CHAPTER THIRTEEN
C HAPTER T HIRTEEN
“How much farther are we to walk?” a boy asks Ryon. He blinks up at him from the ground, his irritation clear at having been roused.
They all ask it. Every face that wakes and spots Ryon’s through this fucking darkness bids him to relay the very same. How much longer? Are we nearing the end? Surely, we are close?
Ryon turns his face in the vague direction of the voices and says, “Not far,” though it is a lie. Each time it is said, the lie grows heavier, more difficult to carry.
The fifth day within the Chasm looms ahead.
He raises his arms to stretch out his shoulder blades and winces. The wound in his back has closed but not healed. He feels it ache as though the knife still remains. Around Ryon, the Ledge people rise from their makeshift resting places and gather their belongings. They are not the same people who entered the Chasm days before. They are lesser. Diminished. Each wears the same weary expression of fatigue.
Humans weren’t meant for the dark, Ryon has decided.
The echo of hacking and coughing is inescapable. It grates on him. Fingernails on the inside of his skull, scratching at the same spot, over and over. He should be thankful that he has not succumbed to the same illness. But enduring the sounds of it around him feels draining enough.
Ryon bends to shake the shoulder of a late riser – an older male, covered by a threadbare blanket. “Wake up,” he says, shaking the man’s shoulder harder. “We must go,” but the man’s body simply slumps over, his face pressing against the ground. Ryon raises his torch higher, and only then does he make out the ring of darkened soil around the man, as though something had seeped from him.
“What happened?” comes a voice – one he can distinguish even in complete obscurity, if only for the thrum in his veins when he hears it. Dawsyn.
He turns to see her in the light he casts and watches her approach. He notes how grey her pallor looks, how far the dark circles beneath her eyes stretch.
“Dead,” Ryon tells her. “His throat has been sliced.”
“By his own hand, it seems.” She nods to that which Ryon had overlooked. The blood-crusted blade clutched within a stiffened fist. His torchlight glances off the rusty metal.
Dawsyn’s looks down to her own feet. “Fool,” she mutters, though her voice quavers. “Escaping the Ledge, only to lay down and die in the Chasm.” She presses the heels of her palms to her eyes, pushing against whatever thoughts plague her. It seems she is always plagued. Always pushing.
“We will find the end, malishka,” Ryon says. “Not all were equipped to see the journey through.”
The words are meant to reassure her, though Ryon himself is far from reassured. He looks at the man, sees the ring of his blood and feels disturbed.
These Ledge-dwellers, ones of hardy breeding, who forge an impossible existence against such callous land, they are not the kind prone to quitting. This man makes the second human who took a violent end by their own hand and saw it as the lesser of two evils.
Ryon squeezes his eyes closed against the image of Wes, burning amidst flames.
Dawsyn groans, swaying where she stands.
“Steady, girl,” Ryon says, placing his hand on her hip. “Are you all right?” For a moment, Ryon thinks she’ll scoff, or perhaps make some flippant remark and carry onward. Onward with the quest. Headfirst through the next obstacle, and then the next.
Instead, she teeters sideways. Her head falls heavy against his chest.
There is a remarkable sensation that fills him in these small moments – these fragments of time where she devests some invisible outer shell and entrusts herself to him. If only she were aware of his deepest desires, his most selfish wishes. That he covets her. That he would become happily entrusted to shield her for the remainder of his days and forever wonder at his good fortune. He only ever wants to be this. Forever. He wants to be the place where she lays.
But she is a creature easily startled by hasty advances. And so, he settles for brushing the hair away from her neck and placing his hand against her skin. He draws her subtly closer, though he cannot quite stop the protective curve of his frame creating walls around her.
“What can be done?” she asks. A small surrender. One he cannot yield to – there is little to be done.
“We continue down the path,” he says in lieu of anything serviceable.
“And when we grow too tired? Half are sick. More will become sick still.”
A tendril of panic unspools in his stomach to hear her resolution waver.
