Silent Hall (16 page)

The ant was only two feet away from her when it veered off. Phaedra did not even let out a sigh of relief until she was sure it was gone. There would be others. Lots of others. She had never thought much about ants, but she knew that each nest contained hundreds, perhaps thousands of them. If there were nests like this so near the village, why hadn't the clansmen said anything about them? These bodies had to have come from somewhere.

She thought about Thasa, glancing about so nervously. If the mushrooms only grew on corpses, then the ants that gathered those mushrooms were almost like…

Farmers. The mountain men knew them, feared them, and had deliberately not told Phaedra and her friends about them. Why? Maybe they hated the islanders for worshipping different Gods. Maybe they hated them because their accents were different, or because their skin was black. Maybe they just wanted the packhorse.

The giant farmer ants would be back to gather more mushrooms, and if they found Phaedra there, she would become just another corpse. She took as deep a breath as her ribs would allow, and rose to her feet. The pain in her ankle brought tears to her eyes, but giving up would mean death. Gruesome death, in an ant's jaws. The ceilings in this chamber were low; the shaft above her was within reach. It was confiningly narrow in places, but that meant that Phaedra would be able to hold herself up by pressing against the walls. Even here, where the tunnel was wider, there were plenty of handholds.

Phaedra could not believe she was even going to try this. Her hands were torn and bloody, her ankle shattered, her ribs broken, and probably her tailbone too. She was going to fall, or worse yet, climb right into the waiting jaws of another ant. But what could she do? Nothing. This was her only option, her only hope.
I am my parents' daughter,
she thought grimly.
I can do anything I set my mind to
. She wiped her eyes on what she hoped was the cleanest part of her sleeve, whispered a prayer to Atel, and began to climb.

N
arky did not just take
the rope, he took the canvas too. He left Thasa standing confused beside a poorly erected tent frame, its few contents completely exposed. As soon as Narky was back at the cave, he called down to let the others know that he had returned.

“Where the hell were you?” Criton shouted up at him.

“I brought the rope,” Narky yelled back. “Is Phaedra still there?”

“No.” That was Hunter's voice. “There are all these shafts down here. She must have fallen or been dragged down one of them.”

Narky crept to the edge of the cavern and looked down. Hunter and Criton were visible far below, carrying torches. Bandu was on the ground, sniffing at one of the large holes in the cavern floor.

“Very bad,” she said. “Very dead things, and other bad things. Phaedra! Can you hear?”

“Do you want me to throw the rope down to you?” Narky asked.

“How much do we have? Not much, right?”

“No,” Narky admitted. “Not much.”

“The climb is hardest near the top,” Hunter said. “Can you find a place to tie the rope so it reaches past the overhang?”

Narky doubted it. “I'll try,” he said.

It took some time for him to secure the rope. His hands kept fumbling. When he had successfully tied it to an outcropping stone and thrown the other side over the edge, he found that the rope did not stretch nearly far enough. Oh, well. He hadn't really expected it to. He took out a knife and began to work on the canvas from the tent. He tore it into strips, twisting them together and tying the ends until he had several additional yards of makeshift rope. When he tied these new lengths together, they were long enough to disappear past the overhang.

Narky was just testing his knots' strength when he heard shouts from below, and the familiar sound of Hunter's sword being drawn. Clutching the rope, Narky cautiously eased himself over the rocky edge until he could see what was happening.

Below, his friends were facing what looked remarkably like a large black ant with its forelegs cut off. It was a little hard to believe that the creature really was an ant, because from this distance, his friends too appeared rather ant-like. An actual ant shouldn't have been visible at all. Yet the creature's jerky movements were unmistakable. How large was that thing?

As Narky watched, Hunter raised his sword with both hands and brought it down on the ant's head. The ant collapsed, and dark bluish liquid sprayed from its broken head. Hunter jerked out his sword and looked around warily, expecting another.

Bandu knelt and put both her hands on the ground. “More coming,” she said. “Over there! Criton, behind you!”

She was pointing in two separate directions, but Hunter at least was ready. He leapt toward one of the holes in the ground that Bandu had indicated, and plunged his sword downward just as another ant was crawling out. His blade slipped between the insect's mandibles and stuck for a moment before he pulled it back.

Criton was less ready. The ants moved so quickly! By the time he had turned around, another pair was mere feet away. Criton was still holding both torches, but he did not bother to drop them. Instead he breathed a steady stream of flame, and Narky watched in relief as the ants writhed for a moment and fell onto their sides, their legs curling.

Narky stepped away from the edge and took up his spear. Did he dare climb down with it to join his friends? Would he be of any use down there? What if more ants were outside the cave, foraging? If the others survived and tried to climb back up, any ants here at the top could make short work of them as they climbed. It was best to stand guard, he thought.

