Rocke pulled himself up onto the large diesel machine and tugged the cab door open. A hardhat clattered out, its tumble down the side of the machine muted beneath the rumble of the engine. Rocke watched it fall, a solemn look on his face, then reached inside the cab and twisted something next to the steering column. The engine gave a final sputter then died, its echoes slowly fading from the cavern.
Rocke descended, his feet making a muffled, but now distinct, ring against each of the ladder rungs. He paused for a moment at the bottom, picking up the hardhat and flipping it over.
“No blood,” he said, tossing it at me. I snatched it from the air and checked it. He was right. Aside from some dirt smudges, the hardhat looked just like one of ours.
Except for the single cut that had split the neck strap in two and the acrid tang of magic that clung to it like skunk musk. I held up one of the straps, focusing on the sliced end. Just like the wounds we’d found on Felix’s animals and the Wraith’s victims, it was so precise it could have come from a scalpel. Each of the finely-woven strands that made up the strap had been cut cleanly through, with none of the puffiness or irregular-length strands that would have come from a duller edge. I doubted I owned a single knife that could cut cleaner.
“Clean cut,” I said, passing the hardhat back to Rocke. “Those obsidian blades must be pretty sharp.” As Rocke examined the hardhat, I took a quick look around at the rest of our surroundings. Now that I was taking a minute to really look, I could see the signs of what had happened: scuff-marks in the gravel underneath us, impact marks beneath the tools where they’d been thrown in a panic.
Nine people, I thought as I slowly moved around a pile of rock. Nine people, and not one of them made it out.
I backtracked, moving back along the path towards the entrance. There. A depression in the gravel I hadn’t noticed before, a slight change in coloration that said some of the loose rock had been disturbed recently. But not by Rocke’s passing or mine. The depression was too large. Large enough to be a body.
I walked a few dozen feet more, but no more depressions made themselves apparent. That had been the one who’d managed to get furthest from the site before being run down. Roughly fifteen feet; not very far at all. These things weren’t like the Horror we had faced before. That had been slow and powerful. These things were fast.
“Find anything?” I asked as I trotted back to the dig site. Rocke was crouched near one of the piles of rock, turning something over in his hands.
“Ever seen something like this?” he asked, standing and holding up a small, triangular piece of what looked like black glass. “Careful, the edges are sharp.”
“Obsidian?” I asked as he passed the piece to me. It almost felt like a shark’s tooth in my palm, hard and dangerous. I gave one of the edges an experimental tap with my finger and almost immediately pulled back. It looked like glass, and it was about as sharp, too. Any more pressure than the slight tap I’d given it and I would have drawn blood. As it was there was now a thin, grey line where the top layers of my skin had parted.
“If I had to guess,” Rocke said. “No idea what it’s from, though. It’s too small to be a knife.”
“Where’d you find it?”
He pointed towards the base of the pile of rocks he’d been crouched by. “Right there. Looks like someone took a tumble, tried to catch themselves with their hands, and then went down, hard. Blunt impact to the back, maybe.”
I held the small piece of obsidian up in front of my face and watched the light slide off of it. In some places, like the edges, it only glinted. In others, the light just seemed to slide, like water slipping off oil. “And again, we’ve got no bodies to look at. Why?”
“They probably didn’t take Mrs. Fimmlewit or Charlie because they hadn’t trespassed,” Rocke said as I passed the stone back to him. He looked at it for a moment and then set it back on the ground, presumably near where he’d found it. “That’s my best theory, at least.”
“And all the people in the desert?”
Rocke shrugged. “I’d have to get a look at the runes carved on these things to get a better idea. For now though, the real question is where did they take them?”
“It can’t be far,” I said, pointing my headlamp at the cleared portion of the cavern wall and double-checking to make sure we hadn’t missed a passage. “You didn’t see any offshoot shafts on the way here, did you?”
“No,” Rocke said, shaking his head. “That baffle was still up, too, so wherever they came from and went to, it has to be close.”
