to trust you, you might want to stop lying and betraying people in front of me.”
Rift twitched, watched him uncertainly, then turned to lead the way down the ramp.
Moon couldn’t trust what Rift told him and he couldn’t trust Esom and Karsis, but with all three together, he might be able to get something close to the truth out of them. Though if Esom had really concealed his power from Ardan all this time, he was a better liar than Moon would have thought.
Running footsteps from somewhere far up the passage suggested that Ardan’s men had found the panel and opened it. They didn’t have much time.
Two more spirals down, and the ramp ended in a low-ceilinged chamber, sparsely lit with the green mold, with a large round hole in the center of the floor. Moon stepped to the edge. The shaft plunged more than a hundred paces down, the bottom lost in the dim greenish light. The wind sound came from somewhere below, and the smell was horrific.
“Down there,” Rift said. He glanced worriedly back up the ramp. “We need to hurry.”
Esom and Karsis exchanged an appalled look. Wonderful, Moon thought, privately agreeing with them. To Rift he said, “You take her, I’ll take—”
“No,” Esom interrupted. He told Moon, “You take Karsis.”
It was an interesting point, that Esom felt his sister was safer with Moon, another Raksura and a stranger, than Rift. In Raksuran, Moon said to Rift, “I want them both alive. Drop him, and I’ll gut you.”
Rift hissed in exasperation. “I won’t. I told you, I want to help you.”
Moon caught Karsis around the waist and jumped down into the shaft to catch the edge one-handed. She made a noise like a short shriek and grabbed his shoulders. His claws hooked on a gap in the mortar, Moon said, “Put your arms around my neck and hold on. Watch the spines, they’re sharp.”
“Yes, I see.” Karsis wound her arms around his neck, holding on tightly. Moon planted his feet on the wall and pushed off, falling to catch hold of another gap further down. Karsis’ shriek was closer to a strangled yelp that time. “Sorry,” she gasped.
Moon glanced up, saw that Rift had Esom and hung from the upper ledge. Moon cautiously let go of Karsis, made certain she had a firm hold on him, and began to climb down the wall.
Keeping his voice low, Moon said, “Tell me about Rift.”
She whispered, “We didn’t know what he was, at first. He came on the voyage to the forest coast with Ardan and his other men. Ardan said Rift would be our guide. He didn’t reveal himself until Ardan needed his help to force us to keep going inland.” She hesitated, then added, “We thought he was one of a kind, a…”
“Monster,” Moon finished for her.
“Yes, until we reached the tree and saw the artwork. It looked as if it had been abandoned for ages. We didn’t— And even Ardan and Rift didn’t think anyone lived there anymore.”
“It wasn’t abandoned, just… waiting.” The last thing he wanted at the moment was an apology. “Where is Rift from?”
“He’s never said.” She gasped as he had to drop for the next handhold, but recovered quickly. “Is it important?”
Moon couldn’t answer that right now either. He wanted Rift to be from a rival court, a place hostile to Indigo Cloud. He wanted him to be in the power of the Fell. “Why didn’t you mention that Ardan had a pet Raksura?”
“Ardan has six members of our crew locked up somewhere in the tower. He said if we spoke about Rift to anyone he’d order them killed. We know he’s serious. Five of our crew tried to escape in the forest, and he had them executed. He let Rift kill three of his own men when we were at the tree.”
That explained the bones left behind in the root passage. “What for?”
“Rift caught the men destroying some of the wall carvings, trying to take the inset gems.”
Moon snarled under his breath, incredulous. “What?” Karsis asked nervously.
“He showed Ardan how to take the seed; that’s killing the tree. Those carvings were all going to rot away with the rest of the tree without it.” If Rift knew where to find the seed in its hidden cradle in the colony tree, then he had to know what it was, what it meant to cut it out.
“I see,” Karsis muttered. “Or, I don’t see. I don’t understand his thinking.”
That makes two of us. The stench