Tavi shuddered and blinked his eyes several times. He must have stood there, his hand extended toward the first of the mushrooms for nearly a full minute, not moving. What was the matter with him?
The hairs on the back of his neck prickled up more sharply as he reached for the nearest mushrooms. He hurried, breath rasping, picking one, then another, careful to put them into the pouch at his belt.
And then he thought he saw something in the great mound in front of him move.
Tavi jerked his eyes up to it, flinching, and felt an immediate, hot pain in the fingers of his hand. The thorns on the next mushroom had pierced him. He jerked his hand back, and droplets of his blood flashed out and arced through the air, sprinkling the glowing mound in front of him.
Tavi stared at the mound, the droplets of his blood on it. The surface of the glowing croach abruptly pulsed, bulged, and then rippled beneath the droplets of his blood, moving like the skin of some hideous, enormous creature and making Tavi’s own flesh crawl in response. He watched as the droplets of blood vanished into the mound, sinking into the surface of the croach like snowflakes into a still-melted pond.
And the shadowy shape within the mound abruptly shuddered. And moved. A slow unwinding of limbs, languid, liquid, as though from a sleeper that had, after an endless passing of seasons, finally awakened. It moved, and Tavi felt its movement, felt a vast, bewildering awareness that swept over him like the gaze of some ancient and horrible beast.
Terror flooded over Tavi, raw and hot rather than cold, terror that set his limbs on fire and burned any thought from his mind, save one: escape.
Tavi spun on his heel and, heedless of the danger in revealing himself, broke into a panicked sprint.
He would remember little of his run, later. One or two chirruping whistles, perhaps, echoed through the trees after him, but they were sparse, and he left them behind him, his steps light on the surface of the croach, terror lending him more speed than he would have credited to himself before that night.
He flicked one glance over his shoulder as he ran and saw something through the glowing trees, at the base of the monolith, the opening he’d fled through. He saw something tall, glistening —alien. It stood just within the central tree, just behind the doorway. Tavi could not quite see it, but he could feel it in a way both horribly intimate and beyond simple description.
The lower-pitched whistle that went out through the trees felt, to Tavi, like some sort of hideous, mocking laughter.
Tavi fled and did not look back again.
He ran over the croach until his legs were burning and his limbs felt as though they would be ripped apart by the demands he placed on them. He almost didn’t see the strip of blanket that he had torn off and tied to a low tree branch before he left to mark his way back. He headed for it, and from that flag spotted the next, and the next, laying out his escape route back to the ropes at the base of the cliff.
“Aleran!” came a voice from before him. Kitai dropped from a tree branch ahead of him. “Do you have it?”
“Got two!” Tavi yelped. “Couldn’t get any more!”
Kitai extended her hand, and Tavi shoved one of the mushrooms into it. “Run! Go, go go!”
Kitai nodded once, then stooped to the ground. Tavi hesitated behind the girl, dancing in place as he looked back over his shoulder. “Hurry,” he panted. “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”
Kitai drew out the firestones smoothly, her expression cool, and struck them together. Sparks fell from the stones onto the oil-soaked blanket that lay on the croach before them. Kitai watched the flames leap up, then moved quickly, reaching up to grab the end of the fishing line that Tavi had soaked in the icy water before he left. She jerked the line toward her, hand over hand. The other end of the line looped up over one of the higher branches of the tree, up where living leaves grew above the grasp of the croach, and then fell back down to where it was tied at one corner of the oil-soaked blanket. Kitai hauled the line in, and the blazing blanket rose up into the tree’s branches and snagged among the living leaves.
Fire leapt up from the tree in a blaze, sudden and high, and once again, from the direction of the central spire, whistling shrieks rose up in a solid wall of terrifying sound—one underlaid, this time, by that deeper whistle, one that overrode the shrieks and continued over the silence.
Kitai stared at Tavi, her eyes suddenly wide. “What is that?”
“I don’t know,” Tavi said. “But, uh. I think, uh. I think I woke it up.”
They looked at one another once more and, in silent accord, turned together and fled toward the ropes a few yards away, toward the safety at the top of the cliffs. To either side of him, Tavi saw the Keepers flooding toward the fire through the trees, closing on them in a carpet of glowing eyes and knobby limbs and leathery shells.
Tavi had reached the ropes and Kitai was only a few paces behind when something dropped down from one of the croach-shrouded trees above them, something tall and slender and horribly fast. Whatever it was, it wasn’t a Keeper, because it reached out with one long limb and wrapped hard-looking, chitinous fingers around Kitai’s ankle, hauling her to the ground. The girl let out a scream of sudden terror and twisted in that grip.
Tavi only saw what happened in bits and pieces. He remembered turning to see something that he thought was like some kind of hideous wasp, semitransparent wings fluttering in the glowing light of the croach. It bent over Kitai, weirdly humped shoulders flexing as its head whipped down, as mandibles sank into her thigh. Kitai let out a horrible scream and struck down at the thing’s head with her fists, once, twice. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and her body started jerking and twisting in helpless spasm, limbs flailing. She kept trying to scream, but the sound came out broken, irregular.
The wasp-thing, covered in the glowing slime of the croach, lifted its head and let out a signal-whistle that echoed around the chasm like the tones of some vast bell. It shook blood from its mandibles, and Tavi caught a flash of multifaceted eyes, of some kind of yellowish fluid at the edges of Kitai’s wounds.
“Valleyboy!” shouted a distant voice. Tavi looked up to see Doroga, one hand on the rope, leaning far out over the cliff, and even from so far below, Tavi could see that his face was anguished. “Aleran! You cannot save her! Come up!”
Tavi looked back and forth between Doroga and the Marat girl on the ground, the horrible thing crouched over her twitching body. Terror rose through him, a horrible taste in his mouth, and he couldn’t see, couldn’t seem to focus his eyes. One hand tightened on the rope in helpless frustration.
Kitai had saved his life.
She had trusted his plan to get them both out of the chasm alive.
He was the only one who could help her.
Tavi let go of the rope.