by Gustavo Bondoni
in Issue 139, August 2023
“How dare you?” the courtier sputtered as Hyar grabbed him and pressed a blade to his throat. He was dressed in gold thread and sported enough precious stones to decorate a good-sized tent.
“Be silent, or die,” I replied.
The storeroom, deep beneath the glorious spires and airy corridors of the green glass city above, overflowed with enough wine casks to keep an army drunk for a month. It smelled of the dirt our tunnel had disturbed.
Our prisoner didn’t seem like the kind who’d give up his life to shout about our presence there. Besides, anyone close enough to hear him—here beneath the city’s protective walls and magic—would not be willing to risk their lives for him. Servants didn’t always love their masters, especially not greedy masters who took bribes to meet with strangers.
“Bring him.”
The prisoner resisted, but Hyar’s hand stifled the noise. Curie took his other arm while I sang to the land.
The tunnel that had closed up behind us opened once more, and I led the way.
The dirt unpacked and became a dust-colored cloud whose particles danced around us. The sensation was akin to moving through water in which we could breathe.
I looked back to see if the magic was holding for the entire group. If it failed, my compatriots would die, crushed and suffocated in the belly of the earth.
All was well. The earth propelled us forward at fantastic speed, closing behind us as if we had never been there.
The courtier’s eyes widened and he screamed through Hyar’s hand. No matter; we were leagues from the city already. Such was the power of my magic, my curse.
“Let him speak,” I told Hyar.
“You… you’re a snake. A monster,” the courtier said.
“I am neither snake nor monster,” I replied. “I am a man just like you.”
“I know what my eyes see.”
“Your eyes see only what the magic shows them,” I replied.
“You are of the accursed.”
“I am of the land. You are the accursed, you who shelter behind walls of spells and pretend to live in fairy tale. Now be quiet. We’re nearly there, and I need to judge this precisely.”
I closed my eyes and visualized our exit from the tunnel. If I misjudged and hit a deep pool of water…
I shuddered to think of it. Let others deal with water. I would navigate the rock and earth, noble elements that only moved at my command.
We emerged into a cavern deep under a mountain. Home.
Torches lit the far side of the space, and we stood alone: people knew to avoid the Entrance Place.
I turned to the courtier, who looked around wide-eyed. “Welcome to your new home,” I told him. “This is where you’ll die. The only question is how soon that will be. Today? Or years hence?”
The man tried to stare me down, but his features crumbled within seconds. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“We’re keeping you alive because we need the information you have. If it were up to me, I’d kill every coward inside the green tower.”
“Bertone,” a loud voice said. “I would like to talk to you.”
We didn’t have leaders. Not Undermountain, not in any of the accursed strongholds. Each woman and man was free to act as they chose. But everyone deferred to Frua. She’d lived twice as long as the next oldest of the accursed, and knew how to keep herself—and by extension others—alive.
“I’ll be right there,” I told her. Then I turned to the Band. “Keep him safe until I return.”
Curie smirked. “If you return,” she said. “Now hurry up before Frua gets even more pissed at you.”
“She’s mad at all of us.”
“If that makes you feel any better…”
I hurried to where Frua waited at the top the stairs to the main cavern: a set of wide steps carved out of the stone. Her hands rested on her hips, and a stern gaze on her features. Despite her age, she didn’t flicker with the magic… she would outlast us all.
Wordlessly, Frua turned away and strode across the organically smooth floor of the cavern. She turned right at the entrance and entered the smaller chambers. Finally, she sat on an outcropping that we used as a bench for private conferences. The shadows of a nearby torch flickered across her face.
I sat beside her.
“Why are you doing this?” she asked.
“You know why. They deserve it.”
“It won’t bring her back.”
“I don’t want her back. I want them to suffer for not helping us.”
She sighed. “And how much do you think they can do?”
“I don’t know. I just know is that they are good enough at keeping their few hundred safe while we suffer out here.”
“They’re afraid,” Frua replied.
“More afraid than us?” I held up my hand. It flickered, changing my skin from its usual tan tone to the sandy, mottled tones of the Land Snake, my curse-animal.
Her expression turned sad, but she didn’t scold me for tapping the magic of the curse. “One is always more afraid of those things one doesn’t understand. We live with the curse every day, it’s part of our lives. Think, are you truly terrified, or are you resigned and looking to try to make things better for us?”
“Me?” I asked, incredulous that Frua, of all people, would be so callous. “I’m dead inside.”
She put her hand on my arm. “I don’t believe that.”
I stood and walked away. As a slave to the Land Snake, I was one of the people who could come and go from the caverns as I pleased. I wanted to run, to go far from there, find an empty place to abandon the courtier from the Green City and let him die on the sand, alone.
