“No,” Rhapsody whispered, choking. “No, please. Stay asleep, little one.”
i.e. a
Slowly the child pulled first one foot, then the other, from the ground and took a step forward.
The sleepwalker.
“Please,” Rhapsody whispered again. “Not yet, little one, it’s not time now. Go back to sleep.”
The Earthchild paid her no heed. With a lumbering gait she began climbing through the hills of littered stone, gliding through the rock as if wading ankle-deep in the sea, her eyes still closed. Whipcords and tendrils of the colossal vine flexed and lashed impotently toward her, straining against the thrall caused by the strange insectoid music that the Grandmother was still making.
Achmed put his hand out to Rhapsody. “Come on,” he said. Involuntarily she obeyed, following him over the boulders that had once been part of the ceiling.
They followed in the wake of the Earthchild, whose movements left an open passage in the rocky wasteland that the Colony had become. As they passed the great arms of the demon-root it began to tremble, causing even more dust and grit to rain down from the crushed walls and ceiling. Rhapsody coughed, trying to expel the debris from the back of her throat, as Achmed hauled her over a mound of earth and under a mammoth, hissing vine. Tiny tendrils writhed in the dark, lunging in serpentine strikes, to be reined back by the power of the Thrall ritual. Unable to reach their target, the roots spat in snake-like fury.
At the sound Rhapsody’s eyes suddenly narrowed, brightened by hate and the memory of Jo’s death. She let go of Achmed’s hand. With a movement so sudden that he couldn’t follow it with his eyes, she lashed out with a vicious sweep of the sword and struck off the tendrils, tossing them onto the floor of the cavern. The vine shrieked and shuddered, the tiny branches igniting and burning to ash on the ground.
“Not now!” Achmed hissed. “Listen.”
The Thrall ritual was diminishing. The echo of the Grandmother’s voice in the distance was thinner, rasping, as the strain of maintaining the difficult song began to take its toll.
“She’s failing,” Achmed said, dragging Rhapsody out from under the quivering root and up the tunnel. “We have to get to the Loritorium.”
“Grunthor—”
“Come,” Achmed insisted. He could barely keep the same thought from his mind. The heartbeat of the Grandmother was beginning to wane, the exertion of the ritual wearing her down rapidly. Her ancient heart would give out soon. If it did before they got to the Loritorium, there would be no chance for escape, not for them.
And not for the rest of the world, upon whom the prisoners of the ancient vault deep within the Earth were about to be loosed.
A horrific crash and the sound of falling rock rumbled through the passageway ahead, and a thick fog of dust rolled over them. Instinctively they covered their eyes and heads. When the noise abated, they looked up simultaneously and waved their arms to clear the air of the gray dust. Achmed nodded, and they hurried forward, only to stop.
A solid wall of newly fallen rock blocked the passageway ahead of them. Achmed ran his hands over it desperately, then pointed off to the side. A tiny opening beneath heavy stone slabs was the only break in the wall.
Quickly Rhapsody sheathed her sword, dropped to the ground, and crawled into the hole, breathing in the bitter dust as she did. The broken fragments of basalt ripped through the fabric of her trousers and the skin of her hands as she pulled herself through to the other side, then immediately began clearing as much of the debris as she could from around the hole.
A moment later, Achmed’s head appeared, his face contorted in pain. His shoulders caught as he struggled through, wedging him in the hole. With great effort he pulled himself back again, then reached an arm through first. Rhapsody grabbed his hand and pulled, bracing herself against the rockwall with one foot. She could feel the crack of the bones in his hand and shuddered.
“Pull harder,” Achmed mumbled, his face in the gravel of the floor.
“Your ribs—”
“Pull harder” he growled. Rhapsody set her teeth and repositioned her foot once more, then pulled with all her strength. A sickening popping vibrated through her hands, and she heard the intake of breath as Achmed swallowed the sound of agony. His head and shoulders emerged. Rhapsody slid her hands under his armpits and tugged again, hauling his upper body free of the hole and striping his back with streaks of blood as it grazed against the jagged rocks of the floor. A moment later he was free, clutching his broken ribs, and she helped him rise. They exchanged a quick nod, then turned and ran up the passageway again.
They scrambled over a pile of broken granite that had once been the great archway, the shattered words of the inscription now littering the ground in mute testimony to the wisdom they had once held. The Sleeping Child was no longer within their sight. Achmed’s foot slipped as he reached the summit of the mound and wedged in a crevasse. Rhapsody pulled it out before following him over the hill.
Before them yawned the tunnel opening to the Loritorium.
“Can you see the Earthchild?” Rhapsody gasped. Achmed shook his head, then rapidly descended the hill, running until he reached the smooth marble of the Loritorium floor.
The flame of the firewell was twisting brightly in its fountain, casting grim shadows around the streets and over the silent buildings. Rhapsody ran to the central square where the cases that housed the elements stood, then stopped and exhaled in relief. The Sleeping Child was standing there, near the altar of Living Stone, eyes still closed. The Sleepwalker.
Rhapsody slowed her gait and walked toward the tall figure as quietly as she could, taking care not to frighten her. The Earthchild ran her hands blindly over the altar of Living Stone, then turned slowly. She sat down on the top of the slab and then lay back, crossing her arms over her waist, resuming the position in which she had once rested on her catafalque. The shadows from the firelight illuminated her face, relaxing into a peaceful countenance, as they danced over her. She let loose a deep sigh.
Then, as Rhapsody stared in astonishment, the body of the Sleeping Child seemed to become liquid and began to shift and expand. Her chest and head glistened, then glowed with a light of their own. The flesh of her long, stone-gray body became translucent, gleaming in the flickering light from the firewell, then stretched in an absurd dance, twisting hypnotically, grotesquely, in earth-colors more intensely beautiful than Rhapsody had ever seen, a multiplicity of subtle shades of vermilion and green, brown and purple. Like bread dough being kneaded, she thought as the child’s abdomen elongated, then distended upward. Ethereal bread dough.
An acrid odor shattered her reverie and snapped her to awareness. Rhapsody turned away from watching the transformation the Child of Earth was undergoing to see Achmed raking his sword through the slender channels of the Loritorium’s street lamp system, as if driving a herd of small animals within the narrow arteries. The blistering odor brought water to her eyes and nose, and panic flashed through her as she recognized the smell.
He had unplugged the stone dam of the lampfuel. She looked behind him to see it was gushing from the reservoir, running in a great corpulent river from the center of the square to the tunnel into the Colony, filling the streets and pooling dangerously close to the firewell.
“Gods, what are you doing?” she cried. “Get away from there! It will ignite!”
Achmed continued to drag the blade through the channels, directing the thick ooze back to the halfwall closest to the tunnel leading back to Ylorc.