“He stole our seed. He knew what that would do to the tree,” Moon said, and thought, He thinks Rift is here. He wants him to hear this. “Give it back, and we’ll leave. That’s all we want.” It was worth a try.
“I’m afraid I can’t.” Ardan’s voice was low and intense. “I persuaded Rift to help me take it from the forest because I had no other choice. It is a powerful artifact, and it means the survival of everyone in this city.” He stepped forward, and his men spread out to either side of him, watching Moon nervously. “Over the turns, our own magic has waned. We have to use substitutes, objects that carry inherent power that can be transferred to the devices that keep the leviathan from sinking below the surface or thrashing until it destroys the city. When I brought the seed here, the other magisters were only days away from losing what little control over the creature we have.” He spread his hands. “You must understand. Your people can find another place to live. Mine have no choice.”
Moon said, “We both know that’s not true.”
Ardan’s face went still, and a flush of heat darkened the blue skin of his cheeks and forehead.
Moon’s spines twitched. He had meant the traders’ ships, that the people here could leave the city if the magisters and the other wealthy residents bought the use of them for an evacuation. But that wasn’t what Ardan had heard. Jade was right. It wasn’t a coincidence that the leviathan had moved further out to sea. Ardan is controlling it.
Ardan said, thickly, “Then I’m glad we had this conversation.”
Then the floor dissolved under Moon’s feet, crumbling to dust. He dropped, shot his wings out to stop himself. Air rushed straight up from below and he caught it, played it across his wings to stay aloft. Several of Ardan’s men weren’t so lucky, and flailed as they tumbled down toward a great dark space below, along with fragments of the floor.
Moon couldn’t see what was down there, where the wind came from. The thick stench of the leviathan filled the air. Moon twisted enough to get a look behind him. The balcony had broken into a twisted mass of metal supports, and Stone clung to a post. River and Chime clung to him, and Esom clung to Chime. I’d tell Esom he was right, but I think he already knows, Moon thought, and looked back up at Ardan.
The Magister had gone to his knees, his face turned dull blue-gray by the terrible effort of destroying the floor.
The rush of air, the leviathan’s breathing, Moon thought suddenly. That wind came from the leviathan itself. There was some opening just below them, and in a moment it would— Moon flapped, tried to get out of the draft, shouted, “Stone, get away—”
The air reversed with a terrible suction as the creature inhaled. It dragged Moon down, tangled his wings. The pressure was terrible, irresistible. It dragged the air out of his lungs and made the edges of his vision go black. He flipped over in time to see it yank River and Chime away from their grip on Stone. Stone made a wild grab for them. The suction jerked him off the remnants of the balcony, shattered metal hurtling down after him.
Moon swore helplessly and used every bit of his remaining strength to wrench his wings in. The force of it rolled his body over again, so at least he could see what they were plunging into. He had the terrible feeling he already knew.
All he could see was a great dark space, then his eyes adjusted. It was a crater, a giant black crater in the back of the leviathan, surrounded by a ridge of scaly skin. An air hole, Moon thought, sick with dread, as they dropped helplessly down into it.
Chapter Fifteen
They fell, dragged down by the powerful suction of the leviathan’s breath. Moon couldn’t even struggle, the pressure so intense he couldn’t breathe. He thought his body would snap in half before he had a chance to smash into anything.
At first the darkness was complete. Then Moon caught flashes of blue light, just enough to show him that he was falling past a dark-gray surface ridged by scaly bone rings. He had a hard time believing this was really happening. He had always thought he would probably die by being eaten. Being inhaled by a leviathan wasn’t a fate he had considered.
Then he slammed into something ropy and semi-porous, bounced off it with stunning force, and tumbled through an opening in the surface.
Knocked nearly out of his wits, it took Moon moments to realize he was falling free into a huge open space lit by an eerie blue glow, that the pressure was gone. He spread his wings and cupped them to slow his headlong plunge.
Thick webs stretched from all sides of the big chamber and formed a shadowy, complicated architecture, as if he were surrounded by the towers and galleries of a near-transparent city. The moving lights were small bundles of blue-tinged phosphorescence, suspended on long poles and somehow attached to the heads of creatures like giant slugs that crawled ponderously over the heavy cables of the webs. The light from those ambulatory bundles lit other shapes, big ones, small ones, that moved through the webs, hopped from strand to strand, or glided on ridged wings.
Oh, this is… different. Horrible and different. Moon’s throat was too dry to swallow, but at least he could breathe. He looked up, saw Stone not far above him, and the smaller figures of Chime and River. Chime had, somehow, managed to hold on to Esom. Moon wasn’t sure Esom was going to thank him for that; it might have been a kinder end to die in the fall down onto the leviathan’s skin.
Moon looked down and spotted a solid mass below, some distance from the walls. It was an oblong shape, a couple of hundred paces long and wide, suspended near the center of the space. Moon aimed for it and landed on the rubbery surface, then pulled his wings in and dropped to a defensive crouch. River and Chime landed on either side of him, Esom still clinging tightly to Chime. Stone reached it a few moments later. He snapped his wings in and crouched low.
The bulk of Stone’s body looming over them gave Moon what was probably a false sense of security. He peered into the dim blue light; nothing seemed to be coming for them, but that had to be just a matter of time. “What is this place?”
“Didn’t we fall into the monster?” River said, a thread of panic in his voice. “Where are we?”
“Parasites.” It was Esom who gasped it out. “Colonies of parasites…”
“He’s right,” Chime said, sounding near the edge of panic himself. “These creatures live inside the leviathan. They could be animals, or intelligent, I don’t know.”
Moon looked around again, his gorge rising, and wished he could unhear that.
“They carved out this space, out of its body? Wouldn’t that hurt?” River said, clearly still dazed from horror.
“Apparently they don’t care,” Moon snapped. Next to him, Stone made a low, soft growl and nudged Moon with a claw. Moon turned, saw Stone was staring at a thin column about twenty paces away. Glinting faintly in the blue light, it stretched up out of a ridged aperture in the gray rubbery ground. Moon looked up, traced its path upward… to where it connected with a thick strand of web crossing the chamber. Oh, no… This mass wasn’t suspended from the web; it was creating the web. “What are we standing on?”
Chime and River turned to look, just as the surface under them rippled. From the near end of the mass, an immense head suddenly loomed up. It had multiple glaring eyes and a round, fanged mouth. Spiked tentacles stretched up from its sides, as the whole creature started to curve up and inward toward them.
Stone surged over their heads and hit the creature’s face claws first. Moon yelled, “Up and over, now!” and sprang into the air.