“You came a long way,” Kestrel said, raising his hand over his head as a way to spread his light more widely and show the full scene of their other companions behind Kestrel.
“I just kept going until I found something to report,” the gnome said nonchalantly.
“And I did find something,” he added after a pregnant pause. “The walls ahead are smooth; they’ve been cut and worked by someone.”
“That’s a sign – we must be coming to the end of the cave,” Kestrel answered thankfully.
“And the beginning of something else,” Wren said, coming up behind him. “We’ll see what that something is.”
She turned and went over to the others to translate Woven’s findings, making the humans eager and re-energized to move on.
“I’ll do anything to finally be able to fly out in the open sky again,” Stillwater said longingly, and the group started moving forward with renewed speed.
In half an hour they came to the threshold of the smoothed walls, and with Kestrel’s light available, they all stopped to examine the work that had been done to the light gray stones that surrounded them. The walls were finely done, almost polished with an unblemished surface, and only a few steps down the passageway they came upon a wall bracket that contained an unlit torch.
“Does anyone have a flint and steel to light the torch?” Kestrel asked. He felt the a growing effort needed to maintain his light, as though his energy was faltering, a problem he attributed to the long length of time he had spent generating the light, on top of having survived the brutal battle with the Viathin at the lake.
Stuart motioned to one of his guards, and the man quickly lit the torch to produce a flickering and smoky new source of light, as Kestrel immediately released his grasp on the power, then gave a sigh of relief.
“Sorry, that was wearing on me,” he apologized in response to the quizzical looks.
“We appreciate you carrying the burden of lighting our way, my friend,” Stuart told him warmly, bringing a smile to Kestrel’s face.
The floor of the passage was just as finely done as the walls, allowing them to step surely and swiftly along their way, until they came to a location where the walls and floor were marred by a wide fissure, one that they stepped over. A chilly breeze – even colder than the ambient air of the cave – issued forth from the fissure, and Kestrel felt a sense of something unpleasant nearby.
“Let’s be on our way,” he suggested after they had stopped for a momentary examination of the fissure, and the blackened edges around them.
“It looks like a fire or explosion happened here, doesn’t it?” Woven asked as they began to move on. “It’s very unusual.”
They followed the passage, and minutes later it started to angle upward. “We must be approaching the surface!” Lark said joyfully.
“I hope so,” Wren agreed.
And that’s when the attack fell upon them.
Chapter 12
Wren was bringing up the rear of the squad, when she gave a scream as she fell to the ground.
All the others in front of her instantly turned, and saw an extraordinary sight; a blackness was crawling along the floor of the cave from behind them, and a tendril of it wrapped itself around one of Wren’s feet. It appeared to be insubstantial, but as she kicked her foot wildly it remained attached to her, and tiny wisps continued to climb up along her leg.
“It hurts! It’s attacking me!” she said as she ineffectively sliced her sword at it. The blade passed through the dark shadow without inflicting any visible damage.
“The torch!” Gates shouted, taking the handle of their torch from the man who held it. He bravely dashed forward and thrust the flaming end of the brand directly into the larger body of darkness behind Wren, which was still approaching slowly along the floor.
In reaction, the black mist sent a new tendril of its insubstantial-self shooting out towards his feet, and as it made contact he was jerked down too, sending the torch to roll back along the floor after he dropped it.
“It’s alive! It’s going to eat my soul!” Gates shouted in terror.
Shocked by the horror unfolding before him, Kestrel desperately reached for the energy within himself, and called it to come to him.
He found it and sensed that it was present, but his ability to grasp it was tenuous – something seemed to create a barrier that he could hardly surmount. With great focus, he managed to pull a weak thread of the energy out, and focused it in his hand, then threw it as a blue ball of energy right at the black mist.
The energy landed inside the mist, and then the mist closed over it, hiding it from view, foretelling that Kestrel’s attack had been fruitless. But then both Gates and Wren shouted, and the mist was scattered around the cavern as Kestrel’s energy exploded in a small fireball of blue energy, one that momentarily blinded the onlookers.
When their vision cleared, they saw Gates and Wren both rapidly scrambling across the floor, free of their attacker, and at the same time small puffs and fragments of the mist were coalescing together again in the middle of the cave passage.
There was a sibilant whispering sound that chilled Kestrel’s heart as he heard its nonverbal message, a message he could not decipher.
“It says you are a Power, and it did not know,” Wren told him.
“You understand it?” Kestrel asked in astonishment.
“I do,” Wren answered. “You don’t?”
“It’s the ring from Kai,” Kestrel pointed at her hand.
“It says we are unlike any that have come before. It only wants one of us – if we give it just one, it will let the rest pass without harm. It says we seem to be trustworthy, not like the,” she paused, “I think it means the Viathins, we’re not like the Viathins.”
“Tell it we will give it none of companions, but if it goes away, we will not do it further harm,” Kestrel said. To put proof to his threat, he focused on his power, the weak and reluctant power, and called forth enough to make his hand glow as Wren spoke in a lisping, whispering voice.
