The Whispering Trees (31 page)

The creature called itself Konet and had been born inside Niersook, just like all its brothers and sisters. Konet and its brethren spent their entire lives with one purpose alone—to manufacture what they called the “elixir.” Kara wasn't able to understand all the intricacies of the process, but apparently it was so complicated that it required the entirety of Niersook's massive body, which was really no more than an organic factory.

Niersook crashed into the mountain. Niersook died. We live. Continue to make elixir. No food. Soon Konet's people die too. Then Konet
.

“That's very sad,” Kara said.

Death not sad. Wasted elixir sad. Must use
.

“I intend to,” said Kara.

They followed a series of tunnels deeper into Niersook, Safi's floating light leading the way. The ground seemed solid enough but shifted from side to side like a rope bridge. Through the translucent floor Kara could see the surface far below her. They were going up.

They entered a tunnel that was larger than the others and filled with some sort of brackish, flowing liquid.

“What is this stuff?” Taff asked.

For transport
, Konet said.
To move supplies from one end of Niersook to the other. Elixir requires many ingredients. Many steps. A lifetime to make a single drop
.

“Is this a vein?” Taff asked, poking at the dark liquid with his boot.

“It's a transport tunnel,” said Kara.

“Right,” said Taff. “A vein.”

On Konet's suggestion, they cut away a piece of the wall and draped it over the surface of the liquid. It was
as thin as a bedsheet but floated perfectly, even after Safi sat on top of it. Kara held it in place while Taff joined Safi. The membrane, like a lily pad, dipped only slightly beneath the liquid.

“I don't think it's going to support all three of us,” Taff said.

Kara agreed. Reaching up, she slid her knife through the membrane and cut herself a new raft, a bit larger than the first one. She placed it on top of the liquid and hopped on before the current could carry it away.

They floated through the tunnel. Safi's sphere of light was a meager defense against the encroaching darkness.

“Do you think we're under the mountain?” Safi asked.

“I don't know,” replied Taff. “I'm still getting used to the idea that we're traveling through something that used to be
alive
.”

“It's pretty disgusting when you think about it like that.”

“How else are you supposed to think about it?”

Kara allowed their conversation, amusing as it was, to drift away. She had a larger concern right now that she did not want to share with the other two children. Something was not right. Her mind felt
bloated
, as though someone had blown air into her head and inflated it like a balloon. Kara supposed she should be grateful that there was no pain, but in a way she would have preferred it. At least pain would have been something; this was just a vast emptiness stretching the perimeter of her mind far beyond its natural capacity.

The bridge. An open invitation
.

No one new had attempted to cross over—not yet, at least—but it felt like her mind was readying itself to house a vast new number of occupants.

I have to get Konet out of me, as quickly as possible. I can't close the bridge until I do
.

“Do you hear something?” asked Taff.

“Just you,” replied Safi, “trying to scare me. It's not going to work.”

“Shh,” said Taff. “Listen.”

Kara concentrated, trying to pinpoint what Taff was talking about. She heard the lapping sound of the raft as it cut gently through the liquid. A steady dripping just ahead of them. The ragged sprinting of her own breath.

There!

In the distance, back from where they had come, she heard the unmistakable sound of swimming. Drawing her knife, Kara held it before her with two slightly trembling hands. She opened her mind and listened, hoping to identify the creature. . . .

LET US IN! LET US IN! WE WANT TO LIVE TOO!

The chorus of voices assailed her like a physical blow. She dropped to her knees, nearly retching over the side of the raft, and the knife fell from her open hand and into the brackish liquid. She was aware of the bridge in her mind, still open, a welcoming beacon to those who hovered on the other side.

Mary warned me. She said it wasn't the creature I was
enchanting that would harm me. It would be the others: lonely spirits who craved the same attention
.

Kara thought about the countless bones they had carelessly stepped on, the hundreds, maybe thousands of spirits trapped in this never-decaying corpse forever. How angry they must be. And how jealous that Konet had stolen a tiny flash of mortality while they remained consigned to everlasting night.

