Zally's Book (10 page)

I looked at the writing above the carved serpent.

Kir nosed between us and looked at the wall.

“The feathered snake is called Kukulkan,” Imishi said, reading along with me. “According to the carved legend, it was wise beyond all other creatures, fearsome when angered, and could fly with the speed of an arrow.”

The golden horse gave an uneasy snort.

Below the image of the snake was an even more intricate carving that took my breath away: a map! I studied it, reaching out a hand to trace the lines.
This
was what the city had looked like long ago, before it was ruined.

“¡Ay, mira!
Thank you, Imishi. It's—”

“Of course!” Imishi interrupted, her face filled with wonder. “I should have realized it before. This is Ool-Kib. It was a Kib fairy city, abandoned in ancient times when a volcano destroyed much of it. Since then, the spirits of innocent creatures have been drawn here after they die.”

The parrot took that opportunity to stretch its wings and fly through the hole in the ceiling. It then circled the observatory, squawking, “We're here, we're here!”

“Stupid bird!” I muttered in exasperation. I peeked through one of the wall slits but saw neither the bird nor the jaguar. Outside, though, I heard a menacing growl and a snarl, followed by several frantic shrieks from the parrot, some loud snapping sounds like branches breaking, a split second of silence, and then—

A terrible roar echoed through the room where we stood.

7
The Innocent

The jaguar's hungry roar echoed in the stone chamber. I quickly scanned the small room for any sign of the jungle cat, but our little band of travelers was still alone. It was obvious that none of the holes in the walls or ceiling could possibly be large enough to admit the cat. The door was still closed. Yet the rumble of the cat breathing in and out sounded so close.

Imishi jumped onto Kir's back. She leaned forward with her arms around his neck, her wings spread flat, to protect him. It probably wouldn't have helped, had the jaguar actually been in the room with us, but it showed her courage.

From Kir, I felt the same worry as before: concern for his sire and the rest of Kib Valley. He knew the jaguar was not in the room with us. So why did the roaring suddenly seem so loud? I peeked through
the slits one after another but could not catch a glimpse of the jaguar.

From outside I heard, “We're here, we're here, we're here!” The parrot was not dead, then. I smiled as the fleeting thought reminded me of a Monty Python DVD my oldest brother, Ed, sometimes watched—something silly about a dead parrot. It seemed
our
parrot was safe, though, and hadn't been eaten by the jaguar.

I saw no sign of the jaguar outside, but I could hear her and feel her. (I could tell it was female now.) Strangely, I no longer felt
hunger
in the thoughts of the wild creature; instead came a feeling of fear and being trapped. The parrot called, “Safe now, safe now!” I wondered if the bird had any idea what it was saying. It was possible. I wondered if I could try thinking to it myself.

Kir whinnied.

Imishi sat up on his back. “What can you see?”

“Not much,” I admitted. “Just the jungle and our parrot friend. But I feel something, and I need to check it out.” I went to the door and grasped the heavy metal ring that was affixed to the stone slab where I would normally expect a doorknob to be. I pulled and the door swung inward just enough so I could squeeze out.

“Zally, no—it's too dangerous!” Imishi cried.

“Close the door behind me,” I whispered back. “I'll be okay.” I heard the scraping of stone as Imishi shut the door. Staying close to the small building, I inched to the corner and peeked around it. At the edge of my vision I caught a glimpse of something—the jaguar? No, it was just a ghostly animal spirit of some sort.

I slid along the wall, taking care not to step into the stone circle of grass and leaves on that side of the building. If Kir had not wanted to step into it, neither did I. At the next corner, I peeked around again: no jaguar.

I turned the corner and began inching along the wall. Something was different here: the stone circle, which was wider than I was tall, was not completely filled in with grass and debris. A sound came from it, like an echoey, raspy bark. The parrot—minus a few green tail feathers—fluttered down to perch on one of the low encircling stones. “We're here, we're here! Safe now, safe now!”

