Witchlanders (31 page)

The echoes. Of course!

The echoes weren't good enough for this to be an echo site, but perhaps they were good enough to let him see a little, with the sight that singing gave him. In the darkness, a glimmer of hope sparked.

Falpian tried a note, tried to harmonize with the sounds that came back to him, but the echo lasted only a moment—not long enough. He took a tentative step to his right and tried to sing again.

He had never done anything like this before, but it wasn't unheard of. An echo site like the one at Stonehouse wasn't made, after all; it was found. Magicians of old had painstakingly sung into gullies and mountain passes, listening to echoes and planting flags at promising places. He just had to be patient and do what they did, he told himself, and he took another step.

This time when he sang, he caught a glimpse of something, the ghost of an image in his mind. Fruit. The ceiling of the cave was hung with quivering fruit. Falpian was so surprised that he stopped singing, and his vision was snuffed out. He sang again.

No, not fruit. Stormbats. They hung upside down from the ceiling like bunches of grapes, keeping warm by pressing close. Gracefully they swooped down all around him, catching thief spiders or picking the dead ones out of the water. This was the splashing he had heard. Stormbats were a good sign. Stormbats needed openings to the outside.

Falpian's voice grew louder, bolder. He had a stitch in his side, and every time he took a breath, however small, his vision dimmed. But he was grinning as he sang. Could
he
do this? Could his father find an unmarked echo site?

I don't need your approval,
he thought.
I'm a black magician in my own right now.

Opposite the tunnel he had entered, he could see three passages. Two led down to twisting paths. The other . . .
Falpian struggled to visualize it, though his lungs hurt like fire. The right-hand tunnel led down . . . There! A storm-bat swooped through—a straggler, flying home to the colony. That must be the way.

Falpian's knees buckled, and he struggled for air. He stumbled out of the pool, slipping and sliding on the wet floor of the cave. He fell, but he quickly got up again, waving his hands in front of him until he reached the rock wall.

He felt along the wall for the right-hand tunnel and staggered down it, hoping what he had seen was more than some trick of his mind. The path dipped down and made a turn.

Ahead, something made his eyes sting, something bright. It was—Kar's eyes, he hadn't imagined it—it was daylight! Falpian rushed forward. There was light ahead, and it wasn't a lamp, or a torch. It was morning.

Falpian emerged into a large chamber. He breathed deeply. Air. Clean, cold air filled his lungs. Shafts of natural light fell from the ceiling. He blinked again and again, dazzled. Light filtered in from a little round hole in a lower corner of the chamber—an exit! Falpian lurched toward it.

After a few steps he stopped short. Ryder. His talat-sa. “I feel you now,” he said aloud, laughing to himself with relief. “I must have been trying too hard before.”

The passage he had just come from was on the far
right, but there were many other openings and stairways leading off into dark tunnels. Ryder was somewhere close. Falpian took a tentative step forward. One arch was bigger and more ornate than the others. Falpian closed his eyes and immediately felt drawn to it. There. Like a needle to a lodestone. His talat-sa.

“There you are,” he breathed.

“There who is?” said a voice from a shadowed corner.

Falpian's eyes snapped open. He wasn't alone.

“Stop what you're doing,” said Ryder. “Stop right now.”

Visser stood caught in the middle of a high chamber, holding a large rock over her head. She lowered her arms, staring at Ryder and Skyla with a mixture of shock and guilt. A stone sarcophagus dominated the room, and Visser had been about to smash something carved on top of it, something Ryder couldn't make out.

“You shouldn't be here,” she spat. Her gray braid had come undone, and her face glistened with sweat in spite of the chill.

Ryder stepped into the room and immediately felt the awe it was meant to inspire. A low stone lamp illuminated walls covered with intricate carvings and half-faded murals. Writing, both Baen and Witchlander, spread over everything like black vines, including the floor and ceiling. The sarcophagus stood at the center of the room, surrounded
by four mosaic pillars studded with green and blue glass. Between the pillars, garlands of long-dead flowers gathered dust. It seemed to Ryder to be a reverent place. A sacred place. Whatever Visser was doing, it was wrong.

