Danaus looked more tired than ever. ‘Confidentially, Madame Cardui, we have tried to pass the infection from one patient to another in a controlled experimental group. We did not succeed. Even mixing blood from a diseased patient with blood from a healthy one will not do it. Frankly, we have no idea at all how the disease spreads.’
‘But it is spreading?’ Madame Cardui said. She realised suddenly that with her various concerns, she had not been taking as careful note of the epidemic as she should have.
‘Oh yes,’ Danaus said grimly. ‘More than a thousand new cases reported every day now.’
Madame Cardui went chill. ‘More than a thousand?’
‘Worse than that,’ Danaus said. ‘Latest analysis suggests we may be into a geometrical progression. The number of reported cases have doubled every few weeks. The figures have to be rechecked, of course, but if the trend continues, it may be only a matter of weeks before the entire Realm is infected.’
‘Weeks?’ Madame Cardui exploded. ‘Why did you not tell me this sooner?’
Danaus gave a small, fatalistic shrug. ‘What could you do to prevent it? Really, what can any of us do?’
She stared at him and forced herself to relax. He was right, of course. Everyone was doing everything they could. To tell her of every development in the progress of the plague would simply add to her worries without making the slightest difference to anything. Suddenly she felt very, very tired. In less troubled times she would have headed for her quarters, locked the door and slept. As it was…
‘Thank you, Danaus,’ she said quietly, ‘I shall leave you to your work and try to get on with mine.’
But as she swept off down the corridor, exhaustion overcame her.
Seventy-Five
Blue waited until she was inside the cave before she swallowed the first catsite crystal. Catsite was toxic. One or two crystals wouldn’t kill you, but the effect was cumulative and once the build-up reached a critical point, death followed quickly, with no advance warning. But what option had she? If she was to search these caverns without alerting the serpent, she could hardly stomp about waving a flaming torch or levitate a glow globe. Not that she’d smuggled any glowglobes into this gods-forsaken country. Or levitation spells, for that matter.
Catsite had no magical charge, but its base structure was alchemical so that the crystal tingled in her throat and stomach. Deceptively, the sensation was rather pleasant. For a moment, nothing more happened; then the chemical seized her nervous system and her surroundings sprang suddenly into stark relief. The colour tones were peculiar – everything had a greenish tinge – but that apart, she could now see in the dark.
The cave entrance sloped downwards, narrowing almost at once to a passageway that quickly curved out of sight. Disturbingly, there was a scattering of bones on the floor, as if an animal had recently eaten something here… although exactly what she had no way of knowing. She listened, fervently wishing the alchemists had found a way of giving her better hearing. There was no sound that she could detect, so she moved forward cautiously down the slope.
The passage way continued to descend after it curved, but as she followed it, the right-hand wall fell away so that she was looking down into a broad underground gallery that acted as a terminus for further passageways. The slope on which she was standing clung to the open wall like a mountain road, but meandered eventually into the gallery itself. To her left was another opening, whether to a cave or a further passageway she had no way of telling; besides which, it was too high for her to reach without a difficult climb. She decided on the gallery and followed the slope cautiously downwards.
By the time she reached the bottom, it was obvious this was no simple cavern. There were passageways branching everywhere and while some of them might be dead ends, she had a strong suspicion she was entering a warren. If so, the prime danger was not some mythic serpent – which she was still not sure actually existed but the possibility of getting lost.
Blue slipped the backpack from her shoulders and opened it on the floor. She’d never learned to pack tidily, so she had to rummage, but she found what she was looking for eventually. She took out a smallish cylinder, pointed at one end like a stubby pencil, and pressed the base to activate it. The cylinder hummed briefly. Experimentally, Blue took three steps forward, then glanced behind her. Nothing. She blinked her eyes twice in quick succession. Now she could see a luminous filament that trailed through the air from the device in her hand to the exact point where she had switched it on. Another blink and the filament disappeared. Perfect. She dropped the activated cylinder into her pocket. Now wherever she went she left a trail. When she wanted to return, she had only to follow it. Best of all, the trail was visible to no one except her.
She returned to the backpack and rummaged again. While she was getting herself organised, she might as well sort out something else. She was still cross about the hammer – ridiculous to give her equipment she couldn’t use – but she frankly didn’t believe there was a creature on the planet that could only be killed by one weapon. Her hand closed on the handle of the Halek knife and she drew it lovingly from the backpack. Pyrgus would kill her if he ever found out she’d borrowed it. The blade had been his pride and joy for years. Blue held it up just inches from her face, so close she could feel the aura of the trapped energies tingling on her skin. There was nothing this could not kill, whatever the Purlisa said about the serpent.
Blue stuck the blade in her belt for easy access and slung the pack across her back again. Now, where to go? Looking around, she counted eighteen passageways leading from the gallery. After a moment’s indecision, it occurred to her that since she had not the slightest idea where any of them led, one was as good as any other. She walked at once into the nearest.
It proved narrower than she anticipated and rubble on the floor made it hard going, but the passage opened out eventually so that she could move more quickly. After a time she spotted a light up ahead: not simply her cat-site vision, but an actual glow. She slowed cautiously, fearful that she might not be the only explorer down here, but as she got closer, she discovered the glow was coming from some sort of fungus clinging to one wall. A little further on, the passageway simply ended in a blank wall.
Blue retraced her steps without the need of her luminous filament and selected another passageway in the gallery. Although this one descended quite sharply, it was wider, clearer and altogether easier going. But the passage forked several times so she was forced to make arbitrary decisions and would have been helplessly lost without her filament. All the same, she made good progress for several hundred yards before she realised something was following her.
Blue froze.
The sounds were faint, but definite, an intermittent shuffle punctuated by soft clicks. She had the impression of a large animal attempting to move silently, but not succeeding very well. Was this the Midgard Serpent? It didn’t sound like a serpent, which would surely have produced a slithering noise. The problem was, it didn’t sound much like anything else either.
She pushed down a small surge of panic and forced herself to think. She was deep underground in a strange country. The gods alone knew what might be living in these passages. Bear was one possibility. Lion was another – wingless haniels sometimes made their homes in mountains. Yet somehow she didn’t think it was either of these, or any natural beast. Her stretched imagination presented her with altogether different horrors: foundlings, crandibles or wisps, perhaps – she hesitated to think it, but thought it just the same – perhaps even an undead.
Suddenly she couldn’t get the idea out of her head. Undeads were rare. Since they couldn’t reproduce, they teetered as a breed on the edge of extinction. Yet somehow they always managed to rebuild their ranks from the bodies of their victims. Was something stalking her? Had she become prey for a vampire or a grint?