“Ever since then, most people have avoided them. Some—” he glanced at Gaz Bronn—”like to go hunting down there, but even they don’t go very far.”
“And some of the tunnels are forbidden even for hunters,” the inlama finished. “The ones that no one has ever come back from. As Praja Waluu says, I’ve been down there. As a matter of fact, I even invited Keryl to go with me, but we never got the chance. All of the lower caverns are dangerous, and none is nearly as big as this one, so there is no reason for us to go down there except for hunting. We know that the cave spiders still live down there, cave spiders and other things. The problem is that the ‘other things’ are coming up to our level—and now they’re hunting us.”
“Wait a second!” I’d been hanging back, trying to let Gaz Bronn and Praja Waluu do the talking, but I had to say something. Apparently, from the way they all turned to look at me, I’d said it a little louder than I intended. “Uh, I don’t want to sound scared or anything, but…what are these ‘other things,’ and what do you mean, they’re ‘hunting us’?”
“Oh, thank God,” Zachary Kyle said. “I thought nobody was ever going to ask.”
I don’t know much about klurath facial expressions, but I could tell that Skull and Sanja weren’t really happy with us right now. The hell with them. At least I wasn’t the only one who thought these things were creepy.
“Well,” Praja Waluu said, “there are the cave spiders. They come in various sizes, but they’re not aggressive unless they’re disturbed. They like to wait for their prey to come to them, and then they usually drop down from above. We thought we had cleared the cave of them, but now we know that they’re still living just under the roof.” We all looked up by reflex. Keryl had discovered the cave spiders of the outer cavern by accident, and he nearly didn’t live to tell about it. Fortunately, the roof of the cavern was so high the spiders weren’t a problem unless you went up there looking for them. “We’ve had spiders on the tops of some buildings, but now that we know what to look for, we have them under control.
“The other main problem so far are the sluggeths. Sluggeths are the opposite of cave spiders. In fact, they’re probably the reason spiders stay on the ceiling. They spend their entire lives scouring the ground for dead animals, detritus, anything they can eat. And they can and will eat pretty much anything. They have several hundreds legs on their underside, which is pretty much all mouth. On top they have a hard exoskeleton. They are extremely hard to kill. Like I said, they pretty much stay on the ground, but they have been known to rear up and try to take down a larger animal by covering it and eating it alive.”
“How big an animal?” Sanja asked.
“Sluggeths can grow eight feet long. They’ve been known to attack animals up to half their size.”
I relaxed a little. “So they’re not really a threat to humans or klurath.”
Praja Waluu gave the reptilian sign for a negative. “Not unless you’re lying down. Then they’ll just crawl right over you.”
I made a note to sleep with one eye open. And preferably several feet off the ground.
“It doesn’t sound to me like these things are that much of a threat,” Kyle noted. “I mean, yeah, giant spiders are bad, but you said you had them under control, and while these slug things can be dangerous, it’s not like they can exactly hide very easily. That doesn’t explain why you closed the city to outsiders, or why people are disappearing. Something else is going on. What’s up with these agitators you were talking about?”
“You were right,” Gaz Bronn said to me. “He is like Keryl. He gets right to the heart of the things.
“And you’re right, Zachary Kyle; it isn’t the cave spiders or the sluggeths that have me worried. It’s these former slaves going around stirring up trouble. We lived down here for 3000 years while we waited to take back the surface world—with the Thorans as our slaves. Generations lived and died believing that this was the natural order of things. Eventually even the slaves began to think of themselves as special, better than the surface people—even though they were slaves—because we were going to be the master race. They thought when we regained the upper world, they would share in the benefits, that they would be the overlords of the slaves of the surface world just as we were their overlords.
“And then, after all these centuries, we were finally about to invade the surface. Fale Teevat and his war party were all ready. All they needed to do first was kill me, as the representative of the peace party, and blame it on the surface people so that everyone in Jhal would fall in behind them. And then Keryl Clee came along and saved my life. He changed everything. Within a few weeks he had started a revolt against the war party, and when Fale Teevat launched his attack, we stopped it. The war everyone had been waiting for, for 3000 years, and we stopped it.
“Suddenly there was no war, no glorious victory over the surface. And then I—we—wrote a new constitution, freeing the slaves and granting them citizenship. Most of the war party went to prison, but not everyone is happy with the way things have turned out—not klurath, not even all the former slaves. And now someone is out there getting the people angry—while at the same time we are having an invasion of cave dwellers that we haven’t seen in a thousand years. This isn’t a coincidence. Someone is attacking us, an invisible enemy that is hiding in the lower caves and driving these creatures up to attack us.”
Sanja held up her hand. “Wait. How could anyone get down into the lower caves to do that?”
“That’s why we were hoping Keryl Clee was with you,” Praja Waluu explained. “Because we have to go down there to find out.”
“But how are you going to decide which tunnels to explore?” I asked.
“We know which ones are dead ends; that leaves the ones that we don’t know about.”
