Tryal's Curse 17.0

Chapter Seventeen: 
Blacksmith

Arlene's hands grappled at the stone wall as she fell. Her nails slid along its cool surface and she cringed, drawing her fingers inwards to curl up in her palm. Colour slid in from the walls, splashes of bright purples and blues that seemed to wash underneath and around her. Her hair flew behind her, stark red even amidst the melee of artistic overabundance. Bits of it stuck to the back of her neck, sweaty and matted with dust. The rush of cool air froze her face, so she wanted to gasp and breathe at the same time, but found that she was capable of doing neither.

The slide was endless, looping down along the side-tunnel like a meandering waterfall. Her frock gathered up between her legs, the slide's metal surface cool—yet oddly burning—against her skin. Her ankles stung. Her arms lay flat against the slide, too, outstretched slightly, as if she was caught in the mid-motion of making a snow angel. Every now and then, her hands would graze the tunnel wall; it was an odd combination of gems and rough stonework, all positioned with meticulous precision.

She wondered, dimly, who would have taken the time to build such a thing.

A scream was constantly lodged in her throat, which had started to ache very badly. Arlene found that screaming helped. It was how she had dealt with her distress—it was a security blanket of sorts, because she could not yell, or punch, or cry. She was a frazzled heap of aching bones, a cesspit of tiredness. Sleep was so very appealing; she wished she could close her eyes and descend into a comforting darkness--faint, even, but her nerves were all much too ablaze to grant her that desire.

She wondered where the tunnel was taking her. Even farther from Quixa, I bet, she thought sourly, trying in vain to ease herself into a more comfortable position.

Hours passed by--perhaps minutes, but Arlene had lost track of time long ago. Her thoughts drifted to the Meare, to Elborn, to Garnet and to Prince. She thought of Lira, the girl who had gotten into her head, the girl she knew so well that she could have been her sister. Shoulders hunched up, Arlene crossed her arms over her chest and exhaled. She needed to talk to someone, despite her thoughts being a strange assortment of wild, whirling nonsense. 

Pushing at the barrier that she had sensed during her last talk with Lira, she focussed on the other girl's thoughts. Lira's head was calm, for the most part, balanced and logical, but Arlene knew that she had suppressed a lot of cynical, bitter thoughts from surfacing during their ... head-chat? encounter? She wondered what one would call it.... Despite her mind-connect with Lira, Arlene did not know how the other girl had gotten to Adreitus. And now that she had felt Lira's misery swoop across the rim of her own mind, Arlene thought that she did not particularly want to know, either.

But she needed to talk to her. Talking to Lira had made Arlene feel more grounded, safer somehow. She wished for a moment, as the topaz-and-granite of the walls swished past her, that she could have shared this connection with Elborn. Maybe he could have helped her somehow. She gritted her teeth. What did fate know about its own choices, anyway? she thought angrily. How could it be so sure its choices were right?

Arlene knew she should be glad that she hadn't died, at least, but it was hard to be grateful for anything when you were rushing down a spiralling metal tornado toward the unknown.

'C'mon,' she hissed between her teeth, reaching out to Lira. Mind-reading, Arlene had discovered, was like unwittingly leaving inky fingerprints across paper when you didn't mean it. Other people's minds felt like grease, slipping in and slipping out, as fleeting as time, faster-paced and more confusing to navigate through than the Meargro caves. She felt and prodded in her mind with an invisible hand, searching frantically for the link, the connection that would enable her to talk to Lira again. 

But she found nothing. It was frustrating, and she could have groaned with dismay when her mind touched ... not the slippery feel of another's mind slipping like an eel from between her wrists, but a cold, stone wall.

The barrier between her mind and Lira's was up again.

Arlene stuck a fist into her mouth as she tried to spit out some hair that had gotten onto her tongue. She felt dizzy, hunger pangs gnawing at her stomach. Tears streamed out from her eyes, running down her cheek and pooling along her collarbones. For the first time in a long time, Arlene let herself cry, her shoulders shaking violently--she didn't even wince as her shoulder blades clashed hard against the metal of the slide. Her nails gripped into the skin above her elbows, digging in hard enough to draw blood. 

'Owhh,' she said, drawing her knees up and curling her arms around her legs as she lay.

