Furies of Calderon (56 page)

Kitai frowned, pale brows drawing together. “I am what?”

“You’re a
girl
,” Tavi accused.

“No,” Kitai said in a fierce whisper. “I am a whelp. Until they bond, all Marat children are whelps. After I bond to a totem—then I will be a young female. Until then, I am a whelp like any other. Your ways are not our ways, Aleran.”

Tavi stared at her. “But you’re a
girl
.”

“And if you walk in front of that fire, you’ll be the only cold thing there,” Tavi said. “Stay here and be still and quiet. When the fire dies down, they’ll spread out to look for us again, and we’ll have our chance.”

Kitai frowned, but slowly settled back into the water. “Our chance to do what?”

Tavi swallowed. “To get inside. To that big tree.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Kitai said, though there was a reluctant weight to her words. “The Keepers are roused. No one has ever gone to the tree and come out again when the Keepers had been stirred from sleep. We would die.”

“You forget.
I’m
going to die anyway.” He frowned. “But it might be just as well. I don’t want to lead a girl into that kind of danger.”

“That’s stupid,” said Kitai. “Just as it is stupid for us to pursue the trial. If neither of us comes back with the Blessing, the trial is inconclusive. They’ll wait until a new moon and hold it again. You will be Doroga’s guest until then, valley-boy. You will be safe.”

Tavi frowned and swallowed, thinking. Part of him had all but let out a shout of relief. He could get out of this bizarre chasm with its alien creatures and return to the world above. It wasn’t a friendly one, among the Marat, but it was living, and he would at least be kept alive and unharmed until the next trial. He could survive.

But the new moon wouldn’t be for weeks. The Marat would move long before then, attack Garrison and then the stead-holts in the valley beyond, including his own home. For a moment, Tavi’s imagination conjured up an image of returning to Bernard-holt to find it deserted, thick with the stench of rotten meat and burned hair; to open one of the swinging gates and see a cloud of carrion crows hurtle into the air, leaving the bodies of people he had known his whole life ravaged and unrecognizable on the cold earth. His aunt. His uncle. Frederic, Beritte, Old Bitte, and so many others.

His legs started shaking—not with cold, but with the sudden realization that he could not turn his back on them now. If returning with that stupid mushroom meant that he would gain his family even a better chance to survive what was coming, then he could do nothing less than everything in his power to retrieve it. He couldn’t back down now, he couldn’t run now, even though it meant he might go into mortal danger.

He might wind up like that crow, sealed into the
croach
, devoured alive. For a moment, the pale, colored eyes of the Keepers haunted his mind. There had been so many of them. There still were, gathered all around the now-guttering fire, crawling mindlessly over one another in all directions, their long, knobby legs falling feather-light onto the surface of the
croach
. Their leathery shells made squeaking sounds as they crowded close, rubbed against one another. And they smelled. Something pungent and acrid and inexplicably alien. Even as he realized that he could smell them, Tavi felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle up, and his shivering increased in reaction.

She shrugged and said, “It is your life to waste. Look at you. You are shaking hard enough to rattle your teeth.” But her odd, opalescent eyes stayed on him, intent, curious. She didn’t speak the question, but Tavi all but heard her ask:
Why
?

He took a shuddering breath. “It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter that I’m afraid. I have to get that mushroom and get out again. It’s the only thing I can do to help my family.”

Kitai stared at him in silence for a long moment. Then she nodded once, an expression of comprehension coming over her features. “Now I understand, valley-boy,” she said, quiet. She looked around them and said, “I do not wish to die. My family is not at stake. Freedom from my sire is useless to me if I am dead.”

Tavi chewed on his lip, thinking. Then he said, “Kitai, is there any reason that we can’t both get the Blessing? What happens if we both get back with it at the same time?”

Kitai frowned. “Then it will be assumed that The One tells us there is merit in either side’s argument,” she said. “The headman will be free to decide on his own.”

“Wait,” Tavi said, his heart pounding faster. “You mean that you’d get out from under your father,
and
he would be free to lead your people away from the battle with mine?”

Kitai blinked at Tavi and then smiled, slowly. “By The One, yes. That was his plan all along.” She blinked her abruptly shining eyes several times and said fiercely, “The problem is that Doroga does not
seem
to be clever. No wonder my mother loved him.”

“Then we work together,” Tavi said. He offered the girl his hand. She glanced down at his hand, frowned at him, and then mimicked the gesture. Her hand was slim, hot, strong. Tavi shook and said, “It means we agree to work together.”

“Very well,” Kitai said. “What do you think we should do?”

Tavi shot a glance back to the Keepers, who were slowly, randomly dispersing again, crawling away in different directions and at different speeds.

“I have a plan.”

An hour later, Tavi, covered with the soaked and chilly blanket, moved in silence over the smooth surface of the
croach
, his pace never varying. He kept count to himself as he walked, one pace per count. He was near five hundred. A Keeper walked perhaps ten feet in front of him, on a slow and steady pace toward the great tree at the center of the chasm. Tavi had followed it for several minutes without it turning to look at him or giving any indication that it sensed his presence. He had become more confident that he had determined how the things would detect him. So long as he was careful to be quiet and moved smoothly, he was effectively invisible.

The enormous tree loomed closer and closer, though the more Tavi could see of it, the less certain he was that
tree
was the right word to describe it.

