“Right and left auricles?” asked Akki.
“That’s it. Auricle. That’s what I mean.” There was excitement in his voice. “We’ll call her Auricle, which sounds like oracle, which is a kind of omen.”
“A good one, I hope,” Akki said. “We could use some good luck.”
“Auricle. I like that. Because she reminds me of Heart’s Blood,” Jakkin said. “Get it? Part of a heart is an auricle.”
Akki put her hand out and touched Jakkin’s arm. “She is no relation to Heart’s Blood, Jakkin. Don’t keep hurting yourself that way.”
“How do you know? Remember Blood’s A Rover, one of the nursery dragons who went feral? He could have flown to these mountains. They’re not far from the nursery. And if he did, and bred with other mountain dragons—well, Auricle and Heart’s Blood could be related. Distant cousins. All of Sarkkhan’s nursery dragons went back to a single breeding pair. So it’s possible. No, even more than possible. It’s probable. They’re cousins.”
Akki didn’t answer, but her sending was dim and crackled around the edges.
“Anyway, we need to wake Auricle,” Jakkin said.
As if on cue, the dragon began to grunt and snort, the usual sounds of a dragon rousing.
“Hello, Auricle,” Jakkin said, stretching out the name itself and sending her a rainbow of grayish hearts.
The dragon ignored him and began grooming herself.
“Hey, worm waste, that’s you!” Jakkin said. Then, switching to the more formal language of the dragon master, he added, “Auricle is thy name, little one.” He punctuated it with a stronger sending.
The dragon looked up, its sending puzzled, fragmented. “Name? No-name? Name? No-name?”
“This one is either stupid, brain-damaged, or things are weirder down here than we imagined,” Jakkin said.
Akki agreed, but put her hand on the dragon’s neck and whispered into its ear, “Thy name is Auricle, little one. Auricle. For thou art part of Heart’s Blood in that thou art part of something that belongs to the two of us, Jakkin and me.”
At that the dragon’s head snapped up, and in the not quite complete dark they could see the dark shrouds of her eyes.
“No-name,” came the sending. “Dragons no-name.” It bent its neck almost in two and waited, a gesture of such submission that Jakkin was shocked.
“Well, No-name,” he said at last in exasperation, “get yourself up. We are going to search for your bubbles and your man/no-man. Now. Up.” He said the last angrily and the sending was laced with a different kind of fire.
Akki added, “Go!”
The dragon leaped to its feet, its sending a mumble of grays and blacks. “Up. Go. Man says. Man says. Man says. Up. Go.” It turned carefully around in the cave and with a slow, lumbering, shambling walk began to go back the way it had come.
Jakkin grabbed Akki’s hand and squeezed it once. “Up and go, us, too,” he whispered directly into her ear, so there was no echo.
***
AS THEY WALKED down the spiraling tunnel, following the dragon, they expected things to become even darker, but instead the way seemed lighter. A fuzzy phosphorescence spattered the cave walls, spotty at first, and then in larger and larger patches. By the time they had gone around four or five deep bends, the tunnel was bathed in a gray-white glow that made the shadows they cast only darker.
Akki pulled on Jakkin’s shirt and he turned, then gasped, for her face was gray and her mouth and eyes dark holes.
“You look strange,” Akki said.
“You look like . . . a skull,” Jakkin answered.
They didn’t speak after that or look at each other, preferring to send little bits of comforting color back and forth between their bridged minds, reminders of the world outside, where gray was only a minor tint. But color was difficult to remember underground, and soon their sendings shaded off into the gray of the stone and shadow around them.
The walls grew damper to the touch, then progressively slimier. They could hear things dripping just out of sight. Twice Akki bumped into long fanglike pieces of rock that hung down from the ceiling, and once Jakkin tripped over a tooth of rock that protruded up from the floor. And still the tunnel spiraled down and down as they followed the large moving shadow that was the dragon’s back and tail.
They heard a sudden loud splash and, turning a final bend, found themselves at the edge of a body of water.
