The Devoured Earth (21 page)

They relented, but only slightly, and only because Treya intervened. ‘Let him walk freely,’ she said after checking his bonds. The ropes were so tight he had long ago lost all feeling in his hands. ‘Keep an eye on him. At the slightest wrong move, remind him of the wisdom of behaving.’

The two giant men grunted obediently. They had a distinctly fishy, sweaty smell that made Skender wrinkle his nose.

‘I don’t know why you’re expecting me to betray you,’ he said, genuinely puzzled. ‘You’re the ones who turned on
me
. One moment you want to be buddies. The next you’re taking me prisoner and hightailing it, leaving everything behind. What’s the deal?’

‘It was a mistake to treat with you,’ said the middle-aged woman, her eyes as hard as ever. ‘If we’d known of Marmion’s plans at the start, we would have rejected you utterly. No wonder you kept them secret from us.’

‘Plans? What plans? I asked Marmion as I said I would. You heard what he told me. We’re as much in the dark as anyone.’

Treya gestured, and Skender’s guards encouraged him to get moving by shoving him in the shoulder. ‘I know all I need to know. I know what to do.’

They followed tunnels Skender had never seen before. It seemed to him that they were descending deeper into the heart of the mountain range. The air grew thicker and more debilitating with every breath, and the floor became steadily rougher and more treacherous.

It came, therefore, as a complete surprise when they passed through an unremarkable portal and stepped out onto the lake’s pebbly shoreline. A wide black cloud obscured the stars, making the night almost as deep as it had been under the Hanging Mountains. Skender blinked, startled by the sudden transition, but there were more and stranger disorientations to come.

A sound like heavy hoofbeats came from their left; the Ice Eaters froze and formed a circle around Skender, as though afraid he was about to be snatched away from them. Treya raised a long, wooden staff with a wicked-looking hook on the end, and waited in silent challenge.

A strange shape loomed out of the darkness. Massive and blunt-headed, the Angel was galloping along the beach. Skender had never seen it before, but he remembered the descriptions perfectly well — only one creature in the world could have such a featureless triangular head. Three cylindrical legs propelled it with an odd but efficient gait across the icy ground, and Skender was profoundly relieved to note that its trajectory would take it near but not over the top of him and his captors.

As it galloped by, seeming to neither notice nor care about the group watching it, an even odder detail struck him. On the Angel’s back, riding it as a man would a horse, sat a figure that seemed to be made entirely of smoked glass. He stared at it for a good second before recognising it — or its features, at least. They belonged to someone he knew.

The body had once been Kemp’s. The creature riding the Angel pell-mell along the lake shore had therefore to be the glast.

The glast raised a hand in greeting as it and its strange steed galloped by. Skender half-waved back, wondering if he had slipped into a strange, surreal dream. Or maybe the Change-sink collar Treya had fastened around his throat was afflicting him with hallucinogenic side-effects.

No, he told himself. Treya had seen it too, and he had a small advantage over her in that he at least knew what the apparition had been. She was completely in the dark.

‘More trouble,’ she grunted as the sound of hoofbeats faded into the distance. Lowering the business end of her staff, she cast a scathing look at Skender. ‘We’re used to monsters here, but the ones you brought with you are strange indeed.’

‘I’m on your side there,’ he said, wondering what on Earth was going on. The collar ensured he was unable to contact anyone. And even before the collar had been fitted — apart from fleeting messages from Sal and Marmion — he had been left ignorant.

Although, he supposed, he wasn’t as badly off as Mage Kelloman who had been knocked unconscious when he showed the first signs of resisting capture. The mage’s host body hung limply over the shoulder of another hefty Ice Eater. The bilby that accompanied Kelloman everywhere now quivered in a pocket within Skender’s black robes, shivering with either fear or cold or both.

Treya took a look around, as though sensing something that Skender couldn’t see or hear, then motioned to keep moving.

They travelled a short distance, hugging the base of the crater, until they came to another cave entrance. There Skender was blindfolded.

‘Is this really necessary?’ he asked, not trying to hide his testiness as the rough cloth came down over his eyes and he was pushed once more into motion. ‘I keep telling you, I’m on your side. We all are. You asked for our help and we’re trying our best to give it to you.’

