30

My fingertip offers no milk. A mewl of infant indignation frets him. When I look down, the baby’s eyes are open. An expression no innocent baby could ever have mars the unblemished features: he is aware and he is afraid. When I met my baby sister’s gaze, the threads of our hearts tangled. This stranger stares at me as if he is trying to figure out who I am and if I mean to hurt him. His eyes squish up, his chin trembles, and he wails.

A hand presses on my shoulder as the awful sound swirls around us.

“Give him to me,” Mother says in the strongest voice I have heard from her since I first entered the tomb. “He’s hungry.”

I can’t bear to touch him. I just want to fling him away. So I am relieved when she takes him.

My body aches like it has been torn apart and stitched back together. Limping to the arches I lean against the smooth stone and rub my forehead as I stare out at the stone bridge. All the lit sparks have come to rest like butterflies on the supporting arches beneath the roadway. Their light illuminates a sandy floor, not a fathomless sea. The vast cavern we crossed is nothing more than a large chamber with vaulted ceilings, not nearly as big as I imagined it. In the murky shadows concealing the far end of the span I see the mouth of a passageway but not the door we came through. There is no wooden bridge. Everything I thought I saw has vanished.

“Jes? Are you all right? I saw you stumble.” Kalliarkos hurries up, and I open my arms so he can walk right into them.

“Will we ever find Bettany?” I whisper as I put my head on his shoulder.

“We’ll find her,” he promises. “We’ll do it together, Jes.”

I rest there, feeling his heart beat against mine.

After a short silence he speaks again. “I’ve never seen oil flare so brightly as when the reservoir shattered. The flames blinded me. Unfortunately most of our reserve oil burned up so we have to move on soon.”

“The flames?” I look over at the others clustered together around the lit lamp. The ceramic jug with its reservoir of oil is indeed broken, and leaked oil has spread across the floor. “It was the sparks that blinded us.”

“Sparks? What sparks?”

“Don’t you see them?” The sparks gleaming along the bridge start to fall. One by one they plummet onto the sandy floor and wink out of existence to become just another grain of sand.

He eases me back. We are face-to-face with nothing between us. “Listen to me, Jes. You’re exhausted. But it’s all right. We can do this.”

He can’t see the sparks. As they fall, flash, and vanish, the bridge fades until I can no longer see the chamber, only breathe in its ancient salt-dust odor. Did I hallucinate it all? Yet when I touch my chest the sling hangs limp because they took the baby. My brother is alive.

The pressure of Kalliarkos’s hand on the small of my back makes me so aware of how close he stands. His breathing quickens.

“Jes,” he whispers as softly as a promise I never knew was made. I have been yearning for such a promise all my life.

“I don’t have to hide behind a mask when I’m with you,” I say.

“Jes! Where are you?” Maraya’s frantic tone cuts between us, and I pull back from him.

She stands at the edge of the lamplight. The boy nurses industriously in Mother’s arms as Cook supports her. Amaya clutches our sister as if she means to shield her from malevolent spirits. Ro-emnu has an arm thrown protectively around Coriander but it is he who looks stricken and she who seems to be whispering reassurances as they look nervously around the chamber. The oracle lies facedown on the floor.

“I’m here,” I say as Kalliarkos and I walk over.

Amaya grabs my arm, shaking it like she means to yank it off. “What were those sparks, Jes?”

“You saw them?”

“Of course I saw them! They passed right through my flesh. I thought I was turning to smoke. What were they?”

“What sparks?” asks Cook, looking up.

When Ro-emnu and Coriander nod at each other I know they saw them too.

“Do you have some boring Archivist’s explanation, Merry?” Amaya demands.

Maraya shakes her head slowly. “No. I can’t explain that with ropes and pulleys and wires. It was like the hearts of a thousand stars pierced my body and flew right through me.”

Mother whispers, “The land is the Mother of All. She gave birth to the five souls that bind us. The souls arise from the land. If we forget Her then She will forget Her children.”

To hear such a superstitious utterance pour out of my mother’s lips shocks me. By the sweating shine of her face I see that she is feverish.

“Why is it so cold?” she adds.

We three girls look at one another, for while it is cool here beneath the earth, it is not so cold as to make a person shiver as she is doing.

Ro-emnu kneels, offering her a flask. “Honored Lady, will you drink in honor of the five?”