Ryder handed Skyla his lamp and pulled Lilla's knife from the sash of his reds. “We know you made the monsters,” he said. “Come with us. We're taking you up to the elders.”

Visser snorted. “You don't know what you're talking about.”

“Innocent people have died!” Ryder's voice shook as he said the words, in spite of himself. “In Aata's name, why did you do it? To show your power?”

“No!”

“Why, then?”

“Don't be a fool!” she cried. “It was that blackhair—it must have been. He's tricked you.” Visser dropped the stone she was holding to the floor. She walked right up to Ryder's blade. “You wave that knife around, young man, but do you even know how to use it?”

Ryder held his ground, brandishing the weapon, but she was right to call his bluff. Angry as he was, he still wasn't sure he could do what Lilla had asked and put the knife between her ribs.

“Don't let her scare you, Ryder,” Skyla said urgently. “Remember what she's done.”

Skyla swung the lamp awkwardly on its chain, threatening Visser with it as if it were a weapon. Ryder moved forward too, steeled by his sister's words. Visser held up her hands and backed away, but Ryder and Skyla pressed forward until they had her trapped in one corner of the room.

“
You
should understand,” Visser said to Skyla. There was a note of pleading in her voice. “The witches are
your
people now. They're trapped by the snowslide. I need to lead them through the forbidden tunnels and down to the lower exit. If they dig their way out, more of those things might be waiting for them.”

“That doesn't explain why you're
here
,” Skyla said sharply.

“Yes,” said Ryder. “What does leading the witches through the tunnels have to do with destroying this place? Just what is that?” He nodded to the sarcophagus. Visser pressed her lips tight.

He kept his eyes locked on the witch and edged over to the sarcophagus, dead blossoms turning to dust under his feet. On top, the life-size figure of a woman had been carved from different pieces of colored stone: white for her bare forearms, red for her witch's costume. Visser had done cruel damage—the face was almost gone—but it was obvious what she was trying to hide. She hadn't yet destroyed the eyes. They were open, staring up at the ceiling, irises as black as Falpian's. And the hair was another clue. Black
stone curls cascaded down the side of the sarcophagus.

“She's Baen,” Ryder said. “You did this because she's Baen.”

He touched the rough place where the nose had been, and anger coursed through him. The sculpture must have been so beautiful. There were fine veins on the hands, and the fingers seemed about to twitch with life.

Disparate images and thoughts that had been floating around inside his head now slid into place like the pieces of a puzzle. “Oh Goddess,” he breathed. It wasn't just wrong, what Visser was doing, it was . . . blasphemy. “Visser, how could you do it?”

“It was necessary!” Visser said, desperation in her voice now. “It's still necessary. Leading my people through the tunnels might be the only way to save them. But by the red, they can't see this.”

Skyla gave Ryder a questioning glance. “I don't understand,” she said. “All right, the woman buried here is Baen, or has Baen blood, but we've seen others like her in the catacombs. Why is this one so important?”

“Tell her, Visser,” Ryder said firmly.

She shook her head. “No! No one must ever find out! There are secrets in these caves that should stay hidden forever!”

Ryder didn't agree, and for him it wasn't a secret anymore.

“Think, Sky,” he said. “We've heard Fa tell this story a hundred times. ‘When she died, the women hung her tomb with flowers.'” Ryder reached up to touch the crumbling flower garlands that hung between the pillars. “‘Aata stayed by her sister's side, neither eating nor sleeping, for nine days and nine nights. And then the Goddess came.'”

“Aayse?” said Skyla with awe in her voice. “The tomb of Aayse?” She hurried to the sarcophagus and held the lamp over the ruined face. Hesitantly she ran her fingers over the damaged lips. Ryder wasn't sure how his sister would react, but then a smile lit up her face, and she looked at him across the carved body with shining eyes.

“This is incredible!” She lifted the lamp to the mosaic friezes along the wall, gazing around the chamber again as if seeing it for the first time. “Was Aata a Baen as well?” She addressed her question to Visser, but it was Ryder who answered, excited to have someone with whom to share the thoughts that had been circling in his mind.

