by Tim Lebbon
He briefly touched on the mind of a blind spider that had its home in a crack in the cavern ceiling, a chilling, alien encounter that bore no words or explanation. For that instant his sense changed, his perception altered so radically that it denied translation, and back in his dust bath Trey cried out. He withdrew quickly, disturbed but equally thrilled by this surreal experience.
Past another pillar, past the expanse of cave moss and fungi that gave food, dipping down to where the river rushed by way below the home-cave and carried its detritus and waste away, Trey drifted aimlessly by the many homes carved into the rock extremes of the cavern. A few of these caves were natural, but most had been excavated over the several generations since the Cataclysmic War. Many were ongoing efforts, expanding all the time as families grew and caves were passed down from father to son, mother to daughter. He dove into the misted spray that rose from the river below, trying to clear his memory of the spider mind, and back in the dust bath his body prickled with cold.
Trey knew exactly where to find Sonda.
Her family cave was dark, but that did not mean that she was absent. Her father was a miner and her mother worked in one of the food caves along the main street. Sonda herself was training to become a topside runner, the small group of mining folk who spent their lives traveling back and forth from the home-cave to the surface to trade fledge for essential supplies. Runners were those most likely to try to make their way topside, and few grew old in the caves. Sometimes Trey mourned Sonda’s leaving already.
For a moment images blurred and fought in his mind. He drew back slightly, becoming more aware of his own body back in the dust bath, the sound of his mother’s snoring, and as he opened his eyes he saw the weak firelight still prancing across the rock ceiling. He could even taste fledge in his mouth, instead of the cavern’s fresh open air. Or perhaps it was guilt.
He closed his eyes again and concentrated, moving himself back to Sonda’s cave, hearing her soft song from within, smelling the rich tang of the river sweeping past way below his feet. He remained there for a while, a strong consciousness cast across the space of the cavern, the tinge of guilt he felt at spying more than counteracted by what he was beginning to feel for Sonda. This journey was innocent, the pure necessity of a burgeoning first love. He was not trying to see the future, he was not spying on the girl as she changed or bathed or slept. He hardly even probed inside the house.
And then her singing stopped, and Trey knew that she was dreaming a fledge dream. If only she would ride the dream and come to meet him out here.
He moved away and slipped down one of the many shafts that led to the river. Like the tunnel he traveled every day to the fledge face, this river held history and the future in its grasp. The miners buried their dead here, dropping them into the water and letting them ride the river forever. And they drew water from here as well, catching the future before it hurtled past and lost itself deep beneath the mountains. The future was upriver, the past downriver, and this one moment beneath Trey was the most important of all. The river was all noise, a mind-shattering roar which, broken down, could be saying anything. He cast his consciousness down, tempted to plunge in and see where the waters would take him. Many had done so, and some came back mad.
Trey returned up the black shaft and burst out into the light of the cavern again, veering away and entering one of the old fledge tunnels. This shaft was not worked anymore, not because the fledge had all been mined, but because it had become too dangerous. It was here that Lufero the puppet master had lost his legs many years before, and others had lost more than that here more recently. Cave-ins, a flash flood and a plague of stingers had caused them to abandon this tunnel, leaving it to the dark and whatever eventually crawled in there, out of sight and mind.
Trey liked to travel through here on occasion, his body safe at home while his imagination sought whatever had driven his elders away. He was not the only one; he occasionally brushed past other minds steering this way, but like them he kept to himself. It was not exactly forbidden, what they were doing. But it would be frowned upon by the mayors. This was not a safe place. It had been abandoned for a reason. Many reasons, in fact; most of them told, some of them still held on to by the old miners that had worked this seam. Secrets. Trey knew that the whole truth had never been revealed, and like most people his age, the mystery intrigued him.
Like Petra in Lufero’s puppet play, Trey pushed on.
The shaft was long, winding, and soon it dipped and ran deep. There were several vertical shafts in the floor where machines had once toiled, and newer steps and staircases carved into the tunnels by hand since the Cataclysmic War. Trey had once started down one of these pits, trying to push his consciousness deep, smelling and sensing his way down, way past the river level and into a darkness so thick that it seemed to have weight. He had gone too far, he’d known that even as he pushed, and his body had stiffened and cooled in his cave as his mind plummeted. That shaft had no bottom, and its depth had a gravity. The air held hints of strange things far below, and the turning point had been the touching of an alien mind on his. Only briefly, barely a kiss of consciousness, like something turning its head and its hair swinging out to touch his face.
That had been enough. Trey had somehow hauled himself back, and he’d been sick for the three shifts following.
So now he kept to the tunnels and the mine workings themselves, leaving the old shafts to whatever it was that haunted them. He had asked his mother whether the machines could have become ghosts, but she had scoffed and stormed away, cursing his foolishness.
