Trading into Darkness

by C. M. Simpson

  Trainee Leclerc!

  Marsh kept walking. She was sure the trail wasn’t empty; she was sure there had to be someone living along it—a prospector, a farm, a… Surely the damn mage knew of somewhere! He was supposed to be the Wanderer.

  Whatever that was.

  “I’ll tell you about it one day,” Roeglin answered, coming alongside her and laying an arm over her shoulders.

  At least he didn’t try to stop her.

  “To answer your question, a prospector lives about five miles down the next side trail. He’ll just be waking when we arrive. If we wait for him to come out, he might lend us his hut for the day.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “One of us might get shot with a crossbow bolt.”

  Marsh almost stopped but forced herself to keep going. A cabin, right? It was better than spending a night in a gut-soaked cavern that raiders were using as a thoroughfare. If Roeglin caught the hitch in her stride he didn’t comment, just matched her step for step and pointed out the turnoff when she would have missed it.

  Clarinay surprised her by materializing out of the shadows ahead of them.

  “The road ahead is clear,” he said, and then, catching Marsh’s look, he continued, “You’re in no condition to scout tonight.”

  The surety in his words was almost enough to have Marsh protesting that she was more than able to scout, but she knew she wasn’t. She was exhausted, and the new use of her shadow magic, the battle, and the search for danger as the others had ended the fight had taken more out of her than she’d realized.

  Rather than respond, she kept her silence and watched as Clarinay faded into a background of stone.

  “Keep going,” Roeglin said. “We all need the rest, and stopping’s not a good idea.”

  “I don’t know, boy,” Gustav teased. “Henri, Jakob, and me? We’re fine.”

  “That’s why you’re carrying Zeb,” Roeglin retorted.

  They were? The shadow mage moved down the trail, taking Marsh with him. Five miles had never seemed so long in all her life, and what they found when they arrived was not what they’d hoped for.

  For one thing, it was quiet; far quieter than it should have been. Beyond the lack of movement in the hut or the yard, there was no smoke coming from the small chimney. Roeglin came to an abrupt halt, his sudden stop echoed by those behind him. When Clarinay had emerged from the side of the path and told them the claim was quiet, they’d thought nothing of it, given the early hour.

  Now, though…

  They all stared at the small cottage in the center of the clearing. It was close to the back wall of the cavern. The low ceiling billowed and wavered to the right before dipping toward the floor in a wall of blackness. Worst of all, the door hung open, and silence reigned.

  Roeglin lifted his arm from behind Marsh’s neck and stepped forward, drawing his sword.

  “Wait with Zeb,” Roeglin ordered, and Marsh heard the command in his voice—and the unspoken warning.

  This time, she’d better not try shadow-fishing or looking for life signs around the cavern. Well, that was fine with her. She’d be lucky to keep her eyes open until he got back. She turned around in time for Henri and Jakob to slide Zeb’s arm over her shoulders and make sure she had a good grip on the man’s waist. To her surprise, Zeb was conscious.

  “I can stand on my own, you know,” he said, and tried to push himself upright.

  “Uh huh,” Marsh said a moment later when they landed in a heap on the ground. “Tell me how that works for you.”

  The look he gave her might have been lethal if he hadn’t given up and started to smile.

  “Sorry.”

  “Yeah. I’ll keep watch; you’re a mess,” Marsh told him, and got to her feet…or tried to.

  She really had overdone it, and found herself sitting on her ass beside Zeb, trying not to meet his eye. He reached over and nudged her in the ribs.

  “So,” he quipped, “tell me how that works for you.”

  Marsh opened her mouth to tell him what he could do with himself, but Roeglin emerged from the cabin, his brow furrowed with concern. He glared when he saw them sitting propped against each other.

  “Honestly, I can’t leave either of you on your own. Get up.”

  Marsh twisted her head to catch Zeb’s stare, and they both rolled their eyes. In the end, it was Zeb who replied.

  “We’re sorry, Master Leger, but getting up is beyond us right now.”

  “And what were you going to do if you were attacked?”

  “You were the one who thought it was a good idea to leave us out here unprotected,” Marsh snapped, and Mordan gave a soft growl of concern.

