by Tim Lebbon
“Come with me,” he said. “Ignore everything you sense, just keep one thing in your mind: escape.”
“I have to get some things,” she said, and she turned slowly, dazed, confused. Trey grabbed her arm and squeezed hard.
“Mother. Please. These are Nax! We can’t waste any time, if there’s a slightest chance of escape we have to take it now!”
His mother winced and glanced down at where he was squeezing her arm. He had never hurt her before, not physically, not emotionally. She was strong. When she looked up there was a tear in her eye. “Oh Trey, I’m so scared.”
Trey hugged his mother, but only briefly. He could not be close to her with these images, these smells riding the psychic waves from outside. He felt corrupted.
He dressed quickly, then nudged aside the curtain and looked out. Many of the smaller cave fires had already been extinguished—the miners’ natural state was darkness, and that was where they found most safety—but new conflagrations were being seeded across the home-cave by the Nax. The hateful images and sensations were confused now, and Trey could not tell if there were still only two Nax down there, or more. People were running, screaming, whispering and trying to steal away. Someone passed his cave and headed down the steps. Trey called after them, but they did not hear. He ducked back inside, breathing hard, not knowing what to do.
“Can we get out?” his mother asked. “Is there a way?”
Plenty of ways, Trey knew, but none of them sure. None of them safe. And what about Sonda? He’d looked across to her side of the cavern but there had been only darkness. That could be a good sign, because it may mean the Nax had not visited there yet. Or perhaps it meant that they had been, and finished.
“We’ll have to get through the tunnels to the rising,” Trey said. “There’s an old seam, one that was mined way before the Cataclysmic War, that gives a route between the face we’re working on now and a tunnel leading straight there. It’s never used, it’s too narrow, too awkward. Barely a crawl space at times. If we can get there, get through, maybe we can make it up. If the Nax haven’t been there as well.”
Trey’s mother looked sad. “I can’t do all that, Trey. Look at me.”
Trey looked. His mother was big around the waist, even though their mining caste erred toward tall and thin. Her hands, on the coldest parts of the year when fires merely drew in colder air from deeper caves, were crippled into twisted claws. And she was old. She had been down here forever, with only a few visits topside to break up her underground existence. These visits, legendary in her eyes and related whenever she had the opportunity, had all been made safely, and via the proper routes.
But he loved her. He took her for granted and sometimes she annoyed him, always here for him. “I will not leave you behind. I don’t know much about the Nax—I don’t think anyone does, only what’s told in legend—but I do know that this is the most dangerous place to be. We can’t stay. Maybe if we can just get into the tunnels and hide, it’ll all be over soon.”
He knew that was a lie. And he thought his mother did too as she nodded, stepped past him and peered out into the cave. There were more screams out there from further away, closer to the dark holes that plummeted to the underground river. There was also the occasional twang of a crossbow being fired, and here and there Trey saw the glint of steel as disc-swords were unsheathed. He turned quickly and ran to the rear of the cave, grabbing his own disc-sword from beneath his bed. If he came close enough to a Nax to use it he would probably be dead already, but there were other things out there. If they made it into the tunnels there may be stingers in the old fledge seam, hiding away from the miners. Past them, if Chartise and his mules were still alive, perhaps there was topside, the world of sunlight and moonlight and starlight, the world of no darkness. And there probably dwelled countless dangers of which he had never dreamed.
Trey was a miner no longer.
If he lived past the next few hours, he would be a survivor.
They worked their way down the series of steps and balconies carved into the walls of the cavern. They hid behind huge pots on the landings, breathing in the meaty fumes of moss and trying to figure, from the ghastly psychic twinges they felt in sight or sound or taste, just where the Nax were unleashing their slaughter. Trey touched the ball of moss before him and squeezed, revelling as ever in the feel of this cold growing thing, pleased that his own sensation was covering those exuded by the murderous Nax.
He sensed a held breath, a diversion of frenzied attention away from one place to another, and he remembered that he still had fresh fledge in his system. He cursed himself silently and removed his hand, thinking fuck you as he grasped his mother’s hand and led her down another uneven flight of steps. He’d tried to sling the disc-sword across his shoulders, but he was unused to carrying the weapon and the knot kept slipping. Unsheathing it gave him an unreasonable sense of power as the metal sang against the old dried leather.
“What is it?” his mother whispered. Trey turned and placed his finger across his mouth. Shhh.
When they reached the cavern floor they met a group of people milling around the mayors’ militia cave. The militiamen were nowhere to be seen—Trey suspected that the crossbow shots he’d heard earlier marked their fate—but still these people seemed to think that safety existed here.
“We have to get out!” Trey said. He recognised a couple of fellow miners from his shift and smiled at them in the poor light. He touched them as he spoke, pleaded, cajoled, his touch a familiar form of communication that made up for facial expression whenever the miners talked in the pitch black. “This place is finished, we can never beat the Nax, we have to leave and go topside until it’s safe again.”
