Unleashed

by Tiffany Roberts

  “It might be the last one,” Nina said. She stood with a hand over her eyes, shielding them from the overhead light. “We’re close.”

  Vortok’s steps felt a little lighter when they continued, as though he were sped on by the thought of getting out of this hot, wet, nightmarish place. It didn’t prevent him from sinking in the muck — that would’ve been too much to ask — but it was something.

  He’d be fine so long as he didn’t try to guess what awaited beyond the cliff.

  The rockface soon came into focus; it looked almost exactly like the cliffside in the forest, and that struck Vortok like a blow. What if they’d somehow come back to where they began? It made sense when he recalled the floodwaters that had swept between the trees, but it was unlikely; the trees were too different here, the land too uneven. This couldn’t be the same place.

  When they finally reached the cliff, Vortok was grateful to find a narrow strip of dry ground between it and the water. He set the bags down and returned to the water to scrub the muck from his fur. The others followed his example, and Nina drifted between them, helping to clean places they couldn’t reach.

  Back on land, they ate the last of their soggy meat — it wasn’t likely to keep for much longer, so there seemed little sense in saving it — and surveyed the rock before them. Vortok tilted his head back. The cliff went up and up, at least as high as the first they’d climbed, tall enough that it might as well have been holding up the sky.

  But that is not the sky, he reminded himself.

  “The calls are coming from somewhere on the other side,” Nina said. She was looking up at the cliff with doubt etched on her face.

  Aduun released a heavy breath. “Then we will have to climb it.”

  “But this looks even bigger than the first one.” A hint of fear colored Nina’s voice.

  “Something is…off,” Balir said, stepping forward. He placed his hand on the stone and angled his face toward the sky, releasing a series of clicks from his throat. “I think there is stone directly overhead, but it is too high for me to tell.”

  “There’s been stone over our heads the entire time we’ve been down here,” Vortok said. “Not seeing it didn’t mean it wasn’t there.”

  “This is the first time I’ve been able to detect it. That means it is closer than it’s been before.” Balir turned to the others. “It is the same as when we first stepped into the forest. You could not see the stone behind us once we emerged from the tunnel, but I could still sense it. I will climb this and find out for sure…but I do not believe we can go over this barrier.”

  Nina looked from Balir to the top of the cliff, and her face paled. “Be careful, Balir.”

  “I will.”

  Vortok, Nina, and Aduun backed away from the cliffside as Balir scaled it. Despite his lack of sight, Balir moved with surprising surety over the rocks, making Vortok feel all the clumsier for his big, clumsy hands and unyielding hooves. Something brushed against his hand. He glanced down to see Nina beside him, watching Balir with her head tilted back and her lips pressed in a tight line. She squeezed Vortok’s hand. He drew comfort from her presence at his side.

  Balir stopped around three-fourths of the way to the top. Gripping the rock with one hand, he reached over his head and swung his palm upward.

  Vortok heard the slap of flesh against stone from the ground.

  Balir remained in place for several moments, feeling around with his extended hand, turning his head from side to side, before climbing back down. Tension Vortok hadn’t realized he’d been carrying eased when Balir set foot on the ground.

  “We cannot move past that point,” he said as he turned to face the others. “The ceiling goes on in either direction for as far as I can detect.”

  “There has to be an opening down here then,” Nina said. “A tunnel or something. We just need to keep moving.”

  “Which way do we go?” Aduun asked, attention on her.

  Vortok looked to either side, sniffing the air. He concentrated. The scents of the swamp were numerous and layered, all with an undercurrent of rot which made it difficult to pluck any individual smells from their midst. Were anything out of the ordinary present — not that anything here was ordinary to him — it would serve as a good starting point.

  “We can go left first,” Nina said. “If we come to a dead end, we can backtrack and hope for passage on the other side.”

  “There’s little else we can do,” Aduun said. “Standing here and wondering about it will only waste time.”

