by DD Barant
“Exhausted. Sore. And really, really good.” I sit up, taking my weight off her hands. I realize I can taste blood in my mouth. “I think I bit my lip or something, though—”
I turn around. Azura’s got a crust of dried blood around her nose, lips, and chin.
“Hey, what happened to you?” I ask. “Was there a psychic backlash or something?”
“Backlash, yes. Pyschic, no.” She dips her hand in the water, uses it to wipe away some of the mess on her face. “I thought I was out of range, but you’ve got one hell of a reach. Don’t think it’s broken, though.”
“Sorry. Will the water help heal it?”
She looks puzzled, but it’s replaced a second later by a look of comprehension. “Ah. Not really. Healing is not among its properties.”
“I’m not so sure.” I climb out, realize there’s no towel, and decide it’s warm enough to air-dry, anyway. “I feel a helluva lot better than when I got in there. A little wrinkly, maybe, but about fifty pounds lighter. That Lethe water worked just the way you said it would: I was living the memory, but I was able to change it.”
She gets lithely to her feet. “I take it the outcome was more satisfactory this time?”
“Are you kidding? It was fantastic. Can we do it again? There’s a pudgy little monster in the fifth grade I want to visit.”
She smiles. “I’m afraid not.”
It’s amazing how many people give away a lie by not being able to hide that little trace of smugness that comes with getting away with something. “There’s no such thing as Lethe water, is there?” I ask.
“Oh, there is. Just not here.”
“This isn’t a ritual center.”
“It’s a bathroom. In the sense of having a bath in it.”
“If I didn’t feel so good, I’d slug you.”
“You already did.”
I shake my head. “I should have known.”
“You did it on your own, Jace—and yes, I lied to you, because that’s what you needed to hear. Surprised?”
I stare at her, and then smile back. “No. Astonished…”
* * *
My initial high wears off pretty quickly, and Azura finds me a room to sleep in. I sink down onto a mattress that’s probably stuffed with dried fungus, and fall asleep almost immediately.
If I have any dreams, I don’t remember them.
I wake up feeling refreshed, though I’d gladly assassinate someone for a coffee. Azura showed me where the food and toilet facilities are—both about as crude as you’d expect—so I take care of my morning business first. When I’m done, I find Azura in the pantry, sitting at a round table and drinking something that smells like tea out of a carved wooden mug. The room has a high enough ceiling that it doesn’t feel cramped and tapestries hung on the walls to cover the bare earth. It’s almost like we’re not underground.
“Sleep well?” she asks.
“Yeah, thanks. Is that—”
“Earl Grey. Not as good when you can’t boil water, but passable. I picked up the habit in your world—care to join me?”
“God, would I.” She pours some steaming water from a gourd into another mug, then adds a tea bag she fishes out of a leather pouch.
I rummage through a crude cupboard for food. There’s no fruits or vegetables, but lots of mushrooms in various sizes and colors. Inside a wooden box with a leather-hinged lid, I find something surprising: meat, big chunks of it. It doesn’t seem to be dried, salted, or smoked, but when I pick up a piece to examine it I discover it’s as hard as a rock. Not cold, though.
“What’s this, shank of boulder?” I ask, holding up a T-bone.
“Venison, I believe. Want some? You’d have to eat it raw, of course.”
I make a face. “No thanks. You people must have teeth like diamond drills.”
She laughs. “You don’t eat it like that. It’s got an underdead enchantment on it to prevent it from spoiling—similar to the process of refrigeration, but without the risk of freezer burn.”
It makes sense. They use magic to keep themselves from decomposing, so why not do the same for food? “I’ll pass, anyway. I don’t eat meat, as a rule.”
“Fair enough. I had you pegged as an herbivore, actually.”
“Oh?” I know I shouldn’t be irritated by that, but I am. “Why’s that?”
“Any species can be aggressive, but it’s the animals with hooves that really have the market cornered on stubbornness.”
And that should tick me off, but doesn’t. “Huh.”
“Try the sporenuts in the basket—they’re quite good.”
