by William Ray
Salka harrumphed as if offended at either the appellation or Gus’s demanding tone. He was still the better dressed of the two of them, and for a moment, Gus felt a little ridiculous for talking down to him; even if he were just a gob, Salka had led a career as a successful entertainer, owned the most popular club in town, and was even involved in the planning of a multimillion-peis exposition.
That thought took but a single bleak moment, and then Gus reassured himself that, while exceptional for his breed, Salka was not human and never could be. There was some comfort in that, and the gob seemed to realize it too, for his arch expression relented, and he replied, “Very well. This way, Mister Baston.”
They ventured further along the corridor, which ended in a doorway just slightly higher than his head, and Gus was amazed as they left the large corridor and stepped into what was an even larger room of some sort. Columns of white stone stretched off into the distance, and the far wall was farther away than his light could reach. The ceiling arched far overhead, the top vanishing into a dim pool of shadow.
They walked through that vast chamber, steps echoing sharply on the polished tiles of the stone floor. “This is incredible. Did you know any of this was down here?”
“I don’t think anyone knows,” replied the gob. He walked about thirty feet ahead with his back to the lantern light. “I’ve lived here for over a decade, and this is the first I’ve seen or heard of it. Look at it all! It must extend beneath the entire city!”
“Someone must know. The Wardens know about it,” his voice echoed loudly, and at the mention of Wardens, Gus began to worry that with all these echoes they might hear him coming. It was as silent down here as it was dark, and he realized he didn’t need to speak quite so loudly to be heard. Lowering his voice, he remarked, “Miss Aliyah Gale must surely know. She owns the companies that dig out the sewers and the gas lines.”
Salka lowered his own voice and said, “And the buildings. We’re much deeper than most of those things reach, but,” he said, pausing and pointing upwards, “these ceilings are quite high at their peak. Someone must have encountered them in all the construction over the years.”
They continued further forward for a time, keeping mostly quiet as they explored the Duer cavern. He had never heard any suggestion that the mountain spirits placated by high-country rubes had once been anything real, which made him think they must have left long before the Elves did.
“It is quite old, isn’t it?” Gus asked and rapped his shoe against a column as he passed it. That tapping echoed louder than he expected, and there was a distant clatter afterwards, like stones spilling on some distant portion of the floor.
Realizing how far sound must carry down here, Gus recalled the socks the Wardens had pulled over Emily’s shoes and supposed they must have been used to muffle her footsteps down here. Wondering why the Wardens would need to be so carefully quiet in their own secret tunnels, he asked, “You don’t suppose it’s unstable do you?”
He got no answer and wasn’t sure which that meant but didn’t want to risk asking louder if the answer was yes.
As they walked on, most of the room extended beyond his light, and there was little to see beyond the floor and the white columns that would occasionally emerge from the darkness. Gus’s attention drifted from his guide, and he peered into the darkness as he wondered again at how far away the walls were. The echo suggested immensity, but only the goblin knew for sure.
Salka halted and scrambled backward so quickly that Gus stumbled into him while distracted by the designs painted around the base of a nearby column. The gob hissed something too soft to be heard, and as Salka continued to pull backwards towards him, Gus could feel him trembling.
Holding the lantern higher, Gus could not see whatever distant object had caught Salka’s attention, but then the goblin repeated himself in a terrified falsetto, “Douse the lantern! Quickly!”
Looking around at his small island of visibility in a sea of endless darkness, Gus had absolutely no intention of extinguishing the only light. He opened his mouth to make that point, but then, in the distance, he heard another clatter of stones atop tiles, followed by a soft grinding sound, like someone were dragging a heavy sack across the floor.
The clattering he had worried indicated instability echoed again and took on a rhythmic intensity that stole away his illusion of stones falling randomly to the floor. The dragging sounded more steadily, and the combination reminded him of a train picking up steam. For a brief instant, there was a distant flicker of light, and he asked, “What is that?”
