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Chapter Twenty-Three



They ran without caution, wads of glowing lichen held aloft to light their way. Long weapons were too cumbersome for running in the tight passage, so they held only shortswords or daggers in their other hands. Besides, if they did encounter anything, it would be so sudden and at such short range, that only a short stabbing weapon was sure to be useful.

The passage led into what Druadaen first perceived as a dark tunnel with a very distant opposite wall, but the eyes of the urzh and the aeosti quickly discerned that they were, in fact, on the ledge of a precipice. Safety and speed required proceeding in single file, staying close against the wall, two urzh at the front and two at the rear. Ahearn asked how far the drop was. Umkhira answered that she did not know. Well, Ahearn wondered, maybe she should take a look and find out. She shook her head and explained that she had looked; she just couldn’t see the bottom.

Silenced by that dire report, they hurried as best they could along the ledge. Even the dog seemed to stay unnaturally close to the wall.

After almost two miles, the ledge bored back into solid rock. In this tunnel, the stone underfoot was much rougher: not often used, the Rot explained. At the first intersection, though, all the urzhen started sniffing. A moment later, Druadaen detected the odor: the sour, rotting-eggs smell of sulfur.

Ahearn and Elweyr exchanged glances. “You think we’re close?” asked the swordsman.

The thaumantic shrugged. “Could be. But we need better light if we hope to recognize a familiar tunnel.”

“A light may be our death,” Umkhira muttered.

“Could be,” Ahearn agreed, signaling for a halt while he rummaged in his pack and produced a very small bull’s-eye lantern. “But it could also be what saves us. By following that smell, there’s a good chance—if we come across tunnels we recognize—we’ll find the way to a safe place we know. One that will throw the blugner sow off our scent.”

“How?” Druadaen asked.

Ahearn kindled a small flame in the lamp. “You’ll see.”

“If underkin don’t see us first,” Umkhira added.

Ahearn grinned and shrugged. “No perfect answers in the Under, Lightstrider.” Playing the lantern’s beam from one wall to the other, he started forward at a quick jog. Muttering darkly, Umkhira followed, gesturing for the others to stay close.

* * *

It was impossible to even guess at the passing of time after that. Druadaen couldn’t measure it by the limits of his own endurance because they weren’t always running. The two other humans made frequent stops to examine their surroundings, particularly when the smell of sulfur either grew fainter or stronger.

And then there were the moments when someone—often the urzhen, but usually S’ythreni—reported distant sounds. That meant covering the lamp and lichens as they crouched flat against the roughest part of the nearest wall. The time spent in the black silence could have been ten hours as easily as ten minutes, but whatever they heard ultimately did not come their way.

On one occasion, Druadaen asked if it was the sound of their pursuers.

Umkhira met his eyes with a baleful stare. “No. Worse.”

“By which you mean…?”

“The sound was from in front and below. So, underkin.”

“Or Deepkin,” Zhuklu’a added, her voice hushed not against fear of detection, but in dread.

Eventually, Druadaen stopped trying to keep track of time. The dark, the sweat, the constant need to pay attention to the rough footing, and the constant threat of sudden attack made it far easier to suspend consciousness in a state of what one of his docents had called an “eternal present”: no past or future, just immediate experience.

Until the tone in Elweyr’s sudden “Wait!” snapped him back into the present.

Ahearn had seen whatever the mantic had. “Yes! No doubt about it. This is where we fought that band of Red kosh. Nasty business.”

“So, we are close to this hiding place you spoke of?” Umkhira asked in a low tone.

“Well, I wouldn’t say it’s close, exactly,” Ahearn temporized. “But we know the way from here.”

Whether it was, in fact, fairly close, or because they had no more pathfinding interruptions, or simply because there was a promised end to their desperate journey, Druadaen did not feel much time passed before Ahearn called for a halt and went forward with Kaakhag and Umkhira to scout the chamber that was their destination.

They came back quickly. “All clear,” Ahearn announced almost cheerily. “Quick now; boots off and follow me.”

“Won’t that leave a stronger trail for the sow?” Druadaen asked.

“That’s the idea. You’ll see. Now, come on!”

They followed Ahearn past a craggy opening from which the distant sound of running—or was it falling?—water emerged, along with a pungent surge of the sulfur scent. Two hundred yards past that, they came to a six-way intersection where a swarm of rats approached, then scurried away when Ahearn and Kaakhag ran toward them. Without breaking stride, Ahearn led them down each of the other five passages for about thirty yards.

