Chapter 43
There were bleary stretches when I saw nothing at all. When I opened my eyes, I sensed movement around me. Animals were nuzzling at my form. I prayed it wasn’t a condorla, I hoped that it wouldn’t tear into my flesh, as it had the frilled lizards. I was so thirsty, my lips so dry that they stuck together when I tried to pull them apart they cracked and bled.
I could smell water too but when I tried to roll over and crawl to it, nothing moved. My head and neck burned, my stomach felt as if it were eating its way out. I moaned and the sound echoed a hundredfold in there.
My eyes picked out glowing sources of heat everywhere, the two largest resolved into the shape of horses.
“Beau. Diomed,” I said and both moved towards me, reached down and nibbled at my cold skin. Instantly, my body craved their blood but I refused to give into it. Having thought I’d lost them once to my bloodlust, I would not chance it again.
I called out using my glamour and because I was so weak, I could only bring small creatures to me. Bats, cave crawlers and small voles and rodents. Whatever answered my summons, I took what I could from them until a small measure of strength came back. It was enough to let me stand, stumble down to the underground lake and slid in. I floated, letting the ice-cold water cleanse me and here, I found blind fish and I devoured them, filling me with more energy. It did not upset my stomach and I could actually taste them.
The horses drank yet I had nothing to feed them. No grass or brush grew underground without light. To keep them alive, I had to bring them out onto the land and the only place safe enough for that was one of the lost cities.
I knew Blackfin had found one of the lost cities and Reyjdask but I knew of seven more, one lost in the wilds of Southland that neither the ice people nor Elassai knew about. It was there I was headed if I could survive what Blackfin had done to me.
From the damage, it seemed as if his weapon had struck my collar at the same time as I triggered the spell and the sonic charge to shatter the mechanism and free me. There was still the triple geas on me but without the fear of the collar’s pain, I could fight those compulsions. The bullet had hit the collar and gouged a 6-inch gash at my back and the back of my head, which had bled copiously. Being fed so irregularly and little at that, my reserves had been too low to recover and heal hence the need to eat.
Below ground, his geas was not so powerful and I could eat without the pain or nausea. Once I exited the caverns, I was not so sure I would be free of Lyr Averon’s original curse.
It was two more days by more reckoning before I was able to move about without any pain. I felt lighter both mentally and physically without the collar on. I knew I had to leave the safety of the cavern soon, the horses were starving and I had nothing to feed them.
I couldn’t get on either of them, I was too weak and sore, my legs had an alarming tendency to fold under me and my head ached with the mother of all headaches. My probing fingers found a half-healed lesions, scabbed over on both the back of my head and neck. I’d drank enough blood to start the healing process but not enough to recover completely.
I walked the passages I could manage without climbing and the horses followed me anxiously. They did not like being underground any more than I did. I wished I could call Arianell and her brother to come here but I had neither a message globe nor the knowledge of how to work a spell. What I did have though, was the ability to call the animals to my side and I did that. Hundreds of bats flew around me and I snatched one out of the air holding it gently between my two hands before laying it aside. It lay still as if I had stunned it.
With a sharp crystal, I poked my finger and using my own blood, painstakingly wrote a message on a scrap torn from my pants leg. I wrote, Arian, I am on the Forgotten Way with my two friends and we are headed south for the lost city. I blew on the blood to let it dry.
Wrapping it carefully around the crystal, I picked up the bat, and tied the scrap of material into a tiny bundle onto the bat’s legs. We stared eye to eye and I saw a sly intelligence in the creature’s gaze.
“Seek the woman Ranger and her brother,” I spoke in Valesch, the language of the ancients, gave the creature her image and scent praying that it could find her. When I let the bat go, it flittered around my head making high-pitched noises that only I could hear. A swarm of the animals filled the cave and just as suddenly, disappeared in the blink of an eye. I watched for a second and then headed out the passageway I remember taking with Arianell.
There was a feeble light produced by some strange growth on the cave walls. It looked like lichen or moss and when disturbed, glowed green and brightened. At rest, it produced a dim glow that was enough for my eyes to see and to maneuver safely through the tunnel. I expected to come out at the same forgotten city as the last time I’d been here. I kept the horses behind me so that I could scope it out first.
What I saw surprised me beyond reason – instead of the cave mouth on the cliffside, I emerged in a valley hidden between two massive walls of rock that seemed to be the jaws of a monster ready to snap shut on the unwary inhabitants. In the bowl of this valley was a small city, a city as beautiful as anything I had ever seen. If fairies and elves were real then they must have lived in a place like this – towers of soaring glass breathtakingly beautiful with the warm sun on it. Buildings that defied gravity, fountains of breathing marble, and plazas landscaped with incredible beauty and flawless design.
Streets paved with tiles that were precious inlaid lapis, carnelian and marble. Trees and flowers were everywhere and a graceful stream meandered through the streets where sparkling trout leaped among the stones and the water. I could smell roses and honey. For the first time since I’d left the farm, I saw honeybees. I saw apple trees laden with ripe fruit, cherries and plums, even oranges that grew only in southern climes and hothouses. By all rights, these temperate fruit trees should not be here.