“I’m so cold,” she says. “I’m not thirsty.”

“Amaya, get Mother to drink.” I stand. “Kal, help me look for a way out.”

He frowns as Cook and my sisters fuss over Mother and the babies. “We can only use one lamp at a time. We risk running out of oil now that we’ve lost the reservoir.”

So he and I and Ro-emnu leave them in the dark and with a single lamp we discover five passages leading out of this chamber: two lead down, one up, one is level, and the fifth is the bridge. I enter the closest ramp, one of the two leading down. A few steps into the featureless passageway, I take in a deep breath of the musty air to see if I can smell sky or sea, but it is all dust and silence.

Light throws wavering shadows on the wall. They stretch with monstrous limbs reaching out for me, and I jump back.

“Careful,” says Kalliarkos, coming up behind me with the lamp. I know he has my back.

Now that he’s brought up light we can see that both ceiling and floor drop away in a jumble of collapsed masonry: the passage is blocked. As we retreat the light glimmers over four lines like pointed caps gouged halfway up the passageway’s opening.

“Doesn’t that look like the mark for Rivers?” I say.

“Kal, let’s try the one that leads up,” says Ro-emnu. I follow them, and as they enter I can’t help but glance at that same spot halfway up the right-hand wall where, at the entrance to each Fives obstacle, its identifying mark is carved. There it is! As they go in I pause to trace five interlocked circles incised into the stone: Rings.

Inside the passage, their voices crow in triumph. “Stairs!”

Light chases shadows as they hurry back, congratulating each other, but when they reach me I grab the lamp out of Kalliarkos’s hand.

“Come with me!” The other passageway leading down is marked with four parallel lines of uneven length: Trees. The arches overlooking the cavern are marked with the doubled inverted pyramid of Traps. The last passageway, the one that is level, spans a ditch and then cuts straight into what seems to be solid rock, not part of a building at all.

“Look! This is the mark for Pillars.” I point to overlapped right angles incised to the right of this passage. “Like start gates on a Fives court.”

“This is not a Fives court, Jes,” says Kalliarkos, hands extended as if calming a crazed person. “We are buried underneath the City of the Dead. But Ro and I have found stairs—”

“Don’t you see?” Like my mother I’m feverish, but it’s an idea that consumes me, not illness. I begin to sing the song that announces each new Fives run: Shadows fall where pillars stand. Traps spill sparks like grains of sand.

To my surprise Ro-emnu joins me, slipping into harmony: Seen atop the trees, you’re known. Rivers flow to seas and home.

Kalliarkos whistles sharply to interrupt us. “You both need to drink something and sit down. You’re dizzy.”

“No, she’s right about the marks.” Ro-emnu’s agreement comes so unexpectedly that I actually smile at him. “And there were sparks that turned to sand.”

“I didn’t see any sparks,” says Kalliarkos.

“You’re not Efean,” says Ro-emnu. “Go on, Doma.”

The pattern has seized me. It’s like watching Rings unfold on the court. “You said you climbed a lot to get to us. So you entered the underground complex in Trees, right?”

They glance at each other. “We entered next to a pool and crossed some streams,” says Kal.

“Ah! Then you entered in Rivers. Even better! But the passage here that’s marked with Rivers is blocked, so we can’t return that way. What if you climbed through Trees to get to the tomb, and then we all crossed Traps together? The way the bridge was constructed is kind of a trap, right? If the stairs you found lead to Rings, then they won’t take us to the surface but into the heart of the complex. We’ll be stuck underneath the kings’ tombs. So we have to go through Pillars to circle back to Rivers. Doesn’t that make sense?”

Ro-emnu shakes his head. “This can’t be a Fives court because Fives isn’t an Efean game. The Saroese brought it here with their other festivals.”

“How do you know the Saroese brought it? You weren’t alive then. Your grandparents weren’t even alive yet.” Hands on hips, chin up, I challenge him. “Look around! Obviously this is not a Fives court because it isn’t the game we play. But I will wager you anything you wish that if we enter the passage marked like Pillars we will end up in a maze.”

“It’s our lives we’re wagering with,” Ro-emnu retorts.

“With chalk to mark the dead ends and false turns we can get through it and back to Rivers and thus to the place you came in! Do you have a better idea?”