“So, you’re talking about the ones where nobody has ever come back.”
“Yes.”
I just knew he was going to say that.
Chapter 28
The Tunnels of No Return
It was no surprise, to me, at least, that Sanja was the first one of us to volunteer.
“As Timash can testify, I have experience hunting big spiders in the dark.”
“It’s true.” I didn’t like it, but I had to back her up.
“I was there, too,” Skull put in quickly. “She only had four men with her. That thing almost killed her.”
Sanja spun on him. “The only reason it ever had a chance was because somebody blinded us with a searchlight.”
Skull cringed. “All right, I apologized! This’ll give me a chance to make it up to you.”
“Make it up to me? You’re not getting anywhere near me! You’ll get us all killed.”
“I’d like to go,” Kyle said. “No offense, but I don’t know anybody here but you guys.”
Praja Waluu looked him up and down. Kyle was the only one of the humans who was close to klurath-sized.
“If you are anything like Keryl Clee, we will be glad to have you.”
“Wait a second,” Skull protested. “If he’s going, I’m going.”
Sanja looked like she wanted to say something violent, but she kept it in. I couldn’t believe that membership in this suicide mission depended on who didn’t want to leave Sanja alone with the other guy. I had just about decided that all humans were insane—with the possible exception of Maire—when I realized they were all looking at me. I suddenly knew what it meant when Keryl said he sometimes got a chill down his spine.
These people were planning on descending from this cave into even lower caves through pitch-black tunnels crawling with cave spiders and sluggeths and gods-know-what-else, down paths that nobody had ever come back from, and even if they got to the other end they had no idea what they were going to find. The best-case scenario was some unknown race of humans who wanted everyone in Jhal dead, and the worst-case scenario was that they could wander around in the dark for the rest of their very short lives.
When people used to ask
my Uncle Balu how he wandered so far all those years ago, and had all those adventures and lived to tell the tale, he used to say, “There’s one rule of survival that you have to remember above all others: Don’t Be Stupid.” I was pretty damned sure that this trip would qualify in his book as “stupid.”
But not as stupid as abandoning your friends.
Putting a lid on lovers’ quarrels was far from the only problem that delayed our departure.
“We’re not going down there unarmed.”
Skull was adamant, and Praja Waluu no less so. “My men won’t hold with projectile weapons. They’ve been banned from Jhal for centuries. You saw what happened when Fale Teevat’s men caused that ceiling collapse.”
“These aren’t projectile weapons,” Skull insisted. “They’re ray blasters. And if they’re set on low power, they won’t have any effect on the walls. Let me show you!”
“No! I’m telling you—listen, Skull, I understand what you’re thinking. I know that on the surface they use other weapons. Even we use them on our airships. But as much as I trust my men, I can’t trust that under the conditions we might find down there that one of them won’t panic if you start shooting. My men are trained with swords and lances, and they’re the best. They’ve faced cave spiders with nothing more than that, and I’ve drilled them on how to take on a sluggeth using a lance to tip it over on its back. They’re ready.”
“And I’m telling you—”
I sighed. We were wasting time. I put a hand on Skull’s arm, and he stopped in mid-sentence. I have that effect on people.
“Praja Waluu,” I said calmly. “The other expeditions, the ones that didn’t come back. Were they as well-trained as your men?”
He thought about it a minute. “Well, that was three thousand years ago, so I don’t know. But they had been fighting the Thorans, and the cave spiders, and everything else they found, so…if anything, they were probably better.”
“And none of them came back,” I reminded him gently. “We need to come back. Jhal needs us to come back.”
I left them to work out the details of what Praja Waluu was going to tell his men. That averted one crisis, at least. I only wished I could come up with an argument that would keep us from having to go at all. Of course, I couldn’t.
We had no idea how long we were going to be gone, what conditions we were going to find, if there would be any usable food or water once we got there—or if there was even a “there” to find. Except that if we were right, and someone was driving these things toward the surface, then there was more than just more spiders down there. If we didn’t believe that, there was no point in going at all.
It made sense that there was something more down there; those creatures hadn’t appeared out of thin air. They had to come from somewhere, which meant food and water, and an ecosystem of some kind, but whether we could survive in it was anybody’s guess. For all those reasons, we had to pack everything we might need for an extended trip, and extras of everything. It turned out, however, that living in a cavern for 3000 years is worth something when it comes to exploring caves.
The klurath who had explored these tunnels all those years ago had faced the same issues, and the hunters who followed them did, too. Hunting in the lower caverns was more popular than Praja Waluu had let on, and Gaz Bronn was very much a fan. He personally got us outfitted with thermal sleeping gear that folded into practically nothing, flashlights with six months of power, and water recycling kits with an almost indefinite capacity. I was glad to have those assurances, although I was not looking forward to testing their limits. Ironically, it looked like our most valuable piece of equipment might be the oldest.
