Free Wolfsangel by M. D. Lachlan

the lower caves, where the rocks were stained glowing reds and greens and the damp and the cold gave way to a heat that seemed to pour from the earth. She took with her a small piece of cured leather that had once been a chieftain’s belt and a pin that had held his cloak at his neck. Then she stayed on her own for a season. No one brought her food; the water she had was only what she licked from the cave walls; there was no light except the phosphorescence of the rock and no presence but her own. At the end of her ordeal the sisters came and carried her from the cave. She had written nothing and it was clear a greater trial was needed.

    The sink hole at the bottom of the ghost caves was not a natural phenomenon, though no one could recall who had dug it. It was about an armspan wide at the top but narrowed as it descended ten or twelve times the height of a man until anyone falling into it would have been stuck fast like a stopper in a bottle. The shaft cut across a powerful underground stream which entered through a fissure as wide as an fist at the top and left through another at the bottom. The result was that, when the witch was lowered by rope into the hole, she was immersed in flowing water up to her neck.

    She knew that, for the ritual to succeed, she would need to spend nine days there.

    The first three days had been dark and agonising. She was, after all, human. No one who had grown up without her training could have endured it. Since she was a tiny girl she had been subjected to terrible long fasts and meditations, she had consumed strange mushrooms and been confined and buried like the dead, spent nights naked beneath the moon on frozen hillsides when only the power of the mind stands between life and death. So the witch queen did endure it, clawing her way out of her humanity in pain and anguish. On the fourth day the torture had divorced her mind from her physical body and the lights had come on. Dwarfs stood in the darkness, offering her gold and jewels and a ship that seemed built of something like pearl but was, she knew, made of dead men’s nails. It was all hers, if only she would call to the sisters to pull her from the water. On the fifth day the walls around her flamed with green and purple lights and the spirits of the rock tried to lift her from the pool, but she remained. On the sixth day her ancestors were at her side, the ghosts who gave the caves their name, one hundred queens all less powerful than her but all part of her. She was the sum of the whole, she knew. All the dead queens were there, some naked and smeared in muds and vegetable dyes, some finer than she was, calling, jabbering, singing and weeping in the dark. They begged her to give up, spat at her, tried to rip her from the water, but she would not relent. The witch queen was on the way to her answer. On the seventh day there were voices and she knew the gods were near. On the eighth day there was just blackness, an absence of thought, nothing, as she stood on the edge of death. Then, on the ninth day, she was back in the pool, just as she had been the moment she went in.

    The flowing water had stopped and she felt warm. None of the other sisters was around her, nor any of the servant boys, but the phosphorescence of the rocks seemed even brighter. In the cave it was like daylight.

    A voice came echoing from tunnels that stretched away from her.

    ‘Do you know what they did to me? Do you know what they did?’ Though the witch queen rarely spoke, she could understand these words that resonated as much in her mind as in her ears.

    An odour of burning seeped into her consciousness, not a pleasant smell at all, nothing like wood or straw on fire. It was closer to hair.

    ‘See what they did to me, see what they did!’

    She climbed out of the sink hole and walked down to the lower caves, and then lower still, following the burning smell and the voice.

    ‘I am blind, I am blind!’ The voice spoke again.

    The witch moved on