Squinting his eyes, Jakkin realized that a small lake lay before them. He could just make out the dragon’s head and neck protruding and throwing off ripples as it moved.
“Now what?” Jakkin asked.
Akki bent down and felt the water. “It’s cold,” she said.
“Well, we’re part dragon,” Jakkin said. “We should be able to stand the cold.”
“The cold’s not the problem,” Akki said. “I . . . I can’t swim.”
Jakkin was silent for a moment, watching the dragon’s head disappearing into the dark beyond.
“Maybe there’s some other way around, some sort of ledge or path,” Akki said.
“We don’t have time,” Jakkin said. “Auricle . . . she’s getting away.”
“Then you swim after her, Jakkin, and I’ll keep looking for another way and follow along after.” Her voice was thin.
“I don’t want to leave you,” Jakkin said.
“Go!” Akki gave him a push.
He stumbled backward into the water, which was colder than he’d expected, then he turned and splashed noisily after the dragon, his clothing slowing him down but not so much as to take him below. The sound of his swimming drowned out everything else. Once or twice he went under, but kept up his stroke. The water had a flat, metallic taste. When he opened his eyes under the water it was too dark to see anything. Blindly, he swam on.
The lake was not very large and he was on the other side quickly. But when he turned around the cave behind him was black. He couldn’t see Akki at all.
“Akkkkkkkkkkki,” he called out.
The sounds bounced crazily off the cave walls and it was some time before it was quiet again.
At last there came a tinny cry, neither plea nor call.
“Go on,” said the voice. Or at least Jakkin thought that’s what it sounded like. He mouthed the words back: “Go on.”
He tried to send to her, but there was no response. All he received was a fuzzy static, a crackling that sputtered across his mind as if the water had somehow damaged his ability to receive. He shivered, more from fear than cold, then looked back over his shoulder to the passage where the dragon had disappeared.
“She said to go on,” he urged himself. Then he hesitated for another long moment before he plunged into the passage after the worm.
11
STATIC STILL CRACKLED through Jakkin’s mind, blanking out even the lightest of sendings, but he could track the dragon by the trail of large puddles in the middle of three tunnels leading away from the lake. Jakkin searched his pockets frantically for a marker to leave for Akki. Finding none, he tore off a pocket instead and dropped it on the floor of the cave. It was the best he could do.
The middle tunnel curved downward at a steep slope, but it, too, was lit with patches of phosphorescence. They were at such regular intervals, Jakkin wondered if they had been placed there.
“Question number twelve,” he thought grimly.
The tunnel took one last abrupt turning, and then, suddenly, he could see light ahead. It wasn’t the bright white light of outdoors, but rather a flickering reddish glow. For a moment he wondered if he should wait for Akki to catch up to him. He turned and looked over his shoulder, straining into the darkness behind, but he couldn’t see her. In fact, he couldn’t see anything. For a moment he listened, but his crackle-filled mind reached nothing. The only way to go was forward, so he edged slowly toward the red light.
As he got closer he heard a kind of steady growl above the mind-crackling. It came from the same direction as the light. He moved forward again
and began to distinguish two separate noises, one a low clanging and the other an echo. The closer he got, the more he became mesmerized by the light and sound. After so many hours in the cave, the color and noise both assaulted and drew him. Finally, overwhelmed by it all, he stopped, crouched down, and put his hands up over his ears. He squeezed his eyes tight until white sparks seemed to jump around in front of them.
For a long time he squatted, unmoving. Then slowly his mind cleared, as if he were waking up and knew he was waking, but wasn’t yet shed of a dream. He opened his eyes, took his hands away from his ears, and stood. His knees gave a protesting creak.
The scene before him was as odd as anything he’d gotten from the dragon. It looked as if it were a sending he couldn’t read properly. He was on the far end of a large cavern lit by flames from a central pit that was as wide across as the Narakka River. Sitting on a grillwork over the flames were large pots filled with something that glowed now red and now shadow. Above the pots, on an overhang of rock, were half a dozen leaning figures stirring the pots with long sticks.