Of course they don’t have a better idea!

In the silence, a sound flutters like wings above us. When I glance up, shadows twist along the ceiling even though the lamp isn’t moving. If sparks spill in Traps, then shadows haunt Pillars. Fear runs cold through me. But I know better than to hesitate.

“Get everyone up. We have to go now.”

We have four lamps. I lead the way with one, but we leave the other three unlit so that Kalliarkos must guard the rear with dark shrouding him. As we pick a route along the tunnel, the smoothness of a stone walkway gives way to a rumpled floor of awkward ropy ridges and bumpy protuberances. The ceiling is too high to touch; the walls are rough.

Maraya says, “These tunnels don’t seem like they were chiseled out of rock. In the Archives it’s said rough tunnels like this were made long ago by fire burning a path.”

Ro-emnu breaks in. “These passages are the veins of the land through which ran the blood of the Mother of All. Hers is the blood that wells out of the earth’s heart. In ancient days before people lived here, the Queen’s Hill and the King’s Hill were lakes of molten fire.”

“Like the Fire Islands,” she replies. “Yes, that’s what the Archivists teach.”

“It is the dames who kept this knowing knitted into the hearts of the people. Not your Archivists.” His look challenges her. “Everything you Saroese have you have stolen from us.”

“We have no time for this,” I say. Mother sags like a sack of grain over Ro-emnu’s back. Her eyes are closed, and there is blood on her legs. She will die if we don’t get her to a safe place and a healer. “Keep moving.”

Ahead, the path branches, and I find that my heart feels the same. All that I am has come unmoored. The mask I have worn my whole life is cracking, and what shines up from beneath will scald our eyes.

Did Lord Ottonor’s shadow try to crawl into my body? Was my brother merely caught in a deep sleep that we mistook for death or did a spark give life to his dead flesh?

What lies buried beneath the City of the Dead? Is this the corpse of old Efea, the secret at the heart of the land?

You know the lies they tell you but you don’t know the truth, so Coriander said to me.

I rest my right hand on the right-hand wall of the right-hand passageway. I am the tomb spider, anchored to the stone, spinning a way out of this maze. “Kal, you have the chalk.”

“I’ll mark the junctions, Jes,” he calls forward. We both know how to unravel a maze.

I pace with slow sweeps, checking for pitfalls and traps. The ragged rock scrapes at my fingers but my gloves protect my palms. Our light reveals the mark of tools scoring the walls, places where long-dead workmen smoothed a sharp edge or erased the mark another maze traveler carved in the rock to show their path. Suddenly an unseen creature crawls over my hand and I shriek.

“Nothing,” I say, although my heart pounds twice as fast as before. “It was just a bug.”

“I’d have smacked it with my slipper,” says Amaya. Her words give me the courage to go on.

Twice we pass a cleft that leads to an air shaft. In the first the shaft is partially collapsed. In the second we smell a fetid aroma, and the mark on the shaft indicates it is the tomb of a lord who passed, Maraya says, eighteen years earlier. Perhaps his oracle and her attendants have died.

We reach a circular space like a distended gourd. There are three possible exits. Ro-emnu sets Mother down with meticulous gentleness. She is unconscious and does not wake even when the babies fuss hungrily. Cook and Maraya let them suck broth off their little fingers. Coriander rests against a wall. The oracle stares so blankly I wonder what she sees.

Amaya sinks to the ground with head on knees, next to the opening that is the first to the right. According to my own plan we have to keep going to the right, yet the opening isn’t even tall enough to walk upright. Its sloped confines hook away into the rock. What if the tunnel closes and we are stuck and can’t turn around? How can Mother crawl if she can’t even wake up?

I sit with her hand in mine. Her pulse is a fragile thread.

Kalliarkos crouches beside me and clasps my other hand. “The leftmost opening is another air shaft,” he says. “It’s clear of debris, and it doesn’t stink. I’ll climb it. There’s a chance we can get out more quickly that way. Everyone needs a rest anyway.”

He vanishes up the shaft, taking no light, climbing blind. Doubt digs its teeth into my heart. If I am mistaken in thinking this complex to have anything in common with a Fives court, then I may have doomed us to dying of thirst, lost in a maze.

Coming up beside me, Ro-emnu smiles the way a tomcat prowls. “What is your next command, Captain Jessamy? How is your campaign strategy proceeding?”