At the end of the last, he stopped to pull his boots back on, gestured for them to do the same. “Back we go,” he explained. “And long steps, now. Less of a trail, that way.”

Reaching the opening again, he made hand gestures indicating that they should relieve themselves near the entry before following him single file.

Umkhira stared. “That is not so easily done for my sex!”

“Aye, just be as quick as you can,” he muttered, taking almost comically long steps inside, Elweyr and Raun following just behind.

After finishing Ahearn’s physically and socially awkward instructions, they followed his steps to the far end of the cavern. A wide sheet of sulfur-reeking water fell ten feet from a cleft along the back wall. It sent up a vaporous spray as it splashed into a shallow pool. That, in turn, ran off into a crevice that spilled into an apparently bottomless fissure.

With one hand firmly holding Raun’s collar, Ahearn stuck a glowing patch of lichen on the tip of his shortsword and walked straight into the solid sheet of water—and disappeared through it. Elweyr followed immediately.

“Well,” Ahearn called through the rush and splash of the dully glimmering curtain, “what are you waiting for?”

* * *

The chamber beyond the waterfall was a breeding ground for snails, which supported a small population of rats with freakishly large and luminous eyes. By the time Druadaen entered, the last of them were hurrying to the rear of the small cave, doing their best to become invisible.

Ahearn shrugged out of his gear, arranged it in the careful fashion he did when bedding down in the dark; all his weapons and other needful objects were in precise locations, and all in arm’s reach. Druadaen had adopted a version of that for himself; if he had no way to react until there was light, it was unlikely he’d last long enough to react at all.

S’ythreni seemed to pout. “So now we have to sit in the dark.”

Ahearn nodded. “Unless you want to become somebody’s—well, something’s—dinner.”

“But we can talk?”

“That should be safe, but there’s no way to be sure. I’m not so worried about the sow or warriors from the tribe; Raun will hear them long before they could hear us through that waterfall and all the echoes of the overflow plunging into the crevice. But some creatures of the Underblack can be very, very silent. So if one of them happens to come up this high, they could get close enough to hear us before Raun hears them.”

S’ythreni sighed, looked around. “How did you endure the boredom of this existence?”

“Oh,” Ahearn smiled broadly as he gathered strips and bits of hide from the urzhen gear they’d all accumulated in recent days, “our time down here wasn’t the least bit boring. It’s rather invigorating, living in constant fear of one’s life.”

Her answering smile was small and perhaps abashed. But only slightly.

As the rest of the group arranged their packs and sleeping rolls out of the line of sight of the narrow entry and as far away from it as possible, Elweyr was using Raun to flush out the rats at the back of the cavern. One by one, he extended a hand in the direction of the large-eyed rodents and, in a moment, their movement stilled and they sat. Raun was apparently familiar with this routine. The instant a rat became quiescent, he turned his aggressive attention to another.

When four had been gathered, Elweyr called for each person’s sanitary rags. All but Zhuklu’a was moderately revolted; she seemed intrigued. “I have none to share, but what do you intend to do with them?”

Elweyr answered by way of demonstration. He wiped the first rat with each rag, and then proceeded to do the same with the others, leaving only one unwiped. He ignored the group’s mutters of complaint and disgust and gently scooped the other rats into a satchel and nodded to Ahearn who whispered, “Wait here,” and followed the thaumantic through the sheet of water.

“Well, that’s revolting,” S’ythreni hissed.

“I do not like it, but I think I see their intent,” Umkhira replied.

“So do I—creating a false scent trail—but I’ll be unboled before I’ll ever use that rag again.”

“‘Unboled’?” Zhuklu’a asked before Druadaen could. But Umkhira made a gesture for the young Lightstrider to desist when S’ythreni affected not to have heard her curious echo of the unfamiliar expression.

Druadaen used what little aeosti he had. “I know that word not.”

“You’re not supposed to, Dunarran,” she snapped in Commerce.

Veth…your pardon, please,” he murmured, not sure which language she would prefer.

She nodded tightly but did not look at him.

Shortly afterward, Ahearn and Elweyr returned, the latter looking drawn. In response to the questioning glances, Ahearn just shook his head. “Long day for him. More concentrating than even a wizard should try, I suppose.”

He hung the satchel up and pulled out the sanitary rags. They had been washed, wrung dry, and smelled of sulfur. Which was, frankly, a considerable improvement. “Sorry to impose that way,” Ahearn murmured, “but if you want to leave a trail, well…”

The urzhen shrugged. Druadaen waved off the apology as unneeded. S’ythreni just took the rag and stretched it out to dry further.

