A cricket scuttled through a grove of knee-high mushrooms, shaking clouds of white spores from the bells. The insect was as big as a mouse; its hind legs were in normal proportion instead of the outsize pair on which its smaller relatives jumped in the world outside the cave.
Ilna ran the coils of the noose through her fingers, squeezing moisture from the silk with firm pressure. She had to decide what to do with her soaked tunics as well. She supposed they’d dry more quickly on her body than if she hung them in the cave’s dank atmosphere, but she could speed the process by wringing them out first.
“Well, it doesn’t look to me like we’re any better off than we were before,” Alecto said in a challenging tone. Her words echoed, softened by repetition and the forest of fungus.
“We’re a great deal worse off than we were before you murdered the priest,” Ilna said. “We can’t change the past, though, so I’ll begin looking for a way out after I’ve taken time to rest.”
Her voice as she met the wild girl’s eyes was very calm, but she held the noose ready to throw. If Alecto chose to attack…Ilna didn’t know what she’d do with her companion after disarming her, but she supposed she’d think of something.
“Faugh!” said Alecto. She turned and stalked deeper into the cave. Ilna thought the wild girl was simply walking away, but instead she knelt to examine a clump of ball-headed mushrooms.
Ilna grimaced and resumed her survey of the cave. The fungus forest crawled with insects, all of them much larger than similar forms in the upper world. Ilna wondered if there’d be more salamanders like the God-thing Alecto slew, but there was no sign of such. Perhaps now that the giant was dead his lesser kin would move toward the pool, like rams struggling for the flock’s leadership after the bellwether dies.
Well, that would mean meat. The omnipresent fungus must be edible; insects at least were able to live and flourish on it. And Ilna supposed that she could eat giant crickets the way she’d eaten crabs caught off the shore of Barca’s Hamlet.
The crabs had been stewed, though, and Ilna didn’t see much way of building a fire in this place. The notion of raw cricket wasn’t appealing.
She snorted, almost a laugh. Very little in the situation was appealing.
“Yes it is, by the Sister!” Alecto cried enthusiastically. She stood and turned, holding her dagger out in what Ilna momentarily thought was a threatening gesture.
No: Alecto was using the flat of her blade as a spatula, demonstrating the dark spores she’d shaken from the gills of the mushrooms she’d been looking at. They meant nothing to Ilna. Old Allis fattened the living she scraped from the land in the north of the borough by selling cures to those who trusted her. She picked mushrooms, both spring and fall. Nobody else near Barca’s Hamlet did, though. Most people thought any fungus was apt to poison the fool who ate it.
“I’ve never seen them this big before,” Alecto said, “but these are Traveller’s Balls as sure as I’m a woman!”
“We can eat them, you mean?” Ilna said. She preferred to be on good terms with her companion instead of at the edge of violence, but she really couldn’t understand what Alecto was talking about.
And as for “never seen them this big…” Each of these nearly spherical caps was the size of a boar’s head. No mushroom got that big in the borough.
“Not travelling that way,” said Alecto, with a half sneer she was unwilling or unable to control in the cause of harmony. Obviously the wild girl felt power had shifted again in her direction. “Travelling like what brought me here. Through the dreamworld!”
“I don’t see how that’s an improvement,” Ilna said. “According to what you told me, our spirits have to come back to our bodies, and they’re still here…oh.”
“Right!” said Alecto in triumph. “I’ll find another—”
Her face changed as she realized what she was saying and who she was saying it to. “That is, I’ll take you along and we’ll both get back to, well, out of—”
“We’ll go to wherever the next innocent victim happens to be,” Ilna said coldly. “Don’t bother. I have enough on my conscience without snatching some stranger into the place your luck and judgment puts them. I haven’t been impressed by your past successes.”
The wild girl’s hot fury met the ice in Ilna’s eyes—and backed away from it. “Do you think you’re better than me?” Alecto shouted. “Do you think I don’t know what you are?”
“I don’t think a spider is better than a weasel, no,” Ilna said, her hands on her noose. “But I think we’re different.”
“Do as you please!” Alecto said, turning away. “Stay here and die, then! But I’m going to get out.”
Ilna forced herself to relax. She needed rest more than she needed food; perhaps after she slept she’d be better able to follow the strands of this pattern.
And again, maybe she already knew where the pattern led. Maybe it wasn’t simply chance that made the web-draped, spider-filled Hell she’d seen in a dead man’s eyes quiver constantly at the fringes of her memory.
Alecto had caught a cricket and was opening its body with the point of her knife. Do insects have blood? They must, Ilna supposed; and if her companion was determined to use blood magic—let her.
Ilna lay down, resting her head on a clump of broad-capped mushrooms whose firm flesh cushioned her better than a rolled tunic would have done. She still hadn’t wrung out her clothing…. Well, that could wait; had to wait.
Alecto shook a mushroom cap over herself and the figure she’d scratched on the ground. She began to chant in an angry, hectoring tone very different from the quiet care Ilna was used to hearing in Tenoctris’ voice.
It wasn’t just that Ilna was exhausted by the effort of worming through narrow tunnels and water almost cold enough to freeze. The rock itself, the whole living mass of it above and around Ilna, was forcing itself onto her soul though for the moment it couldn’t crush her body.
Ilna found every moment’s existence in this place a battle. The rock wouldn’t defeat her so long as she lived, but the struggle was a greater strain than anything her muscles had gone through.
Spores from Alecto’s mushroom drifted to where she lay. They had a sharp tang, but the smell wasn’t really unpleasant.
Ilna felt herself sliding. Instead of a cave floor as level as those of most houses in Barca’s Hamlet, she was on a smooth, steep funnel. She wanted to crawl back, but her limbs didn’t move, and nothing she did would make a difference anyway. At the bottom of the funnel was a hole, and she knew what was on the other side of the hole as well.
Alecto chanted. Ilna would’ve smiled if she’d been able to move the muscles even of her face. She could see the pattern spreading from this point. The wild girl would follow her strand to its end, her end. No one could change that, no one could change any part of what was already woven.
Ilna slid faster. Her eyes were open. They saw the world of the cave as motionless and unchanged: rock and lichen and the insects which ate the fungus and one another.
On the domed ceiling over Ilna’s head, a spider the size of a man’s spread hand waited in her web for prey. She looked down at Ilna, as still and silent as the rock she gripped.
As the world about Ilna vanished into gray darkness, she felt herself falling upward.
Garric tumbled into sunlight on a landscape of rocks, flowering scrub, and stone boxes. The sea roared against a nearby coastline, and above him birds called.
His face was buried in coarse grass, each stem topped with a tiny white bloom. If he’d come through Metron’s passage a hand’s breadth farther forward, the spiky leaves of something like a yucca would’ve been gouging his cheeks. He was too exhausted to feel relief.
At that he was better off than Metron, who lay half under, half beside, Garric’s body. The wizard couldn’t have been more still if he’d been dead, though Garric found a pulse in his throat when he checked.