It looked awful, but it was meat and it was hot, so she ate with vigour. Chewy but almost tasteless, it was not what she had been living on since . . . since whenever.
‘Someone tell me what’s going on,’ Che said at last. ‘What’s happened since we . . . Since whatever. I don’t care who, but someone tell me.’
‘Now there’s the Che we were looking for,’ Thalric remarked drily. ‘Always with the useless questions.’ His sardonic smile was leavened by something uncharacteristic, though: worry. Worry for her.
‘We’ve been on our own down here for a long time,’ Maure declared, her voice strung taut with fatigue and nerves. ‘We’ve been avoiding other people for most of the time. We . . . this place is huge, a whole world locked away. There are strange kinden here . . . we didn’t know, none of us, what they would do with us. So we’ve been living like vagrants for . . . time. A long time. We wanted just to strike out. I thought I could . . . find a way out.’ Her voice shook. ‘I can’t . . . I have nothing left of my skills. Thalric says they were never real, and I . . . sometimes I think he must be right. This place has killed them, eaten them. And out there, in the true dark, there are things . . . and so little food, so little of anything. And you . . . at first we thought you would come back to us and tell us a way out, but you just . . . there was nothing . . .’
‘I . . .’ Che’s mind thronged with excuses, mystical nonsense about seeking answers, fighting some higher battle. She knew, wretchedly, that they would probably believe her: even Maure, who should know better. The words were in her mouth but she swallowed them down. ‘I’m sorry. I couldn’t . . . It was too much, and I couldn’t face it. I’m sorry.’ She took a deep breath. ‘But you . . . you’ve kept us together, all of us. You’ve found . . . something?’
‘People,’ said Esmail quietly. ‘We found the people who live here.’
‘We lived in the wilderness at the start,’ Maure explained. ‘But it’s hard out there. There’s just rock, darkness, mushrooms and lichen. When we couldn’t last any longer, when we were starving, we had to go to where the fires were. We’ve been chained to where the people are, since then, where the food is. But never meeting with them, hiding ourselves. Stealing. We’ve been living by stealing. Esmail, he crept in and took from them, their food, their water . . . It was the only way.’
‘But the Worm . . .’ Che whispered. This name – and it was not even that ancient enemy’s true name, just the Moths’ insult for them – had been unspeakable and erased from history, but here . . . what was there to lose in saying it? ‘You can’t just walk up to the Worm and steal from its table, surely?’
‘Slaves,’ from Esmail. ‘Those we saw, those we took such care to avoid, for fear of their terrible power . . . They’re only slaves of the Worm. We have seen the Worm since.’
Che took a deep breath, feeling that her hold on the here and now, rather than the dismal wastes within her, was suddenly failing. Too much, too soon, and yet she had to know. She had to understand. ‘What’s changed? The fire . . . the food . . .’
‘Someone found us,’ Maure told her.
‘He’d been spying on us for days,’ Thalric interjected, in what sounded like a jab at Esmail’s ability to remain unseen. ‘Messel is his name. He’s a . . . a renegade, of sorts, but there’s a place near here where he has kin. He won’t talk about it, but he’s not exactly an exile and he’s said he returns there sometimes. A slave village.’
Another deep breath. ‘You have a plan?’
‘We need to know where in the pits we are,’ Thalric explained. ‘Next, how to get out. This man, this Messel, he had a sort of a laugh when I first said that, but when he realized that we’d got in somehow, he shut up real fast. After that, when we asked him again about talking to more of his folk, he was a lot keener.’
‘Does your plan go any further than that?’ Che asked.
‘Why, yes, the plan is: find out how, get out, never mention this place again. Needs fleshing out a little, though. We need intelligence first,’ said Thalric, the former agent. ‘We’re in somewhere completely alien, but there are people here. That means common ground. That gives us something to work with.’
‘And the Worm?’ Che asked.
There was a long silence. Clearly nobody had any answers.
While the fire burned itself out, they rested. Thalric, Tynisa and Esmail slept, and Che guessed that they had been doing most of the work while she had been refusing to face reality. Now she took hold of herself, still ashamed of the way that she had just given in. So I have no Aptitude? It’s not as if anyone down here’s going to ask me to fix their gear train. So this place has no reserves of magic, somehow. Are the Worm Apt nowadays, then? Was there an underground revolution that drove it all out, or . . .? But it was as Thalric had said: they needed more information. If there were any people here who would not kill them on sight – or worse – then Che needed to speak to them.
Messel had led them to this cave, she was told, and it was deep and tortuous enough that the firelight would not show outside. While the others slept, Maure took Che to the mouth of it, a jagged slash of dark in a broken rockface, where some ancient upheaval had changed the contours of this buried place. The terrain fell away from them in a tumbled field of jagged stone and shale, and Che’s Art let her see out across it, the great desolation of it: as inhospitable a landscape as she had ever seen.
‘How can anything live here?’ she asked hollowly.
‘There’s plenty.’ Maure’s voice still sounded shaky. ‘There’s stuff . . . lichen-looking stuff over a lot of the rocks, and wherever there’s water there are fungi. And things eat the fungi and the lichen, and other things eat them, just as you’d expect. Crickets – there are a lot of crickets. That’s what we just ate. Messel brought one down for us.’
The idea of eating cricket meat seemed such a normal and domestic thing that Che almost laughed.
Her Art had limits, but she strained her eyes, seeing something out there that looked more complex, more artificial. There was a chasm, and she thought there was a river, but beyond it, set into the rising cliffs of the far bank . . .
‘Is that a town?’
‘Cold Well,’ said a low, resonant voice, and they both started from a shrouded figure crouching motionless nearby, which even Che’s eyes had missed.
For a second Che was reaching for magic that remained stubbornly absent, seeking a defence, a weapon, but then Maure announced, ‘Messel.’
He was draped in cloth, cloaked with it, then a long, hooded tunic and trousers beneath, all cut into a heavy and unfamiliar style, the fabric woven from thick grey-mottled fibres. Seeking his face under the cowl, she tried to meet his eyes and failed.
His skin was dead white, save where it was thinnest – where the faint shadows of veins and bones showed through. He was small, surely no taller than she, and thin to the point of starvation. His face was taut over a skull whose contours she could trace, and his long, delicate hands were lessons in anatomy. He had no eyes at all, not even sockets, just a wrinkled expanse of translucent skin from hairline down to his beak of a nose.
‘Cold Well,’ he said again. ‘I was born there.’ The voice buzzed within his chest, sounding as though it was meant for a far larger man than this fragile creature.
‘A slave?’
‘There are only slaves and the Worm.’ A thoughtful pause. ‘And now you.’
‘Messel,’ Che spoke his name. He was not coming closer, crouched against the stone with that sightless visage cocked upwards, drawing in his understanding of the world through sound and smell and who knew what hidden Art besides. When she took a step towards him, he scuttled back exactly the same distance, his feet sure on the uneven rocks, silent in motion, then remaining still to the point of invisibility, no matter how good her eyes were.