Most of the superstructure of the shrine was still standing, a thousand years after the earth had fallen in on it. It rose around Lucia in all its melancholy grandeur, colossal ribs of stone that thrust from the lake and arced up the curved sides of the cavern to broken tips. Huge pictograms were carved on the ribs in a language too old for Lucia to recognise, a dialect left behind in the evolution of society; their shapes suggested to her a grave and serious tone, resonant and wise.
Other sections of the shrine remained, too. Below her was the skeleton of a domed chamber, its floor raised enough so that the water lapped around its edges but did not swallow it. Fractured pieces of other rooms gave hints to the layout of the building before its destruction. On the wall before her, there was a massive section of stonework supported between two of the ribs, a piece of what had once been the original roof of the shrine. Angular patterns scrawled along its surface, a tiny glimpse of the majesty that this place had once possessed when it was intact. At the periphery of the light, she could see other structures, too dim to make out but evoking an impression of breathtaking size.
She felt suddenly, awfully small and alone. Alone, except for the presence that waited in Alskain Mar.
They lowered her towards the ruin of the domed chamber, and her creaking chair descended in steady increments, pausing between each gentle drop. Thankfully, she had no fear of heights, but she was dreadfully afraid of the chair or the rope giving way, even though she had been assured that they had taken every possible precaution and that the cradle was sturdy enough for someone six times her weight. She listened to her heart thumping, and tried to endure as she slowly neared the bottom of the cavern.
Then, finally, she was passing through the curled, broken fingers of the shattered dome, and her cradle bumped to the stone floor. She untied herself hurriedly, desperate to be out of it, as if they might haul her back up into the abyss again at any moment.
‘Lucia?’ Zaelis called from the shaft above, where the heads of the observers were dark blots against the blinding sunlight. ‘Are you well?’
His voice rang like a blasphemy against the eerie peace of the cavern, and the air suddenly seemed to darken, to become thick with an overwhelming and angry disapproval so palpable that it made Lucia shy and whimper. The others felt it too, for she heard the guards exclaiming frightened oaths, and Cailin snapped something at Zaelis, after which he was quiet and did not shout any more.
The light swelled in the room again gradually, the tension easing. Lucia breathed again, but her hands trembled slightly. She looked back at the tiny, fragile cradle which was her only lifeline out of this place, and realised just how far from help she truly was. Standing on the edge of the slanting sunlight, she was just a willowy girl of fourteen harvests, wearing a scuffed and dirty pair of trousers and a white blouse.
Lucia, you are not somebody’s sacrifice
. Kaiku’s words, spoken to her on the first day of Aestival Week. And yet here she was, in the lair of some unguessable entity, like a maiden offered to a mythical demon by her own father.
She willed herself to relax once again. The voices of the other spirits that she heard every day – the animals, the earth, the air – were silent here. It made her nervous. She had never been without them before, and it only intensified the loneliness and abandonment that she felt.
The occupant of the shrine was paying her little more attention now than it had been before. It was dormant and uninterested. If she had to rouse it, she would have to do it
very
gently.
The time had come. She could not put it off any longer. She walked to the edge of the platform, facing the darkness, and knelt on the cool stone. She placed her hands flat on its surface and bowed her head. And she listened.
The process of actively communicating with a spirit was not as simple as language. Animals were easy enough for Lucia, but most spirits were largely ignorant of the world that humans saw and felt. There was no real lexicon through which humans and spirits were capable of understanding each other, since they did not share the same senses. Instead, they had to connect on a level far beneath reason, a primal melding which could only be achieved by becoming one with the nature of each other. A tentative, dim unity had to be formed, like that between a baby in a womb and its mother.
Now Lucia let herself become aware of the stone beneath her palms, and let the stone become aware of her. At first, the sensations were merely physical: the cold touch against her skin, the pressure of her flesh against the surface. They became sharpened and more acute as she slipped further into her trance, so that she became aware of the infinity of pores and creases in the skin of her hands, and could sense the microscopic cracks and seams in the stone that she knelt on.
