The Canticle of Whispers by David Whitley

Author:David Whitley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Believing

IT WAS NATURAL LIGHT, Laud was sure of it.

He urged his aching legs to keep climbing. This winding stone staircase had seemed endless at first, but now he could see something that was almost like daylight, filtering down from above.

His throat was parched, and his stomach ached. He had finished the last of the food some time ago, though how long ago he couldn’t say. He had slept a couple of times since then, but he had taken to sleeping whenever the chatter of the Cacophony lulled for a few moments, rather than keeping to any sort of schedule. He must have been wandering the tunnels for days, but sometimes, it felt like years. Or hours.

He realized that he was muttering to himself, counting the stone steps as he climbed them. That had started fairly quickly once the lantern oil ran out. He preferred hearing his own voice to the endless echoes in the pitch-black caverns.

What will come? Why? Which? Where? Whom? Wherefore?

“One thousand, five hundred and fifty-eight…” Laud muttered to himself. He had lost count of the steps a while back, but anything was preferable to listening to the voices. At the moment they were asking questions, which wasn’t too bad. But sometimes they whispered secrets that made him blush, or screamed abuse and threats. At one point, when he had been negotiating his way through a tunnel lined with fiercely sharp spears of rock, they had done nothing but prattle inane greetings, so that he felt as though an army of idiots was following him, just out of reach, and impossible to shut up.

But all of that he could take. He knew that the voices, however loud, were nothing but sound. The trouble was, sometimes the sound was familiar.

He had expected that hearing Lily’s voice would be the worst. And it was true that he could always pick it out of all the others, however distorted. But in a way, that gave him hope. Even if she was crying or raging, she was still alive. It kept his weary, blistered feet moving on.

No, the worst parts were the old echoes. The sounds he hadn’t heard since he was tiny.

Sometimes they were so simple. The call of the nut seller who had lived across the street. The sound of his friends, playing. Yes, he remembered. There was a time when he’d played and he’d had friends. Before his parents had been taken from him and he’d had to go and work. Before he’d seen what the city was really like.

Still, it could have been worse. He could have heard Gloria, his dead sister. The Cacophany could have summoned her voice—just a little too bright, as she tried to take over from their mother. It could have found her last words to him, promising to give up taking the bottled emotions she needed to get through the day.

He heard those words often enough in his dreams.

So many people had left him. And now he’d left. Benedicta, the last of his family, was far away.

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