Gallen halted. The light from her glow globe cast enormous shadows, shadows that frightened her because for a moment she thought she saw something huge and black struggling toward her from a passage.
She went to Gallen’s side. “The dronon will be hunting here,” she whispered, “And the sfuz. Maybe we shouldn’t try to get so close to Teeawah.”
Gallen looked up toward the passage that had frightened Maggie. “We don’t know how close we are, yet.”
“Close enough so their children play in these passages.”
Gallen looked forward eagerly, then frowned as he glanced at the trail behind. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Maggie’s heart pounded. Her mouth felt dry. She unstrapped the canteen from her back and took a swig. She didn’t know what to do, either. The tension in the air was so thick, she could hardly swallow. She nodded, let Gallen lead them forward.
He can’t do it all, Maggie thought. He can’t lead us. He can’t fight for us. He can’t do it all. Think.… Think. She didn’t want to go forward, could barely force herself to keep up.
They hurried up the passage, came to a bend. Gallen halted. To their left, a great hole opened, perfectly round. This one was twice the diameter of the one they’d encountered earlier. Another mistwife. Huge. Huge.
Maggie’s heart pounded. Gallen and the others tiptoed ahead.
Think, Maggie told herself. She reached into her pockets, shoving her fists in to get warm; her fingers closed around glass.
She pulled it out. The bottle of scent from the perfumery. She stopped, considered it for a moment.
The dronon would follow her, chase her with their Seekers. She couldn’t let them find her.
She motioned with her hand for Gallen to come back. He had already gone fifty meters ahead. He returned reluctantly.
Maggie didn’t dare speak. Instead, she reached up, fumbled with his robe. Its nanoscrubbers could hide her scent,’ clean it from the air as she walked. If she wore his robe, she hoped, she’d be almost undetectable to the Seekers.
Gallen frowned at her, confused, tried to pull her forward. Apparently he thought she was only cold, and he considered this a poor place to give her the loan of a cloak, but Maggie refused to be led away till she had the cloak off him and over her own shoulders. She pulled the hood up over her head, then took the bottle of scent, carried it to the lip of the great hole in the ground, the mistwife’s passage.
The dirt here was slippery, loose. If she got too near the edge, she’d fall in. But she had to do this, had to reach out over that dark hole and pour a few drops, a few precious drops of her scent down that hole.
When she finished, she put the stopper back on the empty bottle and dropped it into the thick humus at her feet, covered it with dirt, then fled.
Every second, she listened for the sound of something rushing up that shaft, something shrieking and tumbling. If this monster came after them, they might not escape.
When she’d gone a few hundred meters, she sighed in relief. Yet her relief was short-lived.
If I made it safely, won’t the dronon? she wondered. She’d hoped the mistwife would kill any Seekers that came after her. She’d imagined the machines hurtling over the lip of that pit, and the dronon buzzing away, crashing into the jaws of the mistwife.
But what if no mistwife lived down that hole? The pit was vast, twenty meters in diameter. Perhaps its maker had died centuries ago.…
Maggie couldn’t know, might never know. She only knew she had to keep running. By now it was late afternoon. The sfuz would be waking, leaving their chambers. The group needed to find a place to hide.
Chapter 35
Gallen glanced back down the trail behind him, watching for sign of pursuit, then looked ahead again. Before them was a small pond, water pooling from a rock cliff, that stretched up into the darkness. The pool appeared deep and still. Tiny blind fish and insects swam in it, yet Gallen dared not drink that water, for it had an unhealthy green tint to it. Besides, it was not the solemn pond, with the sound of dripping from above, that interested him. It was the cliff.
The weathered yellow stone had been swept smooth eons ago by wind and rain, yet here in the tangle, it looked as if wind would never touch it again.
Still, on the cliff before them faint pictographs could be seen in dim green characters. A bird, with both wings spread, looking up to its right. Lightning bolts seemed to be flying from its eyes. Zeus stared at it, mesmerized, mouth open in wonder.
“What is it?” Orick asked.
“A Qualeewooh,” Zeus said, “who wears no spirit mask.”