“Shhh!” I hissed, sending a thought of silence to it at the same time.

The parrot stopped squawking and continued bobbing his head and shifting his weight as if he were doing a dance. It seemed I was really talking to
animals! I wished I could celebrate how cool this was, but this wasn't the time.

I noticed a jagged hole in the surface closest to the building. About a third of the ground inside the circle had broken away and fallen inward. I knelt beside the parrot, leaned forward, and looked into the hole. It was a deep pit, more than twenty feet down, and the jaguar was at the bottom.

Turning her glowing eyes upward, the jaguar saw me. I didn't sense any threat from her, but she crouched and sprang upward. I gasped and jerked back. I heard the jaguar's claws scrabble on the hard, smooth stone at the side of the pit for a moment before she fell back with a raspy growl of feline frustration.

I saw now that the ground inside the circle was nothing more than a thin crust of dried clay covered with dirt, pebbles, leaves, and twigs to disguise it.

“Safe now,” the bird squawked again.

I was getting the idea that the parrot really did know what he was saying, albeit with a limited vocabulary. “Okay, okay,” I said. “But what am I supposed to do?” I leaned over and peered down into the hole again. This time when the jaguar saw me, I felt a flicker of … what? Hope? The jaguar's thoughts and feelings were edged with green. I drew
back again and looked through one of the slits into the building. I almost laughed out loud when I saw one fairy eye and one horse eye staring back at me.

“It's okay, you can come out now,” I said. “Just don't step in any of those stone circles.”

A minute later, Kir and Imishi joined me. I had not moved from beside the pit, and I found myself wondering why Kir's instincts had steered him clear of the pit when the jaguar's had not. I felt a strange sensation in my mind as Kir tried to explain something about the way vibrations in the ground had warned him that there was a hollow area ahead. I gave a mental shrug. Maybe the jaguar had been distracted by stalking us—or by that loud parrot.

“We need to go now,” Imishi said, mounting up. “We have lost much time.”

I nodded and stood, still staring into the pit, brushing dirt from my knees. Imishi stretched out a hand to help me up onto Kir's back. Something stopped me. Feelings tingled and poked at my mind: discouragement, disappointment, despair, tinged green at the edges.

“We have to help her get out of the pit,” I said.

Imishi stared at me, her face going pale with disbelief.
“What?
We just spent hours escaping that beast, and now you want to
help
it?”

When she put it that way, it did sound like a pretty dumb thing to do. But something told me that this was the
right
thing to do. Kir neighed and took a step backward. I gave my friends an apologetic look. “I know, I know. I'm sorry, but I have to do this. She won't try to hurt us now.”

Imishi snorted. “It is a
jaguar!
That's what they
do
—hunt and eat other creatures!”

“She needs help, or she'll die,” I said. “Isn't that what you Kib Fairies do—help other creatures?”

The fairy girl's eyes narrowed, and she shook her head. “Not creatures that want to eat us! We're wasting time, and we need to get back to help Queen Carmina and creatures who
deserve
our help!” She threaded her fingers through Kir's mane, and he turned to face the jungle. I knew that they wouldn't leave without me. So did they.

I went back to the hole, eased myself down onto my stomach, and stuck my head over the edge. The jaguar's paws were flecked with blood, as if she had been clawing at the walls. When she saw me, I felt a flicker of anticipation, of pleading. Was that possible? The jaguar crouched and tried to leap again, but this time the leap took her barely halfway up the walls before she fell back to the ground. She turned in agitation, lashing her tail. I saw that the bottom of
the pit was littered with the bones of creatures that had not escaped.

I stared down at the jaguar, trying to catch her eerie gaze, doing my best to send her a message. Our eyes locked, and the jaguar stopped pacing. Focusing on the jade glow, I sent thoughts to her as best I could, thoughts like
calm
and
friendly
and
rescue
.

