Rhapsody: Child of Blood

7

When the darkness swallowed them, Rhapsody went absolutely silent. She gave the gloom a moment to settle, then tried to rip free from Grunthor’s hands. It was a futile effort; she could hear the giant chuckle as he tightened his grip slightly on her. Instantly she knew that she was mired to the waist in tepid liquid, something more viscous than water, with tensile strands running through it, supporting her weight.

Seconds later she saw a tiny flame appear, and Achmed’s nightmarish face came into the light; it was a sight that caused her to gasp again. Grunthor let go of her with one hand and reached behind him over his head, pulled out a small torch, and gave it to his partner. The smaller man lit it, and held it out to look around.

Above them, disappearing into the darkness, was a tapered shaft, the passage through which they had descended. The shadows from the torch leapt off its black sides.

Around them was a wide, irregular cylinder of softly translucent walls, striated in hues of sunless green, pale yellow, and mottled white. As the light from the weak flame passed over the walls she could see they were thick and fibrous, damming in the murky liquid of similar color which surrounded their legs and hips. Ropey strands twisted through the glutinous muck.

It seemed clear that once long ago the opening in which they now stood had been a tunnel of a sort, an irregular corridor descending through the vast root. Time and nature had filled in the base of the shaft with thick new growth, a crazily woven system of branchlike strands that crisscrossed the air around them and formed the netlike floor on which they now were balanced. The thick liquid had been displaced with the opening of the doorway, but ebbed and surged slightly, rising back through the network of vines below them.

Droplets of water from the dank, vapor-rich air came to rest on her skin, leaving it clammy and cold. Rhapsody looked back up from where they had come. In the torchlight she could see no opening. The walls of the tree trunk were as smooth as if they had never been opened.

She squirmed away from Grunthor—he released her when he saw Achmed nod—reached up, and ran her hands over the smooth wooden surface, looking for the break. There was none.

A knotted fiber close to her hip offered a higher ledge. With great effort she extricated a leg from the gelatinous liquid and brought her foot to rest on the strand. It seemed firm enough to bear her weight, so she felt around for a handhold, then lifted herself out of the fleshy slime.

Her head and shoulders ascended into the shaft, but still she could see no break in the wood of the Tree’s core. Rhapsody’s hands trembled as she ran them frantically over the shaft around and above her. There was no break, no hole, no tunnel in the Tree. The surface was solid as death.

“Where’s the door?” she demanded, trying to keep the panic she felt out of her voice. “What have you done?”

“Closed it,” Achmed answered without sarcasm.

Grunthor’s hand came to rest on her back as she teetered on her fibrous perch. She was almost on eye level with him, and within those amber eyes, remarkable in their humanity above the rest of the monstrous face, there was a distinct look of sympathy.

“The door is gone, miss; Oi’m sorry. We ’ave to press on, we can’t go back.”

Rhapsody whirled around and glared down at Achmed, her eyes blazing green in the light of the torch. “What do you mean, we can’t go back? We have to go back—you have to let me out.”

“We can’t. You’re stuck. You may as well accept it and come along. We’re not going to wait for you.”

The air in her lungs grew heavier with each breath. “Come along? You’re insane. There’s nowhere to go but back through there.” She jabbed a finger into the tapering shaft above her.

“You really are given to some amazingly incorrect assumptions.” The man she had renamed Achmed the Snake shoved aside some hanging branchlike strands, pushed past her legs, and waded to the farthest side of the cylindrical wall, where the flesh seemed thinnest.

He removed his leather gloves and slowly ran his hands along the surface, probing the semi-flaccid barrier carefully, until he found the weakest spot. He glanced back at Grunthor, who nodded and drew from his back scabbard the strangely sharp, three-bladed weapon he had taken from Karvolt.

The giant assumed the same stance he would if throwing a spear. The muscles of his massive back recoiled, and with a single thrust he drove the triatine deep into the fleshy wall. Then he dragged the weapon down, bringing the bulk of his weight to bear on it, tearing loose a hand-sized piece of semi-solid fiber the consistency of melon. The musical vibration of the Tree, muted once they had entered the passageway in the root, surged around her in a frightening crescendo.

“Gods. Stop,” Rhapsody whispered, stepping down off her foothold and back into the mire. “Sagia. You’re hurting Sagia.” She stumbled blindly toward Grunthor, only to be brought to a halt by the grip of a iron hand.

“Nonsense. This is a trunk root; the Tree has thousands of them.” Grunthor ripped away a larger section of the fibrous wall, causing Rhapsody to shudder. “The hole in the root wall will close up once we’re outside; this corridor is filling in as we speak. Or hadn’t you noticed?” Achmed pointed to the viscous liquid in which they stood. Where once it had leveled off at her waist, the muck now reached almost to her breasts.

Once more the giant twisted the three-bladed weapon. The ripping sound reverberated off the liquid in which they stood. Then Grunthor looked back at them.

“Oi’m through, sir.”

Achmed nodded, then turned Rhapsody to face him as Grunthor backed into the hole he had just made.

“Listen carefully; I’m only going to explain this once. We need to leave the inside of this root and follow it along the outside. There is a tunnel of sorts that sheathes the root because its flesh expands and contracts, depending on how much water it is holding. That tunnel will serve as our corridor; we’ll find water and air there. With a good deal of luck it will lead us to a new place, somewhere safe from those who pursue us. Somewhere where Michael can never find you. But that is up to you.”

“Now, you can come with us, or you can wait in here and drown inside the Tree when the root fills in. Your choice.”

