Sanja had pulled out her pistol. “I can see it better from this angle. It’s segmented, and the segments overlap front-to-back. I can see gaps from here. If I can hit the gap, I can cut it in half.”
Had I a chance to take a survey, I could have mustered at least a dozen good reasons why she shouldn’t, but she never gave us the chance to say anything. The light shot out of her pistol—
—and damned if the worm didn’t just come apart in two pieces.
For good measure she took another shot, severing a foot-long piece near the head, then a fourth, cutting the rear section neatly in half. Even in that light, I could see the crazy smile on her face as she surveyed the four neatly-carved pieces of sluggeth at her feet.
Every one of which started to move on its own, heading straight for her.
And that’s when Sanja, princess of the desert, killer of the mighty sandclaw, screamed.
We quickly found out sluggeths can’t jump, because that’s what Sanja did—she leaped over the four of them in one bound and didn’t stop running until she was back with us, breathless as I had never seen her.
“I—they—” Finally she caught her breath. “They surprised me,” she said primly.
“Yeah,” I replied. “Obviously.”
The two klurath had already sprung forward, lances raised, skewering two of the mini-sluggeths and pinning them down, where they wiggled helplessly. The other two skittered about and went for the klurath the same as they’d run at Sanja. They didn’t seem bothered by the lights anymore. I think the shock of being cut into pieces had overcome their fear. Before any of the klurath could help their friends, Zachary Kyle ran up and jumped on one of the sluggeths, which made an awful crack, but it sure didn’t move anymore.
Not to be outdone, Skull ran in to smash the other one, with similar results. Then he looked around to see how Sanja was taking his bravery. More klurath stepped in and polished off the remaining segments by stabbing them with their lances until they stopped moving.
Praja Waluu checked on his men and to make sure the sluggeths were well and truly dead, and weren’t going to start up again and come at us from behind. I had half a mind to do the same.
“Well, that’s one thing we don’t have to worry about anymore,” he said.
“What do you mean?” Skull asked. I was surprised he was paying attention, given how hard he was trying to catch Sanja’s eye.
“Sluggeths have a hierarchy. We’ve seen it before in other tunnels. The biggest one chases the others out. Given that we just killed this one, we won’t be seeing any more. I can’t imagine they get any bigger.”
Yeah, that’s what you said before we saw this one.
We weren’t expecting the tunnel to end; it just did. One minute we were walking single-file, our torches held up to ward off the cave spiders that we had to assume were crawling all over the ceiling (something I had almost managed to stop obsessing over at last), and the next minute the air had changed and we felt space all around us. Praja Waluu gave the order to halt.
“Is there light in here?” Kyle asked.
“Yeah, I think there is,” Skull answered. Most of us couldn’t say one way or the other, but humans have better eyesight than either the klurath or me.
“Turn off the lanterns for a second,” Kyle suggested, and after a few moments of hesitation, they were turned off. Nobody suggested we douse the torches.
“It’s not dark,” I said with admirable perception, in case there was anyone who hadn’t noticed.
The light was coming from the walls. They glowed in wide, winding stripes, up and down and sideways and all sorts of in-betweens, a soft golden illumination that had completely escaped me, at least, until we turned down our lanterns. Now it was like twilight, enough to see across the cave we found ourselves in, and a welcome change from the harsh white we were used to.
The cavern itself big and narrow. It looked like we were standing at one end. We couldn’t see the other end, although the opposite wall wasn’t more than a few hundred feet away. The ground felt gritty, like sand, but at the same time soft.
I looked down. “My god,” I said. “It looks like grass.”
It did. There was a fine dusting of low plants growing from what I know saw was some kind of sandy soil, kind of like grass. In the dim light it almost looked like it was moving, but I chalked that up to fatigue. There was no telling how long we had been walking, and no amount of switching hands could make up for the strain of having to hold a torch over your head all that time. I know I would have put it down a long time ago if I hadn’t known exactly why I needed to hold it up.
