The Sapling Cage, page 17
“Oh, to the fires with this,” I said.
Henomi looked at me and nodded. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
I took three deep breaths to steel my nerve, then crawled into what I assumed to be a trap, deep under the mountain. Henomi followed after.
The rock of the cave walls was tight around me, cutting into my skin, but I kept going. At first I was on my hands and knees, but soon I was on my belly. Then the floor beneath me went smooth, and the walls went smooth, and I barreled down into the darkness. I couldn’t help it: I screamed.
My lantern fell free from my hand and disappeared ahead of me, leaving me in the dark as I slid and fell. Terror cut through me, worse than I’d ever felt.
Then there was no floor underneath me. I was falling. I only just had the presence of mind to get my hands out in front of me before my body crashed into rock. Pain ran through my veins, pushing out even the fear. Henomi tumbled out shortly after, still cradling her lantern.
I blinked and opened my eyes. I could see, though barely, by the dim light of Henomi’s lantern. We’d fallen more than twenty feet onto a midden of bones and fur. Most were animal bones—bats and rats, the skull of a wolf—but I saw a fractured human skull amid the rest.
The walls were not crystalline, not anymore. They were black rock, black glass. Half basalt, half obsidian. Some of the walls were natural, some seemed to have been shaped by hand.
Araneigh, Haim, and Daidi stood nearby, and in front of them, what could only be a white wyrm skittered a semicircle back and forth. More a centipede than a dragon, it looked at me with saucer-sized white eyes. Even as it paced the width of the cave, circling us, its eyes stayed fixed on me. Four more of them skittered through the hall. They were, indeed, as tall as wolves. But they were as long as horses.
Of everything I’d seen in my life, only the helgirden felt so alien as these creatures. They seemed to belong to a different world.
“Let us out, little girls, let us out,” the wyrm in front of me said.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“We are hungry, let us out,” it began to sing. “We will eat you, or you’ll let us out.”
“We want moon on our bodies, let us out,” the other wyrms sang in chorus.
“There’s a door,” Araneigh explained, shouting to be heard over the song. “At the far end of the hall. They’re trapped in here, because they don’t have hands. They’ll eat us if we don’t let them out. If we let them out, they’ll eat everyone in town.”
“All but the girls,” the first wyrm answered. “All but the little, all but the little, all but you little little girls.”
“No,” I said.
“Then your bones will fill the pile, stack the pile, then your bones will lie yellow and white, in the dark forever.”
“You aren’t going to kill us, since we’re your only chance of escape.”
“You talk so much, little boy, little girl. I will eat your friends, eat your friends, eat everyone but you, little boy, little girl.”
The wyrms knew what I was. I looked down at my dress, afraid that the fall had ripped it, but it was intact.
“I’m a very stubborn girl,” I said. “If you eat my friends, I’ll die in the dark before I let you out. But let’s make a deal. Someone trapped you here, yes? Closed you into this room, and you’ve been living off of whatever finds its way into your trap?”
“Not long, not long,” the wyrm in front of me said, never stopping moving, “not for the length of an age, less than the age of a girl, a boy.”
“We’ll let you out if you agree not to eat us, or the witches, or any of the people from the town.”
“Not eat them today,” the wyrm replied.
“Not ever,” I corrected.
“We agree, we agree, whatever it takes, we agree,” the wyrm sang.
“We can’t trust them!” Araneigh shouted.
“You can’t trust us,” the wyrm agreed.
“We don’t have a choice,” I countered.
“We could wait until dawn, when the Order comes to find us,” Daidi said.
“So hungry before the dawn, so hungry,” the wyrm said.
“We could kill them,” Haim said, her axe held at her side.
“Yes, yes, listen to the girl, fight us, blood for blood, limb for limb, nail for nail. We are hungry.”
“We agree,” I said. “Let us go, and we’ll let you out.”
“No tricks, no traps?”
“No tricks, no traps,” I said.
