7. Black water, white water
7
BLACK WATER, WHITE WATER
Following the stream led them to a larger stream, which led to a brook, which opened up onto a still larger watercourse. Occasionally, the openings that the waterways flowed through were scarcely larger than the water, causing a struggle for the larger members of the group—Kaibren and Naeron.
Ris’s sword, which had so skillfully decapitated a lot of rock wyrms and one Scarsea warrior, proved invaluable. She wedged it between rocks to provide steps or floated the blade so people could grab the hilt as a handhold—sometimes she used it as an anchor point for ropes.
This didn’t mean the trip was enjoyable. The looming threat of a fatal slip and fall was ever-present. Anahrod came close to doing exactly that, when a foothold slid out from under her like a sheet of buttered glass as Ris and her sword were busy elsewhere. Naeron caught her arm, but not before Anahrod opened up a gash along her hip.
Naeron immediately stopped the bleeding, of course. Fortunate, but it still wasn’t an experience she cared to repeat.
Anahrod was ill-equipped for this journey, wearing only a teenage boy’s borrowed shirt and sandals never meant for rock climbing. She’d have thought Naeron would also be at a disadvantage, but the man’s endurance proved extraordinary. He was stronger than she’d assumed.
Claw was the hero of the day. She had a talent for judging if a cliff face was stable, if a section of rock would slip, what would be the easiest and safest path.
When asked, she just grinned. “I’m from Blackglass.”
“That can’t be true,” Gwydinion protested. “Everyone from Blackglass wears a veil.”
“Oh yes,” she agreed. “It’s rude to show the scars.” She grinned nastily to emphasize those features.
“I thought she was from Grayshroud?” Gwydinion looked at the others for an explanation.
Claw leaned over him. “I lived in Grayshroud, but I’m from Blackglass. It’s traditional to give ourselves one scar for every person we’ve killed. You know, in duels and such. Then we wear a veil so as not to upset the rest of you delicate crystals with our bloodthirsty ways.”
“Claw.” The warning in Ris’s voice was unmistakable.
The boy leaned away. Hardly a surprise. Even if one knew nothing at all about Claw (and Anahrod surely qualified) it was impossible to miss all the scars on her face.
Claw laughed as she straightened again. “What? Should I lie to the boy?”
“I hear the river,” Anahrod interrupted. She heard something, anyway, a steady thrum of running water far greater than anything they’d encountered so far.
“Good,” Ris said. “Let’s go. I’m so eager to be done with this place. I can’t even begin to tell you.”
“You don’t have to tell us,” Claw said. “We all feel the same.”
“No,” Naeron said.
“I stand corrected,” Claw said. “Let me guess: you find the quiet soothing?”
The mage nodded. “It’s nice.” His voice was wistful. “Reminds me of home.” He gazed off into the distance.
“If you say so,” Claw said. “Place gives me the creeps.”
“Then why are you lingering?” Anahrod walked past the woman, down the passage that (hopefully) led to the main river tunnel. Everyone hurried to catch up, reminded of their time limit.
As if Anahrod could wander too far ahead. Ris still had the only light.
A short time later, the tunnel opened up onto a rock ledge, which jutted out over a large, hollow cylinder. One of those places where magma had once flowed. Now the liquid here was water instead of molten stone. The smell of wet rock hung thick in humid air.
The river had brought with it all manner of surface debris. Detritus, even runoff soil, which had gathered in the cracks and fissures to create a fertile environment for fungi and odd, lichen-like structures. Anahrod imagined this place as a sort of underground oasis. She felt the nearby animals hiding. Creatures who, like Gwydinion’s pale snake, felt no need for sight or camouflage.
They’d caught a break. As Anahrod had hoped, the season meant the tunnels weren’t flooded. That was their only luck, however. The river ran fast and deep. Nothing about it appeared the slightest bit “safe.”
“No.” Naeron turned around.
Claw caught his arm. “This was your idea. What were you planning to do instead? Bleed your way to safety?”
