The Blood Debt (3 page)

But now, here he was, out in the world a second time and finding himself caught in a crack he would once have slithered through with ease, distressingly deep underground.

I’m too big for this,
he told himself as he reached for a handhold just out of reach,
obviously.
He was curved like a hairpin; if he could only obtain some sort of leverage, he could easily wriggle around the bend, but his fingers were flailing about like a newborn’s and his feet kicked uselessly at air. He flexed his entire body, hoping to shake things up, but succeeded only in banging his knees and scraping his spine even more. He tried twisting in a spiral fashion and brought his skull into sharp contact with stone. He saw stars.

For the first time in years, he truly feared for his life.

‘Help!’ he yelled, even though he knew it would be futile. He was deeper than few in Laure ever went, surrounded on all sides by heavy, ancient stone. Thinking him mad and possibly dangerous, the guides whose experience he had tapped had all warned him about the dangers of going down into the caves. Not one of them offered help, but nevertheless he had had to try. His mother was down here
somewhere,
and she needed rescuing.

Hands gripped his ankles.

He yelped in fright and kicked out. His foot struck something soft.

‘Hey!’ came a muffled voice past the plug of his twisted body. ‘I’m trying to help you, you idiot!’

‘Sorry.’ He forced himself to relax and let the hands clutch him again. Whoever they belonged to used their body weight to pull at his legs. Skender yelped as he shifted suddenly in the bend, losing still more skin to the rough, dry stone. His spine complained and his face was rammed hard against rock. For a moment he thought he might lose his nose.

‘Ow! Be careful.’

‘You want to stay down here forever?’

‘No, but —’

‘Then stop whining!’

The weight dragging at his ankles dislodged him from the hairpin. He tried to grab the walls to slow himself down, but he had been taken by surprise, and so had the person pulling his legs. He shot out of the crack to freedom in a rush and they tumbled together to the floor of the cave. One flailing limb caught his rescuer solidly in the abdomen. He heard a sudden exhalation of air, then pained wheezing.

‘Bloody —hell!’

‘I’m sorry. It was an accident.’ He fumbled to lift his fallen pack off the glowstone he had been holding when he became stuck. Its reservoir of stored sunlight was strong enough to make out the person who had popped him from his early grave like a cork from a bottle.

He saw a young woman, around his age, with black hair and almond eyes. Her skin was neither white nor brown, but something in between. A dirty boot print stood out on the front of her chest.

‘That’s — gratitude — for you,’ she said, casting him a dark look. Wheezing, she climbed painfully to her feet and dusted herself off. She wore a faded black leather uniform that had seen better days. Patched and piecemeal, it had obviously belonged to many other people before she had acquired it; tight-fitting, with padding around the shoulders, elbows and knees, there were two dull purple lines crossing at the front in a large X. The motif was repeated on the upper arms, in miniature.

‘I
said
it was an accident,’ he repeated, although his mind was already moving on. ‘Hey, I remember your face. You were in the crowd at the coffee stall, and at the hostel.’ Facts clicked belatedly into place. ‘You’ve been following me!’

‘You don’t sound very glad about it,’ she said, glaring at him and picking up a short, fat tube from the rough ground. Tapped once, hard, against her thigh, it emitted a beam of weak blue light that she shone into his eyes. ‘If I hadn’t come along, you’d be another squeal closer to dying down here.’

‘But ...’ Although there was no denying his gratitude at being rescued, he couldn’t leave it at that. ‘Who are you?’

‘My name is Chu. I’m a miner.’

Understanding dawned. ‘So
that’s
what you’re doing down here. This is where you work. You weren’t following me at all. You just heard me yelling.’

She laughed. ‘You’re an idiot, Skender Van Haasteren the Tenth.’

‘Huh?’

‘You have no idea how Laure works. That’s why I’m following you. Someone’s got to keep white folks like you out of trouble.’

Stung by her tone, he turned away to check his robes for rips. Vivid afterimages cast by her lightstick danced across his vision. ‘Look, thanks for helping me, but if you’re not going to tell me anything useful, don’t bother sticking around. I can find my own way back.’

He felt her staring at him, and turned to find her examining him quite seriously, all trace of mockery gone.

‘You’re a strange one,’ she said. ‘It’s not just your pale skin. I watched you taking directions in the hostel last night. The place was full of people. Once the word got around that a Stone Mage with money was looking for information about the caves, every guide and scrounger in town came running.’

‘I’m not a Stone Mage,’ Skender protested. ‘I haven’t graduated yet.’

‘So? If you dress like one, people will naturally assume. I followed them out of curiosity, and there you were, listening to everything everyone was saying, taking it all in. You never asked twice; you never drew any maps. People thought you were having them on. Some of them started giving you bogus directions, trying to catch you lying, but they never did. If what they told you was inconsistent,
you
caught
them
out. It was as if you knew the way already.’

Her intense regard made him feel uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know the way,’ he said, quite honestly. ‘I just have a good memory. A perfect one. Once I see or hear something, I never forget it.’

‘Really? And here I was thinking you remembered me because of my good looks.’

The beginnings of a flush made his ears redden. ‘That’s not what I meant —’

She laughed again. ‘You’re such an easy target, stone-boy. Don’t you ever get teased back home?’

He certainly did. He’d lived his entire life in a school full of older students. That his father was the headmaster didn’t protect him from regular ribbing; in fact, that encouraged it.

His defences were normally excellent, but there was something about Chu that put him off-balance. Something about her eyes, quite apart from their unusual shape. He blinked and told himself to remember what he was supposed to be doing.

‘You were at the hostel,’ he said, ‘so you know why I’m here. My mother is missing.’

