He did not understand.
His mind suffered the same turmoil from Sorha’s words that his stomach suffered from the poison he had taken within for power. Saradis? Alive? Skua-Rai to Tarl-an-Gig? But how could that be? How could that ever be?
When he had seen the woman in the Slowlands, the Skua-Rai, she had reminded him of Saradis, but he had never considered she could be her. The idea she would turn traitor to her god was unthinkable. He felt like a child again, like nothing. Like the land of Crua was some vast and cruel joke played on him. He could barely think. His muscles refused to answer to his mind. He had shadow memories of the Slowlands, of the stand collapsing. Was she dead? Or did she live?
Was he still a puppet to her, playing out his part in some plan too complex for him to see?
She could not be a traitor to her beliefs he was sure of it. Zorir, the god, was her all.
And these people, they clearly knew that name.
How? That word flooding his mind, driving out all else. He did not react when the Osere pushed him to the floor. He barely heard Sorha fighting them as they did the same to her, shrieking and cursing as she was forced down. He barely saw the spears above him. Felt no fear as they were thrust at him, only stopping short of skewering him to the ground at a shout from one of the Osere on the thrones.
Then silence.
Stillness and darkness, until it was split by the voice of Ulan.
“The leaders of the Osere have more questions of you,” he said. “Be careful in your answers, for you walk dangerous ground.”
“Why?” shouted Sorha.
“Say nothing!” shouted Ulan. Cahan heard the fear in the interpreter’s voice but he did not care. He was numb. “You have put us all in danger with your foolish talk.”
“What foolish talk?” shouted Sorha. “What is happening?” One of the Osere shouted something and Cahan heard wood on flesh. The grunt of Sorha as the air left her lungs.
“Answer their questions,” said Ulan slowly. “Do nothing else.” The female Osere spoke again. Not many words, but they were said slowly and with an intensity Cahan recognised as import, what they asked meant much to them. On his answer he knew the spears of the warriors crowding around him would fall or be stayed but he did not really care either way.
“They want to know,” said Ulan, “why you have not told them of Zorir before.” Cahan could not answer, he did not understand himself. “Say something,” said Ulan, “the leaders of the Osere are not patient.”
“Zorir does not rule,” said Sorha. “Tarl-an-Gig, that is the god who rules above. Zorir-Who-Walks-In-Fire was a minor god, I thought their cult wiped out.”
One of the leaders spoke again, staccato, urgent noises.
“How do you know Zorir?” said Ulan. “That is what they want to know, it is what matters.” Cahan did not speak, not at first. The tension in the air was too great, the pain within too deep. It choked him. He coughed, tried to sit up a little but a spear stopped him.
“Let Sorha live,” he said, but he did not know why. “She has nothing to do with Zorir. It is me you want.”
“Why?” A harsh bark from one of the Osere on the thrones. “Why you?”
“I was raised,” he said softly, “in the monastery of Zorir, by Saradis, to be Cowl-Rai of Zorir.” Silence. Cahan expected an order, expected the spears to come down. Nothing. “Do they know what Cowl-Rai is?” he said to Ulan.
“They know,” said Ulan. The Osere leaders spoke again. “She wants to know if they sent you down here, to be with your god.”
“No.” Cahan turned his head towards where the thrones were, he could only see feet. “The monastery was destroyed a long time ago, as Sorha said. The monks all killed by the forces of Tarl-an-Gig. Or so I always believed.” How had he not realised when he saw Laha, not even considered Saradis could also live? “I never became what they wished. They thought me weak.” Then, as silence once more entombed him he spoke again. “Why would our gods be down here?” Laughter in response to that. More words from those on the throne, then a softer voice said something to the warriors threatening him.
“Above world, do not know?” From the thrones, they sounded both confused and amused by this. Then they barked out orders in their own language. Cahan was lifted.
“They wish to show you something,” said Ulan. “The woman stays here, run and she will be killed.”
“No!” he shouted, and now he fought them as they dragged him forward, more hands grabbing him. “No! you do not understand! She must come! For all your safety.” The Osere paid no attention, pulled him on. At the same time another group were pulling her away and no matter how he fought and shouted they did not listen. He felt the grip of Sorha’s power loosening. Felt the pain coursing through him. His armour changing. A scream from his mouth as he threw off the warriors holding him, shaking them from him the way a garaur shook off water. A spear thrown and it took all his control not to throw it back, instead he caught it and thrust it into the ground. Forced himself to his knees. Lifted his arms to show he was not about to fight, though his armour was changing, serrating. His back screaming as tentacles of black wood began to grow from it.
