“I know,” Alexander said quietly.
“Any contact with Siduri?” Jack asked.
“No. In fact, once I got to this place of peace, I forgot all about him.”
“Maybe you ought to give it some time and some thought before you try that again,” Jack said.
“You’re not going to try that again, are you?” Anja asked.
“I have to,” Alexander said. “Siduri is too important to ignore. He can help me master my magic and he may be the key to destroying the shades once and for all.”
“But it almost killed you,” Anja said.
“I’ll be more careful next time and I have some experience to build on, but Jack’s right, I need to think about it for a while before I try again.”
Chapter 32
Several bandage changes, followed by further healing spells, followed by sleep, brought Alexander to the moment he’d been silently dreading. He was on his feet, his leg strong enough, though still a bit tender, his weapons and armor in place, Luminessence in hand. Jataan and Anja flanked him on either side with Lita and Jack well behind them.
Alexander looked to Jataan and Anja in turn; both nodded. He willed the door open, dimming the light in the room to almost nothing in the same moment. Silence and darkness. Alexander breathed a sigh of relief, bringing the light up a bit. Jataan peered outside, listening for any hint of a threat.
“I believe they’ve gone,” he said.
“Good,” Alexander and Anja said in unison.
“Keep an eye on the door while I have a look around,” Alexander said, going to his magic circle.
His leg gave him a few jabs of pain when he sat down to meditate, but once he’d cleared his mind, he slipped into the firmament easily, bringing his awareness into being above his head. He floated out the door and up three levels to the open-sided corridor they’d followed into the underdark, then to the door he’d opened, using only his aura vision to see. A steady stream of insects was moving into and out of the room, but the ones coming out were all going toward the main entrance, away from Alexander and his friends.
He floated toward the way they’d come in. The corridor was littered with the well-picked-over corpses of dozens of overseers, some insects stopping to search for a last scrap but most crawling over the stripped bones without pausing. At the next open door, about half of the insects turned into the underdark, while the rest continued on toward the entry hall.
He floated to the balcony and found a garrison of soldiers setting up behind a shield wall that warded the threshold between them and the entry corridor. The bugs had reached the shield and a few seemed to be stationed on the balcony, but the rest fanned out like search parties taking every viable pathway into the underdark.
Alexander drifted through the shield and into the enemy forces assembling beyond and found them wanting. While several of the ranking overseers were Acuna wizards, most were little more than organized thugs. Palace guards or even Lancers would have been better suited to the task, but the overseers had jurisdiction over the city proper and they weren’t about to give that up, even if it meant losing many of their own men.
Alexander could see the fear in them. They whispered stories of how the first group of overseers to venture into the underdark had never returned. Officers talked of plans, but the men looked nervously through the shield wall at the enemy, as inhuman and impersonal as it could get, flowing by like a river, ignorant of strategy, impossible to negotiate with, driven only by hunger and instinct.
He snapped back to the fissure and began exploring in the direction of the well of memory. The main pathways along the chasm wall were collapsed, broken in multiple places for several thousand feet. He floated through the dark as a ball of light, inspecting the open-sided corridors cut into the chasm wall but found none leading away from the fissure that were intact for any significant distance.
That left the underdark. He returned to the fissure and searched the area, looking for passages out. Finding three, he followed each for a distance. One wrapped back around in the wrong direction. Another ended in a cave-in. The third eventually led up a flight of stairs and connected to a hallway that seemed to be the underdark’s version of a road, long and straight and well-supported. More importantly, it looked intact for quite a ways in both directions. Alexander returned to his body and opened his eyes, closing the door to the Wizard’s Den, just to be safe.
“There were a lot more bugs than we thought. Fortunately, they’ve branched out in the other direction.”
“That might complicate getting out,” Jack said.
“Not nearly as much as the regiment of overseers camped at the entrance.”
“I take it the bugs did win,” Jack said.
“Very much so. Most of the overseers are terrified. Fortunately, all of that is happening back there. I think I’ve found a way through. Try to be as quiet as possible. I’ll keep our light to a minimum; I don’t want to draw the bugs’ attention.”
They slipped out of the Wizard’s Den under a very dim light from Luminessence. Everyone followed closely behind Alexander, taking great care to make as little noise as possible.
The fissure had opened a crack in a nearby wall. Alexander slipped through it and into a large room that might have once been a public bath. Bringing his light up to examine the art on the walls, he revealed a continuous fresco of fair-haired, frail-looking creatures tending to the lands and forests around them. They were depicted as wielding great magic for the betterment of the world they’d chosen to act as stewards for.
“The ancient history in this room alone could inspire a hundred songs,” Jack said.
“I know what you mean,” Alexander said. “I wish we had more time.”
The only door out of the room led into a tiled room filled with several benches situated between floor-to-ceiling armoires. Through that room and into the next hall, they found a straight corridor with stone doors every fifty feet or so on either side. Alexander ignored them, stretching out with his all around sight, looking for any hint of a threat in the distance, but finding only cold, empty passages and long-abandoned rooms.
