She narrowed her eyes and leaned on her spear. “How do I know you’re telling the truth?”

  “You don’t,” I said. “But I am.”

  She pursed her lips. I could almost feel her thinking. I could leave my mind and take hers, I thought, make her drop the spear and leave me. But strangely, I didn’t feel that would be right. There was something in her that made me feel she was not an enemy.

  “You say you are running,” she said. “Does that mean they are following?”

  I nodded and she let out a sharp hiss from between her teeth. “And you led them to my home?”

  “I didn’t know anyone was living here,” I said. “I didn’t have time to ask.”

  Another lip twitch. She thought I was amusing, even through her fear. “Listen to me, girl,” she said. “I’m going to remove this spear, you are going to get up and we are going to leave here. But don’t think I couldn’t open your belly in a second if I had need to. Don’t try anything, and I won’t kill you. Got it?”

  I nodded and she stepped back.

  I stayed sitting.

  “Well?” she said. “Ain’t you getting up?”

  I held out my club. “You take it,” I said. “Then I have no weapon.”

  She stared at me. “Are you unstable or something? You’d give up your weapon to someone you don’t know? How do you know I won’t kill you?”

  “I don’t for sure,” I said. “But I think you won’t. And this way you might come to trust me.”

  She seemed puzzled. “You are an odd one.”

  “Perhaps,” I said and smiled. I pushed the club at her and she took it. I stood up. “I don’t think you’d hurt me unless I tried to hurt you,” I said.

  She looked at the club, then at me. There was a strange expression on her face; wary, yet amused. I could tell she didn’t know quite what to make of me. “These others,” she said. “They’re after you?”

  I nodded. “They followed me to the river,” I said. “But I put distance between us in this valley.” I looked at the grim landscape; the tortured buildings being enveloped by earth and plants, the strange, clear walls reflecting the darkness of the skies. “This is your home?” I asked.

  The woman half-smiled. “Not quite,” she said. “I come here to collect food and materials.” She looked around. “Well,” she said. “Now that I think you aren’t going to kill me, I can’t just leave you here for those flesh-eaters to find.” She frowned, an expression of pure hatred moving over her face. “Come on,” she said. “Come with me.”

  She walked out of the building, pausing at the broken wall to ease herself gently from its shattered sides and looked into the twilight.

  “My name is Holt,” I said, following her.

  She turned back, light rain falling on her dark clothes and hair. She pulled a lump of material from her back, over her head, and looked out at me from the darkness of her hood. “Hathor,” she said softly, nodding to a little path, only just visible, which led into the woods. “My name is Hathor.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked. I was not familiar with the word.

  She stopped. “Once,” she said, “it was the name of a higher being, a god.”

  Her stare held my eyes for a moment, then roamed out, across the shattered world of the ancient ones. The darkness of night was falling over the broken buildings and rain made little paths through the moss and grass.

  She shivered and pulled her cloak around her. “But there are no gods anymore,” she said. “Not here.” She turned and walked away into the gloom of the forest.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  A Door

  I followed Hathor into the woods. I could not tell you why I felt I could trust her, but I did.

  Bracken once told me that Reaching was not just the ability to enter minds, but to hear them, even when not Reaching. She thought that sensitivity to the moods and feelings of others was another part of our ability, an unconscious element of our power. It had not served me wrong with my friends in the village, so I trusted it now, too.

  I knew the woman would do me no harm, unless I harmed her.

  Through the dusky woods we walked. Hathor’s pace was fast, and I had to trot to keep up. Although the oldest person I had ever seen, older even than Fletcher, Hathor was clearly not infirm, and her tall frame made her stride long. Her hair was like Bracken’s, wound into sections, but she wore it plaited, and it was iron grey. Hathor’s skin was crinkled and worn. Yet she did not tire or stumble. She picked her way carefully through the forest, always far ahead of me.

  “Keep up, girl,” she said. “There is a way to go before we can rest.”

  I scuttled after her. Her feet made so little sound in the bramble and leaves. Even my feet, which I had thought so delicate, were nothing to hers.

  At the base of a great tree, she stopped and crouched. Through the dim light, I saw she was moving branches covering a hole in the ground. “You live in a hole?” I asked.

  She chuckled. “Not exactly, child,” she said. “Follow me.”

  Hathor started to lower herself into the hole, her feet and hands moving down layered platforms in the earth, much like the ones I had seen in the buildings of the old ones. “Cover the hole as you come in,” she said, disappearing into the earth.

  I could barely see inside the hole at all, it was so dark, but I placed my hands and feet as she had done, and stepped down, pulling branches and leaves back over the hole, sealing us in.

  For a moment, the darkness was so like memories of my childhood that I felt a sense of overwhelming calm in the belly of the earth.

