Starspawn

by Wendy N. Wagner

  He swallowed hard and only nodded in response.

  Fylga gave a soft bark as if in agreement with Jendara. Jendara glanced down at the animal. It didn’t look so ugly anymore; maybe she’d just gotten used to its odd looks. She pulled the next-to-last strip of jerky from her belt pouch and gave it to Kran. “Share it with Fylga.” He grinned at her.

  The group set out again. Tam let Zuna lead, and Jendara gave Boruc her lantern so he could take the end of the line. Thin, pained sounds followed them out of the room and down the hallway, and Jendara couldn’t tell if they came from the wind or she still heard Sarni, wherever she was.

  They walked in silence for several more minutes. The hallway showed no sign of ending. At this depth, the city’s builders had cut a straight line through the island, ignoring the hills and valleys that affected the upper levels. They hadn’t seen a cross-street in what felt like miles.

  Zuna paused. “I’m going to turn down my lantern,” she announced. “To conserve oil.”

  Boruc’s flame lowered, too. The shadows pressed in closer. Jendara wished she dared light her own lamp and drive the gloom away, but she knew the time would come when they would be glad of their thrift. She tried to push aside the fear that perhaps they had missed the staircase to the next level, and that they would be trapped down here forever.

  Zuna whispered: “I think there’s a cross-tunnel.”

  Jendara stopped. “Should we explore it?”

  From the darkness ahead came a crash.

  9

  WHERE THERE IS DARKNESS, LIGHT

  At the intersection of tunnels ahead, a very small blue light bobbed. Then the spot of eerie luminescence paused. If it were anything with the ability to see in the dark, it was looking right at Jendara’s crew.

  “Turn up your lamps!” Jendara ordered, dropping into a crouch. She already gripped her handaxe, but now she raised it.

  Zuna raised her lamp and Boruc followed suit, their lanterns blazing like day. Kran drew his seax, his stance as solid as a blooded warrior’s.

  Someone shouted and a figure lunged forward. Jendara caught the man by the arm. “Vorrin!”

  “Dara?” He shielded his face with his arm. “I can’t believe it’s you.”

  Glayn stumbled forward. “You lot found us! And brought enough lights for an army.”

  Still shading his eyes, Vorrin hurried toward Jendara and crushed her in a hug made awkward by the rope tying her to the others. When he pulled away, he explained: “We were in total darkness until we found a patch of this strange seaweed.” He held out the blue blob, which proved to be a ball of luminescent leaves.

  Kran squeezed in to hug Vorrin while Tam and Glayn clasped each other tightly. Then Vorrin and Glayn exchanged glances. “There’s a bit of a story,” Vorrin said.

  “Tell it while we walk,” Zuna suggested. “We’re almost out of lamp oil.”

  Vorrin reached for the lantern still clipped to his belt. “There’s still oil in my lantern; the wick’s just too wet to burn.”

  The others gladly refilled their lanterns, and Zuna turned up her light a bit. Since Vorrin and Glayn had already explored the length of the intersecting hallway, the group continued down the main corridor. Tam quickly introduced Yerka, and gave a brief recounting of their search for the missing men.

  Jendara gave Vorrin’s arm a squeeze just to reassure herself he was beside her. “So what happened?”

  “I think we should keep our voices down,” he warned. “We’re not alone down here. We saw more of those fish-things.”

  “Just tell us the story,” Boruc complained.

  “When we fell into the pit trap,” Vorrin said, “I got knocked out. We’re lucky we both didn’t die. I would have drowned if Glayn hadn’t caught hold of my collar and hauled me out onto a rock.”

  “It was pure dark until you lowered that torch,” Glayn added, “but then I could see there was some kind of opening on one wall.”

  “So Glayn told me to stay there and then he dove down underneath to see if the hole he’d seen in the wall was any kind of exit—”

  “Which it was,” Glayn cut in, “so I made him dive, too—”

  “Thought I’d drown,” Vorrin grumbled.

  Even by the faint light of the lanterns, Jendara could see Glayn roll his eyes. “It wasn’t that long of a swim, although it was all swimming down stairs.”