I do, and she’s right—they’re crunchy, sweet, and just a little malty, like beer nuts if they were actually made from beer.
“So what’s the plan?” I ask while I’m crunching away.
“We wait. Hopefully not for long; Nightstorm should be back before day’s end. I thought I’d do a little scouting.”
“I’m coming along.”
She doesn’t argue. “I was going to suggest it, actually. You should familiarize yourself with these tunnels, just in case.”
After breakfast we head out—or deeper in, I guess. The glowing bugs in my little globe are still going strong, and I wonder what sort of magic they’re charged with; maybe they’re zombie fireflies. In any case, they give off enough light to let me see about ten feet ahead while we’re traveling.
“We’re headed back toward the edge of the city,” Azura says. “I want to take a closer look at the border zone, specifically where the stormstalk roots cross it.”
It takes us over an hour to get there; traveling on zebra-back in a straight line is a lot quicker than making your way through tunnels that double back on themselves and are filled with hidden traps and blind alleys. Azura seems to know where all of them are, though every now and then she stops and frowns as if trying to remember something. I stick pretty close.
And then we come to the root.
It protrudes from the ceiling, about as thick as a telephone pole and a pale, creamy white that glows ever so faintly. It runs in a straight line along the roof of the tunnel like some kind of giant organic fluorescent, and gives off a hum as well; but where the noise from a bank of fluorescent lights can get on your nerves, this soothes them. I feel a strong urge to touch it, but resist.
“Is it dangerous?” I ask.
“Like electricity, you mean? Not usually. It’s a power source, but the energy that flows through it is the stuff of life itself. It can power many kinds of enchantments, but direct contact is not generally harmful—though it can amplify any spells or mystic tools in your possession.”
I wonder what it would do to someone who’d swallowed a magic translation seed, and decide I’d rather not find out. I could find myself speaking were-boar every time I got drunk.
We follow the tunnel right up to its end, where it dead-ends abruptly at a flat, gray wall. I tap the surface with one finger. “Concrete. This must be the foundation of a Vegas building.”
Azura studies the root overhead. It melds with the concrete seamlessly, as if it had always been there. “This is the dimensional boundary. Energy is still flowing down the root—if there were any disruption, we would be able to see it.”
“So this is where we dig?”
“To either side, yes. They’ll lay down some sort of conductor between the roots, and when the new connection system is in place we’ll sever them here, at the boundary. Cut the power and kill the spell.”
It sounds like a workable plan. And of course, I’m sure that disrupting a massive magical power system is completely and totally safe.
Sure.
* * *
We go back to our little hidey-hole and do some strategizing; by the time we’re done my respect for Azura has gone up a few notches. The girl’s mind is devious, and she believes in planning ahead. I feel sorry for whoever marries her; the poor schmuck doesn’t stand a chance.
And then we wait.
The work crew shows up th
e next morning—morning being defined under the current buried circumstances as the bleary period immediately following my waking up—and prove to be not exactly what I expect.
I grew up with a certain kind of mythology around the walking dead: mobs of rotting corpses with their guts hanging out, staggering around like frat boys on summer break and moaning, “braaaiiins!” while trying to chow down on those who still have a pulse. Big on appetite, not so much on the social graces.
So when I hear a polite knock on the door frame and pull aside the cloth that serves as a door, I don’t expect to see a zombie standing there.
He’s a big guy, six-four or so, muscular, with grayish skin. His hair is short, very black, and not combed. His eyes are—well, dead. His lips are black. Unlike the Hollywood undead I’m familiar with, he isn’t dressed in torn funeral rags or clothes stained with the blood of his victims; he’s wearing a black, toga-like thing and sandals. I know immediately what he is, because he radiates this sense of stillness that makes the most serene Buddhist monk I’ve ever met seem like a sugar-crazed toddler with ADD. If I was the fashion-conscious type, I’d label his look as Goth Greek.
“Hello,” it says. He, I mean.
“Uh,” I reply. “Hi.”
