The hanging creepers quickly appeared to be more than a curtain over the mouth of the tunnel; they covered the ceiling as far as either Alik or Deran could see, and hung nearly all the way to the floor, forcing them to crawl. Fortunately, they seemed only mildly curious in their passers-by, poking them awkwardly as they crawled by and then subsiding. The plants were dangerous but evidently didn’t know anything of animals.
Deran looked back over his shoulder and saw the silhouette and gleaming, beady eyes of a drake watching him. Then he suddenly bumped into Alik, who had stopped in front of him. “What is it?” he hissed. “Oh.” Ahead, the tunnel divided into three ways. “Blast—which way? Never mind, turn left.” Alik glared at him. “Or right,” he replied. “Turn either way: we’re being watched.”
Alik leaned over to the ground and glanced behind Deran. Sure enough, he could see several drakes perched beneath the mouth of the tunnel. He pulled off his cloak and tied it across the tunnel as a shroud, using the tentacles of the creepers for rope. Then, still without a word, he continued crawling straight forward, only to find another intersection no more than ten feet beyond.
Krythar, with a group of three silver- or white-clad alien rifters from the boring machine, rappelled to the floor of the great cavern and strode to the mouth of the tunnel Deran and Alik had fled down. “They would pick the ‘airiest,” he muttered. “A’right, a’ swords and s’ash t’rough it a’,” he ordered. The rifters drew swords and began slashing into the thick creepers.
The vegetation responded violently, tangling up the swords and pulling one of its attackers in to smother it. The other rifters threw down their weapons and grabbed the disappearing feet of their comrade, but the creepers would not let go and pulled with increasing strength as new tentacles wrapped around its victim, finally nearly dragging all of them in as well. They were forced to let go.
Krythar cursed. “Curse you, Deran!” he shouted into the foliage. “You hear me, Deran? Curse you!”
Alik collapsed to the tunnel floor, his head numb and swimming. He paused to rest and glanced down at his bloody knees. He could see nothing but he knew from the pain in his knees and the feel of the blood—thicker and darker than water—that he was bleeding. Deran came up and whispered whether he was all right. He nodded and kept going, but he did not know how.
Passages continued branching off to the right or the left, sometimes wider or smoother or less overgrown, but always the bag creature kept crawling straight on, or as near as straight as the tunnels would allow. To Deran and Alik this seemed too arbitrary—to Deran especially, who could feel by his caving sense the vastly radiating complexity of the labyrinth around him.
But here even his senses failed. They reached the end of the labyrinth without his even realizing it beforehand: the tunnel in front of them simply ended. In the dark, Alik hit his head against the mossy dead-end and rolled over with a weak moan.
Deran waited for a moment. Alik did not seem to be about to get up, so he scooted up to him. It was too dark to see anything, so he felt the boy’s pulse. Still alive. Very thin. He filled up his hands from the water of the brook, which was still with them, deep enough now to have drowned in, and hoped it was not polluted. He poured the water into Alik’s lips.
He felt a little woozy himself and took some for himself. Then he turned his attention to the slimy wall to search it for some sign of a secret door. Then he searched the floor. Then he felt for the ceiling and found he would have to stand. He stood up amongst the ruffling creepers and steadied himself dizzily. If there was a way through he thought it could have easily been overgrown. That would be just his luck.
He heard a skittering noise, which by now he recognized to be Alik’s bag creature. It crawled up and down the wall, evidently not remembering this part itself. Grand. Then suddenly the skittering stopped, there was a little splash, and silence. A chill ran through him. As useless as the creature seemed to have turned out to be, its disappearance was still a horrifying thought. He knelt back down and shook Alik.
“De theleiai,” murmured Alik.
“Get up Alik, your bag creature’s gone and we’re lost!” Deran whispered harshly.
Alik pulled himself up. “Vea kyif?” he said.
“Kyif?” asked Deran.
“It...going...here...there...ah, where,” said Alik, finally settling on “where.”
“It went into the brook,” said Deran, still whispering. “There was a splash, and then it was gone.”
