“What’s more confusing,” Evangeline countered, “is why Robbie’s niece thinks people are being fed to the tower. Why is that? Why won’t the guards live here? I’ve noticed their shifts are shorter too.”
Ilsit began to fully relay to them all of the fighting we had seen, the misery amongst the penitents, the poor sleep, the cold, the moroseness.
As they peppered her with questions, I, staying inside the cast of the torch, began to wander. As with the first level, thiswhole smaller chamber was made of one continuous stone. Even the massive trough that cradled the river was made by uneven dips on each side that looked like rows of large, white boulders, though they were all connected at their base where the thick, slow waterline pooled.
I had the silly notion that they looked a bit like giant teeth.
Perhaps that thought was what caused me to kneel near the river, looking down into its sticky canal of waters that barely moved but had collections of bubbles along the surface. Strange for a rill like this, so deep in the earth, to have such slothful waters in it.
As my eyes adjusted in the dimness of the chamber and I stared aimlessly into the channel, over the lip of the uneven white boulders, I saw it. When I did, when the inkling of what I suspected took shape in my mind’s eye, my blood ran cold. I had to be seeing things.
“Reed,” I called softly.
He turned from where Keir was explaining to Ilsit and Evangeline that he thought it would take nearly a half moon to get to Eccleston, but that it was the best plan anyone had thought of yet. The only forestation in this part of the continent, aside from countryside estates in Perpatane, were small clusters of trees along the river and timber forests owned by lumberyards. We were near mining country, and the terrain offered little place to hide. Thane was paying the owner of the timber forest outside the city gates to keep his wagons and horses there.
I listened to all this numbly, watching Reed cross over to me and squat next to me at the lip of the river. I was inert, paralyzed by my suspicion.
“What is it?” he asked.
My body heaved, and I had to pitch forward on all fours, hands grasping at the white boulders sitting in the floor. I swallowed the bile in me rising up my throat, needing to come out.
“Are you ill?”
“I—I need you to look down into the water and tell me what you see. With your air sight, you can better see. Please tell me I am mistaken.”
I sat back on my heels, mouth covered with my hands, trembling.
Reed peered past the white boulders, and as I was on his right side I saw the white of his eye flash, saw him jerk backwards and stumble to his feet. He reached down and pulled me up roughly by my wrist, hurting my arm and shoulder. “Get the hell away from it,” he hissed.
When we had stepped backwards enough for him to deem me safe, our retreat causing Keir to fall silent, Reed removed himself from our grouping, doubled over, and vomited onto floor.
The nausea that had overwhelmed me was so powerful it was crippling. I could not repeat his actions, paralyzed by my disgust, though I sorely wanted to unburden myself of the poison I had drunk, bathed in, washed my hair with.
“What’s going on?” Evangeline inquired, drawing near to Reed and putting a hand on his back. “Are you sick?”
“It’s a tongue,” he rasped out. “It’s a fucking tongue.”
85
NOW: FEAR
“Idon’t understand,” said Keir, baffled by his brother who had his hands on his knees, head hanging while Evangeline still had a hand on his shoulder.
I could hold back no longer and, having had little to eat that day, leaned over and spat up watery, yellowish spew on the white stone floor. When I stood, Ilsit was next to me, a hand on my arm, her eyes wide.
“Robbie, what is happening?”
“It’s a tongue,” Reed repeated, trying to straighten himself, bringing a fist over his mouth. He removed it and continued, saying, “That’s not a riverbed and that’s not a river in it. And this isn’t a cellar. This is amouth. And that is a tongue beneath a runnel of spit.”
Keir squinted at him, brow wrinkling. “You’re saying under the water there’s a—a tonguelike thing? Made of flesh?”
“It’s not water,” Reed amended hoarsely, his mouth turned down. “It’s spittle. That’s why it’s so thick, why it has bubbles. That’s why it doesn’t flow. This isn’t a river, brother. It’s a jaw in which a tongue sits beneathspit.”
Ilsit’s chin dipped forward, as if she too were about to throw upher dinner. “Are you telling me,” she began, her tone laced with repulsion, “we’ve been drinking spit for a week? Washing in it, washing our clothes and dishes in it? Shit, there are children here drinking it.”
“This explains everything,” Reed said to himself, lacing his fingers behind his head, his eye closed, a look of despair about him.
I realized I had never seen him this unnerved. His usual even keel was gone. The slinking, wildcat way in which he carried himself was replaced with a tautness.
