Энн Маккефри - Dragon’s Kin

“After?”

“Well, you can’t expect me to go along and miss my lessons, can you?” she asked with a touch of exasperation.

“You’re coming?”

“How are you going to find your way about without me?” she asked, tapping her foot impatiently. “It’s not as though you’ll be able to see in the dark, you know.”

Kindan gave in with a reluctant sigh. “Fine. I’ll see you tonight.” Then he frowned. “But why do you want to meet on the second floor? Why not by the kitchen?”

“Because the entrance to the secret passageway is on the second floor,” she told him simply.

From the very start, things did not go the way Kindan had planned. He found himself at the end of a line with Nuella leading Kisk.

“Why am I back here?” he complained as they reached the first turn in the passageway. He stumbled and caught himself.

“That’s why,” Nuella replied calmly. “You want Kisk to learn how to lead people safely in the dark, don’t you? Well, how can she do that if all you can teach her is how to stumble around?”

“But it’s dark in here,” Kindan said, defensively.

Nuella snorted. “It’s no darker here than it is anywhere else for me,” she said. “Honestly, Kindan, have you never tried walking with your eyes closed?”

“No,” Kindan replied, stumbling on a rock and going down hard on his knees—again.

“Well, it’s time you learned,” Nuella said. She added conversationally, “It was the first game I learned to play with Dalor.”

“Really?”

“Well, he used to tease me so much and it really got to me,” she admitted. “But my mother asked me one day why didn’t I play a game that showed my strengths, not my weaknesses. So we started playing in the dark.” She added with a laugh, “It got so that I used to move the furniture around to make Dalor trip.”

Kindan, feeling the smart from his shins, still couldn’t understand why he was behind Kisk and Nuella was in front of her. Nuella’s explanation was that she could show Kisk where to go, and it made no sense for the two of them, who could “see” well enough in the dark, to have to halt their stride just because Kindan couldn’t. But it was a pity the passageway wasn’t quite wide enough for Kindan to travel side by side with Kisk.

“How much farther is it?” he asked when he felt that they’d gone on forever. He regretted letting Nuella convince him that they should leave the glows behind. What if something happened to her? But, Kindan reflected ruefully, everything so far had happened to him.

“I told you,” Nuella’s voice carried back in a whisper from somewhere up ahead, “there are two turns, this last one and another gentler one. The sharp turn comes about one third of the way along, and the gentle turn comes about three-quarters of the way along. Of course, it’s just the opposite on the way back.”

Kisk turned her head back and blew a soft reassurance at Kindan.

“Hey! I can almost see her eyes,” he said excitedly.

“Almost?” Nuella repeated. “How can you almost see something?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain. Like maybe I can, maybe I can’t,” he replied, trying to recall the image now that Kisk had turned her head back.

Nuella’s reply was thoughtful. “Sometimes I think I can see things that way, too. It’s like when I dream. My eyes worked fine until I was about three, you know. Mother thinks that’s why I see things when I dream. It’s rather confusing, to be honest.”

Kindan, whose light-starved eyes were reporting all sorts of strange lights, nodded in understanding.

At least the air was cool and clean, he noted. He brushed his fingers against a wall, as Nuella had advised him, and corrected his course slightly. Originally he had tried holding on to Kisk’s tail, but the watch-wher had flicked it away from him impatiently.

The sound of Nuella’s breathing and the lighter, faster breathing of the watch-wher were reassuring in the darkness. Kindan stopped feeling wrong-footed—blind—and started feeling more comfortable in the darkness. He strained his ears, hoping to hear with Nuella’s ease, but admitted after a while that it was hard.

“You’re thinking too much,” Nuella’s voice piped out of the darkness. “Just listen. Don’t try so hard.”

“How did you know what I was doing?” he demanded, eyes bulging in surprise.

“Your breathing changed,” she said simply. “You took a really deep breath, then a couple of short ones, and then you started breathing in spurts.”

Kindan sighed.

“And just then you sighed because I guessed what you were thinking,” Nuella went on. She giggled. “I used to play this game with Dalor, too. It really infuriated him.”

“I can understand,” Kindan said feelingly.

“Okay,” Nuella said, “I’ll stop now. But just listen, okay?”

Kindan nodded, not worrying whether Nuella could “hear” him or not, and the three continued on in unlit silence.

After a while, Kindan noticed that his right hand was brushing against the wall. He moved to the left, but noticed a short while later that his hand was brushing the wall again.

“Is it curving now?”

“Very good,” Nuella said. “I was wondering if you’d notice.”

“So we’re almost there?”

“Yep. About fifty more paces,” Nuella told him. That had been another surprise to Kindan, being told he had to keep count of the number of paces he took. He’d forgotten to keep counting, too, and wondered if Nuella had or if she had just memorized the distances.

“Wait,” she called. “Listen.”

Kindan strained his ears. He felt Kisk turn her head this way and that.

“Can you hear it?” Nuella asked after a long moment.

“No,” Kindan confessed.

“It sounds like they’re putting up the entrance for the second shaft,” Nuella said. “It’s just through the rock on the right here.”

“How far?” Kindan wondered.

“Not more than half a meter, probably less,” she answered promptly. “I heard Father talking. I’m sure he had it made that way on purpose, so that this passage could be connected to the two shafts before the next Pass.”

That made sense. When Thread started to fall again it wouldn’t be safe to have people going outside to get into the mines; with the passage, people would be able to go straight from the Hold to the mine without venturing outside at all.

Perhaps, Kindan mused, Natalon had also thought of building a special enclosure so that all the mined coal could be safely stored without worrying about Thread.

Thread was voracious—Kindan knew that as well as any child in the camp. The Teaching Ballads said it would eat anything organic—flesh or coal. He was glad that the next Pass, when the Red Star drew Thread down on the planet, would not be for another fourteen Turns. Kindan realized that he’d be really old by then—twenty-six Turns.

“That’ll be a good thing for the next Pass,” Kindan said aloud.

“Only if the Camp is proved,” Nuella responded. “Otherwise it’ll all be a waste, like Uncle Tarik’s Camp.”

“What do you know about that?” he asked, intensely curious.

“Shh!” Nuella hissed. She added, in a whisper, “We’re getting near the end of the passage. I’ll tell you later.”

Nuella had explained, when she had first shown Kindan the entrance to the passage, that the exit was in a pocket toward the back of the mine entrance, close to where the shaft’s huge pumps were placed.

“Father had it built to look like part of the supports,” she had said.

Kindan could well imagine that no one would guess about the existence of the passage: It had been expertly concealed at the back of the upstairs hall closet in Natalon’s hold. What had looked like simple round trim at the top and bottom of the back wall had turned out to hide carefully crafted latches that slid back top and bottom on one corner when Nuella moved them. Only someone who had known how they worked would have had a chance of discovering them.