Around a corner, they found a mound of dirt and stones with a crystal shard about a foot long poking out of the top.
“Hey, look at this,” Anja said, picking up the shard and holding it close to Alexander’s light.
“Be very careful with that,” Alexander said. “It’s alive.”
Jack inhaled sharply, his eyes going wide as he angled for a closer look. “This crystal is a sentient being?”
“Yes.”
“And these built all this,” Jack said.
“Yes.”
Anja gently set it down atop its pile of dirt and rocks.
“How interesting,” Lita whispered.
Alexander waited for the question he knew Jack wanted to ask next, but Jack just winked at him with a smile. They continued into the underdark, winding through what looked like a residential community. Alexander found it hard to understand why anyone would choose to live underground. It was dark and the air was stale. He already missed the sun.
Before long, he found the staircase leading up to the long hall. The hallway was twenty feet wide and just as high, running straight in both directions. Alexander suspected it had once been an underground thoroughfare for this side of the underdark. Now, he just hoped it was unused.
It certainly sounded that way, as quiet as a tomb with air just as still. Every noise felt like a trespass. He brought up the light and waited for a moment, listening for a response from some denizen of the underdark, but heard nothing.
With a shrug, he set out, his friends trailing behind him. Not five minutes later, they came to an intersection with another passage half the size of the one they were traveling. Left led toward the chasm, right went deeper into the underdark. Alexander continued going straight.
At regular intervals, they encountered similar intersections with smaller passages, occasional staircases appearing more sporadically. Al
exander found himself relying on his hearing as much as his vision, stopping at each intersection to listen for any hint of a threat, but it was dead quiet for several hours.
“This place is huge,” Jack whispered.
“As big as a city,” Alexander said.
“Must’ve been a sight to behold at its height,” Lita said.
“Indeed,” Jataan whispered.
A few minutes later, Alexander thought he heard something so he doused his light, plunging the passage into total blackness. Everyone froze, stopping in their tracks and holding their breath. Faint sounds of people talking filtered through the underdark.
Alexander sent his all around sight down the corridor, but he reached the limit of his range before he found the source of the voices. He opened the door to his Wizard’s Den, lowering the light to almost total dark at the same time. Once inside the protection of his magic circle, he slipped into the firmament and sent his awareness down the hallway. Almost a league of corridor brought him to a large room that served as the intersection of two large corridors along with several sets of stairs going both up and down.
A dozen overseers stood in a circle around the Acuna wizard who’d tried earlier to stop Alexander from entering the underdark. Several of the overseers were shouting at the wizard all at the same time.
“You got us into this … how’re you going to get us out?”
“He’s lost.”
“That wouldn’t be so bad if he hadn’t collapsed the tunnel we came in through.”
“He’s been nothing but trouble; we should leave him.”
“His magic might be useful.”
“You mean like when he collapsed the tunnel?”
“Had I not collapsed the tunnel,” the wizard said, “you would all be dead. Now, I suggest you lower your voices. She may know of another way into this chamber.” He gestured toward the multiple staircases and passages.
“Do you really think that thing might come back?” an overseer whispered.
“Perhaps,” the wizard said quietly.
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
“I agree. We should go that way,” the wizard said, pointing toward the passage that Alexander and his friends were traveling.
“No!” several said hotly.
“That’s deeper in.”
“Are you sure?”
“You want to go the wrong way.”
“The exit’s that way,” another said, pointing in the opposite direction.
“I assure you, that is the passage we want to take,” the wizard said.
“You said those exact same words earlier today.”
“Yeah.”
“Look where that got us.”
“Earlier today, we were running for our lives,” the wizard said. “The path I chose was necessary at the time. This path is necessary now.”
“You know full well the only reason we got away was because the bugs stopped to eat our fallen.”
“And because we entered the underdark through a door that I was able to secure behind us,” the wizard said. “Had we stayed in the open-sided corridor, we would have been overtaken. You would all be dead.”
“You think you would have survived?”
“Most assuredly,” he said, his shield flaring just enough to make it briefly visible.
“Why do you need to be using your magic right now?”
“Yeah, don’t you trust us?”
“Not especially,” the wizard said, “but I do have an obligation to apprehend the fugitive and your help would be invaluable.”
“You want us to do our jobs? Down here? This place is trying to kill us. We need to get out of here.”
“He’s right.”
“I told you, we should leave him.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
“I thought I heard something.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“No, he’s right.”
Everyone fell silent.
Click … click … click. Chitin on stone.
“Quickly, follow me,” the wizard said, racing through the cordon of overseers surrounding him and heading toward the underground road. Several overseers followed him without hesitation, while a group of five stayed where they were, listening to the darkness.
Click … click … click.