He stares at me blankly. I stare back. So that’s what I look like when I first wake up, goes through my head.
I realize after a few moments he’s not going to say anything else unless prompted. “What do you want?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
Well, duh. I’m going to have to be more careful about how I talk to these guys. “Why did you come to see me?”
“I’m to tell you that we have arrived. Azura is above. Follow me and I will take you to her.”
“Wait here until I’m ready. All right?”
“I shall.” He doesn’t blink, not once. I pull the curtain shut in his face and get myself together.
“Okay,” I say, emerging a few minutes later. “Let’s go.”
He turns and trudges down the tunnel without a word.
“You have a name?” I ask.
“Yes.”
“Right. What is your name?”
“Zoran.” Zoran gives off a very faint reek of decomp, but only when I get too close.
“My name’s Jace. Did you come alone, or bring friends?”
“I did not come alone.”
He reaches a ladder and begins climbing; I let him get a few rungs ahead before I follow. Turns out we’re not that deep underground, maybe only seven or eight feet. When Zoran gets to the ladder’s top, he pushes open a hatch and climbs out.
When I emerge behind him, I see what he means.
“Wow,” I say. “That’s a whole lot of dead folks.”
We’re still in the Edenheart Jungle, but it’s not nearly as empty as the last time I saw daylight—filtered, dim, dusky daylight, but still brighter than fireflies in a snow globe—because apparently a morticians’ convention is in town and they’ve unloaded all their samples right here.
Row after row of the underdead stand, unmoving, in front of me. Hard to tell how many at a glance, but at least a hundred; men, women, all of them dressed in the same simple black tunics and sandals, all of them with the same gray skin and black lips. Unlike Zoran, each of these has some sort of digging implement: usually a gourd cut in half to form a scoop, sometimes with a longer handle lashed to it. They look like the kind of work crew you might hire in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Transylvania.
Azura is over to one side, talking to a short, wide man with a bushy orange beard, a guy who’s clearly not dead. He’s got the biggest hands I’ve ever seen, with long, extremely dirty fingernails. Azura is showing him the stormstalk map she showed me, and he’s nodding as she talks.
I walk over. “I see the contractors have arrived. I just hate remodeling, don’t you?”
“Jace, this is Gorrick Diggur—he’s going to be overseeing the operation at this site.”
“Jace Valchek,” I say. He doesn’t offer to shake hands, for which I’m grateful. He does give me a skeptical glance, then turns his attention back to Azura.
“Aye, we can start right away. We’ll be digging westward, while the team to the east approaches here. They’ll finish before we do, no doubt; we’ve farther to go to the next one. We’ll drive a few sounding posts into the ground to let them know when they’re getting close.”
“Good. And the new roots?”
Gorrick scratches one bushy orange eyebrow with his index finger; if he miscalculates, I’m sure he could gouge out his eye. “On their way. The king’s got men stripping every piece of tapestry or fixture in the castle with a shred of dried stormstalk in it; the royal seamstresses are going to weave it all together into a braid of true hair, were fur, and any leather they figure will conduct a charge. It’ll be patchy and leaky as a wineskin made from a dead porcupine, but it should get the flow going the way we want.”
“And once we’ve established a circular pattern it should hold,” Azura says. “It’s the timing that’ll be tricky.”
Gorrick shrugs. “That’s your lookout. We’ll lay the pipe, but you’ll have to decide when to open the valves.”
“I’ll let you know,” Azura says. She gives him a curt nod that signals the discussion is over, and Gorrick stomps over to the tunnel entrance. “First twenty, single file and follow me!” he bellows, then climbs inside. The underdead do so without a word, moving with nary a stagger. There’s something unnerving about how compliant they are; it feels like they’re just waiting for my guard to drop, and then they’ll go all Romero on me.
“Here we go,” Azura mutters.
* * *
There’s not a lot to do after that but watch them work. Gorrick, I gather, is a were-badger, which makes him something of an expert in the field of digging. Once he gets them started, he organizes some of the others into groups, cutting down tall fungus-trees and hacking the stalks into support posts with obsidian axes.
