82 THE GARDEN UNDERGROUND
Christian
found himself on all fours with tears streaking his face, his breathing quick
and shallow. He shivered uncontrollably. His hellhound stood over him, wagging
its tail with its head cocked at him quizzically.
Tirion’s chest
heaved like he’d just finished a marathon. His face was strained, but he slung
the bow back over his shoulder and said, not unkindly, “Alright, Abernathy?”
Christian
screwed up his face and pressed the heel of his hands to his eyes, but he could
not stop the flow of tears. He wiped his nose on his sleeve. The hellhound
licked his face.
“What,” he
croaked. The other words got lost on their way to his mouth. He was back in the
tunnel, back in the present, yet the pull of his heart and the weight of his
chest were so heavy he might have lost them all yesterday. The years between
all the abandonments and tragedies and heartbreaks had vanished and run them
together into one long string of misery.
Tirion
hesitated and then put a hand on his shoulder, gave him a reassuring squeeze.
“I know,” he
said.
The accountant
watched blearily as the elf released his shoulder and went to Morrow’s side.
The Rover looked even worse than Christian felt: paler than ever, stretched out
on the ground like a corpse, drawing raspy breaths that rattled alarmingly in
his chest. They were broken by intermittent murmurs as he faced his own demons.
Whatever memories the night-mares had made him relive had not stopped with
their death.
Tirion’s face
was white, but he opened Morrow’s eyelids to examine his pupils like nothing
was wrong.
“What,”
Christian tried again. “What…?”
He seemed to
have forgotten how to speak. All he could remember were the faces, flashing
before him in quick, horrific succession. His mother. His father. Joel. Uncle
George. Jude.
“Night-mares,”
the elf said again, as if this explained everything. He rooted about in
Morrow’s pack and produced a bottle of a purplish liquid. “Here. Not too much.
He’ll need it more.”
Christian took
the bottle with shaking fingers. It took him four tries to pry the cork out of
it, but Tirion was still digging through the pack and did not notice. The
liquid smelled like lemons and cold tea but tasted as bitter as quinine. He
gagged on it and spit some down his shirtfront.
“Careful with
that,” the elf said sharply.
“Sorry,”
Christian whispered. He wiped his mouth and held the bottle out to Tirion. It
slipped from his fingers.
“Watch it!”
the elf snarled. A brown hand darted out and caught the bottle before it hit
the ground. He stuffed the cork back inside and then looked at Christian and
sighed. The dropping of the bottle had spooked the accountant; his breath came
in short bursts and fresh tears spilled down his face. He was useless.
Worthless. So many people dead or hurt or gone in his life, and what had he
been able to do to stop any of it? Nothing whatsoever. He couldn’t even keep
from dropping a bottle.
Tirion stopped
rifling through Morrow’s pack, pulled the cork back out of the bottle.
“I guess you’d
better have a little more,” he said. “Come here.”
Christian
crawled over to him on his hands and knees. His head felt heavy again, much
heavier than when he and Morrow had tumbled down the stairs, and his lungs
still felt like something was sitting on his chest. A monster, maybe, or maybe
it was just the weight of all his memories. Tirion helped him into a sit and
held the bottle to the accountant’s lips so Christian could drink. When half
the purple liquid was gone, he said, “That’s enough,” replaced the cork, and
returned to Morrow’s pack, digging through it once more until he found a small
pouch full of leaves. He chewed them into a paste and pulled Morrow into his
arms, feeding the paste to the Rover a little at a time and working his jaws to
make him swallow. Morrow moaned without waking up.
Christian’s
breathing slowed as he watched. He was not sure if it was the purplish liquid
or the elf’s steady action that calmed him, but the pressure on his lungs and
heart let up and his tears dried. The burning anxiety and sorrow that had come
over him at the rusty-pulley sound of the night-mares had diminished, replaced
by exhaustion. He was utterly spent; he felt he could sleep for a thousand
years, gladly, and not feel that he was missing out on anything that happened
during his slumber. But he could not stop shivering. He wished he had a quilt.
“How are you
feeling?” the elf asked.
“Cold,”
Christian said. The hellhound plopped down on its haunches beside him. Heat
radiated from its furry body; the accountant moved closer, still shivering.
Tirion nodded
without looking at him, still focused on feeding Morrow the crushed leaves.
“That’s normal.”
“How,”
Christian said. The words were coming unstuck from his throat—slowly, though,
and he had to search for them. “How…”
“How?”
“How…did you…”
The words rolled over in his mind. “…kill them?”
Tirion glanced
at him quizzically and said, “Arrows. Just arrows. They’re nothing more than
horses, when you come down to it.”