‘We didn’t ask for your help. You just arrived. I said what I did to find out your intentions, and when it became obvious that you knew nothing, I began to worry. Now that worry has been confirmed.’ Treya sounded as rattled as Skender felt, which was strange considering she had the upper hand. ‘This is a terrible night. I pray to the Goddess that we aren’t too late.’

The tunnels led steadily downwards. Skender’s toes continuously caught on irregularities and rough steps. Only the hands tightly gripping his upper arms kept him upright. Over the powerful reek of his captors he began to notice a new smell: a sulphurous reek that made him want to gag.

His one consolation lay in knowing that, no matter how much his captors tried to disorient him, his feet would always remember the route they had followed. All he had to do was loosen his bonds somehow, and he could escape.

A subtle shift in ambience told him that they had entered a much larger chamber than any he had seen in the caves before. There they came to a halt. Skender was forced to sit on the ground with his hands behind his back and the blindfold still in place. People moved all around him, whispering queries and instructions and then hurrying off on unknown errands. Not far away, a chimerical engine thudded, low and fast. It sounded familiar to Skender’s ears, although he couldn’t place it at first. Something he had heard just once, under very different circumstances…?

He remembered eventually, as he had known he would.
Os
, the Alcaide’s ship of bone, had employed two pumps to keep bilge water from rising in its lower decks; he had heard them during his crossing to the island of the Haunted City from the mainland, five years earlier. This engine sounded considerably larger and more powerful, and that begged the question: what, in such a remote and frigid world, did the Ice Eaters need to pump in such quantity?

He shivered. All sensation to his fingers had long vanished. With a pang of fear, he remembered pictures of frostbite in books from the Keep’s library, a condition he had never in his darkest nights dreamed he might have to worry about.

‘Hello?’ he called, feeling ignored.

Rough fingers loosened his bonds. He pulled his hands free and brought them up to his chest, rubbing them together. The bilby wriggled in agitation, then settled down. When he was certain his digits were all accounted for, he went to tug the blindfold from his eyes.

‘Don’t,’ said the person who had untied him. ‘Not yet.’

Skender recognised that voice. It belonged to Orma, the young Ice Eater who had warned them from the village when the Death had come to kill them. ‘What’s going on?’ Skender asked him. ‘Why am I suddenly a prisoner? I haven’t done anything wrong.’

‘You haven’t, but your friends have. The ones in the balloon.’

‘I’m not so sure they’re our friends any more. They stole the balloon, remember?’

‘Yes, but they’re strangers like you, and Treya has trouble seeing the difference.’ Orma squatted beside Skender and whispered in a low voice. ‘They went to the Tomb, and that’s forbidden. They would never have made it had we not been hiding from the Death. Treya is angry at you, and us, and at herself most of all. The covenant should never have been broken.’

‘Covenant? What covenant?’

‘To guard the Tomb, of course,’ Orma said with a hint of impatience. ‘We are its keepers. The Goddess charged our ancestors with the key to opening it and made us promise never to do so — or to allow anyone else to do so, no matter what. In return, we receive eternal life. We’ve been keeping the promise for a thousand years, and now you and your friends in the balloon are mucking it all up!’

‘Shhh. Take it easy.’ Orma’s voice had risen and Skender didn’t want this opportunity to end just yet — as it surely would if Treya noticed. ‘So you’re sentries. The Goddess told you to guard her Tomb forever.’

‘Yes.’

‘And what have the man’kin done, exactly? The last I heard, they were just taking the balloon out to the towers.’

‘That’s exactly what they did. And somehow they reached the Tomb. It’s supposed to be hidden to anyone but us, but they triggered the defences so they must have found it. Treya heard the alarm. That’s why we’re down here — the few of us who are left.’

Skender nodded, hoping he was understanding correctly. ‘But why
are
we down here? Is it to stop the others getting to the Tomb and waking the Goddess up? Maybe the time has come to do just that. Maybe she’s exactly what we need, to fight the Death.’

‘Some of us think so too,’ the boy said. ‘That’s why I’m talking to you. If that’s what your friends
are
trying to do, if that’s why they want to open the Tomb, we might be willing to help.’

