Faerie Lord

Seventy-Nine

Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn – the catsite was wearing off! Blue couldn’t believe it. Of all the foul luck. That creature, that clown, that disguised charno person had snatched her filament and disappeared, leaving her to find her way out of the maze of passages unaided. She might have managed it too – she had a good sense of direction and a fine visual memory – but without the catsite in her system she was blind. Already her eyesight was fading. Where once she could see for yards along the rocky corridor, now only a few steps ahead were visible. Beyond that everything faded into a thickening fog.

Dare she take more catsite?

Fortunately the creature had left her backpack. She rummaged in it now, found the catsite and felt her heart sink. The remaining crystals had clumped together and were in the process of fusing. Catsite did that sometimes if you failed to separate out the crystal structures in advance, which – dammit – she hadn’t. She could break off a portion – she could still do that – but not a small portion. All the fused crystals were far larger than the originals. What it meant was she would have to take a massive second dose… or no dose at all.

Blue forced herself to stay calm. There was a good side and a bad side. The good side was that a massive dose of catsite would last a very long time, probably far longer than she’d need to explore these passages, rescue Henry if he was here, and make her escape. The bad side was a massive dose of catsite would almost certainly kill her.

After a long moment she decided to see how far she could get with the remains of the catsite in her system. No sense risking any more until she absolutely had to. After all, she could still see, if poorly, and she had no way of knowing how long it would be before the catsite cleared her system completely. Enough of it might hang around to let her do what she needed to do.

An hour later, Blue knew it wasn’t enough. She was on her knees in a narrow passageway, near blind now, inching forward more by touch than sight and very much aware she was completely lost. For a moment she experienced a massive sense of desolation. Did it matter if she took more catsite? Even with full vision again she would still be lost. When the creature stole her filament, he took away all hope of orientation. How could she hope to find Henry? How could she hope to rescue him? And if, miraculously, she did, how could they hope to find their way out?

The moment passed and something of her old self-confidence reasserted itself. She was no worse off now than she’d expected to be. If she risked another dose of catsite, there was every chance of doing what she’d set out to do.

She was reaching for the crystals when she saw a pinpoint of light ahead.

It was too good to be true. If there really was a light, it had to be another patch of the luminous fungus she’d seen earlier. But there was no greenish hue. The light was clean and clear, like sunlight. She began to crawl cautiously towards it. Minutes later she knew for certain this was no fungus patch. Minutes more and she was able to stand upright, able to move forward without reliance on the fading catsite. She began to run. She knew she should exercise more caution, but the light was a beacon now; her heart was pumping. This might even be a breakthrough to the surface, a way out, a means of starting again.

Blue ran from the passageway into a vast subterranean cavern. It was well lit, but not from any surface sun – the light was pouring from an opening into a second, smaller chamber. It was too bright to be sunlight, although where it came from she had no idea. There was a heady smell of magic in the air. She could have sworn it was the potent stench of summoning.

She stopped, confused. The floor of the cavern looked a little like an angry ocean, a grey turbulence with flecks of green and blue and white. She could make no sense at all of what she was seeing; then something moved and the scene resolved itself abruptly. The cavern was filled with the blue-green coils of a massive serpent, a creature so huge it could never have been the product of the natural world. The head that slowly turned to gaze at her was larger than a peasant’s cottage. Seated between the serpent’s tree-trunk horns was the clown who’d tracked her earlier. A small loop of filament dangled from his fingers.

He smiled at her brightly. ‘What kept you?’ he asked.