Edene had no problem seeing in the dark. The well was edged in stones, a pavement set into the earth for an arm span around it. You might build your house over your water, in the desert, to protect it from heat and from wanderers—but no one would want the earth of their floor made mud every time they needed to haul up a drink. Edene crouched beside the ragged semicircle of the pit, staring down into a darkness even her eyes could not pierce.
“Water?” she asked Besha Ghul, when it crouched beside her.
“There is no water in this well,” it said. “It drained into the tunnels long ago. We claimed it.”
Edene stayed where she hunkered, and stayed silent. The curve of her belly pressed the tops of her thighs, hard and yet resilient, like a drumhead. She considered the ghul, the well, the cramped angle under the collapsed roof, and the daubed stone beyond.
“You want me to climb down.”
The ghul blinked at Edene, round-pupiled eyes no longer lambent in this close darkness—though she could make them out, still. “It’s an easy climb.”
She let her left palm rest on her belly, highlighting the arch of it under her stained robes. The ghul had no problem in seeing her: she watched its eyes focus. But it seemed to attach no significance to the gesture.
“How easy?”
Besha Ghul shrugged and showed her hooked fingers, long claws. “A scamper.”
She touched the edge of the well. The stone was rough, lipped. She could hook fingertips behind its edge, brace her palms against the roughness. Her shoes were little more than soft-soled slippers, laced tight, meant for scuffing about the fortress Ala-Din in pursuit of the duties a captive had been assigned. Edene’s nose wrinkled involuntarily as she remembered the ammonia reek of guano, the slick sound of primary feathers, each as tall as she was, as hard as steel and as light as spider silk, sliding against one another.
It was irrelevant.
The shoes would serve.
“You first,” she said, and waved Besha Ghul forward.
* * *
Edene had no difficulty in climbing down; her toes found ledges and her fingers holds as if she had come this way a thousand times. And in truth, it was little more of a scramble than she had managed all the years of her youth among the broken slates and granite of the foothills of the Steles of the Sky.
In those days, her belly hadn’t pressed her hips away from the cliff and her center of balance hadn’t seemed to slosh precariously from side to side with every incautious movement—not to mention changing with each passing day. She knew she climbed clumsily, awkwardly, clinging and panting in a manner that shamed her. But she did it nonetheless, and despite her awkwardness found her strength and agility burgeoning. Sand rasped between her fingertips and the stone beneath, scattered and pattered beneath her when her kilted robes brushed the wall.
It was a long climb, some seven or eight times her own height, and Edene found herself admiring whoever had dug so tenaciously to scrape water from this desert soil. But when she was twice her height from the bottom, her eyes pierced the darkness enough to see earth and stone below.
A voice seemed to speak to her from the darkness. Leap.
Leap, if you would be Queen.
That wasn’t so hard. Easier than it had been to sling her leg over the stone lip of the well and lower herself into penetrable darkness. Edene uncurled her fingertips from their surprisingly solid grip and kicked off the ledge. The fall whipped brief wind through her hair, and when the bottom of the well stung her soles, the shock traveled pleasantly up her body. She bounced on her toes, vitality and joy suffusing her until she raised her arms and twirled for the sheer pleasure of it.
A moment later, Besha Ghul landed gently beside her.
“Come, mistress,” it said, lightly flicking dust from one velvet shoulder. “We have far to go.”
* * *
In the darkness, in the tunnels, they passed by secret ways. Secret, that is, except to Edene. At first, the ghul led her, but soon Edene realized that she could feel the tunnels spread out around her in a convoluted labyrinth. Besha Ghul and others of its kind moved through them, and Edene could sense them all. They were like fish moving through a weir, shadowy—translucent. Edene did not see them with her eyes but sensed in some other fashion, as if she were a spider and the passages were her web.
She laid her fingertips on the wall and felt it—not moist, gritting stone. Or rather, yes: stone, and chill, and damp … but somehow simultaneously giving the sense of something soft and alive, as if she touched a loved one’s shoulder at the same time she touched the labyrinth wall. It welcomed her. It leaned into her.
She leaned back as if into the embrace of a friend.
She thought of all the suns she had seen or heard of—the changing moons of the Qersnyk night, the backward flight of the Nameless sun.