Wolf Star Rise: The Claidi Journals Book 2, Tanith Lee [desktop ebook reader .txt] 📗

up on my left, and one was pottering along from over there. Some were smaller or bigger than others. That one looked the size of a large dog. That one, when it stood up again on its hind legs, was about as tall as a man.

I wanted to scream my head off.

Instead a thought came into it, sharp and bright. Of the ring in my bag, the topaz.

Properties. What Grem had thought my Hulta ring had, only it hasn’t. Had Ustareth’s ring got them? Was it, in any way, ‘magic’?

I crouched and fished in the bag and scrabbled out the ring. Nearly dropped it in a swamp of water and mud.

It would only fit on my right thumb. I eased it on. The yellow stone gave a flash.

What should I do?

Obviously I’d done it, because, look, the rats had stopped advancing, they were just shambling away.

The ring was burning like a lamp – that flash wasn’t from any light, there isn’t any proper light just here.

A great gold blaze goes up from Ustareth’s ring, and I’m safe.

There’s another light, too, though. White. What’s causing that?

Above, in the mossy wall, a door flies open with a crash. The rats lumber away, not as if afraid. More as if they’re shy, irritated, don’t want to be disturbed.

‘Claidi!’

He leaps down about fifteen feet into all this muck and squelch. It’s Venn. He throws his arms round me as if I matter. And I’m clinging to him as if he’s my oldest friend. As if he’s Argul.

BETWEEN THE SUN AND THE MOON

In the morning, we saw Jotto, and later Treacle, waving up at us from the groves far below. They’d managed to escape back into the gardens.

It was a sunny morning. Always is, here.

The night before, after Venn so dramatically appeared, Grembilard leaned in through the door. There was a strong rope, part of the supplies we’d carted about with us all those days. Grem had attached it to something, and now first I, and then Venn, were hauled up to the place above.

The door was really a window. This part of the kitchen had sunk. A lot of the kitchens anyway lie outside the main building, in various courtyards. This one led up on to a terrace.

The rat-creatures didn’t pay much attention. A few glanced up as we closed the window – glad to be rid of us.

‘They wouldn’t have hurt you,’ said Venn.

‘No?’

‘They’re timid, don’t like strong lights – even what you call the hard light, though they’re fairly used to that. They wander about the lower parts of the Rise at night. Sometimes you see one being chased by a cat.’

‘What happens?’ I asked dubiously.

‘The cat works out the size difference and loses interest. The rat goes off about its own affairs.’

‘Did she – I mean your mother—?’

‘No, she didn’t breed those. They’ve just got like that by themselves over the past twenty years.’

We camped above the terrace. Dark rustling trees crowded close, grasshoppers chorused, stars winked as faint clouds drifted over. The Star had gone off to the west, and was hidden by angles of the cliff.

Grem fried vegetables over the brazier.

Venn and I were rather embarrassed.

We didn’t speak about hugging each other, or sit at all close.

In the red brazier light, he looked now very familiar, but not like Argul at all.

I showed him the topaz ring.

‘Yes,’ he said, in that cold voice he so often goes back to, ‘she said she left that somewhere. I think I was meant to search for it. A little extra test she set me, when she left. I didn’t ever bother. I suppose it was in her sleeping-place off the Little Book Room.’

‘In a drawer, with some other jewellery.’ I explained why I’d taken it, because of Grem’s question about my own ring, which made me think Ustareth’s one had powers.

‘But if it does,’ I said, ‘why did she leave it behind when she left?’

‘Perhaps she was as sick of fiddling about with science as she was of meddling in everything and everyone’s lives,’ he rasped.

So there was a tense gap, and we ate some of the food. Finally I said, ‘But does it have properties – powers—’

‘I’d expect so.’

‘The stone – the topaz shone out in the kitchen. And the rats backed off. I thought—’

‘They backed off from the flash of the ring. Some reflection it caught. I told you, they don’t like strong light much.’ He was snappy now. So I left it.

It was as if he didn’t like me again, or liked me even less because, for a few minutes, he had liked me.

Whatever else, I thought I’d better give him the topaz ring. But when I did offer it, he said, ‘You keep it. You found it.’

‘But—’

To which I got a furious: ‘Oh just keep it, Claidi, for God’s sake. Why must you keep on.’ Followed by Venn getting up and stamping off for a walk in the trees, scaring all the grasshoppers into dumbness.

I asked Grem about Treacle and Jotto, and Grem said he thought they would be all right – which of course we now know they are. Then I curled up and tried to sleep.

I hate the way, once you start to know someone, care about them, their behaviour can distress you, even when it’s unreasonable and not your fault, even if you were really trying to be careful, tactful.

So, apparently I must care about Venn.

I wish I didn’t.

Next day, after we spotted J and T, Grem, who had been out and around, reported that the main library had appeared directly above us, on the ‘ninth level’, as he said, with the moon and sun towers.

‘Yes,’ said Venn, who was now being distant and vague, ‘it does tend to go there, doesn’t it?’

‘Generally it then stays in place there for several days,’ added Grem. (As if they were talking about something painfully ordinary.)

‘I hope you’re ready for a long climb, Claidi,’ said Venn, now distant, vague, but hearty.

‘Not really.’

‘Oh, well, that’s