Were they men or not-men? Auricle’s puzzlement became his own. Men and notmen. These creatures had a man’s form, muscular and stockier than anyone Jakkin had ever known. But there was something really wrong with the shape. They were much too broad in the shoulder, much too short in the leg. Men and not-men.
One of the strange, stocky creatures saw Jakkin and pointed at him. Without a sound the rest of them all looked up at once.
Jakkin felt his head suddenly filled with strings of picture-questions. Like the sending of dragons, the questions were wordless and yet completely understandable.
“Who you?” The thoughts came in sharp stabs of light. “You? You? Who you?” It was not one mind but a number of them asking the question. He could feel the differences as clearly as if they’d been individual voices.
Jakkin shouted at them across the pit, not yet trusting his mind, needing to feel the precision of words in his mouth. Akki was right about that. “I am Jakkin. Jakkin Stewart. From Sarkkhan’s Nursery. Bondsman and trainer. Master now.” He felt no need to disguise who he was. Surely these creatures knew nothing about the Rokk Pit. Unaccountably, his hand went to his chest, his fingers fumbling for the bond bag that had hung there for so many years. Then he gave a short, staccato laugh. None of that seemed to mean anything to them. He’d try another tack. “I am Jakkin Stewart of the mountains. Out of Heart’s Blood. Who are you?”
That seemed to reach them. They put down their sticks and looked at one another, gesturing wildly but still not speaking aloud. Then, as if on a signal, they all turned and faced him, staring. Their eyes, even from so far away, seemed to glow like an animal’s in the dark.
Jakkin felt his mind fill up again until he felt it would overflow, for the sending was so loud and overpowering, he couldn’t move. It was like Akki’s first sendings multiplied a hundredfold. Hot points of sizzling lights danced in his brain.
How long he stood there, stupefied, he couldn’t have said, but suddenly he felt a painful slap on his cheek and he could see and move again, his mind cleared. In front of him stood the man who had delivered the blow, arm still upraised. A man. Definitely. Stocky, broad-shouldered, hulking, but unquestionably a man. He was stripped down to a skin loincloth, his feet in leather sandals, his chest hairy, his head smooth. But a man.
Despite the stinging cheek, Jakkin smiled at him. The man was a full head shorter than he was.
“I told you who I was,” Jakkin said. “Who are you?”
The man raised his hand again. This time Jakkin saw the blow as well as felt it, yet he couldn’t move from it or respond in kind, for at the same time a ringing admonition leaped into his mind.
“Do not krriah, youngling. You not child. Still you give child’s krriah. Be man.”
Bewildered, Jakkin felt himself cast loose of this second mind-spell. He put his hand to his cheek. He could still feel the heat of the blow beneath his fingers.
“I Makk.” The sending was short, brutal, final. But whether that was his name, his title, or some other designation was not clear.
Before Jakkin could respond, Makk grabbed his arm and jerked him forward until his feet were curled over the lip of the rock. For a moment Jakkin was afraid Makk meant to push him over into the flames. For a short man, he was very powerful. As another protest started to form on his lips, Jakkin felt instructions insinuate themselves in his head. He glanced down at his feet. Below, where his toes curled over the rim, was a rough-carved set of steps.
“Down!”
He had no choice. With Makk at his back, Jakkin carefully made his way down the stone steps, hugging the rock as he went. He could hear the whisper of the man’s feet behind him as he descended, and his head seemed filled with an alien presence he couldn’t quite shake loose. The only thing he could do—and he did it with deliberate care—was to keep Akki’s face out of his thoughts. She must not be caught, as he was, by the not-man men.
12
THE STEPS FOLLOWED the curve of the cave wall and came out on the far side of the pit. Jakkin could feel the heat on his right side, and he longed to turn and say something to the man behind him, but the slap and the strange word kkriah were burned into his memory. Until he knew more he would not chance speaking aloud again.
Their steps echoed in the vast chamber, and Jakkin stopped for a moment, unsure which way he should proceed. He felt Makk’s rough hand on his shoulder turning him toward the left, where there was another tunnel. Once they entered it he was cool again, and he welcomed the dark and the relative quiet.
