"Hello?" I tried again.
An explosion of light surrounded me. I cried out instinctively and shut my eyes. The whispers returned full force and a sudden breeze blew past my face. Still clinging to the wall, I cracked open my eyes.
A cloud of luminescent moths engulfed me. Each one was as large as my hand and glowed pale silver, gold, and rose. Their antennae stretched twice the length of their bodies and brushed me like a woman's hair as they swarmed around. I gasped with relief, then shuddered as the cloud continued to bat around me like drunken bumblebees. The moths seemed harmless, and I wasn't afraid of falling this time (the other day's encounter having been enough to convince me to save some of my magical reserves) but the sensation of the swarm was unsettling.
The moths remained for possibly a minute, their glow overwhelming that of my sunrod, the beat of their wings filling the passage with the susurrus I'd mistaken for whispers. Just when I was wondering if I should start to climb with the moths in tow, they continued their swarm up the chimney and vanished from sight.
"Well," I said in the silence. My sunrod seemed pale and somewhat lifeless in comparison to the moths' glow. "That was interesting. Wonder what woke them up?"
Even as I spoke the words, I remembered my hasty and somewhat irreverent prayer of the day before. Desna's symbol is the butterfly, and these silvery moths were unlike anything I'd seen before: exotic and beautiful. And I'd been hanging from my fingertips again when they'd swarmed past.
Interesting.
I continued down, wedging myself through the narrowest part of the chimney and leaving a bit of skin behind, and soon reached the tunnel to which the chimney connected. Handholds led down the wall below and I dropped the last few feet into the tunnel proper. It stood about six feet high, just enough room for me to unfold and hold my sunrod up.
This tunnel was definitely constructed, though a few side-branches seemed natural. Carvings covered the walls. They seemed similar to the ones I'd seen at the entrance to the Darklands, but so old and worn I could make out no details. I stood in the middle of the tunnel with no clear indication as to which way was "forward," so I consulted the wayfinder and marched onward.
I'd traveled for only a few hundred feet when the tunnel expanded to double its width. Another thirty, and it opened up onto a platform overlooking an ancient underground city. Domes and pillars reached like stalagmites toward the ceiling; crumbling buildings spanned the length of the cavern, close-packed palaces shunning the light from patches of glowing mold in favor of the shadows.
The Darklands are just as dangerous for its residents.
The first thing I did was gape. The second thing I did was sit down on the platform, so that I could gape properly while resting my legs.
I'm not exaggerating when I say the city was immense. In many ways it reminded me of Urgir. Though the buildings here looked considerably older, and many had actually fallen into rubble, the existing structures displayed architecture similar to Urgir's. Squat stone pillars held up heavy roofs, stone blocks as wide as my outstretched arms formed thick walls, and the streets looked grooved, bowed under the ponderous weight of marching feet. The city seemed built to withstand time and stress, and even the collapsed buildings looked solid. I got the impression they'd been knocked down, not succumbed to age.
Small figures moved among the stalactites that hung like dragon's teeth over the city; I thought they were bats, but larger than any I'd seen before. In the streets of the city I caught glimpses of movement. I tried to focus on whatever walked this ancient ruin, but the shadowy forms always slipped out of sight before I could make out details. The hairs on the back of my neck rose as the stories of ghosts and phantasms I'd recalled in the chimney came back in full force. If the dwarven dead walked anywhere, this city seemed like the perfect place.
A flash of light caught my eye. Far to my right, flames caught on a pile of something and flared up into a bonfire. The section of the city it illuminated seemed in better repair than the rest, and I saw stone blocks arranged in a crude barricade around the area. Around the fire's base I glimpsed a few stocky figures before they retreated into the darkness—dwarves, perhaps?
The scrape of a boot on stone sounded behind me. I froze, then slowly turned my head to look over my shoulder.