“How long do you think it’ll take?” I ask Azura.
“We hope to be finished within two days,” she says. “The earth is soft, and we can work nonstop.”
“Why even bother with tunneling? Couldn’t you just run this makeshift cable out the tunnel and through the jungle?”
She shakes her head. “Sadly, no. We’re trying to redirect powerful forces with improvised materials, and the earth will help provide a directional channel. Should we attempt this aboveground, most likely the cable would break—it probably will anyway—but without a tunnel to enclose it, it would release the energy into the open air. No one knows what that would cause, but it makes all the mages very, very nervous.”
“Magically charged life force spewing into the atmosphere? Why do I get the feeling that statement should have started with, A wizard, a zombie, and a were-goat walk into a bar?”
“Oh, I know that one. It has that funny punch line where a mad sorcerer takes over the world and kills both of us for fun.”
“Look on the bright side, Tink—if this doesn’t work, the giant mystic hurricane we’re trying to create will probably kill us.”
“Thanks for putting it all in perspective.”
“Hey, it’s what I do.”
* * *
The underdead deposit the dirt they haul out of the tunnel in a pile a little way into the jungle. I wonder at first why they aren’t just dumping it right beside the tunnel mouth, but after a while I understand. The pile becomes a mound, then a hill, then a foothill. Before too long the edges of it are creeping close to the tunnel mouth itself. According to Azura, Gorrick hopes to hit a tunneling speed of around 220 feet an hour, an amazing 4 feet per minute. If he can do that—barring obstacles like boulders that will have to be removed or detoured around—he can tunnel the mile or so to the next site within twenty-four hours.
Too bad he doesn’t get the chance.
The attack happens in the middle of the night, when Gorrick’s forces are around the three-quarters mark. Azura and I have
pitched tents aboveground so we won’t be in the way, and both of us are fast asleep when it happens.
I wasn’t conscious when it began, so I can’t accurately describe the entire event—but it’s part of my job to reconstruct crime scenes in my imagination, and it must have gone something like this:
The underdead dig silently, intently. There’s no swearing, no laughing, no talking; no grunts or pants or sighs. Four thousand feet of tunnel already exist, with a steady stream of workers flowing one way with empty pails and the other with full ones. At the digging face, workers put support struts in place and reinforce the walls and roof with underdead enchantments that harden the dirt into something like concrete.
Gorrick is at the digging face, supervising. He gives orders only when necessary, when the diggers encounter a large rock or unexpected water; then he instructs accordingly. He is not immediately aware when the attack occurs, because it happens at the other end of the tunnel.
A pulsing ring of energy expands from the point that the stormstalk root melds into the blank gray concrete, painting a shimmery circle on the wall. When it’s as wide as the tunnel itself, at least thirty stainless-steel javelins six feet long erupt from it, turning the short passage into the barrel of a gun. The tunnel being dug is at a right angle to the wall, so only a small number of workers are disabled, but this is only the initial assault.
Golems charge out of the widened dimensional rift. They don’t carry flamethrowers or nerve gas, because they know neither will be effective—but they are armed with heavy-duty bows, axes, swords, and javelins. They break into two columns, one moving down the tunnel to the right, the other advancing over the bodies between them and the exit.
By this time, the underdead that were aboveground when the javelins hit have raised the alarm. Underdead may be literal but they’re not stupid—mostly—and they know what an attack means. Unfortunately, they’re not prepared for war; crude digging implements don’t mean a lot against stainless-steel blades and arrowheads. The golems rip them apart in a matter of minutes.
I’m reconstructing all of this in my head, because that’s really all I can do. I’m blindfolded and gagged, my hands and legs are bound, and I’m locked in the back of what I think is an armored truck. We fought as hard as we could, but they took us anyway. We were slung over the backs of two soldiers and hauled through the dimensional gate, then locked up. The truck roared away immediately, no doubt on its way to deliver us to Ahaseurus. Azura’s right next to me, unconscious but alive.