Instead, I trudged past the sleeping nooks and the granary caves until I arrived at the trails of the accursed. I removed a torch from a sconce and walked down the tunnel I knew so well, a thin tendril through the rock that emerged from the main body of the caverns. It was as if the Land-Cursed who’d created these trails wanted to keep them as far from the living as possible.
As if they wanted to forget what it meant to be cursed. I wasn’t ready for that.
The tiny chamber at the end of the tunnel-tendril was spherical, with the bottom half of the room filled with water that glowed with a blue light from within.
I placed my torch in an empty holder and stripped down to my underclothes. I waded in and shuddered: as a child of the Land-Curse, I hated water.
But I loved what was in the water more.
My intrusion disturbed the light. It darted this way and that, circled around me, too fast for the eye to see. I felt it brush my foot.
The contact reassured it—reassured her—that it was actually me, and my sister, the companion of my childhood, slowed down so I could see her.
She was the source of the light, a long, blue body, flat and so thin I could see through her. She was the Eel of Water, personified. Her curse had not been that of land.
“Hello, Yella,” I said. “I’m sorry it’s been so long.”
The Eel said nothing, just circled my feet, slowly, lovingly.
“I miss you,” I told her. “Nothing is the same without you. We… we grabbed one of them, Yella. We’ve actually got one of the bastards. He went for the bait, exactly the way you said he would.” I gathered my thoughts. “You always were the one who understood them best…” I cupped some water in my hand. “But you went out too often, didn’t you? That’s why the curse took you so quickly, isn’t it?”
The band of blue light said nothing.
“I know why you did it. You wanted to help us strike a blow. We’re all thankful. We love you.”
I stood there a while longer. The Eel that had been my sister circulated a couple more times and then lay quiescent.
I hoped that was why she’d done it, but I feared she immersed herself for the same reason I loved to tunnel through the earth: because it was the only time I felt complete.
***
“If you’re lying to us,” I told the courtier, “I’ll bury you again. This time I’ll put you completely underground and leave enough room for air to reach your mouth. You won’t suffocate. Maybe I’ll get one of the Water-cursed to give you water so you won’t die of thirst. It might be fun to see how long we can keep you alive.”
“I’m telling the truth. I swear on my mother’s ghost. Please let me out. I can hardly breathe.”
That was only to be expected, since, at my command, the earth had swallowed him as far as his neck.
“You’d better be, or you’ll be explaining your forswearing to your mother’s ghost in person.”
I put out my hand and motioned to the ground, which spit the courtier out like a bad piece of meat.
But I wasn’t looking at him, I was staring at my hand, golden and scaled. The Snake had taken possession without my noticing, without my permission. If I wasn’t careful, the magic of the curse would take me soon as well. I’d get my own little chamber, half-full of sand like Yella’s was half-full of water.
But not today. I turned to Curie. “You think you’re up to this?”
She nodded. She was the newest member of the Band, which made her want to prove herself. I had a hard time with it because she was in the place Yella occupied when we formed. But she was good.
“All right. Get close to me,” I said. The other four members of the Band: Curie, Hyar, Amma and Jun bunched close to me.
“What about me?” the courtier whined.
“Go forth and get to know the caverns. But I have to warn you: there aren’t any people to oppress here.”
“Is that what you think of us?” he replied. “Tell me, then: what did I ever do to you?”
“I won’t even dignify that with a response.”
I held out my hand, watched the scales form and the color change. I gathered power around me, feeling it grow strong enough to unleash the tunneling action.
“Bertone.”
The magic disappeared back into the Earth.
“What do you want, Frua?”
“I want you to think about this,” the old woman said.
“I’ve done nothing but think since…”
She nodded. “I know. Alone, out in the darkest tunnels. Or in the chambers of the Cursed. Yes, I’ve been watching you. You have thought. But have you thought the right thoughts?”
I bit back the first response that occurred to me. I took two deep breaths. “I have thought of many things.”
“I ask you only to think of one more. Would it change your plans too much to go tomorrow? I’d ask a boon: that you think of one particular thing tonight.”
“I can never deny you a boon. Even if it will make no difference in the final outcome,” I replied.
“I don’t ask you to promise me that. Just that you’ll think about whether she would want you to do what you’re about to do,” Frua said.
I nodded and she walked off.
“Well,” I said, turning to my friends, “you heard her. I’m to think on the error of my ways before we depart.” I grinned. “So I’ll see you here tomorrow, an hour after the breaking of fast.”
***
I ate a light breakfast the next day and reached the staging area early. Curie was the first to arrive.
“Ready?” I asked.
She nodded.
The rest of the Band arrived. Each of them made eye contact. I nodded to each of them once. None of them asked what they were all thinking.
“Get close together,” I told them.
