'You can go no further,' Lucia said to them all. She appeared sharper now, her mind clear. 'It is up to me now.'
Nobody argued, not even Kaiku. She knew it would come to this. Lucia made no ceremony about it, merely looked over her shoulder at the seven ragged figures that remained of the twenty-four that had followed her into the forest. Her eyes lingered on Kaiku's for a moment, and she tried a smile; but it felt false, and it faltered, so she turned away and walked into the tunnel. They watched as the darkness consumed her, and then she was gone.
At first they were listless, unsure what to do or what to say. Then they began to settle themselves to wait: the three surviving soldiers together, Tsata and Heth with their burden, Kaiku and Asara both sitting alone.
After a time, Kaiku got to her feet and joined the Tkiurathi.
NINETEEN
There was no light in the tunnel, and Lucia was forced to feel her way along it. Her fingers trailed over the moist soil of the tunnel wall, bumping occasionally against protruding roots. It was silent. The babble of the spirits and the animals was quiet. Nothing existed except the Xhiang Xhi.
She wished she could stay here, in the peaceful dark, where there were no voices to plague her. To rest, to sleep in this precious hush just for a single night, would be a prize beyond anything she could ask for. To be this clear-headed forever, not to be burdened with the knowledge that outside this oasis of calm lay chaos, and that even if she survived this she would have to return to it. A place where her thoughts were fogged and a thousand whispers clamoured for her attention, and to even interact with humankind was a struggle to focus.
But it was only a wish. There was no sanctuary for her. She went on through the tunnel, until a short way onwards she saw a ragged oval of grey, with roots hanging across it like a curtain. She pushed through them and stepped into the domain of the great spirit.
It was a gloomy dell that she found on the other side, a hollow surrounded by thick forest which leaned overhead to make a roof of tangled branches. The ground was marshy; ridges of turf rose out of the water, dividing it into brackish pools full of weeds, and thin mists hung in the cold, still air or slunk close to the earth. An occasional tree grew in the dell, ancient and knotted, its leaves brown and dead.
She could sense the spirit here, a vast and brooding melancholy, its attention fixed upon her. The force of its presence was oppressive, the magnitude of its power beyond comprehension. She had spoken with many of the land's oldest spirits since that day when she had descended into Alskain Mar, deciphering the ways of their kind; but this was a thing apart, older than the rocks, older than the rivers, older than the forest it dwelt in.
She waited. Though she was afraid, she was armoured by fatalism. Her life had led to here, and she was as ready as she could possibly be. If it all came to nothing, then that was the way it would go. She could do no more.
Nothing stirred.
After a time, she took off her shoes and walked forward, picking her way from the edge of the dell along a bank of earth towards a tuffet that poked out of the marsh. Chill water welled up between her toes as the soft grass sank beneath her feet. When she reached the tuffet, she knelt there, and laid her hands upon the ground. She bowed her head and let her breathing slow, readying herself to enter the trance-like state necessary for communication with the spirits.
((There is no need, Lucia. I am not as the others are))
She tensed. The voice had been like the sigh of a dying man, a breath of air through a dusty temple. In all her life, a spirit had never spoken to her before. Contact had always been achieved without language, a primal, empathic exchange. It was a meeting on the most basic of levels, because it was the only way beings utterly alien to each other could reach some sort of understanding.
((I understand you)) said the Xhiang Xhi. Her thoughts were as transparent to it as if she had said them out loud. ((They are as children to me, and lack wisdom. They do not know how to think as you do))
She felt dizzied. Children? Heart's blood, this being saw the other spirits as children? What kind of fool had she been, thinking that she was ready for the Xhiang Xhi? She dared not consider what might happen if she had tried to meld with it as she had with the others.
Slowly, she opened her eyes and looked upon the spirit. It hung in the air before her, a slender wraith of mist, an elongated wisp of humanoid form like a shadow cast at sunset. It had hands, with spindly, attenuated fingers, and something that might have been a head, but it shifted and blended with the stir of the murk, so that Lucia could see only impressions of it. Perspective was skewed: it appeared near and far all at once, tiny and massive, and its aspect shifted with its movements and frustrated her efforts to decide. It was ever the way with the spirits: they could not manifest themselves in ways that human senses were entirely comfortable with.
((Stand)) it said to her. ((Do not abase yourself before me. I have no need of worship or respect))
She did so.
((You need not fear to speak, Lucia))
And indeed she did not fear it, not in the way she had some of the other spirits, the ones who were angry and capricious and who had met her with malice or resentment. What she did fear was its terrible sorrow, the heartbreaking sense of tragedy that seeped from it. She was afraid that it might let her know the source of that sorrow and pass its grief on to her, and that was something she would not be able to bear.
'How old are you?' she said eventually. She wanted to test its responses before she asked what she had come to ask, even though she was sure it already knew her purpose. But there was a way for things to be done, and she would bow to that.
((I existed before the first of you stood upright, before the land was formed, before the moons were born. I existed when this world was but dust, and before that. There is no measurement I can give you that would have meaning. I am not like the other spirits you know: they were formed of this land, but I was not. I came from elsewhere, and I will go elsewhere once again when this world is swallowed in fire and its moons turned to ash))
Its voice, like the stirring of dry leaves in her skull, arrived amid fleeting images, spectral glimpses of star-studded void with gargantuan spheres of breathtaking colour turning slowly, and bright, bright flame swelling to consume them. Then, as quickly as they flitted across her consciousness, they were gone, leaving her wide-eyed, her breathing quick, her pulse fluttering. The Xhiang Xhi swirled restlessly in the mist.
'Are you a god?' Lucia asked at last.
((I am not a god)) it replied. ((What now you call gods you may come to call by other names. Some you will lose to myth; others may be more real than you imagine. It is not my place to reveal them. There can be no understanding for you of the things you speak of, though that may come with the passing of ages. For now, you have only interpretation, and that will change as you change, sometimes taking you closer to truth, sometimes further away. Your race is young, Lucia; and like infants you cannot fully comprehend what you see))
Lucia accepted this with a slight nod of her head. Her mind had gone blank. Now that she was here, in the presence of the great spirit, she found that words were eluding her. For long seconds she stood mute, a slight figure in torn and muddied travelling clothes, her blonde hair in disarray.
((There are things you need to know, Lucia)) the spirit said at last. ((You seek to make war to save your homeland, but you do not yet realise the threat. I will show you))
'Show me,' Lucia murmured, and the dell and everything around her disappeared.