. “And those globes divers wear to bring oxygen with them, in case we wind up underwater—”
“If we fail, we can go back and find those.” I glanced at Daziel.
Surely we’d be able to keep his father from dragging him home in the morning if we explained everything, wouldn’t we?
But I was scared to risk it. I thought of how close we’d been to saving the Ziz, if only we had worked faster.
Two days. I thought of the tremors. We’d assumed they were from the death of the Ziz upsetting natural magic.
But a tremor could also be caused by the rocking of something deep in the earth. How long did it take an egg to hatch?
“What if we get trapped?” Daziel asked, and I noticed he was breathing quickly as he stared at the black water. “What if the tunnel angles down and there’s no air?”
Humans couldn’t survive without oxygen. Neither could fire.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said quickly to élodie. “Maybe we should go back for equipment—”
“No.” Daziel shored up his shoulders. “We’ll try.”
“Not everyone needs to come,” I said. “We’ll send a small team. I’ll go.”
Daziel glared. “Obviously I’m going with you.”
“I’ll go too,” Jelan said. “We’ll send someone back after a few minutes.”
There was a general outcry, Stefan and élodie and Leah insisting on coming, but Yael and Jelan argued them down. élodie reluctantly handed me the compass.
We shed down to our smallclothes. Jelan and I holding our globes, Daziel glowing, we waded into the dark, still water.
It was cool, but not as freezing as I had expected, though it was unsettling to be in opaque water, in a dark cave, preparing to go deeper.
The water reached our hips, sliding over us like silk, then higher still.
I shivered. Beneath my feet, the stone floor was slippery.
“Ready?” I said when the water hugged my ribs. Best to jump in while we could still gain some momentum.
“Ready,” the others said, and we dove forward and swam toward the dark opening.