Makk shoved him along the tunnel and Jakkin went slowly, trying to shutter his mind against the barrage of questions/instructions. The minute he closed the imagined door he felt a kind of release of pressure, as if the man had simultaneously stopped searching around in his thoughts. The oddness of it made him raise his eyebrows, but he kept moving.
The tunnel ended abruptly in another large cavern, but this one was not lit with fires. Instead there was a complete wall of phosphorescence that made the cave a place of deep shadows. Over thirty men were in the room, some sitting at long tables eating, some sleeping on rocky outcroppings, some apparently in deep conversations, for their hands moved as if shaping images, though their mouths were still. It reminded Jakkin of an evening in the nursery bondhouse, though it was certainly much quieter. And the memory ached like a rotten tooth when he probed it further.
“What is . . .” Jakkin began aloud, and was stunned into silence by the violence of a multiple sending. He began again, this time only with his mind. “What is this place?”
Makk put a hand on his shoulder again. “This Place of Men.” The pictures he sent were straightforward and without any of the subtleties or undertones Jakkin associated with Akki’s sendings.
“What about. . . women?”
“Place of Women not here. There.” The image Makk sent was of a different cavern in which stocky, broad-shouldered women with long, straight dark hair ate, sat, slept in poses similar to those of the men. It was not a symbol of a place but the place itself, as sharply delineated as a picture.
Makk’s sending continued. “There, too, Place of Those Who Kkriah. There, too, Place of Great Mothers.” The last image he sent was that of dragons huddled together as if they were clutchmates, though they ranged in shape and age.
“Dragons?” Jakkin sent, and when there was no answer he added, “Worms?” Each image was slightly different.
Makk shook his head. He sent a gray picture of dragons hovering over a pile of eggs. The meaning was clear. “Great Mothers.” It was reinforced by all the men.
Jakkin rubbed his head behind the right ear, where an ache was starting. A bad one, he guessed, and nothing to laugh at to help it bleed away. He drew a deep breath, ready to begin again. Sending this way was hard work, like speaking a strange language. Just then his stomach rumbled and all the men laughed. Their laughter was silent, a bubbly mind-sending that made him almost giddy. br />
“You hunger,” Makk sent. “You eat.”
“I’d love to eat,” Jakkin sent back, his images laced with an ironic edge that spoke of other kinds of hunger: sleep, the need to understand, and a very dim image of Akki, which leaked out unbidden and which he quickly suppressed. But Makk seemed oblivious to anything but the central message.
“You eat,” he sent again, signaling one of the sitters with those curious finger waggles. The man stood and brought over a bowl for Jakkin.
Jakkin sniffed at the bowl. It smelled like dragon stew. Hungry as he was, Jakkin’s stomach revolted. He could not eat such a meal. “Dragon?” he queried. Then, remembering, he added, “Great Mother?”
The sending that came back to him, so solid and unemotional, chilled him. “What else?”
He put the bowl on the nearest table and shook his head. “No!”
“You insult Great Mother’s gift?” Even the sleepers stirred at that sending.
“I’m not that hungry. I can’t eat.” How could he explain to these crude cave dwellers that once he’d made full contact with dragons, eating their meat was impossible. His stomach chose that moment to growl again.
The bubbling response of the men was far out of proportion to the joke, and Jakkin suddenly wondered if any involuntary body noise was funny to these silent men. He tried to explain his refusal to eat meat as clearly and directly as he could. “My . . . people . . . do not eat Great Mothers.” It was not exactly a lie. He and Akki were a separate people now.
“Ancestors warn of such people.” Makk’s sending seemed tinged with an emotion other than anger for the first time.
“Your ancestors. Tell me.” Maybe, Jakkin hoped, careful to keep the thought hidden, maybe here was a real clue, a way out of this place.
Makk’s face softened, as if the question somehow pleased him. His sending began and it had the rhythms of a story long rehearsed and often told. “First were The Men. Strong Men. Men of Bonds.” He held up his wrists, and for the first time Jakkin noticed he wore metal bracelets.