Tavi shook his head and touched the blanket with his fingertips. Though it was still cool, it didn’t feel as cold as it had a few minutes ago. The air down here in the chasm was just too warm. He had to hurry, he knew, because with each passing moment his method of concealment became less effective.
Tavi struggled to calm the pounding of his heart. What if these bugs were smarter than he thought? What if they had only allowed him to come this far because they wanted him there anyway? What if they just wanted to get him to a place where he could not escape and would then leap on him and devour him?
And what, he thought, could possibly be there inside that tree? What would be there that the Keepers would be carrying something to? If they were like ants, existing in a colony, where some carried food, and some fought, and so on, would they have a queen, like ants did? If so, would she be inside the tree, at the heart of their domain?
A dozen more questions flicked through Tavi’s mind, before he realized that he was doing nothing but wasting his time. He didn’t have any answers to any of the questions, and he wouldn’t get the answers standing in place—all he would get would be warmer. More vulnerable.
He kept counting in his head and reached five hundred.
Tavi all but held his breath, poised to flee if the plan went wrong, though he knew that his chances of escaping from the heart of the chasm were slim indeed. Tavi waited. And waited. Nothing happened.
He felt his heart begin to race as panic crept over him. Had Kitai abandoned him and her own part of the plan? Had something gone wrong? Had she been found and killed before the time limit was up? Could she even count to five hundred? What had gone wrong?
Tavi remained still and kept counting, deciding to give her another hundred counts before he fled.
Then the stillness and silence of the Wax Forest dissolved into a symphony of whistling shrieks. If Tavi had not seen it happening, he would never have believed that so many of the Keepers could be so close to him without his knowledge of them. They erupted from everywhere, from every surface where the croach glowed, ripping their way up out of the waxy forest floor, dropping from the glowing branches of the twisted trees, boiling out of the interior of the great tree trunk itself. Hundreds of them appeared, and the air itself shook with their whistles and clicks and the squeak of shell rubbing on shell.
Tavi froze, panicked. It was everything he could do to keep from bolting at the sheer speed with which they had appeared. One of the Keepers swept past him, almost close enough to brush against his soaked cloak.
They all swarmed off in the same direction — that opposite of the one that lead back to the ropes to the world above. Kitai had done her job, Tavi decided. She must have been keeping a slower count than Tavi had. She had used half of their remaining oil and the firestones to light a blaze that would draw the Keepers. If she was all right and had kept to the plan, she would even now be huddled beneath her blanket, moving for the ropes out.
The last of the Keepers in sight fled, vanishing into the glowing trees. All that remained was for Tavi to accomplish his part of the plan.
A lump crept up into his throat, and his knees felt like someone had simply slipped the muscles and tendons out of them. He thought that they might abruptly buckle and pitch him to the surface of the croach at any time, he was so afraid. He struggled to keep his breathing slow and quiet, to make sure that his trembling didn’t result in any twitches that the Keepers would see as sudden, jerky movement, and stepped forward, into the trunk of the tree.
Inside, the croach wasn’t in a smooth layer on the floor and walls — it was spilled and dumped and heaped and piled like wheat in a granary. Great swirling loops of it twirled up the walls or wound intricately through one another like the guts of some great and glowing beast. Tavi stared at them for a moment, in confusion and incomprehension. It was beautiful, in a bizarre, alien way — strange and unsettling and fascinating.
He jerked his eyes from one of the more intricate structures and moved closer to a wall, where it would be less likely for a newly entered Keeper to simply bump into him, looking around, struggling to orient himself according to Kitai’s description.
He paced deeper into the eerie stillness inside the tree, around a mound of whirled croach that looked like an anthill and forward through a small field of lumpy croach, which could have contained another thousand Keepers, silent beneath the surface.
He found the mushrooms in a ring at the center of the field, just as Kitai had said. They grew at the base of a glowing mound twice the height of a man, as big around as a small house. The mound pulsed with greenish light, and Tavi thought he could see the shadow of something dark, something slender within.
He drew closer, a sensation of raw dread flowing over him like an icy bath, even worse than the soaked blanket he wore as a cloak. His knees grew weaker, and his breathing, despite his best efforts, became ragged.
Kitai was rather pretty, he thought. Though she was a savage, there was something about her face, her eyes, that he found intriguing. If she wasn’t dressed up in a ragged smock (which really was shamefully short now that he thought about it), she might look more like a girl, less wild. Of course, he had begun to see her without the smock. If he had told her to get more into the water, she might have taken it off altogether. The thought made his cheeks burn, but lingered in front of him, enticing in its exotic appeal.
Tavi shook his head abruptly. What was the matter with him? He had to be careful and get the Blessing of Night. The dark mushrooms had some kind of spiny thorns on their undersides, Kitai had said, which had pierced her hand once and left welts that lasted for months.
He glanced up and around him, but saw no Keepers. That could be an illusion, he knew, There could be a dozen within arm’s reach, But no matter how afraid he was, Tavi had to press on.
That was the history of his people, after all. The Alerans had never let fear or the odds of failure deter them from overcoming, prospering. Their oldest histories, his uncle had once told him, reached so far back into time that the hide and vellum and stone they had been scribed upon had worn away. They had come to Carna from another place, a small band of only a few thousand, and had found themselves pitched against an entire world. They had overcome the Icemen, the Children of the Sun and their stronghold in the Feverthorn Jungle, had repelled the Marat and the Canim over the centuries to claim the land of Alera as their own. They controlled the seas around their home, had walled out the Icemen in the north, overcome the Marat through sheer savage fighting. With their furies and their furycrafting, the Alerans dominated the world, and no other race or peoples could claim mastery over them.