We shot through the rock. My thoughts diffused to become nothing but direction and distance. Thousands of paces, tens of thousands, nearly a hundred thousand, flowed past in mere moments.
The land flowed through me and our group flowed through it. The Snake—me—writhed across the distance and every speck of dust, every block of mountain shared the sense of peace and permanence with me.
I yearned to join with it forever, to leave behind the angers and sadness that filled my waking hours and haunted my nights. I didn’t need a poet to tell me that a mountain felt no sorrow: the placid permanence and peace of the rock were a part of me.
The ground pushed us out, and I felt its care for us, the care with which it pushed us away, gently, allowing us to take our feet.
The Green City stood high upon its rocky base, the fortress built to keep people like that courtier separate from people like us.
“Now what?” Hyar asked.
“You heard the courtier. We wait. We wait until one watch after midnight. That’s when they open the water-gates. That’s when Curie can get us in. Make a fire, we’ll eat lunch.”
We gathered wood while Jun walked a few paces away and held out his arms, palms down. Unseen, unfelt by any but one of the Tree-Cursed, seeds became sprouts, became vines, became fruit. He stooped to pick them up and I had to tear my eyes away from his bark-like skin.
The Tree-Cursed were never entombed in small chambers. They were planted on the lower slopes of the mountain when they turned. And though they lived longer than the rest of us, they turned often because, for each Land-Cursed or Water-Cursed or Air-Cursed, there were a dozen Tree-Cursed. They were the opposite of the Beast-Cursed. Men like Hyar were truly rare: he was the only one of my generation. Only the Metal-Cursed were less frequent.
We ate the squashes and potatoes. We slept out in the open, within sight of enemies who would have preferred to see us dead, but were too cowardly to emerge from behind their magic. Curie sat beside me, and I wished I could think of something other than revenge. If that were possible, I would have held out my hand, called her over, shared my warmth.
But when I closed my eyes, I saw Yella transforming before my eyes. I saw dark magicians—in my mind they were black-bearded men—funneling the magic captured by the poisonous green walls into the source of our curse.
“Relax,” Curie said.
“I’ll relax when I hold the still-beating heart of the bastard responsible for the curse in my hand.”
“We don’t know they caused it. Even if they did, that was before the grandparents of the grandparents of the people living there were even born. Like the courtier said, they’re just scared.”
“I can’t believe that. Innocent people don’t lock themselves behind barriers that kill anyone who touches them.”
“No. They hide themselves behind barriers that keep them safe from a world they can’t survive in.” She put a hand on his arm. “You’re changing. Try to calm down.”
She was right. My arm was covered in scales. I took deep breaths and thought of Yella in her pool. When I saw the fingers of my hand again, I turned to Curie.
“At least I won’t have to suffer too much longer,” I said.
She looked away.
The afternoon gave way to night. My companions grew restless, but there was no way to hurry the moon.
Finally, the midnight watch arrived and passed. We walked to the river.
Curie led us confidently into the water. The river was deep in the central channel, and the current pushed slightly. Beneath my feet, several paces down, I could see the bottom of the river where a single fish swam, holding its position.
I took a deep breath, but I was still breathing in when Curie commanded the river to swallow us up.
I’d traveled by Water-Curse before, encircled by the glowing Curse-Eel, but I’d never enjoyed it. I’d also never trusted anyone other than Yella with my life this way. Earth and rock were natural, solid, noble. Water was slippery and treacherous. Traveling this way was unnatural.
I kept my feelings under control. After all, everyone who entered the mountain they called home had to travel with me. This time, it was my turn to trust another’s magic. I’d endure.
Besides, if I panicked and tried to escape, I would probably drown.
The water coursed through me, seeming to swell my body the same way it swelled a water-skin. I loathed the sensation.
Suddenly the water felt different, vaporous, airy, and I knew we were climbing the cliffside falls, the three-hundred pace waterfall that led to the cityside pool. Another waterfall, even taller, fell from the endless cliffs to feed the pool, but Curie told us that dropping down that fall was riskier than climbing this one.
I didn’t care. As long as we reached our objective, I would be satisfied.
The water became still. Though I couldn’t see in the dark of underwater night, I could sense the difference in the quality of the liquid around us. Where it had been diaphanous and full of furious motion, it was now weighty and placid. The pool.
“Are we in time?” I said.
The words sounded long and drawn out, distorted by the water.
Curie, visible as a flash of light orbiting us said nothing. Instead, she suddenly darted forward, pulling the rest in her wake.
Then, chaos. I lost the sense of being pushed along by magic and suddenly found it difficult to breathe. I could still manage it, but not easily. Every other breath seemed to let a few drops in.
I coughed to clear my throat and the circle Curie had formed exploded and I was swimming in ice-cold water. I wanted to scream but forced myself to keep my mouth closed and looked around desperately.
