Chapter 27
There are few enterprises where the discrepancy between the hopeful party’s assessment of their chances and the truth yawns so widely as in the matter of digging for that which was lost. The owner of any ticket in any lottery may count themselves on to a sure thing by comparison.
The Treasure Seekers , by Nes Ebit
CHAPTER 27
Evar
Even with Arpix’s compass there were no guarantees of finding what they needed. They needed the source of the protection against the skeer to be both portable and accessible. Arpix had pointed out that although they should now be able to triangulate its position, it was entirely possible that the device was buried too deep to reach, or was too large to move, or wasn’t even a device but some kind of aura rooted in the soil and rocks themselves.
The work was hard, and even though Kerrol and Evar were physically stronger than the humans, the tunnels were cramped for the smallest of the human females, so the canith could offer little help. Kerrol stayed with Clovis while Arpix made his calculations, wandering the tunnels with his bowl of gore and a feeble, smoking light to see which way the skeer blood ran. Evar had to admit it was a stroke of genius that would likely have never occurred to him even if they’d grown old on the plateau.
Evar had walked the larger tunnels, holding the leaf lamp and choking on the smoke while Arpix studied the contents of his bowl. Wherever he went, the ichor in the bowl would try to crawl away from the source of the forbidding. Having something that always points away from the object you’re looking for is, it turned out, exactly as useful as having something that always points at it. The hunt moved to the narrower tunnels, and Evar had to leave the humans to the task. He’d returned to help Kerrol nurse Clovis.
“Drink, Clo. You need to drink.” His sister was getting weaker. Evar had never seen sickness before, and although he’d seen injuries dealt there had always been the centre circle to quickly reverse any damage. The idea that Clovis, the peerless warrior, would die on her back, slowly poisoned by a wound that should have healed... It wasn’t one he was ready for. As badly as it would have hurt him, it might have been better if the cratalac had torn her heart out, giving her the quick, bloody death of a soldier. Though, even as the thought crossed his mind, he realised that, outside the pages of some tale of heroes, most soldiers died slow, ugly deaths from their wounds, days after the terror and thrill of the battles in which they had received them.
Clovis guided the bucket’s edge to her mouth with trembling hands and choked as she tried to swallow. Evar would rather dig in the dark than sit there watching her die. But at the same time nothing but the chance to save her would take him from her side.
“Easy.” He let her get her breath.
Kerrol sat close by, watching them both, knees drawn up beneath his chin. He understood. He’d studied them for more than half their lives. He understood exactly, and that was why he had nothing to say, no words of comfort, just silence. There was nothing to say.
The humans came and went, all of them streaked with dirt. Salamonda brought a steaming bowl of bean stew and set it beside Clovis. Pieces of earth fell from the old human’s hair—even she’d been digging. Evar got to his feet in frustration. He struggled with the few human words at his disposal. “I dig! Not sit. Do nothing.”
Salamonda gave him a tired smile and measured a small gap between finger and thumb.
“Either she’s insulting your manhood,” Kerrol said, “or saying that the tunnels are just as small as they were yesterday.”
Evar slumped down with a growl. The mountains burned red in the distance, hurling their shadows towards the plateau. The need to do something ate at Evar. He drew the Soldier’s sword and set it across his knees.
The night came, and with it a thin wind that ruffled every hair Evar owned and stole his warmth. The wind was one of the hardest things to get used to after a life lived in the still air of the library. It felt as if unseen hands were constantly touching him, invading his privacy, overly familiar.
If he considered the wind to be a price paid for freedom, then the sky was part of the prize. Evar sat beside his sister and watched the stars. The night sky rewarded attention. Like most things, it revealed new depths the longer it was studied. Parts of the sky that Evar had thought empty would slowly offer up fainter stars buried in the blackness. Here and there lengthier observation would pull faint veils of light from the depths, wisps of coloured mist that might in themselves be made of yet more stars, innumerable, hauntingly distant. Evar felt himself at once both infinitesimal and yet woven into the vastness promised by the sky. A peace so great and enfolding that even the distant hunting call of a cratalac couldn’t shake him from it.
At last, Attamast, the greater moon, rose to pale the skies with its reflected glory and break the spell. Evar lowered his gaze, eyes finding Clovis sleeping beside him, her breathing fast and shallow. She looked frail, as if the warrior who had led them to the plateau had been replaced with a version of herself from fifty years in the future, skin tight across her bones, cheeks sunken.
In the moonlight, the skeer out beyond the perimeter took on a ghostly glow, their pale bodies seemingly lit from within. They had returned with the evening while the humans still laboured underground. Scores of them milled around the border stones, endlessly circling, as if the latest tactic was to keep their prey totally contained while some new horror was summoned to deal with them. Perhaps it would be more cratalacs, or something worse.