“I would like to see you do better! Since you seem to believe you know so much!”

Coriander’s eyes pop open. “Ro knows more than any Archives!” she says stoutly.

“Kori, hold your tongue.” His is the tone of an exasperated older sibling, one I recognize.

“I won’t! Ro is trained as a poet in the Efean way, to speak only the truth. That’s why the king’s agents arrested him.”

“For murder!” The instant the words leave my mouth I’m sorry I said them in front of everyone else.

Naturally he laughs. Cook shifts away from him. Maraya measures him anxiously. He seems so big and threatening here in this closed space where we can’t run.

Coriander makes a rude gesture with her hand, right at me. “He was arrested for the play he wrote. The one the king’s agents closed the night it opened.”

“The Poet’s Curse? The one that murdered the king’s reputation? What is it about?”

With a chuckle he rubs the stubble of his hair. He has a laborer’s callused hands, nothing like the soft skin I associate with a daydreaming poet sitting at a window gazing over a reed-choked lakeshore where egrets hunt in the misty distance. “The story may shock you, Doma.”

“I’m not afraid of the truth, if that is what you mean,” I retort.

“You don’t have the sense to be afraid.”

“Either tell me or stop boasting, I beg you.”

By the way he stares at me I can tell he is about to refuse, just to spite me.

But it is Maraya who speaks. “I would like to know if the Archives are wrong. Isn’t it better to chase the truth and catch it if you can?”

He glances at the oracle slumped on the ground. A glint like avarice gilds his expression, as if he sees her—the oracle—as a pot of honey that he means to slurp up before anyone can stop him. “People hide all kinds of stories,” he says. “Let me tell you one of them, Doma Maraya, for I believe you truly do wish to know the truth, unlike your sister. Maybe someday you can write your own Archives.”

A mask settles on his face, one that makes him look both new and ancient. As he begins the story, shadows gather like ravenous beasts around our wavering lamp.

“In the days of heaven and earth and sea and wind, the heart of All was planted in the fertile fields of Efea. So the land prospered beneath the rule of balance, a king to oversee soldiers and fieldwork and laborers and a queen to oversee diplomacy and the marketplace and artisans. But sweet food sours if left out in the sun too long. There came a bitter war for succession between two factions within the royal clans. Into this battle sailed a foreign prince, Kliatemnos, a refugee from the broken empire of Saro.”

Shadow and flame weave in and out of his words. I sense something terrible crawling out of the dark as if his tale gives it life. What if death steals Mother? But her hand in mine is warm, and her heart is beating. I will anchor her in the world of the living.

“The young Efean queen took Prince Kliatemnos as her husband. With his troops to aid her, her faction won the battle and defeated her rival. In this way he became king to rule beside her.”

Cook mutters, “Impiety! That is not how it happened!”

His story marches on. “After this, she gave birth to four daughters. The Saroese invaders became restless. They wondered if the gods had turned against them because there was no male heir according to the way these men measured rulership. Yet despite his council’s demands, the king refused to put his Efean queen aside to marry a Saroese woman and try for a son. He could not, for she was the source of his power. So it came about that when the king sickened and died, his cunning and jealous sister invoked the law of the oracle, that a woman must be killed so her last prophecy would accompany the dead emperor into the afterlife. She drugged the queen and the queen’s daughters and walled them alive into the king’s tomb, claiming they had begged to attend him into death. Afterward she took the queen’s name for her own, calling herself Serenissima the First and ordering that the chronicles erase the existence of the Efean queen. She placed a Saroese prince on the throne as King Kliatemnos the Second, saying this youth was the heir, the son of her brother by the last living daughter of the dead Saroese emperor, a woman who never existed.”

When he pauses to look at me, the poet’s heavenly mask falls away to reveal a gloating smile. “That is how your dynasty was founded. On murder and treachery.”

“It’s not true!” exclaims Cook. “Kliatemnos married the last living daughter of the dead emperor of Saro.”

A knife-line of doubt creases Maraya’s pale forehead. “The Archives say Kliatemnos the Second was the last living grandson of the empire. There is no mention of a queen of Efean descent.”

His look is a jab. “What do you think, Captain?”

I want to refute him, but I no longer know what to think.