“Oh, this looks faster than the Illgwuel River.” Gwydinion stared wide-eyed at the rushing white water.
Anahrod put her hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Breathe slowly,” she suggested. “Deep breath, then exhale. I won’t let you drown.” She studied Naeron. “How are we looking in terms of time? Can you make a guess?”
He sat down on a wet rock next to the river and stared at the water. He held up a hand. “One hour,” he said. “Then we must go.”
“Lovely,” Ris said, cracking her neck. “Just enough time to really loathe the idea.”
Anahrod leaned against the cave wall. “When we go in the water, don’t swim. You won’t be able to, anyway. Keep your arms by your side and your feet in front of you. Pretend you’re sliding down a hill, feet first. Use your feet to kick away from rocks or obstacles. Every time your head is above water, take a breath.”
“Great,” Claw commented. “You know, Jungle, I don’t think I’ve heard you string more than two sentences together unless you’re talking about this damn river.”
“I’m always loquacious when I’m about to die,” Anahrod said. “Do any of you not know how to swim?”
Claw’s smile wasn’t enough to cover the pained look on her face. “How hard can it be?”
Next to her, Kaibren shook his head, and Anahrod was positive the man wasn’t answering for Claw, but for himself.
Anahrod exhaled slowly and closed her eyes. This was going to be grim. If this was a brief ride—thirty seconds or so—it might have been reasonable to ask this of people who weren’t strong swimmers. But they were riding this from here all the way to the coast. It would take hours . Even the best swimmers faced the very real danger of drowning. The idea of keeping everyone above water was so outrageous she might as well have been trying to teach them to fly…
Her eyes snapped open again and she turned to Ris. “Do you have sky amber on you?”
If it were anyone else…
Well, if it were anyone else, she wouldn’t have asked, because the answer would’ve been no. With a dragonrider, though? Ris might carry sky amber as a matter of course, just in case her dragon should need it.
Ris looked excited for the barest of split seconds, and then bitter resignation settled around her. “Not in the quantities we’d need to keep us all above water.”
Anahrod pointed at Kaibren. “You know Dralar’s Inversion?”
He scoffed, as if to say, Doesn’t everyone?
“Don’t know the inscription myself,” Anahrod clarified. “Only that the inscription exists. One of my mothers used it to—” She paused as a wave of grief threatened to overwhelm her. She wrestled herself back under control. “I’ve heard it can magnify the properties of another item, but at the cost of longevity. So if you had, oh, a tiny amount of meoren dye, you could stretch that into enough for an entire bolt of cloth, but it would shorten the material’s lifespan drastically.”
Ris gave her an arch look. “That’s an oddly specific example.”
“One of my mothers may have once—hypothetically—bribed a dyemaker’s assistant to add that inscription to the fabric for an outfit being made for a rival just before a major soiree.” Anahrod pursed her lips as she contemplated the memory. “His trousers didn’t even make it to the fourth course before they disintegrated right off his body in front of a thousand people.”
Gwydinion started laughing, so hard that Naeron had to grab the boy by the back of the mantle to keep him from slipping into the rushing water.
“Point is,” Anahrod continued, looking at Kaibren, “can we do the same thing with the sky amber to make everyone’s clothes float ?”
Kaibren’s eyes widened. “As the mountains soar into the sky—” He broke off and grimaced. “The oceans will beat death and dishonor onto a thousand shores before they wash away his pride!”
As one, everyone turned to Claw.
She swallowed. “I think he’s saying it would work right up until the water washes away the inscription.” Claw gave Kaibren a sympathetic look. “Sorry, old man. I didn’t recognize that quote.”
He scowled and waved a hand irritably at her before sullenly chewing on a nail.
“Nomad emblem, no. 3,” Ris said softly, “using the northern cross correlation.”
His head jerked up. Kaibren blinked at her several times, then grabbed his pack and began riffling for supplies as Ris added, “We don’t have the time for embroidery. Paper maybe?”
“Screw paper,” Claw said, with feeling. “If you can make it waterproof, put it on our skin .”