Two figures, both four feet tall and all muscle, stood behind me. Each one clutched a barbed spearhead mounted on a short wooden haft. Dull gray armor made their stocky forms appear even squatter, and their battered helmets glinted dully. Their eyes burned coal-red, and their skin was gray as forge smoke. I speak a little Dwarf, but I didn't have to say a word to know this pair wasn't friendly. I tried raising my empty hands and smiling, just in case.
They lunged for me, spears first, and I shouted an arcane phrase I'd been saving for just such an occasion. Flames burst from my outspread fingertips. (An empty hand doesn't always mean harmless.)
The gray dwarves bellowed and fell back a step, shielding their eyes and beating the flames out of their beards. I used the distraction to roll backward off the lip of the observation platform.
It wasn't a long drop to the ground, and I didn't use my falling spell for the simple reason that I didn't want to slow down. I got my feet under me and hit the stone hard enough to jar my teeth. The gray dwarves shouted above me and rushed to the opposite side of the platform. They began to scramble down with such agility that there must have been hidden handholds; nevertheless, my descent had been quicker than theirs. I used my head start to run. Not that I was necessarily afraid of the two burly, heavily armed dwarves in their native terrain, you understand. But I've been known to show remarkable common sense from time to time.
Unfortunately, running in someone else's native terrain while searching for a hiding place isn't much easier than fighting off two territorial gray dwarves—though it carries less risk of missing limbs. I barreled along as quickly as I could, searching desperately for a crevice or nook in which to conceal myself. A narrow tunnel opened up along the wall to my right and I dove in, hoping to squeeze through a passage too narrow for the armored dwarves to follow.
I found the next best thing: branching tunnels leading off in random directions. Praying with newfound piety not to hit a dead end, I veered right, then left. The tunnel narrowed and widened again, curved like a fishhook, and stopped.
I guess you can't have everything you pray for.
The end of the tunnel was a bulbous cave filled with piles of loose rubble and boulders. I turned, ready to thread my way back and try a different passage, when I heard the clatter of armor and the muttering of guttural voices. The gray dwarves had followed me, and I was afraid any movement would alert them to my presence.
I crouched behind the densest pile of rocks and stuffed the sunrod down my shirtfront, trying to breathe quietly. My lungs and legs ached from the tumble down the cliff followed by my mad dash, and I struggled not to shift and stretch too much. I strained my ears, hoping with each passing second that the sounds of pursuit would fade away.
No such luck. The clattering of armor grew louder. My heart hammered in my chest and I wiped sweat from my brow. If I had to fight, this seemed like the best place in which to make a stand, but I didn't like the odds. I'd bet gold to a Varisian that the gray dwarves could see in the dark. Making a stand might work, but I'd be happier if it didn't come to that. Besides, I had one trick left up my proverbial sleeve.
It wasn't much of a trick, to be honest—one of the first and easiest spells I ever learned. As I'd grown better at casting, the spell had grown more powerful too. At first I'd only been able to conjure the sound of a few people whispering. Now I hoped I could mimic the sounds of that ridiculously large worm I'd seen the day before.
The farther away the gray dwarves were, the better I suspected this would work. I straightened up, put my shoulder against the boulder pile, and heaved.
The topmost
boulder rocked, teetered, and then crashed to the ground with an accompanying shower of gravel. I cast my spell and mimicked, as best I could from memory, the horrible keening roar of the purple worm.
As the echoes of my illusionary cry faded away, the clashing of armor stopped. I thought I heard the whisper of cautious voices ahead. I shoved the rock pile once more and another hail of stones rained down, shaking the ground as they bounced and cracked. I mimicked the worm's roar again, realistically enough to give myself shivers. I tramped around the room, shoving over rock piles and roaring like a madman. I only had a minute or so in which to make this work. Caught up in the frenzy, I could hardly listen to see if the dwarves were really backing off. Plus the chamber was full of the sound of purple worm and falling rocks.
All too quickly, the spell ended. I halted my destructive rampage, panting heavily, my arms aching and palms gritty from the effort. I cocked my head and listened.
Far in the distance, I heard the sound of armored figures quickly retreating. Silently, I celebrated.
