(eng) Maria Dahvana Headley - Magonia 02 by Aerie

Author:Aerie [Aerie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

{JASON}

A flock of bats flies around my face, twitchy things with glider wings and little fox faces. I’m—

In a cage? A moving cage. I can’t see the mandrake. I’m being carried, heading down, on a steep, slippery slant.

I hurt all over, and my vision is weird. I feel like maybe I have a concussion, but I’m whole. Grimm, it comes back to me, is dead. I can’t even think about what happened to him.

Why didn’t the mandrake kill me too?

It’s a bounty hunter, my brain informs me. That means the mandrake wants to sell me to someone. That means it thinks I might be valuable.

I jostle and slide from end to end of my cage, and all around me there are high-pitched creaks. The knowledge of how I’m being transported finally rolls over me like nausea. These are bars made of the mandrake’s rib cage, and I’m inside them.

There’s a staircase going down into the dark, and far below us I can hear water splashing. We’re going deeper into the center of the earth.

I have no GPS. No Google. No Wikipedia. No maps of anything underground. I spent the past year memorizing the sky, itemizing constellations, plotting charts, learning languages, but not under the earth. Not this.

This is becoming a pattern. Cluelessness over and over again.

Far in the distance I can hear a ghastly sound, a shrieky howling.

The roots in the ceiling rustle and stretch. They make a sound that isn’t makeable by humans, or at least I don’t think I could make it. Maybe Aza could.

We walk, and as we walk, roots listen and consider us, moving in the earth above our heads, guiding us down one of the tunnels.

Far off down the river I hear a long, wavering scream.

My vision goes in and out, twitching, and I’m not sure which direction we’re going. My compass, still on my person, is pointing west, but I have no idea if that’s true.

Not just one scream. A bunch of other voices, shouts, chanting noises. High- and low-pitched, something that sounds like a drum. Something that sounds like a waterfall.

The mandrake stops, growls, and I feel it quiver, somehow taking root.

We drop through the dirt.

We tunnel downward and sideways, really, really fast, like the kind of vines that strangle trees and pull down houses. Kudzu. That’s the word I’m thinking as we twist around rocks. I gasp when I can, when we move through caverns and empty places in the damp ground.

At last, we’re skidding along a slippery black path with a stream alongside it, and the increasing smell of something burning. The walls are made of pumice now, and they’re hot.

There’s a tunnel, and glowing light and sound. The screaming’s stopped and now all I hear are a million languages at once, howls and whistles, whispers and barks.

The mandrake moves through the tunnel, slow and sure. There’s light down here.

It’s bright as a volcano, because it IS a volcano.

It’s a giant hollow space. Large animals—animals I don’t recognize—are spitted and roasting, and I don’t want to look at them too closely.

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