“Sorha,” he spat her name, almost begged it.
Then the pain ebbing. Control returning. Sorha near again. The Osere around him picking themselves up. One approached. Only one, the rest holding back. The Osere woman who was one of their leaders stopped in front of him. Her head orientated to his face. Then turned towards the darkness. Away from him. Turned back. Touched where a faint blue glow ran over his armour.
“She stops this?” He nodded. “You walk in sickness?” He shook his head.
“Not when Sorha is near.”
“How?”
“I touched a power I should not have.”
“Why?”
“To save another.” The Osere stood above him, spear poised in her hand. “I thought I could control it. I was wrong.”
“You a weapon for it?” He nodded. The Osere looked him up and down. Stepped back.
“You should kill me.” It was all that made sense, the only reality he had. As long as he had been in Sorha’s shadow he had been able to pretend it was otherwise. But without her, if he was taken from her, or she died, he belonged to what these people said was Zorir. He was the fire waiting to happen. “Finish me, it is what you should do.” So difficult for him to read the woman before him, he had never realised how much he read from another’s eyes. She hefted the spear, as if to throw it.
She did not.
“You worship Zorir?” She cocked her head as if to hear his answer better.
“Never.”
“Then live for now,” she said.
“Why?” he stood.
“A weapon,” she said, “is that to who hold it. We hold you. Now come. Learn.”
She walked away and he followed, out of the village, past the huts and through what he thought of as a wood, or a forest. The trunks of trees gradually becoming thicker and stronger, the pain within subsiding as Sorha caught up with him. No one spoke to him, not even Ulan, until Sorha broke her silence.
“Do you know where we are going?” she whispered. The trees around them occasionally lit up, not too brightly, but enough to give him a view of Sorha. In the light she was monochrome, her face thin as though she was starved. From the corner of his eyes he kept thinking he saw bright colours. “I did not think a forest could grow underground.”
“I think it is the roots of a cloudtree,” he said. “I think they get thicker the nearer we are to the trunk.”
“Do you think that’s where we are going?”
“I do not know, if the roots are as wide as the branches it could be a long walk.” She nodded, glanced at him.
“You did not know about Saradis?”
He shook his head, hearing her name made his mouth dry. “I thought her dead.”
“She was at the Slowlands,” said Sorha. Cahan let out a laugh, a low and bitter thing.
“I saw her. Even thought how much the woman on the stands reminded me of Saradis. It never occurred to me she would betray Zorir.”
“Well—”
“I do not want to talk of it.”
They stopped later, drinking sweet tasting water out of gourds like none he had ever seen before. The Osere served them a kind of bread with a strange texture, no crust, but no grit either.
“It is made from dried and ground mushrooms,” said Ulan. Then added wistfully, “Almost everything down here is mushrooms. What I would give for a histi.”
“How far is it to our destination?” asked Sorha, staring at the mushroom bread.
“A long way.”
“How long, a day? Two days?” Ulan shrugged.
“Time is rarely measured down here,” he said. “The Osere stop when they stop. Sleep when they sleep.” He looked up. “I miss the Light Above, the sense of rhythm to my life.”
“How many times will we sleep?” said Sorha.
“Once, at least. And eat maybe twice more.”
In the end they slept twice and ate three times. That aside there was only the walking. To walk here was nothing like in the forests above, there were no bushes, no animals. Occasional stands of mushrooms loomed out of the darkness like pale sentinels, and Cahan presumed these must act as signs to the Osere. No doubt they would feel as lost in the great forests as he felt down here, in this featureless, unending, darkness.
Thoughts of Saradis filled his mind. Of what she had promised he was, how he had run from it and still it had captured him. A fear rising within that all of this was her plan, that he had never walked any path but hers.
The roots became thicker, though the light from them never changed, always dim and flickering at best. He began to notice that as the Osere passed close, colour shimmered across them but he did not know if it was an illusion or not, something conjured up by a mind starved of things to see.
“I think we are stopping again,” said Sorha. All around the Osere were putting down packs, gathering into small groups to eat bread and drink water. Cahan had become used to this, and it was only as he began to sit that he noticed a difference this time. Ulan was not sitting, and neither was the woman, the Osere leader who had accompanied them. She stood, together with two of her soldiers. Rather than sitting, Cahan straightened up. “What is happening?” said Sorha.