The goblin’s answer was a choked squeal, and he covered his eyes as he rapidly turned, circled around behind Gus, and began to flee, only then thinking to shout behind him, “Run! Run!”
Whatever the horror was that had shaken his guide, Gus could hear it rapidly approaching, so he took to his heels.
Even with the gob’s shorter legs, Gus had trouble matching pace to Salka’s panicked flight back the way they came, and in moments the goblin had fled past the range of his light. Gus could only try to follow the echoes of Salka’s feet slapping against the tiled floor. Whatever pursued them sounded like it was drawing nearer, and Gus risked turning his head to glance back, trying to spot whatever Salka was so terrified of.
That’s when Gus’s foot hit against something unexpected, and the world spun wildly around him as he tumbled to the floor. The lantern slipped from his hand as he hit the floor, and its glass chimney shattered, sending shards skittering everywhere. Thankfully, the wick stayed lit, or he might never have found it again – but without the glass chimney, the flame was little brighter than a lit match.
The shadows weighed heavily, and Gus pushed unsteadily back to his feet, realizing the chamber had fallen eerily silent. The sounds of his own breathing and the thunder of his heart threatened to overwhelm him, but he forced himself to breathe slowly and lifted the lantern to look around. A large lump lay at his feet, and bending down with the dimmed lantern to see what he had tripped over, he recognized the green cloak of the Wardens.
“Where did it go?” hissed Salka from behind him, giving Gus such a start that he nearly yelped in alarm.
“I don’t know! You’re the only one that can see!” Gus hissed back, keeping his voice down, even though the echoing hall probably made that pointless.
Salka shielded his eyes from the dim flame of the broken lantern and peered down at the body Gus had tripped over, “Who is this? It looks like he’s been shot.”
“He killed a friend of mine. I shot him, so he fled down here. I guess we’re even now.” Looking down at the body, Gus wanted to feel some surge of vindication for having avenged Louis, but it never came, so he gave the body a petulant kick.
“Well, if you’re quite done with him then, the place we came in is over that way,” grumbled the goblin, gesturing off to one side.
Gus started to retort with something about how the gob had abandoned him in the dark, but then he heard it again, the stoney clatter and rumbling weight rapidly approaching. He looked to Salka who was simply staring back at him impatiently, not having heard it yet. When he did, his head jerked up, looking frantically off into the dark, and stumbled a step or two back, already half out of Gus’s tiny realm of light.
Like a storm, it was upon them—the heavy rumble suddenly seemed to come from every direction at once. Salka made a frightened squeal, turned in a circle, and then fell to the floor, curling into a ball with his face down and his arms over his head. A light twinkled in the darkness, just for a moment, closer now, although Gus couldn’t tell how close.
Shadows moved. Nothing close enough to make out in the dim light of his broken lantern, but just beyond the point he could see, the darkness took on strange, shifting patterns and extended all around them in an unsettling wall of sinuous motion.
Light flickered again above the moving shadows but drawing lower, nearer, and slowly widening. It became a dull orange glow sketching a jagg
ed row of shadowy knives. There was a deep rumbling, and just above that light, he could see a yellow glimmer reflecting the light of his lamp. As it neared, it resolved into a great yellow eye.
That terrible eye was larger than a dinner plate, and once Gus recognized its yellow shimmer as an eye, the jagged shadows below it became teeth, and the fire behind them a curious horror he had no name for.
There was a deep rumble, a sound he felt in his bones more than he heard it—strange, foreign sounds that, after a moment, he realized must be words, for amid them he heard a pair of syllables he thought might be his own surname. He quaked at the sound, frozen in place. The yellow eye narrowed, half-concealed by some dark eyelid on the face he could not quite see. It snorted, and flame blossomed from between those teeth, roiling out in an infernal cloud of heat that made Gus falter back a step.
An incongruous sound caught his attention: a soft, purposeful cough, just to the right of the fiery jaws. As he looked towards the strange sound, he was stunned to see Miss Aliyah Gale stepping confidently into his narrow circle of illumination.