They wanted a piece of Kara's life too.

“We have to hurry!” Kara called out.

Taff's voice slid through the darkness. “I'm trying to use my sword as an oar, but this stuff is all sticky!”

Kara reached out with her mind, searching for something—
anything—
that might still be alive, and found an ancient intelligence hidden in the cool depths below them. It was reluctant to move after so many years mired in the muck, but Kara pleaded with it, sacrificing the smell of her mother's meat stew in the process. She sensed one red-veined, reptilian eye creak open. The
water parted, and the raft rose into the air on something far more solid than liquid.

They were on top of the creature.

The walls of the vein rushed by in a blur of speed. As Kara passed the other two children she made the creature slow down so she could grab their hands and pull them onto its back with her. They allowed the membranes to slide away and gripped bony ridges worn smooth by centuries in the deep. Their speed increased, the continual shouts of
LET US IN
fading to silence. The tunnel forked again and again, but Kara always knew the right path to follow. Through the translucent ceiling she saw the vast workings of Niersook: tall towers that spired into a branching network of veins, plump sacs the color of a ripening bruise that might have been some sort of organ, coral-like polyps brittle with age but still holding a vestige of their former beauty. Each of these structures was necessary, Konet informed her, to craft the elixir. As the paper-thin walls of the vein grew tighter, Kara marveled
at what Rygoth had created, an entire world dedicated to one specific goal.

Finally the reptilian creature turned sharply, sending the three children tumbling off its back and onto solid ground. Kara reached out with her mind, meaning to thank their unlikely helper, but it had already begun the return journey to its resting spot, worn out from this unexpected exertion.

Kara examined this new area.

The spongy surface was the raging scarlet of an inflamed throat. The walls, equally red, oozed a thick yellow fluid. From the ceiling above them hung dangling shapes, hazy in the shadows. Safi's sphere of light seemed hesitant to get close enough to illuminate them.

In the center of the passage, a single, translucent sphere hung from the ceiling by a thin tube. Kara stepped over a huge pile of bones and bent before it.

Elixir stored here. Safe
.

Kara heard unmistakable pride in Konet's voice. The
elixir had been its life's work.

“Why are there so many bones here?” Safi asked.

“I think they were guarding it,” Taff said. “Everything about this place is centered around the venom. It makes sense that they would protect it.”

Safi nudged a bone with her toe. “It doesn't make sense for living things to have other living things inside them,” she said.

“Actually,” Taff said, “I've often wondered if we have things living inside of
us
. I used to get sick before, so I spent a lot of time thinking about it. How does an illness spread from one person to the other if it's not alive? And how do we fight off an illness if we don't have living things inside us to do so?”

Safi gazed at him with complete disgust. “I'm never getting sick again,” she said.

“Focus,” Kara said. The word was intended for the children, but a little for herself as well. She had begun to hear the words like a drumbeat rising in the distance:
LET
US IN, LET US IN
. She feared the very bones beneath her feet were aware of her presence.

With the back of her hand, Kara wiped away a layer of pinkish fuzz from the sphere. At first it seemed empty, and a flood of panic threatened to overtake her.
This has all been for nothing!
But then Safi's floating light moved closer and revealed, at the bottom of the sphere, a few drops of red liquid.

“Look,” said Taff, pointing to the tube that led from the sphere to the ceiling of the passage, then continued deeper into the tunnel. “This must be how the venom was delivered to the fang. We can follow this to the mouth and get out that way.”

“Good idea,” said Kara. “But we have to get this venom first.” She carefully poked the pliant surface of the sphere, wondering how they'd be able to break it without losing the precious liquid, when it suddenly yielded and allowed her index finger to slide inside. The rest of the sphere remained undamaged, like an unpoppable bubble.

“Look at this!” she said, her finger hovering just above the liquid. “The sphere doesn't break! We can just slide something in here and . . .”

