Shadow Queen - By Deborah Kalin Page 0,78

ground, but it tore in furrows, affording no purchase.

‘Hello, little queen,’ the golem said, with a grin made hideous by broken teeth.

‘Clay.’ Even as I said it, I knew beseeching him would prove useless. Still, I had to try. ‘Clay, you can’t kill me. Look!’ I swept my hair from my forehead, exposing the marks we both bore. ‘We’re the same!’

He stopped, and raised his free hand to paw at his forehead. I wondered whether he felt the same buzz as me – like lightning trapped beneath the surface of his skin. What skin does a man of clay have? My eyes dropped to the wound Roshi had carved in his arm, still open and showing a glimpse of his worm-veins.

Clay met my eyes again, searching for something. I lay still, battling my terror, the ground thrusting into one side of me and Clay bearing down on the other.

‘We’re the same,’ he said at last.

A sob lodged, sharp and jagged, in my throat.

‘We cannot disobey,’ he continued, extinguishing the breath in my lungs.

‘Clay, no –’

Leaning on one elbow, the other hand clamping ever higher up my body, he drew me closer.

‘You didn’t wait for me, little queen,’ he crooned. ‘But I found you anyway. We cannot disobey.’

Broken grass stems pricked the bare flesh of my neck and wrists as the sun glared down, releasing the scents of blood and dirt. Small dark sods dripped from Clay’s torn lip. A worm forced its blind head out of the wound, waving in the air as it twisted further out before dropping, cold and clinging, onto my throat.

Still crooning, Clay wrapped his hands around my neck and squeezed. The world brightened to a painful glare, brimstone orange hues leaping across the pale sky, turning Clay as dark as a patch of night. Familiar and hypnotic, the twisting sensation of an oncoming vision gripped me.

The earth throbbed beneath me, yielding its secrets – the soft places where the crust shielded rich, crumbling soil; the fire buried deep under the land like a sun, calling to its twin arcing across the uncertain sky.

It was the simplest thing I had ever done to close my eyes and imagine the crust breaking, the earth collapsing beneath him like water …

A thud ripped Clay’s weight off me. When I opened my eyes, Sepp stood over me holding a thick branch in both hands. Discarding it, he pulled me to my feet. Clay was clutching at his head, a dark stain visible beneath his broad fingers. His legs had vanished up to his knees in the earth, which was raw and bubbled, as if it had been boiled. Clay started digging, his great hands scraping out great clods of dirt.

I stumbled as cold crept through me and the world snapped back to its normal hue, the sky a sweep of pale blue gone to white at the horizon, the broken grasses a rotting yellow.

Sepp on one side and Roshi on the other, we limped towards the river. Roshi’s ankle hurt, and I hunched around the pain of my broken rib. Every time I looked back, Clay was handfuls closer to freedom.

The river ran bright and sharp, cutting through the summer-grass scent of the plains. ‘Here,’ said Sepp, pointing to a rope staked between the banks of the river. Beneath the rope’s slack span, the water ran fast and troubled, throwing off glints in every direction. A ford, of sorts.

We plunged into the water which rose above our knees, the rocks of the ford slick and treacherous beneath the river’s pull. The force of the water shoved us against the rope, threatening to pull us beneath and past. My arms burned as I strained to keep my feet. Two slow, wrenching paces out from the bank, the water rose to my neck, and only the rope kept me anchored. The water’s icy touch washed the sensation from my muscles and sapped my strength.

A spume of dirt swirled downstream as we struggled into the river’s centre.

‘Little queen!’ came Clay’s angry cry.

‘He’s free,’ Roshi gasped.

The rocks pitched sideways beneath me, the rope burning my hands as I scrabbled back to stand against the water’s pull.

One step at a time, we pushed onwards, pulling ourselves along the rope until the water sank from our necks to our waists, then to our knees. Gasping, we burst onto the bank one by one. I stumbled and fell to the ground, unable to continue.

The pine trees were close enough for me to see the cones scattered