Broken Ground Read online

  Conor had always tried to tell the truth. He knew this was a lie, but he so badly wanted it to be true.

  “What’s it like?” asked Takoda ahead, navigating the uneven ground with lithe steps that reminded Conor of Abeke’s grace. “Living in the dark?”

  Xanthe shot him a smile. “I don’t know,” she answered. “What’s it like, living in the light?”

  Takoda laughed softly. His blue monastery robes billowed behind him, now dingy from their trek through Sadre. “Fair enough. But how do things grow? Do you know what birdsong sounds like? What is—”

  Xanthe laughed and held up her hands. “Slow down there. First of all, light isn’t the only source of nourishment. We have vegetables—carrots, potatoes, yucca—that thrive in the dark, and herbs that feed on the minerals in the rocks, and fungi that make their own light, and rocks that can spark fires. And your birds make song? Ours make sounds, but I wouldn’t call it music. More of a squeak. What do birds sound like above?”

  Takoda brought his hands together and whistled into them, making a kind of melodic trill that echoed through the caves around them. Xanthe broke into a smile. Kovo scowled. The ape had been signing something at Takoda for several long seconds, but the boy’s back was turned, his attention on Xanthe. Finally, the Great Beast reached out and knocked him in the shoulder. Takoda would have tripped, had the ape’s fist not been tangled in the boy’s robes. Satisfied that he had the boy’s attention, Kovo signed again, slowly, deliberately, adding a snort of displeasure to the end like a punctuation mark.

  Conor didn’t know what the ape was saying, but Takoda frowned a little, then wrested himself free. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe if you phrased it as a question or—”

  But that obviously wasn’t the answer the ape wanted, because his lips curled back, teeth bared. Takoda rolled his eyes and turned toward Xanthe. “Kovo wants to know how much farther we have to go. He doesn’t like it down here.”

  “That makes two of us,” said Meilin.

  Conor was about to say three when his foot landed on something slick and he started to fall, not down but through. A thin layer of chalky ground gave way beneath his shoe. And then, abruptly, he stopped falling. Not because the hole was shallow—no, it plummeted down and away into nothing but blackness—but because something had caught his elbow. A massive hand encircled his arm, and he looked up to see Kovo glaring down at him with those red eyes. Weakling, said the crimson gaze. Straggler.

  You’re slowing us down.

  You’re holding us back.

  Why should we try to save you?

  You’re already lost.

  Conor wrenched his arm free and stumbled away from the ape and the hole, his back coming up against an outcropping. Pieces of wall flaked away behind him, revealing another small tunnel no wider than his hand, as if this section of the cave were a bad apple, riddled with wormholes.

  And then, from somewhere deep inside the hole, he heard rustling.

  At first he thought it was only the whispers in his head, but those were quiet and even. This sound was getting closer. Louder. A moment later Xanthe spun back, pink eyes narrowed, and Conor knew that she heard it, too.

  “Get in the center of the cave,” she whispered urgently.

  Meilin was the first to move, putting her back to Xanthe and shifting fluidly into a warrior’s stance, torchlight in one hand, quarterstaff in the other.

  “What’s going on?” asked Takoda, even as he and Kovo joined the circle.

  “Is it the Many?” asked Conor, pushing off the wall and putting his back to Takoda’s, the image of Phos Astos being overrun surging to mind. A tangle of pale bodies, empty eyes, clawing fingers.

  Briggan crouched beside him, ready to lunge.

  “No,” said Xanthe, clutching her pack. “It’s not the Many.”

  “Well, that’s good,” said Takoda. And then, in the ensuing silence, “Isn’t that good, Xanthe?”

  But the girl said nothing. The rustling sound grew nearer, the cave trembling and bits of stone crumbling away to reveal more and more holes, so many Conor thought the tunnel would collapse around them.

  And then, embedded in the darkness, he saw the stars.

  Conor’s first thought was that they were somehow back above ground, that the cave had crumbled around them and revealed the night sky overhead. A brief rush of relief went through him. But then the stars began to blink and shift, and Conor realized with horror that they weren’t stars at all, but eyes.

  Dozens—no, hundreds—of milky white eyes.