‘Can they get me out of here?’

‘No. But they’ll side with you if you try to reason with Treya —’

He got no further. ‘Orma!’ The voice of the leader of the Ice Eaters cracked like a whip. ‘I told you to untie him, not talk him to death. Come here.’

Orma hurried away, leaving Skender alone in the darkness of the blindfold. He resisted the urge to take it off, not wanting to attract any more attention than he already had. More important was loosening the Change-deadening collar so he could warn the others that the Ice Eaters were considerably more than innocent bystanders in the fight against Yod.

But the buckle was securely fastened at the back, and the exact mechanism to release it eluded his numb fingertips. He dropped his hands uselessly into his lap and tried to work out what to do.

The sound of the pump had grown louder while he talked with Orma. Voices called out in the distance, adding a melodic counterpoint to its steady rhythm. He couldn’t quite make out what the Ice Eaters were saying. It was bad enough that the man’kin had stolen the balloon, but if they had unwittingly set in motion a chain of events that could turn the Ice Eaters against the outsiders, then that would be too much to bear.

Footsteps approached him. ‘Take off the blindfold,’ Treya said.

Skender did as he was told and blinked in surprise. He had imagined a brightly lit cave, much like the mighty caverns of Ulum, but instead found himself in darkness that was nearly complete. Treya, a slight but powerful figure in black, stood over him with a crystal lantern in her hand.

‘Stand up. Go see to your friend. She isn’t waking up.’

Skender didn’t know who they were talking about for a second. Who else had they captured during their retreat from the other caves? Not Chu as well, surely?

He realised the truth almost immediately.

The Ice Eaters had placed Kelloman’s litter near a line of wood-and-skin drums that smelled like tar. The bilby squirmed as soon as it came within four paces of Kelloman’s host body, and it was all Skender could do not to be scratched as the tiny animal scrambled free. With a squeaking sound it jumped onto Kelloman and sniffed at his throat, where a collar identical to Skender’s had been fastened.

Skender knew what the problem was the moment he saw the collar, but feigned an examination anyway. He checked under each eyelid for a response and found none. He lightly slapped each cheek.

‘How hard did you hit, uh, her?’ he asked Treya.

‘Not so hard that she shouldn’t be awake by now.’

‘Well, you’re obviously wrong on that point,’ he said, looking suitably worried. ‘If you take off my collar, I might be able to —’

‘No,’ Treya said smartly. ‘Your collar stays on.’

‘Then what about hers, at least? The Change will give her strength to recover. Without that, she might die.’

Treya frowned with annoyance. ‘What concern is that of mine?’

‘What concern?’ Skender could hardly believe what he was hearing. ‘He — she’s done nothing to you. Letting her die would be as bad as murder.’

Treya relented with poor grace. ‘All right.’ With work-toughened fingers, she untied the collar and put it to one side. ‘But the moment your friend regains consciousness, it goes back on.’

The body on the stretcher twitched. Skender put a hand firmly on the empty girl’s forehead, stopping it from moving. ‘See? It’s already doing her some good. A little rest is all she needs.’

Kelloman’s body fell still. Treya nodded, looking only slightly reassured. Someone called her name and she hurried off, instructing one of the guards to keep an eye on the two captives as she went. The cool light of the lantern she left behind barely touched the darkness around them.

Skender smiled at the guard, who didn’t respond. The man stood close but not so close as to overhear a whisper.

‘Are you back?’ he breathed, leaning over the young woman’s face as though to inspect her eyes again.

Kelloman nodded so slightly that even Skender barely noticed it.

‘We’ve been taken captive,’ he told the mage through Kelloman’s newly-reconnected senses. ‘They put a Change-sink collar on both of us, and that broke the link with your real body. I convinced them to take yours off — but you shouldn’t stay here long. You have to warn the others. The Ice Eaters think we want to open the Goddess’s Tomb and they’re sworn to stop that at all costs. Marmion might be heading for trouble, if he isn’t in it already. He should also know that there are some among the Ice Eaters who don’t like what their leader is saying.’

Again Kelloman nodded, then his body went still again.

The bilby stirred from its position and looked questioningly up at Skender.
‘