Then the ground shook under my feet.
This is what happens when I try to be clever.
I spent a second frozen in shock. I wasted another breathing hard, and a third squeezing my eyes shut, before my body caught up with my brain and my legs started pumping. I bolted from the chamber at top speed, just before the ceiling caved in and the enormous bulk of the purple worm surged into the room.
I like to think my roaring dance of falling boulders was some unwitting form of purple worm poetry, and not simply a mating call or—more likely—a territorial breach that summoned the worm to see what was slithering through its home. Regardless, the worm reared its blind head, waving its torso back and forth as if scenting the air. Its maw opened, displaying slime-coated fangs that glistened in the light of the sunrod I desperately dug out of my shirt.
I risked one glance over my shoulder, then put my head down and ran like hell.
Their short legs and heavy armor hampered the gray dwarves' speed, and I passed them just as we exited into the main cavern. They lit out for the bonfire I'd seen earlier; I hightailed it in the opposite direction. The city didn't seem like a viable option—recalling those strange black shapes lurking in the shadows—so I sprinted around its perimeter until I found another tunnel in which to duck.
The sounds of keening roars, falling rocks, and, after a minute or so, dwarven screams followed me as I ran. Apparently the worm had chosen to follow the slower pair. "Excellent choice," I muttered under my breath.
Once I was certain the worm was busy feasting on the dwarves and not following me, I collapsed against the wall of the tunnel and struggled to catch my breath. I held the sunrod before me, taking comfort from its light, but even as I watched, its glow began to fade. I sat quietly, thankful for the respite—thankful to still be alive in this wondrous, dangerous place—and watched as the sunrod's light lessened bit by bit until I sat alone in darkness.
...And Your Enemies Closer
By Greg A. Vaughan
04 Neth, 4707 ar
Progress at last… of a sort. Ever since leaving the gray dwarves and the ruined city, the path I followed continued to descend, usually at a mild grade but sometimes involving scrambling over water-contoured terraces and down the faces of old rockfalls. The whole time my wayfinder pointed me ever onward down the path I was following. Whatever it is that I seek, it lies deep. I have surely descended into the upper reaches of Sekamina by now—the Darklands' middle layer—and I have begun to see signs of intelligent design in the tunnels. No longer do the ways seem to follow old watercourses or dry fault lines. Instead, I am now finding traces of workmanship—the marks of tools on the stone and a general smoothing of the floor to accommodate two-footed travel rather than just the slinking of multi-legged predators or the oozing crawl of even worse.
Today my footsteps brought me into a dry, barren cavern with no other exits. In the center of the cavern stood a small, stepped pyramid, no more than the height of two men and perhaps as wide as four at its base. Ancient glyphs in flowing serpentine motifs adorned its outer face in no language that I could recognize, and the center of one face was pierced by a deep-set stone door.
Before approaching the door (where the wayfinder, of course, indicated that I should go), I walked the circumference of the pyramid to see if any visible tricks or traps awaited me within or without. I even lit one of my precious sunrods to gain a better view of the ceiling to ensure none of the strange stalactite creatures that had plagued my steps in previous days waited to drop on me from above.
All appeared safe, though my searches did reveal some of the local fauna at the base of the pyramid's rear side. They were a half-dozen small, worm-like creatures, perhaps a type of cephalopod, no longer than my forearm with tiny leg buds along their bodies and four stunted tentacles around their mouths. I have seen them before in these dismal caves and have begun calling them slime crawlers for the opalescent trails they tend to leave behind when scuttling along the floor or other surfaces. I suspect them to be a larval form of some larger creature that I have fortunately not yet encountered.
Whatever they are, their tiny, sucker-like mouths seemed to be particularly well adapted to scouring any organic materials—including their own slime trails and sometimes each other—directly from the stone surfaces of cavern floors, walls, and roofs. A few days back, I watched a group of them efficiently break down and consume a dead lizard many times their size in little more than an hour, leaving nothing behind but a damp spot on a smooth-polished stone floor.
