one.’ Jula pointed to the leftmost tunnel, boulder- choked and leading down. She had an instinct for direction below ground that had proved uncanny. ‘Though it doesn’t look very safe.’
Ara led on and they followed, stepping over fallen rock, some of it still jagged. After a hundred yards or so the passage broadened and became a cavern so wide it swallowed their light and gave nothing back. For a moment Ara halted and they all held quiet listening to the silence and to the drip … drip … drip of water that was somehow part of the vastness of the silence. Nona glanced about at the novices around her, all illuminated on one side and dark on the other, and for an instant found herself outside her body, suddenly aware of herself as a tiny mote of life, warmth, and light in the black and endless convolutions of the cave system. Now more than ever she felt the irony that the Rock of Faith, named for the foundations of their religion, lay rotten with voids and secret ways, permeable and ever-changing.
‘We should go across,’ Jula said, her voice small in all that empty space. She didn’t sound as if she wanted to.
Ketti marked the wall with her chalk and drew an arrow on the floor.
‘We should follow the wall. We’re less likely to get lost,’ Darla said.
Ara took them to the left, staying close to the wall. Stalagmites rose in small delicate forests, stalactites descended in curtains where the cave curved down, glistening with an iridescent sheen like the carapace of a beetle.
‘Stop.’ Ruli turned and stared into the darkness beyond the lanterns’ reach. Nona stopped, the others too.
‘What?’ Jula raised her light.
‘Didn’t you hear it?’
‘No.’ Darla loomed beside her, her shadow swinging.
‘Something’s out there, coming for us,’ Ruli said, wide-eyed.
‘There’s nothing living in these caves,’ Darla said. ‘We would have seen bones or dung. What did it sound like?’
‘Dry.’ Ruli shivered.
‘Dry?’
‘I want to go back,’ Ruli said.
Ara advanced a few yards, lantern high. ‘There’s something here.’
Nona crowded forward with the others, leaving Ruli in deepening shadow.
‘What is it?’ Ketti frowned.
To Nona’s eye it seemed that a shadowy forest of misshapen stalagmites covered the cavern floor, some curving over in ways that such growths are not supposed to.
‘Bones.’ Jula saw it first.
From one instant to the next the scene switched from one of confusion to one of horror. Skeletons, calcified like those back in the niche, but more thickly: dozens of them.
‘Some of these have been here for an age.’ Ara pointed to a stony ribcage from which straw-thin stalactites dripped, and to a skull distorted by the weight of stalagmite growing upon it, like a candle from which half the wax had run.
Jula bent over to inspect something by the wall.
‘We really need to go!’ Ruli called at them, not having moved from where she stood. ‘Can’t you feel it?’
‘I don’t …’ But then Nona felt it and held her tongue. Something scraping at the edges of her senses, a dry touch from which her mind recoiled.
Holothour.
What?
Nona felt Keot moving beneath the skin of her back. Normally he was silent in the caves.
You should run.
You always tell me to fight.
Now I’m telling you to run.
‘We should go back. Now!’ Nona turned to follow Ruli who had already started to run back the way they came, into the blind darkness.
‘What’re you scared of?’ Darla called after them. ‘There’s nothing here.’ She laughed. ‘And neither of you have a lantern.’
Nona stopped at the margins of the lighted area, infected by a disembodied fear.
What’s out there, Keot?
Something Missing-bred. Something hungry. Run!
‘We need to go. Trust me.’ Nona’s voice sounded thin in the emptiness of the cavern. Behind her the sounds of Ruli’s stumbling panic.
Ara frowned then followed. ‘I don’t understand you, but I trust you.’ Jula fell in behind her. Darla, with the light now retreating from her, snarled in frustration and hurried after them.
The six novices picked up the pace, shadows swinging all around them. Nona could make out Ruli ahead, feeling her way. With each passing moment it seemed that something gathered itself behind them, as if the space now echoing with their footfalls was drawing in its breath. Nona felt the horror of it crawl along her spine. The darkness held something awful. Something ancient and waiting. The need to be gone made her heart pound and tightened her breathing into gasps.
‘Oh blood!’ Even Darla felt it now, her face white.
Nona knew with cold certainty that beyond the margins of their illumination the calcified bones stretched out yard upon yard, innumerable victims lying in meticulous order. How many centuries had they watched the darkness? And she knew that among them paced a horror. She felt it now, individual, condensing out of the night, taking form. Perhaps it wore a man’s shape. Perhaps even her own. And if it ever raised its face to her she would drown in nightmare.
By the time they reached the chamber where they had chosen between the three unexplored passages all of them were running. Ruli was already on the rope. Jula didn’t wait for her to get off. Ara stood with her back to the cliff, lantern high, staring at the tunnel mouth. Ketti and Darla crouched by the edge urging the others down. It was all Nona could do not to push between them and make her own grab for the rope.
‘Ancestor! Hurry it up!’ The cry broke from her.
Ruli and Jula reached the bottom together and went sprawling in a clatter of loose stones. Ketti began to climb. The darkness in the tunnel seemed to thicken, rejecting the light from Ara’s lantern.
‘It’s coming!’ Darla was sliding over the edge, hands white on the rope, her feet just a yard above Ketti’s head.
‘We can’t stay!’ It was all Nona could do not to scream. Fear filled her, trembling in every limb, fluttering the breath in her lungs. ‘Ara, come on!’
They descended the rope on top of one another, lanterns hooked to belts, burning their palms as they slipped from knot to knot.
A confusion of swinging lanterns, sharp rocks, and snatching shadows followed. Screaming, panting, glimpses of chalk symbols, running, scrambling, and finally a desperate squeeze
