Dream of a Vast Blue Cavern

Chapter 6: Council of Exiles: Larc

 “Enough food, Lady?” The woman cradled her tiny bundle against her chest. The way she bounced it slightly up and down to hush the cries made Larc ill. “We get the same ration as everyone else.”

 Tunnel fungi, less than a handful, and the occasional piece of dried molebear. The baby began to wail again, and Larc reached out and healed it. The healing would not keep; in all likelihood she was wasting her vaerce. As the baby quieted and fell into shallow breathing, Larc straightened and backed out of the tiny alcove where the new mother slept. She could see the woman more clearly, with the icelight shining through from the burial chamber. Her hair was long and black and may once have been beautiful. Now it was dull, crusted with dried sweat. Her eyes were wide-set in a shrunken face, and her stomach was swollen with malnutrition under torn, grimy lakehide garments.

 She, and the babe, and thousands more, might not survive to the next day. The people needed food, urgently. Ten days had passed since Larc and Glace had discovered the first refugees in the Outer Tunnels. In those ten days, twenty-five hundred Icers and over ten thousand humans had been rescued from their hiding places and moved to the Burial Chamber. They were found in the far reaches of the Outer Tunnels, hiding down mine shafts, and scattered in the spurs of the Spiral. In the tight, noisy, smelly alcoves, stacked on top of each other up the high wall to the ceiling, ten thousand seemed like a huge number, but it was chillingly small compared to the hundred thousand people who had populated Iskalon. Lake Lentok was patrolled by Flames, so there was no way to tell if the missing were dead or captured.

 Larc held out hope for her own family, though it was a hollow, weak hope. Her brother Bralon had survived, and as a Luten was commanding scouts now, but there was no word of Father or their younger brother. When either of them had time for sleep, Larc shared an alcove with Bralon, and they clung to each other. Sometimes he cried in his sleep, but Larc had not cried yet. She thought perhaps she was simply too exhausted to cry.

 She squeezed the woman’s hand. “Your babe will be well,” she said. “The scouts will find more food, too. All will be well.”

 It was hard to say because part of her did not believe it. She left the alcoves and reentered the main chamber, aglow with purple burial ice. The chamber had been widened by Icers to four times its original size, and twenty young warriors stood before Glace, taking up half of the space, swinging weapons taken in raids on Chraun’s outer store-caves. Most of the warriors were newly recruited from the fishers, miners, and stock tenders who no longer had their own Guild’s work to do. Their actions were stiff and awkward compared to Glace's smooth coordination. Larc gave Glace a quick salute, and he returned it with barely a pause in his drill.

 On the other side of the enlarged chamber, the Council was preparing to convene. Larc headed for the raised dais where Stasia sat already, looking so regal that only Larc could have guessed how nervous she was. A new circlet had been made for her from scavenged metals, and it was fitted with a drop of mercury held in an oval of quartz, a symbol of the temporary status of her reign. She wore a borrowed websilk dress with a smattering of pale emeralds and very subtle patching. Casser sat behind her in full chirsh armor, glistening with ice crystals, and beside him was Kiner, now General of Iskalon, also in armor, his medals on his lapel. Larc hurried her steps. She was late. When she reached the dais, nearly all the councilors had taken their seats. Larc leapt up and slid into her spot behind Stasia. As she sat, Larc remembered the last council before the war. She had dreamed then of sitting where she sat now, of whispering advice into her ruler's ear. Now she had her dream, but it was more bitter than sweet. She would give it up in a heartbeat to have Iskalon and all her people back.

 Speaker Wyfus had survived the war somehow, probably hiding like a cababar cub in a burrow. Larc herself had healed him, but she could not heal away the drooping of his flesh from hunger. His heavily patched lakehide robes sagged over gaunt bones as he began the first address of the Council of Iskalon since the war. It sounded just like any other address he’d ever made, as long winded and dull as ever, and Larc felt unreal, sitting in a strange cavern so far from home, hearing his familiar words. After quite some time, he got to the point.