A light from above served as a beacon and I swam for it. I wasn’t a strong swimmer and the light looked too far away to reach, but I struck desperately. Two arm-strokes later, I broke the surface, coughing and spluttering.
The light hung on a roof high above my head.
To my right, a green crystal wall, descending slowly, banged into place. Curie’s head appeared next to me.
“I’m sorry,” she said.
Amma’s head broke the surface. Hyar followed a moment later.
“Where’s Jun?” I asked.
Curie cried. “I’m sorry.”
“Where’s Jun?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t bring us all in… they lowered the wall. My magic broke up.”
“But is he outside, in the pool? Is he alive?”
“I don’t know. I lost him,” Curie replied. “I just don’t know.”
Hyar was staring past us. “Guys…”
Two women and an old man were sitting on the floor beside the indoor pool we’d reached. They fled when they saw us, one of the women screaming that curse demons were among them, and that they were all doomed.
“We need to get out of here,” Amma said.
“But Jun…” I began.
“He’s not here. We are. We need to move.”
We swam to the edge of the pool and pulled ourselves onto the floor the inhabitants of the green city had been lying on. They’d abandoned buckets and yokes that would allow them each to hang four buckets from their shoulders.
“We’re inside,” I said. “This is where they get the city’s water. Curie, you did it.”
She nodded glumly. “I wasn’t expecting them to close the green glass on us.”
“None of us were. We’ll need to talk to our informer when we get back.”
“If we get back,” Hyar said. “They know we’re here now.”
“Only if the servants tell the guards. And if the guards believe them. If we get out of here, it might make it harder for them to convince anyone.”
As we sloshed down the only exit from the room other than the one the servants had taken, I realized we were leaving a trail of wet footprints and drops that even the most idiotic soldier could track.
“We need to run,” I said.
The corridor ended at a flight of stairs leading up, and we took the steps two at a time. The stairs ended at a corridor illuminated in white light, with blue and yellow tiles on the floor and light grey walls. Hyar, in the lead, turned right, and we all followed.
Then the corridor turned left. I glanced at an open door as we passed, and I realized the hallway was going around a large empty room full of rough-hewn tables and chairs. Even in the darkness, I could tell that there was no finery present, just badly-carved furniture. A Tree-Cursed child, just coming into his powers, could create something much better in minutes.
Of course, no one in the Green City would ever touch something carved by one of us. They would rather sit on the floor.
We ran up another flight of stairs. Hyar stopped at a massive door.
“We should be far enough away now,” he said. “We’ve been running all this way and we saw no one after those three in the pool.”
I turned to Amma. “Are you all right?”
She nodded. “I just… Did you see how they ran? The servants?”
“They know that we’re here to bring justice,” I replied. “They do well to run.”
“They ran like we were monsters. I don’t think they were afraid of what we came to do. They were afraid of what we are,” Amma said.
“Enemies,” I replied. “I’d be afraid of a raiding party from the city, too.”
She didn’t look convinced, and I recalled what Frua had said, that the city-dwellers weren’t truly evil, just too frightened to reason with. “We need to keep moving,” I said. “Up.”
The door opened into in a large room, more ornate than the food hall below, but not quite what I expected from the ornate exterior. Benches and desks occupied the space.
I ran my finger over the nearest flat surface and it came away covered in a layer of dust.
Hyar closed the door behind us.
Soft white light-globes hung high in the ceiling, among the rafters, creating a perpetual half-light. We crossed the chamber and reached a ladder that leaned against the wall. Wooden shelves lined the room, filled to overflowing with bound tomes.
The only other exit I could see was a wooden door nestled among the shelves.
“Let’s try that one,” I suggested.
“It’s probably just a storage closet,” Hyar replied.
“If so, it might be a good idea to hide in there. They might have been able to follow us.”
Hyar laughed. “In this dust? They can follow our footsteps to the end of the world.”
“Let’s hope the door goes somewhere, then.”
I let Hyar take the lead and, as I was about to follow him up, Amma approached Curie.
“You all right?” she said.
“I guess so,” Curie replied. “It’s just…”
“Just what?”
“What if Frua’s right? What if all of this is a mistake? What if these people don’t mean us any harm?”
Amma took a while to answer, then she said softly. “We’ll be able to tell. If that’s the case, we’ll apologize and leave. We’ve done them no harm.”
“And Jun? What if he’s…” she couldn’t bring herself to voice her fears. “Will it all have been for nothing?”
“Don’t think those things. Whatever happens here, it won’t have been for nothing. At the very least we will find out why the people of the Green City have locked themselves in.”
By the time they stopped speaking and headed up the ladder, I was on the balcony.
The door was locked from within, or at least I saw no way to open it from this side.
