Blood of Dragons

‘I can make myself do it,’ she said.

She felt Sintara lift the glamour from her mind. It peeled away, making her skin stand up in goose-bumps and leaving the night darker around her. She blinked, becoming accustomed to her lesser human vision and then the gleam of the locket she wore. She did not speak and did not let herself think. She inserted her hands into the links of the chain and positioned herself on the edge of the well. The chain vibrated with Rapskal’s weight. He was still moving down it.

She closed her eyes and remembered her childhood days in the treetops of Trehaug. Climbing had been far more familiar to her than running. She took a breath and stripped her Elderling boots from her feet. She levered her body around and groped for the links of the chain. Her clawed toes found them. She began her descent.

Darkness swallowed her as she went down and then the gleam of the moon medallion seemed to grow stronger. Her eyes adjusted. The walls of the well were not as blank as they appeared from up above. When the gleam of the medallion met the black, there were markings engraved into the smooth face. There were not many and it took time for her to realize they were dates and levels. The Elderling system of measuring time meant nothing to her. But Amarinda recalled that the Silver had risen and fallen, sometimes seasonally and also over the years. Sometimes the Silver was scant; sometimes it flowed so strongly that the well had to be capped, lest Silver flow through the streets. She passed a notation scribed by Amarinda’s hand, for those who could work the Silver tended the wells also.

And regulated them.

The deeper she went, the less she felt like Thymara. She was no stranger to the inside of this well, though climbing a chain down was not how she usually descended. There had been levers and chains and gears. A carefully fitted platform with a hatch once travelled up and down in the shaft, just for visits such as this. She could recall the tediously slow process of turning the crank to travel down or up the shaft, and the loud clanking of the chain as it had moved through the mechanism.

She stopped climbing. It was getting colder as she descended. Amarinda had never liked coming here, had never shrugged off as routine the task of managing the Silver. It was not the danger of the volatile stuff. The Silver was always dangerous whether confined to a vial on her workbench or flowing in threads down the street. Casual contact with Silver was always eventually deadly for everyone. Amarinda knew the dangers of the Silver and chose to work with it anyway. Slowly she began descending again. But she had never liked the confinement of this shaft. Nor the dark. Nor the cold.

She stepped on his hand. Tellator cursed, the language foreign to her ears.

‘Wait!’ he commanded her. ‘I’m at the end of the chain. I’m trying to tie the line to the last few links so we can get down the rest of the way. It’s not easy.’

She didn’t respond. She clung to the cold chain in the dark, felt it vibrate with his motions. It swung slightly with their weight. No different from holding tight to a skinny tree, she told herself, and waited.

‘There. I heard the rope hit the bottom when I dropped it. It’s hand over hand from here on down.’

‘If you step down into live Silver …’ She left the thought dangling.

‘I saw debris down there when they fished for the bucket. I’ll stand on it.’

She felt him moving again. He was working harder now and his weight jerked the chain back and forth. Her hands were cramping from their grip on the cold metal and the links bit into her feet. She freed one hand to lift the necklace over her head. Rapskal was too far down for her to hand it to him. She gritted her teeth and then dropped it, letting light fall away from her. ‘Look where you step,’ she warned him, and realized that she was back to it being her and Rapskal doing something foolhardy together. She was still angry at being compelled to be here, but was not sure Rapskal was the one to blame for it.

The jerking continued for some time. Bereft of the jewellery’s shimmer, the blackness closed in on her. She closed her eyes and willed herself to remember that the shaft was not truly that narrow. Deep, yes, very deep. So far from light and moving air. She began to tremble and not with the cold. She hated this. Hated it and feared it. Darkness was a thing to her, not just the absence of light, but a choking thing that could cover her over like a smothering hand.

‘Come down,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll catch you. But be careful.’

She did not want to go down to him, but her hands were losing their strength. She moved down to the end of the chain, and then onto the rope. Her numbed hands slipped, refused her weight, and she slid, shrieking, the rope burning through her hands. He caught her hard and swung her to his side. ‘Open your eyes!’ he demanded of her and only then did she realize they were clenched shut.