The cat sat on her haunches, staring up at me. I sent her thoughts:
We are your friends. We are not food
. I wondered if the concept of friendship was one the jaguar could even understand, but it seemed to work. She lay down on the floor of the pit, surrounded by bones, and only the tip of her tail twitched. I could tell she was ready to wait patiently for help.

I stuck my head further through the hole to look around. A couple of my long hair vines slid forward into the hole to dangle beside my face. The jaguar, seeing this, raised a paw slightly, as if to bat at my hair vines—reminding me of one of the kittens playing with the shoestring. My hair dangled only a couple of feet into the hole, but it gave me an idea.

Wait
, I thought to the jaguar.
I'll be back
.

She lowered her paw and rested her chin on it.

I got up, then spoke to Kir and Imishi. “Look, I'm really sorry. I know you don't understand this part of my quest. But the jaguar in that pit is an innocent,
and I have to help her. Now, the two of you can either wait however long it takes me to do this by myself, or you can decide to help me and we can all get out of here that much sooner.”

With that, I marched away across the foundation and down the one grassy slope to the edge of the jungle. The apparitions of two mice scampered along beside me. I knew what I needed, and I had to find just the right one. I did not look back, but it wasn't long before I heard the soft thud of Kir's hooves on the grass behind me. That was a relief. It only took a minute or two to find what I was searching for: a tall, fallen stalk of bamboo about as big around as my waist. A bunch of small, leafy branches sprouted from the fat stalk. It didn't look too large, yet it looked strong enough. I tried to pick up one end. The bamboo was surprisingly heavy—perhaps it wasn't bamboo after all.

I turned to look at my friends. “Could you help me get this over to the hole, please?”

Imishi got a strange look on her face. Then she jumped off Kir's back, patted his flank, and said, “You will be doing most of the work, cousin.” Kir nodded his understanding.

Imishi rummaged through the saddlebags and drew out a length of silken ribbon. She unrolled it
and, holding each end in one hand, placed the end of the loop under her foot to hold it still. She smoothed the ribbon with her hands, and the ends grew longer and longer. Concentrating, she folded the ends several times, crossing them over each other. Her hands moved so fast they were almost a blur as she wove the narrow ribbon to create a sort of mesh net with a large hole at the center and two long trailing ends of ribbon.

Moving to Kir, she threw the open part of the loop over his head and pulled it down to his shoulders. Then I understood: Imishi had made a harness. She smoothed out the two ends of the ribbon until they were long enough to reach the bamboo stalk and tied them securely around it. It was nothing short of brilliant, and done in less than five minutes.

Imishi and I tied the bamboo with the ribbons. Kir did not need me to tell him what to do when we finished. He took a few steps forward until he felt the weight of the bamboo on the harness. Then he leaned into the harness and tried to walk, but the load was too heavy. Imishi and I pushed the bamboo from behind. It budged. Slightly.

All of a sudden a herd of translucent golden horses appeared around us.

“The horses of Kib Valley!” Imishi gasped.
“Their spirits are helping us save the jaguar.”

Kir whinnied a surprised greeting to his ancestors, who responded in a ghostly, musical echo. Then a shimmer surged out from them into Kir and Imishi, growing brighter until the whole group radiated a dazzling golden light. A feeling of elation flowed from all of them into me as well.

Imishi lifted one end of the heavy bamboo. At the other end, Kir took powerful steps, pulling the stalk forward with his harness. Surrounded by the brilliant spirits, we headed up the grassy slope toward the observatory.

Picking up a short length of branch from the ground, I ran ahead to the pit and broke out the rest of the clay surface inside the stone circle. When Kir arrived, dragging the bamboo all the way to the edge of the pit, I was ready. Strengthened by the horse spirits, Imishi and Kir positioned the stalk so that the largest portion of it rested on the stone rim of the pit. Then I untied the fairy-silk rope from the bamboo and released Kir from his harness. Dipping their heads, the glowing herd of horses backed away from the stone circle but did not leave us.