Despite the surroundings, Miss Aliyah Gale was once again dressed in shimmering silks, this time a dark green upon which was painted a mesh of silver and gold lines to create a hint of serpentine scales. Surging adrenaline made it hard to think clearly, but as he glanced between her and the glowing maw of the thing that surrounded them, Gus suspected this would be bewildering regardless.
The voice of the monster that coiled around them rumbled again, but Miss Gale seemed to ignore it. Her eyes fixed upon Gus, she said, “I asked you a question. What are you doing here, Mister Baston?”
Feeling helpless and too overwhelmed to conjure a believable lie, Gus decided to go with the truth: “We, uh, were looking for Phand. The kidnappers came this way.” He nudged Dougal’s corpse with his foot and said, “So I thought he might be down here?”
Gus’s nerves made the statement come out like a question, and he clenched his teeth, trying to overcome the panic. Thoughts racing, Gus forced himself to take slower, deeper breaths and tried to think of how to get out of this alive.
Miss Aliyah Gale looked down at the corpse at his feet. That deep voice began to rumble behind her, and as it did she said, “These thieves in green—do you know who they are?”
Despite the surreal circumstances, Gus recognized that as a real question. Whatever else was happening here and now, Miss Aliyah Gale and her monster were not behind the kidnapping. Whatever she was, she wasn’t the elf he was up against. That realization helped steady his nerves. If she was asking questions, then maybe he could talk his way to survival.
“They call themselves Wardens,” he struggled to keep his gaze on her, and she simply stared back, her attention focused entirely on him as if the beast behind her wasn’t even there. It remained silent as she did, watchful, listening, waiting for him to elaborate. That was when he realized she had only ever spoken when it did. “What are you?”
The monster’s jaws widened, brightening the room as more light shone between its enormous teeth, but in the sudden contrast of light and darkness, he could see the beast no more clearly than he before; only Miss Aliyah Gale seemed clearer, a bemused smile upon her lips.
The deep voice rumbled behind her again, and then she spoke, “We were the first children of the gods, the first shape given to shapeless things. It is from our strength that oceans learned power, from our flights that wind learned speed, and from our appetites that fire learned … hunger.” From the woman, the last word seemed almost sexual, but the lingering snarl behind her gave it a different meaning entirely.
Gus looked back and forth, between the unblinking stare of the great yellow eye and the piercing green of Miss Aliyah Gale’s, not sure which to focus on now that he understood the two voices were really one. Strange foreign syllables sounded again in that deep voice, and then Miss Aliyah Gale said, “How do these Wardens enter? How did you find this place?”
The creature’s voice fell silent just before her question ended—Miss Aliyah Gale was the echo.
He stood as straight as he could, trying to sound confident and knowledgeable. If he knew things she did not, he was useful, and useful things were less likely to be eaten. “They use the Duer columns in the city. I’m told an elf leads them, so I guess the Elves must have known about these tunnels as well.”
The gargantuan behind her snorted, sending forth a gout of flame as it did. Gus jerked back from the heat, but Miss Aliyah Gale ignored it. She chuckled and slowly nodded as the voice rumbled behind her a fraction of a second before she spoke.
The sound of his name in that deep rumble was unsettling, but then Miss Aliyah Gale spoke over it, echoing in Verin, “The Elves are gone, Mister Baston. These lands were all ours. We watched as the Duer built this place, and we allowed it. Then the Elves came and stole the Duer kingdoms, one by one. The affairs of Elves and Duer were so insignificant then, and in the folly of youth, it became our habit to simply ignore them. Now that at last the Elves have left and with men spilling over every corner of the world, I decided to move my collection here, thinking it would be safe.”
Gus nodded as if all that made perfect sense, as if it corresponded to everything he had expected when coming down here. He willed himself to look both useful and agreeable.
The terrible eye and great fiery maw rose upward, no longer resting at his eye-level but instead rising well above his head. A second golden eye glimmered above that glowing maw as that monstrous head turned in the dark to face him directly, its deep rumble growing louder in a great snarl of reptilian fury.