  Zuna stopped and turned to face the pair. “Wait. You swam down stairs? So we’re under the place where you fell?”

  “No, because there was another bit of stairs, back up.” Glayn shrugged. “Didn’t make sense to me, neither.”

  But Jendara saw the logic. “The pit trap room must have been built so it opened onto the sewage tunnels,” she began, excited. “Maybe they used it as some kind of cellar.” She forced herself to quiet back down. “This is good. This gives us a real sense of how deep this city is.”

  “You’re right.” Boruc rummaged in his pack for his sketch book. “Damp. Good thing I’m using charcoal and not ink.” He untied himself from the group so he could sit down on the floor, and then began to draw furiously by the low light of his lantern. The rest of them stowed their rope. It might be safer to be tied together, but the break felt good.

  “Anyway,” Vorrin continued, “we came out into a long hallway, lit up a bit with patches of this glowing seaweed. On one side, a door stood open and one of those big fishy things sat on a pile of weedy stuff. I thought we’d have to fight him, but he was asleep. Damn lucky for us, too.”

  “We took some of the seaweed, and we’ve been walking down here for the last three or four hours. Thought we’d never find the way.” For delivering such a pessimistic thought, Glayn certainly sounded happy. He clapped Tam on the elbow. “Thank the good gods we’re together again.”

  “Come see.” Boruc waved them over. “It’s still rough, obviously, but it’s a general overview of the four levels: three with big halls like streets, and then the smaller sewage tunnel underneath. Somehow the people who built this had all this space and still had the city aboveground.” He tapped his charcoal pencil against his chin. “I can’t imagine how it worked. Who would want to live down here when they had all that glory up there?”

  Zuna shook her head. “Being in the dark all the time? It’d make me sick.”

  Jendara leaned close to Vorrin’s ear. “You didn’t kill that guard?”

  His face grew serious. “If we’d killed him, it might have raised an alarm when somebody found him later. We could hear a bunch of them in one of the other rooms, croaking to each other. I get the feeling they’re planning something. They built that pit trap for a reason, Dara.”

  “I feel like we stumbled into something over our heads. I wish we hadn’t come here.”

  Vorrin went silent for a moment. “I didn’t think it would be like this. I just thought—an easy little bit of exploration. Quick money. I didn’t think it would be dangerous.”

  “Hey, we made this call together. Remember, this is a partnership. A team.” She reached for his hand and squeezed it. She kept holding his hand as they walked, even if it meant she had only one hand free. She wasn’t ready to let go of him quite yet.

  “The floor drops here,” Zuna warned. “It’s only a few steps.”

  “Great,” Glayn grumbled, “we’re going back downstairs.”

  Boots splashed. “And it’s wet,” Zuna complained.

  Jendara freed her hand reached for the flint striker in her belt pouch. Something about Glayn’s description of the stairs he’d navigated leaving the pit trap room had stuck in her mind, and now she had a bad feeling. Castles and forts and other large facilities often had only a few rooms that were connected to the cellar and sewage lines. Bathrooms and kitchens were the happiest of such places. Prison cells and dungeons were another sort of place entirely.

  She lit her lantern. “Oh, blessed ancestors,” she breathed. She paused in the middle of the stairway and played the light over the wall. Great gashes had been scored in t
he stone.

  “Do those look like claw marks to anyone else?” Boruc asked. He hoisted Fylga off the ground and tucked the damp dog under his arm.

  The stairwell ended in short hallway that bent a few feet to the right, and then came to an end in an open doorway. Zuna paused at the base of the stairs, standing in knee-high water. “Water did real damage here.”

  No one had left the door open to the room beyond: the heavy iron door had rusted in its years below the ocean, and it had been too weak to hold up to the pressures when the island emerged from below. Broken-off shards of rust hung from the twisted hinges, but the rest of the door had gone to the hands of time.

  “This is the first iron we’ve seen on this island,” Jendara noted. She paused, in case any of her comrades had gotten the same notion she had. “Makes me think this might have been a dungeon.”