  “I left you with the kat,” Roeglin protested. “You’d have been fine. Come on, get your asses off the ground.”

  He crossed to help Zeb to his feet. Marsh followed his progress as he hauled the shadow guard off the ground and bit back the urge to protest. The man had a point. She could damn well do this on her own…

  Okay, she decided, a few moments later. I can do this with Mordan’s help.

  Roeglin led the way into the hut, half-carrying and half-supporting Zeb as he went. Marsh followed, leaning on Mordan and resisting the urge to collapse again. Tiredness weighed like lead along her limbs and the cavern spun, so she closed her eyes and used Mordan’s sure progress as a guide. Even so, she was glad when Roeglin returned and helped her up the steps.

  “Time to sleep,” he told her, and barred the door as soon as Mordan had made it inside. “For all of us.”

  “What happened to the prospector?” Marsh asked, but her eyes stayed closed and her words were slurred. It was a question Roeglin answered after she had woken up and was wolfing down a shroom loaf stuffed with cheese.

  She was chasing it with a cup of kaffee, hot and sweet but black as tar. Not what she wanted, but better than water—and it was waking her up much faster than she’d have managed on her own.

  “So, where’s this prospector?” she asked, repeating her question of the morning before, “And how long have we slept?”

  “Gone, and too long,” Roeglin answered. “You up for a bit of a run?”

  She raised her cup and her shroom loaf.

  “When I’m done here. Can we make up the time?”

  “Have to. We—” Roeglin stopped, raising his hand for silence as the others around them stirred.

  Outside, they heard the clatter as a bucket toppled over onto its side and then the swift skitter of claws trotting over stone. Marsh took a soft breath and slowly let it out, listening for another clue, and when Mordan raised her head, tilting it this way and that, Marsh had a better idea how to find out what sort of creatures were outside.

  Closing her eyes, she drew another long, slow breath and, this time when she let it out, she sent her senses outwards with it. It was not the same as asking the shadows, but it gave her a sense of size and number, and then she asked the shadow thread to show her what creatures they could see in the darkness beyond.

  Their reply made her heart sink, and she relayed it to the others.

  “Joffra? Are you sure?” Roeglin asked, and it was Marsh’s turn to raise her hand for silence as she shook her head.

  Around them, the guards shifted their feet and then leaned against walls or seated themselves on the floor. When they were settled, Marsh reached out to the shadows, asking them to confirm what sort of creatures shared them. Only a few answered, and these stretched beneath the door and out onto the narrow porch where several of the creatures wandered curiously about, snuffing along the bottom of the door, and cocking their heads so they could see in the windows.

  At first glance, they looked like oversized chickens, but that wasn’t right. Their heads lacked the beak of a bird, and they had two short forearms tucked before them. None of them had feathers, either. They were either very bald chickens or lizards like the joffra, except they ran around on two legs and not four. One of them lifted its head and gave a curious chirruping call.
r />   “No idea,” Marsh said. “Never seen the lizard-chicken things before. They’re not joffra.”

  Henri rolled his eyes.

  “They’re shroom walkers. We used to get them out on the farm. Death on rats and house pets, but not a threat to humans unless you were too injured to defend yourself. Guess they smelled the blood.”

  Roeglin picked up a dish that was sitting on a bench near a small hand tub.

  “Or they were looking for scraps.”

  Marsh didn’t want to know what was inside the bowl; what was crusted on the outside looked bad enough.

  “They used to stay away from the house, though,” Henri added. “Avoided humans like the plague.”

  “Maybe there hasn’t been a human around here for a while,” Roeglin suggested, looking into the bowl as he set it back on the bench and wrinkling his nose in disgust. “Pieter didn’t have a lot of crockery. Doesn’t make sense that he’d let things get into this state by choice.”

  “You think he’s been taken?” Gustav asked, throwing a quick glance toward Marsh.

  Roeglin looked around the cabin as though ticking things off on a list as he spoke.

  “Food on the table. No resident. Nothing was stolen, not even his savings.” He nodded toward a small biscuit jar on a shelf above a stove. “It sounds exactly like the waystation Marchant described.”