‘And you’re looking for her down here.’ She nodded. ‘That was the part you weren’t very clear on. Why down here? Why the caves of Laure?’

It was a long story, and the air in the cramped cave was beginning to grow musty.

Skender indicated the crack behind him. ‘Looks like I’m not going to get much further this way. Why don’t we go up and I’ll tell you then? Maybe you can help me work out what to do next.’

Her teeth were white in the light of his glowstone. ‘I’d better not make a habit of doing that,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t possibly afford my rates.’

‘Rates? If I could afford hired help, I wouldn’t be lost down here in the first place.’

Her laugh was rich and echoed back at them from a hundred rock faces as they began their ascent into the daylight.

* * * *

Some five weeks earlier, Abi Van Haasteren had left on her latest expedition, departing the subterranean city of Ulum with a caravan full of Surveyors, porters, camel riders, cooks and grunts. She even had a man’kin with her for advice on esoteric matters. The stone intelligence, a high-templed man-shaped bust called Mawson, was a free agent who helped her willingly, not because he was bonded into service as many of his kind were. Still, from the position where he would ride out most of the journey, lashed firmly to the back of the leading caravan, his expression had been disdainful.

‘Dignity,’
he had told Skender, his voice like the buzz of bees at a great distance, ‘
is
in short supply among the living.’’

‘But you are alive,’ Skender had responded, ‘aren’t you?’

‘In
a manner of speaking.’

‘Which manner?’

‘The one that matters.’

‘Is this boy bothering you?’ asked a voice. Skender felt a big hand come down heavily on his shoulder. ‘Move along, Skender. Mawson has important cogitating to do.’

Skender turned and looked up into a broad, pale face. Kemp was the largest person he had ever met, and albino with it, so he stood out in any crowd. A refugee from the Strand, he had taken up with the Stone Mages and was by now a regular traveller with Skender’s mother through the Interior.

Skender didn’t respond to the good-natured ribbing. ‘You’ll keep an eye on everyone. Won’t you?’

‘An eye and an ear,’ Kemp had assured him, grinning and moving off to help the baggage handlers. ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll be back before you know it.’

Skender had come to see them off via the space-bending Way leading from the Keep to Ulum, which allowed him to cross hundreds of kilometres in a few paces. Why his mother didn’t use such means to travel to her destinations was beyond him. The charm took its toll and wasn’t entirely safe, but travelling across the Interior for weeks on end had the same disadvantages. He had tried both, and knew which he preferred.

‘At least take the buggy,’ he pressed her as she checked the last of the provisions to be loaded. ‘You know Mawson prefers to travel that way.’

‘He’s the least of my concerns,’ she said, lashing a crate into place with a deft knot. Her long brown hair hung to her waist in beaded strands and swung with every movement. Lines of delicate, tattooed characters framed her face and lined her arms. She was striking and mysterious, even to Skender, her son. He had inherited her hair and skin colour and his father’s memory, but the height of neither.

‘What about Dad?’ he pressed her. ‘Couldn’t you at least have gone to say goodbye to him?’

‘Couldn’t he have come here?’ She adjusted a camel’s harness a little too abruptly. It snorted and eyeballed her warningly. She sighed and turned to Skender. ‘Your father doesn’t approve.’

‘He never does, but that doesn’t stop you two getting along.’

‘Not this time,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t like where we’re going, or why.’

‘Where is that again?’ he asked, trying to sound casual. ‘I don’t believe I’ve heard.’

She tilted her head to one side. ‘If you’d heard, you’d know. And that’s why you
haven’t
heard. I’m keeping this one close to my chest, in case someone else beats me to it.’ She put a hand to the rust-red material of her travelling robe where it covered her heart. ‘Don’t worry, my Skender. We’ll be okay. And when we come back, we’ll have found something wonderful. Just you wait and see.’

She had hugged him tightly then, and he had hugged her back, even though her words did little to reassure him. The caravan had trundled with a rattle and clatter of wheels out of the staging area, with the dour ex-Sky Warden Shorn Behenna bringing up the rear, his black skin a vivid contrast to Kemp’s and the others’ around him. His mother had waved at him as her wagon mounted the ramp leading to the surface, then turned her eyes forward, to the long journey ahead.

Skender returned to the Keep and finished his assignments for that week, then climbed out of his bedroom window and scaled the cliff as high as he dared without ropes or harness, relying solely on the strength of his arms and legs to hold him firm against the sun-warmed rock. He knew he was taking a risk — but why shouldn’t he? If his mother was allowed to throw herself headlong into some unknown venture his father disapproved of, he didn’t see why he should be any different, in his own small way.

Five years earlier, he had stowed away on a caravan similar to hers, one headed south for the Haunted City. He had hidden in a chest until his bladder forced him out, and he too had thought that his adventure was going to be wonderful, that he would come back with riches and wisdom. Instead, he had seen a woman murdered in front of him and barely escaped with his mind intact from the Void Beneath.

Ever since his return, he had had a keen appreciation of what his mother was risking every time she left him. He didn’t want to lose her to the dangers of the world. He wished she could be more like his father, who seemed perfectly happy confined to the Keep, where he taught his charges in the way of the Change. Why wasn’t his mother, like him, content to stay
home?

Skender told himself that he worried too much. His mother was a supremely capable Senior Surveyor. She had a good team. He climbed back down to his room after the sun had set, feeling his way by moon — and starlight. The smell of roast potatoes drifted up from the kitchens and his stomach rumbled.

A month later, when word had come that Abi Van Haasteren and her party had been given up for dead by their caravan porters, he confronted his father and demanded that something be done to find her. He railed and ranted, expecting an argument in response. His father normally defended his mother’s right to do as she willed. This time, however, all Skender received was worried agreement.