Witchlanders (27 page)

“I'll be back soon.” The woman's voice was gravelly but pleasant, like the singing of a rusty door.

After the cramped tunnels, Falpian felt dwarfed by the blackness all around him. This must have been the place Kef had called the preparation chamber, whatever that meant. Falpian couldn't guess its dimensions, but something
about the way his voice carried gave him the feeling of space and high ceilings.

“Hello?” he called. There was a slight echo in the room, but other than that he got no answer. He ran his hands over the cool stone of the table and touched what he thought was a large crate or box sitting on top. He moved his hands up the wooden sides. There was no lid, but inside the box was some sort of sand. He pinched a bit of it and touched his fingers to his tongue. Salt.

From far across the room, a light appeared. Then another. The two lights bobbed toward him. “That's better,” said the voice. “I do hate the dark.”

As the lights came closer, Falpian began to distinguish rows of rough wooden shelves around him, each one filled with bottles and jars. Dried plants hung upside down from nails driven into the cave walls. He could see where he was now, could see that the stone table was very large, and that the box he had touched was one of three, about as long as men. There was something in the nearest box that he hadn't noticed before.

“Kar's thousand eyes!” he yelled, jumping back.

A woman holding two glims hurried forward. Falpian pointed in horror at a mound sticking up out of the salt. Fingers.

“One of the witches who died in the attack,” she said calmly. “This is where I will prepare their bodies.”

Falpian gagged and wiped his tongue on the sleeve of his coat—he'd actually tasted the salt around those corpses! The witch tilted her head, bemused. It was the woman in black he had seen praying in the chamber of Aata and Aayse. She was older than her flexible body had led him to believe. Now Falpian saw the deep lines around her mouth and eyes, saw that her short-cropped hair had paled to white. Her eyes were sharp, though, he noticed, bright and curious.

“I'm sorry,” he murmured. “I meant no . . . disrespect.” She looked him up and down. “Please, don't be alarmed. My name is Falpian.” He remembered that you were supposed to bow to witches, so he quickly bent over, stooping so low that he could see the tile work on the dusty floor. “I know you probably haven't seen a Baen in a long time. . . .”

“I thought you would be older.”

Her words didn't register. “I'm not here to harm you.”

“You've come too early.”

He stood up. “Honestly, I—what?”

The witch stared at him with her bright bird's eyes. “Come along.” She turned and began to walk quickly toward the other end of the chamber. “There is an exit,” she said over her shoulder. “But I'm afraid it is a long way down, and you will have to climb back up the mountain on the Witchlander side. It will be dangerous, but it's the only way. We must get you back across the border.”

“Wait!” Falpian stood where he was. “I—”

“Young man!” The witch raised her two glims. “You must go home. Now. Don't you know what we did to people like you during the war?”

Falpian's mouth went dry. He knew. He hurried toward her, not wanting to be left in the dark. “But I have a friend. He's here in the caves. I need to speak with him.”

“You have no friends in the covens,” she said sharply. “No friends but me. You must go forward.” She was right, of course. It was foolish to want to see Ryder again—what made him even think of it? He'd only be caught by the witches, and he had a mission to complete.

“Why would you call yourself my friend?”

The woman stared at him in the light of the glims. Her eyes were still bright, but something in the depths of them made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He'd thought her eyes were birdlike; now he remembered what strange little creatures birds really were. Then she laughed a jovial laugh that made Falpian wonder why, a moment before, he had been afraid of her.

“Follow me,” she said, and she turned without answering the question. “I can't go with you. But I will show you the way!”

Ryder let out a deep breath when he got to the chamber. He'd made it through the main cavern without being
noticed, though all the while he'd felt as if the Goddess were shining a light on him from above, angry at his wearing reds. Aata's Right Hand had said they would call too much attention to themselves if they all went together, so Ryder was alone, waiting in the dim quiet for the two girls to join him.

From the walls, blue-stone eyes stared at him placidly. Ryder took a large lamp from the wall and held it up to better see the portraits of two women. One of the faces was especially fine; the light glittered on blond hair made of hundreds of gold and yellow tiles. But the second portrait was damaged, with only a few of its original stones remaining.

“The twin prophets,” he murmured. He drew a finger across the yellow hair in the damaged portrait, then examined the yellow stain on his finger.

His sister came out of the tunnel and slipped in beside him. “What is it?” She must have seen these portraits before, but to Ryder they were new and strange.

“I've seen something like this somewhere else,” he said, thinking of the day the monsters came when he saw the two faces at the waterfall: one Witchlander, one Baen. Ryder bent down and picked something off the floor—a shard of jet-black stone with a curved edge—and a wild idea flashed through his mind. He tried to fit it into the empty eye socket of the damaged portrait, but it was hard to tell exactly where it belonged.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing.” He had no time to think about Aata and Aayse, and the history of ancient witches wasn't any of his business anyway. Aata's Right Hand entered the tunnel, and Ryder let the shard drop from his fingers.

“What exactly are we doing here?” he asked her sharply. “I should speak to Sodan. Does he have people searching for Falpian? Does he know it might be a witch who made the creatures?”

“Sodan is a good leader,” the white witch said, “but old age makes him too careful. He won't allow us to do what must be done.” She spoke in a harsh whisper, and Ryder realized she must have lost her voice from all the talking she had done—arguing for his life, and Falpian's. She reached into a pouch at her waist and held something out to him. “Please, take this.”

He frowned when he saw what it was. “My mother's bone? Aata's sake, what good is that? I can't throw.”