  Everyone turned to look at her. She shrugged and then joined Zuna at the doorway. What would an ancient dungeon look like? Would they find corroded implements of torture and the broken bits of thousand year-old skeletons, or would a civilization as mighty and intellectual as these star worshipers have only a few spartan prison cells?

  “Let’s keep moving,” she said, and waded carefully into the room beyond.

  The floor lay a few steps lower than the hallway’s floor, and the water now stood chest deep. Kran’s chin barely cleared the surface.

  Jendara’s teeth began to chatter. When the island had been submerged, this chamber might have lain hundreds of feet beneath the surface. No sunlight had warmed this water in years.

  “Oh, it’s cold,” Zuna breathed.

  “And it stinks like something died,” Boruc grumbled.

  Zuna held her lantern high above her head, casting light around the great open space. The room was a bit longer than the Milady, maybe fifty or sixty yards. The walls rose into darkness, the ceiling impossible to make out. If this was a prison, it could have held a great number of prisoners.

  The lantern light glinted against the far wall. “Look.” Glayn, at this depth forced to tread water, pointed to the reflection. “Bars.”

  Jendara squinted. The light wasn’t strong enough to make out the details, but she thought Glayn was correct. “Looks like prison cells, maybe.” She wondered why the bars of the little cells still gleamed like new when the main prison door had rotted out. They reminded her of the windows in the purple boulevard—perhaps the bars and the glass had all been magically or alchemically treated.

  She took another step forward, sending out a wake of ripples across the murky water. Something bobbed on the surface and she pulled it toward her.

  “That’s not old at all.” Glayn grabbed onto her arm to steady himself as he treaded water. He looked closer at the thing, a broken chunk of painted wood. “—ermaid,” he read. He shook her head. “This is the bow of a fishing boat. The Mermaid. Never saw it, but it went missing a few months ago. Presumed sunk.”

  Boruc jerked his chin to the left, his arm still clamped tight around the dog. “Is that her crew?”

  Jendara turned. Her lantern lit up the left side of the room. At first, she couldn’t understand Boruc’s question. Something big floated on the surface of the water, a moist heap of pale and quivering stuff. Then her stomach turned. “Merciful Desna,” she breathed.

  “Are those—” Yerka broke off. She clapped her hands over her mouth, her eyes filling with tears. “Tell me they’re not.”

  Boruc took a step closer. “That’s a boot. And a hand.”

  Jendara didn’t want to make out those details. The waterlogged flesh was horrible enough. The cold had slowed decomposition, but nothing could stop the onset of decay, and these men had been dead a while.

  “How’d they get down here if the Mermaid went down two months ago?” Glayn put some distance between himself and the bodies. “Bodies float, not sink.”

  “Something must have put them here,” Jendara said, “the gods only know why.”

  Tam shook his head, eyes fixed on the corpses. “They’re in too good of shape for something that’s been in the sea. No crabs feasting on them. No fish nibbling on their flesh. Whatever brought them down here wanted to keep them fresh. Like hanging your venison in a cold house.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” Vorrin said. “If this is something’s larder, it’s not going to appreciate visitors.”

  “I’m sure whatever cached these bodies was flushed out of here when the island came up to the surface,” Glayn said. “I mean, I hope.” His teeth chattered.

  Jendara looked from him to Kran. The boy’s lips had turned blue. “I hope as well as you, Glayn, but let’s get moving anyway. It’s damn cold.”

  Zuna waded forward. “I think there’s a staircase going up over by those jail cells.” She indicated the far wall with a wave of her lantern. A dark gap showed, overlaid by the same gleaming metal bars as the prison cells.

  A bit of hope stirred in Jendara’s chest. “If they went to the effort of protecting those bars from rust, then I’m guessing that staircase goes someplace more important than the lowest level of the island. I think we’ve found our way up.”

  “You can pick a lock, can’t you, Jendara?” Vorrin sloshed past her.