He traveled until he found the old fledge seam. Even after so long he could sense the toil of the miners that had carved their way this far. It was a wide seam, rich, and Trey guessed that it continued on and on beneath the mountains. Its surface smelled rancid after such a long exposure, but he pushed inside just a little and it was fresh and fruitful, good fledge, free of impurities. A pity that this seam had been left alone. A pity that stingers had come and scared them away, and cave-ins, and…
What else? He pushed farther, because there was something in there. Something denser than fledge. Trey stilled, his body tense and tight in the dust bath, his consciousness holding a moment five thousand steps away. He waited because it seemed the right thing to do, to hold back and make himself quiet and unseen, because something was about to happen. He had stumbled across a held breath.
Trey felt his heartbeat rippling the surface of the dust bath. His mind was submerged in fledge, and borne of it. And he was suddenly very, very afraid.
A heartbeat amongst his, deeper, slower, harder, trying to hide between his own but failing because he had been listening for it.
A heartbeat… something alive in the fledge… alive but sleeping, hibernating, because his heart beat a hundred times before he heard another strange pulse.
Nax?
He tried to pull back. He wanted more than anything to wake in the bath, his mind his own, and to tell his mother about the fledge nightmare he’d had. But this was no nightmare, and Trey could not pull back. Because he had already brushed against this Nax’s mind, and his frantic thought of escape was merely a vain attempt to avoid what was coming.
It came in quickly:
Threat from above, safety being slaughtered, magic returned to shift the balance of things, death and war and change that would seep down even this far, through the cracks in riverbeds and past the roots of the oldest trees down through the earth the danger given an easy route via the holes gutted into the world by those who still plundered
…
And more, much more, none of it in words, all of it in hateful alien expressions of such contempt that Trey, physically ensconced in his dust bath as if that could possibly keep him safe, began to cry.
Eventually he pulled free, or was let go. Flailing, horrified, venting psychic screams that echoed before him and gave many home-cave sleepers instant nightmares, Trey fled back to his own body. As he did so he sensed other mind
s waking through the earth, some near, some farther away. Minds angry not at him, but at what the future promised.
He flipped from the dust bath and hit the stone floor hard, bruising his limbs and shoulders, running through his cave naked, tripping over his sleeping mother and gashing his elbows open on the ground, giving premature blood to the land. He rose again and tore aside the leather curtain at the cave’s entrance.
“They’re awake!” he screamed. “The Nax are awake!” He could see shadows of people moving to and fro on the main street, and he imagined the puppet master’s red-painted hand clenching and cutting, taking them all down.
There was an outburst of screaming from all across the cavern. Other fledge dreamers were traveling too far this night.
THE FIRST NAXcame from the same tunnel Trey had fled in his fugue.
The Nax were also known as fledge demons. No one had ever seen one and lived. Most had an idea of what they were-myths, stories, legends handed down from generation to generation, drawings in books, ancient cave paintings that smeared some of the rock walls of the home-cave Church-but as well as sometimes being exaggerated with time, the truth can also be diluted. Most people had no idea what they were about to face.
Heads turned as the shadow burst from darkness into weak firelight. It flew across the cavern and landed at the base of one of the five giant pillars. And then it started to kill.
Trey fell to his knees and screamed. His mother shouted in her sleep, sounding as if she was being choked. Other cries rose up across the cavern, high-pitched and androgynous with terror. Because as well as the sight it presented its victims-wings spread, various limbs tipped with spinning bone-clawed appendages, openings that may have been mouths steaming and spitting gobs of flaming gas-the Nax gave them so much more. Its mind reached out as well, probing with alien fingers, seeming to touch everyone in the cavern. And it was like eating shit.
Trey pressed his hands to his ears, screamed, shook his head, trying to drown out the feeling that he was being invaded, his senses turned in on themselves, twisted and forced and split apart. He saw the slaughter that had begun below, people spinning and coming apart as the Nax danced across the uneven ground, limbs slapping at the air just as Lufero had shown in his play. Coughs of fire leapt from its mouths and wrapped around heads, stomachs, bounced along the ground until they found something to burn. People ran but few escaped; the Nax was too fast. It could run, it could fly, it could whip out its long tail and haul the escapees back into range of its killing limbs. They saw all this, but there were also images that could only have been seen through the Nax’s eyes. And with those images came outlandish glee. There was the smell too, the burning of flesh and spilled blood as Trey’s friends died before him. He retched, and his stomach rumbled with hateful hunger. Screams of pain and terror drove him mad. He tried to cry out again but he seemed to roar instead, a fledge-filled scream of fury and pent-up hunger that was echoed around the cavern by a thousand other voices, each once unwilling and yet reveling in its new freedom. The Nax was sharing itself with its victims before it killed them. A creature of the drug, its casting of its own consciousness was part of its makeup, a facet of the hunt.
Trey fell back and crawled into the cave on his hands and knees. “We have to go!” he said to his mother.
“We can’t leave,” she said, shaking her head, trying to shed the alien images. “We’ll fight, there are plenty of us, we’ll have to-”
“Mother, I sensed it, I felt it waking. There were more than one. Something woke them. I think something’s happening topside, and it angered them and drew them out of hibernation. Mother, we have to leave! We’ll go topside, somehow. Whatever, we have to get out of the cavern.”
