“You wear a talisman from the ancient days,” said the creature patiently.
He saw now a dozen of the creatures seated like boulders around the chamber, sessile except for slight gestures whose subtle configurations and variations in sound began to make sense to him, flowing together and apart in the same way that seams of metal work their way through rock.
“The ancient days are only a false story! We must set aside comfort and dig for truth!”
“Despair is not truth. The ancient days are no false story, but a record carved in air to tell us the truth of the ancient days and the city whose walls speak.”
“You are a fool! A dreamer!”
“You are trapped by falls of rock that exist only in the mind you carry!”
They spoke by means of touch and sound, reaching out each to the others, passing speech down from one to the next and back again, punctuated by the scritch of fingers on dust and the rap of knuckles against rock or skin, by the push and pull of air stirred by their movements and the intake and exhalation of breath. The words they spoke were as much constructs he made through his own understanding of language as uttered syllables.
“The talisman bears witness to the truth! This creature bears the talisman! This catacomb traps us because in the watch-that-came-before we walk here seeking luiadh. To find luiadh we follow the veins of silapu. One element leads us to the next. This creature leads us to this talisman, or this talisman to the creature. Do not pretend one comes without the other. Listen!”
They quieted.
The one whose skin gleamed like pewter, the one who had spoken first, shifted and addressed him. “What are you? The others of your kind, who descend from the Blinding, are empty when they reach us. You are not.”
“I am alive,” he agreed, before recalling the fate of the poor criminals cast into the pit. He shuddered. That shudder passed through the assembly like a venomous wind.
“It fears us!”
“It wishes to poison us!”
“It seeks silapu! Thief! Concealer!”
“Listen!” Pewter-skin stamped a three-clawed foot, and the others shifted restlessly before subsiding. When they crouched, motionless, they really did begin to blend into the rock so that he wondered if he still dreamed. They were only rocks, and he was hallucinating. But they kept speaking, and he kept hearing their words. “Let it speak. What are you? Why are you not empty? Why are you cast down like the empty ones? Why do you wear the talisman?”
“I don’t know.” Shards of memory flashed in his mind like lightning, burned into his eyes. “You are skrolin. My people called you that once. It was one of your kind who gave me this.” He brushed his fingers over the gleaming armband, cool to his touch although its surface burned as though it were hot. “I remember the great city. A shining city.”
“Ah! Ah!” They stirred, sighing and groaning, and fell silent again. Their milky eyes swirled and stilled. A few brushed fingers over rock before curling back up into their crouch.
Pewter-skin spoke. “Tell us of the city.”
“Are you going to eat me?”
“Eat you?”
“The bodies of my people. They are thrown down here for your food; and then you give silver to the miners in exchange.”
They huffed, all their breath whuffing out. Dust stirred on the floor. First one, then a second and third, and finally all of them uncurled and with a rolling gait scurried out of the chamber, leaving him alone. He rubbed his filthy hair, shivering with fear and exhaustion as he struggled to get his bearings, to remember, but he could make sense of nothing. He possessed only scraps, like the chipped and broken ornaments the skrolin draped around their gnarled bodies. Nothing fit together.
Hadn’t he seen a woman with wheat-colored hair, her belly swollen with pregnancy? She had betrayed him! But he wasn’t sure how. It seemed as if anger and sadness had been his companions, but even they escaped him now.
He staggered to his feet, hit his head on the rough ceiling, and collapsed back to his knees while pain wept through him. It was all he could do to draw breath, let it out, and suck it in again. Once the world, every fiber of his being, had not hurt so much, but his head hurt all the time now. That was why he had been blind and mute. That blow to the head had damaged him.
When had it happened?
He couldn’t recall.
A butterfly touch fluttered over his back. He jerked up, saw Pewter-skin folded into that boulder curl just beyond arm’s length. There was something wrong with the creature’s smooth skin; the lack niggled at him, but he couldn’t place it. He couldn’t remember.