As we slowly turned, taking it all in, it dawned on me that I heard water nearby, a choppy splish-splish-blorp, more like a large lake than a moving river. I was about to make one of my perceptive announcements when I realized that everyone else had noticed it, too. A couple of the klurath had even moved off to investigate, muttering something about their feet getting stuck in the mud, but that couldn’t be right.
“There must be some kind of radioactive mineral veins in the walls,” Kyle said. He didn’t sound happy about it.
“Do you think we’re in danger here?” Praja Waluu asked.
Kyle took a moment to answer. “I’m not a geologist, but I’m thinking the sooner we’re out of here the better.”
“Because of the radiation?”
“Yeah, that—and that.” He turned on his lantern and used it as a pointer, indicating the far wall. Crawling along the vertical surface as easily as it could creep along the floor was a sluggeth, twenty feet long at least. From where I stood, its segments each looked to be a foot wide. I turned to Praja Waluu.
“Please don’t tell me there can’t be any larger than that. I really don’t want to see you get it wrong again.”
“We have another problem,” Sanja said. “We haven’t seen another tunnel yet, which means we have to go that way.” She waved an arm down the length of the cave. “And that’s the way it’s going.”
“We have another problem,” I said. “I can’t move.”
A chorus of questions arose, quickly becoming cries of outrage and concern. I wasn’t the only one. We were all stuck.
All at once we all stopped shouting. In the silence, even all the way across the cave, we could hear the sluggeth’s feet clicking faster.
Chapter 33
Bridge of Doom
We had to ignore the sluggeth for the moment—which wasn’t easy—and use our lights to try to figure out what was holding onto our feet. Our boots were encased in grass! I’d thought I’d seen the blades moving earlier, and I was right. We’d stopped in the middle of some kind of carnivorous plant, although how it thought it was going to eat something our size was beyond me.
“It’s the grass. It’s trying to trap us. But unless it’s got acid or something, I don’t see what it’s going to do to us.”
“It’s not the grass we have to worry about,” Sanja snapped. “I’ve seen this before—it’s like oasis grass!”
“What’s oasis grass?” Skull had stopped pulling and started kicking back and forth. It looked like he was getting somewhere.
“It’s like this stuff. It grows in oases. The grass traps the prey, and the water monster kills it. The monster gets the prey and the grass gets water and blood.”
“Water monster? What water monster?”
But I didn’t have to ask. The splashing noises we’d heard earlier were getting louder, and I felt drops falling from the air. I tried to turn toward the sounds but I couldn’t move well enough.
“There!” someone shouted. “Look out!”
A wave of water washed over my feet. It was cold, really cold, but the sandy soil the grass grew out of absorbed it almost immediately. I couldn’t see much of what was going on. All I could hear was a lot of shouting and the pounding of a large body hitting the cavern floor. A bunch of flashes lit the darkness off to my left, Sanja and Skull and Kyle letting loose with their pistols, and there was more screaming, n
ot human this time.
Then there was silence, except for the sloshing of the water in the lake that I still couldn’t see, and my friends’ heavy breathing. I finally got my head in the game and used my own gun to free myself.
Two klurath lay on the ground. I didn’t have to ask; even in that uncertain light I could see they were dead, bludgeoned to death. The rest of the klurath were gathered around them. I felt the grass crunch under my feet where it had been burned to keep the same thing from happening again.
“What’s going on?” I whispered to Kyle, who was nearest.
“They’re trying to decide what to do with the bodies. They don’t want to leave them here, but we can’t bury them, and we can’t carry them.”
I could see why they didn’t want to leave their friends’ bodies lying in this cave, waiting for a sluggeth to crawl over them, or worse, for the spiders. I didn’t know what they normally did with their dead; the subject hadn’t come up while I was there—although looking back on it, it was kind of surprising it hadn’t. I mentioned that to Kyle.
