Tavi licked his lips. "Oh," he said. He looked down at the forest's glowing floor. "Why did I break through it, then?"
Kitai glanced at him and then paced over to the spot where Tavi had landed, crouching down beside it. He touched the glowing fluid with his fingertips. "It's thinner, here. I don't understand. It's never been like this."
Tavi said, "Looks like they were expecting company."
Kitai turned to him, his eyes wide, body tense. "They knew where we were coming in. And now they know that we're here." The Marat boy's eyes flicked left and right, and he took several steps sideways, toward Tavi, his back to the stone of the wall.
Tavi backed toward the wall as well, emulating Kitai, and almost tripped on an incongruous lump in the smooth surface of the croach. Tavi glanced down and then leaned over, peering at it.
The lump was not large: perhaps the size of a chicken. It rose from the otherwise smooth floor of the forest in a hemisphere of greenish light with something dark at its core. Tavi leaned closer, peering at the shadowed lump.
It stirred and moved. Tavi hopped back from it, his breath catching in his throat.
"That," he gasped. "That's a crow. There's a crow in there. And it's alive."
"Yes, Aleran," Kitai said with scarcely veiled impatience. "The crows are sometimes foolish. They come down and peck at the croach, and the Keepers come for them and entomb them." Kitai cast his eyes to one side, where several other lumps, quite a bit larger, lay only a dozen long strides from the ropes at the base of the cliff. "They can live for days. Being eaten by the croach."
Tavi shuddered, a cold sensation crawling down his spine like a runnel of melting snow. "You mean. If these Keepers get one of us…"
"A Marat can live for weeks buried in the croach, Aleran."
Tavi felt sick. "You don't rescue them?"
Kitai flashed him a look, his eyes hard, cool. Then, in a few silent strides, paced over to the crow. He drew his knife, reached down, and slashed the blade over the surface of the lump. With a swift, curt motion, he reached down for the crow's neck and drew it from the clinging goo of the croach.
Parts of the bird peeled and sloughed away, like meat from a roast that had been cooked to tender perfection in a carefully tended oven. It let out a rasping sound, but its beak never attempted to close. Its eyes blinked once and then went glassy.
"That takes only hours," Kitai said and dropped the remains back near the slit in the wax. "Do you see, Aleran?"
Tavi stared at the ground, sickened. "I… I see."
Kitai grimaced at him. He turned and started pacing away, following the wall of stone again. "We must move. The Keepers will come to investigate the break you made and put the rest of the crow back. We should not be here when they arrive."
"No," Tavi whispered. "I guess we sh-"
In the trees, Tavi saw something move.
It was indistinct at first. Just a lump in the wax on the trunk of the tree. But it shuddered and twitched with life. Tavi thought for a moment that a piece of the croach had broken from the tree trunk and would fall to earth. It had a lumpy shape and coursed with the same luminous green fluid as the rest of the wax. But as the Aleran boy watched, legs writhed free of the lump's sides. Something like a head emerged from a shell-like coating of the croach, pale eyes round and huge. All in all, eight knobby, many-jointed legs stretched free of the thing's body, and then, with a quiet, horrible grace, it paced down the trunk of the tree and across the floor of the forest to the break in the surface of the croach, where greenish glowing fluid bubbled and seethed like blood in an open wound.
A wax spider. A Keeper of Silence. Silent and strange and the size of a large dog. Tavi stared at it, his heart pounding in his chest, and felt his eyes widening.
He shot a glance to Kitai, who had also frozen and was staring at the
Keeper. The creature bent down and spread wide a set of smooth mandibles at the base of its head. It scooped up pieces of the crow and using its foremost set of legs, tucked them back into the open wound in the croach. Then it hovered over the slash, several of its legs working back and forth over it in swift, methodical movements, sealing the wax closed over the carcass.
Tavi shot a glance back at Kitai, who motioned to Tavi and then covered his own mouth with his hand, a clear command to be silent. Tavi nodded and turned toward Kitai. The Marat's eyes widened in alarm, and he held up his hands, palms out, to tell Tavi to stop.
Tavi froze.
Behind him, the quiet rustle of the Keeper's limbs over the wax had come to a halt. From the corner of his eye, Tavi could just see it gather all its limbs beneath it again, bobbing up and down in restless agitation. It began to emit a series of high pitched chirrups, not quite like a bird's voice, or anything else Tavi had ever heard. The sound made shivers slither down the length of his body.
After a moment, the Keeper appeared to go back to its work. Kitai turned toward Tavi, his motions very, very slow, graceful. He gestured toward Tavi with his hand, every movement smooth and circular and rolling, exaggerated. Then he turned and began to walk away, silent and slow, his steps flowing almost as though in a dance.
Tavi swallowed and turned to follow Kitai, struggling to emulate the Marat boy's steps. Kitai walked before him, close to the stone wall of the chasm, and Tavi followed until they were several dozen yards away from the Keeper. Tavi felt its presence behind him, bizarre and unworldly, disturbing as the legs of a fly prickling along the nape of his neck. When they were out of its sight, he felt himself relaxing and moving closer to Kitai out of reflex- as different as the other boy might be, he was more familiar, more friendly than that buglike creature entombing the crow within the glowing wax.
Kitai looked back over his shoulder at Tavi and then past him, eyes wide. There was something in them-tightly controlled terror, Tavi thought. He thought that Kitai looked a bit relieved to see Tavi standing so close to him, and the two boys exchanged a silent nod of acknowledgment to one another. Tavi felt the understanding between them without words needing to be said: truce.
Kitai let out a breath, slowly. "You must be quiet," he said, whispering. "And move smoothly. They see sudden motions."
Tavi swallowed and whispered, "We're safe if we're still?"
Kitai's face grew a shade paler. He shook his head, giving the gesture a circular accent to smooth it out. "They've found even those who were still. I've seen it."
Tavi frowned. "They must have some other way of seeing. Smell, hearing, something."
Kitai rolled his head in the negative again. "I don't know. We do not stay where they are to learn of them." He looked around and shivered. "We must be careful. It called. Others will come to search. They will be slow for now. But the Keepers will come."
Tavi nodded and had to swallow and force himself to make the gesture slowly, not in nervous jerks. "What should we do?"
Kitai nodded toward the ancient tree rising from the center of the forest. "We continue the trial, Aleran."
"Uh. Maybe we shouldn't."
"I will continue, Aleran. If you are too afraid to go on, then stay." His lips curled in a mischievous sneer. "It is what I would expect of a child."
"I am not a child,'' Tavi hissed furiously. "I'm older than you. What are you, twelve years old? Thirteen?"
Kitai narrowed his eyes. "Fifteen," he hissed.
Tavi stared at the other boy for a moment, then started smiling. He had to struggle not to break out into sudden laughter.