Chapter 9 Mullayne #2
And then Hakara was kneeling next to him, holding a square of cloth in front of his face, straps hanging from the rubbery edges.
He felt everything inside him go still. He had forgotten, in the confusion of the aether sickness, that he’d been wearing it when they’d found him. “I know what this does,” she said.
It was still new, this technology. He’d not had the chance to properly test it until his expedition, and that had gone all wrong.
He’d killed them. He’d killed all of them.
The only thing that could make this right was if he finished what they’d started.
If he couldn’t follow Tolemne’s path to Unterra, he could at least follow it back to the surface, to understand where and how things had gone so very wrong.
Was this truly what Tolemne had bargained for? If what was written wasn’t true, then what did that mean for restoration?
Hakara was still talking, taking his silence as acknowledgment. “You’re not going straight back into danger. I didn’t save your life just so you could immediately go and off yourself. You’re a noble and an inventor, and we need your help.”
He scoffed. “And what if I don’t want to help you?”
She wasn’t wearing a weapon, just several pouches affixed to her belt, but the single half-step she took toward him was filled with menace. “Let me be clear, friend. There are bigger things at stake here. You’re not in a position to negotiate.”
His mouth was so dry. He could feel the grains of dirt and dust stuck to his gums. There was something in Hakara’s gaze that felt familiar, as though he’d met her at one point or another – though that was impossible. But she was not his friend. “My friends are dead.”
A flicker of understanding, but her gaze was relentless.
“It happens,” she said, her voice light.
“Not a one of my people hasn’t lost someone, and unlike your friends, those they lost didn’t have much choice in the matter.
” Each of her entourage looked steadfastly in other directions, none of them meeting his eyes.
He caught the tightening of a jaw on one, the sheen of tears on another.
“You have talked your way in circles. Do not trust what is written. What does it mean, and what sort of expedition were you on?”
And maybe it was the way she settled onto the floor near him, with the air of a bull that had set its feet to charge, or maybe it was the sense he got that beneath her bluster there was some fresh hurt too, but he found the story spilling from his lips.
Not all of it. Not what the deaths of Jeeoon and Pont had meant to him.
Not the votes they’d taken and the thumb he’d pressed on those scales.
But the larger parts of it – the hope of a cure, the desire to see Unterra, and finally the discrepancy between his notes and the reality.
“There’s a third aerocline.” He pressed a hand to the creases of his forehead, felt the dust and dirt caked onto his skin.
The woman with the russet hair went still. “There’s a what?”
The enormous man with the heavy jaw and black-feathered wings stood behind Hakara. He stared at her back as though willing her to look at him. She did not, the whole of her focus on Mull.
He took a breath. “We made it past the first and second aeroclines. We thought we’d get to Unterra. And then we encountered another one.”
Silence met this pronouncement.
“He’s mad,” said the man with the curved sword. “Still aether-sick.”
“And you’re the Unanointed,” he blurted out. He probably shouldn’t have said it aloud, but they were not miners, and he didn’t enjoy the implication that he wasn’t of sound mind.
The man with the curved sword put his hand on the hilt. “Quiet.”
Hakara finally exchanged glances with the winged man behind her. Why did he get the impression that they both already knew there were more than two aeroclines? She held a hand up. “No, Dashu. Let him speak. If he’s spotted who we are, then his mind is sound.”
Mull shook his head. “I wish I was lying. I wish there wasn’t a third aerocline.
We might have made it to Unterra.” Instead of dying, one by one.
Imeah stabbing a blade into Pont’s back.
Pont’s body heavy atop his, the scrape of skin against stone as he wriggled free.
Imeah’s back disappearing into the darkness.
He shut his eyes tight, wishing he could wipe the memories from his mind.
“There’s not supposed to be a third aerocline, and yet there was.
Nothing that was carved into stone down there matched the scrolls and books I’ve read.
One of the carvings said not to trust what was written on paper.
It said he would write the truth on stone.
Another indicated that Tolemne didn’t stay in Unterra.
He returned to the surface. To his family’s tomb.
“It’s there.” He pointed to the map. “There are answers in that tomb and I have to go there.” What he didn’t say was: I have to know.
If he’d been fed lies all his life, then what was he?
A scholar of lies, of untruths, of a spun reality that glimmered and shifted, capricious and diaphanous as the clouds.
He had to find out why Tolemne had returned to the surface, what had truly happened next.
For the sake of his dead friends, who were murdered by the lies he’d spewed as though they were truth. For himself.
Hakara cast him a skeptical look. “He’s speaking too logically. I don’t think he’s raving. But if that tomb is inside the den, he’s not getting in without a fight.”
A low grumble as the winged man spoke up. “We don’t have the resources or—”
She cut him off, as though it were nothing to speak over an altered with arms as thick as Mull’s thighs. “I need your help and I’m willing to make concessions to get it, but going into that den is not an option. We won’t fight for you.”
He was used to this. His family scoffed at his expeditions, at his desire to find Tolemne’s Path.
An ill-advised obsession. He’d funded each one from his personal accounts; he’d found and hired his own crews.
Why would anyone help him now? His jaw shifted, teeth setting into place.
“You won’t need to. Just let me go. I’ll do what you want, and then I’ll infiltrate the den myself. ”