House of Shadows(76)

“We don’t have to follow them,” Karah pointed out, “if you’d rather not, and if you know another way out.”

“They’re not leading us out of the dark at all,” Nemienne answered, though not knowing how she knew this. “They’re leading us toward something else…”

“Really? What?”

Nemienne only shook her head. She remembered perfectly well the homely, everyday light she’d held in her mind previously, when she had stepped out of the dark and into that remembered light. She could do that again, probably. Probably she could even bring Karah with her. She was sure she could. That kind of ordinary light glimmered around the edges of her mind and memory in implicit invitation. But if she took that way out, she’d never know toward what goal Enkea and the kitten were leading them. And she was curious as well as frightened. What was it that lay beneath stone, within Kerre Maraddras, at the heart of darkness?

“I’m not sure we should follow them, if they’re not showing us the way out,” Karah said. Her tone was still reasonable, still matter-of-fact, as though this were some practical decision they had to make. “It’s terribly late, I think—or terribly early. I’m sure I should be back in Cloisonné House by the time everyone’s stirring. And you…” Her eye fell worriedly on her sister.

Nemienne shook her head, though a moment ago she had been the one frightened, the one who had wanted to turn aside. “It’s not a question of what we should do. It’s a question of what we need to do.” This came out more confusing than she’d intended, but she didn’t know how to put what she felt into words. She took a step forward again. Ahead of them, both cats immediately started forward again as well. Enkea’s white foot flashed with her steps, and the kitten’s pale form flickered at the older cat’s side like a silver fish swimming through dark waters. Nemienne had not released Karah’s hand, and so her sister was drawn after her.

Ahead of them, the endless darkness was in fact ending at last. Uneven walls of pale stone became visible before the girls, glimmering with a subdued light that seemed to pass through them, as the light of a candle might pass through a translucent screen. Like the light that clung to Nemienne’s hands, this light was green tinged. The green light seemed less to push back the darkness than… accent it, somehow. Nemienne suspected that this was not the sort of light Mage Ankennes had in mind when he tried to teach her to summon light as a defense against the dark.

And yet, now that they were able to see them properly, the caverns were unexpectedly beautiful. On all sides, glistening pale stone folded into curtains and pillars. Powerful stalactites and delicate spines descended from unseen heights, each beaded with moisture that slowly gathered at its tip before dripping to the moist stone beneath. But these drops of falling water were not what had haunted Nemienne through this darkness.

What she had heard… what echoed through the caverns here… was the sound of fat drops of water falling into a deep pool of black water that, as they came around one last curtain of stone, lay unexpectedly before them. Though the water was black, it seemed to glimmer with a light of its own, and each drop of water that fell into the pool glowed like a live ember. And when each drop fell, it seemed to Nemienne, it struck the black pool with a reverberant liquid chiming, as though a bell was somehow ringing under the water.

Beyond the pool… and this took time to grasp, for it was so unexpected and so vast that at first the eye did not focus on it… but beyond the pool lay, carved in deep relief from the pale stone, a dragon. Nemienne at once recognized the long serpentine form as the dragon from Mage Ankennes’s harp. In the book by Kelle Iasodde that Mage Ankennes had given her to study, Nemienne had found images of dragons like this one, drawn in fine black inks and illuminated with gold and crushed pearl.

But this dragon had been carved in more detail than any little image engraved in ink. Indeed, it was so detailed that it might have been living, except it was half embedded within the stone of the cavern. The dragon was enormous. If it could have torn itself out of the mountain and taken to the air, it would surely have shaded half of Lonne with the shadow of its outspread wings. But here, within the mountain, those wings were folded.

Water gathered, drop by drop, along the carved edge of one great wing and fell, glittering, into the black water: plink. Ripples spread out on the surface of the pool every time a drop fell, and each ripple seemed to run up against the shallow edge of the pool with a not-quite-audible sound of its own, like the vibration that lingered in the air after the note of a plucked kinsana string had faded. This was the sound that had so troubled Nemienne, and now that she saw its source, she could believe she would hear that sound in her dreams forever, that she would never be beyond the reach of that persistent vibration.