Alik felt the water, then strangely nodded, inhaled, and threw himself in. Deran touched his foot, which kicked him and splashed water in his face. He took hold of it again and felt as it crawled away through the water...beneath the wall.
The one last thought he had before he followed was that his torches would be thoroughly soaked.
Out of breath, he burst up out of the water on the other side and crawled out of the brook. The water was cold and refreshing. A bit of wind and it would have been numbing. His feeling of dizziness left off with the soaking and was replaced by long-awaited, stinging hunger and clear-headedness, as though at the reversal of some insidious magic. The poison of the flowers finally wearing off. He looked for Alik and found him nearby, evidently also feeling refreshed.
The tunnel here was overgrown with moss and ferns, but the roof, which sloped upward into the darkness to a height of perhaps twenty feet, was less densely populated by creepers, and they did not reach down to tangle in their hair. The walls zig-zagged back and forth, or else were overgrown thus with moss. Where he was sitting, he discovered, he had no sound at all.
He could see all this by the faintest glimmer of lights, something which palely illuminated as though through a dark blanket. He rose, and it seemed strange to him to do so without sound or echo. Alik turned toward him and tried to say something, but it was muted. Deran took his shoulder and turned him in the proper direction, then led him on. As they advanced, both light and sound gradually returned. First there was a disturbing moaning, then it grew into a rushing, then into a roaring of water, and finally Deran could sense the presence of a large, long cavern very near ahead.
It appeared all at once. The curtains of the walls fell away to reveal a long cavern, dim bluish by the fluorescent light, carved out by a thundering, foaming underground current. This underground river was evidently younger than their cross-tunnel out of the labyrinth, and it had swept out the softer stone and impacted mud below and above the older tunnel’s floor, leaving only a precariously thin stone ledge extending across the river, worn smooth as polish and criss-crossed with lines of wet slime-mold. The bag creature was just scurrying into the dark opening of the tunnel opposite them.
Deran scanned the tunnel for some other means of crossing. The banks of the river were thin and littered with shattered rock, and huge mounds of slime perched among these, the only type of plant life the hostile conditions would support. There was no way the water could be waded because if its depth and rabidity. Rocks protruded from the river that might have provided a way across, but they were slick and slimy and more treacherous even than the bridge.
Alik stepped out onto the bridge and carefully crept forward. The bridge groaned beneath his slight weight but held. Gaps of broken stone pocked the face of the bridge. He felt that if he slipped and fell he would become another of these. The spray of the water below misted his feet and legs, and he suddenly stopped with a deadly premonition.
Deran waited tensely. He didn’t dare to test the bridge’s strength against two bodies, but his sense of urgency was aroused by an intuition he felt of the nearness of the end of this underground maze. The nearness of the pernicious plant shard.
Alik reached the far side of the bridge unharmed, and Deran started over. As he stepped out onto the bridge, however, he stepped on one of the trails of slime criss-crossing the bridge. To his surprise, it recoiled rapidly. In a moment the bridge was completely vacant of slime.
Deran shrugged away a thought that troubled him: even if it was so,
a little slime wouldn’t hold the bridge together. He crossed. The groaning of the stones was even more than before, but it seemed to be going to hold. Alik watched in horror as slime from all over the cavern slithered in huge heaps toward the base of the bridge below him. He fished in his pockets for some weapon he might use. He came across the shard, rejected it, and discovered his old fish knife in his pocket. He drew that out.
Deran passed the center of the bridge and noticed the amassing slime ahead of him. That didn’t look good. He glanced around for some way out, estimated the strength of the bridge ahead...and ran.
At once the monster of slime reared up at the bridge, and it could not have been told whether the section of bridge fell away because it was hit by the monster from below or too heavily trod by Deran from above. The entire bridge, too weakened by the loss to support even its own weight, disintegrated into the stream. Deran hit the water with a gloopy splash broken by the monster’s body, slipped off of its body into the hands of the river, and was battered across a protruding boulder.
Alik shouted and slashed with his knife into the body of the monster of slime. It turned and a huge arm or protuberance of slime swung at him. He raised his knife and slashed into it as it struck him. He was bowled over and rained with creeping slime cut clean by the blade. He struggled in the mess and the mess struggled to disentangle itself from him until the monster itself reached down and re-absorbed its arm.