  Kovo growled, a sound deep in his chest, and Briggan bared his teeth. Conor waited for faces to form around the eyes, for the shapes of the creatures—whatever they were—to materialize, but they didn’t. Instead, the eyes hovered, as if they belonged to the darkness itself. And then the darkness itself began to move.

  “What on earth … ” whispered Meilin.

  “It’s a cyrix nest!” said Xanthe, as if anyone but her knew what that meant. But the tone of her voice was enough to tell Conor that whatever a cyrix nest was, it was bad.

  The darkness was alive with the creatures. The shadows and eyes shuddered forward together, pouring through the holes and into the cavern, writhing and coiling and blinking their hundred white pupils.

  Meilin shouted, and brought her quarterstaff down on a tendril of darkness.

  Xanthe took the torchlight and swung it into the writhing dark. The cyrix retreated from the fire just like actual shadows, but then a limb surged forward and struck Xanthe in the chest. The force sent her staggering back into Meilin. The torch fell from her grip and skittered away.

  On the damp cave floor, the torchlight began to sputter and die.

  In its faltering flame, Conor saw Kovo bring a massive fist down on a writhing shape, blocking out several white eyes as his hand connected with something both solid and insubstantial. The creature bent like jelly around the beast’s blow. The force of the ape’s attack shuddered through the darkness, and Conor realized with sick certainty that the seething shadows were connected.

  The cyrix wasn’t many things.

  It was one.

  One massive creature, either coming together or spreading apart, surrounding them in shadow and eyes and—somewhere, given their luck—teeth.

  Something brushed against Conor’s leg, and he tried to pull back, but the thing was already wrapping a smoky black tendril around his ankle. No, not a tendril. A tentacle. It latched on to him, cold seeping through his leg where the creature’s touch met his skin. Conor gasped at the icy contact and tried to tear free, but the cyrix’s grip only tightened. He felt himself losing ground, being dragged forward toward the nearest hole.

  Conor stumbled and went down, grasping at the chalky floor for something, anything to hold on to as the cyrix pulled him toward the dark. A cry escaped his lips, and then he heard a growl and felt rushing air as a blur of fur tore past him. An instant later Briggan’s teeth closed around the tentacle, and the wolf shook his head viciously, the way Conor had seen terriers do with rats.

  The eye-dotted limb twitched in Briggan’s mouth, and then wrenched itself free from the wolf’s teeth and the boy’s leg at the same time. It snaked down into the hole and out of sight.

  But there were so many more.

  Leg still tingling with cold, Conor grabbed a loose rock from the ground and hurled it at the nearest pair of eyes. The tentacle flinched back and then reared up to strike again as the torchlight faltered, plunging the cave into stuttering seconds of dark.

  In the spasms of light, Conor saw Meilin swinging her quarterstaff, the motions fluid but wild, as if she didn’t know where to strike; saw Xanthe digging through her pack, searching desperately for something; saw Kovo trying to put himself between Takoda and the monster, but the monster was everywhere!

  “Does this thing have a weakness?” asked Conor, crouching to grab another rock.

  “Yeah, Xanthe,” snapped Meilin, lashing out at nothing. “How are we supposed to f
ight this thing?”

  Just before the torchlight failed for good, Conor saw Xanthe pull something small and spherical from the pack. “You don’t fight a cyrix,” she said, holding the sphere over her head. “You run.”

  The torchlight vanished, plunging them all into darkness, but Conor still squeezed his eyes shut. He knew what was coming, and an instant later Xanthe’s hand must have tightened on the sphere, because light exploded through the cave. The cyrix hissed and recoiled, hundreds of starlike eyes vanishing like candles blown out by a gust. Xanthe wasted no time. She burst into movement, looking less like a girl and more like a ball of blue-white light as she ran for the nearest tunnel.

  They all followed, ape and boys and girl and wolf, knowing that the flare would only buy them a few moments. But it was long enough. It had to be.

  Conor was the last one out. He saw the extinguished torchlight and snatched it up, stumbling to keep up with the strange blaze of blue-white light ahead and not get left behind in shadow.

