Fevered Star (Between Earth and Sky, #2)(9)

She looked around the room for anything else she might use. There was the ever-diminishing light of the lantern, the blanket she had been wrapped in, and the now-empty water bowl. Very little to free her from this hell. But there was nothing to be done about it, and nothing else to do, so she gathered her meager items and crawled on her hands and knees into the darkness.

Her journey was awkward. She wore the blanket as a dress, tucked under one arm and knotted on the opposite shoulder. She slipped the bowl into a makeshift pouch at her shoulder, and she used one hand to hold the lantern. Her progress was slow but always forward. Once she passed a deep black hole of darkness on her left, the sudden lack of a wall enough to make her yelp in fear. She shone her lantern into the gaping mouth of earth. Light bounced off bare dirt walls, illuminating nothing but more dirt. She kept going.

She stopped once and fell into an exhausted sleep. She woke, forgetting where she was, her resin light extinguished. The dark was heavy around her, palpable.

“Help me!” she cried, to whom or what she had no idea. But to her surprise, something answered her.

Her chest burned, and a strange glow emanated from her palms. Her eyes brightened with their own light. At first, she did not believe it. It was, after all, impossible. But she was alive, and that was impossible, too. Bewildered but too grateful to question this blessing, she lifted a hand. The glow illuminated the path in front of her for a dozen paces. It was not much, but it was good enough.

She crawled.

Time stretched beneath the earth, long and endless, fifteen minutes indistinguishable from fifteen hours. Once she hit a dead end, and terror clutched at her throat, but a hand against the blockage proved the wall to be soft, and she used the old water bowl as a shovel and dug it out enough to squeeze through.

Her knees were rubbed raw, her palms scraped and began to bleed. The food she had eaten had long ago passed through her body, and her belly was taut with hunger yet again. She was exhausted, and hopelessness threatened to bury her, as sure as the earth around her. But she kept going, warmed by the unnatural heat in her chest and hands. She would not die here and prove right that voice in her dream. She would not.

She wasn’t sure how long she crawled through the darkness, holding back her fear, trying not to think of how stale the air felt or how far she might have to continue with only the thinnest filament of hope, when she heard it. Rushing water. The sound of a river through deep canyons. The Tovasheh.

A low, keening wail escaped her lips, a noise that she would not have recognized as her own voice had she not been the only living thing in this never-ending night. Relief threatened to break her open.

She had already determined that she must be deep in the Maw, in the catacombs that dotted the bottomless crevices far from the city proper. How she had gotten here, and why, was still a mystery, but it was enough now to know she could hear the river. All Maw children were taught that if they ever got lost, they were to listen for the river. She knew that if she followed the sound of the water, she would eventually find a way out. She was bleeding and filthy, and her bones begged for rest, but she forced herself on, toward the source of the water, and of life.



* * *



Another hour passed. Or a day, or a week. She could not tell in the darkness. All she knew was forward, toward the river.

Finally, she turned a corner, and fresh air greeted her, the rush of water thundering in her ears. And in her eyes, light. She scrambled forward. The opening fell off into space, so she dropped flat on her belly and nudged closer to look. She found herself peering out of a cave situated in the middle of a sheer cliffside. The drop was straight down but not impossibly high. Perhaps the length of half a dozen men. But the waters were swift, and she couldn’t tell if they were deep enough to cushion her or hid rocks that might shatter her skull. Of course, such concerns hadn’t stopped her from leaping into the Tovasheh before, but now she was not sure she would survive the fall, let alone be able to swim the currents of frigid waters below.

She laid her head down on crossed forearms and fought off despair. What choice did she have but to fling herself into the unknown and hope fate took pity on her, again? She laughed silently, her shoulders shaking. Skies, was this pity? If waking up in one’s tomb was fate’s mercy, she would hate to know its savagery.

No. This wasn’t fate. Fate hadn’t left her in that grave-in-waiting to see if she’d wake up or not. Zataya had. Or Denaochi himself. She supposed she should be grateful, but she was not. Rage boiled low in her gut. Rage at that witch, and at her brother for listening to her, and at herself for believing in either of them.

She rolled onto her back, the top of her head dangerously close to the cliff, and stared up at the sheer wall stretching above her… and smiled.

A knotted climbing rope, the end only an arm’s length away, hung down the side of the cliff.

“Fuck you, Ochi,” she whispered. Because she was right. It was not fate that did this but her brother, and he was a man of games and tests, and Naranpa understood now that this had been a test. This test was cruel and unnecessary, and she hated him for it, but at least she knew she could pass it.

She allowed herself a few moments’ rest before scooting her body over the edge, shoulders dangling over the canyon drop, to reach the rope. She hauled herself up, span by span, out of the hole. Once she was free of the tunnel and hanging parallel to the cliffside, her old climbing senses came to her, and hand-and footholes revealed themselves in what had looked sheer and unclimbable before. Using toes wedged in rock and knees for balance, she looped the knotted rope around her waist and began to climb. She was weak, and her progress was frustratingly slow, but she was rising.