  Vortok lifted a large branch from the ground and carried it to the spot they were standing. He jabbed the thicker, broken end of the branch into the dirt and forced it down, sinking its base low. “A marker to guide us,” he said.

  They walked in the direction Nina had suggested. Balir continued clicking, his attention often directed at the cliffside, undoubtedly trying to locate any openings along the way. The narrow strip of land persisted at the base of the rock face until the stone abruptly veered right, opening on a wide section of swamp. They told Balir, and he shook his head. When he extended his hand into the seemingly empty air, his palm hit something.

  Vortok reached forward. His hand touched hard, rough stone, but his eyes could not see it. The disconnect between hand and eye sparked an uneasy feeling within him. He should’ve been used to Kelsharn’s tricks by now, but such things seemed to defy what was natural on such a deep level that Vortok couldn’t shake the wrongness of them.

  “If the stone is no longer visible, we may well have come too far,” Balir said.

  They turned around and went back, their pace a little slower than it had been on the first trip. Vortok found himself often stepping in his own hoofprints. The more he thought about that, the more it felt like they’d wasted their time, like they’d done exactly what Kelsharn would’ve wanted them to do. What if there were some unspoken time restraint on this? What if their people were subjected to more and more suffering the longer Aduun, Balir, and Vortok took to find them?

  Vortok stared at the tracks as they walked. When Balir stopped abruptly, Vortok bumped into him from behind, nearly knocking the smaller valo over.

  “What is wro—” Vortok began, but his words died as he looked up and to the left.

  The sky had darkened with the approaching sunset, and it cast an orange glow on everything through the clouds. There was a large opening in the side of the cliff before them. There’d been no attempt to make this opening look natural. Quite the opposite — a carved stone roof extended from a massive recess in the cliffside, supported by six tall columns that were shaped to look like Vortok’s people. The statues supported the roof on their backs, their bodies hunched as though the weight would break them, their features warped in sorrow and agony. Light stones embedded in the bases of the statues cast soft light and hard shadows up at the stone carvings, enhancing the sense of suffering. The light stones ended before reaching the rectangular opening, which led into total darkness.

  At the front of the overhead slab, a huge, familiar shape was mounted, looming above everything else — Kelsharn’s horned mask.

  “That… How?” Nina frowned, brows drawn low. “We felt the rocks, and Balir didn’t detect any entryways.”

  “We…we just walked farther than we thought,” Vortok said, suffused by a sense of numbness. “We just overshot our starting point.”

  “Vortok…” Something in Aduun’s quiet tone demanded attention.

  Vortok followed Aduun’s troubled gaze to the ground just in front of them, where a large branch jutted up from the mud. The branch he’d placed as a marker.

  His thoughts faltered, and for several moments, only one word remained in his mind, echoing between his ears in his own voice and Nina’s — how?

  “More games,” Balir growled. “There must be certain conditions that dictate when this entry is revealed.”

  “Bahmet has many hidden rooms and doorways,” Nina said. “When you activate the mechanisms, they open, and they
always fit in so perfectly that you forget they were practically invisible a moment before. But…we’ve never found anything like this.”

  “So what triggered this? What prompted it to open?” Aduun asked.

  “It could be…where we walked, the time of day, or…anything,” Nina replied with a shrug. “It doesn’t matter. We should go in before it’s gone again. This,” she waved toward the statues, “could be it.”

  Aduun drew in a deep breath. “All right. Balir, you take the lead. There doesn’t appear to be any light inside. We will have to rely on you for guidance again.”

  Balir hesitated for a moment before he stepped forward. Vortok wondered if the same sense of dread had overcome him, as well. It slithered through Vortok’s gut, cold, oily, and heavy. He was not proud of it, but he could not shake it.

  He barely suppressed the shiver threatening to course up his back. Through all these struggles, through all these trials, they’d been moving in the direction Kelsharn wanted them to go. When he stopped to think about it, that was a disturbing notion.