Deran dragged himself out of the current and up the sharp rocks of the bank, drawing his own knife. Alik retreated down the corridor out of the way of another attack.
Unexpectedly a shower of stone from the cavern ceiling collapsed across the monster and the remnants of the bridge. Deran hugged the cavern wall to avoid a loosened sheet of rock and felt the earth trembling with a drum-like refrain. Earthquake? No, he thought. The monster confused, he took his chance to make a break for the tunnel entrance. Pain reeled through his body as he ran, nearly doubling him over.
The monster swung at him with a slimy tentacle and threw itself up on the bank to chase them. Deran dodged but took the hit and staggered backwards into the wall. His lungs collapsed; his ribs rattled; he fell to the ground, gasping for air. Alik cried out and slashed the advancing monster’s arm. A second shower of rock shook the cavern, and suddenly General Krythar’s digging machine smashed through the cavern wall where they had come from, twisted and jammed with writhing vines and blood. The slime monster whipped around and its arm shot toward the roaring machine, elongating until the monster stretched from wall to wall. Deran fancied he saw Krythar’s eyes bulging, and then the monster batted the machine and its drivers into the deadly river below.
Alik took the opportunity to pull Deran back into the shadows of the exit corridor. As he did so, the drakes burst from the opening opposite them and scattered across the cavern. The slime monster swiped at them, knocking a few out of the air and grabbing one. The captured drake screamed and clawed desperately for almost a half a minute until it disappeared completely beneath the folds of slime.
“That way!” shouted Krythar, pointing toward the exit corridor. “Find the shard at all costs: quickly!”
A flight of drakes flying wide of the monster sped toward Alik and Deran in the exit corridor. Deran looked backwards and groaned. “Now it’s time for me to save you, friend,” he mumbled toward Alik. He unfurled his dull dark brown cloak and pulled Alik to the ground as close to the wall as he could: and as the drakes sped into the corridor, he draped the cloak over both himself and Alik. In an instant they were as though invisible. The drakes sped down the corridor, unseeing, as Deran stifled Alik’s cries.
In between the flights of drakes Deran and Alik crawled upward along the dark passage. Drake cries echoed up and down the passage. He could sense they were nearing the surface…but the drakes were above.
He heard Krythar’s voice coming from above. “Deran! Ah ye’ to hearing? Ea’s to t’e new Narrissor!”
He cursed under his breath. As he did, the tunnel shuddered with a bang. Rock poured down from the ceiling before them. The corridor collapsed. Deran and Alik were thrown back down the tunnel by a rush of heat.
From behind them there was a hollow moan from the slime monster. From before them was the sifting of sand and broken stone settling.
“You all right?” Deran asked Alik. Alik nodded. “Look: straight up at the beginning of the cave-in. It’s not too deep and we have air to last.” He showed Alik by diving in, hauling out rock and rubble by hand. Wherever he took a stone, four more rolled down, but he was unperturbed. Alik pulled himself up and joined in.
The ground was so shattered they were forced to dig through the debris for hours, till at last they could dig no longer. Deran had wrapped his chest in his cloak to try to brace it but even thus could only work slowly, and Alik was small and already exhausted.
Sounds and shrieks and tremors disturbed them for a little while as they slept, but finally subsided.
And why have I even gone this far? the thought ran through Alik’s mind. Perhaps the jungle would become a sea, and the sea afterward a rocky waste. It plays games with people’s bones. It would not be sated till all the world lay as it did, in shattered pieces. It was not magic, but demonry. From his youth it had been planting seeds and language within his mind, to try to warp him into fulfilling its blood-dripping plan. He knew that now. Well, he would not be its slave.
The day dawned in the world above. Alik stirred wearily to consciousness and squinted, partly in pain but partly in reaction to a dusty shaft of light piercing through the dirt and rock to alight gently against his eye. He roused Deran and began to dig.
