The Call of Ancient Light

by Ben Wolf

  By Calum’s estimation, they had lowered the Saurian down at least fifty feet into the pit. At sixty feet, the rope tugged three times. Then three more. Then it just kept tugging rapidly, again and again.

  “Pull ’im up,” Burtis said.

  The two men on the other end of the pulley yanked on the rope, but it didn’t move.

  Burtis blinked, then pointed to three more men nearby the pit. “Go help them.”

  Calum stepped closer to the hole and peered down, careful not to slip down the steep slopes around it. The pickax sounds had given way to growls and a guttural rumbling.

  The rope still wouldn’t move.

  Burtis snapped his fingers and pointed to a group of six other men working nearby. They hurried over, grabbed the rope, and began to pull. It started to retract from the pit. One foot, two feet, three feet…

  A roar ascended from the pit, followed by the sound of two voices in a dissonant shriek. At first, Calum recoiled at the sound, but then he stepped forward and peered into the pit again.

  …seven feet, eight feet, nine… then back to eight feet again, then seven.

  The men on the other end of the rope lurched forward, and half of them tripped. A chorus of grunts and groans emanated from their direction as the rope continued to pull them toward the pulley, toward the pit.

  Burtis’s eyes widened. He cursed and darted over to the men holding the rope, all the while yelling for more men. Jidon grabbed ahold of it next and started hauling with all of his might.

  When Calum refocused on the pit, a faint green light glowed in the darkness below. Calum’s heart stuttered at the sight.

  “Burtis!” Calum shouted. “There’s green light in the pit!”

  “Pull ’im up!” Burtis shouted. The muscles in his big arms rippled with each yank. “More men—we need more men over here, now!”

  Another half-dozen nearby men dropped their tools and ran over to the rope.

  “Not good enough,” Burtis yelled. “We need more. We need everyone!”

  As more men came running, Calum looked down into the pit again. The green light had brightened, and the shrieking continued.

  Something cracked to his right, then above him. Calum looked up.

  The frame that held the pulley crashed toward him.

  Calum dropped to the ground and rolled away from the pit with his arms shielding his head. When he looked up again, the entire framework capsized and dropped into the pit. The rope followed, and the twenty or so men who held the other end skidded toward the edge of the pit.

  “Pull harder!” Burtis yelled. Easy for him to say—he was at the back of the group.

  Petyr, the worker at the front of the rope, inched ever closer to the edge.

  Let go. Calum’s jaw hung down. Let. Go.

  Petyr didn’t let go. His foot slipped over the edge, and he tipped forward, still holding the rope, and his feet dangled over the pit.

  Calum’s eyes widened. Don’t let go!

  “Don’t stop! Pull! Pull! Pull!” Burtis leaned back and pulled with all of his body weight. The other men did the same and synchronized with Burtis’s pulls. They managed to pull the rope back far enough so Petyr could find his footing again.

  Calum scrambled to his feet and ran over to help, but Burtis stopped him short.

  “Get back, Calum!” Burtis hollered. “Back on the edge an’ spot for us. Now!”

  Several agonizing minutes later, the men had made significant headway with the rope, but the Saurian still wasn’t out of the pit. All the while, the green light in the pit had intensified, as had the mixture of roars and wails from below. Yet even with the extra light, he still couldn’t see anything down there.

  The men pulled faster and harder, still keeping time with Burtis.

  “That’s it!” Sweat glistened on Burtis’s bare shoulders. “Pull. Don’t stop.”

  All at once, the entire group jerked closer to the pit by two feet. Jidon’s eyes widened, and so did those of several others. The pit was pulling back again.

  More and more rope slid down into the pit, and the men skidded toward it.

  Burtis cursed and swore. “Come on! Pull harder!”

  The green light in the pit flared brighter, and the two-toned shriek screeched even louder from below. Men struggled and strained, but they couldn’t help but be pulled closer, even though more than thirty of them strained at the rope.

  Another wrench from the pit yanked the men forward. Their boots carved into the dirt, but it didn’t help. Calum didn’t know much about the Gronyx or the pit, but he knew this had never happened before.