Gallen wanted to say something in response, but he, too, suddenly felt a sense of wonder. Even the most ancient depictions of Qualeewoohs he’d seen portrayed them with spirit masks. But if the masks were created to be receivers so the Qualeewoohs could hear the voices of their ancestors, then there would have been a time before the ancestors spoke, a time when no Qualeewooh yet wore a mask. A time before the Waters of Strength.
Gallen shook his head. This particular chamber in the tangle was fairly large, but had no openings to either side. It came to an abrupt stop at the cliff face. Here, the trail ended.
The last fork in the trail that Gallen had seen was hundreds of meters back. Even if he knew where an entrance to Teeawah was, he knew he wouldn’t reach it easily. That in itself made him uneasy, but he faced another challenge. It had been three hours since the dronon had pinpointed his ship.
The dronon were now hunting them, deep in the tangle. His mantle picked up their radio chatter—the incessant clicking of dronon mouthfingers over a background of static. It wasn’t coming over just a few channels, but over hundreds or thousands.
The dronon must be crawling through here en masse, he realized. More of them than he’d imagined possible were filtering through the tangle. It was only a matter of time before they found him. Gallen couldn’t afford any more blind alleys or delays.
“Come on,” he whispered, leading the party back the way they’d come. Maggie turned and hobbled, neck bent, nearly stumbling with fatigue. For the past four hours they’d been climbing up and down, seeking routes through the maze. They’d found few signs of sfuz-excrement here, a hole dug there.
Gallen realized that they’d come too low. The entrance to the city must be higher up the cliffs. Down here, where nothing lived, the sfuz did not bother to hunt. That’s why he’d found so few tracks.
Gallen walked with Maggie, holding her hand, trying to give the comfort she needed. He watched her face bobbing, unsteady light; saw that more than the energy had drained from it. Her hope, too, was going.
“Don’t worry, darling,” Gallen whispered, emphasizing the brogue accent he’d all but completely discared in the last months. “I’ll not let nothing bad happen to the prettiest girl her Clere.” He clenched her hand reassuringly.
Maggie smiled, but kept her mouth shut. None of them really should be talking, even though it looked certain that no sfuz were close by.
For another hour they hiked, backtracking from one cavern to the next, climbing up higher whenever possible. In one passage, they finally found a trail that had seen some use, and Gallen tried following it—climbing vertical trees as if he were a sfuz, squeezing through a tunnel so narrow Maggie feared she wouldn’t be able to make it.
When they reached the end of the tunnel, they found they hadn’t come to a sfuz lair, but had reached something vast yawning pit filled with the shells of some crab like animals, along with hundreds of skeletons. At first Gallen imagined that the sfuz had disposed of bones here, but movement in the pit caught his eye. It wasn’t shells, but actual crablike insects, each with a dozen thin legs, climbing among corpses—sfuz corpses. In this graveyard, scavengers fed.
The fact that some sfuz died at all suggested that not all of them were allowed to drink from the Waters of Strength. Gallen wondered. Like any great treasure, some would horde it, deny it to others. Gallen guessed that these were the lowest of the sfuz, t
he wasted, those who did not merit immortality.
Gallen turned away in disgust, listening to the clacking jaws, the faint scrabbling of insects. Worse yet, among the corpses, some dead sfuz had burn marks. These were sfuz Gallen had killed only the day before.
Maggie sat at the edge of the stinking pit, put her head in her hands, trembling from weariness.
“Come,” Gallen said. “We’re not far from their lair. We have to keep moving.”
He took them back the way they’d come, past their previous path. Not a dozen yards from where they’d first joined the sfuz trail, they turned a bend, found an opening to a tunnel with a road ten times as wide as the trail they’d been traveling.
The road was trampled hard as cement. The walls rose dozens of meters, and Gallen could see fresh wooden beams shoring the walls of this tunnel. This wasn’t just some wild path through the tangle—it was a highway.
We must be near Teeawah, Gallen realized, looking northward along the subterranean highway. There was an odd reek in the air, the sour smell of sfuz hide, almost nauseating in its intensity. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of sfuz must live here.
