The light-and-shadow energies slid along my mind like phosphorescence on cave walls, like the warmth of hot springs and magma far below the surface, like drowsy silk, wrapping around me and skimming along my mind. Poking and prodding and petting in their odd little dance. As if learning me.
In the deeps, words began to sound, like a bell ringing, a vibration so deep it hummed through my bones. “Floooows, flooows, flows. Pools, pools, pools. Gone, gone, gone.” Over and over. And the movement of the light-and-shadows changed to match the words, as if the dancing power was evolving. As if the rhythms of the earth itself were changing it.
The silk that had caressed my wrist tightened, roughened, as if perceiving more of what it held. As if understanding, becoming aware. Becomingreal. Or becoming matter, transitioning from pure energy to something with weight and mass. It slipped up my arm, twining higher, over my biceps and shoulder and inside. It paused at my heart, watching. And stroked along mynerves. It was light and shadow twining with me, dancing inside me. As if capturing me. Taking me over.
Inside of me a spark of fear—my fear—flared in the light-and-shadows. Brightening the blackness. Some of the motes of power were clinging to me, to my heart and nerves. As if already a part of me. I tried to withdraw. To pull away. The energies resisted.
And though it was impossible this far below the surface of the ground, I heard a voice, a human voice speaking in the cadence of a witch working.Flows, flows, flows. Pools, pools, pools. Gone, gone, gone,it sang, the cadence like the words to a spell.
The silken shadow-and-light was trying to... merge with me. Tocaptureme.
I grunted at the realization and jerked. Trying to get away. But it had trapped me.
I heard the sounds of my own fear, moaning. “Eh, eh, eh, eh, eh,” with each gasping breath.
In some part of my mind I felt something. I heard slaps, brutal and fierce. I felt pain. Over and over. And then the resonance of my moans in my chest. The hoarseness of my breath. The thundering of my heart, as if I were sprinting, hard and fast, to outrace death itself.
“Nell! Fight! Fight this! I’m cutting you free. Fight!” I knew that voice.Occam. He had cut me from the earth once before. I felt things snap and writhe around me. Stinging. Biting. And pulling away in fury. A blast hit my heart. It sped, arrhythmic. Too many thumps in the incorrect order.
I moaned again, the desperate, meaningless sounds. I flailed, but the silk holding me, inside me, mutated, thickened. Strong and scratchy. It was tying me in place. Deep in the dark. I fisted my hands, as I had been taught. Punched. Fought.
“Good, Nell. Keep fighting. Only a few more.”
The silk roughened and twisted, reaching through me, reaching for the roots inside me, the roots that the medical scans said weren’t there, but that I could feel each time I touched my stomach. I pounded against the restraint. It tightened on me. Pulled me deeper again, along the surface of the presence buried in the earth.
Hibernating,the energies hummed at me, all meaning without words.
And deeper, a human thought:Get out! Get out! It’smine!
If I wake the sleeper, I will become... free,the dancing energies hummed.
No! Never!the woman screamed.The sleeping power is mine!
Yes,I thought.A woman. Female.
Before I could tell what species she was, the dancing energies tapped against me again, a torture against my heart, blasts of agony. The light-and-shadow thing was learning too much of me, learning what I was, what my magic did. But I was also learningit. And learning the thing it was trying to wake. The silk of its binding coarsened into hemp, creating a shackle, melding into me. The light-and-energy silk/hemp was nothing like what I compared it to, but those concepts were all I had to describe it. It was a new thing, a new construct.Evolving,moment by moment,fast.
The blacker-than-blackest-night thing below it was old, old, old, beyond old. This one had been here, always, in the land. Sleeping.
Fed by blood and death,the dancer thought at me.By war and battle and the life-force soaking into the earth for aeons. It has not been fed in many passages.
I got an impression of humans falling and dying in violence and war. Left to rot on the surface of the land or buried on/in the earth, generation after generation. Energy tendrils rose from the sleeper, touching the surface where each great battle had taken place. Battles between tribal people, between Europeans and tribal peoples, between the gray and the blue. War. Long in the past to my concept of time, but only yesterday to the sleeping consciousness in the earth. It had fed on death. The dancer wanted it to be fed again. Wanted to give it blood, like in those long-ago times of conflict.
What the woman wanted, I didn’t know. Was she a witch? Or was she something else?
Pain exploded through me. Shivered through me, stinging and sharp. The light/dark silk/hemp tightened. A blade sliced into me, beneath my flesh, pain that shivered up through my nerves and flesh, flaying me. I heard something cadenced. A woman’s voice. T. Laine, chanting. A working, using the energies of life and of the earth. I could see the energies of a tearing, cutting spell, a freedom spell. I had learned about spells in Spook School. Learned not to fear them, not when they wereused by people I trusted. Like T. Laine. I reached for the power in the spell even as it reached for me. Words hammered me as steel cut me. The blade cutting me free was silver plated. And coated with my blood.
My blood flowed over my skin and onto the earth. The light/shadow silk/hemp saw my blood and twirled into it, where it spread on the ground.
I was ripped out of the earth and lifted into the air. “I got her. I got her. Nell. Sugar. Talk to me.”
It was Occam. I blinked at the sky. Bands of scarlet streaked across the western horizon. Sunset. It wassunset. I had been inside the earth for hours. Darkness took me.
THREE
I woke fast, struggling to sit up. Fighting. Trying to get free.
“Nell, sugar. I got you. I’m here. It’s okay. You’re fine.”