Ris sighed. “Do you remember when Anahrod said it would drastically decrease the lifespan of whatever it was used on? The word ‘disintegration’ may have come up at one point.”
Claw opened her mouth, then closed it again. “Or we could use paper. Paper sounds great, too.”
“Yes,” Ris said. “That’s what I thought.”
After that, everyone helped grind up the ink and sky amber, combining both with water.
At one point, Claw said, “I thought sky amber was supposed to float innately.”
“Not without help,” Gwydinion explained. “Very proprietary. The Travelers Guild zealously guards the process. Before that it’s just”—he waved a hand at the tiny pieces of resin waiting to be ground down—“like this. The raw version is what the dragons burn as incense.”
Gwydinion gave Kaibren a narrow-eyed look, like he might at any moment demand to see Kaibren’s license to know the sky amber inscription formula. If so, he overcame the impulse.
They continued grinding as Kaibren began drawing out the inscriptions using sky amber–infused ink on paper. By the third sheet, Naeron had to start sitting on pages to keep them from floating away in the air. Before long, each of them had a page—all waterproof and trying to drag them airborne.
“Who’s… who’s first?” Gwydinion scanned the rolling waters below with ill-concealed dread.
“I’ll light the way,” Ris said.
Anahrod expected the dragonrider to say more, but Ris gave Anahrod a saucy wink and jumped. The water whisked her away so quickly all Anahrod could see was the reflection of Ris’s amulet light on the walls.
“You next,” Anahrod told Gwydinion. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Anahrod had to hand it to the boy. He didn’t hesitate.
Neither did she, for practical reasons if nothing else: she preferred to stay as close to Ris’s light as possible for as long as possible.
The water was warm, hinting at a volcanic origin or a long journey through the jungles before plunging underground.
Despite this advantage, the trip took on nightmarish qualities. Being impossible to sink did nothing to stop the violent white water from tossing her about. If she kicked too hard against a rock, she pulled herself sideways, an ugly position to be in if she wanted to avoid smashing her head. The light from Ris’s locket reflected against the tunnel roof as they raced down the river, a one-color kaleidoscope fracturing its ambiance in all directions. Without the paper, it would have been nearly impossible for her to prevent herself from drowning.
While she was enduring all this, a stray thought occurred to her.
Ris had called her Anahrod.
She’d never told Ris—or anyone else in that group—her real name.
Whether it was the worst possible spot to panic or the best was debatable, but that was the moment that the river plunged into darkness.
Anahrod had no way to know what had happened to Ris, or her light. Anahrod might have heard Gwydinion call out, but she couldn’t be certain. The churning water drowned out all other noise.
She seethed in a world of roaring water and darkness.
The threat of braining herself against sharp rocks vanished, primarily because there were suddenly no rocks at all, sharp or otherwise. She couldn’t think of an explanation for the sudden change in the river, but it distracted her enough that she didn’t notice when the sound of the river shifted from whitewater noise to something more rhythmic.
A second later she plunged underwater, the world simultaneously muffled and roaring. The water pushed her violently forward before releasing her into a blue-green expanse, almost painfully bright when compared to the blackness of the river tunnel.
The river had emptied into the sea.
Naeron had been right, she thought. It was high tide in the Bay of Bones, and if she didn’t swim up to the surface, she’d drown.
Fortunately for her, the inscribed paper knew which way was up, even if she was less certain. As she broke the water’s surface and gasped for breath, something metallic flashed overhead. Gwydinion’s voice called out for her.
Again, by name.
An arm wrapped around Anahrod before she could slip back under the water.
“Don’t worry, beautiful,” Ris whispered. “I’ve got you.”
All the blood in her head rushed somewhere else. Not metaphorically, but literally.
Anahrod knew what flying sickness felt like, and this wasn’t it. Something else was happening.
Naeron, she realized. Naeron and his power over blood.
Her last thought before unconsciousness overwhelmed all was that she should’ve gone with her first instinct.
Never trust a dragonrider.