The Ale Boy's Feast
As they floated around a bend, he noticed a painted figure on the wall. Across the purple curve someone had rendered a white creature that reminded him of the Keeper. But this creature seemed to have fins rather than legs. It was sleeker, with a snaking tail and ears like kites. Someone had plastered brightly colored petals into the stone so they seemed to flower from the creature’s mouth. He started to say something, then fell silent.
“Is that rain?” asked Irimus. “Or snow?”
The golden hermits pulled them into a corridor lined with trees, grateful giants that held out their boughs to one another high above. Flowers caught in their canopy shone with a ghostly blue aura, shedding a steady shower of petals that drifted down, fizzed when they met the water, and spun as they dissolved, causing small shimmering whirlpools in the river.
The passengers watched, hypnotized and quiet.
We’re reversing Tammos Raak’s journey. We’re drawing closer to the Wall. If the Great Ancestor’s escape into the Expanse was such a glorious thing, why is the world more beautiful the closer we come to the Wall?
The boy caught a petal on his hand. He had seen these blue flowers somewhere before, but not in a tree and never so large. He carefully tucked it onto his tongue, felt it melt like a sugar wafer.
“Everything that lives here has all it needs,” said Raechyl. “I could almost live here.”
“It won’t last,” said the boy. “Why not?”
“We’ve found it,” said the boy. “It’s bound to change.”
“Rescue, look.” Nella Bye smiled. “Look at your hands.”
He opened them and saw that the dark red color that had emerged from the flames was peeling away like sunburn. His new skin was almost the color it had been before his fall in the Cent Regus Core.
He felt a sting in his eyes and rubbed them with his knuckles. When he drew his hands away, they were wet with an oily darkness. He realized that he felt warm with fever. His throat began to ache.
And yet somehow he knew this was necessary.
He caught a few more petals and tucked them into the pocket of his loose white shirt.
The turtles tired and crawled up onto fallen trees, dripping and humming deep sounds of happy exhaustion. The passengers decided to sleep awhile as well.
In this hush Batey visited the ale boy. “I’d form an army to defend this place,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean I’m giving up on Bel Amica. Rescue, we’ve got to go home. People are in trouble up there. And the more we lie here looking at pretty lights, the easier it is for me to forget my duty.”
The ale boy nodded. “We’re fed. We’re not thirsty. I think we’re safer than before. Maybe it’s a good time to find a way out.”
So while the others slept, Batey and the ale boy swam through the fence of trees, climbed up on the rocky shore beyond it, and began to examine the shell-strewn banks. Clearly, this was an otters’ feasting ground. They explored in opposite directions. The boy moved up the tunnel, where birds flitted this way and that, and toads splatted along down to the water.
Reaching the shore’s end, he waded into the shallows and stepped cautiously into a crevasse in the wall. He found himself waist-deep in a narrow stream bathed in a flood of white sunshine. The water was surprisingly clear; he could see his bare, scarred feet along the smooth river floor. Fish chased each other around his ankles. A striped, eyeless eel with a toothless mouth nibbled at his legs, its scratchy tongue scraping for moss or water bugs.
As he refilled his water flask, he smelled smoke mingling with the perfumes of abundant cave lilies. Then he moved on toward a commotion. A deep ache flared, a feeling he had come to know. Something was in trouble nearby. Something needed his help.
As he straightened, he saw a spill of rugged earth on the left where part of a wall had collapsed, opening a window to bright, turbulent daylight above. Outside, ribbons of smoke twisted past an array of contorted, blackened trees. Flames lashed at the tree trunks.
Those aren’t Cragavar trees. That’s Fraughtenwood. And it’s on fire.
Deep impressions—hoofprints—punctured the rubble incline. They led into the stream and then emerged again on the soft soil to the right.
He heard trouble frightfully close. Something stirred behind ivy curtains that draped the wall. Drawn by invisible strings, he walked up and gingerly pulled back an edge of the ivy.
A tremendous display of antlers burst forward. The antlers thrashed, striking the hard wall with sharp cracks, dragging strands of ivy. Crawling away on all fours, the boy saw the blood-streaked face of the animal—a stag of magnificent size, lying crumpled behind the curtain.
