The Red Queen (118 page)

My head began to swim and I dropped to my knees and put my face close to the ground to suck in several breaths of clearer air, then I moved into the tunnel, keeping low. I froze at the sight of a flash of yellowing light that revealed the swift scuttling of a wave of small black beetles. Then the light flashed again and I saw that there was some sort of light mounted further along the cracked wall of the tunnel. But who would have dared put it there, if the monster was attracted by light? Unless this was merely something the father had told his boy. There was another pulse of yellowish light and now I thought I saw a cat. I shook my head hard, blinked several times and pinched my wrist viciously for good measure. Then I gathered my courage and crawled deeper into the tunnel, keeping my head low and picking my way around the rubble, grimacing when I came to an icy sludge of water.

I came to a mound of rubble and climbed over it. There were more of the beetles and they scuttled from view, dropping into a dozen gaps between the rocks. Mist billowed about me and my mind drifted to wondering if Ika’s father and the other miners really were shackled in the mine, forgotten. Then rocks beside me moved. My heart nearly leapt straight from my chest, but it was not the beast; it was someone lying in the rubble. Surely the beast must hear the pounding of my heart. I forced myself to grasp the body under its arms and half drag, half lift it as I backed out of the tunnel. It was awkward getting it over the rubble and I was afraid to move quickly in case I made a noise.

Only when I had dragged it from the mouth of the tunnel and turned it did I see that it was Dameon. There were dozens of small cuts on his face and neck but his eyes fluttered open. Although he could not see me, he murmured my name. I gave a sobbing laugh and kissed him, then I hauled him into a sitting position against the side of the tunnel and said softly, ‘You are safe now, dear one.’ Blessing Ana, I used the dagger to cut Dameon’s hands and feet free. ‘If you can walk . . .’

‘When the blood returns,’ he said. ‘Where . . .?’

‘Shh. The mine tunnel,’ I said. ‘Ariel laid you in the mouth of the monster’s lair.’

‘Why?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. It does not matter now. I need to get Swallow. Gahltha will be here soon. He will lead you out . . .’

‘I will manage. Go . . .’

I returned to the tunnel, carrying the sack, and made my way along it, again keeping low. The yellow light flashed just as I reached the place where I had found Dameon, and I spotted another human shape a little way ahead, directly under it. I was repelled to see that the black beetles were all over it, though they fled, dropping from sight the moment I came close. Then I saw that there was
another body
beyond it, turned on its side and facing away. Only then did I realise Ana had spoken of Swallow and the others. The body furthest away moved and I bent low to catch a breath of fresher air, for I could feel my head swimming. A sound made me freeze, but I realised it was one of the men. Fear that he would cry out made me hasten, but the rubble was higher here and as I moved over it, trying not to make a sound, I grimaced to see another wave of the black beetles flow away. I wondered how I was going to get the men out over the rubble. Even if I could manage, it would make a good deal of noise. The other alternative was to shift the rubble. But that would take time and some of the chunks were very big. Maybe the one that was moving could be wakened and help me with the other.

There was another flash of yellow light from the lamp on the wall above, but now I noticed another identical pulse of yellow light had flashed further in. It reminded me of something and I was still staring at it when I felt a savage slash of pain in my leg. It woke me from my stupor and I looked down to see Maruman glaring up at me with his one good eye. For one second I thought he was an illusion born of the strange fog, but he gave a soft yowl and pressed himself against me, using the contact to beastspeak me.

‘Hurry/make haste, ElspethInnle, lest the many-in-one gather courage enough to attack, for your light is dimming.’

His mind showed me the beetles I had seen and I was horrified to understand that they were the tiny vicious creatures that massed to strip the flesh from the bone of any miner who fell into the cracks. He had been defending the bodies from the creatures, but it was only the flashes of yellow light that had kept them from being devoured. I crawled to the first of the bodies. It was a strongly made man who was lying flat on his back and I recognised his clothes even before the yellow flash of light showed me Swallow’s face. Like Dameon’s it was covered in what I now knew to be bites. He was not moving, but when I touched him, I was relieved to feel the strong pulse of his life. I leaned over him to catch the other man’s shoulder so that I could pull him onto his back, but he stiffened and whipped his head around, eyes wide with fear.

It was Daffyd.