  At the bottom of the shaft, I felt her hands grasp me. I came to stand. I could see little, but the earth around me felt warm. It smelt musty and earthen, the salt of the soil bit into my tongue and the scent of mud and clay was thick in my lungs.

  “Hold on to my cloak,” she said, rummaging in the folds of her clothes. “I have some light, but we can only go one at a time through the tunnels and you won’t be able to see well.”

  She pulled out a flask made from clay, and poured liquid into a little dish. An eerie green glow emerged, lighting the space around me.

  “What is that?” I asked, feeling a spark of instinctive fear that came from seeing a light in the darkness, and then something else, a sense of home. It was like the drip.

  “Phosphorescence,” she said. In the green light she looked sinister, the glowing radiance picking up the angles of her face and darkening her eyes so they were deep black pools. “There is always something that can make light,” she said. “Even in the darkest places.”

  “I don’t mind darkness,” I said as she started to walk, with me clutching the end of her cloak so I didn’t fall over.

  “You would down here,” she said. “There are all kinds of things you’d never get to see.”

  As we walked down the earthen tunnel, I could feel the sides widening, opening until the air felt almost as it did above the earth. I stumbled against her often, my feet unsure. She did not tsk at me, or seem annoyed. She just kept walking.

  The passage opened up and I stared out into a vast cavern, lit by the same queer green glow as the bowl in Hathor’s hand, but this light radiated from the walls and from the floor. It lit a cavern shimmering in green luminosity.

  I gasped. I had never seen anything like it.

  Great buildings, the feet of the structures which jutted up on the surface were here too, under the ground, their broken forms held in place by the earth above and below them. Where, above the earth, their shattered bodies seemed to rear up as though in pain, here, under the ground, they had become the pillars of a vast, cavernous room. I had walked into another world, a secret domain beneath the earth.

  All around the pillars, the floor had been cleaned; simple streets constructed, swept and tidied. Places of human habitation had been made, their walls built from remnants of the ruined past. In places, on the walls, I could see where human hands had made pretty patterns, drawings made in the glowing earth, depicting ferns and trees. The people of this place had sought to bring the beauty of the forest into their hidden world.

  It was a village, underground, secret and safe from the world above.

  But yet, the stillness chilled my heart. Nothing and no one moved in the well-kept streets. No voices came from the houses. I could smell no cooking and hear no wood crackling in a welcoming fire. There was no laughter, no talk, no song. All there was, was the sound of my breathing and the stillness of the woman beside me.

  The village was empty, eerie. Ghostly in its aching loneliness.

  “Is this where you live?” My voice was loud and abrasive in the emptiness. Words echoed around the chamber, making me wince.

  Hathor shook her head. “It’s where I was born,” she said. “But no one lives here now.” She looked at it sadly. “Once, there were many of us, once there was a village.” She looked at me and I almost took a step back. There were ghosts in her eyes. “I had family, but they came. They took them all. Now, there is only me.”

  There was such sadness in her voice; a sense of loneliness so strong that had become a part of her.

  “Were they…taken?” I asked.

  “They came one day when we were above ground,” she said, her voice dull, numb. “We used to use the land to grow things. It was harvest. Almost everyone was above ground. They found them and they slaughtered them. They followed those trying to flee back here and that allowed them to take the village. I was the only one not here that day. I had gone to find a herb to help a woman with her birthing. I did not think I had been gone that long, but when I came back, all there was left was blood on the floor, the imprints of fingers scraping the earth as my friends were dragged along the ground... the screams of my people echoing in the halls of the earth. Now, I am the only one left.”

  “I sat here for a long time before I could do anything, move a muscle,” she said. “I thought, if I kept my eyes closed, it might turn out to be a dream and I would wake to find them all here.” She stared at the village, her eyes as hollow as her voice. “I keep it nice,” she said. “I sweep the streets and clean the houses. I know they aren’t coming back, but it feels right. I can’t let the memory of them die until I do.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  She glanced at me. “Follow me,” she said. “I don’t care to stay here alone. I have a place further on.”

  We walked through the streets. “Here, Aurora lived,” she said as we passed a house. “She was my cousin, always has an opinion about everything… and here is the house of Odysseus, and his wife Sekmet. I used to go there for dinner, for I saved Sekmet from dying in childbirth, so they always have something for me.”

  As we walked past each house, she told me of dead people. The way she spoke of them was unnerving. Hathor flitted between speaking of them as alive, and of them as dead. There was no one here, but she spoke as though they might come back. And with each step, I felt the sorrow that lived in her. It grew, casting darkness inside me until I felt I could not breathe.

  She walked out, across the village, circled it and started to walk to another tunnel to the side of the buildings.