“We carry on,” he says firmly. “Whatever ails them, it does not seem so sinister. As long as they remain on their feet, there is hope.”
“I feel it,” she whispers to him. It is a secret breathed into the fabric of his shirt. “This infection. It has hold of me. It speaks.”
The panic blooms. A voice speaking to her? Cajoling her? “What does it say?” he demands. For a moment, she is silent, and Ryon thinks she won’t relay it, that she’ll crawl back within the armour she has forged and withdraw.
But then the words come.
“It wants me to surrender,” she confesses, the way a starved man speaks of supper. The words curl with deep yearning. It is a voice Ryon does not recognise in her. Not in this human, so impervious. So strong.
“Yennes said the Chasm was not empty,” Ryon growls, his pulse jumping, muscles tensing. “Perhaps she spoke of more than one threat.”
Dawsyn nods, pulling her body away from Ryon’s, likely feeling how cool his blood has become.
“Do not heed it, malishka,” Ryon says suddenly, taking her jaw in his hands, angling her face to his. “Do you hear me?”
She turns her cheek into his palm, then nods.
Too easy, the submission comes.
“All right,” she says, though her voice is a faint imitation. “Time to march on.”
Ryon stays to the middle of their convoy as they journey, as he has done each day. He cannot see Dawsyn who leads, or Tasheem who herds the stragglers. Indeed, he can only see the faint outline of those closest to him.
But he hears them all. The straggled breaths, bodies hitting earth as they stumble, the pained cries as they glance their shins and knees along the hazardous path, littered by invisible traps.
And the coughing. The coughing is all around.
“I can hold that awhile, Ryon.” Yennes appears at his shoulder. He can just make out the familiar profile of her face. She taps the torch in his hand.
His arm has been growing weary from holding it aloft. Ryon passes it to her. “Thank you.”
“No trouble.” Her words always seem so muted, so hesitant around him. And he cannot help but feel uneasy around her in return. Perhaps it is her innate furtiveness, her skittishness rubbing off on him.
“Tell me,” she says in a voice that could be aloof if it weren’t so timid. “You grew up in the Colony, or the palace?”
Ryon is taken aback by the question. “You know of the Colony?”
“Tasheem and I have spoken some.”
Ryon hesitates a moment. “The Colony,” he relents. “I made my way into the palace when I was full-grown.”
A pause, and then, “How did you manage it?”
He sighs. It isn’t a tale he enjoys telling – one full of deception, fouled remembrances, old ties. Even more unpleasant, that he should tell it to a near stranger.
But Yennes was a friend of Baltisse. Someone she had trusted enough with Dawsyn’s life. Yennes has aided them greatly, helped Dawsyn, closed his wounds. His distrust in her is irrational at best. She deserves his leniency.
“I had a… friend,” he begins. “A Glacian noble. He trained me to fight, looked over me as I grew. He eventually persuaded the King to permit my entrance into the palace. As a servant.”
Yennes is quiet, but he can feel her practically vibrating, absorbing each word. “And that was what you wanted?” she asked. “To leave the Colony?”
“It was what needed to be done, to learn the ways to tear down the palace.”
More silence. “Your benefactor,” she says. “He must have been a very generous being.”
Ryon grits his teeth. “I assure you, he is not worthy of any praise,” he says darkly. “He was merely loyal to the memory of my father. Not to me.”
“Even so,” she says. “A generous Glacian indeed. I knew them to be the opposite. Brutes.”
Quite , Ryon thinks. He has a hundred memories of a hundred bodies snapped and shoved and hauled from the pool. “They regarded themselves so highly they could no longer see the difference between themselves and gods,” Ryon intones. “You were very lucky to escape their cruelty.”
Yennes doesn’t respond. Ryon can hear her walking alongside him, see the golden reflection of fire in her eyes, but he cannot discern her expression, her thoughts.