  On the next lurch, Petyr left his feet again, but this time he didn’t hold onto the rope. He couldn’t have, even if he’d wanted to. It happened too fast.

  Instead, in a desperate attempt to survive, he leaped across the pit and grabbed an exposed tree root that protruded from the opposite edge. As he cried for help, the terror in his voice added to the swirl of sounds coming from the pit.

  “Calum, help ’im!” Burtis yelled.

  Calum rounded the pit and dropped to one knee in front of Petyr. He reached out with his right arm and kept his left behind him as a counterbalance.

  Petyr glanced down at the pit, then he refocused on Calum with pure fear in his eyes. “Help me!”

  Calum stretched toward him. “Grab my hand!”

  Their fingertips touched, but Petyr couldn’t get a grip. He latched on to the tree root again and shook his head. “You gotta get lower, or I can’t reach!”

  Would Calum even be able to pull him up anyway? Sure, he’d worked in the quarry for the last eight years, but Petyr was built of solid, heavy muscle.

  It didn’t matter. He had to try.

  Calum dropped to his stomach and leaned forward as far as he could without falling in. “You gotta reach farther up. You can do it!”

  Amid the screams and thundering from below, Petyr jerked upward and grasped Calum’s wrist. He smiled. “Now pull me up.”

  Pull him up? Calum couldn’t even get any leverage to get himself up.

  He tried anyway, but he could barely hold Petyr in place, much less pull him up. “I—I can’t—”

  “Pull me up, kid!”

  “You need to help me.” Calum ground his teeth. “You’re too heavy!”

  Petyr’s eyes filled with desperation again.

  Calum slid toward the pit, and his bare chest scraped against the rough sand.

  “Grab onto something!” he shouted to himself as much as to Petyr, but he didn’t have an angle to get a good grip on anything.

  Petyr groped for the tree root again, but his fingers scraped past it, and he sunk even lower than before. His body weight pulled Calum closer to the edge. Any more and Calum wouldn’t have enough counterweight to stay out of the pit.

  “Help me!” Petyr pleaded. “Please.”

  Calum shook his head. “I can’t! I can’t hold you.”

  Petyr’s eyes ignited with fear and—anger. He wrenched Calum’s arm down and reached with his other hand. He clamped onto Calum’s forearm and tried to climb out of the pit using Calum’s lean body as a rope.

  “No—don’t!” Calum’s heart jumped as his body slipped forward and pitched over the edge toward a shrieking green hell.

  Chapter Three

  The drop ended with a sudden impact. Calum’s body hit something softer than rock, yet it still cracked upon impact. He rolled off whatever it was onto the pit’s gravel floor. His back and arms protested with pain, but he was alive.

  Green light blanketed the rocky cave walls around him. The rank odor of decay and stagnant soil hit his nose.

  His head swam, and his vision blurred. Dazed, he tried to blink the sensations away, only to see a dark massive form reaching out for him. Something else wailed from behind him. The thing latched onto his wrist and pulled him close.

  The next thing Calum knew, his feet left the gravel below, and his body began to ascend. Nausea from the abrupt lift seized his stomach, and he
vomited. Some of his meager breakfast hit his boots, but the rest fell past down to the dirt, now a good ten feet below.

  Something slithered beneath him, but it shrank away rapidly.

  He craned his head and looked up. The blue-white opening of the pit came into focus above him and approached fast. Really fast.

  Calum vomited again, this time missing his boots entirely.

  The green light and the shrieks gave way to hot sunlight and grunts. Three pairs of hands hooked under his limbs and set him on the dirt. Fellow quarry workers.

  What?

  “Get ’em away from the edge.” Burtis’s bearded face appeared overhead. He reached down and took hold of Calum’s left arm along with three other men and lifted him. “And don’t let him escape.”

  Calum squinted in the sunlight. He turned his head to where Burtis was looking and blinked several times. The large form, the one that had grabbed him and pulled him to safety, stood to its full seven-foot height.

  The Saurian.