  For a moment, I stopped, looking back at the empty streets. Green light glowed in the buildings, along deserted roads, twinkling on earthen walls. I shivered. Somehow, it was like seeing her loss, made flesh, in the fibre of the earth. I turned my eyes away and walked after her.

  Behind me, I heard wind wailing softly in the streets, crying, mourning for the dead.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Tunnels

  Through dark tunnels I followed Hathor, stumbling as I tried to walk without stepping on her heels. The eerie glow of the village was far behind us. All there was to show the way was the smouldering light of the clay pot of phosphorescence in her hand.

  We did not talk. The aching sadness of a loss so vast and so sudden was palpable in the air. It was as though I could taste the despair Hathor had felt upon returning to her home to find it destroyed and her people slain. My blood cried out. My sorrow sought hers in the dim light, melding together; a stream of silent agony.

  Hathor walked slower than before, weighed down by grief. Above ground, she had walked fast and strong, but now she had hunched up, as though trying to stem the bleeding of a wound to the belly.

  To me, it was clear that the grief she had felt on seeing the destruction of her people was not the only wound she had received; echoes of that first pain rang within her soul. The first sorrow had been a wound, and the later grief was infected blood coursing through her body. Hathor emitted sorrow as though it were her scent. She was a creature of sadness, loss.

  I thought I should say something… but what can you say to someone who has had everything they loved taken from them? Sometimes, when there are no words, it is better not to speak.

  As I was thinking on this, I started to notice the tunnels were growing lighter. In the distance was a dim light. I could feel the whisper of a breath of air on my face.

  At first my heart leapt with fear, my old reaction to seeing light in darkness, but, as I felt air wash over my skin, my heart relaxed. Those ideas of light and dark only applied to the captivity of the pits and the Factory… there were many things in the outside world that were good and clean, sweet and precious, and the feel of the wind on your skin is one.

  I breathed in as fresh air stole through the stifled heat of the tunnels. It smelt delicious; a tang of salt riding the breeze.

  As we neared the end of the tunnels, Hathor pulled aside hanging vines that concealed another entrance, and I stepped out into a damp, darkling twilight. Under my feet the earth felt light and warm. It slid as I stepped, and was bright white in colour. Even through the gloom and misty rain, I could see a large expanse of dark water in front of me. It lapped the bright earth, caressing it, making a noise like wind through the trees.

  Perhaps I should have been scared to see this vast expanse of darkness… but it seemed gentle, almost welcoming in its peaceful rise and fall against the shore, like the breathing of a great animal as it sleeps in safety.

  Hathor was staring at me, her brown eyes deep voids in the quickening night. “You haven’t seen the sea before, have you?” she asked, watching my wide eyes and open mouth.

  “I hadn’t seen anything until nine moons ago,” I said quietly. “Just darkness… sometimes the eyes of my mother and her children.”

  “Where are you from, girl?”

  “I was born in the Factory,” I said. “Raised as meat, although we didn’t know it then. We knew nothing. We hardly ever talked. I escaped one day when they left a door open and almost died in the forest, but I was taken in by a group of people who looked after me, taught me… loved me.”

  She was staring at me, her eyes glistening with terrible anger. “They took your family,” she said, her voice quiet, yet strained; metal grinding metal.

  “I think my brothers and sisters are dead,” I said. “My mother was a breeder. She most likely lives as they take her children from her to die.” I shook myself. “But there are people in the world who are kind. I have a village, of people who do not kill to live. I’m going to get back to them. You could come with me.”

  Hathor blinked. Her eyes had been so fixed on mine that I felt a little shiver run through me. I trusted she would not harm me, but I was becoming equally sure that she was not entirely sane. I had suffered the thunder-sickness, and knew what it was to be lost to my own mind. Hathor seemed to have something of that in her, some madness, some dislocation from her true self. I could feel it emanating from her, and her gaze was too fixated, too intense…. I wondered if I should Reach and see what was in her mind.

  But that time was hardly now.

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t leave my people,” she said looking back at the caves.

  “They wouldn’t want you to be alone,” I said gently.

  “I’m not alone.” She tapped her head. “They are all in here.”

  Her smile was unsettling. It rose on her mouth, crooked and broken. Although her statement might have been just a simple phrase, I felt a shudder run through my bones. I realized she was speaking the truth. With the same clarity with which I had known I could trust her, I knew I was not the only one speaking to her. There was more than one voice in her head.

  Ghosts, I thought. Hathor was haunted.

  “Come,” she said, pointing to the tree line. “My place is up there. I had some soup cooking before I left.”

  “Hathor?” I asked nervously as I followed her. “Was your soup made of anything… living?”

  “Most things are living, girl,” she said. “But no, nothing with a thought.” She started to walk along the slippery earth towards a dark hole in the gloom, and then quietly added, “Nothing with a family.”

 

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