As Gallen stumbled onto this thoroughfare, he stood a moment, unsure if he should go forward. How could he hope to reach the city undiscovered?
Yet even as he worried, his mantle picked up a strong, clear radio signal. dronon were coming, and one of them was relaying a report to its masters. Down the bend, on the highway leading out of the city, lights shone.
Gallen raced back to the narrow trail off the highway, urging Maggie to hide her glow globes, and the small group scurried back down the corridor. In moments the highway tunnel filled with the echoing sounds of a dronon march, the clicking of mouthfingers over voicedrums, the rattle of weapons against carapaces.
Zeus, Maggie, and the bears scurried farther down their narrow tunnel, squeezing round a corner. Gallen halted far back in the darkness, listening. In the shadows he knelt in the dirt, mouth pressed close to the moldy humus, and peeked out at the highway, letting his mantle capture and illuminate the image.
A dronon Vanquisher suddenly filled the passage before them, flashed a light over Gallen’s head, and fired a pulp gun blindly, just to make certain the passage was clear. Dirt sprinkled down on Gallen, and he dared not move. In half a second, the dronon moved on, and Gallen saw the marching bodies of others come into view.
The dronon had come in force. For ten minutes he watched dronon, hundreds of them, marching in formation, scurrying through the cavern like roaches, weapons at ready. Twice more, scouts glanced down his long passage, each flashing a strong light into the crevice. Gallen drew back around the corner, out of sight. Sweat poured down his brow. Gallen seldom became frightened, yet his heart pounded.
When the echo of footsteps dimmed, when the dronon had passed, Gallen sat, trying to calm himself. Twelve hundred. A contingent of twelve hundred Vanquishers, all armed with incendiary rifles and pulp guns.
Gallen waited, unsure what to do. He didn’t want to follow the dronon. It would be better, perhaps, to put as much distance between himself and the dronon as possible. But his gut instinct told him that the highway out there led to Teeawah.
He looked back to Maggie for counsel. “What now?” “Follow them,” she whispered. “To the city.”
Gallen nodded, uncertain. His arms and legs trembled, but not from fear—it was the ground trembling beneath him. Not the deep rumbling of an earthquake, not even the milder reverberations of a mistwife moving through its tunnel. Smaller.
Gallen stilled his breath. Distantly, he heard small-arms fire.
The dronon firing pulp guns. The concussions caused the tremors. For two solid minutes, the rumbling continued, and Gallen finally recognized a crackling, too. The sharper retorts of incendiary rifles.
A battle raged, nearby. Here, underground, sound wouldn’t carry far. Gallen smelled smoke, a smoke he realized might take weeks to clear from the tangle.
Suddenly, down the highway, just outside his little tunnel, the whistling cries of sfuz erupted, rapidly drawing close. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, were fleeing the city, Gallen thought.
But something was wrong. The pitch of their whistles wasn’t the high, desperate whine he’d heard before from retreating sfuz, but rather the low cries of hunters.
The dronon guns had gone silent.
“Damn,” Gallen whispered, unprepared for the revelation.
The dronon had reached Teeawah. And died?
How many sfuz were out there? Twelve hundred Vanquishers, gone just like that.
We’re next, he thought.
He turned back, urging the others to flee down the narrow trail. Zeus took little encouragement, retreated the way they’d come. Gallen wondered how safe it would be. Their trail led to a dead end through one corridor and to the mistwives in another.
And the dronon should be following us, Gallen realized. The Seekers should be on our trail. He couldn’t retreat.
But sfuz and the city lay ahead. He couldn’t go forward.
When they reached a small chamber where ancient limbs thrust up from the floor, Gallen called a halt. “Zeus, spread some of this down the corridor,” he said, tossing Zeus the canister of exploding foam. Zeus took it, disappeared up the trail.
Gallen heard the hiss of foam as Zeus sprayed the floor and walls. In sixty seconds the foam would set; anything that touched it thereafter would explode in a fireball.
“Maggie, you and the bears take cover here between these branches, and break out some food. We need some rest.” He indicated the two largest partially petrified tree branches, which thrust up. From behind them, they’d have some protection.