As soon as Wren finished, the mist struck at them, and Kestrel threw his energy up into a shield that stretched from one side of the cave to the other, a dim blue protective device that repelled the creature, making it halt its strike and rapidly withdraw backwards.
“Tell it I will turn my shield into a cage and trap it away forever,” Kestrel threatened. “Tell it we are not like the Viathins, we are here to fight them, so it should just leave us alone.”
Wren spent several seconds speaking in the tongue of the mist once again, then listened to it reply.
“It says that since we are going to fight the Viathins, it will let us pass,” she translated.
Kestrel looked at the mist.
“Everyone start going,” he told the others, who were looking at the two elven kinfolks in astonishment. “I’ll stay here to hold the shield for a little while more, then I’ll follow you.”
“Be careful, Kestrel,” Stuart commented, then he turned and led the others away, as Wren translated for Stillwater and Woven to explain the situation. Kestrel listened to the sound of their footsteps grow fainter as they departed, while he watched the horrible mist on the other side of his shield restlessly creep about the floor of the passage, testing every edge of his shield, without ever quite touching the glowing blue power itself.
The mist spoke to him; he heard the sibilant whispering, but he did not understand. “Go away!” he shouted. “Go back to your hole and leave us alone!” He wanted the mist to leave, not just because of the threat it directly presented, but also because beads of sweat were starting to form on his forehead as he strained to maintain his control of the elusive power he was using.
The others had moved far enough away that he realized he could no longer hear their footsteps, and when he turned to look over his shoulder, he could no longer see the glow of the torch they carried.
He needed to go, to rejoin them, and to hopefully escape from the mist and from the need to maint
ain the protective shield. Kestrel held his shield in place, as the monster on the other side tried to speak to him again, while Kestrel began to slowly back away from the shield. Step by step he put space between himself and his protection, until the stress of holding the shield at such a distance became too much burden to withstand, and then he pulled the shield in towards himself, letting it slide away from the misty entity beyond.
The intangible threat grew still as the shield suddenly retreated, and it grew less visible as the glow of the shield separated from it. Then to Kestrel’s surprise and relief, it suddenly turned, uttered one last phrase, and then disappeared, slinking away from him as it returned to the darkness of the passageway from whence it had come.
Kestrel exhaled loudly, then turned as he released his hold on the energy and started running forward, away from the frightening encounter, running through the darkness to catch his friends and return to the comfort of their company. He saw a faint light ahead, the light that he knew to be the torch they carried, and he redoubled his efforts to catch them, as he did just a minute later.
As soon as he reached them he turned to look over his shoulder to assure himself that the mist had not followed him, and saw to his satisfaction that there was no darker blackness evident.
“What happened Kestrel?” Wren asked.
“It tried to talk to me, and then, when I started to back away, it left, so I ran here,” Kestrel replied.
“Let’s stay together,” he added. “There may be more things like that, and we don’t want to be separated if they attack.”
“Is that light ahead?” Woven asked at that moment.
Kestrel and Wren both peered forward. “It does look like it,” Wren agreed.
“We think we see light ahead,” Kestrel told Stillwater.
“Do you want me to go ahead to check?” the imp immediately asked.
“No, stay here with us, and we’ll all go together,” Kestrel answered, as Wren told the humans that there was light ahead.
The whole group jogged forward at a brisk pace, and soon the humans could see the blue light ahead.
“What is it? Another sorcerer like you?” Lark asked Kestrel as the blue tint to the light became evident.
“I doubt there is another sorcerer quite like Kestrel,” Stuart said affectionately. “Whether sorcerer is the right phrase or not I’m not sure, but there can’t be many like Kestrel, whatever he is.”
“It’s not a sorcerer,” Kestrel answered as they drew closer, and his keen elven vision better examined the light ahead. “I think it’s the outside, the world we’re going to. It looks like a land with a blue sun!” he said in wonder.
“That’s impossible,” Lark said flatly. “The sun is yellow.”
“I was in a land that had two suns, and one of them was red,” Kestrel contradicted her immediately.
“I believe you,” Wren said supportively. “I remember Dewberry talking about your adventures there, when you rescued the imps and sprites.”
They all were starting to squint, as the brightness of the light overwhelmed their cavern-dimmed vision, but within another five minutes they reached the threshold of the passage, and stood staring out at the strange landscape before them.
There was a blue sun in the sky, just as Kestrel had predicted. It was small, with a diameter much less than that of their own land’s yellow sun, perhaps. It was hard to tell, for the blue sun shone with such a bright, harsh brilliance that they could not stand to look directly at it. And instead, their attention was immediately drawn to the landscape in front of them, a vast city of buildings, many of them grand, some of them impossibly tall, beyond the likes of any city the people from the Inner Seas had ever even imagined. Yet the profiles of the tall buildings conveyed an oddness to the eyes of the outland observers, for the windows were short and wide, and spaced so closely on top of one another that they conveyed an impression of interior floors only two or three feet tall.
And the city was nestled in a valley that was fenced on two sides by high hills or low mountains. The hillsides were green, but there were no trees, only low-growing bushes.
