“Run!” Damaric shouted.
They ran.
They tore back one street in the direction they had come from, rounded the corner so the reapers couldn’t see them, and kept going. Their pounding feet drowned out any sounds the reapers might have made; that and the rush of blood in his ears seemed to Aric to have taken over all his senses. He could barely see where he was going, making out only choppy flashes of the street and buildings and his knees.
“Through here!” Ruhm called. He stopped in front of an alley entrance with a stone arch at the top. The narrow alley cut between two large buildings toward something—a courtyard, perhaps—at its end. Amoni went in first, her long legs covering ground almost as fast as Ruhm’s. Damaric went next, then Aric. Ruhm brought up the rear. The alley was barely wider than Aric’s shoulders. Ruhm had to turn sideways to squeeze through.
“They saw me,” Ruhm said when he emerged into the courtyard.
“But only one of them can fit through at a time,” Damaric said. “We can hold them off.”
Aric took in the layout of the courtyard. Tall buildings hemmed it in on three sides, blocking the worst of the sun’s rays, and a high wall ran across the back. It had survived the city’s devastation in remarkably good shape—but for a thick layer of sand over everything, it might have been abandoned the day before. In the cool shade, Aric felt the sweat on his sides and shivered.
“They might be able to flank us,” he said. “If they can climb that wall, or get into any of these buildings.”
“I don’t know if they’re that clever,” Damaric said.
“We may yet find out, right?” Amoni said. She and Ruhm took up positions at the alley’s end. Amoni was ready to hack any approaching dune reapers to bloody bits, Ruhm to pound those bits into the ground with his greatclub.
A drone came into the alley first, clacking and chuffing. The drones were smaller than the warriors, and where the warriors had those impressive bladed arms, the drones had thin arms ending in vicious claws.
This one skittered toward them on clawed feet. When it reached the end of the alley, Amoni swung her cahulaks at it. It reacted quickly, raising claws to block the attack, but the flail’s sharp blades slashed its arm. One claw, severed entirely, clattered to the ground. The drone let out a pained wail, which Ruhm silenced with a blow from his club.
Eight more drones tried the alley, only to be met by Aric’s sword, or Damaric’s singing stick, or Ruhm and Amoni working in concert.
After the last was slain, the moment’s peace dragged out so long that Aric grew concerned. “There were warriors,” he said. “Surely they haven’t abandoned the hunt.”
Damaric sniffed the air. “That sour-sweet smell?” he said quietly. “Smells like death, like rotting flesh? That’s them.”
“We’ve killed five of their drones,” Amoni pointed out.
“Aye. But they don’t smell as strong as the warriors. They’re near.”
Ruhm took in a great breath. “Yes,” he agreed. “Close by.”
All four of them heard the sound, a thump from inside one of the buildings facing onto the alley. “In there!” Damaric said.
Amoni had been inspecting the doorway of the house opposite, where some indecipherable runes had been burned into the wood. “This way!” she cried. “I think we can defend the doorway.”
The other three darted past her, and she closed the door just as five warriors emerged into the courtyard, two through a door and three dropping down from windows. The door had a heavy iron bolt, and Aric silently shot it after Amoni was clear.
The house they had entered had low ceilings and small rooms. They had come into a kitchen, with a washbasin and a stove made of mud bricks still intact.
Having taken that in, Aric watched the reaper warriors through a hairline crack between the door and jamb. They milled about in the courtyard, appearing confused. They don’t know which way we’ve gone, Aric thought. At the same time, his hand rested on the ancient iron bolt, and a strange certainty grew in him.
They only had moments before the warriors tried the door. But those moments, he was convinced, could count. He gestured the others through the kitchen doorway into the next room, empty but as cramped as the kitchen. A door was hung on iron hinges at the far side of the room, its heavy wood planks carved with strange runic symbols blackened with age. Aric grazed the iron hinges with his fingertips as he passed, and allowed a smile onto his lips. He felt like he hadn’t smiled in days.