His ears pricked toward the boy, the stag bared his teeth and seethed. His eyes were clouded, and his hide was purple and red, burned hairless. He held one front hoof suspended.
“You can’t see me clearly, can you?” the boy asked. “You’re burned too badly.”
The stag’s nostrils sucked noisily at the air, and he shook his antlers as if to assert that he was in complete control.
“You’re mighty. You’re glorious. I can help. But you’ll have to put down your pride.”
The daylight flickered, and waves of twisting flame crashed past the opening. The grasses around the cave-in cowered, blackened, and disappeared in smoke. Heat wafted into the tunnel. The stag pawed at the ground and wheezed what would have been a bellow before smoke scorched his lungs.
The boy uncorked the flask.
The stag sniffed the air again. His ears swiveled back as a great tree, somewhere unseen in the conflagration outside, groaned and exploded. A spray of sparks and smoke billowed up into the sky.
“I won’t hurt you,” whispered the boy. “You’re thirsty. And your wounds need washing.”
The stag’s nostrils opened, the flesh of the muzzle around it scarred with heat.
“You are such a beautiful king,” said the boy. He cupped his hand, poured a splash of water into it.
The stag lifted his head, listened intently to the world all around, then slowly lowered his muzzle, extending a cracked, purple tongue.
As the stag drank, the boy’s eyes glazed with tears. For a moment he felt that all these things had happened so that he might be here, in this moment, offering a sip of water to a desperate king—a touch of comfort, a rumor of a place where water was pure and enlivening, where help came when you needed it.
The stag licked the boy’s hand dry. Then his muzzle swung around and nudged the flask.
“There’s more,” said the boy. “A whole river of it.”
“Boy!” That was Batey’s voice somewhere in the distance.
The stag bit his hand lightly with thick, square teeth, and the boy poured him another handful. He winced, trying to keep his gaze from the magnificent ruin of the creature’s scorched flesh. “You have to let go of this place,” said the boy. “Go north. This water spills from somewhere.”
The stag kicked at the ground, lurched to his feet, and then struck the ale boy with a hard thrust of a hoof. The boy sprawled into the dirt. He heard a thud and a splash, and he saw a shadow pass into the sunlight.
Holding his chest, he fought for breath. The stag was now a proud silhouette stark against the wall of fire, and then it was gone into the conflagration.
“Get back here!” Batey called. “Trouble!”
Batey lifted the boy and carried him, running along the shore and diving back out to swim through the tree line. “They’re coming!” he panted as he approached the others.
“Who?” asked Irimus, sharper than he had been since years before Abascar’s fall. “Shredders?”
“The runaways. They’re armed and look like trouble. Get back on the water.”
“All of them?”
“Five. And … and they’re not right.”
The golden hermits were asleep and refused to rouse, offering deep groans of discomfort when they were jostled. “We’ll row,” said Batey.
A venomous hiss sounded in the corridor behind them. “W
as that one of … them?” Kar-balter whispered.
The ale boy saw Batey cast a fearful glance to Raechyl. And now he, too, was afraid.
At the end of the tree-lined corridor, they passed beneath a red arch into a high-ceilinged space lit by patches of blue flowers. A thick pillar—perhaps a tree trunk—dressed in a coat of trailing white moss stretched up to press against the ceiling, which was studded with strange growths like large, folded flower buds. Beyond the pillar they heard a continuous thunder.
“A falls,” said the boy.
“Will we go over?” Kar-balter yelped.
“No,” said Batey. “We’re going upstream.”
“Then we may be trapped,” said Nella Bye.
Daylight painted the far end of the cavern, which was terraced in great swells of stone draped in pink sheets of minerals. Through breaks in the clouds that stormed and steamed from the falls’ concussion, they caught glimpses of a vast pool.
“There’s our way out!” said Batey.
A crooked stair rose from the shoreline just to the right of the falls and ascended into a shaft in the earth.