By now she was entirely still, her breathing slowed to a languorous sigh, her heartbeat a dull and lazy thump.
Next, she let the sharing of sensation spread beyond the point of contact, expanding her awareness to include her whole body: the gush and pump of her blood, the net of follicles on her scalp, the snarled and dead tissue of her scars, the mesh of muscle in her back. She opened to the stone her knowledge of the steadily gathering potential of her ovaries and womb, which would soon become active; of the gradually lengthening bones in her limbs; all the processes of life and growth.
And with that, she let herself sink further into the essence of the stone, skimming its ancient, grinding memory. She felt its structure, its flaws; she sensed its origins, where it had grown and where it had been hewed from; she knew of its hard, senseless existence. There was no real life in a stone that had been separated from its mountain, cut from the greater entity of the land it was formed in; but there was still an imprint of things that had occurred here, an impression left by time on the character of the place.
Then, all at once, the shrine woke up around her. She almost lost her trance as her perception widened in one dramatic sweep, and she was feeling not just the stone but the entire structure of the shrine, a millennium of existence revealed to her at once. She sensed the pride and power of this place in its youth, felt its bitterness at its abandonment. This had been a site of great worship once, and it had not forgotten the days when men and women praised in its halls and burned sacrifices on its altars. Then she knew of a long emptiness, and of the coming of the new inhabitant, and the shrine was a place of power once again, though a wan and hollow shadow of its former self.
She began to tentatively probe, reaching toward this new inhabitant, to make it aware of her. Despite her trance, she was becoming fearful again. Even the oblique sensations she had received about the spirit that dwelt here had been massive and daunting, as if she were an insect brushing up against the flanks of some enormous beast.
Slowly, the spirit of Alskain Mar roused.
Lucia felt the change in the air around her with her finely attuned senses. The cavern was darkening, a blackness like smoky ink billowing into the light and defeating the glare of Nuki’s eye. She could hear, distantly, Zaelis’s exclamation of horror as the sight of her was obscured. The small heat that the beam of sun had provided faded away, and the temperature plummeted. She started to shiver; her breath came out in slow jets of vapour. The discomfort was causing her to slip back out of her trance again, and she retreated from the spirit to master herself, to relax.
But the spirit came after her. Her contact had stirred it, and it would not let her go without knowing something of the nature of the intruder in its lair. Lucia had a moment of terror at its sudden aggression before it engulfed her mind, melding forcefully with her in one cruel deluge.
There was the briefest instant where she was brutally faced with an immensity impossible to fathom with her human structures of thought. Then she died of shock.
And kept living.
Her eyes fluttered open. She lay face down on the floor of the ruined chamber. Her cheek and breasts hurt where she had fallen forward. There was light, pale blue and ethereal.
She raised herself up on her arms.
The illumination was coming from beneath the lake, underlighting her face eerily. The entire cavern was aglow. It was bigger even than her initial glimpses of it had suggested. The water cast shining ripples onto the walls and the remnants of the shrine. Overhead, the darkness was total, and no sight of the shaft through which she had entered Alskain Mar could be seen.
As her consciousness reassembled itself, she realised that the spirit of the shrine was still melded with her. She could feel it, tentative now. It sent a wash of knowledge, a recapitulation and something that she interpreted as an apology. The spirit had accidentally killed her, but only for moments. It had taken that long to absorb the nature of the girl, and to reactivate her biology, to repair the damage done to her sanity. Though she had died, she had not missed more than a couple of beats of her heart; her blood had barely time to slow.
Lucia realised with amazement that she was
communicating
with it. Or rather, it was communicating with her. She had known that it was hopelessly beyond her capabilities to make herself understood to a thing that was so alien, but she had never considered that the spirit might be able to simplify itself enough to descend to her level. Yet, in absorbing her nature, it had gained knowledge of her limitations and capabilities, and a rudimentary contact was achieved and held.
