Saturn's Arc

Chapter 5 of 4

The door stood open, and the stair sank into black. Saturn set one foot on the first step and stopped. The dark below was total. He could not see the floor, or his queen, or the thing Meyo warned him sleeps beneath her. He needed light. But any flame would wake what rested down there. Meyo had already gone, his warning hanging in the cold. Saturn stood on the threshold with no way to see and no safe way to look. "You will blind yourself and still fail," said a flat voice. The jackalope Woga Dimples climbed down from a root above the door. She had guided Saturn through this forest once, and she wore the same pressed suit, dirt now on her white gloves. "I followed you. I wanted to see how a god handles the dark." "Light wakes the sleeper," Saturn said. "Fire, lantern, torch. All of it burns loud." "Then don't use fire." Woga reached into her coat and drew out a glass bottle. Inside it a soft glow turned, pale and quiet, like dawn held under cork. "A fairy gave me this. She said it was hope. It shines, but it does not burn." Saturn took the bottle. The light inside did not flicker or snap. It simply breathed. "Where did a fairy give you this?" "Ashles," Woga said. "She fights the rot in her grove. She gave it to me when I helped her band cross poisoned ground. She said hope is slow and cold. It won't rouse a thing that feeds on fear." Saturn pulled the cork. The glow rose and spread down the stair. It touched the steps, the old roots, the stone, and showed him the floor far below. Nothing stirred. The light was gentle. It did not wake the sleeper. He went down. The glow went with him. At the bottom lay a wide chamber, its walls knotted with dead roots. In the center, on a slab of pale stone, his queen lay still. He crossed to her. Her face was unchanged. He had crossed a forest and forced a god to open a door, and now she was close enough to touch. Then the light caught a shape coiled beneath the slab. A lion's head on a rotting black body, scales peeling, eyes two small suns. The creature counted under its breath. "Forty-one. Forty-two." It opened its eyes and looked at the glow. The air went silent, a silence that felt like death. "You brought light," Malacaww said. "Slow light. It did not wake me. I was already awake." Saturn stood between his queen and the thing the demiurge had hidden beneath her. The bottle had shown him both at once. He had found her. He had also found the trap. And the trap was looking back at him, counting its scales, waiting.