“Great goddess,” one of the humans exclaimed softly.
“Where do we go, Kestrel?” Stuart asked.
Kestrel stood silent, looking from left to right, examining the panorama. There was nothing to indicate a particular spot was the right one. There were no movements at all. The buildings and the streets looked empty, abandoned and forlorn.
“In the other world I visited,” he decided to draw upon his recollections. “We had to move away from the entrance to the portal before we found anything. And then we found Viathins, and killed them, and released one of the natives of that land who was the captive of the Viathins.
“Let’s make our way down this trail,” he nodded towards a rocky path between the shrubs on their hillside. “Have your weapons ready just in case.”
“How will we even talk to anyone we meet here?” Gates asked. “Is that your job?” he asked Wren. “You seemed to talk to that thing in the cave.”
“I have a gift from Kai, and it seems to let me understand anyone – the gnomes, the cave creature, I hope whatever comes next,” Wren confirmed.
“A gift from the goddess? Just like that, you people are blessed by Kai and you’re not even real humans?” Lark asked.
Kestrel stopped in his tracks, and turned, furious at the girl’s comments. “Not real humans like all the Uniontown fodder the Viathins used to spread death and destruction across the entire Inner Seas? Is that what you mean? Maybe Kai just thinks we’re better,” he snapped.
The guards behind Lark drew their weapons.
“Hold everyone, hold,” Stuart said immediately. “We cannot start fighting among ourselves now. Both of you put your prejudices away,” he said to Kestrel and Lark, who both stood facing one another, both with chins jutted out aggressively.
“Kestrel,” Stuart said, “take the lead. Duchess, you and I will walk with Gates in the rear.”
Kestrel felt Wren’s hand on his arm, and he turned. “We’re all tense,” she said softly in elvish. “Let’s just do our task.
“Then I’ll slap her for you when we get back to the Inner Seas,” she grinned as they moved to the front of the group.
“It’s not bloody right they can talk in our language and use the other one too,” one of the guards grumbled, as they started walking down the path.
Taking Wren’s advice, Kestrel kept walking, his eyes roving in all directions in search of any movement or sign of trouble. A small wispy cloud moved rapidly across the sky, moving with a speed Kestrel had never seen such a solitary cloud possess around the Inner Seas, but there was nothing else to note for the half hour they walked down the path.
The city buildings began to rise at some inexplicable boundary; on one side there were shrubs and grasses, and on the other side of the boundary moderately-sized buildings rose from the ground, while the trail immediately broadened out into a city street. Kestrel stopped abruptly once they were a few steps into the city, and looked up at the buildings that created an ominous atmosphere.
“What is it Kestrel?” Stuart asked.
“It’s just so empty, it frightens me,” Kestrel said. “Stillwater, would you go fly up and look in some of these windows? Tell us what you see in the buildings, but don’t get too close,” he asked in elvish.
“I shall explore,” the imp agreed, and he floated straight up over the middle of the street, then maneuvered into position to look into the strange windows. He edged closer and closer to the windows, causing Kestrel to unconsciously hold his breath, until the imp actually stuck his head inside a window and peered at the interior of the building for several seconds, then withdrew and went to look at a different building.
All the heads of the travelers were craned upward, watching the imp’s cautious movement, until one of the guards suddenly yelped in pain, and slapped at his leg.
Everyone jumped, startled, then looked at the man, who pull
ed his hand away from his pant leg to reveal a red smear on the palm of his hand and a red stain on his pant leg.
“Must have been some kind of bug bite,” he apologized.
“I haven’t noticed any bugs,” Gates said.
Kestrel’s attention shifted from the man’s minor discomfort to Stillwater’s continuing exploration, and he looked upward again for several seconds.
“Maybe we should get moving,” he said to Wren, without removing his eyes from Stillwater.
“Probably,” she agreed.
“Let’s get going, people,” she said aloud, and she looked around at the streets, gave Kestrel a light shove, and started walking forward.
“Kestrel friend,” Stillwater called down moments later, as he looked down from his overhead location, “there is something moving around the corner behind you,” he pointed to one of the buildings they had passed.
Kestrel and Wren immediately pulled weapons and wheeled around, and the others reacted to their actions by doing the same, as the humans formed a circle around the girl they were assigned to protect.
“What is it Kestrel?” Gates asked.
“Stillwater saw something move behind us,” Kestrel answered.
“It’s the mist, the evil from the cave!” Stillwater screamed, and as he did, the dark shapeless entity flowed around the corner and swiftly approached them.
In a panic, Kestrel reached for his powers, but found that he could manage to produce nothing – there was no contact between his will and his ability. He felt his powers, but they felt as though they were being diverted or shielded away, as though there was another greater power that called his energy away from him, instead of letting it answer his demands.
“Tell it to stop or I’ll kill it!” he told Wren, stepping forward in a threatening manner, hoping to bluff the monster away from an attack.
His cousin spoke in the shushing, slippery syllables of the language of the mist, and the creature stopped, then paused, before it began to speak in return, as all the members of the group stood tensely.
An Unexpected Deity (Book 7) Page 15
