CHAPTER SEVEN
C HAPTER S EVEN
A strange ache seizes Dawsyn as the hours trickle by. It begins in her stomach, a small, muted pulse, easily ignored. She barely notices its presence among the other small pangs of foot travel – the sting of her heels sliding within her boots, the pull of the sacks she straps to her shoulders, the strain of her eyes as she tries uselessly to peer through the unending dimness.
But, insidiously, the ache spreads. It reaches her muscles and makes each step laborious. It shortens her breath. She finds herself coughing with the exertion.
And she is not alone. The Chasm is full of the sounds of ragged breath and dry coughs. Dawsyn wonders if it is something in the air that parches their throats and turns their breath to sand.
Esra walks close by her side, and he eyes her suspiciously as she coughs again. “You sound like a goat,” he says. “If a goat were to choke on its own testicles.”
Dawsyn snorts. “I wonder if you work to be indelicate or if it comes by you naturally.”
“Pariahs are renowned for their shocking indelicacy. Princesses however–”
“How many times must I denounce that! My grandmother was a princess, not I.”
“No,” Esra agrees. “You are, in fact, a goat.”
“I’ve been accused of worse,” she says with a grin, then coughs again, her eyes watering.
Esra frowns, but he does not raise further concern. “You would make quite a monarch, you know,” he remarks, stumbling over a half-concealed boulder. “A great one.”
Dawsyn sighs. “Of what kingdom?”
He doesn’t answer immediately. The silence stretches a few moments longer than he would usually allow. “Any kingdom,” he says eventually. “All kingdoms need fair leaders. Moral leaders.”
She grimaces at the mention of morality. After all, should she wish to, a flood of barely vindicated brutalities could be conjured from her memory wherein she was left with a bloody ax and a hollow chest. If morality is a requirement of royalty, then a crown will likely burst into flame should it ever meet her head.
“I’ve rarely seen fairness and morality meet at the same table and not come to blows,” Dawsyn says. “Balancing the scales of fairness often requires… immoral acts.”
“You are right, Dawsyn dear, as you so often are.” Esra nods morosely. “Morality might well be a faraway dream. But fairness, Dawsyn… ‘ the balancing of scales’ , as you say. That dream, I believe, is far closer to you than anyone else. And a pariah like me,” he says, taking Dawsyn’s hand and squeezing her fingers, “can only hope to be led by a queen, even if she were a goat.” He smiles at her, but another boulder catches his toe, and he lurches forward, breaking the moment. “Fuck me!” he shrieks.
“I’ve rarely seen one person stumble so often,” Dawsyn remarks dryly.
“Princess, I walk cobblestones in a gown with a three-foot train while villages throw rotten lettuces at me, and I don’t miss a step. I’m fucking blind in here.”
Dawsyn laughs again, thinking it must be a person of truer magic than hers to make light of a place so grim.
They stop earlier than Dawsyn intended. She raises her hand to call for a halt, too tired to raise her voice, and hears the resounding relief from the mob behind her.
They follow the same routines as the previous nights. Hector, Salem, Esra and Ryon ration out the last of what little food they had managed to bring. Dawsyn and Yennes comb through everyone in search of any that might need aid, and the people of the Ledge drink from the slow-moving creek. They try to find quiet corners and crevices to sleep in along the rockface.
Dawsyn drags her feet. With each expenditure of magic, no matter how small, the fatigue worsens. She finds herself longing to find Ryon, to seek in him that strange sense of renewal.
“Miss Sabar?” comes a voice from the ground. Dawsyn peers down, letting her torch reveal a woman huddled, a child in her lap. The small boy appears waxen in the low light. His lips horribly dried. His eyes are closed with something that resembles sleep and even though he gives a small cough it does not rouse him.
“My son,” the woman says. “He grew ill throughout the day.”
Dawsyn frowns. “Does he have a fever?”
“No,” the woman says. “Only this cough. And he complained of tiredness, though we are all tired. I carried him most of the way.”
Dawsyn grimaces. The boy looks to be about seven years old. It can’t have been easy to carry him. She crouches next to the woman. “Diedre, isn’t it?”
She nods. “And Leon,” she looks down at the boy.
“I can try to… fix it,” Dawsyn tells her, grimacing at her choice of words. “But I am a novice with this magic. It may not be completely effective.”
“Please,” Dierdre begs, the lines in her forehead deepening. “We’ll fall behind if I must carry him another day.”
Dawsyn readies herself. Slowly she places her hand to the boy’s throat. “Close your eyes,” she warns Deirdre.
Palm to the site of disrepair, Baltisse had told her.
“Ishveet.” Dawsyn encourages the waning magic to rid the child of whatever ails him. She feels it flow through her to him, feels it move through his blood.
The small boy startles as the magic touches him, clutching tightly to his mother in fear. Too soon, the magic pulls back, thinning into something insubstantial. It flees back into her palm.
The child, wrapped in furs, stares wide-eyed at Dawsyn, but his cheeks hold their colour, he appears alert. When he coughs, it is faint and innocuous.
“There we are,” Deirdre sighs, gripping her son tighter. “It’s all right, you are well.”
But Dawsyn fears he won’t remain well for long. She nods to Leon, then to Dierdre, and forces herself to stand.
The limitations to her magic are endlessly frustrating. She coughs into the crook of her elbow and wipes the wetness from her eyes, wincing against the pang in her throat and chest.