He closed this door behind them as well. “The staircase,” he said. “Down. We’ve got to go down.”
“So those things can wait up here for us?” Amoni asked. “No.”
“We must,” Aric said. “It’s telling me to.”
“What is?”
“The metal in this place. It’s calling to me. We need to go down, and fast.”
3
Sure enough, around the corner was a staircase. The flight up had, as they had so often seen, been destroyed, but there were stairs leading down, in reasonable repair. “It’s dark down there,” Amoni said. “And we have no torches.”
“All the more reason the dune reapers won’t think we’ve gone that way,” Aric argued. “Hurry.”
“Metal speaks to him,” Ruhm said. Amoni and Damaric had heard this, and they knew why Kadya had brought him on the journey, but they had not seen it in action.
“And now it’s telling me we have to go down,” Aric said. “I’ll lead the way.”
“Then whatever’s down there will get you first,” Amoni said. “I’m game.”
With his agafari-wood sword in his right hand, Aric grasped his coin medallion with his left. It had no messages for him, but he felt a warming tingle. A comforting sensation, assuring him he was making the right moves. At last, he thought. Confidence spread through him with every step into the darkness.
When he reached a landing, he was lost in a pitch-black world. He tapped ahead with his foot, waved his sword ahead of him, but the staircase had ended. He touched the medallion again. “There’s another way down,” he said.
“Farther?” Amoni almost whined. Perhaps she didn’t like the darkness. Aric wasn’t fond of it himself.
He felt along the wall until he found another opening, with more stairs, leading down further. Above, they heard the crash of dune reaper warriors breaking through the bolted door, then the thumping about as they searched for the escaped Nibenese. But he kept going, silently, into the blackness, the others right behind. Each of them kept a hand on the next, as the dark was impenetrable.
The stairs led down and down, eight steps, a small landing, a turn and then eight more. The deeper they went, the more convinced Aric became that they were going the right way. There was a vibration in his head, almost a song, growing stronger all the time.
Then he realized that he could see a little, although they were far underground. They crossed a landing and at the bottom of eight more steps was a faintly glowing corridor of stone, the walls themselves somehow luminous.
“Ahh!” Amoni said. It was the first vocalization any of them had made since hearing the reapers above them.
“I think we’ve left our foes behind,” Aric said.
“And left Kadya and the others to deal with them alone,” Damaric added.
“I’ve no love for her sort of magic,” Amoni said. “But if anyone can defeat the dune reapers, it might well be her.”
“While we’ve found what?” Ruhm asked. “Illuminated rocks?”
“Unless I’m wrong,” Aric replied, “we’ve found what we were sent here for.”
“The metal?” Damaric asked. “Where?”
“I don’t know,” Aric said. “But we’re getting close.”
They reached the bottom of the staircase. The corridor extended in both directions, faintly lit, as far as the eye could see. The walls, floor and ceiling were constructed of the same stone, the floor worn smooth as if from the passage of many, many feet over the centuries. More runes, like the ones on the door and oth
ers as well, were carved into the walls.
Littering the floor were bone fragments. Here and there, whole bones stood out, but most had been stepped on, crushed, broken by feet passing through here over the span of years.
“Ahh,” Aric said. “It’s some sort of battleground.”
“Or abattoir,” Damaric added.
“This must run beneath the entire breadth of the city,” Amoni said.
“At least,” Aric said.
“But which way do we go?”
Aric listened to the humming in his head. He pointed toward the right, which he believed was the east. “This way.”
“You’re sure about this?” Damaric said. “I’d hate to be lost down here.”
“You have to trust me,” Aric told him. “The steel calls to me.”
The others agreed, Damaric perhaps less happily than the rest, and they started in the direction Aric had indicated. They passed occasional doorways, most of those paved over with the same sort of stone. A few were open, and side tunnels led off in various directions, but Aric felt no pull to follow those. They kept to the main tunnel.