  But Vortok would not allow that to stop him. He would protect Nina and his companions, would find his people, and would reclaim his life.

  Balir started forward. Aduun followed a few steps behind, and Nina after him. Vortok didn’t allow himself any hesitation; he walked with his head high and plunged into the darkness behind his companions.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Nina pressed deeper into the dark passage, clutching Aduun’s tail in her hands for guidance. If she held him too tightly, he made no complaint. Vortok kept a hand on her shoulder as he followed behind her. Despite being in physical contact with her mates, despite sensing the pulses of their minds nearby, her lack of sight made her uneasy.

  This entire place made her uneasy.

  The light behind them had disappeared shortly after they’d passed through the opening, punctuated by the boom of an immense stone barrier falling into place, and now there was nowhere to go but forward — wherever that would lead them.

  Come, Nina, the voices beckoned and begged, louder and stronger than ever. Help us, before it’s too late. Free us, Nina.

  The voices were growing increasingly difficult to block. She shouldn’t have wanted to; these were her mate’s people, her tribe, and yet a sliver of fear raced down her spine every time they connected with her. They felt…wrong.

  “How long is this passage?” Aduun whispered.

  The entryway had been twice as tall as Vortok, wide enough for all four of them to walk through side-by-side, but they’d maintained their single file formation. She sensed the tunnel around them hadn’t become any smaller as they walked, but the walls seemed too close all the same, the darkness too cloying.

  “I cannot tell,” Balir replied from the front. His throat clicks echoed softly off the stone walls, lending an eerie quality to their sound. “Wherever it ends is too far away for me to sense.”

  “Can you detect any—” Vortok’s words were suddenly cut off, and his hand abruptly left her shoulder. He yelled, the sound echoing and distant, diminishing with each second.

  “Vortok!” Nina cried, turning and reaching out blindly. She tilted, falling. What should have been the ground that Vortok had been standing on was…gone. He was gone.

  Aduun caught her, banding his arms around her middle and yanking her back before she could fall through the hole.

  “Vortok!” Nina fought Aduun’s hold, panic and fear rising like bile in her throat. She threw herself forward, reaching for Vortok, her desperation to save him overpowering logic and reason, outweighing her fear.

  Aduun grunted and staggered, his hold on her slipping slightly. It wasn’t enough for her to get away, but it was enough for her fingers to scrape over the solid stone floor.

  The hole was gone.

  “No!” she rasped, frantically sweeping her hands over the stone. “Balir, where is it?”

  “It’s…gone, Nina. It closed,” Balir replied, his voice wavering.

  Aduun drew her back against his body; this time, her struggles meant nothing. “We will find him, Nina.”

  “The ground swallowed him,” she cried, throat tight. “What if…what if it…”

  She couldn’t allow herself to imagine the ground closing around him, crushing him, killing him.

  “Come, Nina,” Aduun said gently. She felt the pain in his heart, knew he was barely holding himself together as he took a step backward, pulling her along with him. “We need to keep—”

  The ground beneath them disappeared. Aduun’s hold on her tightened as they were suddenly falling, plunged into even deeper darkness. Nina’s terror stole the air from her lungs; she couldn’t even scream.

  Balir’s shrieking roar sounded from somewhere above, echoing to envelop them completely as they fell down, down, into nothingness. His call was abruptly cut off. She had no idea if he’d fallen, too, or if the hole had simply closed above them.

  Their direction altered suddenly; instead of falling, they were now hurtling through the darkness sideways, though they’d hit no physical object to redirect their momentum. Nina clung to Aduun and struggled to breathe. Air rushed past, whipping her hair back, and though she had no visible means of judgment, it felt like their speed was increasing. She clenched her teeth. They were going to hit a wall, were going to crash with such force that every bone in their bodies would shatter, because Kelsharn would have found it amusing to have them come all this way, surviving so much, only to be splattered like bugs.