Maggie sat and drew her heavy pistol, a conventional weapon with high-explosive charges and a silencer. No sooner had she got down than the sfuz found them.
Several dozen charged down the narrow corridor, whistling in anticipation. The sfuz boiled through the cavern opening like ants, grasping the cavern wall with their strong fingers, apparently unmindful of gravity. Some were running along the ceiling, others erupting around walls, while yet others scampered along the floor. They seemed intent on finding their prey, mindless with rage.
Gallen turned, firing his intelligent pistol as rapidly as he could, targeting individual sfuz.
Maggie didn’t have time for such niceties. She opened fire with her pistol, blasting as fast as she could squeeze the trigger, counting on the explosive force of her projectiles to rip apart anything in her path.
Maggie’s weapon worked well in close quarters. As she fired, sfuz dropped from the ceiling, raining down in bloody gobbets on their kin, their hunting cries turning to death screams.
The black creatures seemed to seethe from the walls, their horrible, long, twisted limbs writhing. They curled up on themselves as they died, sometimes kicking out savagely with long limbs. Their dark eyes gleamed, their fangs flashed in the pale light thrown by the firefight, their claws raked the air.
These were not adults, Gallen suddenly realized. These are juveniles and children, smaller than adults, but no less deadly, apparently, for they had just slaughtered a thousand dronon.
But at what cost? Gallen wondered. How many sfuz died? Gallen took to targeting the sfuz that got past Maggie. Maggie screamed, “Back me! My clip’s empty!”
Gallen’s own weapon was nearly out of missiles, and in his mind, he practiced drawing his vibro-blade, considered how he might best hold off the sfuz till Maggie could reload. He needn’t have worried.
Zeus came charging around the bend, firing his incendiary pistol. He got off three shots before Gallen shouted, “No!”
The plasma from the pistol burned like the sun, setting the ancient detritus along the walls afire. The fierce heat of the blasts was like a furnace burning Gallen’s face. Gallen raised his arm to shield himself, to cover his mouth. The smoke that erupted in the chamber was so overwhelming, Gallen feared they would all suffocate before they escaped.
The sfuz retreated. None dared enter this chamber.
Gallen looked back, wondering if he could retreat. Zeus had just mined the passage. Explosive foams were seldom used in real campaigns—they were too nondiscriminatory, and couldn’t be easily disarmed. In fact, Gallen hadn’t brought the solvents needed to disarm the foam.
They couldn’t retreat past the foam, nor could they go forward through the blaze. Yet as smoke billowed into the chamber, Gallen knew if they stayed here, they’d suffocate.
He had to close off the passage ahead—conserve the oxygen here. He reached into his weapons pouch, found a heavy grenade, and tossed it toward the corpses of the sfuz.
The grenade exploded, dirt sprayed toward him in the hot wind. The cavern shook. Detritus rained from above, filling Gallen’s eyes. He raised his hands to shield his face.
A second explosion rocked the cavern behind. Falling dirt had detonated the foam.
The ground gave way beneath him.
Maggie shrieked.
Gallen grabbed her arm, then they were tumbling, the earth opening to swallow them, an avalanche of dirt and rotted humus storming down upon them.
Chapter 36
Felph stood beside Lord Karthenor aboard the dronon vessel Acquiescence, watching the viewscreens on the dome above them, the dronon cameras displaying hellish nightmares.
In one region deep in the tangle, dronon Seekers had captured Maggie’s scent, only to find that it led down a huge shaft. A giant mistwife rose up to greet the dronon, and now hundreds of dronon engaged the monster, trying to fight their way past, with no assurance that Maggie had ever escaped the monster’s grasp.
The presence of hundreds of thousands of dronon in the tangle aroused every mistwife in the region, so that on nearly every screen, the monsters hunted through the tangle, shrieking in pain, madly swatting dronon who did not fight so bravely as they did mindlessly.
Yet, for the Felph, other screens displayed far more interesting battles. Dronon Vanquishers high in the tangle were blasting through sfuz hunting parties.
Lords of the Seventh Swarm Page 30
