Pathka’s impatience to get going outstripped the speed of his healing, and they set off for Big Spooky four days later, on a warm, clear morning, before he was really ready to travel.
The two miles took half a day because they stopped whenever Pathka’s breathing grew too labored. Tess had brought all her gear, plus rations the nuns had kindly packed, hoping not to go back to the hospice, but Pathka crept so slowly that she began to regret not staying another week. It was midafternoon by the time they spotted the ruins on the ridge.
The denizens of Muddle-on-the-Fussy, who had a special talent for naming things, called the shattered keep Old Haunty. It looked like a collapsed soufflé, crumpled in on itself, sunken and shrunken down through the middle. The stone walls bowed and bulged dangerously. Vines snaked over the walls, and saplings grew in the crevices of the ruined battlements. The caverns beneath the castle had collapsed a century ago.
Had the castle’s people had any warning, or had they suddenly fallen down a hole and died? There might still be bones in the caverns, or treasure. Tess felt a vestigial piratical twinge.
Big Spooky’s most accessible entrance, the nuns had insisted, was south of the keep, a fifty-foot pit lined with vegetation. It was a hard climb down for Tess, even with rocks and vines to hold on to, which made her wonder about these nuns. They must be tough as goats.
Pathka, even injured, outclimbed Tess. He was already preparing a torch for her by the time she reached the bottom of the pit, aching, scratched up, and proud of herself.
“Finished these…the night of the storm,” said Pathka in the harsh, sore whisper his voice had become. He gingerly drew from his throat a pair of what looked like large cockroaches. They were thniks, roughly moon-shaped; Tess had mistaken untidy wires for legs. “Only hands and tongue. No tools,” Pathka rasped, amazed at himself.
Tess stowed her bug—she still found it insectoid—down the front of her jerkin. Pathka lit the torch, and together they descended into humid, chilly darkness.
These were caves on a different scale than they’d encountered before; they walked for hours. Pathka chose large passageways, looking for someplace deep and majestic enough to perform his calling. He’d know it when he saw it, he insisted. They found a vast lake, which horrified and fascinated Tess, and discovered rooms full of crystalline wonders: frozen waterfalls, gypsum snowballs, pale needles of stone. Nothing suited Pathka.
They reached a chamber like the nave of a cathedral, its ceiling and walls far beyond the torch’s reach. An enormous flat rock, like a dais, lay near the center; it had fallen from the unseen ceiling an age ago.
“Here,” Pathka said approvingly. “Help me, Teth.” He paused, hand to his throat, until the pain passed.
“Of course,” said Tess warmly, wedging the torch between two rocks so she could have her hands free. “What do you need?”
“Pierce my artery,” said Pathka, pointing out a tender spot under his arm. “Collect blood. Sprinkle around while I sleep.”
Caves, it turns out, are incredibly quiet when you’re too stunned to speak.
“Use your knife,” said Pathka gently, as to a frightened child. “Your skillet. I can do the…stabbing, if it’s too hard.” His throat pouch quivered as he spoke.
The stabbing was one place Tess had snagged, certainly, but not the only place. It was too grotesque to fill the skillet with blood, as if she meant to boil it down for quigutl black pudding. What else did she have to catch blood in? Her water skin was in use. The nuns had sent a jar of sauerkraut. She couldn’t possibly eat it quickly enough.
She glanced around in frustration and noticed two odd whitish stones a ways off. They were identical, curved like shallow bowls, roughly the shape of a fingernail and the size of two cupped hands. She’d never heard of such formations in any geology lecture.
They’d hold a good dribble of blood, though.
“Teth!” cried Pathka. “Now. Quick.”
He was already bleeding. Tess grabbed the bowl-stones, one in each hand, and moved them to catch the silver blood. “What are those?” Pathka cried, his arm gushing.
Tess examined the bowl-stones anew. They didn’t feel like stone, in fact. They were too light in her hands, milky and translucent and…flexible? A little? “They feel like fingernails, honestly,” she said, feeling foolish about this observation.
Pathka, with some difficulty, reached his non-bleeding arm across his body and touched the rim of one of the bowls. “Ohhh,” he sighed. “Teth, you’re right…that was…living matter.”
“A shell?” she asked, because the only other living matter she could think of that was this shape was too strange. It couldn’t be. The bowls were too small.
“Anathuthia,” gasped Pathka as if the name took everything he had.
“A shed scale?” There was no way this had come from a great serpent. “It’s too small.”
“She’s been young…many times. Renews herself…parthenogenesis. Must’ve passed this way…long ago.”
Tess didn’t know the word parthenogenesis—in Quootla or Goreddi—but she knew when her friend was suffering. “Is this enough?” she said, swirling blood in both bowls.
“Probably. It’s all a guess,” said Pathka. He seared the wound with his flaming tongue and then flopped back against the flat stone, exhausted. “Wait until I’m asleep.”
“Do I pour it on or around you?” asked Tess, trying not to sound appalled.
“Try both,” he said faintly. “Listen to your instinct. Do what seems right. Intention is more important…than details. Probably.”
Tess sat carefully, a bowl—scale?—full of blood in each hand, and waited, listening for his snores. They came like a trickle, then a roar.
Before she’d made up her mind to start pouring Pathka’s blood, it began to glow. The bowls in her hands glowed pale blue. All around the cavern other blue orbs shone, like a hundred moons reflected in a lake, breathtakingly beautiful. The chamber was full of these…scales?
Pathka had surely guessed right. What besides World Serpent scales would glow in sympathy with a quigutl’s dreaming? Tess, remembering her task, rose awkwardly and circled Pathka’s stone, dribbling blood around him. Every spatter made a constellation.
She flicked the last drops across his body, and Pathka, too, began to glow.
Tess sank to her knees just as the torch sputtered out. The pale blue light of a hundred shining scales suffused everything and was enough. It ebbed and flowed over Pathka like the Southern Lights, flaring upon his throat pouch, his dorsal arm, his skull.
Before her eyes, the hole in his throat closed up.
Tess watched, mesmerized. Then the light began to fade, so slowly that Tess couldn’t tell if the glow still lingered or if it was an afterimage on her eyelids.
Finally the darkness was total. Pathka stopped snoring, and the silence was total as well.
For a moment Tess imagined she didn’t exist. It was surprisingly soothing.
“Teth Teth Teth!” Pathka cried, just beside her. “We did it! I dreamed with her! She’s expecting us now. I can hardly believe it worked—”
The stream of enthusiasm was forestalled, momentarily, by the sound of Pathka vomiting.
His voice sounded stronger. “Are you all right? I can’t see,” said Tess, feeling around.
Pathka reignited the torch and vomited once more. Tess saw what his voice had made her hope: his throat was whole again. She knelt beside him and held up a tentative hand; Pathka stilled himself and let her touch his skin, his arm, the dome of his head, every place that had glowed with extra brilliance. He was whole all over.