She crawled weakly to the edge of the platform, driven by a half-heard motivation, and knelt by the edge. Then she looked down into the water, and saw it.
There was no bottom to the lake any more. Though still as clear as crystal, it now plunged away to endless depths, from which the strange glow came. And down there, at some unguessable distance, the spirit looked back at her.
It had no form. It was like a dent in the water, hovering at the edge of Lucia’s sight, more a suggestion of a shape than a physical entity. Somewhere within it two oval formations that approximated eyes watched her with a frightening intensity. It flickered with the invisible convection of the lake, sometimes jumping for a fraction of a second to another place before returning to its original location, flitting fitfully about while remaining perfectly still. It seemed at once small and looming to Lucia’s eyes. She could not trust her perspective; it was as if she could reach into the water and touch it, though it appeared further away than the moons. Despite its best attempts at a manifestation she could comprehend, it still bent her senses just to look at it; yet look at it she did, for she knew that was what it wanted.
Awe and joy and raw terror clashed within her. She would never have believed she could ever achieve an understanding with a spirit such as this; but now that she had, she was committed to that contact, and there was no telling what kind of force she was dealing with. It could annihilate her mind in a fit of whimsy; it could keep her trapped here for an eternity as a companion; it could do something entirely beyond her imagination. She was still stunned and fragile from the mental impact of the spirit’s first touch, from her momentary skip across the surface of death; she did not know if she was strong enough to deal with what was to follow.
But there was no other recourse now. She had questions to ask. Slowly, she spread her hands and laid them onto the cold surface of the lake. She exhaled a long, shivering breath, and a plume of vapour rose around her.
Then she began.
TWENTY
‘I will not go back!’ Kaiku said, stalking around the rock-lined hollow where the travellers hid. ‘Not yet. Not while we still know nothing about those creatures down there.’
‘It’s
because
we know nothing that we have to go back,’ Yugi argued. He glanced up at Tsata, who was on lookout, crouched on the lip of a flat stone. ‘We have no idea what kind of defences they can muster. And we’re certainly not equipped to try and infiltrate them. What is it exactly you’re planning to
do
, Kaiku?’
‘It is not enough for us to return to the Fold with news of an Aberrant army hiding in the Fault,’ Kaiku said. ‘Why are they here? Who are they intended for? Is it the Libera Dramach, or somebody else? We need answers, not a report that will only breed more questions.’
‘Keep your voices down,’ Nomoru told them coldly.
They had observed the Aberrants and the strange Weaver-like newcomers for several hours before retreating from the edge of the cliff that overlooked the flood plain. Fearing the brightening day, they had pulled back to a less exposed spot where they could chew over their options. Nomoru had found them a pebbly dip between a cluster of tall rocks that leaned together, shutting out most of the sky. Despite the relative ease with which they had penetrated this far into the Weavers’ protected area, they were all becoming increasingly nervous. The lack of any form of guards could be explained by the barrier they had passed through: as with the monastery on Fo that Kaiku had infiltrated in the past, the Weavers believed their barrier was infallible, and did not trouble themselves with security. But still, they had begun to feel that their luck was running thin, and something had to be done.
‘If we stay and try to find out more, we run the risk that we are captured or killed,’ said Yugi, running a hand through his hair before readjusting the rag around his forehead. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his stubbled cheeks made him look haggard and weary; but he was the leader here, and he spoke with authority. ‘Then nobody gets
any
answers, and no warning of what the Weavers are planning.’
‘But what
are
they planning?’ Kaiku said. She was unusually agitated. ‘What do we know?’
‘We know that they have a horde of several different species of Aberrant,’ Yugi said. ‘All predator species or specialised in some way. And they’re all pure-bloods; no freaks.’ Yugi shrugged. ‘That means they’ve either selected them very carefully from their natural habitat, or bred them that way. This is what they have been moving in secret with their barges. This is what Lucia sensed on the river.’