Quintessence Sky (23 page)

"Never the sun," Maasha Kaatra said. "Only
stars and darkness."

"Well, yes, of course," Catherine said.
"Unless the sun was directly overhead, the light couldn't penetrate
this deep. It probably does shine all the way down the shaft, but
only twice a year, and for a few minutes at most."

Maasha Kaatra gazed at her, uncomprehending,
or perhaps just not listening. She looked back down to see that the
crowd of salamanders was much closer. "Maasha Kaatra?"

A deafening sound, both deep and shrill at
the same time, echoed through the cavern. Catherine covered her
ears. "What's happening?" she shouted.

The salamanders turned to face one direction,
and Maasha Kaatra did the same. Something began to force itself
through one of the largest of the tunnels carved by the streams of
water. A gigantic black creature, slick with moisture. Its flesh
rippled and seemed to burst out of the hole as it shoved itself
through in rhythmic pushes, bellowing its terrible cry. Finally, it
emerged.

It was a salamander, but a hundred times
larger. It had the same fat, glistening body, the same face, the
same open-mouthed gape, but its front legs had grown stubby and
formed into fins; its back legs had fused into a massive tail; and
most disturbing of all, its snout had lengthened, and in that open
jaw were dozens of teeth as tall as a man. It was not pink anymore,
but jet black. She had seen a creature like this before.

"Leviathan," Maasha Kaatra said in tones of
worship, his voice dark and rich. "He is the god of this land."

"It's not a god. It's just a really big
fish," Catherine said. A member of this species had attacked and
nearly capsized their ship on the way to Horizon.

"It's the devil himself. You should not be
here, Catherine Parris."

She glared. "I don't want to be here either,
when it comes down to it. You don't know a way out, do you?"

"Hide yourself." He closed his eyes and
raised his hands. His skin began to glow white. "Our epic struggle
begins."

Catherine looked around, trying to
understand. Epic struggle? Had Maasha Kaatra gone mad from a year
of living alone underground? When the leviathan attacked their
ship, it had been attracted to a glowing quintessence pearl that
her father had in his pocket. Once he realized what the leviathan
wanted, he threw it into the water, and the leviathan ate it and
left them alone. Which made sense—salamanders were ravenous for
sources of quintessence, so if leviathans were just another stage
in the life of the same creature, it stood to reason that they
would be attracted to the same food.

The leviathan surged forward with surprising
strength, opened its jaws and slammed them shut into the crowd of
salamanders. Three of the soft, pink bodies were crushed in its
maw. Those nearby squealed piteously, but made no move to get
away.

Catherine recoiled and took a step back. "Why
don't they run?"

Maasha Kaatra was paying no attention. His
body was blazing with light now, and she could hardly look at him.
Then it occurred to her what that meant. He was making himself the
most brilliant source of quintessence in the room.

The leviathan looked toward them, the light
reflected in its black eyes. It was clearly a sea creature,
unsuited for life on land, but its whole body was a spring of hard
muscle. It slapped its tail and propelled its huge bulk, awkwardly
but effectively, directly at them, its giant mouth open wide.

Catherine screamed and threw herself off the
platform, heedless of the salamanders. The leviathan landed like a
falling tree, smashing the rock and crushing salamanders underneath
it. Maasha Kaatra disappeared into its mouth.

Catherine struggled to stand, crying despite
herself. She had been so glad to see Maasha Kaatra, alive after all
this time. Together, they might have found a way to the surface.
Why would he commit suicide in this bizarre way just moments after
meeting her? He seemed to have planned it for some time, perhaps
even constructing that platform somehow for the purpose. He must
truly have gone mad.

She scrambled out of the crowd of
salamanders, who seemed equally intent on self-destruction, and
cowered along the wall of the cave, gasping for breath. What would
cause a living creature to sit still while it was devoured? Every
animal in her experience—or plant, for that matter—did everything
in its power to survive. It made no sense for the salamanders to
sit there, unmoving, while their older brother ate them whole.

An idea struck her. What if, when eaten, the
individual salamanders
did
survive? Just as two manticores
could share a bond of connected consciousness through quintessence
threads, perhaps two salamanders could share a more direct bond,
the smaller one contributing both its flesh and its consciousness
to the larger. The whole salamander group would live on, part of
one large body, which would then slip into the deep pool, and from
there, find its way to the sea. Perhaps this was how it had grown
so large in the first place—by eating its own kind. If she only had
some skink tears, she could have seen whether it was true. If it
retained the quintessence anchors of those it devoured, she would
be able to see them, and that would prove that the leviathan was in
fact not a single creature, but many, sharing the same body.

A breeze fluttered her hair. Swirls of dust
eddied at her feet. The wind picked up, blowing steadily along the
rock wall. She looked up and saw that the spirit lights were caught
in it, too, propelled around the cavern in counter-clockwise
circles. Dark clouds began to form. A deep rumble echoed through
the cavern. A rain storm, underground? Catherine huddled into a
niche and held her knees as lightning flashed from cloud to cloud
over her head.

A glow appeared in the cave shaft above, its
rays shining through the swirling dust straight down onto the
leviathan on the circular platform. Its illuminated sides heaved
with its labored breathing. The crowd of salamanders was similarly
still. The swirling wind intensified, rippling Catherine's clothes
and sending her hair streaming out to one side. Curiosity got the
better of her. She stepped out of her niche and staggered through
the wind, back toward the center of the cavern. From this vantage,
she could see straight up the shaft to the stars. At the center was
the nova. The hole in the sky.