“I have an idea,” he said in a low voice, “but I don’t know how they’ll take it.”
“What is it?”
He told me, and I thought about it. It was practical, and it would keep the bodies from being desecrated, but I could see where he was hesitant to bring it up.
“Ask Praja Waluu,” I said after a minute. “Tell him we won’t do it if he doesn’t want to.”
Kyle sighed as if steeling himself, then approached the knot of lizard-men. He spoke briefly to Praja Waluu, then stepped back. Praja Waluu talked to his men for a moment, then I saw him give the klurath equivalent of a nod.
“He says it’s the best way,” Kyle told me when he came back. “I thought it would work better if we all did it.”
We got Skull and Sanja and explained what we were about. Praja Waluu had already ordered his men to strip the bodies of anything useful, and now they were laid out alongside one another in the middle of a circle of their fellows. Praja Waluu said a few words, his soldiers gave a salute, then he waved us forward while they stepped aside.
Kyle and I stood on one side of the fallen, and Sanja and Skull took up their positions opposite. We turned up our pistols’ ratings and carefully incinerated the bodies. Because of the close quarters and uncertain light, it took a full minute to do the job, but no one wanted to hurry.
As long as we kept moving, the “cave grass,” as we took to calling it, wasn’t a problem. We were too big to grab onto. Anytime somebody had to stop, he just kept churning his feet so there was no time to get a grip. All the same, we kept an eye on our left, where we could hear the water of the underground lake. We couldn’t really see it, but then nobody wanted to look anyway.
The good thing about the cave grass was that all of the other creatures in the cave had learned to avoid it, so we didn’t have any problems with them. Obviously, that was why the sluggeth we saw had clung to the wall instead of the floor as usual. We had lost sight of it, but that was all right by me. Praja Waluu theorized that its size might be because of its exposure to the radioactive minerals in the walls, the same minerals that gave us what light there was. If he was right, I didn’t want to think about what else was sharing this cave with us.
We were flashing lights all around us, on both walls, looking for anything that might be another tunnel leading downward, or at least away from here. Many times we thought we saw movement at the edge of the light, but we never actually saw any animals, so apparently they didn’t like the bright, which was fine. Praja Waluu had given orders that as long as we were in this large space, we could stop holding up our torches, and we put them out gladly. But we still hadn’t found a way out.
Then we saw the bridge.
It looked like a natural formation, a long arch that stretched up toward the ceiling and down to the other side of the cavern. We could finally see the lake, too; it veered toward us at this point, and the bridge started right at its edge. The surface seemed calm, but none of us wanted to check it out just yet.
“That’s amazing,” Kyle said. “It almost looks like someone built it.”
“But who?” Sanja asked, and not just for herself. “It’s not like anyone could live down here.”
“We do,” Praja Waluu pointed out. “Not this deep, but we’ve been living in Jhal for three thousand years, and no one on the surface ever knew. And there are the people we’re looking for…”
He had a point. “I wonder if it leads anywhere?” I wasn’t even aware I’d spoken out loud until Skull answered me.
“There’s only one way to find out.” He headed for the near end of the bridge, until we stopped him with a chorus of protests.
“No one is going onto that bridge until we have a plan,” Praja Waluu ordered. “We don’t know if it’s safe, and we don’t know what’s on the other side even if we can get there.”
“Probably that sluggeth,” I said. “If it’s smart enough to avoid the cave grass, it might be smart enough to stake out the end of the bridge.”
“Exactly,” Praja Waluu said. “Two of us will go first. Our tails give us better balance and we don’t know how good the footing is.” He pointed to one of his men. “Tars Arcus, come with me. Everyone else stay here until we come back. Keep alert—and don’t get caught in the cave grass.”
I jumped a bit guiltily and felt the resistance at my feet. I began walking around and the others did the same, keeping one eye on the bridge and the other on the water and our lights pointed outward like a shield.