Hyar looked my way. I nodded, and he pulled out a thick knife. He wedged it between door and frame. He levered. A dry crack echoed through the room, and the door gave the width of a finger.
A second push on the hilt splintered the door near the lock and it swung open with a creak to raise the dead.
Beyond, a passage disappeared into darkness.
“Does anyone have a dry torch?” I asked.
Amma rummaged within her pack and removed a tightly-wrapped oilskin bag from which she extracted two torches. “The pitch would burn even wet,” she said. “It’s the kindling that needs to stay dry. Here.”
We entered the passage, closing the door behind us. It wouldn’t stand close scrutiny, but we’d left so many tracks on the floor that it made no difference.
The tunnel beyond was even more dust-covered than the library. It followed the contour of the room for thirty paces before reaching a tight spiral staircase.
I laid a hand on the stone of the stair, but this stone, within the magic blanket of the Green city, was inert. If I tried to sing to it, it wouldn’t respond, wouldn’t shape itself to my commands, wouldn’t flow with me. I shuddered. This was what stone felt like to those without the Snake-Curse.
“Up,” I said.
We climbed, around and around, endlessly circling ourselves until the breath came ragged in our throats. None of us was accustomed to transporting ourselves this way. Our magic could almost always help us to avoid long climbs and difficult passages, whether it be by manipulating the land, the vegetation, the animals or the very air.
“How much longer?” I asked Hyar, who led.
“I can’t see a thing. Just more steps.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s rest.”
“Where do you think this goes?” Amma asked.
I’d been thinking as we climbed. “This is the private access tunnel for some high official. Maybe he needed to check records when the workers below weren’t present, in secret.”
“He must really have enjoyed climbing stairs.”
“Perhaps he had no choice,” I said.
We resumed our climb. When we finally reached the top, I thought my lungs would burst. Amma and Curie panted alongside me, our hands on our knees. Hyar looked like he could climb back down and up again without ill effects. He was barely breathing hard.
We’d arrived at another dusty room. This one wasn’t full of books, but of stairwells. Seven different spiral staircases that came from deep in the crystal city ended in this room.
Amma studied a pair of them. “I think they descend at an angle. So these stairways, by the time they reach the bottom of the city, are widely separated.”
Hyar didn’t look convinced. “Why not just use one staircase and then connect everything with tunnels?”
Amma rolled her eyes. “Because that would only work if they ended at the same floor.”
I laughed. Hyar wasn’t just dumb muscle, but he wasn’t in Amma’s league when it came to understanding the world around us. He gave me a black look, but then tempered it with a shrug and a chuckle. “So where next, o geniuses?”
“Anywhere but down,” I said.
“There’s a door,” Amma replied.
“Where?” The walls appeared to be unbroken white.
Amma pointed up. A circular hole in the roof with metal rungs embedded in the wall ended at a trapdoor above.
“Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide this room.”
“Give me a leg up,” I told Hyar.
This time it was his turn to laugh at me. “That’s backward,” he said. “I’m the biggest, so I should go first to check if I can get the door open. If it is, you’ll lift the women and I’ll pull them up. Finally, you’ll jump and grab my hand and I’ll pull you up, too.”
“Can you do that?”
“A little guy like you? Of course.”
I cupped my hands together and boosted him into the hole. He quickly climbed up and pushed the wooden door open with a loud grunt. “Got it,” he whispered down the hole, as if his earlier sound hadn’t been loud enough to be heard all over the city.
I did what he’d suggested. Curie and Amma went first. When it was my turn, he hung from the bottom rung with both hands down and I jumped up to reach him, then clambered up his back.
The trapdoor opened into an empty bedroom.
“This isn’t a servant’s quarters,” Hyar said.
His observation was superfluous. No one could ever have mistaken that place for anything but the quarters of an absolute ruler.
Tapestries adorned every wall, gold thread present in every weave. The furniture was well-built but delicately carved and decorated. At a glance, I could tell that it combined beauty with durability.
Carpets, soft and richly-colored in reds and golds, covered the floor.
“Too bad we didn’t catch the owner at home. I have a feeling that, if we grabbed this guy, we’d have achieved everything we came here to do,” I said.
“But he’s not here,” Amma replied. “And no wonder—there are no windows.” She shuddered. “So let’s go find someone.”
The chamber door opened into a sitting room and an antechamber. Each echoed the opulence of the bedroom.
Finally, we emerged into a hall that served as an ascending ramp.
“It’s the middle of the night,” I said. “Why isn’t the guy in his room?”
Hyar chuckled. “Maybe his in a different room. A lady’s room.”
I rolled my eyes. Hyar’s thoughts were never far from the women in his life.
The hall turned a corner and we stopped in our tracks.