“Batey!” Nella Bye grabbed his arm and dragged him down. A spear sailed over the Bel Amican.
What looked like Aronakt stood at the front of the first pursuing raft. He wavered awkwardly in his tattered cloak, like a Cent Regus merging of man and bat. His jaw hung open as if it was broken, and fresh scars raked his face. His eyelids were drawn back, and his eyes swiveled loosely.
Hunched low behind him on the raft, the others were also familiar, also distorted, their flesh in shreds, their gazes fixed on the travelers with something like hunger, something like rage.
“He looks like …”
“I know,” said Batey.
“What’s that in the water around them?” Irimus squinted, then answered himself. “More of those crawlers the cavespiders caught.”
Feelers, thought the ale boy. Feelers uprooted. There are so many.
“To shore!” Batey cried. “Into the tunnel, where we can block them with fire!”
The water was troubled, shaken into a roiling turbulence. Debris fell from the ceiling, splashing the river and battering the rafts. The field of hanging buds exploded, each one unfolding leathery wings. The bats cycloned around the cave’s white pillar, then rushed downstream in a chattering storm.
The ale boy thought of the sign he had seen painted on the passage wall like a warning.
The rafts closed in around the pillar, and the passengers clung to each other. Some spread cloaks as if to shield themselves. Others brandished torches, readying for the attack. Some clutched at the pillar’s white moss for a hold to keep the rafts from slipping away.
But then the pillar turned. Its outer crust split open, broke loose, and peeled away. At the top, two spheres brightened, crackling with energy. A low rumble spread out from the pillar, and it began to bend in half, its heights descending toward the pursuers.
The travelers shouted to each other, rowing their rafts away as the pillar broke apart.
From each side suddenly unfurled massive wings that, spanning the breadth of the cavern, exposed a slender body of glittering silver scales. The creature swelled with breath and a reverberating voice. The eyes, infused with light, illuminated a blunt, ferocious visage and vast jaws dripping with flame.
The creature raised a mighty tail and smashed the river, shocking waves into a rush. Thrusting its horns at the pursuers’ raft, it caught the assailants in the white light of its eyes. Its snout, rather like a bat’s but large enough for swarms of bats to nest in its nostrils, twitched as if it were reading the air.
Beneath its wings some travelers rowed their rafts to shore, while others leapt off and swam. They splashed from the shallows and huddled together. The wings blocked out the daylight and any access to the stair.
The ale boy tried to follow but stumbled. He was caught. He looked down and saw one of the strong leash cords looped around his foot. He fought to untangle it.
The man who had once been Petch hissed at the creature, shaking a sharpened oar as if to spear a seabull. The spidery crawlers clawed at the air.
The creature waited.
The five assailants unleashed a wave of curses in unfamiliar voices, raised what weapons they had left, and flung them. The creature’s jaws opened, and it coughed a flicker of light. The spears were engulfed, incinerated.
One of the assailants uttered a command, and crawlers sprang in clusters toward the beast. Again those great jaws opened. This time flames poured out, paving the river in fire, immersing the crawlers and the assailants’ rafts.
Not a scream escaped the blaze. When the gusting fire abated, scraps of smoking, blackened bodies floated downstream among the charred splinters of the crawlers.
Five ghostly figures remained, hovering in the haze, bell shaped and trailing barbed tentacles, like jellyfish.
The creature growled, snapping its jaws at the phantoms, which swayed but could not be caught.
Turning its head, it brought those glassy globes of white light in close to the shore so that the ale boy lay under its bristled chin, like a mouse hiding under a furnace. The scene before him on the shore wavered, illusory in the heat. Dumbstruck with fear, none of the travelers dared move.
“Please, have mercy,” Raechyl whispered.
The creature sniffed the air. The Bel Amicans trembled, but the Abascar survivors spread to form a circle around them. Together they began to sing the Early Morning Verse.
The creature blinked its eyes. In the center of those bright globes, dark pupils solidified—it was examining them. Then it emanated something like a purr from a mountain-sized cat.