After what felt like ages, they reached another doorway. Like so many they had passed, stone and mortar blocked it. But the vibration was so strong here, Aric was surprised the others couldn’t hear it. His whole body tingled, all his fine hairs standing on end. “Behind here.”
“It’s sealed,” Damaric pointed out.
“We need to unseal it.”
“How?”
Ruhm pushed past the others, taking Aric’s agafari-wood sword from him. “Like this,” he said. He started jamming the hard wooden blade into the mortar, chipping it away little by little. The others joined in, using whatever slender implements they had, attacking the mortar rather than the solid stones. Soon, Ruhm had chipped away enough mortar from one of the upper stones that he was able to shove his fingers through and get a grip on the stone. “Back away,” he said.
The others complied, and he pulled on the stone, putting all his considerable weight into it. Mortar crumbled beneath it, and then the stone gave way, breaking loose several around it at the same time. They all reached into this larger hole and tugged together.
Soon they could step through the doorway. On the other side they found a gargantuan cavern. The walls of the cavern must have been where the stone for the corridor came from, as they glowed with the same gentle luminosity.
They were on a level slightly more than halfway to the cavern’s roof. A narrow stone staircase wound down, close beside a cave wall. Stalactites dripped from the ceiling, stalagmites at the bottom reaching up to join them. In some places they met, forming columns. All of it was suffused with that soft glow. On each step, a different rune had been etched.
All over the floor and on every rock shelf and outcropping were bones. Thousands must have been slaughtered here. Animals, monsters, people—there was no way to know what the bones had come from. They were everywhere.
And the steel … the steel sang.
From this height, it was a shapeless, formless mass, sitting on the cavern floor. But Aric knew what it was. More metal than he had ever imagined in one place, mined and smelted and shaped.
“It’s here,” he said, his heart racing. “It’s really here, just as Nibenay said it would be.”
Damaric pointed down at the hulking shapes. “That’s all metal?”
“It is.”
“Incredible.”
Aric started down the stairs, almost at a run. “I know!”
Excitement built in him with every step down, until he thought he would surely burst. The singing in his head was louder than ever, like a choir of a million voices.
Then, on the way down, he spotted an almost whole skeleton, lying on a shelf of rock just off the staircase. He couldn’t make out what type of creature it had been—not quite human or elf, but something not too different, he believed. It was covered in cobwebs, and some of the brown bones had, over time, separated from the others. It, like everything else he had seen in this city, seemed impossibly ancient.
Jutting from the skeleton’s bony ribs was a steel broadsword.
Aric put down his wooden sword and leaned off the staircase as far as he dared. The tips of his fingers could just brush the sword’s hilt. But he couldn’t close them, couldn’t get a grip on it.
The sword wasn’t new—it was as dusty and cobwebbed as everything else—but it looked intact. The workmanship, as far as he could see in the faint glow of the rocks, was spectacular. He longed to hold it in his hand.
Clutching his coin medallion in his left hand, he reached out again with his right and the sword hilt shifted, just enough to fall into his outstretched palm.
He closed his hand around the sword, and the singing in his head ceased so abruptly he wondered if he had gone deaf.
“Aric?”
It was Ruhm. Aric could hear—and besides, he reminded himself, it wasn’t my ears hearing that anyway.
“I’m fine,” Aric said.
“Good. Had me worried.”
“But look.” Aric drew the heavy sword from the skeleton, supporting his grip with his left hand to hold it steady. Its blade was long, gleaming in the rocks’ glow, and appeared to be in very good condition: old, with nicks and scratches, but still sharp and sturdy. “A steel sword, as fine as any I’ve …” His words trailed off, as the staircase seemed to turn inside out around him. The glow faded from the walls, and once again, Aric plunged into absolute blackness.