“All right, should we split up then?” For a moment Rocke’s face took on a look of shock, then he saw my forced grin and let out a chuckle.
“Right,” he said, shaking his head. “How about we not make amateur horror movie mistakes?”
“Fine by me,” I said with a little less enthusiasm. My attempt at humor had taken a little of the edge off, but I could still feel a cold, stiff ball of anxiety sitting in my gut, surrounded by the sick, oily feeling that was still in the air. “Any sign that they were dragged away?”
“No, and that worries me,” Rocke said. “It means that either these things can each pick up and carry four or five people, or we’ve got at least nine of them out there. Got that Glock where you can get it?”
I nodded.
“Good. Don’t forget about it. Aim for the chest. It’ll be the largest target the rune can disrupt, but don’t hesitate to shoot elsewhere if you have to.” I nodded again as he lifted his own gun. “All right then. Let’s get looking.”
The moment we were away from the work area, the ground began to take on a slick texture underfoot, and I was once again grateful my headlamp, letting me keep one hand free to catch myself with if I fell. The rock around us was a strange mix of textures, alternating between portions that looked like they had been gradually sanded down and jagged areas I had to watch my hands on.
“See anything yet?” Rocke asked after a moment.
“No, not yet,” I said, shaking my head and sending the beam from my headlamp bouncing across the scenery. The terrain grew even more jumbled as we moved towards the edge of the cavern, a massive pile of boulder-sized chunks of rock reaching up towards the cavern ceiling in front of us. Rocke stopped for a moment and bent down, checking something by to one side but shaking his head.
I stepped to the left, keeping him in sight as I panned my beam over the ground, looking for something that would stand out, Scrapes in the rock dust that had built up here and there? Disturbed stones? I shook my head again.
You don’t have the slightest idea— I stopped, confused, and rubbed a hand across my cheek. I’d just felt a faint push, like a whisper, run itself across my face.
“Rocke?”
“Yeah?”
“There aren’t any spirits hanging around here, are there?”
“No. Why?” I felt another faint brush against my skin.
“I’ll let you know in a second.” I stuck the tip of my finger to my tongue and placed it near my cheek. There it is again! I moved my hand further to the left, the slight pressure getting stronger. A breeze!
“I think I found something,” I called, stepping forward, my finger outstretched like a compass needle. Rocke ducked around the massive stone pile as I followed my finger. Up ahead, I could make out faint crack between the large boulders, a natural slot through which the air was flowing. Right above the opening, fluttering faintly in the breeze and caught on a small outcropping, was a chunk of dirty-white cloth.
“Rocke,” I said, my voice low. “I think this is it.”
“More cave crawling?”
“A little more natural this time, I think,” I said, eyeing the opening. “But hey, they did it.” Rocke blinked and turned towards me, forcing me to shield my eyes as his headlamp filled my vision.
“Says the seven-foot linebacker,” he said with dry laugh. “I’m not sure you want to count a skeletal death dealer half your size as a reputable source.”
“Oh,
laugh it up,” I said, stepping towards the slot. “You first, or me?”
“Gun first,” he said, ducking past me and lowering his head as he stepped into the gap. “If you go first and something happens, I’m not even sure I’d see it.”
“Har-har,” I said, twisting my shoulders sideways as I followed him. “Next you’ll be making a joke about my mother.”
“She’d fit through here easier than you would.”
“Rocke …”
Fortunately, his ribbing cut off as the slot became narrower, forcing him to turn to his side—and forcing me to actually push through, scraping my shirt and harness against the cold, unyielding stone. Up ahead of me, I saw Rocke’s headlamp glisten off the wall as he twisted, and then he was through, the slot opening up. I pressed after him, biting back a curse as my elbow scraped across bare rock.