“I don't think so. Remember the mural in the chamber at the top of the mountain? One woman blond with blue eyes, the other part destroyed?”

“But Aata and Aayse were twins.”

“Twins in spirit,” he said, thinking of Falpian's description. He hesitated for a moment. “Aata and Aayse were talat-sa.”

Skyla's face showed her confusion: She didn't know the word. Ryder struggled to explain. “They were a singer pair like . . . like Falpian and me.”

“The prophets were nothing like you and that Baen!” Visser snapped.

But Ryder hardly heard. He was remembering a conversation he'd had with Falpian on the mountain. “The Baen don't allow women to use magic,” he went on, words tumbling out excitedly. “And Falpian told me they used to have cruel punishments for women who tried to sing. What if one of those punishments was cutting the vocal cords?” He ran his fingers gently over the figure's throat and was amazed to find exactly what he was looking for: a raised slash carved over the voice box. A thrill rippled through him.

Aata and the witches who came after her took a vow to be silent, but silence had been forced on this woman.

“It makes perfect sense!” he said. “Aata was like us, and Aayse was Baen. But Aayse was mute, so they couldn't sing together. They had to invent a whole new kind of magic. Witch magic. A silent magic.”

He stopped speaking as the enormity of what he was suggesting began to dawn on him. How brave Aata and Aayse must have been. As brave as Mabis. For the first time he felt proud to be descended from their followers.

“Imagine if that were all true,” said Skyla, the lamplight
illuminating her bright eyes. “The story is probably written on these walls. A person could spend her life studying this place, translating these writings.”

“No, no,
no
!” cried Visser. “No one is going to translate this heresy. We have to destroy it before anyone else finds out about it. Don't you see? The other witches can't see Baen writing in a sacred tomb. They can't see—whoever this is.” She gestured to the sarcophagus. “It would destroy the coven!”

“It's Aayse,” Ryder insisted.

Visser's eyes were wild. “I'll never believe that.”

“I think you do already. And besides, what
you
believe isn't important. Not after what you've done.”

“I swear by the prophets, I've done nothing!”

Ryder hissed at the hypocrisy of Visser swearing by Aata and Aayse. “Lilla Red Bird told us you made the creatures; she saw it in a bone casting.”

Visser gasped, speechless.

“Actually,” Skyla began hesitantly, “Lilla didn't exactly say that Visser made the creatures.”

“What?” Ryder gave his sister a look. “Of course she did.”

“Think,” Skyla said. “She told us that Visser planned ‘a great desecration.' Lilla could have been talking about destroying this tomb.”

Ryder looked from Skyla to Visser and back again. He didn't know what to think now. “Oh, for Aata's sake,” he
finally said. “We'll just have to take her back up to Sodan and the elders. They'll decide.” He raised his knife again and glared at Visser. “And I won't allow you to make another mark on this chamber.”

“Why should you care?” Visser said haughtily. “You're no witch. This place has nothing to do with you.”

To his surprise it was Skyla who defended him. “How can you be so arrogant as to think this place is only for witches?” she demanded. “The most devout man I ever knew was my father. He may not have had a drop of magic in him, but he prayed to the Goddess every day. And there are fifty more like him in the village. This place is theirs! It belongs to them and to my brother as much as it does to you. Do you think that because we wear red we have some right to destroy it?”

“Do you think your father wanted to know this?” Visser's sharp voice echoed in the high ceiling of the chamber. “That everything he ever believed in was a lie? I'm doing it for him. And for the witches, too. You have seen how small our coven has grown. The young leave us to go to the cities. No one can throw the bones anymore. No one has faith. This tomb would only cause confusion and doubt.”

Skyla trembled with restrained fury. “Maybe we witches can't throw the bones anymore because we've forgotten where we come from. You don't give your own people enough credit, Visser.”

“It's not just me,” Visser insisted. “Keeping our secrets, keeping the catacombs forbidden—it is a decision that Sodan and the elders have made. We didn't make it on a whim.”