Before Moon could answer, River interposed, “Of course it is. He’s the only one who can’t shut up.”
“He’s not the only one,” Moon told him. Stone growled low in his throat and bounded away to follow the thread of sound.
The supporting pillars were closer together through this area, blocking the view, but as they traveled Moon started to make out some movement in the hazy light ahead. At least it was no mystery how the others had gotten down here. Vine and Drift would have seen Ardan’s men enter the mortuary from the main entrance, and had gone back to the tower-camp for help. Now they must be trying to find the underground entrance to the temple, which was what Moon would have done in their place.
Ahead, dim light glittered off scales and Moon spotted the Raksura, gathered with their backs to a pillar. He couldn’t tell what threat they faced… Then his eyes adjusted and he thought in disgust, Oh, that’s typical. The Raksura confronted a large group of the pale armored Thluth.
Moon shot ahead of Stone, River, and Chime. Coming up behind the Thluth, he swarmed up the nearest pillar, hopped to the next to get above them. In the group of Raksura he saw Vine, Floret, Song, Root, Drift… And Balm! She was leading the others, and faced the Thluth leader, her spines bristling. Relief was sharp and almost painful. Balm was alive; he just wished he could tell Jade.
And there was one extra Raksura: Rift was here, too.
Moon saw enough to tell the confrontation with the Thluth was angry. The Thluth seemed to be demanding tribute and Balm and the others weren’t taking it much better than Moon had. The Thluth leader spoke, pushed forward aggressively. Balm lunged to swipe him back.
Then Stone slammed between the pillars and sent the Thluth scrambling frantically away. Moon leapt down behind the leader.
He wasn’t certain if this was the same tribe of Thluth, but apparently it didn’t matter. The leader spun around, saw Moon, and bellowed a wordless warning. It wasn’t needed, since the other Thluth were already loping rapidly into the shadows. The leader bolted away, desperate to catch up with the others.
Chime and River arrived, and Esom staggered away as soon as Chime set him on his feet. Then Karsis darted out from behind the pillar and flung herself at Esom. They hugged each other, speaking rapidly in their own language, Karsis laughing with relief. Moon tried not to be envious.
“Balm!” Chime shouted. He grabbed her in a hug, and released her immediately when she gasped, “Ow!”
“Are you all right?” Chime asked her worriedly, holding onto her arm to steady her. “We couldn’t find you. We thought you were dead!”
“No, I’m fine,” Balm insisted. At close range, she didn’t look fine. She had scratches and dark patches in her golden scales, and her left wingjoin had a dark, livid scrape. She asked, “But what happened? I thought you were trapped.”
“We got out the hard way,” Chime told her. “It was horrible, but it worked.”
Drift greeted River enthusiastically, Root bounced around trying to greet everybody, and the others gathered around, excited, relieved, and demanding immediate answers. Only Rift hung back, watching them uneasily. “We thought the groundling sorcerer had you,” Floret said to Moon. “Balm saw—”
Balm frowned suddenly. “Wait, where’s Jade and Flower?”
Moon said it quickly, to get it over with. “They didn’t get out. They were trapped in that dome we found. We opened it, but then the warden-creatures attacked, and the door slid shut.”
That put an end to all the relieved excitement. Balm hissed in dismay, and looked from Moon to Stone. “Are they all right? Can the sorcerer get to them?”
“We don’t know.” Moon didn’t want to think about that right now. “How did you get away?”
Balm’s spines flicked in agitation, but she let her question go. “The waterling threw me back toward the other side of the chamber, and I hit the wall and fell to the floor. I must have been knocked out for a time. The next thing I knew, some groundlings ran right past me. When I managed to stand, those warden-creatures swarmed me and I flew up the first passage I found. It was the one that went outside to the plaza, where the guards were. They shot darts at me, but I got past them.” Her expression was bleak. “I found Vine and Drift, and we tried to get back in through the entrance in the flooded area, but the magical barrier was still there. So we went to the tower to get the others, and we decided to come down here to look for an underground passage into the temple.”
“That’s where we’re headed now,” Chime told her.