But how could that be? It was Aquarius she
had seen through the gap, not Gemini. Half a day would have to have
passed for the nova to become visible. Either time itself had
passed with impossible speed, or else a second nova had formed.

Now that she thought of it, she could see
that this one was different. It was smaller than the other, more
like when the other had first appeared. How long had this second
nova been there? She hadn't seen it when she first looked up
through the shaft. Had it formed just at this moment?

Oddly, the leviathan itself seemed the only
thing illuminated by the stars. The crushed platform around it, the
other salamanders, and the rock floor all remained dark. It was
almost as if the leviathan was sucking the light down out of the
stars, instead of just being shined on. It grew brighter, and she
could hardly look at it.

A brilliant shock of lightning tore out of
the clouds and struck the monster, sending up liquid sparks like
molten metal. The wind gusted, nearly knocking Catherine down. She
pushed through it back to her niche and held on to the rock,
peering out at the unfolding scene.

Lightning struck again and again, like a
blacksmith's hammer falling in a forge. The leviathan drew the
light down from the sky, making the nova pulse and the stars dim,
and all at once, Catherine realized what was going on.

She checked off the things she knew or
guessed. One: When shekinah flatworms were full-grown, the largest
of them ate the others and grew into salamanders. She hadn't
actually seen this happening, but it stood to reason based on what
she had seen. Two: When salamanders were full-grown, the largest of
them ate the others and grew into a leviathan. That meant that a
leviathan represented the combined spirits of thousands of
shekinahs, and all their quintessence power. The growth of all of
those creatures culminated in a single, magnificent predator that
ruled the seas.

It fit with the rest of the island's ecology.
Humans tended to think of spirits as inherently individual, one
spirit for one body, but that's not how things worked on Horizon.
Manticores split and connected their spirits. Boarcats
intentionally sacrificed their spirits, then brought them back from
the void. As Christopher Sinclair had taught her, everything that
animals and even plants did was for a purpose. The purpose of this
was clear: presumably the deep pool actually provided a route to
the sea, and once the salamanders were all eaten, the leviathan
would slip into the depths and spend the rest of its life prowling
the oceans, too large and powerful to be harmed by anything.

But the most important realization was that
Maasha Kaatra had not committed suicide. He had allowed himself to
be eaten, just like the others. He was joining the leviathan.

What about the lightning storm? And the nova?
She didn't know. Was this a normal part of the birth of a
leviathan? It didn't seem so—the novas were a recent phenomenon,
and she suspected the fierce storms that had plagued the island
since the first nova appeared might have had their origin in this
storm as well. That implied that the nova and the storm were not
naturally connected to the formation of a leviathan, but were
connected instead to Maasha Kaatra's interference with it.

The lightning strikes increased to such a
rapid rate that the leviathan appeared to be connected to the
clouds by shifting, jagged lines of light. The noise was deafening,
and the sharp smell of burning air filled Catherine's nostrils. The
creature's skeleton glowed red through its flesh, like a log in a
cookfire burned down to char. Finally, its body exploded,
fountaining ash into the wind. The storm boiled and swirled, then
rushed upward into the shaft with a roar, spiraling up and out of
the cavern. For a brief moment, there was utter darkness, then the
shaft cleared and the light from above shone down again.

Spirit lights traced gentle circles around
the ceiling, only now there seemed to be more of them. In fact,
hundreds of new spirit lights were drifting down from the shaft,
filling the room. The new ones darted and zagged, full of energy,
like fireflies. Many sought the caves from which the streams
spilled and made their way up. Other flitted about the ceiling and
into nooks and niches. Finally, when all the lights and smoke and
ash and cloud had cleared, she saw Maasha Kaatra.

The leviathan was gone. The salamanders were
gone. He stood alone on the platform, strong and proud and erect.
The posture and gait of an old man had left him; he was young and
powerful now. His muscles bulged, and he moved lithely, like a
stag. The chalky lesions and scabs had disappeared. Instead, his
skin glowed with a pure white energy. The platform, crushed and
broken by the weight of the leviathan, was whole again, its sides
straight and true.

"Catherine Parris!" Maasha Kaatra roared. His
voice echoed through the cavern. She stood, afraid. "Come," he
said.

She approached slowly, unsure what to expect.
Closer, she could see that the light moved like fire under his
skin.

"Now I have power, for a while," he said. He
pointed to one of the rocky spikes extending down from the roof.
Lightning fired from his pointed finger and struck the spike; it
shattered and fell to the floor in explosions of falling rock and
powder.

Catherine gaped. "And this power will
fade?"

He nodded solemnly. "But it is the only way
to survive."

She looked up through the empty cave shaft,
and saw the newest nova, larger now, a great gap in the sky where
the quintessence had been torn away. "The novas," she said.
"
You
made them."

How long had he been doing this? The first
nova had appeared six weeks ago, but Maasha Kaatra had been here
more than a year. Had he been killing leviathans all this time, but
only recently learned how to draw the power from the sky? Or
perhaps he had first been eaten by salamanders, before learning how
to entice and then defeat the leviathan itself? Catherine shuddered
to think how close she had come to being similarly devoured. How
had he discovered this as a means of survival? Surely he hadn't
allowed himself to be eaten on purpose the first time. Perhaps it
had been an accident, simply an exercise of his will to survive as
an individual spirit among the thousands inside.

With this power, could he help her reach the
surface again? The idea gave her pause. As much as she wanted to
return to the colony and her family, she wasn't sure if she should
talk Maasha Kaatra into taking her there. Once he reached the
surface, with the power of lightning and more at his command, what
would he do? Whose side would he be on?

CHAPTER 15