“You’re almost through,” Rocke said, his voice so low I almost couldn’t hear it over the sound of my shoulders rubbing against the stone. The earplugs were muffling everything, making noises blend together. Then there was a rush of movement, and I was past the slot, as well. Rocke held a finger up to his mouth as I stood up.
It didn’t take me long to see why, either. In front of us was a tunnel. Not a machine-carved mineshaft like the one we’d followed Henderson’s team down, but a legitimate old-fashioned tunnel, complete with aged, wooden ceiling supports that looked so old and dry, I was almost afraid to touch one.
But the most attention-grabbing thing was the rune etched into one of them. It was a pulsing, pounding thing that shifted from dark, shimmering lines so close to black they seemed to suck color from everything nearby to bright, twisted, vivid-red scrawls that almost hurt to look at. The intricate lines swept across one another in a pattern so complex and detailed that I couldn’t have begun to find where one line ended and another began. At a distance it, almost looked like a solid mass of color instead of the carefully scrawled design that it was.
And I couldn’t feel it.
I glanced at Rocke, momentarily worried that I was seeing things. But no, he was looking at it, too, a sort of suspicious fascination on his face. It was definitely real, but I couldn’t feel it. When I’d encountered runes like this before, there had always been a sense of unease around about them.
“Rocke?” I asked, still staring at the pulsing, throbbing scrawl of lines. “That is a necromantic spellrune I’m looking at, right?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t feel it,” I said, averting my eyes as it began to glow again.
“I know,” Rocke said, taking a careful step forward. “Neither can—ah, there it is.” He pulled back, a grimace on his face. “It’s … shielded somehow. Try it. Careful, though.”
I took a slight step forward, then another, and then a twist ran though my body as a sick wrongness shoved its way through my insides. I caught myself with my staff as my footing slipped, my raised foot coming down much harder than I’d expected. Then the oily sensation faded as I pushed myself back, glad that my stomach was empty.
“You’re right,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s shielding itself. How?”
“I don’t know,” Rocke said, stepping forward again. His face twitched as he passed the invisible line marking the rune’s blind spot. “It barely even smells.”
He was right. I took a quick sniff and caught just the barest hint of magical tang. Somehow, the rune was not only concealing its power but the scent that marked the use of magic as well. Everything I knew about spellrunes said that shouldn’t have been possible.
“Can you identify what it’s for?” I asked as Rocke stepped closer, tapping the pillar with a single finger before bracing himself against it so he could bend down to take a closer look.
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I mean, it’s obviously not for defense or it would have tried to fry us when we came out of the slot. It barely seems reactive.” His eyes narrowed as the rune continued to pulse, almost closing as the rune grew brighter before dimming again.
“I’ve never seen anything this complex,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d guess that part of it is whatever is keeping us from feeling the power source until we’re close, and another part is linking it back to its source—”
“Source?”
He nodded. “Yeah, like the runes that Dorati made, remember? A little rune like this won’t last long without a source—not one this complex, at least. It’s pulling its energy from someplace else.”
“Something like that giant battery rune Dorati made?” I asked, remembering the twisted, blood-painted rune we’d found.
“Something like that, yeah.” Rocke pulled a heavy, serrated knife from his coat and began angling the tip at the rune.
“Going to try to pop it?” I asked as he held the tip over the edge of the rune, just scarce centimeters from the edge.
“I …” Rocke shook his head as the tip of the knife began to weave intricate patterns in the air, tracing the rune’s lines. “No.” The knife dropped, vanishing back into his jacket. “I don’t know where to start, and if I screw it up, things could go very, very bad. There’s quite a bit of power tied up in all those lines. It could go off like a bomb. Better leave it be.”
“Fair enough,” I said, taking a breath and stepping forward. The sickly feeling returned, but I was ready for it this time. I started down the tunnel, mentally pushing back my body’s reaction to the perverse energies.
“So, any ideas?” Rocke asked as he moved alongside me. The tunnel was a tight fit, but shorter than it was wide, so while I was forced to duck my head fairly regularly, Rocke could still fit in alongside me.