“You brought the solitary and the groundling woman?” River demanded, with an angry gesture at Rift. “What was the sense of that?”
“I told her not to do it,” Drift said. He sounded self-righteous about it, despite the fact that he had a fist-sized swelling around his left eye and another one low on his jaw. Moon hadn’t seen any of the Thluth land a blow, so it had to have happened earlier.
Rift, who had been hovering in the back to listen, twitched uneasily and looked away. Unexpectedly, it was Floret who rattled her spines and said, “The groundling woman showed us where the entrance to this place was, the one above the leviathan’s tail.”
Her voice flat and angry, Balm added, “We couldn’t leave them there. Rift would run away, and if we were all killed, Karsis would be stuck up in that tower unable to get out. I was going to just let her go, but she said she wanted to come along to find her brother.”
Moon flicked his spines at River, and told Balm, “No, you did right.” Stone touched her frills lightly with one claw tip, sympathy and reassurance combined. Moon looked around at the others. “We need to go.”
Balm nodded. “We think it’s this way.”
As the others moved away, Moon stopped her with a hand on her arm. He asked quietly, “What happened to Drift?” If Rift had tried to escape and Drift had gotten hurt stopping him, Moon needed to know.
Balm’s spines twitched at the memory. “He tried to take over the group, so I had to fight him. I didn’t trust him to do the right thing, and I knew we had to get back to Jade fast.” She hesitated, then in a mix of pride and relief said, “When I won, I was still afraid the others wouldn’t follow me, but they did.”
Moon thought that was the important part. Balm had to know that she could physically beat Drift. It was the fact that the others had not only stood by and let her, but supported her over him afterward, tacitly acknowledging Balm’s status in the court, even over one of Pearl’s favorites. He said, “Good.”
It was better hidden than Moon had anticipated, and they found it only because Stone was able to follow the stench of the fermenting edilvine and rot, buried in with the leviathan’s pervasive scent.
The tunnel entrance was in the deeper shadow up near the city’s foundation, in a buttress that joined two pillars, about fifty paces above the leviathan’s skin. When Moon climbed up to investigate, he found a broad walkway along the buttress, with the tunnel just above it, opening into a dark passage up through the layers of rock and metal.
Moon made the others stay below and climbed up with Chime and Floret, Chime in front to sense any magical barriers. The city’s foundation was much thinner here than it had been under Ardan’s tower. Barely twenty paces up, Chime hissed for them to stop, then climbed back down to report, “There’s a tunnel up there, pretty narrow. It stinks of those vines. It’s coming from the direction of the mortuary, going off toward the east.”
River hovered impatiently under the passage opening. “Come on, let’s go,” he said. “We have to find out what the sorcerer did with Jade and Flower.”
Moon, who hadn’t been able to think of anything else except what the sorcerer might be doing to Jade and Flower, managed not to give in to the impulse to drop back down and tear River’s head off. He said, “No, we scout first.” He didn’t intend to make any mistakes, or to let them all rush up there and find themselves running right into Ardan. “Floret, follow the tunnel back toward the mortuary, as far as you can wit
hout being seen. See if there’s anyone guarding it. Take Chime, to check for barriers.”
Floret flicked her spines in acknowledgement and started to climb. Chime, nervous but determined, followed her. Moon dropped back out of the passage to wait, as River stomped away to sulk with Drift. But no one questioned the decision.
Stone settled under the opening to wait and Moon paced uneasily. It didn’t help that the others were all sitting or standing there staring at him, even Karsis and Esom. This was much easier when Jade was here to take all the responsibility, and all Moon had to do was have the crazy ideas. It had been easier having responsibility only for himself.
Rift hovered a little apart from the others, his whole body suggesting reluctance to be anywhere near them, though he hadn’t tried to run away. Seeing him again made Moon realize just how confused his feelings were. He felt sorry for Rift, he was deeply suspicious of him, he wanted to help him, he just wanted him to go away. Rift was a miserable reminder that there were pitfalls to living with the Raksuran courts that Moon hadn’t even stumbled into yet. None of it was going to matter if they didn’t get the seed back and get off this damn leviathan, but he couldn’t stop his thoughts from drifting in that direction.