  Streaked with dirt and something like glowing green ooze, he strained against the men who pulled on his rope and harness while others surrounded him wielding pickaxes and shovels. Now free of his restraints, he had an opportunity to try to escape, albeit not a great one, but he didn’t engage the men.

  Instead, he let them pin him to the ground, and he exhaled long breaths through his flared nostrils, all the while focused on Calum.

  The Saurian had saved him…

  But why?

  Then Jidon’s boot plowed into the Saurian’s snout.

  “No!” Calum shouted and twisted out of the other workers’ grips. His boots hit the ground and he charged at Jidon, lowered his shoulder, and hit him from behind.

  It wasn’t much, but the impact sent Jidon forward just enough that he tripped over the Saurian’s torso. He sprang to his feet in a hurry and stared steel at Calum.

  Calum didn’t back down. “Don’t hurt him. He saved my life.”

  Jidon snarled and stepped toward Calum with his fist raised, but Burtis caught his wrist mid-swing.

  “Enough.” Burtis shoved Jidon back with his other hand then turned to Calum. “Don’t you ever side with that thing over your own kind again, crystal? A man’s dead ’cause of him.”

  The men surrounding them muttered to each other.

  Sickness tinged Calum’s stomach. “But I’m alive because of him. Doesn’t that—”

  Burtis backhanded Calum hard enough to awaken every latent ache from his fall into the pit. He stumbled backward, stunned but not surprised, as the taste of copper tainted his mouth once again.

  “What’d I just say to you?” Burtis snapped. “You don’t side with ‘im over us, over me. Period.”

  Calum dabbed at his lip and found blood on his fingers. He scowled at Burtis.

  “And if you don’t get that sour look off your face, I’ll smack it clear off you.”

  “Do you got any idea what a Gronyx does with its victims?” Jidon stepped toward Calum. “It rips its food apart before it feeds. I’ve seen it firsthand. That’s what happened to Petyr. Shoulda been that Saurian, but instead, Petyr died. You expect us to feel good ’bout that? To let him off easy? No. He’s gonna pay. A life for a life.”

  “Jidon, shut up.” Burtis stared at him. “Petyr had bad luck, nothin’ more. I paid good money for that Saurian, and he’s gonna work here ‘til the day he dies. You don’t cut ’im off early ’less I say so.”

  Jidon grunted and folded his arms.

  Burtis refocused on Calum. “Either case, I don’t want you ’round the Saurian no more. I was wrong to let you try your hand at discipline when you obviously don’t got any of your own. From now on, you’re back on boulder duty.”

  Calum glared at Burtis, but he nodded. Burtis stepped away, toward the Saurian, and barked more orders to the surrounding men.

  As Calum stood there, Jidon leaned in close. “Watch out, little man. You cross me again, and even Burtis won’t be able to stop me from breakin’ your neck.”

  Calum recoiled a step. Then Jidon spat a wad of saliva on the dirt at his feet, snarled, and plodded away.

  As Calum watched Jidon go, he saw something small and metal disappear in the Saurian’s scaly fist. Calum squinted at it and briefly considered telling Burtis, but after that rebuke, Calum didn’t care to ever speak to him again.

  Instead, he grabbed a pickax and headed toward the upper level of the quarry. He took one last glance back at the Saurian, just in time to see several workers surrounding him, many of them with whips in their hands. Burtis and Jidon stood among them.

  Calum didn’t look back again, even when the whips began to crack.

  Chapter Four

  Western Kanarah

  Lilly woke up to find a hooded man crouched over her.

  She gasped and pushed away from him, but her back hit metal bars. The ground under her bounced, and she stared at the hooded man, wide-eyed. She groped for something to use to defend herself, but her fingers found only straw.

  “Easy, child.” The man raised his hands and pulled the hood of his tattered cloak from his head. Long silver hair spilled out and draped over his shoulders. “I’m not going to hurt you. Quite the opposite, in fact. I was trying to make sure you were alright.”

  Unlikely. She’d been warned about the kind of indecent men who wandered Kanarah, men with no allegiance to anything or anyone but themselves and their own carnal desires. For all she knew, this old man was one of them.