“Who flew you to the bottom of the Chasm?” he asks abruptly, tired of having this one thing unanswered. “You said you did not know the Glacians to be a generous breed, yet it must have been a pure-blooded brute who offered you an escape into this pit. I watched a hundred or more soulless humans fall into it. No amount of iskra could bring one back,” Ryon waits until she gathers the courage to look at him squarely. Her face a mere shadow. “Who was it?” he asks.
Yennes takes a deep breath. “I did not know their names, Ryon,” she says. “Only that their pool could not have me and that there was at least one Glacian among them still human enough to see me to the bottom of this hole.” She utters this last with a mixture of venom and trepidation. “And even imbued with iskra, I barely survived it.”
Ryon considers her words for a moment. “What did you encounter, here in the Chasm?” He is sure his efforts will be wasted. Dawsyn and he had both questioned Yennes on what they might find here in the world’s middle before they’d left Terrsaw, but the woman barely uttered an intelligible word. She had clammed up, her lips pursed and trembling. Her hands had clenched and unclenched, giving way to whatever anxiety lied within her.
Horrible things, she’d said. Bodiless beasts. That was all Ryon had interpreted amongst the quiet muttering. Yennes had a tendency of retreating inward, speaking to herself in hushed murmurs. She did so now, mouthing what could have been answers or spells for all Ryon knew.
“Yennes?” he says to redraw her attention. “ Yennes. ”
“Death,” she says. “Death and Dyvolsh.” Then she says no more, for she has doubled over, her body spasming with racking coughs that erupt from something dark and insidious within.
Hesitantly, Ryon stops alongside her. He allows others near him to pass by. He places a wary hand on her shoulder to support her, lest she teeter face-first to the craggy ground.
Her muscles jump beneath his hand, spurred into action by that which consumes her. Consumes many of them. Even now, Ryon hears Yennes’ expulsions echoed by ten others, twenty. An unending melody that only seems to grow more frenetic as time passes. An insidious crescendo. Somewhere down the path, Dawsyn likely joins the chorus.
Ryon had lain awake the night before as Dawsyn coughed in her sleep, her breaths choked and disjointed. And yet still she had not woken, touched by that unnatural slumber of the other humans. Trapped in sleep, not roused even by their own gasps for air.
“Dawsyn is hearing voices,” Ryon says, though he remains reluctant to offer this confidence to Yennes. “Is that what you mean, when you say Dyvolsh is here?”
Yennes straightens. Wipes her mouth. Whatever her expression, Ryon cannot see it. She does not answer him.
“Do you hear them, Yennes? The voices? Answer this much, please.”
“Mother help me,” she mumbles, the words hardly discernible. “I hear every whisper.” Then, she stoops once more, the resounding hacks erupting from her chest.
“Damn it,” Ryon growls, grabbing her shoulders as she begins to fall. “It is this sickness. It must be. It addles the mind.”
“N-no,” Yennes splutters, more vehement than Ryon has ever heard her. “The voices belong to the Chasm.”
“How could you possibly know?”
“Because they are no different to those I outran when I was last here. And they have haunted me since.”
He can feel it vibrating from her, that marrow-deep knowledge. He feels her muscles coiled beneath his touch, as though she resists some deep-seated instinct to flee.
And yet she has not.
“Why did you come?” he asks her, and this time his voice is softer. Whatever misgivings he may have, he cannot ignore her sacrifice, her courage.
She turns toward him, and though her features are shrouded in shadow, Ryon is sure he is being searched, measured.
“There are things here that I could not simply turn my back on,” she says.
With a fortifying breath, Yennes passes the torch back to Ryon. “I’m afraid I may topple should I try to journey with it.”
Ryon nods to her as she walks onward, disappearing into the folds of darkness.
And Ryon is left with a faint glimmer of hope.
…They are no different to the ones I outran when I was last here. And they have haunted me since.
These voices, Ryon thinks, looking ahead to where he imagines Dawsyn might be, dragging her feet along this cursed path. These voices can be beaten.