Chapter 177: Down the Throat

The tongue stopped an arm’s length from the girl.

It hung there, quivering, wet and pink and thick as a tree trunk, and the walls went on murmuring in their hundred voices. *Welcome home. Welcome home, little heart.* Then, one by one, the voices changed. They thinned out. They deepened. They dropped into a single rumbling, gentle, shy voice that I’d never heard before.

"*Hungry, little heart?*"

The girl’s whole body went rigid.

"*Come sit. I’ve saved you something sweet. Next time, remember? You promised.*"

"Grathul," she whispered.

"Don’t," I said.

"*It’s all right, little heart.*" So warm. So patient. The voice of a very large, very kind demon, calling from the bottom of a well. "*I’m not hurt. It’s only a game. Come here. Come home.*"

She was already rising.

Her bare feet slid across the straw. Her eyes were silver and huge and wet. I got my hands around her shoulders and she didn’t even feel it. She was leaning toward that long wet hole in the floor like a flower toward the sun.

"It’s not him," I said. "It’s *not* him."

"I know." She was crying. "I *know.* But it sounds so much like him."

I’d heard those words before, on a dying man’s lips. *It sounds exactly like her.* The island had given us a thousand traps, and every single one was built the same way. It didn’t use fear. It used the thing you couldn’t stop *wanting.*

"Sing," I said.

"What?"

"The song. The one you hummed in the orchard. Sing it."

She stared at me, lost. Then she closed her eyes, and her thin voice cracked out into that cradle tune, the one the Eighth had hummed in her burning hall, soft and wavering and utterly sincere.

The tongue flinched.

The walls shuddered. The voices cut off all at once, like a hand closing around a throat, and the whole belly of the ridge gave a long, low, startled *groan.* The tongue yanked back from the girl as though she’d burned it.

"It *recoils,*" Tamsin croaked. "It’s afraid of her."

"No," I said slowly. "It’s *confused.* It’s never been sung to."

*Valerian.* Aurelix, very small, very fast. *Look at the straw. Look at what it picked.*

I looked down.

It had gone past Kaelen, who was standing. Past me, standing. Past Emmet, who’d thrown himself in front of Tamsin like a shield. It had brushed Dunstan’s boots, and Ansel’s, and a handful of others, all lying flat on their faces. But it had stopped dead at the girl.

At the one who’d been *asleep.*

*It’s not choosing at random,* Aurelix breathed. *It takes whoever’s been resting longest.*

---

"*EVERYBODY UP!*"

I don’t think I’d ever shouted so loud in my life. Dunstan’s head snapped round. Ansel half rose. The whole cavern jerked like a stirred hive.

"Don’t lie still! Don’t *stop!* Move, keep *moving!* It can’t take what moves!"

"The doors are closed!" Dunstan bellowed. "There’s nowhere to *go!*"

"There’s one door open."

I turned and pointed at the hole in the floor.

It was a dark, ribbed, dripping throat, ringed with white ridges and sloping down at a steep angle into the heart of the ridge. The tongue had drawn back into it, trembling. A thin wind blew up out of it, smelling of salt and iron and wet stone, and underneath, very faint, I caught the cold, clean scent of the open sea.

"That’s the way *out,*" I said. "It’s the only way *out.* A mouth has two ends. We just have to go through."

"Through the *throat?*"

"Run!"

---

Nobody argued. I’ll always be grateful for that.

Dunstan swept Tamsin up in his arms like a child. Kaelen caught Emmet by the scruff and tucked him under one arm. I scooped up the girl, and ten people hurled themselves down a dripping pink slope into the dark, screaming.

It was like falling into a nightmare.

The walls closed in on both sides, slick and ribbed and warm. Sheets of clear fluid poured down from above, hissing where they hit the stone, and every drop that touched my sleeve ate a hole through the cloth. Black shapes littered the floor, half-dissolved, heaped like driftwood. Bones. Boots. A long, grey, polished skull with a few strands of hair still clinging to it. Something that might once have been a man’s hand, curled around a rusted spear.

"Don’t *look!*" Kaelen yelled. "Run!"

The ribs of the throat clenched. Walls squeezed shut, then eased, then squeezed again, pulsing, swallowing. We were being *pushed.* Every step I took was a step the throat was taking for me. I clutched the girl against my chest and felt her trembling and kept running.