“Don't!” exclaimed Taff, yanking Kara's hand out of the sphere. “This stuff takes magical powers away! You can't go near it! Neither can Safi.”

Kara glanced down at her hand as though it had betrayed her.

“You're right,” she said.

“It has to be me,” said Taff.

Kara had no desire to let Taff go anywhere near the sphere, but she knew he was right.
I have to let him help me. Safi too. There's no way to do this on my own
. Besides, the low hum of
LET US IN
was rising in her head and she was finding it difficult to concentrate. She thought about destroying the mind-bridge and setting Konet free, but what if they weren't able to exit through the mouth like Taff said? They might still need the dead creature's help.

“Just hurry up,” Kara told him. She stepped away from
the sphere, intending to give Taff more space to work, and winced at a sudden onslaught of pain. It felt as though the space in her head—the room she was involuntarily making for the approaching dead—was stretching too far, straining the limits of her skull. Kara clasped two hands to her temples as though she could push her mind back into shape. It didn't work.

“Are you all right?” Safi asked.

“I'm fine,” Kara said. She looked up and saw Taff watching her with concern. “The venom! Quick!”

Taff snapped back to work. “Give me your knife,” he said.

“I lost it.”

“Okay,” he said, shaking his head. “That's okay. We just need something to get the venom into Sordyr's body. Something sharp. A dagger. An arrow tip.” He eyed the bones scattered across the ground and smiled. “That will work. Help me find a sharp one.” Taff and Safi rifled through the bones while Kara, the world around her
spinning, slumped to the ground. “Hurry,” she muttered, but she didn't think either child heard her. She closed her eyes, heard the snap of a bone as Safi cracked it in two and handed it to Taff.

LET US IN! LET US IN!

“Let's get at least three,” Kara said. “In case something goes wrong.”

Taff, his forehead furrowed with concern, was staring at her again. She waved him away.

“No time,” she said. “Get it!”

The voices had risen to a wailing chorus of need.
There are so many of them. And they are so lonely
. They craved human companionship, living sensations.

They craved her.

Seeing no other option, Kara destroyed the mind-bridge.

Instantly the voices dissipated. She had one moment to touch Konet's spirit as a meager way of thanking the worker for its assistance, and then it was gone as well.
Kara's head still throbbed and she felt weak, as though she had not eaten in several days. But her mind was her own again.

And yet—her nerves still trembled.

“Got one!” Taff exclaimed. From the sphere he withdrew a venom-infused bone shard, now dyed a violent shade of crimson. Carefully he wrapped the shard in a rag and slipped it into his pocket.

On the ground, the bones began to quiver.

It was subtle at first, barely perceptible movements that could have been caused by an errant breeze or vibrations along the ground. But then a hip bone spun in front of Kara's eyes like an enchanted baton and she knew it was not her imagination.

“Bones,” muttered Kara. Between her still-pounding head and the impossible sight before her, she was having difficulty forming the necessary words to warn the others. Taff and Safi had their backs to her, too absorbed in the task at hand to notice the movement on the ground behind them.

The hip bone locked joints with a curved, stubby little bone, and together they rolled like a broken axle, indiscriminately locking onto new bones as they passed. Joints jammed into sockets far too small for them, Nature's grand design rejected in favor of a more immediate need.

Reanimation.

When I built the bridge to Konet, I awoke all the spirits in this place. They wanted to touch life again, if just for a moment
. Kara's cheeks burned with remorse; she had provided an irresistible temptation, a glimpse of warmth in a dark and frigid world. She sensed their fury at her inadvertent cruelty and felt the bitter weight of responsibility.

They hoped to cross the bridge and join Konet in my mind. I teased them and then closed the bridge. Now they have nowhere else to go, but their spirits are too angry to rest again—so they're breaking the rules and creating a new home instead
.

“I lost it!” Taff exclaimed in frustration. He had dropped the second shard into the sphere and could not get his fingers deep enough to retrieve it. “Get me another one,” he told Safi.