XII
GLIMPSES IN THE DARK
1
Aric saw an Athas that surely had never been: a lush, forested world, where a gentle breeze could set a million leaves quivering. Birds flew over the forests in great flocks, and animals left the shelter of huge trees to drink at the shores of rushing rivers. Wildflowers of every color carpeted the valleys and the wild meadows beyond vast cultivated fields. Glorious cities gleamed in vivid, golden sunlight.
But as he watched—a tiny part of him protesting, aware that he was not truly present in those scenes, but viewing them as if from the back of a high-flying Athasian roc—the peaceful world before him was riven by strife. He could not determine the source of the unrest, but in its wake forests burned and rivers dried up. People in those cities stared toward the skies in horror, and then the cities crumbled. Finally, as deserts spread across the beautiful, serene world he had glimpsed so briefly, that brilliant yellow sun dulled, then turned to the dark red color so much more familiar to him.
And as if suddenly transported into Akrankhot itself, he saw a powerful, sun-bronzed man wielding a broadsword—I’m holding that sword, he thought, before the idea flitted away like a dried blade of grass in a heavy wind—battling what seemed to be an army of foul, depraved creatures. He slayed many but killed himself in the process.
Aric felt the loss as personally as if the big man had been a close friend, and tears dampened his eyes even as the visions continued. In place of the mighty-thewed warrior, he saw the citizens of Akrankhot, trembling in fear of the powerful forces sweeping their planet, terror of a conflict between beings for greater than themselves. And there was something else, something dark and horrible, with too many limbs and tentacles and teeth, and on its twin tongues Aric could taste the blood of innocents, and—
“Ungh …” Aric moaned and thrashed and blinked. Faces loomed around him, causing panic to well up in his chest. He tried to scrabble away, then saw that it was only Amoni and Ruhm, the closest things to friends he had.
He was in the cavern beneath Akrankhot, on the staircase landing, a heavy broadsword weighing upon his chest.
And something else was there, too; its psionic tendrils probing at Aric’s mind.
2
Aric jerked into a sitting position. “Are you hurt, Aric?” Amoni asked. “You fell, and then you were … dreaming, perhaps …”
Aric closed his eyes, gripping the broadsword with both hands to draw as much strength from the steel as he could. He sensed al
l the other metal nearby, on the cavern floor—rods and posts and columns and bars of it, gold, lead, iron, steel, silver, copper, bronze—and he reached out with his psionic abilities and touched that, and for an instant the vision of a bygone time almost returned, but he fought it off. He needed to concentrate, to focus on summoning what energy he could from the steel and on blocking the unknown incursion into his mind. The cold, solid bulk of steel comforted him, made him strong.
He turned his attention inward, where it seemed he could see several slimy tentacles oozing through cracks in his mental defenses. He took each in turn, pinching it off until the tentacle itself retreated, then disposed of the segments in an infinitely deep pit he imagined.
Finally, the thing’s efforts ended. Aric was himself again, weakened by the experience, soaked with sweat that chilled him in these subterranean depths. But himself, just the same.
“I’m fine,” he said. “But … that was strange.”
“What happened?” Ruhm asked. “You were lost.”
“Yes … wait, where’s Damaric?”
“He went on ahead,” Amoni said.
“By himself?”
“I hope so. I don’t think there’s anyone else down here.”
“Do you … feel anything strange? In your heads?”
“Nothing in mine,” Ruhm said.
“I don’t,” Amoni said. “What are you talking about, Aric?”
Aric got to his feet. His head still swam, and the ground beneath him seemed unstable, shifting moment by moment. But an overpowering urge to get down the stairs filled him, to get to that metal. “Come on,” he said. He hoisted the broadsword and started down the steps.
With every spiral of the staircase he grew stronger. The metal no longer sang to him the way it had, and the visions had already faded, like memories of some event that had happened to him years before.
The cavern’s floor was uneven, but a path had been worn smooth between the bottom of the staircase and the great mass of metal. Before the metal, his hands resting against it, stood Damaric.
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