SCCCCCREEEEEEEE!
A hunter’s scream, worryingly close, ricocheting from the archway to the left.
“Quick!” Arka skirted around the walls, avoiding the symbols burning on the floor. Kao hobbled after her, then Quina and Petrick, then Maya. Thurin beckoned Yaz on and she tried to follow, straining against the forbidding that lay written out before her. The symbols blazed as she defied them. The light became so fierce that it seemed a brilliant world waited beneath the stone and that the curves of the symbols were just gaps through which it shone. Wisps of pale fire started to dance above the lines. Each of the symbols shouted at Yaz, roaring, adding its voice to a wordless four-part harmony.
SCCCCCREEEEEEEEEEE!
Even louder this time, setting Yaz’s teeth buzzing in their sockets. In the distance the clatter of metal claws on stone.
Yaz came to a halt with her back pressed to the wall, seeking to distance herself from the source of her pain.
“What are you doing?” Thurin reached out toward her. She read the words from his lips, his face pale, dark eyes wide. “We need to run!”
“I . . .” She coughed and spat blood on the floor, her head about to split open. The symbols’ song filled her, ringing in her bones.
“Come on!”
Gathering the same determination with which she faced the wind as the long night closed in, Yaz forced herself on. Something had to break. For a moment it seemed it must be her. And then, with a last flash and flare, the symbols released their hold.
“This is all wrong,” Arka muttered to herself, starting on the steps. She glanced back into the room as if expecting the hunter to burst in any moment. “All wrong.”
They climbed at speed, held back only by Kao and his ankle. More symbols appeared along the walls of the stairway while Arka led the group up the square spiral of steps. Strings of text ignited as the drop-group passed them. More and more. Lines of symbols so small each could be covered with a finger, and so bright that they wrote themselves across Yaz’s furs as she passed, whispering to her all the while, their voices filled with reproach. She felt them burn on her skin, a searing that she thought must leave a mark. The others though showed no discomfort as symbols slid across them.
The stairs gave onto a large rectangular chamber with many exits. Rubble scattered the floor from old roof falls. Huge single symbols decorated the walls opposite and to either side, lighting the chamber. The lack of any lichen told Yaz immediately that these too were new.
Even as Arka led them in, more symbols appeared, not revealing themselves by growing brighter but scrolling down from above the ceiling or as strings of text running in through the doorways. Thurin and the rest looked wildly around, the script writing itself across their faces in light, flowing over their bodies. For a moment they reminded Yaz of the regulator and the complex burn scars all across his skin. When they reached her she gasped in pain at their fierce heat.
Behind them on the stairs a sudden crashing and thrashing, metal on stone, approaching fast, loud enough and close enough for Yaz to hear it over the cacophony of symbol song that none of the others seemed to notice.
“Run!” Arka shouted. In moments all of them were chasing her through a brightness that was almost blinding. Where the others ran straight paths, symbols of forbidding forced Yaz to twist and turn. More came, moving, shifting, almost as though they were herding her.
Without warning all the symbols vanished, leaving total darkness. Behind her Yaz heard the hunter take the last turn of the stairs, whirring and clanking, the angry pulse of its core-stone echoing in her head. She took two more steps blind then tumbled as the ground beneath her feet gave way. And for the second time in two days Yaz was dropped into empty space, screaming into the depths of a fall that no person should expect to survive.
14
GREEN. A CARPET of green. Innumerable green blades, like the swords of an army pointing at the sky. Yaz could find no sense of scale.