A girl, no more than five years old, with shoulder-length brown hair sat in the center of the passage playing with a red ball, deep in concentration as the slope of the carpeted floor pulled the ball downward. She’d lift it, watch it roll down and then stop it, before repeating the process. Only when we got to withing arm’s length of her did she look up.
Big brown eyes studied us. “I don’t know you,” she declared. “You’re not soldiers. You’re not servants.”
Amma knelt next to her. “We’re from outside.”
The girl frowned. “From the lower levels? I don’t think you should be up here.”
“No. From outside. Outside the green walls.”
The girl’s eyes widened and she crawled backwards, keeping her gaze locked on them. “The monsters? Please don’t hurt me? I don’t want you to kill me… please!”
“We won’t—”
But the girl had already turned around and was running away, screaming, down the hall.
“They’re so scared,” Curie said. “They think we’re monsters. That’s all. And they’re dying. Can’t you see this whole place is empty?”
“It’s empty because everyone is asleep,” I replied.
“No. You can tell. This is a dying city.”
“Good riddance,” I said.
Amma spoke up. “You don’t mean that. Think for a second. Locked up here for generations… what can they know of us? All they probably remember is that we have strange magic, and that they can’t go out there without suffering the curse.”
“I think we should leave,” Curie said.
“And I think we should have this conversation later,” Hyar interjected. “Right now, we need to run after that child before she can call the guards. She was very clear that she knows the soldiers by sight.”
We ran after her—up the slope around four corners—and burst up a final set of stairs at the end.
I gasped.
The steps deposited us at the very top of the Green City. The glass dome above us was of a green we’d never seen from the outside: dark, bluish… even more evil than how it looked from the exterior. The transparent ceiling, twenty paces above our heads, revealed green-tinged stars and a muddy dawn breaking on the eastern horizon.
The room beneath the dome was simple. The stairs we’d just climbed were located on one side. The rest of the circular room was paved with polished white flagstones and empty save for a raised dais on the side opposite the stairs, which held a throne. Stone tables surrounded the empty area, located right where the walls met the glass.
I paid only cursory attention to any of that. My eyes and those of my companions were locked upon the pillar of light in the center of the room.
The fire was of the purest red I’d ever seen. It was somehow the perfect opposite of the evil green of the glass dome. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d taken a half-step towards it. All I wanted was to immerse my body in the light, to lose myself in the glory of the red. It looked vibrant, like life itself.
I stumbled. A channel at my feet cut through the stone, white against white and difficult to make out. My foot had stepped onto the edge at an awkward angle and my ankle had been twisted.
It broke the spell. I looked around to see my friends walking towards the column. Curie had her hand out, and a beatific look on her face.
“Stop,” I said.
They kept walking, so I ran up to Hyar and tackled him.
“What are you doing?” he roared, throwing me off. Then he looked around. “What was I doing?” he said.
“I don’t know, but help me with Amma and Curie.”
We arrested the women’s progress, more gently than I had with my old friend. When they stopped trying to reach the pillar, I spoke: “What is that?”
To my surprise, it was Curie who replied. “I’ve never felt anything so alive,” she said. “It’s like everything that I’ve ever missed in the world is in there. I just want to be a part of it.”
“Where’s the girl?” Hyar said.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“She had to come this way. There were no doors in the passageway. There are no doors here that I can see. Where is she?”
Amma was kneeling down. “And why are there blood channels cut into the floor,” she said.
“What?” Hyar asked.
“Blood channels. Look. These cuts in the stone run to those altars, then slightly downhill over the rock and…” she pointed, “into the hole where the column disappears.” She looked around and her face crumpled. “This place is built to harness the energy of life. It’s probably what runs the green shield. And the power… is from people sacrificed on those altars.”
“Well, they don’t seem to be doing that now… besides, they would run out of people soon enough.”
“They don’t need people,” Amma said. She pointed at the pillar again. “They’re pulling the very life essence out of the world itself. That’s what that light is.”
“Ah,” a small voice said, “very intelligent. But blood is good, too. It’s actually better than the weak remains of the life force of the world you animals inhabit.”
The little girl reappeared. She’d been standing behind the throne. It was her voice we’d heard.
And it was that voice that suddenly grew to fill the entire dome. It was somehow still a little girl’s voice, but resonant. My feet buzzed with the vibration of the flagstones below. “And now, we’ll add your blood to the collection. It’s so much better than milking the thin, cold air like we’ve been doing.”
Hyar laughed. “It will take a lot more than one little girl to defeat the Band.”
The girl cocked her head. “No. I think I could defeat you myself. But I don’t have to. I have soldiers.”
There must have been a trapdoor behind the throne. A dozen armed men poured into the room. They wore silver-green armor and metal helms.
