"Tomorrow night!" Pavek protested. "The thirteenth night. I have the Lion-King's word—"
"Tonight," Cerk insisted. "Halflings have forgotten more than the dragons will ever know. Hamanu's calculations are founded in myth; ours in fact: The convergence will be tonight. We're too late for them, but Kakzim will be drunk and bloated. Tomorrow will be a good time to confront him—"
"Tonight! We'll get there tonight, if I have to carry you. Start walking!"
Chapter Fifteen
Another night, another day in shades of darkness beneath the black tree. Orekel's ankle had swelled up to the size of a cabra fruit. It was hot—not warm—to the touch; Mahtra had heard Zvain say so more than once. And painful. The dwarf couldn't move without moaning, couldn't move much at all. Zvain took Orekel's share of the slops the halflings dumped into their pit and carried it to him in his hands. The boy collected water from the ground seeps the same way.
His behavior made no sense to Mahtra. The dwarf didn't need food or water; he needed relief from his suffering. She didn't understand suffering. Father and Mika had died, but they'd died quickly. They hadn't suffered. Pavek had taken longer to die, but not as long as Orekel was taking. She'd asked Zvain, "What is wrong with the dwarf that he hasn't died?"
Zvain had gotten angry at her. He'd called her the names the street children had shouted when she'd walked from the templar quarter to the cavern in what seemed, now, to have been another life. Mahtra was hurt by the names, but not the way Orekel was hurt. She didn't die; she just crouched in the little place she'd claimed as her own.
Darkness thickened again; another night was coming. Mahtra thought it was the fourth night. She'd lost track of days and nights while she sat outside House Escrissar because they were the same while she lived them and fell one on top of the other in her memory. She didn't want to lose track of days again; it seemed somehow important to know how long she stayed in a particular place, even if the only events to remember were Orekel's groans and the slops falling from above.
Still thinking about time, Mahtra tried to make four marks that would help her keep the days and nights in order. The roots that intruded into their prison seemed an ideal place to carve her counting lines, but they were too tough for her fingernails; she broke two trying. Her nails were the color of cinnabar and tasted faintly of the bright red stone. She scratched along the dirt floor, searching for the broken-off pieces and had found one when she heard scratching sounds through the dirt beside her.
"Zvain—?" she whispered.
"Shsssh!" came the whispered reply. "I can hear it."
An animal digging through the dirt, drawn, perhaps, by the sounds she'd made? A large animal? An animal like the one Ruari had freed on the other side of the mountains? Fear tremors shook Mahtra's hands, nothing more. No warmth rising from the burnished marks on her skin, no heaviness in her arms, her legs, or her eyes. She'd chewed and swallowed all her cinnabar, but that wasn't enough. She didn't know what was missing, but cinnabar wasn't enough. If Ruari's beast burst into their prison, she'd have no protection.
"You can't go boom, can you?" he asked.
"No—I chewed up all my cinnabar, but something's missing."
"Damn!" the boy swore softly, and said other things besides. Father wouldn't have approved, or Pavek, but they were the words Mahtra would have used herself, if she'd remembered them.
Then there was light, so bright and painful that she couldn't see. Closing her eyes was no improvement. Her eyelids couldn't keep out the light after so much time in darkness. Mahtra warded the light with her hands, finally restoring the darkness with the pressure of her forearm against her closed eyes.
But she wanted desperately to see.
There were halfling voices, halfling words, halfling hands all around her, pulling her away from the wall, pushing her toward the agonizing light. She stumbled and needed her hands to catch herself as she fell. Her eyes opened—no choice of hers—and the light was less painful.
Halflings had scratched sideways into their prison!
For a heartbeat, Mahtra held the hope that they'd been rescued. Then she heard Kakzim's voice.
"Hurry up! The convergence begins before sundown! Hurry!"
Mahtra didn't know what a convergence was, but she didn't think she'd like it.
With halflings pushing and shoving, she crawled through the sideways hole, emerging into a tunnel that was high enough for the halflings to stand comfortably, but nowhere near high enough for Mahtra. Crawling was demeaning and not fast enough to satisfy the halflings, who harried her with sharpened sticks. She walked stooped over, like the old slave-woman at House Escrissar, and stopped when they thrust their sticks toward her face.
Zvain came out of the prison after her. Being not much bigger than the halflings themselves, the human youth could, and did, put up a fight that got him nowhere except beaten with sharp sticks and bound with ropes around his wrists and neck. Mahtra saw these things because the tunnel where she sat waiting had its own light: countless bright and flickering specks. The specks moved, gathering themselves into little worms that streaked up one side of the tunnel, across, and down the other where they broke apart and disappeared. The specks were white, but the little worms could be any color, or several colors and changing colors.
There'd been worms in the reservoir cavern, even worms that glowed faintly in the dark, but nothing like these fast-moving, fast-changing creatures that seemed to be made from light itself. Watching them, Mahtra forgot the prison she'd just left, forgot Zvain, forgot the halflings with their sticks—nothing mattered except touching a worm....
"Ack!" a halfling shouted in its own language, and struck Mahtra's knuckles with its stick.
She pulled her hand back to her hard-lipped mouth.
"Behave yourself! The halfling knowledge isn't to be touched by corrupt mongrels like you." Kakzim sneered. "Your protection doesn't work in the dark, does it, Mahtra?"
With her stinging hand still pressed against her mouth, Mahtra gave a wide-eyed nod, which was a lie—one of the very few that she'd ever told, but one for which she thought Father would forgive her. Pavek certainly would, or Ruari or Zvain. She could almost hear the three of them telling her not to let Kakzim know that she'd felt a spark inside when the halfling struck her hand.
Or that Kakzim himself had told her something she hadn't known before: darkness did stifle her protection, but she needed only a very little light to make it work again. A daily walk between the templar quarter and the elven market had been enough, so that she'd never suspected light was as important as cinnabar, but the little worms she mustn't touch were almost bright enough themselves.
The halflings were sealing their prison, leaving Orekel alone inside it, and that made Zvain frantic. He fought again, screaming that he and the dwarf couldn't be separated, and got beaten again. The two humans Mahtra knew best, Zvain and Pavek, were each inclined to risk themselves for others, regardless of the consequences. It was very brave, she supposed, but also very foolish. Wherever they were going—now that the halflings were making them move forward again—the dwarf was better off where he was.
As for Ruari—Mahtra hoped, as the halflings prodded her through another tight passage, that Ruari was with Pavek and Father in the place where people went after they died.
But Ruari was still alive.
They came out into another prison chamber, similar to the one they'd left, except it was open to the sky and afternoon bright, and the first thing she saw was Ruari's long, lean body hanging down from rope tied around his wrists. The second was the shallow movements of his ribs.