“I know no more than you.” He glanced around, noticing in the gloom what appeared to be a taffistone but no one was approaching it. Ulan came over.
“From here, we go forward in a smaller group. Me, the guards, Frina of the Osere, she is their leader, and both of you.”
“Through the taffistone?” said Cahan. Ulan shook his head.
“Not yet. Leave anything here that may catch or entangle you, imagine you intend to go through a thornbush in Harnwood.” Cahan nodded, though there was nothing he could remove, his armour was part of him. Sorha took off her helmet and left it on the ground together with her belts and scabbards. She looked at him.
“You could take your belts off too.” He blinked, nodded. He had worn these clothes so long he had come to think of them all as part of him, and the belt he wore to hang a gourd from he had long since stopped thinking about. He placed it on the floor. For a moment wondered what had happened to his bow, if someone back in the Forestal tree city used it now, Ont maybe. He hoped they did, he did not want it to go to waste. It was a good bow.
“Come,” said Ulan. “We have a way to go yet.” He watched Sorha, she was staring at the taffistone.
“It will not lead you back,” said Ulan. “The paths between stones here do not lead above.” Sorha nodded and turned from it.
They walked on, over the grit of the landscape and around huge roots. Always heading towards some destination that he could not see. Slowly, a glow appeared before him, growing in intensity as they neared. At first it frightened him, it was similar to the glow he had seen around the Boughry; were they what waited? As he neared he became sure it was not them. This glow was criss-crossed with lines that, when he was very close, revealed themselves to be a cage of thick rootlets.
He turned to ask Ulan and the Osere what this was and saw something spectacular. The Osere, whatever they painted on their skin and armour was reacting to the light. He had not been going mad when he saw colours before, though what he had seen was weak compared to this. Frina and her guards shone in the brightest colours he had ever seen, streaks of green and pink and purple. Handprints in bright, bright pink adorned their bodies. Lines of white drawn across where he would expect to see eyes. They were beautiful, and he thought it sad they would never know.
The Osere were walking round the cage, in the darkness their bodies left behind after-images in his vision. Streamers of bright colour until they vanished behind the light and mass of tangled roots. They were gone for long enough that Cahan began to think they had been abandoned.
They had not been, the Osere reappeared, spilling colour where they walked. They said something to Ulan in their odd language. The interpreter turned.
“Follow,” he told them.
They went around the cage of roots until the Osere stopped, she pointed to the cage and then put her hands between two of the roots, pushing hard and with a creak, the roots moved so she could force her way in. Cahan followed, Sorha close behind him and they made slow and painful progress. The cage was so thick with roots they could not go in a straight line. Instead they had to slide between, and over thicker roots. Moving aside thinner ones, a constant feeling of claustrophobia as they pushed through. Their skin scratched and bleeding before they had got far, but when they finally broke through Cahan did not feel the scratches. He did not feel anything.
He did not know what or how to think. He did not understand what was there, what he was being shown.
He felt a pulse, like a heartbeat felt through the ground – though it was very slow. He had felt it when he was pushing through the root wall, but it was weak and he had ignored it.
Now he was through it was no longer something he could ignore. And he found himself looking at something he could not understand. From above came a massive, thick root. Thicker than any other he had seen, nearly as thick as the trunks above, and it pierced the ground below them. Where it met the ground he found the light source that made the Osere a riot of colour. As Cahan watched a pulse of light ran down the root and into a strange, bulbous blister on the bottom of the wood that was the source of the light. It was many times taller and wider than him. Its outside semi-opaque, like glass. Unlike glass it looked soft, malleable. The Osere leader led him closer, saying something softly in her language. As she spoke he saw that there was something inside the blister.
The thing within was huge and black, slowly moving in time with the gentle pulse of the light. It was like watching something made of cogs or wheels, spinning, stopping, spinning. He could not understand it, not at first. Then he managed to decipher some of what he saw. It was like a gasmaw, but on the scale of cloudtrees. Tentacles as thick as he was, suckers edged in blades. The flash of a beak that could easily cut him in half. The overwhelming feeling of a presence, of a power.
His first instinct was to run. This was another creature like the one that had hunted him in Ancient Anjiin, but those around him did not appear frightened of it. Or worried it may attack them.
“Behold,” said Ulan, “before you a god in its prison.”
