Lady Friday(27)
She slowed again and looked once more for a hiding spot. Harrison was fussing around with the last of his sleepers, tilting an old woman’s head back so that, like the others, she was looking at the spire in the lake.
Leaf saw a crack in the stone, a shadow that might be just wide enough for her to climb into. She ran over to it and knelt down. It was a very narrow crevasse, but she thought it was a little wider than she was at the top, and it was broader below. It was also only four feet deep, but it looked like there was a hole in one corner that might lead deeper.
She took a breath and climbed down. It was a tight squeeze and she grazed her hip as she twisted around, but then she was in. Leaf sighed and crawled to the hole. As she’d hoped, it led farther into the stony ground – it was impossible to say how far, as the purple sunlight only lit up the first part of the hole and it clearly went much deeper. Deep into darkness.
She was about to crawl in anyway when she smelled something familiar. Familiar yet repulsive, an odour that made her instantly flinch, even though she didn’t immediately recognise it. It was a damp, rotten kind of smell and it made the gorge rise in her throat, and that was what made her remember when she’d smelled it before.
The mind-control mould she’d thrown up had smelled just like what she was smelling now … Leaf recoiled, this time scraping the skin off her elbows as she tried to squirm out of the narrow crack even faster than she’d gone in. As she hoisted herself up, a thin tendril of grey fungus came quivering out of the dark and slowly felt around the spot where her feet had been only a few seconds before.
Leaf threw herself back and landed badly, hurting herself. But she didn’t stop, scuttling back with a sobbing cry to find herself at the feet of Harrison. He helped her up as she cried out.
‘Fungus! The mind-control fungus!’
‘The grey creeper?’ said Harrison. ‘The spores do get in occasionally and root in the cracks. It’s not so bad, that one. It’ll only give you nightmares. Still, I’ll report it. One of the guards will burn it out. Come on – we have to get back a safe distance.’
Leaf followed him meekly. The smell of the grey fungus was still everywhere in her nose and mouth. She could taste it and she could remember the terrible pressure in her head when it was establishing itself—
She stopped to dry retch for a moment, but Harrison came back and pulled her along by her wrist.
‘Come on! They’ve put the chair down. She’ll fly down any minute and we have to be back almost to the door or we might get caught up too!’
The two of them scrambled back to the door and Leaf collapsed, coughing. Her legs ached and her mouth felt horrible, made no better by the loose threads that stuck to her tongue as she dragged the sleeve of her robe across her face. Leaf spat them out, in the process looking up and out across the lake.
The silver chair was on the pillar of dark stone. The four Denizens hovered in formation around it; the lake roiled underneath from the downbeat of their wings.
High on the balcony, a star flashed into being, or so it seemed to Leaf. A light too bright to look at, that leaped into the air and then slowly descended towards the pillar and the chair.
The light dimmed as the star fell, and through scrunched-up eyes Leaf saw that it was Lady Friday, her long, radiantly yellow wings stretched out for ten feet to either side, tip feathers ruffling as she glided down to alight on the silver chair. The radiance came from something she held in her hand, the same bright object she’d held before when leading the sleepers to the hospital pool.
The twelve sleepers raised their arms as Lady Friday settled on the chair. Leaf heard Harrison suck in air and hold it with a kind of choking noise, and she felt her own breath catch. Lady Friday languidly lifted the shining object in her hand and the light from it dimmed, then suddenly flashed, lighting up everything in the crater as if it were a giant camera flash. In that instant, the lake turned silver, like reflective glass, as did the dome above.
It felt like time stopped. Leaf was motionless, held in that light, as if caught in a still photograph. Nothing moved and she could hear no sound, not even her own beating heart. Then, very slowly, in the slowest of slow motions, she saw something coming out of the mouths and eyes of the sleepers. Tendrils of many colours, twining and twisting as they stretched across the water to the bright star in Friday’s hand.
It was as if the Trustee was drawing coloured threads out of their bodies. As the tendrils reached her, the light in her hand changed, the white giving way to a rainbow cluster of red, blue, green, and violet.
Then the tendrils snapped off at the sleepers’ end and the trailing pieces whipped and curled as they crossed the lake into Friday’s hand. The sleepers slowly crumpled to the ground, so slowly that Leaf felt as if it took seconds for them to fall.