Christian
shook his head. “Not…not what I…meant.”
The elf did
not answer, but his nostrils flared and something tightened in his face. Now he
was rubbing Morrow’s temples with his thumbs in an absent-minded way, his
leaf-green eyes fixed on the Rover’s wrinkled forehead.
“My sister,”
he said finally, and then paused as if he did not know what he meant to say.
“Tiriel, she…she ran afoul of a herd in the plains north of Greendale. By the
time I found her and brought her home, there was nothing we could do. Wasn’t
long after that when this idiot—” with a nod at Morrow and a sternness in his
tone that did not deceive Christian in the least—“went out looking to kill one
and got attacked instead, but I was there with him.”
He heaved
Morrow into a sit and uncorked the bottle of purplish liquid.
“He had to
take an infusion of skullcap every day after that to keep the night terrors at
bay, but he survived. Ever since then, I’ve hunted them—any time there’s been a
sighting within a hundred miles of Greendale, I’ve gone to find it. I’ve built
up a tolerance. But it’s not easy. And you can never be totally immune to their
effects.”
He resumed
rubbing Morrow’s jaws and temples until the Rover’s mouth slumped open. Tirion
tilted the bottleneck to his lips and whispered in his ear. Morrow’s throat
rippled as he swallowed the liquid, but he did not wake up.
The elf nodded
at the iron knife, lying on the floor where Christian had dropped it when he
collapsed.
“You’ll need
that.”
The
accountant’s eyebrows knit together in confusion. The purplish liquid had
calmed his body and begun to work on his thoughts, but his head was still
fuzzy. He could not remember why he would need a knife.
Tirion avoided
his gaze, looking ashamed of himself.
“Look,” he
said. “As long as we’re down here, your friends are up there fighting and
dying, and it won’t stop until Goblin is dead.”
Goblin! He had
forgotten all about Goblin, but at Tirion’s words, thoughts of the battle and the
tunnel and the mission came flooding back.
Morrow stirred
in the elf’s arms, gave a low groan, and stilled again.
“He’s down for
the count,” Tirion said. “I know I should leave him here and go with you, but—”
He fell
silent, but Christian saw his meaning as clearly as if it had been inked into
his skin. He had left the Rover alone for twenty years, and he would not leave
him again unless forced—certainly not for anything so trivial as the defeat of
an age-old enemy.
“I don’t know
why he thinks you can do this, but he does,” the elf said. “We’re not that far.
You follow the light, and you kill that bastard,
and you end this. If you run into trouble, stall as long as you can. I’ll join you
as soon as he wakes up.”
Christian’s
shivering had not yet stopped, but he struggled to his feet and stood quivering
in the middle of the tunnel. Why Morrow had asked him to wield a knife when he
had no discernable skill with any weapon, he did not know, but the task was
his, and Tirion was right: the battle would not end until Goblin was stopped.
He would go on alone, weary and afraid as he was, and he would see this
through.
“Alright,” he
said.
The elf’s eyes
shone with a grudging respect as if he had seen some quality in the accountant
that he had not realized was there before.
“As soon as he
wakes up,” he said. “I promise.”
Christian put
a hand on the hellhound’s warm hide. The two of them continued down the tunnel
on their own with the light ahead shining on their faces.
It grew still
brighter as they went. The sounds of the hellhounds and the crow and the
creaking of a spider’s legs echoed around the tunnel as they neared. Then,
there they were: standing in a massive doorway, looking into a cavernous stone
chamber with massive roots hanging from the ceiling and waving gently as if in
a breeze.
Christian
blinked in surprise. He was underground, yet it looked as if he had stepped
into a bright garden. Thick grass replaced the stone floor beneath his feet;
creepers and vines sent tendrils snaking up the walls, hiding much of the
stone. Flowering shrubs stood scattered around the edges of the room. There was
even a fountain.
Three
hellhounds (much smaller than Christian’s) tumbled about on the grass together
as if in play. Guarding the doorway were two spiders (much larger than
Christian’s); across from it were three stone steps crowned by a throne like
Neva’s. This one, too, was covered in bougainvillea, made of two flowering
dogwoods growing together in the shape of a chair. At the bottom of the steps,
a pale, ragged woman drifted silently. One more night-mare stood on the other
side of the steps; its bat-like wings stretched in and out, but it stared at
Christian with its empty eyes without a sound.
On the throne sat
Imelda with her eyes shining blue and a crow sitting on her shoulder. She grinned and arose at the sight of
him, her arms spread wide in welcome.
“Christian
Abernathy,” she said. “At long last.”
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