“The mayors will know what to do,” Trey’s mother said with blind, humbling faith. But then she glanced over his shoulder, and he knew what she was seeing without turning around, because the image was shared between them all. A second Nax burst from another tunnel and powered straight into one of the pillar dwellings. Trey felt the walls and balconies of that place splintering, and he knew the weak flesh of the mayor was parting beneath the onslaught of the spinning and ripping limbs.
“Come with me,” he said. “Ignore everything you sense, just keep one thing in your mind: escape.”
“I have to get some things,” she said, and she turned slowly, dazed, confused. Trey grabbed her arm and squeezed hard.
“Mother. Please. These are Nax! We can’t waste any time, if there’s a slightest chance of escape we have to take it now!”
His mother winced and glanced down at where he was squeezing her arm. He had never hurt her before, not physically, not emotionally. She was strong. When she looked up there was a tear in her eye. “Oh Trey, I’m so scared.”
Trey hugged his mother, but only briefly. He could not be close to her with these images, these smells riding the psychic waves from outside. He felt corrupted.
He dressed quickly, then nudged aside the curtain and looked out. Many of the smaller cave fires had already been extinguished-the miners’ natural state was darkness, and that was where they found most safety-but new conflagrations were being seeded across the home-cave by the Nax. The hateful images and sensations were confused now, and Trey could not tell if there were still only two Nax down there, or more. People were running, screaming, whispering and trying to steal away. Some passed his cave and headed down the steps. Trey called after them, but they did not hear. He ducked back inside, breathing hard, not knowing what to do.
“Can we get out?” his mother asked. “Is there a way?”
Plenty of ways, Trey knew, but none of them sure. None of them safe. And what about Sonda? He’d looked across to her side of the cavern but there had been only darkness. That could be a good sign, because it may mean the Nax had not visited there yet. Or perhaps it meant that they had been, and finished.
“We’ll have to get through the tunnels to the rising,” Trey said. “There’s an old seam, one that was mined way before the Cataclysmic War, that gives a route between the face we’re working on now and a tunnel leading straight there. It’s never used, it’s too narrow, too awkward. Barely a crawl space at times. If we can get there, get through, maybe we can make it up. If the Nax haven’t been there as well.”
Trey’s mother looked sad. “I can’t do all that, Trey. Look at me.”
Trey looked. His mother was big around the waist, even though their mining caste erred toward tall and thin. Her hands, on the coldest parts of the year when fires merely drew in colder air from deeper caves, were crippled into twisted claws. And she was old. She had been down here forever, with only a few visits topside to break up her underground existence. These visits, legendary in her eyes and related whenever she had the opportunity, had all been made safely, and via the proper routes.
But he loved her. He took her for granted and sometimes she annoyed him, always here for him. “I will not leave you behind. I don’t know much about the Nax-I don’t think anyone does, only what’s told in legend-but I do know that this is the most dangerous place to be. We can’t stay. Maybe if we can just get into the tunnels and hide, it’ll all be over soon.”
He knew that was a lie. And he thought his mother did too as she nodded, stepped past him and peered out into the cave. There were more screams out there from farther away, closer to the dark holes that plummeted to the underground river. There was also the occasional twang of a crossbow being fired, and here and there Trey saw the glint of steel as disc-swords were unsheathed. He turned quickly and ran to the rear of the cave, grabbing his own disc-sword from beneath his bed. If he came close enough to a Nax to use it he would probably be dead already, but there were other things out there. If they made it into the tunnels there may be stingers in the old fledge seam, hiding away from the miners. Past them, if Chartise and his mules were still alive, perhaps there was topside, the world of sunlight and moonlight and starlight, the world of no darkness. And there probably dwelled countless dangers of which he
had never dreamed.
Trey was a miner no longer.
If he lived past the next few hours, he would be a survivor.
THEY WORKED THEIRway down the series of steps and balconies carved into the walls of the cavern. They hid behind huge pots on the landings, breathing in the meaty fumes of moss and trying to figure, from the ghastly psychic twinges they felt in sight or sound or taste, just where the Nax were unleashing their slaughter. Trey touched the ball of moss before him and squeezed, reveling as ever in the feel of this cold growing thing, pleased that his own sensation was covering those exuded by the murderous Nax.
He sensed a held breath, a diversion of frenzied attention away from one place to another, and he remembered that he still had fresh fledge in his system. He cursed himself silently and removed his hand, thinking Fuck you as he grasped his mother’s hand and led her down another uneven flight of steps. He’d tried to sling the disc-sword across his shoulders, but he was unused to carrying the weapon and the knot kept slipping. Unsheathing it gave him an unreasonable sense of power as the metal sang against the old dried leather.
“What is it?” his mother whispered. Trey turned and placed his finger across his mouth. Shhh.
When they reached the cavern floor they met a group of people milling around the mayors’ militia cave. The militiamen were nowhere to be seen-Trey suspected that the crossbow shots he’d heard earlier marked their fate-but still these people seemed to think that safety existed here.