“Anjiin’s ruins,” said Sorha from behind him. “Is there one of these on every cloudtree?”
“I believe so, and the same in the south.”
“They are part of the tree?” said Sorha.
“No, I think they live off it.” The Osere Leader, Frina, said something to Ulan and he nodded. “When a cloudtree falls, the prisoner dies.”
“Parasites,” said Cahan. “Like fungus.” Frina spoke again. Saying something long and complex, using her hands, which glowed a warm blue, to emphasise some words.
“No,” said Ulan, “she says the fungal web lives with life, it is part of it. These creatures, they live off the tree but give nothing back.” Cahan looked across at the Osere, her head locked on the blister in the wood. He wondered how she perceived it, if it was purely by sound, or if the lack of eyes meant the Osere had some other senses. Her talk of webs had made him curious.
“Do these people know the name Ranya?” All attention on him.
“Ranya?” said Frina; she stepped closer, talking all the while in her own language, and Ulan, shocked at first, eventually managed to speak.
“She wants to know where you have heard of the Visiongiver.”
“Visiongiver?”
“The Osere believe Ranya to be the herald of Iftal, that through her they will have their eyes returned to them, if they stay loyal to their cause. But she is a god of the underground. The Lady of the Web.” The Osere leader spoke again. “She is not a god of the overground, her web lives below.”
“I met a man when I was a youth who told me of Ranya,” said Cahan, and he addressed Frina, not Ulan. “Then later I met a monk, called Udinny, who said she heard the voice of Ranya. She called the god ‘Our Lady of the Lost’. I found a kindness in her followers that was lacking anywhere else.” He heard Sorha laugh.
“I don’t think a soft god has any place in Crua.” She shook her head. The Osere leader spoke again, her voice gentle.
“She says Ranya is kindness. The ones you call gods are mostly cruel. Or they were. Iftal was once aloof, but Ranya grew within them and looked down on the people and felt pity. When her web is complete, Iftal will rise again. Anjiin will be full of light and the Osere will be given eyes to see it.” The Osere nodded. She pushed her way back through the cage of roots. Cahan looked at Ulan.
“Follow,” he said.
They left the cage and the sleeping god, returned to the camp and spent the night. The next morning they stood before the taffistone and Ulan told them to put a hand on the person in front of them. Then they passed through the stone, the now-familiar feeling of nausea, of being upside-down and the right way up at the same time. Then they were on the other side in complete darkness. No lights in the sky here. No brightly glowing Osere. He heard Ulan speak, something coming back that sounded affirmative. Then a scratching sound, sparks, bright in the pitch black. A moment later a torch guttered into being.
“There is no light here,” said Ulan. “It took a long time for me to get the Osere to understand light when I first came.” He lit two more torches, passed one to Cahan and one to Sorha. “Follow,” he said, pointing to the Osere who were walking away.
Again, they walked with little sense of time and more of a sense of unreality, everything here was black. The flickering of the torches painting bodies and faces with odd shadows, making the Osere look even stranger than Cahan already thought them.
They passed through another root forest, but this was different. Cahan tripped at one point, a hand going out to steady himself on a thick root. It crumbled beneath his hand and he fell into the dirt. The Osere stopped. Waited until he was standing and he reached out, touched another root. That one also cracked at his touch, it was dry, like paper.
He saw none of the mushroom clumps, nothing that helped him understand how the Osere navigated down here, and he felt a moment of terror. If they abandoned him he would be lost for ever in the darkness.
Eventually he began to see a light; at first he thought his eyes played tricks on him but as they got closer he saw it was a blue glow, so soft as to be barely there. It came from within another of those balls of roots, the prisons. But this one was not thick like the first, it looked like it had been exploded outwards and as they approached Cahan became more and more sure of what he would see within.
The Osere stopped at the hole in the root ball and he walked up to it. Looked inside. The thick root was there, and along it blue, faintly glowing lines. At the bottom was another blister, but this one was shattered, broken, the liquid it had contained splashed over the ground and the root, where it had solidified like ice. The occupant gone, and Cahan did not need the Osere to speak, to tell him it was the creature he had seen in Ancient Anjiin. In the end the Osere said only one word. She pointed at the empty blister.
“Zorir,” she said.
“The name of the god that was here?” said Cahan.
“No,” said Ulan. “They do not know the names of the gods. In their language ‘Zorir’ means ‘escape’.”