From the cloud of blue ghosts, another lash of dissonant screams cut through the song. The creature reared up, pawing the air with its black-clawed forelegs. The horns splaying from its head spread into a wide crown, and it crowed like a rooster. It folded in its wings, exposing the stairway.
The crowd walked with excruciating caution to the foot of the stairs. But Nella Bye stopped and looked back. “Rescue?”
The creature’s eyes narrowed as if it were listening to some far-off command. The ale boy got to his feet, still tightly knotted in the tether.
The ghosts, shrieking over the water, caught a current of air and streamed toward the stairway.
The creature sniffed at the ale boy and then exclaimed a bell-like cry. It cocked its head as if in disbelief, and then it unfolded its wings again, sealing off the boy’s view of his companions and blocking the ghosts from reaching the stairway.
“Please,” he said. “I’ll do whatever you wish. But may I go and see Auralia soon?” He tightened his grip around the strap of the water flask and closed his eyes.
A wave of water swept over him, lifting him off the ground. He felt a hard tug at his ankle, and he fell. His raft washed back into the river and pulled him from the shore. He felt the water close over his head. A mighty hand lifted him out, then set him down on the raft, and he saw the creature rushing downstream, bearing the raft before it, the blue ghosts streaming along behind, screaming.
23
THRESHOLD
yes like ovens sealed in glass. Dark eyelashes fanning a face encased in intricate, fireproof shields. Scales green as new clover and, growing like a lacework of beetle-black mortar between them, shiny new shields that would someday guard the creature’s whole body.
Entranced by the Fearblind Dragon’s strange, alien nature, her unfamiliar textures and jagged lines, Auralia wanted to sculpt a model or paint a picture. At times Reveler seemed more plant than animal or something halfway between—the way she sprouted barbs where no other animal was barbed and the way her head seemed a giant seedcone that had grown in segments. As Reveler stretched and groomed and crawled impatiently over the canyons, sniffing the rocky crevasses and sneezing smoke, her sinuous grasshopper legs started rock slides. She commanded attention from the shaken and even the wounded, as if she were a dancer on a stage.
Auralia had seen a great deal of the life the world had to offer. But she had never seen a dragon until Scharr ben Fray arrived, steering Reveler as if she were a vawn, to save this company from those viscorclaws and bow-wielding beastmen.
And yet, there was someone more fascinating than the dragon in Auralia’s view. Krawg and Warney had helped Bel Amican soldiers carry the wounded into the smoky daylight where Say-ressa could examine them better, and King Cal-raven moved among them. He bowed over each patient as if it were his duty to heal every scratch. He would wear himself out with apologies and vows, unnecessary as they were. “Auralia, you greedy wretch,” she muttered to herself. She felt foolish, for she coveted his attention, wanted him to truly see her and recall her real name. But he carried so many burdens now. How would he ever find time for curiosity?
She fitfully fingered the ring he had failed to see on her hand.
He spoke quietly not only with the Abascars but with the others who had helped them, ministering to the merchants and the Bel Amican guards. He also knelt before Sisterly Emeriene, putting his hands on the shoulders of her young children and speaking quiet words of comfort. Emeriene seemed like a woman suffocating, and Cal-raven’s attention seemed to be the air she wanted to breathe. Her gaze followed him everywhere.
Say-ressa whispered to him over the fallen, and he knelt to question Jes-hawk about the journey and all they had endured. He even held the archer’s right hand as Say-ressa’s sharp instruments probed the bones in his left shoulder, stitching together torn edges. But nothing was harder to endure than the thudding of Tabor Jan’s boots against the ground as he endured Say-ressa’s needles while she teased out shards of the Strongbreed arrow. He had no voice to scream, but his whole body fought as if a predator were upon him.
Say-ressa would have no way to repair the captain’s deepest wound. Word had spread quickly of the marriage tattoo.
Bodies heal faster than hearts.
She thought of Jordam the beastman and looked up a spill of boulders where the dragon had buried some struggling Strongbreed. Sitting on a high, flat stone, Jordam watched the king. Arm’s length to his left sat a stranger draped and hooded by a heavy canvas. The two glanced at each other like dogs that take a dislike to each other.