  Their speed faltered abruptly, manipulated by some unseen force. They fell again, but this time solid ground met them. They tumbled, Aduun’s muscles tense as he fought to shield her from as much harm as he could, and finally came to a full stop. Nina squeezed her eyes shut, her body aching and bruised from the fall. She panted to catch her breath, wondering how they were alive, almost unable to believe they’d survived. She tightened her grip on Aduun.

  “Are you two all right?”

  Her heart skipped a beat; that low, rumbling voice belonged to Vortok. She opened her eyes and lifted her head. To her surprise, Vortok was standing over her, every bit as large and powerful as ever.

  And she could see him.

  She disentangled herself from Aduun and leapt at Vortok. He caught her, his strong arms drawing her into a mutual embrace; she desperately needed to feel him, to know he was here, that he was solid and alive.

  “I thought I’d lost you this time,” she whispered into his mane.

  “Hard to lose someone as big as me,” he replied, holding her tight. Despite his humor, his voice cracked, revealing an underlying vulnerability he’d rarely displayed.

  A pained grunt and the sound of a body tumbling over the floor drew her attention to the side. Balir spread his claws and brought himself to a stop. For a moment, he lay with limbs splayed out, and then he slowly pushed himself onto hands and knees.

  “That was unpleasant,” he muttered.

  Aduun helped Balir to his feet. Nina released Vortok, and he guided her to stand beside him. The others joined them, and all four pressed close to one another.

  “What is this place?” Vortok asked.

  Though their bodies were illuminated by an unseen source, the space around them was black; the only indication of a floor was the feel of it beneath Nina’s feet. This was familiar; she’d seen this in her dreams each night. This was the black place from which the voices always seemed to call her. She shuddered.

  Lights came into view, hundreds, thousands, so faint at first that Nina wondered at first if they were figments of her imagination, a desperate attempt by her brain to reconcile what it was experiencing here. But as they brightened, she understood.

  They were stars. Countless stars of varying brightness and hue, hanging in the blackness all around. But it wasn’t blackness anymore — swathes of deep blue and purple, clouds of subtle color, filled in the spaces between and within the thicker star clusters. Galaxies. That was Quinn’s word for them. Nina had never quite bee
n able to picture what Quinn meant by it, but she knew now.

  She looked down, and a sudden wave of dizziness struck her. She gripped Vortok’s arm and closed her eyes.

  There were stars beneath them, too. Instead of a floor, space stretched on into infinity under their feet, surrounding them completely, giving her a disorienting, nauseating sense of being lost in the night sky.

  “This is…” Aduun’s voice trailed off with a mixture of wonder and fear.

  Balir grunted. Nina forced herself to open her eyes and looked at him, doing her best not to glance down, and saw him shaking his head as though in agitation. The red spots around his throat flared.

  “What is that sound?” he growled.

  Nina held her breath and listened. She heard only the sound of her own pounding heart; they were surrounded by eerie, total silence, broken only by the little noises produced by the valos’ movements.

  “I hear nothing,” Vortok said.

  Aduun glanced at Balir. “Nor do I.”

  “What is it?” Nina asked.

  Balir tilted his head back and made his throat-clicking noises, turning his face from side to side as he did so. “I can’t hear the returning sounds over it,” he said, “can’t see with it so loud.”

  Nina released Vortok and reached out for Balir, curling her fingers around his arm and moving closer. “Open up to me, Balir.”

  Dipping his chin toward her, he closed his eyes. She felt his guard drop, felt him open completely to her, and she delved into his mind. His love and trust overwhelmed her senses, but she pushed it aside to focus on what he was experiencing — on what he was hearing.

  It wasn’t a single sound, but two, layered together into something more powerful than its pieces. A high ringing and a low, low hum. For Balir, the combination was massively disruptive. The noises seemed to cancel out much of his range of hearing.

  Nina closed her eyes and pushed more, pinpointing those two sounds.