Still your lips… cease your breath… amid our walls… we dealers call…
Dawsyn stills.
Lie where sorrow dares not be… amid our walls… inside our breast.
A tangle of verse, over-lapping and intertwining as it breathes into her ear. She whirls in a circle, bringing her ax forth. But as with each time before, there is nothing that embodies the hissing. A trio of women seated a foot away stare at Dawsyn warily, disquieted only by her, and not by the bodiless voices only she seems to hear.
“Dawsyn?” Yennes calls to her, the glow of her torch bobbing steadily closer.
Dawsyn gives her head a shake, clearing the noise as Yennes comes into view. The woman peers up at Dawsyn for a moment before looking away. “I’ve seen to as many as I can tonight. I’m afraid I can do no more.” Her voice quavers as she speaks.
Dawsyn watches Yennes’ fingers grip and regrip her cloak with restless urgency, her hands always revealing her discomfort, and Dawsyn is suddenly struck by a thought, a niggling suspicion. “Do you hear them?” she asks abruptly.
Yennes seems to shrivel. She shakes her head, not in refute, but rather as a warning. Do not speak of it, she seems to say. Please.
Dawsyn recalls again Yennes’ mutterings in a voice not quite her own. Two paths, both are filled. Two paths, both are filled.
Filled with what? Dawsyn had asked her in the cove. Tell me.
I cannot begin to describe, Yennes had hedged.
Try. Please.
A… presence, she had said. The presence of something… most sinister.
Dawsyn had breathed a sigh of relief. A presence is easily ignored.
Not these, Yennes had said, her eyes closing against something imaginary. These won’t be ignored.
Dawsyn feels the tightening in her chest again, something weighing her down, and she coughs. She splutters without drawing breath, until all the air is expelled from her lungs and Yennes has to grip her arms to keep her upright.
“How many did you come across with the same infection?” Yennes asks her now, patting her back ineffectually.
Dawsyn is doubled over, panting raggedly with her hands pressed to her knees. Her ax lies before her, discarded. “In…fection?”
“Yes. The coughing. The fever.”
“Ten, though I hear many more.” And indeed, the Chasm’s silence is splintered over and over again by splutters from every direction.
“I saw to six of them,” Yennes says with a sigh. “Though I couldn’t clear their chests completely. It is difficult to cure an unknown sickness.”
“Where has it come from?”
“I suspect it is the water. Though it could be the air, or a virus carried here from the Ledge. Or… something more insidious altogether.”
“You mean a presence within the Chasm?”
Yennes doesn’t answer. For whatever reason, the woman does not give voice to what they both so obviously hear, what they both feel.
“If there were something here that wished for our demise, there are far quicker ways than the spread of a cough,” Dawsyn says quietly. She is well aware of the women nearby who might be listening.
“Then, we must consider some kind of contaminant.”
Dawsyn curses. “How are we to continue if the water cannot be drunk?”
“I do not know, but we have exhausted our food stores this night, Dawsyn.”
“Yes, I know.”
“A day faster than we had planned for.”
“ I know,” Dawsyn repeats.
“You cannot take away water as well,”
“I am well aware.”
“And yet, it seems we’ve come no closer to–”
“–to the end. Yes, Yennes. There is no one in this fucking Chasm with a better grasp on the depths of our dilemma than I.”
Dawsyn’s voice rises with each word. She runs her free hand over her face and ignores its trembling. Three days they have been in the Chasm. Just three.
“There is nothing to be done,” she murmurs, struggling to reign in her temper, her fear. She cannot ask that these people fast from water without knowing if it is indeed contaminated. Dehydration will weaken them faster than any infection can. “We will help who we can, and hope that the end of this journey draws near.”
Yennes hesitates, biting her lip. “And if it does not?”
Dawsyn closes her eyes. She breathes deeply, fortifying herself. “Then we will get everyone out.”
Yennes does not say the obvious thing, that the Glacians are still weak, that Dawsyn has not yet folded successfully, that Yennes’ own magic is dwindling, that getting these people into the Chasm was a feat all on its own, a challenge of which will not likely be matched.
Instead, Yennes says, “We fight against time now,” and then she looks about her. “We ought not waste too much of it remaining idle.”
Dawsyn raises her torch to illuminate as much as she can and sees her people sleeping in their disturbingly deadened way. People who she will allow to drink from this Chasm, despite the sickness it may or may not spread. “Idleness is our enemy,” Dawsyn mutters, only it is not her own voice she hears. It is her grandmother’s. It is Briar’s.
Yennes sighs. “Indeed.”
“Please, say nothing of the infection. It will not serve to spread panic.”
Yennes nods once, then turns away.
But it is sheer, undiluted panic that Dawsyn feels herself, watching Yennes leave. She coughs again and feels a stab of corresponding pain in her chest, in her throat. It is all she can do not to sink to the ground where she stands and submit to sleep.
Seal your eyes and sleep… lie here with us…
There is only one resurfacing thought that stops her, that forces her to turn back. Ryon, it tells her. It promises to fill her, ease her. Find him. Then sleep.
So concentrated is she on this promise, that she doesn’t see the person waiting there in the dark until it is too late. A man blocking the path mere feet from where she stands, well within hearing range.
Dawsyn falters as he steps into view. Her heart plummets into her stomach.
The man leers at her.
“Nevrak,” Dawsyn says.