‘Elspeth! Help me. Filthy little creatures were . . . were crawling on me. Biting me . . . Eating me,’ there was real horror in his voice. ‘My hands are near freed,’ he gasped.

I groped for his hands and found he was right – the bindings were loose. I cut through them with the dagger clumsily, my head starting to swim as I helped him to sit. He took the dagger from me and cut through the bindings around his ankles.

Light flashed dully again, simultaneously overhead and along the tunnel, and this time I saw that the tunnel curved where the second light was mounted. Then the beast gave throat to its hideous strident howl and I cringed. The ground shuddered under me and I imagined some terrible monster lumbering towards me, reaching out its claws, opening its maw. But nothing disturbed the slowly billowing murk and as the wailing howl faded away, the light flashed yellow and I heard in the profound silence that followed the sound of water dripping into water again, and I realised it had been a small earth tremor.

‘Let’s get out of here before it comes,’ Daffyd whispered, on his haunches massaging his ankles.

I turned to him. He was facing the tunnel mouth and I could see the white glow of the lightstick in his eyes. ‘Can you carry Swallow out of this tunnel on your own? Dameon is just outside and Gahltha will come any minute – you can lay Swallow over his back.’

‘I can, but why . . .?’

‘I have to go deeper in.’

‘But the beast . . .’

‘There is no beast,’ I said.

‘Elspeth, the fog is . . .’

‘No,’ I said. ‘This place, that light. I dreamed of it. Many times. Sentinel is here.’

‘The Beforetime weaponmachine Dragon says you have to destroy?
Here?
’

I looked up to see Maruman sitting a little further along the tunnel, his yellow eye fixed on me expectantly, his tail lashing. I looked at Daffyd. ‘I am sure of it.’

‘But the miners that were taken, the awful howling of it!’ he said incredulously.

‘It was the beetle things that were biting you. They can’t stand the light, but out of it, they mass. Maruman calls them the many-in-one. He has been keeping them off you as best he can in between flashes of light. But that cry . . . it’s not the cry of a beast. I realise that, now that I have heard it clearly, not muffled by the ground. It is a sound given off by the devices protecting Sentinel. I have heard it in my dreams, but I didn’t recognise it until now. It is a warning.’

‘A warning . . . but . . .’

‘Go back,’ I said gently, and laid a hand on his arm, coercing him. ‘Take the others out. This is for me alone to do. Let no one follow me.’

I made my way along the ancient tunnel, following Maruman, who ran lightly ahead of me. I did not ask how he had come to be here. He was the Moonwatcher as I was the Seeker. This was where we had been destined to come together. My only concern was that I had not got whatever Cassy had left for me in Luthen’s crypt, but perhaps seeing the crypt was only part of the journey that had brought me to Sentinel. And I had the wing pendant made up of the two hacker’s keys hung round my neck and the memory seed in the pocket of my trews.

I moved along the tunnel as quietly as I could, minding where I stepped, for Maruman had warned me the beetles were opportunists and would mass and attack anything if it was dark and the creature seemed vulnerable. I must give them no opportunity.

I did not need the second lightstick Ana had sent because I could see well enough now with the yellow lights fixed at regular intervals along the tunnel wall. The damage was less marked the further along it I went, and the floor was not earth as I had thought, but the same stony grey matter as the walls. In effect I was in another
graag
. The lights here did not flash, but shone dully and steadily. There was still fog, billowing towards me, but every few steps, I knelt for a moment to draw in a few breaths of clean air in order to clear my head of whatever drug infused the mist, certain it was another protection brewed up by the makers of Sentinel.

I saw the end of the tunnel ahead and slowed, for all was darkness and billowing fog beyond it. I stopped and rummaged in the sack for the other lightstick and lifted it out, hesitating a moment for fear it might draw some lethal reaction from whatever defences had been laid about Sentinel, then touched its mechanism. The white light shot out into the misty void and I felt suddenly sick: the tunnel jutted out into nothing. The thought that I might have stepped out into it made my stomach churn.