“Is that all you’ve got?” Hyar roared.
“It’s more than I’ll need.” The girl sat on the throne to watch the fight.
“Any ideas?” I asked Hyar.
Hyar pulled a short sword out of his pack. “We’ll kill these guys and then deal with the girl.”
I had a short club that Jun had magicked into growing sharp, solid knobs all over its surface. It was designed to protect me against animals and bandits out in the country, but I didn’t think I could do much with it now except maybe scratch the armor. “That’s the worst idea you’ve ever had,” I said.
“Do you have a better one?”
I didn’t. Neither did Curie, by the look of it. She stood beside us, her thin rapier held in front of her. I respected that blade: despite its slenderness, you had to be very strong to wield it. Like my club, however it would be unsuitable against an armored man. These guys had halberds of all things.
“Sometimes you three embarrass me,” Amma said. “We can’t win this.”
“We don’t have much choice but to try,” Hyar said.
“It’s not like our magic works in here,” I chimed in. “The green walls don’t let it in.”
The soldiers advanced on us and I focused on them. The first to reach us, braver or more foolhardy than the rest, lunged at Hyar with his halberd. Hyar stepped aside—for such a big man, he was quite light on his feet—grabbed the shaft of the halberd with his left hand and pulled the soldier to him. Then he slapped the man’s helmet with his sword quite hard. The soldier fell back, his weapon clattering to the floor.
“You should have kept that,” I told Hyar.
“Don’t know how to use one,” he grunted as he caught another blade against his sword.
Now I was engaged. Two men advanced on me, and though Hyar might take a couple with him, I had no illusions about my own capabilities. I’d dodge as long as I could, but eventually, I’d either be skewered by a sharp tip or cut in half by one of the axe blades.
I jumped out of the way.
A metallic ring sounded in my ear and I glanced up to see Curie staring at her blade… or what used to be her blade. Only half of it remained. I dove in her direction.
The soldier nearest her swung his halberd in a wide arc. I flattened myself to the floor and the axe-head whistled over me, only to impact Curie with a sickening, meaty thunk.
She fell to the floor, hand clutching her gut. The halberd was in so deep the soldier couldn’t pull it away.
“No!” someone screamed. I couldn’t tell if it was my voice or Amma’s.
Hyar turned to see what had happened and two men stepped towards him. I shouted a warning–
And suddenly a gust of wind stronger than anything I’d ever experienced, even in the middle of the howling desert, knocked everyone down. The soldiers collapsed. Several fell in a heap. Helmets and halberds rolled to the ground and accumulated against the green glass barrier.
Only Curie and I, already on the floor, were relatively unaffected.
I lifted my head against the screaming air and looked back the way it came. Amma stood at the red pillar. She’d put one hand into the flow and was using the other to direct the storm. Her form was that of a bright yellow bird, the Bird-Curse of the air, arms switching to wings and back as I watched.
Then, the bird form suddenly stayed, not fluctuating like before.
The wind stopped.
“Amma!” I yelled.
But I couldn’t go to her. Not yet. Hyar had weathered the wind better than the rest of us, and was already on his feet, stabbing the enemy soldiers as they tried to get untangled. He was coldly efficient, finding holes in their armor through which to thread his blade and suck out their lives.
I waded in and bashed any unprotected head. I hit them with everything I had, each crack of my club against a skull a tiny piece of vengeance for Curie’s spilled blood.
The little girl laughed. “Ah,” she said as the floor vibrated below me. “I never thought that I’d be adding so much blood today. Good.”
She stood and raised her arms.
A green glass stone the size of my head formed and shot across the room, catching Hyar in the side. He spun across the cobbles and landed with a hollow sound. He tried to get up but, before he could make it to his feet, he collapsed with a groan.
I threw myself to the floor as the next green missile missed my head by a hand’s-breadth. The stone shattered into a million shards of emerald.
I got back on my feet and ran, zigzagging to where Amma had fallen. From a distance, I saw that she was slowly turning human again. Too slowly. She wouldn’t survive the curse very long after this.
I reached her side just as the little girl got a bead on me. A ball of green glass hit me in the back of the knee and sent me to the ground. I landed beside Amma.
“Finish this,” she croaked.
I tried to crawl. My knee couldn’t hold, so I rolled twice.
The girl thought I was down and she was walking to inspect Hyar. By the time she raised her eyes in my direction and began to raise her hand, my own hand was in the red pillar.
For the first time since we’d entered the city, I could feel the connection to the world around me. This was the pure, distilled essence of the life outside, its magic and also its price, the curse that eventually took us all.
I closed my eyes and commanded the stone.
The polished white flagstones buckled below me. They resisted my commands. I shouted, not words but simply incoherent sounds as I strained to get the rock to move.