“The spiders hate torches,” Praja Waluu explained to us again. We were clustered outside the tunnel entrance that he and his second had picked for our first try. (Yes, our first, because if we didn’t find whatever it was that we were looking for, the plan was to return to Jhal and go out again. Of course, the “return to Jhal” might be the trickiest part.) We were twenty, large enough to make a stand against anything we might reasonably expect to come up against, few enough to make keeping together in the tunnels feasible.
Praja Waluu was still talking. “We think it’s the smoke. Whatever you do, don’t put your torch too close to a spider. They go up in a flash. They have some kind of oil in them that helps with their webs. We don’t need a rain of flaming spiders on top of everything else.”
That was not an image that would help me sleep tonight.
His speech done, Praja Waluu turned and entered the tunnel, the rest of us filing behind: sixteen klurath, Skull, Sanja, Kyle, and me. The four of us, being inexperienced, were in the middle of the file; Praja Waluu’s second, a close-mouthed lieutenant named Kak Manzin, brought up the rear. As we had been drilled, we kept our torches just above head level, high enough not to blind us, but well below the ceiling. I could tell from the fact that the smoke wasn’t choking us that the ceiling here must be high, but I was very glad I couldn’t see it. I didn’t want to think about the time when the tunnel would inevitably narrow and the space overhead decline.
There was no way to measure time. We kept shuffling forward, shifting our torches from hand to hand when we got tired. What you were supposed to do if you got too tired to hold it up was one of those questions I didn’t really want answered. I’d already received one answer I didn’t like: No matter how far we walked, while we remained inside the tunnel, we would keep walking. Stopping to rest with the cave spiders above us and sluggeths and anything else potentially just outside of the range of the lanterns of the men on point was out of the question. Given that this was possibly the mistake the last exploration party had made, I was all in favor of it—in theory.
Each of us had a lantern attached to his harness. The three klurath at point had theirs pointed at the floor and walls ahead as well as carrying torches; the rest of us had strict orders to leave ours off except in emergency. I carried an extra lantern because I was actually wearing two harnesses; there wasn’t one in Jhal that would fit me, so they’d buckled a pair together, and Praja Waluu, loathe to waste the extra capacity, had loaded me with extra supplies.
The silence was almost as bad as the darkness. We made a bit of noise as we walked—the clicking of the kluraths’ unshod claws on the hard stone, the unceasing rasps of clothing, the muffled swoosh of the torch flames, our own breathing echoing against the walls punctuated by the occasional cough when someone caught a whiff of smoke—but we were under orders not to speak unless necessary so we could listen for any sign of predators. With the slight incline, I felt like part of a long line of dead souls on a slow march into hell.
Then the order to “halt” was relayed backward. I obeyed, and passed it on.
The sounds of our progress had stopped, and it felt as though as breathing had ceased as well. The only thing I could hear was the quiet guttering of the torches. Another message was passed from the point.
“Skull and Timash forward.”
Oh, this isn’t good. Praja Waluu had finally allowed ray weapons on the condition that only the three humans and I would be able to carry them, which was why none of the rest of The Dark Lady’s crew had accompanied us. Skull had named himself as having the most experience with guns, and me after him, which meant that if we were being called to the front of our line, there was trouble ahead that the klurath didn’t think they could handle on their own.
I had wanted to argue that Zachary Kyle, being a policeman, was probably a better choice than I was, but I hadn’t gotten a chance then, and there certainly wasn’t time now. We were lucky that the tunnel was wide enough at the point that I could squeeze my way past the line to where Praja Waluu and his companions had adjusted their lanterns to flashlights pointed straight ahead.
They had come to a stop at a point where the tunnel began to narrow. Within forty feet, there would be no room for anyone, even Sanja, to pass ahead of another. And squatting squarely in that gap, its carapace glistening in the lig
ht as its hundreds of legs drummed nervously in place, was a sluggeth, nine feet long if it was an inch.
Chapter 29
The Monster and the Maiden
“Your guns. Just how effective are they?” Praja Waluu asked.
Skull wouldn’t take his eyes off the monster in our path. “That depends on what you mean by ‘effective.’ We can kill that thing, but it’s not going be easy. If we don’t give it enough power, we won’t kill it right away, and if we do, we risk chipping away at the walls.”
“I thought you said you could stop these things without endangering the tunnels!”
“I did, but you said these things never grow over eight feet. And it’s right at the mouth of where the tunnel narrows.”
“That’s why my men can’t use their lances to turn it over; there’s no room. If you can’t stop it without risking blocking the tunnel, we might as well turn around and try another way.”
I thought about how far we’d come in the dark, and the long walk back, only to start again.
“We’ve got try. Skull, how about we both shoot at it? We can use lower intensity beams and there’s less chance we’ll damage anything else.”
“Works for me. Aim for just behind the…where the head would be.”
We leveled our pistols and fired almost simultaneously. The two pale red beams hit the sluggeth at nearly the same spot—and splashed away in a rainbow of colors. The sluggeth didn’t move.
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