The wyrms herded us to the end of the hall. Henomi held her lantern aloft and it illuminated a stone door. Based on the deep gouges in the basalt, it was clear that the wyrms had been trying to escape, and obvious that they were immensely powerful. A brass knob protruded from the center of the door.
The five of us circled up and I whispered my plan one by one in everyone’s ear. No one liked it, that was clear. I didn’t like it either. But one after another, my friends nodded.
“There is time, is time, is time for waiting only if for eating,” a wyrm announced. “Not for planning, not for tricks. We have tricks, you have tricks.”
Haim went to the knob and tried to turn it. It wouldn’t budge. She put a second hand over her first hand, braced herself against the ground, and tried again. It turned. Somewhere inside the wall, a latch came free. She pushed, and the door swung open a crack.
“Go!” Haim shouted, and we ran past her through the door into a bright hall beyond, man-made and immense, lit by some unseen rainbow.
Haim tried to slam the door shut. One wyrm skittered through before she succeeded.
“Betrayers, misleaders, misbehavers!” it shouted and reared up onto its back legs, its forelegs like sickles aimed at my chest. Then it lunged at me.
Haim and Henomi slammed into it from the side, armed only with their hands and the weight of their bodies. The creature staggered but didn’t fall.
I dodged out of the way as it crashed down, its legs gouging the stone of the floor.
The two of them pinned the wyrm’s back half to the ground, but its front still flailed and thrashed, the sharp antennae that covered its body whipping through the air. Araneigh came at it from the side, swinging an axe that scraped harmlessly across its armored back. The creature turned toward Araneigh, lashing out. A leg speared her arm, and blood shot out of the wound.
She might have screamed. I saw her mouth open, but I couldn’t hear anything anymore. Just blood. Just adrenaline.
I rushed the wyrm’s face and swung my fist at its eye. It moved, and I hit a scaled jaw, doing more damage to my hand than the creature.
“All of you dead, all you girls, the boy and the girls,” it hissed, struggling to keep its voice.
Haim slammed her axe down across the top of its head. The blow still didn’t break skin, but it did smash the creature’s head into the stone.
I kicked and heard teeth crack, but it caught the toe of my boot in its jaw. I kicked with my other foot, but couldn’t get purchase.
It pulled back and I fell to the ground. I saw that huge mouth open again, ready to bite down on my foot or my leg, ready to eat me. Ready to end me.
Henomi pulled the beast backwards with all her strength, and the wyrm’s jaw clamped down on air. I was free.
Haim slammed her axe down on its face, again, again. It turned its malice on her.
Araneigh lay next to me, holding pressure on her arm as blood oozed through her fingers. She was out of the fight. I took the axe from her.
The wyrm opened its mouth and snapped at Haim. I struck where its jaws met and cut deep, and the monster screamed loud enough, inhuman enough, for me to hear it through the tunnel vision of battle.
Henomi broke one of its legs, then another. Haim struck blow after blow against the thing’s face, bludgeoning it with her axe.
It writhed and wriggled and thrashed, and I saw more blood, someone’s blood. I pushed the blade of the axe up under the large scales on its neck and pressed, cutting into its soft skin.
Finally, it died. No last words, just a whimper like a wounded dog.
I’d never killed anything before, let alone anything that could whimper. Let alone anything that could speak.
My hand was probably broken. Araneigh was losing a lot of blood from her arm, and Henomi had a nasty puncture in her thigh. All of us were covered with tiny cuts from the antennae. Daidi cut and ripped at the hem of her dress and got off two long strips. She handed one to me, then started dressing Henomi’s leg. I tied the bandage around Araneigh’s arm as best I could with only one working hand—it didn’t stop the bleeding, but it slowed it down. They both needed more care, especially Henomi.
Behind the door, the other wyrms howled.
Once the most immediate crisis was over, I leaned against the wall, fighting for breath. Araneigh took my hand and collapsed into me, letting me hold her. I’d nearly died. We’d all nearly died.
“We need to go,” Haim said. She was right, but I didn’t want to listen to her.