She yelped when she lifted her head slightly: the shimmering gems that made up the side-tunnel's walls had begun to glow brighter. If she tilted her head upwards--just a tad--she could see an exit. It was close. Arlene drew in a deep breath. So close, like a gaping mouth that opened up and breathed a blinding light into an otherwise-darkness.

She laughed as she neared it, glad that something could swallow her up and take her away from this endless cycle of pain.

Her feet hit solid ground, and she got up unsteadily, trying not to trip over her own feet. She held her arms out just as she fell--her forehead crashed into the ground and her vision was marred with blotches of neon. It was hard to see. She sat up again, breathing hard. Her forehead was wet--she didn't know if it was sweat or blood, and she was not keen on finding out either.

When she stood up again, the world slid around her like a speck of light in a glass orb, swirling round and round her until she wanted nothing more to fall asleep and never wake up again. The cave the rock slide had led to was brightly lit, torches dancing in brackets along the rugged walls. Arlene wondered if this was Quixa's cave, and debated if she ought to continue walking to the right, or to the left. But as the torches seemed to blaze brighter and brighter, and the tiredness pricked at her eyes, and her organs curled up inside her body and pleaded for her to rest, all thoughts of Lira, and of her nightmares, left her mind....

She thought she registered dimly the sound of heavy footfalls before she fell asleep, but later, she would coin it to being a product of her own imagination. When she woke up a little while later, she was alone; when she curled up against the cold tunnel wall, she was alone. But something jarred her into abrupt consciousness not soon after.

The first thing she saw was a set of broken chessboard teeth leering at her. Instinctively, she knew she had come out into the wrong place.

His breath was hot and sticky against her face; it smelled like years of decomposition and frog mucus. Arlene blinked furiously, her eyes watering. She shuffled back, pressing her back into the wall of the cave. Her gaze travelled up to the strange man's face--he was huge and broad-shouldered, but his eyes were like tiny slits of light in an otherwise huge but empty room. His face was made of nothing but layers--layers and layers of wrinkled flesh that ended at his chin, each of them making a staircase down to the collar of his faded once-poppy-red overcoat. He smiled widely at Arlene, and the staircases stretched out on his wide face. His long, white braids swung in front of Arlene's face.

'H--aargh,' Arlene said, screwing her face up as she looked at him. 'Do you--do you know where...' she stammered, her throat feeling dry and flaky. 'Are you Ixister Quixa?' Despite herself, her voice came out as a squeak; her courage shrivelled to the size of a fly.

The man laughed, and his laugh sounded like the strangled cry of a man being led to the gallows. The sound echoed loudly, reverberating off the walls of the long, narrow cave that seemed to spine into forever. Arlene shielded her face with a hand, wincing as the man's braying sprayed her with spit. She thought he would never stop--his face was horribly contorted as he carried on and on, laughing as if the world depended on it. Arlene shuffled to the side and got to her feet, but the man's laughter had mellowed to silent fits of mirth. His shoulders shook as he turned to look at her with a gaze that was cruel, biting, and impeccably shrewd.

'I am not Quixa,' he said. 'That weasel of a man knows nothing--is nothing compared to what I am. My name'--he stood up straighter, until the top of his head brushed the ceiling of the tunnel--'is Blacksmith Tenor. I am the last Blacksmith.' He grinned, holding his head higher, looking down at Arlene over his large, bulbous nose. 'And you know this, do you not?'

Arlene shook her head.

'No?' The man's eyebrows furrowed. 'But never mind. You shall know. I am keeping you. You can be my new daughter,' he crowed. 'My own died of asthma twenty years ago. Didn't like the caves. But you'll do--yes, you'll do just fine.' He patted at his thigh, where a dagger was tied--sheath-less--to his belt with a piece of stout rope. 'Follow me,' he said to Arlene in his booming voice. Turning around with more agility than she would have expected him to possess, he walked down the tunnel, heading into a passage to their right. Arlene loitered, fiddling with the hem of her dress--which was now more of a patchwork quilt than a dress, really. She jumped when she heard the Blacksmith call out to her, and hurried into the passage behind him.

They walked on for half-an-hour, along a straight path that opened, finally, to a set of badly-built wooden stairs. As they ducked into the tiny alcove and went deeper than ever into the Meargro caves, Arlene swore that even the stalactites parted to make way for the Blacksmith's large head.