“Yes. And it’s not just that. There’s no wind inside at the convent, but you can always hear it. Here, there’s nothing.”
“Serenity now.” Nona let the lines of the children’s song run through her head. “It will work. That girl at the Academy tried to make me run with her shadows. Serenity kept them from me.
“She’s falling down, she’s falling down . . .” Nona muttered the words beneath her breath and her serenity rose around her like the sides of a deep well.
Beside her Ara, Ruli, and Jula each walked their own path into the serenity trance.
“Let’s go.” Ara began to climb.
Ten minutes later the tunnel that led to the holothour and its cave of horror yawned before them. Ara walked on without a word. Nona and Jula followed, Ruli at the rear.
“I can feel it.” Nona’s skin prickled as if a thousand eyes watched her from the dark.
It can feel you. Keot rose across the back of her neck like a scald and her anger rose with him, darker emotions too, palpable through the thick velvet wrapping of her serenity.
“Me too.” Ruli sounded calm, almost sleepy.
The light from Ara’s lantern reached out across stone walls smoothed by ancient waters. Thick, glistening deposits of limescale coated every surface, like treacle frozen in mid flow, somehow organic, as if they were advancing down the gullet of some vast beast.
Nona wore her serenity as if it were a protective bubble, extending yards past the reach of her arms, beyond even the limits of their illumination, with the fear pushing at its borders a distant thing. Ahead, shapes loomed among the shifting shadows, the rock-bound skeletons of the holothour’s victims.
The four girls pressed tight together, calm but seeking the comfort of one another’s warmth and a side from which attack would not come. The ancient night of the cave began to roll back before the lantern’s advance, leaving calcified skeletons behind like rocks revealed by retreating waves. Shadows swung.
“It’s coming.” A whisper.
Nona felt it, like a squall racing across the flatness of open fields, something big, something vast that would carry her off. The walls seemed to pull away, the touch of her friends fade to nothing. Every fear she owned hurtled towards her out of the night at terrifying speed.
Then it struck.
The bubble of her serenity collapsed in less than a heartbeat, from something wide and confident to the thinnest skin moulded to her body with the holothour’s unclean touch scratching dry-fingered across every inch. In a moment Nona hung high above herself, seeing her body in the small patch of illumination, a tight circle around her, and beyond that an endless void both wholly empty and full of implacable hate.
Run!
It wasn’t Keot’s command that set Nona turning to flee, it was the sound of running feet. The sound of being abandoned. She glimpsed Ruli’s white face, stretched into a scream, horror in every line. Jula shrieking, dropping her knife as she started to run. Ara crashing into the nearest wall as she ran blind. The terror breached Nona’s barriers and flooded through her. She tore off after Ruli, Keot demanding she run faster.
Ruli leapt Ara’s sprawled body. Nona followed. Ara’s collision with the wall had left her on the ground, blonde hair fanned around her head, one arm stretched out as if pointing the way.
Run! Keot fled into her eyes and suddenly the passage ahead revealed itself to her as if the stone itself were glowing with a reddish light.
Nona got five more steps, each slower than the last, before Jula overtook her, habit flapping.
Run! The voice that filled her brain rang with terror as the holothour’s fear infected even the devil. It’s an old one. Too powerful!
“She’s my friend.” The words brought Nona to a halt as effectively as a rope about her neck. She turned. Ara moved her head, groaning, the lantern lying on its side close to her hip. Keot retreated from her eyes, unwilling to see what followed them.
Take the lantern and run!
Nona took one step back towards Ara, then another, bowed as if braving a headwind. It wasn’t that her fear had gone, simply that a greater one drove her, the thought of Ara’s bones lying with the rest, slowly devoured by stone, a constant silent accusation that the foundation of her own existence lay as hollow as the Rock of Faith.
“No . . .” A whisper. Trembling in each limb, Nona stepped over Ara for a second time and faced the darkness. “No!” A shout.
She stood in an invisible wind. At the back of her head Keot hung, bleeding out into the air, trying to free himself from her skin and flee back to the Path. The intensity built: the cave’s empty night reverberated with it, skins of stone shattered from the walls, warm blood ran from Nona’s eyes and nose. She sank to her knees beneath the weight of it, every nerve screaming to run.
The rocks around her began to bleed. An awful rasping breath shuddered through the blackness. And out there a howling hate, condensing. A darker clot of night. The stench of decay surrounded her. Screams of pain worse than the abbess had made when they’d burned her. A novice emerged into the trembling illumination, thin limbs, rotting skin, dragging a withered leg, lifting up her face. Hessa!
RUN!
“No.” A whisper.
And suddenly the fear blew out. From one moment to the next it had gone. The darkness was again just darkness. Nona fell forward onto all fours and vomited everything she had in her.
* * *
? ? ?
JULA AND RULI came back, patting their way along the walls. They emerged pale-faced into the light to find Ara kneeling by Nona, holding Nona’s hair back as she wiped drool from her mouth.
“Where is it?” Ruli bent to pick up the hammer she’d dropped. It shook in her hand.
“Gone, I think.” Nona spat and rose to her knees.
What does she mean, where is it? Keot sounded weak, distant, he shivered over the very surface of her skin.
She means, where is it?
That was it. Holothour have nothing so primitive as flesh.
“I think it’s gone.” Nona helped Ara up, raising her fingers to the scrape on Ara’s forehead. “You’re all right?”
“You should see the other girl.” Ara managed a grin. It was an old joke.
“I see what you mean.” Jula tapped her frying pan to the wall where Ara had collided with it, and more layers of stone cracked away.
Ara scooped up the lantern. “Come on.”
She led them back.
“Where are all the bones?” Ara held the lantern high. The cavern floor lay clear of anything but rocks and stalagmites. Further back something large and circular loomed.
“Were the skeletons part of it? Like the fear?” Ruli whispered. “In our heads?”
“There’s one here.” Jula pointed at a limed skeleton sprawled between two rocks. “Just the one, like those two in the niche. The rest were illusion?”
Nona turned towards the object at the limits of the lantern light and advanced with Ara. It was a ring, four yards across, standing upright with the lowest part of it buried in the stone floor. The ring itself was the thickness of a roof beam and covered in flowstone, stalagmites and stalactites decorating the top of the arch.
“What is it?” Jula stopped and they all stopped with her.
“Something the Missing left,” Nona said.
“No?” Ruli looked at her, round-eyed.
“Anyone could have put it here,” Jula said. “The people who built the pillars.”
“Sister Rule said it takes two hundred years for a stalactite to grow an inch,” Nona said. “How long would you say those were?”
“Two feet? Three?” Ruli stepped closer.
“That’s the best part of ten thousand years since someone knocked them off last.” Nona advanced too, her voice a whisper. “We should push on.” She looked past the ring to the back of the cavern where two tunnels led off, one rising, one falling. “Which way, Jula?”
“Shouldn’t we . . .” Jula returned her gaze to the ring.
“It’s been there forever. I need to see where Hessa died.” She saw the others’ doubt. “It’s the key to finding Yisht and recovering the shipheart,” she added, with more confidence than she felt.