Balm looked up at the passage, worried and preoccupied. She said, “You think the sorcerer knows Jade and Flower are trapped in the dome?”
“He has to.” Moon thought it was dangerous to assume anything else. “He would have wanted to open it to see if the seed was still there.”
“Maybe they can fight him off,” Song said. “There’s two of them, and Flower’s still pretty strong.” She flicked her spines nervously, a young and deceptively delicate predator.
“Your friends might have been able to lock the door from the inside,” Esom pointed out. “Or dismantle the mechanism that opens it, if it’s not too complicated.” Karsis elbowed him and he blinked and added, “Not that I think they wouldn’t be able to figure out something complicated—”
“It’s all right,” Moon cut him off before he made it any worse. “We know what you mean.”
Karsis cleared her throat. Obviously trying to distract everyone from Esom’s gaffe, she asked Moon, “Is Jade your wife?”
In groundling terms, it was close enough. “Yes.”
With bitter emphasis, Rift said, “He’s a consort. It’s not like he had a choice. It’s not like anyone in a Raksuran court has a choice.”
And having Rift speak for him didn’t decrease Moon’s irritation. Moon said, pointedly, “I had a choice.”
Rift threw a glance at him, half-angry, half-wary. “To compete for a queen or to be a useless burden to the court?”
If Stone had heard that, he ignored it. Balm hissed and Song and Vine bristled angrily. Glaring at Rift in annoyance, Karsis said, “You know, I don’t think anyone here cares for your opinion. I know I never have.”
Rift barred his teeth at her. Then Root, seething with indignation, said, “Moon was a solitary, too, and he stays with Jade because he wants to.”
Rift stared at Moon, so incredulous his spines flattened. Vine thumped Root in the side of the head, and hissed, “No more talking. Ever.”
Moon set his jaw. Rift had always had a hold on him; now he would know what it was. Rift said, “That’s… Consorts don’t leave their courts…”
“Tell him the story,” Moon said. He walked away and circled around Stone to take up a position under the passage. Stone, proving that he had been listening, heaved a deeply annoyed sigh.
There was a long moment of awkward silence from the other side of the walkway, then Moon heard Balm speak quietly to Vine. Vine gestured and Rift, still badly shocked, followed him down the walkway to talk. Song shook her head grimly at Root, whose spines drooped with embarrassment.
Time seemed to drag. Standing still, without immediate danger as a distraction, Moon could feel every cut and slash that had penetrated his scales, the exhaustion dragging at him like a net, making his wings feel like they were iron weights. It had been a long time since he had shifted to groundling, but if he did it now he might fall down and not be able to get up again.
As they waited, everyone showed signs of fatigue: Balm’s spines were drooping, Root had trouble keeping his eyes open, and River leaned against a pillar, trying to pretend it wasn’t holding him up. There was only so much more of this they could take without a chance to eat and rest. He hoped Ardan was tired too, and feeling the strain of doing so much magic at once. But Moon was willing to bet Ardan had had time to stop for a meal, and they hadn’t.
There was a scrabbling in the passage above them, then Floret and Chime dropped out.
The others bounded over to gather around, Esom and Karsis hurrying after them. Floret reported, “We got all the way up to this room full of stinking vines in barrels. There were two blue groundlings in the corridor just past it. Chime said they belonged to the sorcerer.”
“I didn’t feel any barriers,” Chime added. “I bet Ardan doesn’t know about this way out.”
Moon nodded, thinking it over. Ardan must believe that the people who were trading with the water travelers only used that doorway to the flooded street. “If the guards are there, then Ardan is still in the mortuary. Maybe he didn’t get the dome open yet.” And everyone on the leviathan must have felt the jolt when Moon had removed the crystal piece. Maybe Ardan had more to deal with at the moment than just the Raksura.
“But he must be trying to get it open,” Chime said. “Even if we can get past the guards and get into the mortuary, he’ll be right there.”
“So how do we get past him?” Balm said, frustrated.
Moon shook his head. “We can’t. We have to talk to him.”