I looked about for Maruman and realised he was gone. There was no sign of him when I shone the light beam back along the tunnel. Finally, I knelt in the tunnel mouth and leaned out, shining the beam to the left and then the right, and then down. I saw his eye first, gleaming yellow, and then I realised he was sitting on the top step of a flight of steps cleaving to the wall and running down into the murk. It looked as if whatever had damaged the tunnel – no doubt the same thing that had caused the plain to drop, had driven the tunnel out from its original position above the steps. To get onto them, I would have to reach back from the end of the pipe to the steps. My heart was in my mouth as I lay on my belly, wriggled backwards until my legs hung over the void, then lowered myself and groped with my feet until I found the step. Then I eased myself under the pipe, holding tight to it with one hand until I regained my balance. Gasping, I set my back to the wall, slid down it and sat for a moment, heart pounding.

Maruman had retreated a few steps, but now he came up and climbed onto my bare legs, his mind flowing into mine. ‘Come, ElspethInnle, the many-in-one are stirring,’ he sent simply.

With a shuddering breath I forced myself to stand and reactivated the lightstick I had pushed into my sack. I saw that the narrow step was only the remnant of what had evidently been a wider step, and I held onto the wall as I descended into the void, remembering suddenly how I had fallen into a chasm while descending from the white observing house in the mountains. I pushed away the memory lest it unnerve me so that I would be too frightened to go on. It was no comfort that my body had healed itself,
would
heal itself, because while I lay, the many-in-one would come, and Maruman would have to fight them off the whole time I lay unconscious.

It was a long way down, and what I hoped were the last few steps were invisible beneath a blanket of thick, heavy-looking fog. But the ground was further down than I had expected. I entered the fog, my head swimming, and then passed through it. Looking up I saw it hovering over my head, a low drifting roof of grey, but the air beneath it was clear, and I drew in several long breaths with relief.

‘Come,’ Maruman sent, padding away across the flat bare ground. Beyond him I could see nothing under the low ceiling of grimy fog, running away to darkness. Even when I shone the beam of the lightstick straight ahead, I saw nothing but more of the carnivorous beetles scuttling away and a few puddles of glistening ooze lying here and there.

Maruman returned to leap up into my arms and claw his way about my neck, emanating fastidious disgust. As I continued, the air grew less cold and then warm, but now I could smell a terrible foul odour, as if something had died and lain dead for a long time, rotting. Gagging a little, I pinched my nose with my free hand. Was it another protection? The Teknoguilders had once said the Beforetimers had found ways to use scents as weapons, even the scents of human bodies, which they were not conscious of emanating or taking in. But I had no sense that the stench was doing me harm. Even if it was, my body would repair itself of any physical damage.

Ahead, I saw another flash of yellow light through the mist and realised it was fixed to the wall of the cavern or chamber we had been traversing. Maruman had taken a course that had brought us parallel to it. Then ahead I saw the vast stony wall was split open. It was not a crack but a chasm from which fog spilled thickly, flowing out and out in a ghostly grey tide to float above the ground. It must have been made to rise up so that it would flow out into the tunnel leading to the cavern, I thought.

Then it came to me that I had seen the chasm before in a vision provoked by the painful torture I endured lying on the Zebkrahn machine. For a moment, I seemed to hear Alexi railing at me to tell him where his stepmother had hidden her map to the weapon that would give him the power he desired. I had seen the doors to Obernewtyn and had known they contained a map and directions to the weapon he hungered for, then the machine had burst into flame. The pain had been so terrible that it had taken me deeper, to the thing at the end of the maps and directions. To the chasm where Sentinel stood.

‘Marumanyelloweyes told you long ago of the chasm of the giador,’ Maruman sent disdainfully. ‘Come.’

Entina, I thought, Sentinel. How queer that the Redlanders had given their imaginary trapped beast a name that was part of Sentinel’s name.

As I approached the entrance to the chasm, I noticed there was a line of grey metal pipes protruding from the ground in a row, tilted towards me, and a narrow stream of mist issued from each of them with a faint humming hiss, to soften and swell into clouds that billowed and merged into the fog flowing endlessly outward. Then I was past them and I saw that a black road ran across the ground to the chasm, though it was cracked and buckled. A high barrier ran from one side of the chasm mouth to the other, with a wide gate made of the same meshed metal loops as the barrier, but there was no lever or handle to open it. I noticed there was no red rust on the metal rings nor on the poles, and realised that they were not metal but some other material. I reached out to touch them, and Maruman hissed.