Alishia stirred beside him, rolling onto her side and opening her eyes. For an instant Trey thought he saw clear blue flames within her pupils, and he glanced up to see whether the darkness had parted to reveal blue sky. But the dusk was as deep as ever.
“…her own book of madness…” Alishia said.
“Alishia?” Trey touched her face and tilted her head to the side, looking into her eyes and realizing that she was not awake at all. Her mouth was slack, her chin limp and her eyes reflected nothing of what he could see.
“…Hope…” she whispered.
“She’s coming,” Trey said, and a frown creased Alishia’s forehead.
The scream came again, and the miner recognized how it found its way to his ears: it was eaten and spat out again, an echo wending around subterranean corners and through cracks in the land.
Hope sounded terrified.“They’re coming!” she screamed.
Trey shivered. What was coming? The Nax? Had she gone deep and found them awake? But if that were the case, she would be dead.
He should shout to her, guide her up, lean down into the hole, ready to haul her out of the ground and away from whatever pursued her. But he did not. Because of that look on Alishia’s face, and the depth of the sleeping nightmare in her open eyes.
WHEN HOPE TOUCHED the object-the middle, the center, the giant dried heart of this old dead thing-it disintegrated.
The gravemaker spider still sat atop the fossilized heart as it came apart. The creature’s legs thrashed below it where before there had been rigidity, and Hope knew how it felt. The whole world had been ripped out from under her. Reality, already struggling to maintain its tenuous hold on the land, had given way to nightmare. As the spider fell so did Hope’s mind, both of them lost in a cloud of dust as the Sleeping God’s heart came apart. It went to grit, sandy blood and a haze of history spinning around inside this buried corpse.
Hope tried to scream, but it came as a keen. She could not move. Her hand was still held before her, fingers splayed, their tips grayed with the God’s dust. She drew in another breath and the dust coated her throat. It hurt when she breathed. It hurt when she thought. Here is the history of the land…dead…dead and dry, like a corpse left out in the sun.
The gravemaker spider appeared again. It had risen in the dust and re-created itself, and each dust particle began to mimic it. There were five spiders now, and fifteen, and a hundred, all of them crawling slowly toward Hope on the dust that webbed her vision. Still she keened, trying to scream past the grit that clogged her throat.
The spiders came closer. She should have never come down here. The people she had killed smiled in their secret graves, and she turned and ran back the way she had come. She used the disc-sword to haul herself up the slope of the Sleeping God’s chest cavity, wincing at every hack and cut, digging in with the fingers of her other hand.
From behind her, the sound of sand falling, small feet rushing. She started to glance back but saw the air moving, so she looked forward again. She jerked the disc-sword free and leapt up, jamming it into the ground again and pulling with all her might, kicking with her feet, clawing with her other hand, and then she reached the rent and pulled herself inside.
The walls still glowed but the light was changing now, phasing out, flickering back in again and revealing nothing new.
Hope paused and listened for a miraculous heartbeat. But there was nothing other than the gravemaker spiders following her, born of dead dust. They sounded like the sea washing onto a sandy beach. There must have been a million of them.
She screamed and drove forward, coughing and spitting dust that turned into spiders.
She swatted at them as she went. Their bodies burst back to dust, fell apart as the disc-sword swung, and she felt the unbelievable weight of them forcing her on.
She emerged into the huge cavern and fell from the narrow crack, feeling solidified veins cracking around her. She stood and swung back, hacking at the shadows that had already started falling out behind her. The spiders screeched as they died. She had never heard a spider screech before. She added her scream to their death cries and backed away, trying to follow the path she had made earlier.
The spiders poured into the cavern like a wave of black oil. They ate what little light there was, giving off no reflection.
Hope stomped. Her scream was free now, her throat clear of dust at last, and she vented her fear as she turned and ran for her life.
Everything she saw or touched, everything she breathed in, was the Sleeping God. She was looking at its insides. Dry now, fossilized and dead; still, this was the most amazing thing she had ever seen in her long life. The most amazing, and the most dreadful. If the Sleeping Gods die, what hope is there for the rest of us?
“They’re coming!”she screamed, feeling the dark wave lapping at her feet as she ran. The spiders crawled up her ankles, her calves, but they did not bite. Perhaps they’ll cover me, smother me, keep me down here to die and dry in this dead dry thing…
And then the light began to change and Hope saw moonlight. She had fallen and crashed through the Sleeping God’s skin, entered its body searching for its self, and now the chance that she would escape was here in this splash of yellow moonlight.
Death moon, lighting the way for me, giving me sight to see the spiders come and take me. They’ll all bite at once and my heart will explode and my body will rupture and spread me across the stony flesh of this God, my fresh blood, my corrupted mind…
“Hope!” The fledge miner was up there, his head a shadow against the death moon.
Hope stopped beneath the hole and looked at the wave of spiders closing in.
“It’s madness!” she shouted. “Madness, that’s all that’s left for us now!”
She thrust the disc-sword up into the dusk and felt it hit something hard.
The spiders struck her, lifted her body, and light left her world.
TREY COULD NOT sit back and do nothing.
He lay flat on the ground and pulled himself forward so that he could see over the edge of the crevasse. The hole in the strange surface was alive with sound. Hope’s screams, the slapping of feet, the scraping of something metallic on stone…and something else. A hiss. A whisper.
Trey grew cold at the sound, as though he were hearing the breath of a Nax. It can’t be, he thought. I smell no fledge. This is no fledge mine. It can’tbe.
Hope came into view and looked up, and for a moment he thought she was yellowed with fledge. The death moon splashed on her upturned face and filled her eyes, and he drew back because that was a Nax she was running from, it had to be; he could hear it approaching even now. The terror in Hope’s drug-yellowed eyes told him that there was no hope at all.
Alishia shouted incoherently, her voice startling him out of his stupor.
“Hope!” he said.
She stared right up at him, the tattoos on her face tight and straight, pulling down the corners of her mouth, painting an image of madness that he could not look at for more than a heartbeat. Whatever she’s seen has destroyed her. She shouted, and then the disc-sword was thrust up from the hole. He jerked his head aside and caught its metal shaft, careful to avoid the still-spinning blade. It was smeared with dust.
He pulled. Hope helped, hauling at the edges of the ragged opening and then jumping, reaching for the lip of the crevasse and dragging herself out, rolling, tearing the disc-sword from Trey’s grasp and stepping toward Alishia. The witch stood astride the sleeping girl, glancing down, up at Trey, back down again.
Trey looked down into the crevasse. A gush of dust had risen from the hole, hanging in the air and starting to drift back down as though given weight by the death moon. Only dust. She seems so terrified…
He stood and faced Hope. “What did you see down there?”
“You’re slow,” Hope said. “You’re weak. You’re of the underground, and the underground is all dead, all gone, all history turned to fucking stone!”
“What are you on about? What’s down there?”