The Lost Animas (The Ammonite Galaxy Series, Book 5)

Chapter 22

PETRA HAD BEEN repeating the chant of valour for so long that her tongue was completely dry.

'I will not stop, I will be a river.

I will not pause, I will be light.

I will not waver, I will be the earth.

I will not give up, I will be death.

I will not fail, for the blue stone is in my heart.'

Mandalon 50 rather liked the song. He liked the way the Namuri girl unconsciously moved her hand towards where the blue stone usually hung around her neck every time she got to the last line. He promised himself that if they ever got out of this one, he would buy her the biggest namura stone he could find in the whole binary system. Even then, it would be smaller than her heart, he thought, because she simply never gave up.

They had been scrabbling away at the rock for nearly two more days, and the air inside their confinement was not going to last for much longer. Already each gasp of breath left them unsatisfied, and their bodies were responding by caking them with sweat, and leaving their skin cold and clammy. They were shivering uncontrollably, too, but still the Namuri girl chanted the song.

It wasn't audible now, because she didn't want to use up more of the precious air than strictly necessary, but he knew where she was in the song by the motion of her lips. She always opened them slightly when she got to the middle of the last line. Every time she thought the words 'blue stone' she closed her eyes momentarily, paused a second, and her fingers gave a slight movement towards her throat - just enough to do justice to the sound of the words, to honour them. Although there was no light in the tunnel, the namura stone gave off an eerie blue sheen which gave him just enough illumination to see her.

Mandalon had long ago taken on the chant as his own. As they took it in turns to hack their way through the fallen stones in the passageway, he found his own mind returning again and again to the few lines she had taught him. Each time he found himself wondering if the blue stone would one day be in his heart, or whether Sellites didn't qualify for spiritual help like that. He felt sad that they probably couldn't. For centuries the Sellites had only believed in the Sellites. Wealth and status were the only things that mattered to them: the cost-to-bulk proportion of their artifacts, and their position as heads of house.

He sighed in the dark. The fact that an unschooled girl from a backward clan on Coriolis could teach him anything had come as a surprise. When he had asked for her as a bodyguard it had been on an impulse. He had remembered the bravado she had shown, and, when he had wanted an outsider he could trust, his mind had automatically gone to the brother and sister he had met when Amanita had been arrested. They were young, and they had impressed him with their sublime disinterest in his culture, in the way they had judged his society as being a wasteland. Now he was beginning to realize that they might have been right.

"I think we are nearly through," gasped Petra.

Mandalon closed his eyes. She said that at regular intervals, and he rather wished that she wouldn't; it didn't raise his spirits at all.

She put one hand out to shake his arm. "Did you hear?"

"Of course."

"Then say something!"

"I am trying to conserve oxygen."

"Arcan will find us as soon as we break through the last rubble. He will be able to sense where we are."

"I am not afraid."

Petra looked sideways. She could barely see the face of the boy next to her, but she knew that this was true. Although he was a foreigner, he had moved as fearlessly into the tunnel with her as her own brother would have, had been prepared to risk losing his life under a rock fall in this dry and dusty tomb. He had surprised her.