“No,” I said, shaking my head and crouching as the ceiling dropped. I angled my staff horizontally, bracing one hand against the roof as I moved forward. “This kind of thing is your department, not mine. You got a plan?”
“Well,” he said, falling behind me as the tunnel began to narrow. “First of all, we need to assess what we’re facing. We already know it’s dangerous, so we’re looking for some way to shut it down or destroy it,” he said as I ducked under another support beam, this one with a huge crack running down it. “Preferably without bringing the whole place down on top of us.”
Another rune glimmered out of the darkness ahead of us, similar to the one we had already passed. I felt the pressure grow as we pushed passed it, the oppressive feel in the air growing.
“Rocke?”
“I feel it,” he said. “We must be getting closer.” Up ahead of us the tunnel narrowed again, and I paused as I caught sight of something on the ground.
“What?” Rocke asked, his voice muted through my earplugs.
“Drag marks,” I said, tapping the clear divots in the gravelly floor with my staff. “We’re still on the right track.” I unclipped the flashlight from my belt and thumbed it on, casting its bright light down the tunnel. “And footprints,” I said. “Not human. At least, not in a boot. Or with skin.” My light illuminated more of the tunnel ahead as I threw the beam ahead. “Looks like there’s a bend farther on. Should I be worried about anyone seeing the light?”
“Given that these things seem to function in perfect darkness?” Rocke asked. “No idea. We really don’t have any other option, so I’m going to say we go for it and not worry about it for now.”
“Great,” I said, shaking my head as I clipped my flashlight back to my waist. “I guess it beats crawling around in the dark, waiting for one of those things to take my head off.” Gravel dug into my palms and knees as I made my way forward, the ceiling getting lower and lower until I was almost on my belly. Sweat slid down my back, cold and clammy as I fought to ignore the tons of earth hanging above me and the sickening pressure on my soul.
Thankfully, the tunnel widened before it hit the bend I’d seen, and I was able to climb back to a semi-crouch by the time I reached it. I stuck the end of my staff around first, mostly out of paranoid reflex, and then duck-walked the rest of myself around the corner, letting out a sigh of reli
ef as I saw the opening ahead. There was another rune there, carved into a crossbeam that seemed to be the exit to the shaft we were in. Past that, the light of my headlamp couldn’t penetrate whatever thick darkness lay beyond.
“It looks like it opens up,” I said, rising a little higher as the ceiling finally made its way back to a somewhat comfortable height. “I can’t see what’s past the opening though. Too big.”
A hand fell on my shoulder, and I flinched as Rocke pulled himself up alongside me. “Then it’s a good place for a trap,” he said, his eyes darting to the rune. “Let me check.”
“Couldn’t either of the earlier ones been traps?” I asked.
“Yeah, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a death ward etched in them.”
I frowned. “I thought you said weren’t sure what went into those two.”
“I wasn’t,” Rocke said, shrugging. “I guessed. And looking at this one, my guess is that there isn’t a death ward here, either. As for the other side …” His shoulders heaved again, then his hand darted out, past the support. “Nope,” he said, letting out a breath in relief. “No death ward.”
“Couldn’t there have been an easier way to test that?” I asked as I moved forward, my staff rapping against the ceiling. I pulled the tip down as it almost tapped the support. The last thing I wanted was for it to touch that rune.
“Only if you wanted to do it,” Rocke said, playing the light from his headlamp across the ground in front of us. The floor extended past the opening a good ten or fifteen feet before dropping off into darkness. There was a click as he flipped on his own flashlight, shining the more powerful beam across the expanse.
“Looks all right,” he said as the beam found the far wall of whatever we were stepping into. He moved out of the exit slowly, panning his flashlight around as he stood, boots kicking up little bits of rock and dirt.
“Not much light, is there?” I asked as I followed him out, stretching my back to its full height and letting out a sigh of appreciation.
Dead Silver Page 38
