Ширли Мерфи - The Shattered Stone [calibre]

When they started down the hill, the feel of darkness met them like a wall so all of them wanted to draw back. Thorn took Zephy’s hand, and when he turned to look at her, she was too calm and very pale. He wanted to say, Stay here, stay safe. But he knew that he could not. She had committed herself just as he had. She was biting her lip again. He stopped and put his arms around her and held her close. Her warmth dizzied him, he wanted desperately to stay with her there and keep her safe, to find his own safety with her. They stared at each other, stricken.

When they reached the mound between the hills, they could see no opening. Thorn began to wonder then if this was a natural formation after all. But the sense of darkness was too strong, and all of them had begun to catch glimpses of stone slabs and still figures, like mist across their vision. Over and over it came, the two places seen at once, the real and the vision seen together as the sky darkened and night came down.

There was no visible way into the hill. They skirted it expecting a door and found none. They examined the grass-covered earth where it rose abruptly from the valley floor like a wall, but there was only earth and grass. They climbed the hill then, uneasily.

On top it was like a flat field, with tufts and hillocks and rabbit holes. Nothing more, no opening. And the black rabbits themselves, long-tailed, wily creatures, darted away across the hills as they approached, then paused to watch them.

Then at last, in a hill removed from the mound, they found a narrow cleft like a scar, a wedge into which Thorn went alone to find a larger opening inside, then a tunnel and at the end of that a door, dirt encrusted and heavy. He pulled it open slowly, scraping dirt.

Beyond was darkness. He struck flint to a candle, then went cautiously along the bare tunnel, moving at last into the dark mound. The others followed him.

Once through the tunnel, they found themselves in a larger passageway that all of them recognized from the visions. Shallow indentations along the walls held stone slabs and silent figures. The shock of finding in reality what they had seen in the visions made them silent; reality and vision seemed confused suddenly, their minds could not cope.

Then Elodia stepped forward and laid her hand on the bare arm of a child her own age; and they all started at the sense of warm skin, of living flesh.

‘The stone!” Elodia breathed, her intensity like a knife. At once Thorn was beside her laying the jade in her hand; they touched hands and touched the runestone to the figure, willing the child to wake.

She was a pale, fragile girl of about Elodia’s age. Her skin seemed almost transparent, as if her life was frailly held, indeed. She stirred at last, and her face seemed to go whiter with the effort she made. Her chest rose in barely visible breathing; then a movement down the passage made them start. A greasy light came from around a corner of the passage and grew brighter. They could see the flame of a torch approaching.

They snuffed the candle and drew back into the smaller tunnel, clustering against its wall to stare toward the approaching light. They could hear a faint scuffing and an occasional grumble as if the torchbearer was not happy at being pulled from a cozy place, to walk the damp tunnel. If he was after them, if he had heard them, he was not being very quiet about it.

As he reached the first niche he stopped and leaned over. They could see him clearly now, a big Kubalese bending almost double to lift a child to sitting position and hold a cup to its lips. At niche after niche he stopped; but when he reached the little girl she drew back from his grasp. She must have refused the draft, for after a moment he growled in agitation, shook her, then held the cup again, her head higher this time. At last he grunted with satisfaction, released the figure carelessly, and came on down the passage.

When he had done all the sleeping figures and gone on, they followed him, moving in the opposite direction from the sleeping girl. Surely he was giving fresh drug. Now all would be harder to awaken. How often did he make these rounds? Was he the lone keeper or were there others? Passages opened both left and right, and Thorn knew they could easily become lost. It was time to act. He unsheathed the knife, loosed the rope from his belt, handing it to Zephy, then slipped ahead.

It was all done so fast, his thought to hers, no time to panic. Thorn loved her in that quick moment when she leaped ahead with him, steady and fast, never faltering; he crouched behind the Kubalese, jumped, plunged his knife in as Zephy flew to wind the rope around the soldier’s feet and pull it taut. The man cried out, Thorn found his face as he fell and muffled him, and he was down heavy as lead across Thorn’s legs. Zephy was binding him, but Thorn steeled himself and cut the man’s throat. They were safer that way.

“He might have told us something,” Elodia said, coming up. There was a quantity of blood. They all felt sick.

“He might have lied, too,” Thorn answered. He righted the torch and handed it to Toca. Then they moved the nearest figure, a half-grown boy, into another niche beside a young woman, and the three of them were able, just, to lift the Kubalese up onto the slab. The blood was slippery, and they were splashed with it, wiping it off on his clothes before they left him.

Now ahead of them lay half a dozen figures that had not had their dose from the cup. The cup itself Thorn protected carefully for there was an ample draft left that might somehow be useful.

Again they tried to awaken a drugged sleeper, and again there was a stir from the young woman, but she did not open her eyes. As they became more sensitive to the sleepers, they began to experience their need, their crying out for that draft that Thorn carried, an aching hunger that tore at them all in its intensity. They experienced the longing nearly as if it were their own, which perhaps weakened their own determination as they tried to rouse the Children of Ynell. But the need was stronger in some than in others, and in those from whom it came the weakest, their efforts to arouse were most rewarding.

After some time they had amassed a small band that followed them like sleepwalkers down the corridor, children and adults ambling, blank-eyed. Among them was Clytey Varik.

Thorn and Zephy, Elodia and Toca proceeded silently, their mental effort turned to reassuring those who followed, to keep them following, to make them yearn for life . . .

They found that the narrower tunnels leading off the main corridor were short for the most part, some going into empty rooms or caves and others simply stopping; some with a few niches, but most unoccupied. Most of the drugged Children had been kept in the corridor where they were easiest to get to. At the far end of the corridor was the place of most danger.

For by reaching silently forward together, by feeling outward together, sensitive to each other and to what lay ahead they had been able to see into the mound’s depths. And at the end of the corridor was a room where the MadogWerg leaf was brewed in a cold-still, and where two Kubalese guards played at a game of dice sticks. Thorn could feel Zephy’s fear of the place, of the guards, and feel her hatred too and her rising determination to aggression that was very like his own. He could feel Elodia’s singleness of purpose so finely steeled that her abhorrence and tenderness were shielded. And Toca—Toca simply went on, made his stoic effort one-minded, following Thorn. Thinking nothing of good or bad or distasteful, but simply encrusted with a small fierce discipline, soldier-like and so touching that Thorn, in spite of himself, put an arm around the little boy’s shoulder, then knew at once that Toca was better left untouched just now, that the shield was not that impenetrable.