Was it a dance? Was it curiosity?
Her air was giving out. She clawed for the surface, but not soon enough. Not before lightning flashed again, and she saw what was happening.
Gnat and Mosquito were being eaten, flesh ripped from their bodies. Already their faces had lost shape and the bone of their skulls gleamed in patches where the flesh had been gnawed away. Their eyes were gone.
They hadn’t been dead when they’d leaped into the water.
She came clear into the air gasping and heaving, and a face emerged from the seas just as lightning again illuminated the heavens. It had lidless eyes and horrible writhing hair that was a mass of eels with tiny sharp teeth nipping at her face. The monster loomed so close that the shock of seeing it made her forget to paddle. She sank beneath the waves again. Yet drowning gave her no surfeit from a broken heart.
I led them into a trap.
She thrashed, trying to find the surface, but everything had gone topsy-turvy.
A second body undulated underneath her kicking legs. She burst out of the water and, flailing, found a muscular arm under her hand. A rough hand gripped hers. She tugged, trying to break free, but it yanked her along after it. Spray and waves broke over her. The storm howled and thunder made her ears ring. A squall of rain passed over them, pounding on her head.
Must fight.
That claw closed around her arm and the monster dove, dragging her under.
I have been trapped.
She struggled, but the wound had drained her. She had no reserves left, and they were too far under the water for her to fight back to the surface if she could even figure out which way to swim. Her lungs emptied; her vision faded and sparked into hazy blotches as bubbles rolled past her eyes.
A face loomed. A lidless mouth fastened over hers, and a thick, probing tongue forced her mouth open. Now it would feed on her, consume her from the inside out as she had woken the fire that had consumed from the inside out the logs and the poor, doomed soldiers who had died screaming. Razor sharp teeth pressed against her own in an ungainly kiss. Pinpricks jabbed in her hair as the eel-mouths sought flesh.
Air.
Ai, God. Air filled her lungs, breathed into her by the monster.
The creature unfastened its mouth and dragged her onward, down and down, breathed air into her lungs a second time, and when she thought they could go no farther, it swam into a tunnel opening deep in the rock, far underwater, felt not seen because by now she was blind. They were trapped in a drowned hole in the ground and when her head scraped against rock, the pain washed down her body like knives. She passed out.
Eyes swollen shut, she woke when the ground shivered beneath her. Her tongue was so thick it seemed to fill her entire mouth. Clammy fingers pried her lips open and a foul liquid trickled into her mouth. She spat, and struggled, but she hadn’t the strength to fight. As the potion soured in her stomach, she slid back into darkness.
Speak. To. Us. Bright. One. Speak. To. Us. We. Know. Where. You. Are.
“Dead, is it?”
She swam up from the depths. Her face hurt, and her ears rang from a hallucinatory dream of ancient voices afflicting her. Her body throbbed with pain. The earth beneath her trembled and subsided. She opened her eyes and saw a double image wavering in front of her, but at long last she realized that she saw two distinct creatures who were speaking Jinna for some odd reason.
She hadn’t spoken Jinna since the years she and Da had lived in Aquila among the fire worshipers. Those had been good years. Da had been happy there. That’s where he had got the astrolabe, a gift from his noble patron. There had been chopped dates and melon at that banquet. She recalled it well enough, the feasting and the singing, the poem that had taken five nights to tell about a bold queen and the wicked sorcerer who had opposed her; she had known that poem by heart once, it had amused the court poets to teach her because of her excellent memory, but a veil clouded her sight … the palace of memory lay under a fog. She couldn’t recall the opening line.
In the beginning. No.
This is a tale of battle and of a woman.
No.
Wisdom is better than love.
No!
In the Name of the God who is Fire offer my tale …
“Bright One!”
Gnat and Mosquito, her mind told her hazily. Certainly they pestered her mercilessly enough. One pinched her so hard on the arm that she croaked a protest.
“Not dead,” observed the first.
“Bright One, wake up! You must drink.”
She drank. The water cooled her tongue, and she could talk almost like a person. “It was a trap.”
“A trap, indeed, Bright One. They were waiting when we came through,” said Gnat.