“Haim is right,” Araneigh said, offering me a hand up even though she was more hurt than I was. “Something—someone—put those things in there. They might have heard us.”
I was in too much shock to see ley, but Araneigh managed and we followed an invisible stream of purple and white through the dungeon. Every hall was narrow and high, carved from crystalline stone. Every room was a cathedral. All of it was lit by a sourceless glow that cycled through every color.
The light felt familiar, but I couldn’t place it until we entered the largest room of all, with a ceiling so high I thought for a moment we had made it out into the open air. A single natural column cut through the center of the room, holding up the roof. A golden cage sat at its base. Two more sat high up in alcoves carved into its sides. Each held a bright, radiant sapling, growing from a skull.
“By the Lords,” Daidi said, stopping in front of the column to stare.
I stared too, mesmerized by the color, the power. The light of the saplings flickered like that of a candle in the wind. Someone was drawing their energy. The blighters, somewhere, were doing something.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Haim said.
“Sure,” Daidi agreed. She grabbed the cage from the floor, the smallest one. Haim cast a disapproving glance at her, but the rest of us were too focused on escape to weigh in on her theft. With her good arm, Araneigh pointed to a door on the other side of the hall, and we hurried toward it.
We passed through two small rooms and one grand hall. After another few hundred yards, we stepped outside through an entrance well concealed behind a shelf of rock.
The sun was rising, gloom turning into day.
Nearby, we heard the sounds of battle.
SEVENTEEN
We raced through the trees toward the clamor. I was beyond fear, beyond exhaustion, though I still felt the searing pain in my hand.
At the tree line, we hid behind a thick copse of young pines and peered out at the fray. Witches from the Order faced off against a group in gray robes, what I could only assume to be blighters. I’d thought blighters were witches turned bad, like Dam Heavens, but more than half of this group were men, and I didn’t recognize any of them. It was a relief, in its way, to realize Dam Heavens might have been an exception.
The two groups stood ten, maybe twenty paces apart, facing off in a battle of spellcraft. I’d never seen anything like it. Witch magic is rarely showy. But the blighters threw balls of black fire and streams of icy blue. They called down lightning from the dark clouds above.
The blighters’ magic broke with claps of thunder and blasts of fire against some invisible shield that guarded the Order. Alectoria, Ilma, and other crones shook with exertion. I couldn’t hear them over the roar of fire and thunder, but I could see their mouths, and I knew they were singing.
The blighters were outnumbered, but they were winning. There was scarcely any ley here.
One witch—maybe Rose, it was hard to tell at this distance—threw a spear. The steel and wood splintered where lightning struck it down.
“Daidi, can you get the wounded to safety?” Haim asked.
“You do it,” Daidi said. “You can carry them, I can’t.” She handed the golden cage to Haim. “This has got to have a limit on its range, on how far away from it they can draw power. Walk until it stops flickering.” Haim looked uncertain, then nodded and took it.
I realized I didn’t want Araneigh to leave, suddenly thinking this might be the last time I saw her. She squeezed my hand, then Haim helped her and Henomi limp away from the battle, along the beach toward the farthest rotting hulks on the shore. The ships might be an okay place to hide if the blighters broke through the ranks of the witches.
Which, turning my attention back to the battle, seemed like it might happen.
“We’ve got to help,” Daidi said. “Maybe we can sneak around behind the blighters, and attack them from there.”
Lament was skulking behind the rest of the Order, pacing, watching, planning something. I crouched down and ran to her, staying behind the cover of trees as much as I could.
“Dam Lament!” I whisper-shouted when I was close.
“Whelp, get out of here!”
“We found the cages. We found their power. Come with us.”
Lament turned back to the battle and walked into the thick of the witches, then came back with Dam Rose.
“Show her,” Lament said. “She’s studied those damned things more than me.”
As we fled back into the trees, I took one last look at the battle and saw Lament charging forward with a spear. She leaped over something on the ground, something that looked like a body.