Alexander saw it emerge from a stairwell, crawling up onto the wall and then to the ceiling where it coiled around a pillar, eyeing the five remaining men.
A centipede. Twenty-five feet long and two feet wide, with barbed black chitin covering the entire length of its segmented body, two-foot serrated mandibles surrounding its mouth, two multi-jointed legs ending with oversized pincers jutting from its body a few feet behind its head, a foot-long stinger on its tail.
“The wizard can make light,” one of the overseers said, holding up his lamp so he could see how much oil he had left.
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Maybe we should stick together.”
They all nodded to each other before starting toward the passage.
centipede launched from the top of the pillar, uncoiling quickly yet silently. It hit one of the men in the middle of the back, slicing him clean in half with its mandibles, crashing into the ground with a clatter and using the momentum to carry it into the remaining four men, taking two men’s heads with a pincer each in lightning-quick strikes. The last two men got the worst of it. The centipede coiled around them both, raking them with its razor-sharp barbs, stripping flesh away in chunks and filling the underdark with screams that died out in gurgling gasps.
Glistening with blood, the centipede froze in place, its antennae flicking this way and that. After a moment, it began to eat.
Alexander opened his eyes and closed the door to his Wizard’s Den, bringing up the light and gesturing toward the table. He spent a few minutes explaining what lay ahead, both the overseers and the centipede. He had never liked bugs, but this one really made his skin crawl. He did his best to describe it in complete detail.
“That sounds quite beyond me,” Jack said.
“I suspect that it’s beyond me as well,” Lita said.
“I’ll kill it,” Anja said.
“No, you won’t,” Alexander said. “It’s fast, and every part of it is deadly. We’re going to avoid it.”
“What if we can’t?” Anja asked.
“Then Jataan and I will kill it.”
“I’m going to help too,” Anja said.
“No, not with this thing. It’s too fast. Besides, we’re going to avoid it,” he said pointedly.
She frowned.
“It seems like this road is heading in the right direction,” Jack said. “Are we going to take a detour to avoid that chamber?”
“No, we’ll wait,” Alexander said. “I want to give the overseers time to get well past us. Hopefully, the bug will finish eating and go take a nap.”
Chapter 33
Alexander crept along the wall, the fingers of his left hand lightly brushing the stone. One by one, his companions followed behind him through the dark. He held Luminessence, but kept its light extinguished, fearing that any illumination might alert the centipede to their presence.
Even in total black, Alexander could still see the colors of things, so he was confident that he would see the predator insect in time to take refuge in the Wizard’s Den. He had wondered why this underground road seemed so desolate. Now he suspected it was because it was part of the centipede’s hunting grounds.
They walked for a long time in complete darkness. Alexander had to remind himself to relax his muscles; he kept finding himself so tense it was giving him a headache. He was starting to think that his plan had worked, that the centipede had moved along, but then he saw a slight glimmer of color on the floor ahead.
He stopped, listening for a moment before lighting the hall with Luminessence. Five overseers were torn apart, their blood sti
ll sticky, parts of them scattered haphazardly down the passage. The centipede had eaten only part of one, leaving the rest to feed some other denizen of the underdark … or to rot.
Alexander noted the unusual trail of blood leading back toward the intersection chamber, two wavering patterns of tiny streaks of red running generally parallel. As they gained distance from the grisly scene, the blood trail diminished, then vanished altogether. Alexander extinguished his light again, relying on the wall and his magic for guidance. They crept forward slowly and quietly.
Click … click … click.
He froze, listening intently and looking ahead with his all around sight. They were only a few hundred feet from the intersection room. The centipede had returned to the top of one of the support pillars where it was lying in wait, clicking its pincers every so often.
Alexander opened the door to his Wizard’s Den.
“Let’s see if we can draw it out,” he whispered. “I’d rather fight it in this corridor than in the intersection room. If things go badly, we’ll retreat into the Wizard’s Den.”
When everyone had made what preparations they could, Alexander lit the corridor with Luminessence, filling the passageway with light for hundreds of feet in both directions.
Click … click … click.
The creature started toward them, tentatively inching down the underground road, but then turning and scurrying away when it reached the edge of the light.
“I guess it doesn’t like light.”
“Good to know,” Jack said, checking his vial of night-wisp dust.
They approached the intersection room cautiously, stopping at the threshold to look and listen before venturing inside. The centipede was nowhere to be seen, but the remains of overseers were scattered across the floor … a grisly reminder that it was still out there.
“I see light,” Jack said.
In the distance, down the corridor leading toward the chasm, flickered several faint points of lantern light.
“Overseers,” Alexander said. “They’ve seen us for sure. Let’s keep moving.”
He led them out of the intersection room along the same road they’d been traveling, farther into the underdark, no longer attempting to conceal their location by keeping the light low, but instead letting Luminessence fill the passage with bright and clear illumination. While it would give away their position, he hoped it would also keep some of the more unpleasant denizens of the deep from bothering them.
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