  “If it’s not too tough a lock, yeah.” She followed behind him, sliding her axe back into her belt as she went. She caught up with him and they waded to the steel grate blocking the staircase. He took her lantern and held it close while she tugged her belt pouch out of the water and felt around for the slim metal tools at the bottom. “My hands are pretty stiff,” she warned. “This might take a while.”

  “Here.” He took the leather strip out of his clubbed-back hair and used it to tie the lantern to the grate. “I’ve gotten pretty warm walking in this muck.” He took her hands and rubbed them briskly.

  She smiled at him, feeling some of the prison’s grim atmosphere fall away from them. “Works every time.”

  He gave her fingers a little squeeze and she turned back to study the lock. The main lock was at chest height and looked easy enough. She probed inside the lock for a minute and heard it click open. She tugged on the gate. It jiggled, but stayed shut. That meant a second lock, probably a bolt going into the floor—common enough in a prison. She jiggled the grate again and studied the resistance. The floor bolt must be just to the right of the doorframe.

  She wanted to be right over it when she dove; she was going to waste enough air feeling around for the damn thing without having to search for it. She shifted over a few inches and felt something crunch beneath her boots. It wasn’t the hollow, crisp crunch of an empty shell, but a more solid snap, and even before she looked down she knew what it was.

  “There are skeletons in this,” Tam called out. “I’ve got at least two shackled to the wall by the door we just came in.”

  “There’s one here, too,” Jendara announced. She could just make out the jumble of bones in the murk of the bottom. Human. Or if not human, humanish. She supposed she’d get to feel all of its details while she probed around in the muck.

  “Hey, Boruc!” Tam sounded excited. “Remember that ring you found? The weird long finger inside? These things have the same kind of finger bones. Toes look long, too.”

  “Maybe you can sketch it,” Vorrin said. He began to wade back toward the other entrance. “What about that second cell?”

  Jendara breathed long and deep, then drew in several short sharp breaths beyond her normal limit. Overbreathing. The divers she knew claimed it could give you extra time underwater. If they were right, she’d be glad of it. One last sip of air, and then she forced herself beneath the water’s surface.

  The water was too shallow to use kicks to drive her to the bottom; she had to pull herself down with her arms, following the bars of the grate. Silt swirled around her face, obscuring almost everything. Her fingers tapped the bottom and she ran them along the bottom slab of steel that made up the grate. It had to be at least six inches wide and felt as slick as new metal. Whoever had
built this place had been very concerned about something breaking out.

  A clanking and crashing came from off to her left. Tam and Vorrin must have moved their investigation to the prison cells. She hoped they didn’t stir up too much muck and send it in her direction.

  The water cleared a bit and she saw the round dome of a skull just an inch in front of her nose. A bubble of surprise escaped her mouth. The side of the skull was stove in, and the crushed area matched the size and shape of a bar in the iron door. The creature who had died here must have been smashed against the bars of the prison when the ocean rushed inside.

  Her fingers felt for the still-hidden bolt, her eyes unable to look away from the skull. The eye sockets seemed far too huge to be human, the brow bone above broader, the forehead slung back in a vaguely amphibian way. But the lower half of the skull bore a strong resemblance to a human’s. She’d never seen a creature like it—not even the ulat-kini looked like this.

  Her fingers closed on something heavy and round, sending up silt as they moved. She forced herself to concentrate on the latch, but the silt obscured everything. She squeezed her eyes shut to protect them and tried to envision the thing from just the information her fingers sent her. The burning in her lungs threatened to distract her.

  Yes, she could visualize it: a flat disk, about two fingers wide, with a very small opening in its middle.

  She made another pass around the thing’s edge. It felt like a padlock. Grit and mud covered it despite the strange magic that otherwise protected the grate and its mechanisms—she couldn’t see it at all, but it felt sturdy.

  Jendara was going to need to breathe before she could get started on the padlock. Feeling for the nearest bar, she pulled herself up to the surface.

  Spluttering and blinded for a moment, she almost didn’t register the splashing from the other side of the room. She scrubbed the back of her hand across her eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s something big coming out of a crack in the floor!” Vorrin shouted. “Get that gate open now!”