“Why topside?” one of the miners, Grant, asked. He did not use touch as he spoke, a sign that he was angry or terrified, or perhaps both. “Why can’t we go into the tunnels and hide this out?” A few of the other mumbled in confused agreement.
“The militiamen are dead by now,” Trey said. “The Nax may not have fed for centuries. And they know this underground better even than us.” He looked around nervously, expecting at any second to feel the surge of displaced air tickle the hairs on his neck as a Nax swept in through the cave air.
“I doubt that.” Grant turned his back on Trey and his mother and spoke to the others. “We can go into the current working and wait in there. I know it like the touch of my own hand, there are tunnels and crevasses where we can hide. These fledge demons will be sated soon enough. As Trey said, the militiamen will be dead by now. The Nax can feed on them.”
“They’ll continue their slaughter,” Trey said. “It’s not only food they woke for, it’s something else as well. Something that’s driven them to fury.”
“What makes you an expert on the fledge demons?” a woman asked.
Trey looked at the group for a few seconds, wondering whether they would apportion blame. He realised that he barely cared. Wanting to remain down here was foolish, and if they blamed him for what was happening that made them even more so.
“I sensed them waking,” Trey said. “I was on a fledge trip. I went further than I should have, found a Nax and withdrew quickly, but I knew that it wasn’t the only one waking. They never hunt in groups. They exist alone. That’s why I know there’s something wrong. I think there’s something going on topside that has enraged them and—”
“And you want to go there?” Grant said, spinning around.
“Trey…” his mother whispered, afraid.
There was a series of screams from across the cavern accompanied by several loud thuds. They did not last for long.
“I’m saving my mother,” Trey said. “Anyone who wants to come with us, you’re welcome.”
Trey and his mother left on their own.
“They’re just afraid, Trey,” she said as they hurried past deserted caves and skirted the Church. “This is all they’re used to. It isn’t Grant’s way to be like that, he didn’t mean it.”
“He
’s going to get them all killed.”
They continued in silence, passing by one of the mayors’ pillars, glancing up but seeing no sign of life on the balconies overhead. Each time they met someone Trey said, To the caves. Sometimes they miners would follow for a while before doubt took them and they slowed, trailing off, perhaps waiting for someone in authority to tell them what to do and where to go, not this lad wielding a disc-sword like a boy playing at war.
Trey tried to close off his mind to those sensations thrown off the Nax like sweat flicking from a fighting man’s skin. But at the same time he listened for the sense of pursuit, a hint of the chase as a Nax zeroed on them. It never came. Whatever had noticed him as he squeezed the moss had obviously found something else to warrant its attentions.
As they reached the opposite side of the cavern—the place where the entrance to the current working sat like an open throat a few steps up the cavern wall—there was very little light by which to see. Trey moved from memory, holding his mother’s hand and guiding her along. His ears were perfectly attuned to echo, distance and proximity, so each footfall told him just where he was. He grumbled in his throat here and there to launch a low, deep sound to echo back, and when he found a space in that echo he knew that the cave entrance was before them.
He leaned back and brushed his hand across his mother’s cheek, stroking his fingertips across her lips in a sightless smile. “We’re here,” he whispered.
They were alone. A dull red glow lit the centre of the cavern, throwing two of the huge pillars into silhouette. Trey could hear another volley of crossbow bolts being fired, then another. It seemed that the militia were alive after all, and putting up a sustained fight. Again he wondered about Sonda and looked across towards her cave, but there lay only impenetrable blackness. He closed his eyes and went into a crouch, trying to cast himself across this disturbed space, but the mixed input from the Nax—which he had quickly been able to filter and block so that he received only a hint of the terrible sensations they were revelling in—prevented him from casting himself at all. Besides, the fresh fledge was wearing off. Perhaps when they were further into the mines they would pause, Trey could take some fledge from his shoulder bag and try to discern Sonda’s whereabouts.
A brief flush of guilt burned his cheeks in the cool darkness. There were two thousand others down here.
“Come on,” he said to his mother, leaning close and pressing his cheek to hers. “I’ll look after you.” He hefted the disc-sword, turned and entered the mouth of the mine.
They soon left behind the noise, the slaughter, the fighting and screaming. And within five hundred paces, gone too were the dregs of the Naxs’ psychic emanations, swallowed into the rock and fledge seams that had been their home for so long, miners and Nax both. Whether they would ever coexist here again … that was a concern for the future.
Right now, Trey had to get them topside. He wondered what awaited them up there, and just why the Nax had risen into such a fury.
Two thousand steps into the new working, Trey and his mother paused for a rest. Trey had listened to her laboured breathing, her grunts and groans as the landscape of the tunnel floor surprised her, twisting ankles, jarring her old bones. She tried to keep the pain to herself. He had passed this way thousands of times now and he knew the tunnel, how to navigate in the dark, the heavy sense of the tunnel walls repelling him and showing him the way. It was best they travelled as fast as him, not as slow as his mother.