  They ran when the path was even, and slid when the earth beneath them slanted away. They nearly collided with each other several times until the tunnel finally opened up, not into another cave, but into a massive cavern with half a dozen branching tunnels.

  The ceiling rippled overhead. At the center of the cavern, pools of water shone like glass, emitting a faint greenish light.

  Which was good, because the sphere in Xanthe’s hand had petered out.

  “Well … ” Xanthe slowed and stopped, letting the spent flare tumble to the damp cavern floor. “That was my last light.”

  “Who knows,” said Meilin, who barely looked winded. “Maybe we won’t need any more.”

  Takoda let out a small, nervous laugh. He was leaning against Kovo’s broad side. “Maybe,” he said.

  Conor had his hands on his knees, gasping for air, his head swimming with the chase. Briggan stood beside him, hackles still raised. Kovo’s red eyes were trained on the darkness behind them, as if daring the cyrix to follow. But long moments passed, and no milky eyes swam in the shadows, no tendrils of darkness crept toward them.

  “Are we safe?” asked Conor.

  Xanthe squinted around, trying to get her bearings. She nodded and said, “For now.”

  Conor straightened and tried to manage a smile, but the world spun, and the horrible, squirming feeling under his skin redoubled. He clutched the crux of his arm, darkness swimming in his vision.

  “Conor?” came Meilin’s voice, too far away. “Are you okay?”

  Okay, okay, okay, it echoed through the cavern and in his head, mixing with whispers.

  Conor closed his eyes, opened them, swallowed.

  “Yeah,” he said, forcing himself to straighten. “Let’s keep going.” His eyes tracked to Xanthe, who stood reflected by a shallow pool, doubling into two, four, many. She turned toward him, her pink eyes multiplied.

  “Are you sure?” she asked. “You look sick.”

  Sick, sick, sick.

  Conor looked to Meilin, who shook her head. Xanthe didn’t know, not about the parasite crawling through him, infecting him the way it had so many of her people. He tried to find the words but Meilin answered first.

  “He’s tired,” she said. “We all are.”

  Conor managed a nod, but Xanthe’s gaze lingered, eyes narrowing. “I’m okay,” he said shakily. To prove it, he took a step, and then another. “We need to keep moving.”

  “Okay,” said Takoda, looking around at the cavern with its many branching tunnels. “Where do we go from here?”

  THE LOW BRANCH CREAKED BENEATH ABEKE’S FEET.

  She moved carefully across the tree limbs, watching, listening, an arrow already nocked in her bow, but the only sounds that met her ears were the sounds of any forest, the rustle of leaves and the trill of birds and the shuffle of small creatures in the branches and the brush. Somewhere on the ground below, Uraza prowled, and overhead, Rollan’s gyrfalcon, Essix, was a shadow against the clouds, circling soundlessly.

  Abeke shouldered the bow and climbed higher, until she broke through the forest canopy. In the distance, she could see the water that separated Amaya from Greenhaven, the dark shape of boats. They were almost to the water. Slowly, she descended back into the trees. Her body still ached from the fight with Zerif and his stolen beasts—How? How had he taken so many? And the even scarier question, Why?—and a deeper pain ran through her from whatever had shaken her own bond with Uraza. The first was muscle and bone. The second was something worse. Something that scared her.

  They needed to get back to the Greencloaks’ fortress.

  Olvan would know what was happening, what to do. She hoped.

  Beneath her, Uraza’s dark shape slid past.

  And then, all of a sudden, the leopard stopped.

  Her head sank low and her tail flicked, nose twitching as if scenting prey.

  Or predator.

  Abeke held her breath and nocked an arrow in her bow, her mind spiraling through a dozen possible threats. Had Zerif come back? Had one of his infected animals stayed behind? What was lurking in the woods?

  The big cat crouched, hesitated, and then pounced.

  An instant later, a tinny shriek, cut short by Uraza’s strong jaws, and the leopard reappeared, a limp woodland creature in her mouth.

  Abeke rolled her eyes as the cat looked up at her, as if offering to share.

  “That’s okay,” she whispered. “You can keep it.”