Miss Aliyah Gale’s human countenance struck him as equally fearsome when she ignored the thunderous creature behind her and spoke in a furious hiss, barely audible over the roar that still echoed behind her, “And yet there are still thieves! Precious keepsakes stolen away in my moments of quiet repose! Missing trinkets here or there, but in mere decades, so much has gone missing—where are they, Mister Baston? Where do they hide?”
Gus held up his hands, pushing down instinctive terror and trying to seem calm and reasonable as he replied, “That’s what I’m here to find out. I’m tracking them.” He paused, a small tug at his pant leg briefly called his attention back down to his companion. Salka still cowered on the floor but was peering up now. “We, I mean. We are tracking them down. As soon as we find anything, we’ll let you know. I promise.”
The yellow eyes and glowing maw rotated around them, staring down from the heights, rumbling softly. While the other face was inhumanly inscrutable, the face of Miss Aliyah Gale seemed to be weighing the risks of letting them live, now that they had found their way down here. Never one to gamble without trying to tip the odds, Gus smiled a bit and added, “Is there any reward for recovery of the stolen treasures?”
Salka hissed in indignation, tugging at Gus’s pant leg, and Miss Aliyah Gale seemed taken aback by his blatant cupidity. Gus, however, put on his blandest smile and waited. It would be one thing to kill a trespasser and, for some ancient and terrible power like this, probably little different than squashing an insect found skittering through the larder. An employee, however, was something she would have an interest in preserving.
The woman’s eyes narrowed, and she frowned. But then the beast rumbled behind her, and she echoed, “Yes. I will arrange for something appropriate to the value of whatever you manage to recover.”
Gus felt a giddy swell of relief that he would not be eaten. Grinning like an idiot, he said, “Don’t worry, you’re in good—”
An enormous claw closed around Miss Aliyah Gale, and her face showed not the slightest bit of concern as she was yanked backwards and out of sight. The glowing maw vanished into the black and the shadows all around them lurched into motion as the monster rapidly receded into the darkness.
~
“Territorial Justice”
With law enforcement stretched thin across the unsettled territories in Rakhasin by the recent unpleasantness
, it is unsurprising that some residents of Keat’s Field have been required to take the law into their own hands.
Recently, a goblin working upon a licensed claim was caught digging into a neighboring claim to his own benefit. The goblin confessed to the deed when attempting to sell the stones found there but asserted the purchase of a license from an entrepreneur of local renown. The subsequent confirmation of that story was not widely believed, and an angry mob saw to it that the gob was hanged. Members of the township have expressed concern that this may further strain relations with the indigenes.
– Khanom Daily Converser, 17 Tal. 389
~
- CHAPTER 31 -
“You’ve gone mad!” hissed the goblin as Gus shone his diminished lantern over the body on the floor, trying to figure out which way the Warden had been going. “What happens if you don’t find these stolen trinkets?”
“Well, then I guess we don’t get the reward.” The trail of blood leading up to the body at least told them what direction the Warden had been going, but there was no sign of any sort of light he might have carried, and Gus worried the man might have been totally lost.
“If we’re lucky!” Salka stared nervously into the darkness, and in that deep, melodious voice, he groused, “Whatever that thing was, I don’t relish the prospect of being eaten and then cooked any more than I’d like it the other way around. You shouldn’t have promised anything!”
“All I promised was that we’d tell her if we found anything. If I hadn’t, we’d probably be dead already. You’re the one who can see down here; help me look around! Where was he going?”
The gob gave a melodramatic sigh and took a few steps out of Gus’s dim circle of light. He walked around just beyond sight but never so far Gus couldn’t hear his footsteps echo nearby. After a few moments, he returned and said, “This place is a maze! If all those columns lead down here, then it’s as big as the city, and he could have been going anywhere. If he came in where we did though, then it looks like he was going towards the mountain along that row but then began to veer this direction.”