He had sheathed the disc-sword and succeed in slinging it around his shoulders. In this enclosed space he would sense danger long before it reached them.
They sat and took a drink from the leather gourd in Trey’s shoulder bag. There was very little water, he had not refilled it since his shift.
“How far?” his mother asked at last. Trey had been dreading that. He had known that this question would come, had he felt the silence between them thickening with its weight.
Trey reached out and touched his mother’s face, not conveying anything in particular, just touching.
“Maybe two days,” he said.
“Two days,” she echoed. “I’m exhausted already.”
Trey sighed and sat back against the tunnel wall. They would reach the old fledge seam soon, and then they would have to start working their way through that hollowness, that place once filled with fledge which had been mined by machines generations ago, taken topside by machines, transported across Noreela by machines. Try as he might, Trey could never imagine what these things had looked like working and moving. Although he’d seen images of them in books and on wall depictions back in the Church, they imparted nothing of what they had looked like alive.
“Did I ever tell you how they time the days topside?” his mother asked.
Trey smiled to himself in the dark.
“By the movement of the sun and moons. The sun rises and falls, that’s half a day. The moons appear and disappear, that’s a night. The moons are sent away when the sun rises again. Two halves of each day are so different up there, one so bright and warm, the other so dark. And short? They’re so short!”
“Three days to one of ours,” Trey said. She had told him many times.
“Yes. Everything is over so quickly topside. You just get used to the heat of the sun on your face, and then it’s time to sleep, and then suddenly it’s time to rise again.”
Trey had never been up. He’d never felt the urge. He was terrified.
“We should go,” he said. “The old seam starts just along here. We can walk for some of it, Mother, but I think we’ll be doing some crawling too.” He did not repeat what he had suggested earlier—that they would simply hide in the caves—and neither did his mother. They had both known that there was no returning to the cavern, not for a long, long time. Trey felt tears threatening, at his mother’s bravery and his own fears, but he held them back. He did not want her to sense him crying. He needed to be brave.
They started into the old, mined fledge seam. At first it was little different from the tunnel they had just travelled, other than the floor being more uneven and the walls unsmoothed; the machines had never been afraid of sharp edges. Trey went first, uttering the little grumbles and clicks that echoed back and gave him an idea of the topography of the seam ahead. His mother followed on behind, one hand holding onto the loose belt on Trey’s jacket, the other held out to her side for balance. They made good progress. There was no hint of pursuit, and the sense of danger had seemed to recede as they left the cavern further behind.
If I knew to come this way, Trey thought, others will as well. So why no sound? Why no signs that no one has come this way already, or are behind us working their way through?
They moved on. The seam dipped and turned, and for the next thousand steps their route snaked through the rock of the world as if in an effort to throw off pursuers. Trey’s miner senses led the way unerringly, and his mother followed, sighing, grunting, breathing heavily but never once complaining or asking him to stop.
Once or twice Trey mused that they really could linger here. But then he remembered that brief touch with the mind of the hibernating Nax—the fury, the rage, the hunger—and he knew that they had to go on. They may be out of immediate danger, but the Nax were unlikely to be sated with only one cavern. There were mines throughout the Widow’s Peaks, and probably long, arduous routes between them, untravelled and impassable to humans but known to the creatures who truly owned this underworld.
And so they moved on, resting now and then, licking mineral-rich moisture from the walls. And every step they took frightened Trey more.
They were leaving behind danger, but they were also moving away from the only life he had ever known. The people in the home-cave were his people, the pale fires and the moss pots and the stingers and the blind spiders and the cave rats and the mayors, the Church and the constant, comforting distant roar of the underground river … all his, all part of the memories that made his life. He always worked hard at the fledge f
ace, but once back in the cavern he was contented, happy in the knowledge that he did his bit for their underground community. Sometimes there were thoughts of going topside, but it was curiosity more than desire. He was interested in why people would choose to live up there when there was obviously so much more to living down here. Certainly there were dangers in the dark—stingers took one or two people each year, and cave-ins, though infrequent, were often deadly. But he had heard about the inimical inhabitants of topside as well: the tumblers that roamed the surface of the hills, sweeping up children and unwary travellers; the bandits on the plains; raids along the coastal towns by savages from the sea. And fighting in the towns, a malaise in the villages. People topside, it was said, had no care any more.
Trey felt comfortable history staring at his back and mourning his leaving. Before him, with every step he took into the darkness, lay his future.
They encountered a nest of stingers. There were only a few and they were small, no bigger than a man’s fist. And because they surprised the creatures Trey was able to unsheathe his disc-sword and slice most of them down before they even had a chance to attack. The surviving stinger came clicking at them, aiming for Trey’s mother, but Trey kicked out at where he felt the thing passing through the air, knocked it into the stone wall and struck down with the disc-sword. Sparks flashed, and in their brief light he saw the creature dying in a splash of its own blood.
They moved on. Trey was pleased that he had seen them through this danger, but it only went to remind him that there would be more challenges ahead. And not all of them would be stingers.