“Yes, but someone can. I told you that another witch made my prophecies, one who wasn't allowed to throw the bones. You can ask her to make another casting and tell us who made the creatures.”

Ryder held out little hope that this would work. “Well, where is she then? Is she meeting us here?”

Skyla and Aata's Right Hand shared a glance.

“There is only one witch who would be forbidden to
throw,” Skyla said. “The Left Hand of Aata. The black witch. We have to go down into the catacombs and find her.”

He thought about this for a moment. “No. Absolutely not. What we should be doing is looking for Falpian—he and I are the only weapon against the creatures. Besides, I'm not leaving Pima up here when for all we know there could be another attack.”

“You can't help Pima if Sodan just has you tied up again!”

He shook his head. “Think, Skyla. Whoever Aata's Left Hand is, she's no better at boneshaking than Aata's Right. Neither one predicted the attacks, did they? And if this black witch is the one who said that Mabis made the creatures, then I have nothing to say to her.”

“But she didn't!” Aata's Right Hand interrupted, her voice cracking. “That was my fault.” She sighed and put her hand to her throat. Ryder glared coldly and waited for her to go on, but she hesitated, seeming not to want to, and Ryder saw that it was more than the pain of speaking that made her falter.

She lowered her eyes. “When the monsters made the first attack on the village, I knew I'd made a terrible mistake,” she said. “I had your mother's bone by then and I tried to make a casting—but I couldn't see anything. I could never see anything! I came here to this chamber, where
I'd met the black witch before—but she said the bone was mine now and that she couldn't throw again. I went to the elders with the intention of confessing everything—all my lies. But then . . . they asked me to cast for them, and I decided I would try it one more time.”

She looked up at him now, and her eyelashes glistened with caught tears. “I was right here in this chamber. I threw the bones, and I looked at the pattern on the floor as I've done a thousand times. . . . They say that if a witch can hold the pattern of bones in her mind and truly understand them, then the bones will disappear before her eyes and a vision will come. A vision of the future. I looked. And then, suddenly . . .”

Her gaze slipped away from Ryder's face, and he could see that she was looking somewhere behind him, looking to the slanted floor of the cave, as if the bone casting was right there in front of her. Ryder felt a chill go through him, reminded of Mabis and how she'd stare at nothing.

“I saw a place. A waterfall. A green lake thick with maiden's woe. I thought it was somewhere near, but I didn't recognize it.” She squeezed her eyes shut as if to squeeze out the memory. “It wasn't a vision, I know that now. I must have made it up—but I swear I didn't realize it at the time. I wanted to see one so badly. And it seemed so real.”

Ryder glanced at the portrait of Aata and Aayse. He knew the place. He'd heard someone singing there the
day the monsters came. Perhaps the vision was a true one. “You . . . you saw my mother there?”

Aata's Right Hand shook her head. “I wrote out . . . the things I saw for the elders, and they discussed it for a long time. Then they told me that the maiden's woe was a reference to your mother, and that there was a lake like this very near your cottage.”

“That's it? That's all the evidence you needed to decide she was guilty?”

“I trusted them!” she said. “I wanted to believe that what I saw was real. And it seemed to make sense!”

Ryder let out a hiss. “Come on, Skyla. I'd rather try my luck with the elders. I don't see why we should believe anything she has to say.”

“Wait!” The white witch ran to block his exit, holding out her hands. “Don't you understand?” she pleaded. “I believed you. I defended you. You said a witch must have made the creatures, and I agree. I'm sorry about your friend, but he must be dead by now. This is our only hope.”

“He's not dead,” Ryder insisted. “I'd—I think I'd feel it if he were.”

“He's in the tunnels,” said Skyla firmly.

Ryder turned. His sister was bent over something at the other end of the narrow chamber. From the stone floor she picked up a small, shiny object. Ryder stepped toward her. It was a button. A silver button from Falpian's fine coat.

“They must have come this way,” Skyla said.

“That settles it, then,” said the white witch. She grabbed Ryder's hand and pressed the black bone into his palm. “If your friend is in the tunnels, perhaps the Left Hand of Aata has seen him. Ask her. And ask her to make a casting one more time. She will be in the preparation chambers. I have never been there, but it shouldn't be far. If anyone can get her to throw the bones again, it's the two of you.”

“Us?” said Ryder. “Why us?” He looked to Skyla.

“Because she's our mother's sister,” Skyla said. “She's our aunt—the great boneshaker, Lilla Red Bird.”

CHAPTER 21
A CASTING OF BONES

“Hurry up!” he said, though Skyla was already close at his heels. They were descending a narrow passageway leading down, down into the mountain. Ryder held a clay lamp on a chain that he'd taken off a wall in the chamber of Aata and Aayse. It was a large, unwieldy thing, and every time its hot fat spilled over the lip and onto the stone floor, he cursed.

“This witch is dead; no, she's not dead. That witch can throw the bones; no, she can't throw the bones—there are too many lies and secrets in this place.”

“I agree,” muttered Skyla.

He stopped short and turned around. The lamp swung on its chain, making eerie shadows on the tunnel walls. “You don't have to come, you know. These catacombs are forbidden. Aren't you breaking your own witch rules to be down here?”

“Ryder, shush!” She pointed. “There's something ahead.” More softly she added, “Do you think I'd let you come down here alone?”

Ryder turned again in the narrow tunnel. Farther on, the path diverged, and from the left-hand passage a faint yellow glow was coming toward them.

“Who's there?” a voice called. Ryder felt Skyla squeeze his arm as a figure in black emerged from the passage.