  Uraza blinked her violet eyes and began to play with her snack, and Abeke straightened and made her way back across the branches to the clearing where they’d camped. It was little more than a few trampled strides of treeless earth near the edge of the woods. Two exhausted figures huddled around a small fire contained by a circle of rocks.

  She dropped to the forest floor, the mossy earth cushioning the force and sound of her landing.

  “No sign of Zerif,” she said.

  Rollan jumped like a startled cat and spun, gripping the tiny stick he’d been using to nudge the fire. Its end smoked faintly. When he saw Abeke, he slumped back onto the dead log he’d been using as a seat. “Way to give a guy a heart attack,” he said, tossing the stick back into the fire. “I didn’t hear you coming.”

  “Sorry.” Abeke managed a tired smile. “That’s kind of the idea.”

  Rollan rolled his head on his shoulders. Abeke’s attention went to the other figure, a boy in animal skins and a woven grass belt, his back against a fallen tree, a livid bruise against his cheek. Abeke’s chest tightened. Anda. The boy had left his family, his tribe, and they hadn’t been able to keep him safe. Where he had looked lean before, now he looked fragile, his narrow form gone gaunt from the wound at his side and the loss of Tellun.

  Abeke didn’t know what it felt like to lose a spirit animal, but she could see the pain in his eyes. Supposedly it was like losing a loved one, or a limb, a piece of yourself. Abeke made a silent promise that she and Rollan and Meilin and Conor would find a way to stop Zerif, heal the Evertree, and return Anda’s spirit animal.

  When she thought about the tasks, they felt impossible. But Abeke reminded herself of all the impossible things they’d already done. They could handle a few more.

  Still, she had to admit that the three of them had looked better.

  They wouldn’t have escaped Zerif at all, not without the help of the figure in the red cloak. Who was he? How was he strong enough to face a Great Beast? And why had he helped them? Abeke had so many questions for the stranger, but of course, he wasn’t there to answer. He’d vanished into the trees after Zerif. It had taken all Abeke’s restraint not to hunt the man down herself, but Anda needed her, and so did Rollan. They had to stick together, had to deliver Anda to Greenhaven, even without his spirit animal, Tellun.

  Abeke shuddered at the thought of Uraza being taken from her. Even though she’d only had Uraza for a relatively short time, she couldn’t remember what it felt like to live without her. Just the thought of it made her ill, a
n echo of the sickness she’d felt when the earth had shaken and her bond with the leopard had felt stretched to breaking. Those strange tremors were bad enough, and left her feeling like the earth and everything in it was being pulled and torn … but to lose Uraza entirely?

  How? How could a person be separated from their spirit animal? How could Anda bear it?

  But of course, he wasn’t bearing it, not well. His skin looked sallow, and his arms were pressed around his wounded side, where Suka the Polar Bear had slashed him. But she could tell the severed bond hurt him even more. There was nothing she could do for that, but his other injuries still needed tending.

  Abeke crouched in front of the boy and dug some berries from her pocket. She’d found a high-growing bush in the forest, their seeds known to help with pain. Anda took them without question, his eyes never leaving the ground, where several elk tracks marked the last sign of his spirit animal.

  “It’s not far to the water,” said Abeke. “We’ll be back at Greenhaven soon.”

  “What’s the point?” whispered Anda, so softly she almost didn’t hear.

  “You’re still one of us,” said Abeke, but Anda only shrugged, defeated.

  Rollan said nothing. He had tipped his head back, eyes closed. She recognized the blankness in his face and knew he was looking through Essix’s eyes, seeing for himself what she had seen above the canopy. A few moments later he blinked, gaze returning to Abeke and Anda and the dying fire. He nodded and helped the other boy to his feet. Anda leaned heavily against Rollan, beads of sweat running down his face and staining the skins that wrapped around his shoulder.

  Uraza appeared at the edge of the small clearing and began to pace, wearing paths into the forest floor. Abeke knew the leopard preferred to roam freely, but she’d stand out too much in the clearing leading down to the shore, and she wasn’t a fan of the crossing to Greenhaven. Besides, what had Zerif said to Anda before he stole the Great Beast?

  That he hadn’t learned to bring Tellun into the passive state. If the elk had been in its passive state, would it have been safe?