River snarled skeptically. “What, so he can feed us to the leviathan again?” Drift hissed agreement.
Moon didn’t bother to argue that. The trick was going to be to make Ardan want to talk more than he wanted to get rid of them. He looked at Esom. “That spell you did, the one that made it so no one could see you and Karsis when you were trying to get out of the tower. Can you do that again?”
Esom straightened his cracked spectacles, and nodded. “Yes. You want me to use it so we can get back into the mortuary without anyone knowing we’re there?”
“Will that work? Can you get past Ardan?”
“I… think so. I know I can hide myself and one other person, reliably.” Esom hesitated, his expression uncertain. He admitted, “Ardan was always distracted when I tried the spell inside his tower.”
“I can distract him,” Rift said. He bristled his spines uneasily as everyone turned to stare at him. “He’ll listen to me.” He looked at Moon. “You know he will.”
Behind them, Stone shifted to groundling. Esom flinched and cursed, Karsis just stared in fascination. Stone folded his arms and regarded Rift thoughtfully.
Rift threw him a frightened look but held his ground. Still focusing on Moon, he said, “You know it’s true. He wants me back, doesn’t he? He’ll talk to me.”
Moon let out his breath. Yes, Ardan wanted Rift back. Moon just wasn’t sure what Rift wanted. “If you tell him about Esom’s spell, what we’re planning—”
“You’ll kill me, I know.” Rift glanced around at the others, spines lowered. “I didn’t mean to hurt your court. I thought the colony tree was abandoned forever. If I’d known you were coming back—”
“That’s not the point.” Stone’s voice cut across Rift’s, silencing him immediately. It was the first time Stone had spoken directly to him. “That colony tree is our court.”
Rift flattened his spines but said, “A court is Aeriat and Arbora, not the empty shell of a tree. For all I knew, your court had died out and I was doing the tree a favor, letting it die so it wouldn’t live forever alone.”
Stone grimaced, equal parts irritation and disgust, probably because Rift had given him an answer that was hard to argue with.
Moon asked Rift, “What do you want in return?”
If Rift said
“Nothing,” Moon wasn’t going to believe him. Rift wasn’t the self-sacrificing type, even if he did feel sorry about the colony tree. But Rift said, “When you find a way to leave the leviathan, take me with you. I want to go back to the forest Reaches. Ardan may want me back, but he’ll never trust me again, and I can’t trust him.” His scales rippled uneasily. “And I’m sick of this place.”
Moon thought it rang true, but he didn’t quite trust his own judgment when it came to this. The others watched Rift with varying degrees of skepticism, doubt, and even a little sympathy. Moon looked at Balm. She studied Rift carefully, her eyes narrowed. She caught Moon’s gaze, and gave him a grimace of doubt and a slow reluctant nod.
That summed up Moon’s feelings accurately. He told Rift, “All right, we have a deal. Don’t make me regret it.”
Moon and Rift crept up the tunnel, climbed through a doorway that had been knocked out of the wall and into the edilvine chamber. Making their way silently past the stinking barrels, Moon saw there were now three blue-pearl guards in the passage. Most of their attention was on the upper part of the passage, as if they were expecting someone to try to come in through the smugglers’ entrance. Which made it easy when Moon and Rift barreled in among them and knocked them flat.
Moon kicked a dart gun away from the one that was sprawled on the ground but still conscious, and told him, “Go tell Ardan that Moon and Rift want to talk. We have something he wants. Say that to him.”
The man scrambled back, shoved to his feet, and ran.
Then they waited, Moon still and Rift pacing and lashing his tail. “What if he doesn’t—” Rift began, and Moon hissed at him to be quiet. If Ardan didn’t take the bait, he had no idea what they were going to do.
He heard the groundlings coming back, at least six of them. They approached cautiously up the passage, one carrying a small vapor-lamp. Another craned his neck, trying to see the two men still lying unconscious in the shadows. Moon said, “They’re alive.”
The guard stared, startled. Either by the fact that the Raksura hadn’t killed and eaten the men as a matter of course, or that Moon had thought the other guards would care. The one in the lead said, stiffly, “The Magister will speak with you.”