These particular slime worms were busily tearing into some sort of a spider the size of a large dog with strange, whip-like tendrils. It was difficult to tell its exact structure, as the creatures were already well along in their ministrations. Whether they had brought it down themselves or just happened upon its corpse, I could not say.
I scouted the exterior of the pyramid one more time to ensure that there were no more of the spider creatures about or larger slime trails that might indicate the worm larvae were not alone. Finding nothing, I turned my attention to the pyramid door. It was inset several feet into the pyramid face and made of plain stone, and very unlike the decorative nature of the pyramid's outer surface. It had a simple sliding lock catch with a large handle that could be easily manipulated by any creature with a prehensile limb but was sufficient to keep out less-intelligent predators and vermin such as the slime crawlers.
When I was satisfied that the door was safe, I gripped the handle with one hand and clutched my sword and the sunrod together in the other. As the door grated slowly open, I tossed the sunrod into the room for light and to free up my sword hand for a fight if necessary. I was disappointed that there was no puff of stale air or dust as the door opened—so the pyramid had not been so well sealed after all. My sunrod had clattered against bare stone by the sound of it, and when I had the door fully open, I saw that it more than illuminated the small room within.
The chamber was built as a four-way, corbelled arch, each stone set upon and slightly overlapping the stone beneath but held in place by the weight of the stone above, so that the walls met in an apex not far above my head and held the same general shape as the outside of the pyramid. In the center of the ceiling's peak was an opening into the cavern outside—so much for my careful perusal.
A stone slab on a man-sized pedestal dominated the center of the chamber. The borders of the slab were incised with the same serpentine motif as the outside of the pyramid. Lying atop this slab was a humanoid skeleton wearing a tarnished copper breastplate and grasping a short, wide-bladed chopping sword on its breast in skeletal fingers. A thin veneer of dust and cobwebs covered the ancient cadaver and, though it gave no sign of animation, I watched it carefully as I took in my surroundings. It bothered me that none of the little slime worms had dropped in through the ceiling opening and consumed the remains after all these years.
My first impression was of lashing whips, as two searching tendril-like strands caromed off of the bare stone surface, but these were followed quickly by two large pincers on segmented arms. Soon, perched before me was another one of those dog-sized arachnids, this one alive and well. Behind the pincers and whips it had three more pairs of legs, and finally another whip-like appendage as a tail that undulated and wavered constantly as if testing the air.
I leaped back a pace to avoid its snapping claws and dug into my pouch for something of use against this creature. I didn't relish the thought of moving within reach of those whips to battle it with my short blade. Somewhere in my pouch was a bag of exploding alchemical goo that would enable me to pin the thing down and make for a swifter kill. My free hand closed on a small ceramic flask—not what I was looking for. I didn't have time to look further, however, as the creature suddenly jerked its thorax upward and sprayed a fine mist directly into my face. The caustic stench of vinegar filled the air, and I was immediately blinded and unable to breathe.
I tumbled to the floor in a panic, clawing at my sightless eyes and trying to draw breath through my swollen throat. In my flailing, I hurled the ceramic flask and heard it smash against stone. Half a second before I felt the burning, I realized what it was—another item purchased in Urgir. I had just smashed a flask of alchemical fire in the small burial vault with me in its midst.
Fortunately, the explosion seemed to clear some of the caustic fumes from the air, and my breathing became easier almost immediately. In addition, by the sound of it I had scored a direct hit on the monster, as I could hear a frantic clicking and scuffling that soon slowed and stopped. With my cloak and evidently part of my hair on fire, I rolled frantically out of the pyramid and into the cavern, freeing my waterskin and dousing myself as quickly as possible while beating at the flames with my bare hands. Finally, the last of my clothing was extinguished, and I lay in an exhausted daze amid the smell of acrid chemicals, acidic mist, age-old dust, and burned hair. That last probably bothered me the most.
The Compass Stone: The Collected Journals of Eando Kline Page 19
