Quintessence Sky (33 page)

Parris spoke for the first time. "Why do you
think the manticores haven't already mined this salt? It's right on
their doorstep, after all." Matthew gave him a sidelong glance. Did
he know something about this vein through his bond with
Tanalabrinu? If so, he didn't reveal it.

"I don't know," Ferguson said. "Maybe they
never found it. Maybe they're too stupid to know it's valuable.
Maybe it's some sacred place in their demon-spawned religion and
they don't dare touch it. I don't care what they think. It's mine
now."

Matthew noticed that Craddock was now posted
in front of the only exit. They were trapped deep in a cave with
two men bursting with quintessence power. There might be three of
them, but they would have no chance against Ferguson and Craddock,
or even against one of them.

"It should be made available to anyone who
needs it," Marcheford said. "We should start a rotating duty to
mine the salt and bring it out, so everyone can reach it."

"Here's the thing," Ferguson said. "You're
not in charge anymore. So you have two choices. You and your four
friends can walk out of this cave and never come back."

"Or?" Marcheford said.

Ferguson smiled. "Or you can never walk out
of here again."

CATHERINE and Maasha Kaatra emerged into the
blazing brightness of the evening sun, surrounded by manticores.
The spirit lights flew off in every direction, and many of the
manticores, obviously terrified by their sudden appearance,
scattered as well. The remaining manticores, despite their terror,
gathered close around Catherine and Maasha Kaatra, reaching out to
touch them with tentative pincers or tails. Catherine climbed down
from Maasha Kaatra's back and walked among them, smiling,
reassuring, allowing them to see who she was. They looked up at her
with awe, as if she were a god.

She looked back at Maasha Kaatra, who was
still standing in the same place, unmoving. His face was lined, and
he stooped slightly. White lesions had reappeared on his neck, next
to one eye, on the back of his hand. Whatever power he had drawn
from the nova, he had used much of it bringing her here.

The manticores drew them gently away from the
Gorge and down into a sheltered overhang. They washed the dust off
their arms and faces. Maasha Kaatra submitted to this without
expression. The manticores were of many different colors and sizes,
some of which were new to Catherine. One had pure white fur, some
were mottled or streaked with brown or gray, some had blunted
pincers while others came to a sharp point. She had never seen such
a variety in one place. It must be a gathering of some kind, of
manticores from all over the island. But for what purpose?

"I need to get home to the human settlement,"
Catherine said.

No response but some tail-waving that meant
nothing to her. She tried her request again in their language. This
time the white one responded with rapid sounds and gestures, which
again she could make no sense of. They were speaking to her, but
she didn't understand. Was this a different dialect, some variation
of the manticore tongue? If so, they probably couldn't follow her
stumbling vocabulary any better. She gave up and submitted to their
gentle care without any more attempts to communicate.

She fell asleep, only realizing it when she
woke in the dark and found the manticores gone. Maasha Kaatra sat
next to her, awake, but almost like a statue in his stillness.

"Thank you for bringing me back to the
surface," she said.

He nodded gravely. "I was glad to help
you."

"I don't see why. It was my fault you fell
into the void in the first place."

"Your fault? No. I was drawn to the void ever
since I'd seen it. I wanted it. And it wanted me."

Catherine shifted position so she could see
his eyes better, but they told her nothing. "You mean you fell into
the void on purpose?"

He shrugged, barely a twitch of his shoulder
muscles. "Not on purpose, not like that. But it called to me. It
calls to us all, eventually. It is where we end."

"You wanted to see your daughters again,
didn't you?" she said. Maasha Kaatra was so physically powerful, so
reserved, so alien to her that Catherine sometimes forgot he was a
normal mortal person, with more pain in his life than most people
had to endure. He had been sold into slavery, and survived, had
watched his daughters raped and killed by Portuguese slavers, and
survived, had fallen into the void between the atoms of the world
and had still, somehow, survived. He was so good at surviving that
it hadn't occurred to her that perhaps he didn't want to
anymore.

"I want them every day, more than life,"
Maasha Kaatra said. "It is like breathing with lungs full of glass.
Every living moment is pain. If I knew where they were, and how to
get there, I would go through seven hells to be with them
again."

Catherine remembered how her father had been
when her brother Peter had died, like a man drowning, but with no
will to save himself. Mother had kept the family going in those
days, while her father had buried himself in an obsession to heal
what he had failed to heal in Peter. Her father probably thought
she was dead now. Was he as devastated by her loss as he had been
by Peter's? And what about Matthew? If she died, would he be
undone, or would he move on and find someone else?

"I'm sorry," she said. "You were hoping to
find them in the void, weren't you?"