  “Do you know where you are?” the old man asked.

  Her mind clouded with dark images and fright, but it finally started to focus. She remembered the spiky-haired slave trader ordering them to drug her and another man pressing a foul-smelling rag to her mouth and nose, but nothing after that.

  The old man frowned. “Aliophos Nectar. They use it to drug their fresh captures and, on occasion, to subdue unruly slaves. You’ve been unconscious for about half a day.”

  Afternoon sunlight filtered through the trees and down into the cage in patches. She realized she was in a cage atop a wagon, moving along a road of some sort, but not a well-used one. The foliage around them was far too thick and the ride too bumpy for it to be a main road.

  “What?” Lilly blinked, and her heart hammered. She’d been abducted by slave traders, but she didn’t want to believe it. She couldn’t.

  “They removed your armor and put you in here with the rest of their haul from the past week.” The old man motioned over his shoulder at the wagon’s two other occupants: a middle-aged woman with brown hair who kept scratching at her scalp, and a man about the same age—scraggly, dirty, and sound asleep on a mound of hay. “Including me.”

  The ground rumbled beneath Lilly again, and she jumped.

  “Relax.” The old man extended his withered hand toward her. “They’re taking us somewhere. Don’t know where, yet.”

  Lilly noticed her legs, bare from mid-thigh down to her boots, no longer covered with her light-pink armor. She noted her bare arms and stomach as well, but her white armor-lining undergarments still covered her chest and her hips, tight against her skin.

  Still, she might as well have been naked. She hugged herself and retracted her legs until she sat against the bars of her cage, her knees level with her face.

  Worse yet, they’d taken her cape. Even if she could get out, without her cape, she couldn’t fly away.

  Lilly’s eyes widened. What if—?

  “No one has touched you, child.” The old man offered a sad smile. “Roderick, for all his cruelty, lives for the next coin more than for momentary thrills. As such, you are wholly intact.”

  Lilly squinted at him over her kneecaps, but his blue eyes betrayed no aggression, no ill-will. “Who are you?”

  “I’m no one of consequence. My name is Colm, but you may call me Grandfather if you wish. I have always wanted grandchildren, but I never settled down long enough to earn them.” The old man smiled at her. “And you may regard me as such a person in your
life, for I have no desire to harm you or take advantage of you whatsoever.”

  “I’ll stick with Colm, thanks.” Grandfather? Weird. “I’m Lilly.”

  “You should eat something, child.” Colm reached for a thin leather satchel that hung from the inside of their cage-on-wheels and removed a crust of bread. “It’s not much, I know, but the three of us have eaten our share for the morning, and I made sure to save this for you.”

  Lilly wanted to deny his offer, but her stomach accepted with a loud rumble before she could reply. She reached for the bread. “Thank you.”

  Colm grabbed her wrist and pulled her close in one quick motion. Warm breath hissed past her ear in a harsh whisper, and his stubble scratched her cheek.

  “I meant what I said about not harming you, but don’t expect such courtesy from anyone else. You’re in a far different world than the one you left, judging by your armor and your beauty. The other slaves, the slave traders themselves, and even—especially the slave buyers are not to be trusted. Be on your guard at all moments.”

  Lilly pushed away from him, more shocked at his words than his actions, but he’d been honest about not harming her. If he’d wanted to hurt her, he could have done any number of things to her while she was sleeping, or just now when he grabbed her, but he hadn’t.

  When she looked down at her hand, she found the crust of bread in her palm. “How did you—?”

  Colm put his index finger against his lips and gave a slight nod. “Remember what I said.”

  Lilly nodded. She put the bread crust to her mouth.

  “If you’ll pardon me saying so, it helps if you don’t try very hard to chew it. Just let it sit in your mouth until it softens.” Colm chuckled. “At least that’s what I have to do. My teeth don’t work as well as they used to.”

  Lilly crunched into the crust and leaned back against the bars. While she chewed, the wagon came to a halt. “What’s happening?”