On our way, we told Dam Rose what we knew about the cages and the wyrms. When we reached the hall of cages, the remaining two were flickering faster. We had to hurry.
“Can we use them?” Daidi asked.
“Destroy them,” Rose said. “We destroyed that first cage. Bent open the bars, pulled out the sapling. It turned black and dead in my hands.”
It was bizarre to realize that the most magical things in this world are also, at their heart, mundane and fragile. That a magical sapling can simply be uprooted. That a witch will die with a sword in her chest the same as anyone.
Whoever had carved out the alcoves had also carved steps into the column. They were narrow and oddly placed, but they would have to do. I started up the stairs. As I climbed toward the two cages, forty feet in the air, fear finally crept in.
I laughed kind of maniacally. Turns out I have a witch’s cackle after all, so long as I’m terrified. I laughed because, out of all of the terrible things that had happened in the past few hours, the thing I was apparently most afraid of was heights.
I knocked the first cage off its ledge with my good hand. It clattered terribly against the stone as it landed. Daidi and Rose pried open its bars.
I couldn’t believe I was climbing a column in a cave beneath a mountain while witches fought against blighters and knights hunted all of us. Some part of me felt like I should never have left Ledston, but some part of me was ecstatic, alive with the adrenaline surging through my body.
I kept climbing, pushing down my fear and clinging to the stone of the column, and finally neared the second cage. As I reached for it, a man in a simple gray tunic ran into the room, his hands raised high. Black lightning arced between his fingertips.
Dam Rose didn’t hesitate. She didn’t try to talk to him. She ran forward and thrust her spear into the man’s belly. Then she pulled the blade out and thrust it into his throat.
Somehow, the man continued forward, stopping only when he hit the crossbars of Rose’s boar spear. Still, he waved his hands, building power in the air.
“The cage!” Daidi yelled.
The sapling inside the cage pulsed black like the blighter’s lightning. Teetering on the narrow foothold, I held on to the cage with my broken hand as best I could, the pain shooting through my body, and slipped my other hand through the wide-set bars. The skull was old and brittle, bleached white by the sun. I grasped the stalk of the sapling and ripped it out. It broke apart like charcoal in my hands.
Down below, the man crumpled and died, same as the plant.
I was shocked, and my foot slipped. Only by throwing my whole body forward and clawing at the alcove did I manage to keep from falling. My injured hand hurt like fire, and I could barely grasp the rock ledge.
“Thank the Nether,” Dam Rose said, pulling her spear free.
I slowly climbed down, and as the blood pounding in my ears slowed, I noticed a change in the air of the room. I let my eyes drift out of focus, and I saw it: ley. An endless eddy of gathered ley, every color mixed together in a gaudy tapestry of power. It was free.
Daidi stared all around her. She could see it. She was seeing ley for the first time.
“I’ve never killed anyone before,” Dam Rose said, as much to herself as to us, as she wiped her spear clean of blood on the dead man’s robes. “I don’t think I like it.”
I stared at the dead man, the pool of blood surrounding him. I was alive. He was not. Maybe, in the end, that was what mattered.
At Dam Rose’s insistence, we searched the halls for any clues about the blighters. It seemed clear that they’d only moved in recently, as they had no furniture in their sleeping quarters just off the main hall. The rest of the complex was dusty and full of undisturbed rubble, except for one room, a ritual room, near where the wyrms were trapped. Someone had carved a triangle inside a circle into the floor, and there were deep gouges that looked like claw marks in the stone floor inside the circle.
“Summoning,” Dam Rose said without even inspecting closely. “In the witch’s style.”
“They brought the white wyrms here?” I asked. “From the Nethers, like the helgirden?”
“Not from the Nethers. From somewhere else in the world. Wherever there are still wyrms, maybe some cavern far below the surface of the earth. Being summoned hurts more than being flayed alive, as I’ve heard it, and it takes so much power that there are only a few places in the world and just a few times of the year that you can do it. We did it at Endsmeet once, two years ago. We summoned a man who had hurt one of us.”