Though the rest of the forest was covered in a sheath of the greenly glowing
croach
, this one tree, smooth sided, branchless, straight, was only covered to a height of ten or fifteen feet. The trunk was enormous, fully as big around as Bernard-holt’s walls. It didn’t look like it had any bark at all—just smooth wood that reached up to a height of more than a hundred feet before ending in round, irregular edges, as though the tree had been snapped off by some giant hand, then had its rough edges smoothed by time.

At the base of the tree, there was a cavernous opening, a sloped and irregular triangle where the trunk parted, allowing entrance to the interior Tavi paused and watched the Keeper he had been following. It paced slowly into the tree’s interior, and as it passed within, another Keeper moved out on the other side of the opening, as though it were a tunnel in the causeway. Tavi stopped for a few moments and watched.

Shortly, the Keeper he’d been following or another like it came out of the tree in exactly the same place. Still another came creeping in from another direction and entered the tree in exactly the same manner as the first, emerging again a few moments later. The Keepers must have been taking something into the tree. But what? Something small, if they were just scuttling in and out, like ants in and out of their hills Food? Water? What did they carry?

Tavi shook his head and touched the blanket with his fingertips. Though it was still cool, it didn’t feel as cold as it had a few minutes ago. The air down here in the chasm was just too warm. He had to hurry, he knew, because with each passing moment his method of concealment became less effective. Tavi struggled to calm the pounding of his heart. What if these bugs were smarter than he thought? What if they had only allowed him to come this far because they wanted him there anyway? What if they just wanted to get him to a place where he could not escape and would then leap on him and devour him?

And what, he thought, could possibly be there inside that tree? What would be there that the Keepers would be carrying something to? If they were like ants, existing in a colony, where some carried food, and some fought, and so on, would they have a queen, like ants did? If so, would she be inside the tree, at the heart of their domain?

A dozen more questions flicked through Tavi’s mind, before he realized that he was doing nothing but wasting his time. He didn’t have any answers to any of the questions, and he wouldn’t get the answers standing in place— all he would get would be warmer. More vulnerable. He kept counting in his head and reached five hundred. Tavi all but held his breath, poised to flee if the plan went wrong, though he knew that his chances of escaping from the heart of the chasm were slim indeed. Tavi waited. And waited. Nothing happened. He felt his heart begin to race as panic crept over him. Had Kitai abandoned him and her own part of the plan? Had something gone wrong? Had she been found and killed before the time limit was up? Could she even count to five hundred? What had gone wrong?

Tavi remained still and kept counting, deciding to give her another hundred counts before he fled.

Then the stillness and silence of the Wax Forest dissolved into a symphony of whistling shrieks. If Tavi had not seen it happening, he would never have believed that so many of the Keepers could be so close to him without his knowledge of them. They erupted from everywhere, from every surface where the
croach
glowed, ripping their way up out of the waxy forest floor, dropping from the glowing branches of the twisted trees, boiling out of the interior of the great tree trunk itself. Hundreds of them appeared, and the air itself shook with their whistles and clicks and the squeak of shell rubbing on shell.

Tavi froze, panicked. It was everything he could do to keep from bolting at the sheer speed with which they had appeared. One of the Keepers swept past him, almost close enough to brush against his soaked cloak.

They all swarmed off in the same direction—that opposite of the one that lead back to the ropes to the world above. Kitai had done her job, Tavi decided. She must have been keeping a slower count than Tavi had. She had used half of their remaining oil and the firestones to light a blaze that would draw the Keepers. If she was all right and had kept to the plan, she would even now be huddled beneath her blanket, moving for the ropes out.

The last of the Keepers in sight fled, vanishing into the glowing trees. All that remained was for Tavi to accomplish his part of the plan.

A lump crept up into his throat, and his knees felt like someone had simply slipped the muscles and tendons out of them. He thought that they might abruptly buckle and pitch him to the surface of the
croach
at any time, he was so afraid. He struggled to keep his breathing slow and quiet, to make sure that his trembling didn’t result in any twitches that the Keepers would see as sudden, jerky movement, and stepped forward, into the trunk of the tree.

Inside, the
croach
wasn’t in a smooth layer on the floor and walls—it was spilled and dumped and heaped and piled like wheat in a granary. Great swirling loops of it twirled up the walls or wound intricately through one another like the guts of some great and glowing beast. Tavi stared at them for a moment, in confusion and incomprehension. It was beautiful, in a bizarre, alien way—strange and unsettling and fascinating. He jerked his eyes from one of the more intricate structures and moved closer to a wall, where it would be less likely for a newly entered Keeper to simply bump into him, looking around, struggling to orient himself according to Kitai’s description. He paced deeper into the eerie stillness inside the tree, around a mound of whirled
croach
that looked like an anthill and forward through a small field of lumpy
croach
, which could have contained another thousand Keepers, silent beneath the surface.

He found the mushrooms in a ring at the center of the field, just as Kitai had said. They grew at the base of a glowing mound twice the height of a man, as big around as a small house. The mound pulsed with greenish light, and Tavi thought he could see the shadow of something dark, something slender within. He drew closer, a sensation of raw dread flowing over him like an icy bath, even worse than the soaked blanket he wore as a cloak. His knees grew weaker, and his breathing, despite his best efforts, became ragged

Kitai was rather pretty
, he thought
Though she was a savage, there was something about her face, her eyes, that he found intriguing. If she wasn’t dressed, up in a ragged smock (which really was shamefully short now that he thought about it), she might look more like a girl, less wild. Of course, he had begun to see her without the smock. If he had told her to get more into the water, she might have taken it off altogether. The thought made his cheeks burn, but lingered in front of him, enticing in its exotic appeal.