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Keita turns to them, his eyes grim. “I’ll never forget this place. Never. Even if they razed everything to the ground and built a thousand palaces over it, I would still know where to go.”
“Well, that’s reassurin’,” Britta muses, glancing at me pointedly. She’s also worried about his state of mind.
I just shake my head. “Let’s get a move on.”
“I second that,” Belcalis adds. Then she suddenly stiffens, points up.
Wing flaps are sounding. Melanis is returning. Which means the Gilded Ones must have told her about the door.
What are we waiting for? Kweku motions using battle language. Move!
Into the jungle! Acalan urges us on, slipping so quietly into the bushes, only the leaves rustle.
Just that sound is enough to attract Melanis’s attention. “Intruders!” she shrieks, her voice so shrill, it bounces across the trees. “Where are you hiding?”
Prickles run down my spine at the sound. Melanis’s voice is harsher now, less human than when I last saw her. She’s becoming less the alaki I knew and more like one of the Gilded Ones’ many proxies, a creature of pure vengeance and fury, driven only to serve the gods.
“This is the territory of the mothers, Idugu scum,” she calls out, her hunters also screaming around her. “When we find you, we will rip you limb from limb, and then we will feed your entrails to the beasts.”
“Creative,” Britta mutters as we rush onward. “Ye have to give her that.”
“But did you hear what she said? Idugu scum!” Adwapa seems almost gleeful with triumph as she turns to me and very softly says, “The goddesses can’t distinguish who opens a door! They don’t know it’s you who came through.”
“And let’s keep it that way,” I whisper back, ducking beside a tree when a familiar winged figure passes overhead, a few others with her.
Katya swiftly does the same, the brown she’s painted on her bright red skin blending her against the tree trunks. Melanis’s hunters don’t even notice her as they fly past, but then, I should have expected that. Deathshrieks are naturally stealthy despite their massive size.
Once the hunters have passed, Keita beckons us over to what appears to be a huge cluster of vines. “It’s here!” he proclaims, wrenching aside the mass to reveal what looks to be the mouth of a cave.
It’s small and low to the ground. Child-sized.
Keita blinks. “A bit smaller than I remember. But it’s much bigger inside, I promise,” he says as he continues pulling at the vines.
Within moments, he’s fully uncovered the entrance, which is barely more than a cramped hole in the ground. A look of dismay flashes over Katya’s face when she sees it, but she quickly hides her unease.
“I’m sure we can make it bigger,” she whispers, as if convincing herself. “We just have to dig a little.”
Britta steps forward, cracking her knuckles. “Allow me,” she says and breathes in deeply.
The hairs rise on the back of my neck as I feel her power rising to the occasion, the Greater Divinity’s swirling around it. All my friends—the ones who were with me in the pathways, that is—have been practicing using it to amplify their power.
Li moves to stand beside her. “Let’s do this together?” he asks.
Britta grins. “Together.”
They gesture at the same time, and slowly, quietly, the dirt at the base of the cave’s opening moves aside, heeding the call of their combined power.
Ixa help too! A scaly body muscles past the pair. Ixa begins quietly but enthusiastically digging, dirt and stones moving under the force of his claws. In less than a minute, there’s a hole big enough for me to crawl through.
Not that Britta and Li needed the help, but Ixa is too pleased with himself for anyone to mention it.
See, Ixa help, he says with a happy little wriggle.
Thank you, Ixa, I reply as I crawl my way in.
To my surprise, the cave is massive.
I expected a cramped, dark space, but no, rays of sunlight stream down from the ceiling, which soars so high into the air I can only glimpse portions of it from where I’m standing. Ferns and vines of all sorts fill the cavernous expanse, which is at least the size of a small field, and there’s even a tree or two in the center.