Somebody behind me screamed.

I looked back.

One of Dunstan’s men, a lean, hawk-faced fellow I’d never learned the name of, had stumbled. He’d gone down on one knee, gasping, for the space of one breath.

The wall took him.

It didn’t tear him. It *folded* him, neatly, like a letter, so quickly I heard only a single crack. A thin red line ran down the stone where he’d been.

"*Don’t stop!*" Dunstan roared. He was running with Tamsin hanging from one arm, tears streaming down his scarred face. "*Don’t stop, don’t stop, DON’T STOP—*"

I wasn’t sure who he was shouting at.

---

Ansel fell at the halfway mark.

I didn’t see it happen. I heard it. A soft cry, a thud, the scuff of a bandaged hand on slick stone. By the time I turned he was on his knees at the bottom of a steep, wet slope, a dozen feet behind us, and the walls around him were already beginning to purr.

"*Ansel!*" Dunstan screamed.

"Keep going." The young man was laughing. He had a hand pressed to his ribs, and his face was sweaty and white and absurdly peaceful. "I can’t. It’s all right. I’ve got a stitch. Keep going."

"Get *up!*"

"I’d just slow you down."

"I’m not leaving you, you *idiot!*" Dunstan turned. He actually turned, huge arms still full of Tamsin, and took one step back down the slope. "I left Barrow. I left *Barrow,* I’m not—"

"Dunstan." Ansel’s voice was very gentle. "Look at me."

The big man stopped.

"You were going to feed them to it," Ansel said quietly. "And you couldn’t do it. I *saw* you. You stood in front of that fire with the spear in your hands and you couldn’t do it." He smiled. "That’s the man I’d like you to be. So *go.* Be him."

The wall closed over him.

I heard Dunstan’s roar behind me, a sound so raw it cracked in the middle. I heard his boots pounding after us, and the ragged sobbing that went with them. But he didn’t stop. I’ll say that for him till the day I die.

He didn’t stop.

---

We came out into the night like a cork out of a bottle.

The throat spat us out in a heap on the north slope of the ridge, in a spray of stinking green fluid and a rush of cold air. I hit the rock rolling, the girl clutched against my chest, and lay there gasping with a sky full of stars wheeling overhead.

Dunstan landed on his knees, still holding Tamsin. He didn’t say a word. He bent forward until his forehead touched the stone, and his huge back shook, and nobody went near him.

Behind us, the cave mouth snapped shut with a long, wet, offended sigh.

I rolled over onto my back. My whole body felt like one large bruise. Emmet was sobbing quietly in Kaelen’s arms. Tamsin lay on her side with one grey hand pressed over her stump, her eyes shut, her breathing slow and uneven. Dunstan and two of his people had made it out. I counted twice.

Ten of us went in. Eight came out.

The girl lay beside me, wide-eyed, staring up at the stars. She hadn’t said a word since the song. I thought she’d gone into some kind of shock. Then she turned her head, very slowly, and looked at me.

"Father?"

"Yeah?"

"It said *welcome home.*" Her voice was small and strange. "No one has ever said that before."

I didn’t know what to say. I lay there with my black hand on the stone and my heart in my throat, and I took her small, cold fingers in mine, and I held them.

"Next time somebody says it," I said hoarsely, "it’ll be me. And I’ll mean it."

She didn’t answer. But after a long moment, her fingers tightened.

*Valerian,* Aurelix murmured.

"I know. I know. We should move."

*It isn’t that.* She’d crept out of my collar and onto my chest, and she was staring north, out past the edge of the ridge, over the long, black, glittering sea. *Look.*

I raised my head.

Far out over the water, a mile or three beyond the island’s broken cliffs, a tiny red light had bloomed in the dark. It was a spark at first. Then a streak. Then a long, trembling ribbon of fire that rolled once across the sky and lit the whole horizon for the space of a heartbeat, red and gold and furious.

I’d seen that flame before. I’d *breathed* it, once, in a keep far to the south.

"*Nox,*" Aurelix whispered.

The light flickered. Something enormous rose out of the sea beneath it with a roar I felt through the stones.

And then the fire went out.