They reached the daylight within an hour. A dull, charred pit—formerly a lush cave—greeted their liberation from the darkness. Through a tangle of gnarled, greasy roots and the edges of what had once been a thin, translucent mineral dome, they looked out on a field of destruction. Where the plant shard, Floris, had been hid there remained only an ancient skeleton and a tatter of cloak. And downward from there through the once lush, impenetrable jungle, the mountainside was pitted and charred black and grey. Blackened tree trunks lay criss-crossed in every direction. Seared vegetation was strewn in heaps, and here and there amongst them, widely scattered, were mangled drake bodies and parts of bodies. Krythar, with his army of drakes and innumerable resources, had beaten them out.
III.iv.
Stuart Channethoth, the high scribe of Ristoria, rolled deliriously beneath the cover of a rotting, mossy log and peered back into the thick woods. A pair of drakes floated in and out between the trees to assure him his enemy was still behind, following relentlessly.
The short, black-cloaked archer crept out from behind a tree, seemed to detect his presence, and fell back under cover. He had killed three of the drakes variously in ambush, but there were still six of them plus the hunter—too many for him to take on in his exhausted state. Too many to surprise, and enough to force him to stay awake almost constantly. They had chased him for nearly ten days without rest, straight south into the wilderness—out of the Northern Waterwood, across the plains, through the Southern Waterwood, into this forest he had now come into, nearly off the map.
He ducked back beneath his cover, sensing a motion in the trees behind him. His senses were beginning to play tricks on him. He thought he had seen a person. Silently, he slithered into the wild brush and took cover behind a tree briefly, only to quickly move out again to another tree further away.
A drake whished through the air toward his face from the left and then four more rose out of the brush from where he had come from and swooped down. He drew his sword; the first drake struck him in the face, tearing deeply into the back of his cheek, and he slashed its head off surgically with his sword.
Suddenly three elves, clad in dark green and covered with branches and brush, leapt up from out of nowhere and released a volley of arrows at the attacking drakes. Three drakes spiraled out of the air; the others wheeled under cover. The hunter and the l
ast drake appeared behind the log Stuart had been behind, and an elven arrow caught the hunter in the shoulder. The hunter cried out—it was the first time Stuart had heard his enemy’s voice at all: it was a little girl.
Outnumbered suddenly and injured, Krythar’s daughter Zaris was forced to run. The drake, Keiiva, darted out from its cover through the trees, drawing the elves’ fire and disappearing. Stuart wiped away the blood and watched, barely conscious. The elves advanced slowly, cautiously—and when they reached the log, the huntress was gone.
IV.i. magus
O
ver the Mirror of Emeria the wind spiraled tongues of colorful ash after the pattern of the elements, revealing shapes depicting somber earth and vivid flowers, the animal wind and overflowing fire of souls.
White-bearded Ciarthan circled the fire, sprinkling a greyish powder into the flames. The fire flashed to consume it and flickered a rainbow of colored tongues. In the fire the sunrise and the sunset shone, a living history, things below entrained by things above. He entered the day as do the stars, obliquely and invisibly. Yet the stars were blind and so he fell back to earth, the ever-hearing listener who bears all things and nurtures all green things. With earth was only ringing pain, present but not seen, and so he fell back to water, that watches all, flowing through and around all. The water whispered, “All things one, darkness and light...light, light.” And so Ciarthan in his purple robe knelt down, wearied, and set down his garland staff.
As Ciarthan sat before the fire and the mirror pool to watch distractedly the ashes settling on the waters and the fire cooling in its place, about the hall his counselors also sat: Eathril the architect and sometime soldier with his curt, bronzed-green tunic, curved ax, and pensive head; the horseman guardian Cerregan with his lean, grey-streaked beard and twinkling, watchful grey eyes; the minstreless Malaoenidea, veiled in interwoven tresses of black on her black-red-violet-emerald dress; Piachras the champion, close-shorn, eyes half-closed, turquoise and alabaster his tunic and belts, his shield escutcheoned with a guardant osprey; and lastly Ciarthan’s wife, Ctele, in that moment looking frail and old beyond even her own years, sitting lightly in her long, silvery, hooded teacher’s robe. One missing: Sianna, the agile, the light-hearted, the mercurial, the invincible.
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