“So,” whispered Druadaen, “I assume you took them to the intersection.”

Ahearn nodded.

“And does Elweyr have to remain awake in order to, er, keep influencing them?”

Elweyr’s voice was ragged. “Not how I did it. I let the thaumate—an affinity construct—lapse. Too hard to keep up that many, impossible at a distance.”

Umkhira’s head tilted quizzically. “Then how can you be assured they shall go where you wish?”

“Because the moment I let the affinity lapse, I created a sense memory in all of them. They now believe they must continue to flee downward, because something from the higher tunnels is chasing them.”

“So,” asked Umkhira, “will this mislead the sow?”

“I don’t know. It’s possible,” Elweyr sighed. “But I wouldn’t bet my life on it.”

“It seems to me that you just bet all our lives on it.” Although it was Zhuklu’a’s voice conveying the statement, Kaakhag’s irritated gestures largely spoke for themselves.

Druadaen looked away from the exhausted mantic and before he realized it was glaring at the urzh. “And what would you have done instead?”

Kaakhag’s face cycled through surprise, suppressed rage, then surly disdain.

Druadaen stood. “Elweyr has done the best he could, and I have yet to hear your plan. I suspect that is because there is not one to be found. It is as Ahearn said when we finally located the tunnel that brought us to this refuge: there are no perfect answers in the Under.”

Kaakhag started to rise, but his brother tugged him back down. Their brief exchange of signs made Zhuklu’a lift a hand to rub her nose. And so, stifle a laugh.

“What did he say?” S’ythreni asked.

“That sometimes, thinskins are right and urzhen are wrong…and this was one of those times.”

Druadaen was careful not to react or even look in their direction. Instead, rather than sitting, he picked up his rucksack and rummaged through it as he walked toward Kaakhag. The urzhen and his brother looked up, uncertain but still defiant.

Druadaen removed his hand and pushed it toward Kaakhag, unfolding it to reveal what he’d fished out of his rucksack.

Kaakhag looked, then sniffed, at the dried meat, his brow rising in surprise.

Druadaen pushed it closer. “Here,” he said. Then, struggling to pronounce the urzhen word correctly, he said, “H’adzok?”

Umkhira smiled. “You remember.”

Druadaen smiled back. “‘Truce’ is an important word to learn in any language.”

Kaakhag just gaped at him. Then, reminded to act by the elbow his brother jammed into his ribs, he stood and nodded. “H’adzok,” he agreed, and waved away the proffered food.

Druadaen shook his head, held the jerky out again. “K’teff.”

Umkhira blinked. “Where did you learn the word for ‘honor’?”

Druadaen grinned back at her. “Books are useful, you know.”

Kaakhag was frowning at the dried meat. The token was not merely a means of putting aside any hard feelings but was the formal exchange—the act of honor—upon which h’adzok was contingent. The Rot nodded again, very seriously, and accepted the meat. “K’teff, sut.”

Honor, yes/accepted. Druadaen returned the nod, returned to his seat, and noticed Ahearn watching. And, then ever so quickly, flash a pleased wink at him.

* * *

In the near-dark and the silence that followed, time once again became fluid, defied attempt at measurement. Minutes rolled together into an hour, maybe another, or maybe many; Druadaen could no longer tell.

He might have dozed or become caught up wholly in his drifting thoughts and memories. But regardless, he jerked upright when Raun rose, legs stiff, moving toward the narrow opening. Ahearn reached out, drew him back. He covered the one exposed patch of lichen and began rebuckling the straps on his armor. The others began to do the same. Druadaen resisted the urge to catch up; silence was more important than any protection or weapon, at this point.

In the utter dark, S’ythreni’s eyes could not see through to the outer chamber, and the temperature of the sulfur-laced water had a similar effect on the urzhen’s heat-seeing eyes: “a thick veil” was how Umkhira had described it shortly after arriving. And only Raun’s ears might have been able to discriminate the sounds of an approach through the constant spill and churn of water.

Until something audibly thumped on the stone floor of the outer cavern. Voices arose, were hushed by others, some far deeper than the first ones: almost certainly the kosh cadre that had survived the attack on the shaman’s chambers.

A minute passed, then—probably—another. Voices began murmuring again. They passed the waterfall, paused for a moment, then reversed and grew more distant, receding back toward the tunnel. A jabber of hushed voices followed them, diminished, and were gone.


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