“Amaya! Don’t move! I’m coming!”
My head bumps against the ropy ceiling, and the scarf tied over my hair catches and pulls down on my eye so I have to yank it back up. Parallel ridges along the floor make the footing tricky. I hold the lamp out with one hand and balance with the other.
My shadow distends along the walls, and as if alive, it separates into two shadows and then into four. What should be my head and my limbs become horns and claws. A jaw gapes as if to devour me but I drop to hands and knees to change the angle of light. Rippling, the shadows retreat. Goose bumps come out all over my skin.
The meow of a cat whispers up the tunnel. My chest tightens with hope: if a cat has made its way down here, then we can find our way out. As I scramble forward my bare wrist scrapes the rock, a hot burn along the skin.
The tunnel curves sharply and drops into a round space like a bubble of air popped amid the rock. At first I think there is no exit but then I see a gap so low I will have to wiggle forward on my belly. I raise the lantern.
“Amaya?”
She’s not here, but the ceiling heaves as if liquid impossibly flows along it. Shadows elongate off the ceiling, stretching until they drip onto the floor. A shadow exactly like a crocodile hinges open vast jaws that curve along the walls as if to consume me. Hastily I turn the lantern, and it transmogrifies into a jackal’s shadow gathering itself to pounce. Raising up the lantern breaks the shadow’s leap into shards that skitter away like bugs. The feathery crawl of tiny legs brushes along my neck. With a shriek I flick a bug off me and jerk forward onto my knees, dropping the lantern and slapping my head to make sure nothing else is crawling there.
My moving light cuts new pathways across the chamber’s smooth floor. I see another way out: a downward shaft as black as a well filled to the brim with pitch. But the moment I take one hesitant step toward it, the surface of the well slurps darkness over its rim. The shadow of a huge articulated spider’s leg emerges, then a second leg and a third: a tomb spider as big as I am pulls its head and body up until it fills half the space. Its six eyes are voids, sucking away my courage.
I begin to whimper in aching, mindless fear. Its forelegs probe, their long shadow descending toward my face. With a gasp I desperately knock the lantern forward. It tips, over-balances, and my reflexes kick in: I catch it before it crashes over.
When I look up the spider’s shadow is gone and I face the giant shadow of a hissing cat, ears flat, back arched. But now I know what to do. Grabbing the lantern, I leap to my feet and sweep its light all the way around to shatter any more that are forming.
And there Amaya is, where she wasn’t a moment before. She has curled up on herself, lips pulled back to show her teeth, head hunched, arms drawn up as if she is ready to claw at me. The hazy golden light makes a mask of her face, reminding me of the cat mask she briefly wore in the carriage on the day we went to the Ribbon Market. For an instant her pupils look slitted.
“Amaya!”
She blinks with her ordinary eyes. “Jes?”
“What happened to you? Why did you go off?”
She snivels the way she always does when she is being accused of something. “I didn’t! I was resting by the opening. A shadow ate me, Jes! It was a big cat and it just ate me in one gulp! When you shone the light on me it vanished.”
I can’t explain what I saw. The song people sing before each trial winds through my memory again: Shadows fall where pillars stand.
The only thing I really want is to get out of this awful place. Now that I can breathe again because Amaya is safe, I realize I smell water. I shine the lamp down into the shaft, mostly to make sure no spiders linger there. Light catches on a glimmer of water flowing sluggishly below. After so long in these dusty passages, its moisture tickles my nostrils. Escape surely smells like this.
Movement scratches behind us. I whirl, but it is Kalliarkos, not a tomb spider, who crawls out of the tunnel. He has pursued us without a lantern, braving the darkness. He gives me a meaningful look that I can’t answer in front of my sister. “Thanks to the gods you are both safe.”
My nod is my answer. “There’s water at the base of that shaft, not more than a body’s-length drop. If the pattern holds, then we’ve reached Rivers.”
The lamp gutters, flame wavering. When I tip the lantern sideways the flame brightens again.
“That one is almost out of oil,” says Kalliarkos. “It’s going to take time to get to the entrance we came through. We’ve got to move.”
“What about my mother?”
“She is awake. We will not leave her, Jes. I promise you.” He vanishes back up the tunnel.