The girl fixed her eyes on me and gave me a snarl that made me realize that this was no young innocent. A thousand years of evil looked out at me from that tiny body, and I knew that she was the one who’d built the walls of green, long before my grandparents’ grandparents were born.
She pointed a hand towards me.
Something snapped. Whether within me or in the stone, I don’t know, but the flooring moved.
My first command to the stone was to crush the witch arrayed against us. The white rectangles moved as a wave and pushed her back. Green lightning shot from her hands, but it missed as he was thrown from her feet. The wave advanced until it reached the green wall.
Even though I knew what she was, I couldn’t bring myself to crush the innocent-seeming creature between the proverbial rock and hard place.
“Stop,” I whispered wearily, lowering my hand.
Instead of stopping, the stone accelerated. Now that it was free, it seemed to have no intention of holding back. As if it knew who’d been responsible for cutting it off from the rest of the world, it surged forward.
The wall of white stone slammed into the green wall. The glass exploded outward.
All thoughts of the witch flew from my mind. She’d been crushed to a pulp, but we now had even bigger problems.
Cracks ran through the green glass dome above us. It wouldn’t last long.
I ran to where Curie lay. She was still breathing, still bleeding. “Help me,” I told Hyar.
We carried her to a spot beside the red pillar. The glass overhead cracked with a sound like thunder.
I reached into the pillar. I would need the incredible power of the concentrated life force to create a defense against the crushing glass.
The pillar flickered and died. The witch must have been powering it somehow. It was proof that she was dead… but it would be the cause of our death, too.
Boulder-sized pieces of dome began to rain down around us.
I tried to tunnel into the floor, using this rock as I’d used the rock of the mountains to transport us from one place to another so often, but I couldn’t seem to attain my magic. Without the red flow, the glass was powerful enough to block everything. And when the glass fell, it would fall onto our heads. The very thing I needed to reach my magic was the thing that would kill us.
The dome shattered. The entire roof came towards us.
And the floor finally obeyed, swallowing us.
Then, it was just a question of riding the collapse, safely cocooned in the rock that fell with the rest of the structure.
Once the rubble subsided, I took us to the surface. We emerged into bright sunshine at the top of a mound of tortured and broken stone. The waterfall that had eternally fed the pool beside the city now fell a hundred paces to our right.
Amma spoke first. “We need to take Curie to the water.”
We did, Hyar insisted on putting her on his back and carrying her himself. I wondered if there had ever been something between them, too, something he didn’t dare express because she was so obviously pursuing me. And I felt even guiltier. Not because I never allowed her to get close, but because I never cut the cord, never allowed her to go free. I thought she would be able to wander after I turned to Snake, as I inevitably had to since I was using so much magic.
He knelt beside the frothing, churning mud where the colossal waterfall from the cliffs above now landed, and placed her in the newly-forming pool.
Curie shuddered once and turned. Her bleeding, broken body became a beautiful, hale eel of light.
I knew we’d both lost her forever.
***
“I came to say goodbye.”
The water in Yella’s pool was still cold and clammy against my skin, and I still hated it. But she swam around my legs, and that was better than talking to her from the shore. She never reacted unless I came into the pool with her.
“Hyar is spending most of his time in Curie’s pool. Amma is a bird most of the time. We never did find Jun.”
The light eel in the water looked up at me as if listening intently, but I knew better. She’d be flitting around again in seconds.
“And me? Well, I don’t know whether we’ve succeeded or failed. Without the life force flowing into the green city, our own magic has gotten stronger, and I think the people seem to be more resistant to the curse inside it. They’re beginning to travel, to range outside the mountain, and they’re returning to tell the tale without turning into their curse forms. Even the weak, who never managed it before.
“But the curse isn’t gone, and it’s too late for me. The snake… the snake is too strong. I can’t fight him for control anymore.”
I shook my head.
“That’s not true. The truth is that I don’t want to fight him anymore. Why would I? You’re gone. So is Curie. And I know Hyar blames me for her. Better to let the spirit of my magic live free.
“I’ve asked Frua to build me a nice sandy niche where the snake can live out its life. I don’t know what that will be like.
“But I think I’ll miss you.
“Goodbye.”
©August 2023, Gustavo Bondoni
Gustavo Bondoni is an Argentine novelist and short story writer who writes primarily in English. He has published several novels and two short story collections. He has over two hundred short stories published in fourteen countries. They have been translated into seven languages. His writing has appeared in Pearson’s Texas STAAR English Test cycle, The New York Review of Science Fiction, Perihelion SF, The Best of Every Day Fiction and many others. He placed second in the 2019 Been Memorial Contest and received a Judges Commendation in The James White Award. His work has appeared previously in Swords & Sorcery. His website is www.gustavobondoni.com.