"It wasn't until you came that I even
realized I was still in the world," Maasha Kaatra said. "I thought
I was in the afterworld. I thought to find my girls among the
lights."

"Who do you suppose they all are?" Catherine
said. "They seem to be spirits, but where did they come from? Are
they of the living or the dead?"

"If they are dead, they are only the newly
dead. They come from all places in the world, but they have
memories of recent times," Maasha Kaatra said.

"I know what they are," a voice said.

Catherine jumped and looked around. The voice
was soft, young, and female. She saw no one.

"Or should I say, what
we
are," the
voice said.

Only then did Catherine notice the tiny light
hovering nearby. When they emerged from the Gorge, the spirits had
scattered in every direction, but this one had apparently stayed,
or else she had found them again.

"I've been talking with the new ones," she
said. "They remember being in their homes only yesterday. They
remember when the first nova appeared, and some people went mad.
They started babbling nonsense, and many of them were killed, at
least in Spain. I think
we
are those mad ones. Our spirits
left our bodies behind and came here. Now that these new ones have
come, I think it must have happened again."

Maasha Kaatra covered his face with his hands
and let out a cry. "I have done this," he said. "I have killed
these people, separated daughters from fathers."

" Our loved ones may even be hearing what we
are really saying, only it doesn't make any sense to them, so they
call it babbling," the spirit voice said. "Especially at the
beginning, when anything we said would have been panicked, full of
screams and crying."

"Who are you?" Catherine asked.

The light bobbed. "My name is Antonia."

CHAPTER 21

AS her confessor, Ramos was permitted to see
Elizabeth in the Tower before her execution. She had shaved her
head and wore a simple dress of brilliant white. Kat Ashley, her
former governess and now chief gentlewoman, had been imprisoned in
Fleet Street, but Blanche Parry, Dee's cousin, was here with her.
Blanche was in her forties, dressed stiffly in a black gown with a
high neck, the white ruffles almost covering her chin. She stood
behind the princess, stroking her scalp and crying.

"It doesn't have to happen like this," Ramos
said. "We could make a break for it right now. We'd have a good
chance."

"A good chance," Elizabeth echoed, with a
quirk of one eyebrow.

"Well, a better chance than we'll have once
you put your head down on that swordsman's block."

Elizabeth stood and put a hand on his
shoulder. "This is the right path. The people need to see me facing
my death bravely, not sneaking off like an escaped convict. Now,
are you ready with everything we need?"

Ramos nodded. He pulled a bottle from inside
his robes and handed it to her. "It has to cover every inch of your
body. Every inch." Then he flushed, realizing what he had just said
to a princess.

Elizabeth handed the bottle to Blanche,
apparently unconcerned. "I understand. And afterward?"

Ramos spread his arms helplessly. "It is as
ready as it could be. But the risks are high, Your Grace."

She brushed his words away. "The risks are
always high. My mother died out on that block, you know." Of
course, he knew. All the world knew of the death of Anne
Boleyn.

Elizabeth stood and approached her cell's
small window, which looked down onto the Tower Green. The
headsman's block was in clear view, as was the headsman himself,
sharpening and polishing his axe. This was by design, of course, to
give Elizabeth a chance to think on her sins.

"She had the king my father dancing like a
marionette on a string, helpless to resist her," Elizabeth
continued. "Until the day it all turned upside-down, and the very
feminine allure that had given her so much power seemed to the king
like it must have been black magic, a power of the devil used to
enthrall him." Elizabeth turned back from the window to face Ramos.
"In short, she made the king feel foolish, and that you must never
do."

"Never?" Ramos said, thinking of what they
were about to do.

That elicited a tiny laugh. "Well, only when
you can't help it," she said.

The sounds of voices rose through her window.
Ramos glanced out to see that a boat had arrived with the queen's
Chancellor, Stephen Gardiner, as well as Cardinal Pole, the
Archbishop of Canterbury, and a host of their attendants.

Ramos bowed. "I should leave you to finish
your preparations," he said. "I will stand at the door. If any
come, I will say you are within, praying for your eternal soul.
When you are ready, knock, and I will let them pass."

Elizabeth held out her hand for Ramos to
kiss. He knelt and touched his lips briefly to her fingers. He
found that he was shaking. "You have been a loyal subject and
friend," she said. "Go in peace, and whatever happens, be strong. A
clear and innocent conscience need fear nothing."

He bowed again and left her.

THERE had been no reason to hurry. Hours
passed while crowds gathered outside. Finally, four Tower guards,
resplendent in their red livery, came for Elizabeth, and Ramos
rapped lightly to let her know it was time. As she stepped out of
her room, one of the guards tried to take her arm, but she gave him
such a glare that he pulled his hand back as if burned.