Dazed, Rhapsody pulled free of his hands and waded to the hole Grunthor had torn in the root wall. The giant moved aside slightly as she leaned into the rip and stared down. All she could see was endless darkness below. She looked up. Above her was more of the same. The shaft ran, with no visible limit, along the pale root that reached down into the abyss beneath them.

Achmed was checking the bindings on his gear.

“Well? Are you coming?”

The enormity of her situation fell on Rhapsody like an avalanche of mud. She was trapped inside the Tree, with no way out, and nowhere to go but into the endless hole below her; where it led to, the gods only knew. It was bad enough to be exiled from Easton, but the realization of what else she would be leaving behind made Rhapsody break into a cold sweat.

Rhapsody shoved Achmed aside, waded back to where the shaft had been, and pounded wildly on the tree wall above her. As her panic broke loose she began to shout for help, crying out as loudly as she could, hoping the Lirin who guarded the sacred Tree would hear her and pry her free. She waited, listening frantically for the sound of help coming, but heard nothing.

Achmed and Grunthor looked at each other, then returned to watching her. When a few moments passed Rhapsody tried calling out again. She repeated this effort four times before Achmed finally lost patience. He reached out and tapped her shoulder in annoyance.

“If you’re done with your temper tantrum, I suggest you come with us. We’re leaving now. Your alternative is to spend the rest of your short life screaming at a wall of solid wood; not very productive, but your choice nonetheless, at least until the root fills in the hole.”

The finality of his words caused Rhapsody to dissolve into tears. It was not something she did very often; anyone who knew her would recognize it as a sign of utter despair. Achmed’s eyelids and skin rippled with searing pain as the vibration of her lamentation passed over him. He grasped her arm, his voice unsympathetic.

“Stop that immediately,” he ordered harshly. “I forbid you to do that. If you want to come with us, you had best understand that you are never to do that again. Weeping and wailing is banned from here on out. Now decide. Come if you want to—if you can refrain from that noise.”

He stepped through the hole, ignoring the hard look Grunthor cast his way after his tirade. The giant Bolg turned to her and gave her what she had come over the last two weeks to recognize as a smile.

“Aw, come on, miss, it won’t be that bad. Think of it as an adventure. ’Oo knows what we’re gonna find, and besides, ya won’t never have to see the Waste o’ Breath again.” He and Achmed exchanged a glance and a nod before the smaller man began to climb down the trunk root.

“Nor my family, nor my friends,” Rhapsody said, choking back tears.

“Not necessarily, darlin’. Just because ol’ Uchmed and Oi don’t plan to return to Serendair don’t mean you can’t. But you can’t get back from nowhere if you’re not there yet, can you?”

Rhapsody almost smiled in spite of herself. The giant monster was trying to comfort her, while the allegedly more human of the two treated her, as always, with consummate indifference.

This whole event was taking on a surreal quality that made her wonder if she was, in fact, only dreaming. She rubbed the tears out of her eyes and sighed in exhaustion.

“Very well,” she said to Grunthor. “I guess there’s really no choice. There must be a way out somewhere, some place where the root comes up. Let’s go.”

“Atta girl,” said Grunthor approvingly. “You follow me, sweet’eart. Oi wouldn’t wanna take the chance o’ fallin’ on you.” He grabbed hold of the trunk root and began to lower himself into the black hole, which had already swallowed up his companion.

Rhapsody shuddered. “No, we certainly wouldn’t want that.” She stepped through the rip in the root wall and found the fibrous outgrowth that the two men were using as a rope to lower themselves down, then took hold of it herself. Carefully she began her descent into the flickering darkness of the vast hole that sheathed one of the main lifelines of the Oak of Deep Roots. She was about to discover just how aptly the Tree was named.

Michael walked among the bodies of his men, staring down at a scene of savagery he had never been able to match. True, he had been capable of deeper depravity; there had been no torture or ritual dismemberment in the course of this slaughter, just a ferocious efficiency that rippled the hair on his arms with electricity.

Gammon walked silently behind him, keeping his eyes to the ground. He was afraid to speak, afraid to even meet his leader’s glance because his own terror would be readily evident. Gammon had seen greater desolation, larger numbers of broken bodies beneath smoldering skies, but he had never seen so many men dispatched with such obvious indifference. At least Michael enjoyed his work. There was something far more frightening about this brutal nonchalance.

Finally Michael stopped. With a curt nod he directed Gammon to help the others, who were stacking the bodies neatly on the burial mound, then turned in a full circle, surveying the vast meadow where his hunting party had fallen.

He raised a hand to his brow and shielded his eyes, sensitive in their bright blueness, from the hazy afternoon light. There was no cover here, no place that the trap could have been easily laid. As far as his eyes could discern there was nothing but highgrass, brittle in the summer heat, waving silently as the warm breeze whipped through again, bowing in supplication before the sun.

There was only one answer. The Brother.

As the back of his throat tightened dryly, Michael thought about the girl. The sunlit meadow grass rippling in the wind reminded him of her hair, long tresses of golden silk entwined in his hands. How he had loved the feel of it on his chest in the darkness as she lay beneath him. He had carried the sensation with him even as he struggled to put other more erotic thoughts of her out of his mind, fearing the distraction might endanger him.

And now that she was gone, the highgrass would serve as a constant, nagging reminder of what he would never have again. For surely if the Brother had taken her, she was lost to him; the Dhracian had undoubtedly killed her and tossed her body in the sea even before leaving Easton. Not much was known about the mythic assassin, but it was common knowledge that he had no heart, and no vices of the flesh. Those were the only things that would have given Rhapsody a chance.

“Burn the bodies,” he directed. “Gather whatever gear is left and saddle up. We’re finished here.”