A thump startles us. Kalliarkos scrapes into view, shaking dust from his short hair. It is obvious he hasn’t heard a single word of Ro-emnu’s scandalous story.

His dour expression reveals his expedition’s failure. “It’s a sealed tomb. I heard women talking. We can’t get your mother out through an air shaft if it’s like the one in Lord Ottonor’s tomb.”

“Can’t we free them?” Maraya asks. “Bring them with us?”

For the sake of the living a captain must leave the dead behind. It’s what Father would do. “Their oracle may refuse and tell the priests. We can’t take the chance.”

“Jes! It’s sickening to leave them trapped there, not even give them a choice.” Maraya looks around at the others for support. Her eyes widen, and she leans forward. “Where is Amaya?”

“She was sitting right here by me!” I say with alarm.

A ghastly scream echoes out of the low tunnel, filling the space until we cower as it winds around us. With a kiss of drafty air and a curl of moving shadow, the lamp flame gutters out.

“Amaya!” I shout frantically.

A strangled cry twists out of the tunnel. “Jes! It’s swallowing me!”

I can’t even see my hand in front of my face. Fumbling, I find the flint and the last taper tucked into my Fives jacket. Flame licks up the little torch. The light barely illuminates but in contrast to the darkness everyone’s face looks startlingly clear. Kalliarkos at once hands me another lantern. I light it and then hand him the taper as I crouch-walk into the low tunnel.

“Amaya! Don’t move! I’m coming!”

My head bumps against the ropy ceiling, and the scarf tied over my hair catches and pulls down on my eye so I have to yank it back up. Parallel ridges along the floor make the footing tricky. I hold the lamp out with one hand and balance with the other.

My shadow distends along the walls, and as if alive, it separates into two shadows and then into four. What should be my head and my limbs become horns and claws. A jaw gapes as if to devour me but I drop to hands and knees to change the angle of light. Rippling, the shadows retreat. Goose bumps come out all over my skin.

The meow of a cat whispers up the tunnel. My chest tightens with hope: if a cat has made its way down here, then we can find our way out. As I scramble forward my bare wrist scrapes the rock, a hot burn along the skin.

The tunnel curves sharply and drops into a round space like a bubble of air popped amid the rock. At first I think there is no exit but then I see a gap so low I will have to wiggle forward on my belly. I raise the lantern.

“Amaya?”

She’s not here, but the ceiling heaves as if liquid impossibly flows along it. Shadows elongate off the ceiling, stretching until they drip onto the floor. A shadow exactly like a crocodile hinges open vast jaws that curve along the walls as if to consume me. Hastily I turn the lantern, and it transmogrifies into a jackal’s shadow gathering itself to pounce. Raising up the lantern breaks the shadow’s leap into shards that skitter away like bugs. The feathery crawl of tiny legs brushes along my neck. With a shriek I flick a bug off me and jerk forward onto my knees, dropping the lantern and slapping my head to make sure nothing else is crawling there.

My moving light cuts new pathways across the chamber’s smooth floor. I see another way out: a downward shaft as black as a well filled to the brim with pitch. But the moment I take one hesitant step toward it, the surface of the well slurps darkness over its rim. The shadow of a huge articulated spider’s leg emerges, then a second leg and a third: a tomb spider as big as I am pulls its head and body up until it fills half the space. Its six eyes are voids, sucking away my courage.

I begin to whimper in aching, mindless fear. Its forelegs probe, their long shadow descending toward my face. With a gasp I desperately knock the lantern forward. It tips, over-balances, and my reflexes kick in: I catch it before it crashes over.

When I look up the spider’s shadow is gone and I face the giant shadow of a hissing cat, ears flat, back arched. But now I know what to do. Grabbing the lantern, I leap to my feet and sweep its light all the way around to shatter any more that are forming.

And there Amaya is, where she wasn’t a moment before. She has curled up on herself, lips pulled back to show her teeth, head hunched, arms drawn up as if she is ready to claw at me. The hazy golden light makes a mask of her face, reminding me of the cat mask she briefly wore in the carriage on the day we went to the Ribbon Market. For an instant her pupils look slitted.

“Amaya!”

She blinks with her ordinary eyes. “Jes?”

“What happened to you? Why did you go off?”