“Don’t.” Kerrol spoke even before Evar knew he was getting to his feet. Ignoring his brother, Evar strode towards the perimeter, white sword in hand, blazing with the light of Attamast. “How is that going to help?” Kerrol continued at his back. “You could kill them all and they’d replace each one with a hundred more. It’s not going to make Clovis better.”
“It might make me feel better,” Evar growled, but already Kerrol’s words were undoing his anger, making it seem childish.
Even so, unwilling to dance so helplessly to his brother’s tune, Evar advanced three more steps, aiming the Soldier’s blade squarely at the face of the nearest skeer who had stopped to watch him. Just a yard separated them now. The dry stink of the creatures filled his nose, shot through with the sharp metallic scent of their communications.
Evar had threats and promises he wanted to challenge them with, but under the black-eyed stare of their incomprehension he knew the gulf between them could not be bridged. They didn’t hate him. They didn’t understand him. The cratalacs might have been utterly inhuman but at least their rage seemed like common ground. The skeer didn’t care one way or the other. This was simply their nature.
Evar wondered at their efforts to claim the library. It was hard to imagine the creatures reading a book, much less writing one. And yet there were doors in the library only they could open. Chambers given over to their records.
The nearest skeer took a sudden step forward, startling Evar from his contemplations. Its fellows to either side did the same, overstepping the stones laid out to mark the boundary. Evar scrambled back in panic. “The barrier’s down!”
The creatures came on, a yard past the stones, two yards, three. Not charging, but making a steady advance as if they were somehow pushing the invisible wall before them. “Get her back!” Evar yelled at his brother. He swung his sword at the nearest skeer, hoping to warn them off, but none of them so much as flinched. He backed away quickly, ceding ten yards to the insectoids.
“Clovis!” Kerrol’s voice behind him.
Evar whirled around fearing to see Kerrol hunched over their sister, hunting for signs of life. Instead, she was right there, barging against him, cursing in pain, and somehow reclaiming her sword from his hand.
“Clovis! Don’t!” He reached for her injured shoulder but hesitated, knowing the agony it would cause.
Clovis stumbled on, the white blade cutting an arc through the night before her. Evar, refusing to let her end herself in such a manner, lunged, meaning to drag her away. But even with her back to him and her blood running poisoned in her veins, Clovis was better than him. She lurched away at the last instant and set him on the ground with a kick to the side of his knee.
“Come on, you whoresons,” Clovis snarled, stumbling at her foe, cleaving another arc through the darkness.
Evar fully expected her to be torn apart before he could gain his feet. But against all odds the skeer came to a halt before her. She aimed a thrust at the nearest one, but it had started to retreat and already it was beyond her reach. It wasn’t just the one she’d singled out: dozens of them were withdrawing before the threat of a single sick canith.
“Clovis! No!” Evar threw himself forward as he rose. This time she couldn’t escape him, and he managed to get both his arms under hers, struggling not to hurt her whilst at the same time holding her back.
The skeer retreated more swiftly than ever, the darkness swallowing them until even their moonglow was little more than suggestion. “What’s going on?” Evar didn’t understand.
Kerrol reached them and took Clovis’s sword arm, steering her gently back towards the settlement. “Ask them.”
The humans were emerging from the hollow before the mine opening, still just moon-edged silhouettes before Queen Carlotte’s illuminated face. Arpix headed the group, his face as dirty as the rest of him. In both hands he carried a dull ball of what looked like rust-flaked iron, dented and scarred as if it had been kicked about by iron feet for years.
“We found it,” he said. “Dug it out of the wall three levels down.”
Kerrol released Clovis’s arm and went across to lay a hand on the iron ball. “With hindsight it would have been sensible for us to stay nearer the centre. If you’d moved a little more to the east when bringing it up, you would have been missing three canith.”
Evar sagged a little, understanding that the skeer had not retreated from Clovis but had been pushed back as the sphere had been moved and with it its repulsion field.
“The weapon...” Clovis shrugged him off, managing to support herself again.
Evar went to join Kerrol, looming over Arpix. The human hefted the ball into his hands. The thing proved surprisingly heavy. Evar lifted it to eye level. “So, what do we do now?”
“Take... take the war to the enemy,” Clovis said.
Arpix frowned and went to help Clovis back to her bed. “Hopefully it won’t come to that.” He nodded at Salamonda, who stood with Meelan at the front of the dirty band of humans. “You could call him now.”
Evar impressed himself by understanding the last part even though it was in human tongue. Clearly the Exchange had tutored his mind in the language over the time he’d spoken with Livira.
Salamonda faced the night. “Wentworth! Wentworth!” She clucked and called out something in human. Evar felt she’d said that it was time to find Yute.
The cat came nosing its way through the forest of the humans’ legs. It didn’t pause to hunt for treats this time, simply pressing on out across the plateau. They could all see where its path was heading. Back towards the mountain.
“Damn,” Arpix muttered.
Clovis leaned against him heavily, a grim smile on her face. “Told you so, human boy.”