Poor Phaedra! She had fallen right into the ants' nest. It was unlikely she had survived. Even if she had, how could she ever make it back up alive? The tunnels would be simply crawling with the gigantic insects, and if any of these chanced upon Phaedra during her climb, that would be the end. It would take a miracle for Phaedra to come back to them. A miracle.

Narky knelt and prayed. Ravennis had taken an interest in him once; maybe He was still watching.

Please,
he thought,
let Phaedra come back to us. If I have ever deserved Your mercy, she definitely deserves it more. What's she done to deserve this death and burial in a nest of ants? She's far more devoted to wisdom than I am, and she's kinder and more caring, and much more worthy than I ever was. O Ravennis, let Phaedra come back to us!

Narky finished his prayer and opened his eyes. If he was going to be a rearguard, he had best do some actual guarding. He went to the mouth of the cave and looked out to see if he could spot any more ants. He did not see any just now, but something else caught his eye: Thasa had gone. The filthy clansman had fled back homewards, useless runt that he was. He probably knew about the ants, and had led the islanders here anyway. Had this cave even belonged to a dragon? Or was it simply a trap?

A sudden noise made Narky look up. One of the giant ants had just entered the cave from above, and was crawling upside-down on the ceiling. For a moment, Narky hesitated. Would poking at this thing just make it angry?

Don't be ridiculous
, he told himself,
they're fighting a whole nest down there. The least you can do is to make it safe for them to come up.

Narky took a quick breath and lifted his spear high – and found to his dismay that it still didn't reach far enough. He knelt for a stone and threw it, but it only bounced off the ant's thick carapace and skittered to the ground. This was enough to irritate the ant, though. It searched left and right for its attacker, and not finding one on the ceiling, stopped there for a moment with antennae waving. Narky threw another stone. The ant craned its body toward the source of the projectiles, and fell suddenly to the ground. It bounced once and turned over, completely unharmed. Then it charged him.

Narky knelt and planted his spear on the ground the way Hearthman Tachil of the Gallant Ones had taught him. The ant was so
fast.
His spear's point was too low, and the ant ran over it toward him. Narky panicked and leapt back, though he knew the ant was faster than him. He nearly tripped over a knee-high rock, but managed not to fall as he backed around it. Oh, he was going to die. The ant was about to reach him, and then…

With a sudden spark of genius Narky leapt forward, kicking off the rock to sail over the ant's head. He landed on the other side and scrambled to retrieve his spear. The ant's vision was poor, but it had felt the tremors in the ground as he fell. It wheeled around almost immediately. Its mandibles clicked in irritation as it rushed him a second time, but this time Narky's aim was true. His spear's point found the mouth between the mandibles and the charging ant impaled itself, pushing farther and farther up the spear until Narky had to let go and leap back again for fear of losing his hands. The ant convulsed for a moment and then lay still.

Oh, Ravennis above!
Narky thought.
Do I really want that spear back?
Yet he needed his weapon. What if more came? He took hold of the spear's end with both hands and pulled. Nothing much happened. He put his foot on the ant's head and tried again. No, the angle wasn't right. The ant's body was too heavy to lift, and the spear would have to come out the same way it went in. There was nothing for it. Narky lay down on the ground, braced both legs against the ant's head, and pulled with all his might. The spear came out then, faster than expected so that the butt hit him in the upper chest. Oh, that would leave a bruise all right.

The whole spear was sticky with the ant's blue-gray blood, but Narky held it firmly anyway. Cleanliness could wait for a time when he was no longer in mortal danger. He went to stand once more in the mouth of the cave, gazing up and down the mountainside in search of more ants. Having survived his encounter with one of them, he felt vindicated in his decision not to join the others. He had not been cowardly at all, really, only prudent.

Some shouts from down below called him back into the cave. “She's down there!” Bandu was shouting. “She's alive! Oh, Phaedra!”

Narky rushed to the edge of the chasm and looked down to see Hunter pulling Phaedra out of one of the ant tunnels. Even from up here, Narky could tell that she was terribly battered. Hunter lifted her broken body and slung it over his shoulder. “Let's get out of here,” he said.

“I'll be right there,” Criton said, turning back toward the tunnels. He got down on his hands and knees with his head over one of the holes. The great burst of flame that followed turned the tunnel into a halo of light around his head. Even in the midst of Narky's worries about Phaedra, it was a beautiful sight to behold.