The two klurath began climbing the bridge, taking it slowly, even though it didn’t look like they were having any trouble. At this rate it was going to take a long time for them to walk it all and come back, even if they didn’t run into any problems. We were all tired of marching, but we sure couldn’t sit down, and I could feel the mental undercurrent of fatigue and anxiety. Even Zachary Kyle was affected. I couldn’t hear his thoughts, but his face was easy to read.
“What’s the matter?”
He glanced at the bridge where Praja Waluu and Tars Arcus were climbing about half-way up.
“I don’t know. It’s just…something’s wrong. I know it in my gut. I’m a cop where I come from, a time cop, but still a cop.” He shook his head. “And something doesn’t feel right. I wish—oh, hell.”
He ran to the foot of the bridge and up its slope a few steps. “Praja Waluu! Stop! Stop!”
“What’s wrong?” echoed from above.
“I don’t know—but you have to come back. Right now.”
“I’m going to go on. We’re almost at the top. A few yards more and we’ll be able to see the whole rest of the way. If there’s a tunnel, we’ll see it.”
“Damn it!” Kyle started to scramble up the bridge. “Stop!”
I didn’t know Kyle very well, but I had the feeling he knew what he was talking about. Something about that bridge was wrong, we all knew it. There was danger lurking up there. Praja Waluu and Tars Arcus were walking into it. And Zachary Kyle? He was running straight at it. They were all probably going to die.
So why was I right behind him?
Chapter 34
The Invisible Snare
I’m not normally the fastest guy in the race, but this time Kyle was having trouble with the slope and the narrowness of the bridge, and I have a lower center of gravity, so I was able to catch up to him before he’d gotten too far. He didn’t hesitate when he saw me, he just kept climbing, and every couple of steps he’d yell at the klurath to stop, but I couldn’t see them so I didn’t know if they had.
It seemed to take forever to get high enough to see them, but it must have been just a few seconds, because when we did catch sight of them, they had definitely stopped. At least they’d stopped moving forward, because they were struggling for all they were worth and it was getting them anywhere except more tangled up.
In the spider-web.
It must have been invisible in the dimness originally, but now that
Praja Waluu and Tars Arcus had blundered into it, it was easy to see, hundreds of thick strands stretching in a fan shape upward to the ceiling. All of those strands were twitching like crazy, even the ones that weren’t anywhere near the two poor bastards caught by them. I knew before I looked what was coming.
Cave spiders. Spiders that had been infused with the same radiation as the twice-the-size-of-any-other sluggeth we’d seen earlier. They had to be half my size, but they scuttled delicately on their eight legs over these little strings of web that looked like they could never support such weight. And they scuttled fast.
I shone my light in one direction and they froze, but there were a dozen others charging down on other strings and every time I shifted my lantern they’d move again. Kyle was trying to cut the webs with beams from his pistol, but it was the wrong tool for the job and there were hundreds of strands around the lizard-men now; they’d struggled so hard they’d almost encased themselves.
Shouting for Skull and Sanja, I started shooting at spiders, but they were fast and agile and it was hard to aim with the lanterns flicking back and forth. I suddenly realized that if any of the other klurath came up here, armed with only a lance, he’d be worse than useless. It was already hard to hold my ground, and if this bridge got any more crowded, somebody was going to fall into the lake—and lizards can’t swim. I shouted down again to Skull and Sanja—”everybody else stay there!”—but I don’t know who heard me and I didn’t have time to wait for an answer.
I was trying to pick off a pair coming from my right that weren’t presenting good targets when I felt a blast of heat pass by my shoulder. Kyle was aiming over my head at something behind me. He fired again and I heard a splash as a dead spider hit the water, followed by a churning below. Whatever lived in that lake was having a feast.
“It’s no good trying to cut the web away from them! It just melts like glue and burns them!” He switched sides and helped me, then turned back. “We need another way to get them free!”
The Stolen Future Box Set Page 77