She snivels the way she always does when she is being accused of something. “I didn’t! I was resting by the opening. A shadow ate me, Jes! It was a big cat and it just ate me in one gulp! When you shone the light on me it vanished.”

I can’t explain what I saw. The song people sing before each trial winds through my memory again: Shadows fall where pillars stand.

The only thing I really want is to get out of this awful place. Now that I can breathe again because Amaya is safe, I realize I smell water. I shine the lamp down into the shaft, mostly to make sure no spiders linger there. Light catches on a glimmer of water flowing sluggishly below. After so long in these dusty passages, its moisture tickles my nostrils. Escape surely smells like this.

Movement scratches behind us. I whirl, but it is Kalliarkos, not a tomb spider, who crawls out of the tunnel. He has pursued us without a lantern, braving the darkness. He gives me a meaningful look that I can’t answer in front of my sister. “Thanks to the gods you are both safe.”

My nod is my answer. “There’s water at the base of that shaft, not more than a body’s-length drop. If the pattern holds, then we’ve reached Rivers.”

The lamp gutters, flame wavering. When I tip the lantern sideways the flame brightens again.

“That one is almost out of oil,” says Kalliarkos. “It’s going to take time to get to the entrance we came through. We’ve got to move.”

“What about my mother?”

“She is awake. We will not leave her, Jes. I promise you.” He vanishes back up the tunnel.

Amaya is rubbing her lips with the back of her hand just as a cat does. “The handsome prince is sweet on you, Jes,” she purrs. Her meanest smirk peeps out. “How did that happen?”

“Shut up!” I crouch by the shaft, trying to decide how far the drop really is.

“I’ll go down first,” she says unexpectedly. “You need to stay here to lower down the others because you’re stronger than I am.”

“Are you sure?” This isn’t the fussy Amaya I know.

As if my thoughts are words she shows her teeth, and a faint hiss escapes her. Then she smiles. “I’m not afraid, Jes.”

And she isn’t afraid. Without a complaint or a whine or a demand for attention she swings her legs over the opening. When I’ve hooked my elbows under her armpits I lower her as far as I can, then let go. Her splash resounds in an echoing space. She laughs.

When I lower the lamp toward her I can dimly see her staring up at me from where she sits with water eddying around her waist. Twice she slaps the water just to make it jump.

“It’s shallow. Wait!” She flounders out of view.

“Amaya!”

Her voice drifts out of the darkness. “The water is just a narrow channel. I’m already up on a stone floor. It’s easy, Jes! We just need more light!”

Voices murmur down the passage behind me, and Ro-emnu backs into the space. He cradles Mother’s head, while Coriander moves her legs. Mother’s eyes are open, tracking vaguely, and her mouth forms my name when she sees me. I kiss her.

“You go down first,” I say to Ro-emnu, “and we’ll lower her.”

Amaya is right: it is easy. Coriander and I lower Mother into his arms. One by one we transfer the others: the listless, mute oracle; Maraya with our baby sister; Cook; Coriander with the boy and the other lanterns. Last, Kalliarkos rests a hand on my shoulder. Flame sputters as the lamp that has brought us this far flickers, catches a last flare of oil, and drives back the shadows.

Exhaling, I lean against him and shut my eyes. Just one breath to gather my strength and my courage for the last push. His lips brush mine. They’re cool and a little dry and their touch makes me so warm that I can’t help but remember Father ordering me never to speak to him again.

“Jes!” Maraya shouts as if she disapproves of our embrace, not that she can see us. “Hurry! Bring the light!”

Just as I open my mouth to reply, the lamp at our feet spits one last spurt of flame and dies. A soldier’s curse snaps out of me. A faint flame wavers below.

“Go, and I’ll follow,” he says.

I feel my way over the edge, hang, and let go. Water sprays up around me as I absorb a landing in knee-deep water and then jump back blind. He hits right after me, water flung into my face. Flailing to orient myself I slap first a wall and then his arm.

I shout too loud and my voice cracks back from a cavernous space. “Merry? Where are you?”

“Over here!”

When we wade in the direction of her voice we push out of the channel up onto a stone floor covered with rubble and layered with dust. There huddle Maraya, Amaya, Mother, Cook, the babies, and a lamp that flickers and goes out, emptied of oil.

Ro-emnu and Coriander and the oracle are gone, and they have taken the last lantern with them.