The jutting rock that Hunter called the ‘overhang' obscured most of the climb from Narky's vision. Now and then a flash of light from Criton illuminated the cavern walls, but the climbers remained hidden. Narky was forced to wait nervously at the top, watching the mouth of the cave for any more ants and listening for signs of trouble from down below. It was an agonizing wait, and Hunter's loud grunts were hardly reassuring. But then he felt a tug on the rope, and knew that the ordeal was almost over.

There was some discussion about how to get Phaedra safely over the last hurdle. The girl had apparently lost consciousness during their climb up, and now Hunter, Criton and Bandu set about devising a safe way to tie her to the rope without injuring her. When they were satisfied, Bandu came up to help Narky. Her face was worried. They pulled on the rope silently while Criton climbed beside Phaedra, ready to make adjustments to her fastenings if need be. His help was especially needed when Phaedra reached the overhang and Criton was able to partially lift her on his own to avoid scraping her against the rocks. Finally, they reached the top.

Phaedra looked dead. There was no better way to put it. Her whole body was broken and bloody, her hands torn, her ankle grotesquely swollen. But more than anything, it was her stench that made him sure they would lose her. Her smell sickened him.

He leaned closer to her anyway, to see if she was breathing. Yes, he could feel it, weak though it was. His heart nearly ceased its beating when Phaedra took a shuddering breath and then went still. One second, two, three, four, and Phaedra's breathing started again. Narky found that he had been holding his own breath, and he let it out slowly. They untied her as delicately as they could, and threw the end of the rope back down for Hunter.

When they were all together once more, they carefully transported Phaedra out of the cave. The sun had already gone down outside, and they lit new torches to guide their way through the twilight. How far would they have to go before they were no longer in danger from the ants' nest? Further than they could carry Phaedra, no doubt. They found a level spot to lay her down, and kept watches through the night.

During the second watch, Criton woke them up with a gout of flame that roasted an approaching ant. Narky sat terrified during his own turn, clutching his spear in one hand and a torch in the other, but luckily the rest of the night was uneventful.

He awoke the next morning to find Bandu eating the dead ant. She had somehow dismembered it and was cracking its legs with a knife and scooping the meat out with her fingers. Hunter and Criton looked sickened, but neither was brave enough to say anything about it. Narky had no such reservations.

“That's disgusting,” he said.

She regarded him disdainfully. “I eat, you starve.”

Phaedra did wake up once that day, with some coaxing. She did not speak, but did drink some water, and moaned whenever she moved.

“She can't walk like this,” Hunter said, “but we need to get out of the mountains. I'm going to go get the packhorse for her to ride.”

“Don't go yet,” said Narky. “It's still too steep up here for a horse to climb. We'll have to get Phaedra at least halfway down before a packhorse will do any good.”

It was a wonder they were able to move Phaedra at all, in her condition. Yet somehow with the help of the rope, their ingenuity, and a double portion of luck, they managed to get her most of the way down the mountain before the sun set that night, to a place the horse would be able to reach. As well as they managed it though, the climb still took a toll on Phaedra. She moaned often, but the worst was when they accidentally dropped her against a rock and she didn't react at all.

Narky hardly slept that night, for fear that he would wake up to find Phaedra dead. His dreams were full of wriggling ants, and of black birds circling in the sky.

Phaedra did not die that night, though neither did her situation improve. At dawn, they said goodbye to Hunter. The young warrior looked grimmer than ever in his soiled armor, and the heavy scales seemed for the first time like a burden to him rather than a second skin. When Bandu pressed the majority of the remaining food and water on him, he stood in hesitation.

“I can't take all this,” he said.

“Take it,” Bandu said. “You need strong.”

“But you'll need food too, while I'm away.”

“We eat,” she reassured him. “I can feed them. They eat with me.”

“Not ants, I hope,” Narky said.

But it was ants that Bandu had in mind, ants and crushed acorns and the furry little melon-like creatures that clambered about the rocks on their comically short legs. Narky had never even noticed them until Bandu brought back a pair of dead ones, but after that he began to see them everywhere. Their bodies were a dull gray color that blended in perfectly with the rocky mountainside, and they had a tendency to lie perfectly still for minutes at a time, with only their occasionally blinking eyes to show that they were alive. Narky had no complaint with this behavior. His complaint was with their taste.

Two days passed slowly while they waited for Hunter to return. Bandu spent much of that time foraging, while Narky and Criton spent it watching over Phaedra and arguing over whether they should do anything to help her heal. Criton insisted that they had to do something besides praying, but Narky was afraid of causing her more pain, especially if she ended up dying anyway. His experience with Four-foot still haunted him. In the end all they could agree to do was to clean her open wounds and keep giving her water. That could do her no harm, at least, though Narky knew it wasn't enough. Her skin was alarmingly hot to the touch.