  “And Downslopes,” Marsh added, and caught the looks on their faces. “Long time ago, there used to be a waystation on the hillside below Kerrenin’s Ledge. Last I heard it was empty. People who set it up disappeared, but everything was left in place.”

  “Someone you knew?” Roeglin asked.

  Marsh found a loose thread on her sleeve, pulling on it as she answered. “My parents. I was staying with my uncle when it happened.”

  Gustav gave a low whistle, and Roeglin put into the open what they were all thinking.

  “These raiders have been around for a while, then.”

  Before anyone could add anything, a sudden flurry of movement erupted just beyond the door. It was accompanied by several loud alarm calls, squawks, whistles, and the sound of scattering feet.

  “Marsh?”

  Roeglin didn’t have to tell her what he wanted to know. Marsh could guess. She tweaked the shadows, blending them in her search for the life force behind that disturbance. What she found had her recoiling from the door.

  “Centipede,” she whispered, and they froze. All except for Jakob, who quietly pulled the thin blanket from the bed set in the corner of the room. Crushing it into a ball, he tossed the cloth to Roeglin and pointed to the door. Outside, they heard the clatter of a myriad of hard-toed feet scurrying along the porch.

  Roeglin’s eyes flashed white, as though he was asking the guard what he was supposed to do with the blanket, then hurried to press it along the bottom of the door. Before he could say anything, Jakob raised his finger to his lips, and they waited. When the skitter of claws could no longer be heard, he nudged Marsh with the toe of his boot and tilted his chin toward the door.

  Marsh got it. She closed her eyes and tried to sense where the centipede had gone. The shadows wouldn’t answer, but she found the centipede anyway, using just her ability to search for life. It was chasing shroom walkers toward the back of the cave. Marsh let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  “It’s leaving,” she said. “Chasing chicken-lizards toward the back of the cave.”

  “Good.” Roeglin grabbed the pack he’d set on the bench at his side. “Time to go.”

  “We should be glad it’s nothing worse,” Gustav muttered, stooping to collect the pack at his feet.

  Marsh pushed herself off the floor and discovered she’d been using her pack as a pillow, or someone had thought she should. She couldn’t remember; she had been very tired when they arrived. She bent to pick it up, and a familiar cacophony of gibbering howls echoed through the cavern outside.

  She dropped the pack and had her sword drawn before she finished pivoting toward the door.

  “What was that?”

  “You have to ask?”

  “I was hoping it was my imagination playing tricks.”

  Something slammed into the door, and the hut trembled. Human-like footsteps stampeded onto the porch outside, and the window shattered.

  “Guess they were drawn by the smoke from the chimney,” Roeglin muttered. “Not as stupid as they look.”

  “Into the middle!” Gustav commanded, grabbing the two guards closest him and dragging them to the center of the room.

  The others followed and they turned so that they stood back to back, swords drawn while the shadow monsters circled the cabin and battered against the door. When they started climbing through the broken window, Marsh, Gerry, and Jakob stepped forward to meet them.

  Marsh and Gerry pulled shadow blades from the dark, and Jakob pulled enough shadow to coat his very normal blade. Marsh wondered when he’d learned that, but then she was too busy stopping the monsters from getting inside.

  At first, they held their own, but then they started to struggle—and that was when Roeglin intervened.

  “Now would be the time for the shadows to come to your protection,” he told Marsh. “Remember what happened at the eatery?”

  Marsh did, but she didn’t understand what he was trying to tell her. The shadows had gathered in the eatery because part of her had drawn them close as if they could protect her. She remembered how they had clung to the walls in a thick patina, and how the eatery’s cook had told her to dispel them or she’d be doing dishes until they were gone.

  The woman had meant it, too, and the laws of Ruins Hall would have allowed it to happen. Roeglin had told Marsh to tell the shadows she was safe, that she didn’t need them to protect her…

  Well, she damned well needed them now!

  Good, Roeglin whispered. Call them again. Ask them to cover the cabin.

  Cover the cabin? Marsh disagreed, but she didn’t bother correcting him. She didn’t want a sticky mess to clean up. She wanted something like the swords she called to her hands or the darts she could throw, but she didn’t want them in the cabin. Oh, no; she wanted shards of shadow falling from the cavern ceiling to skewer every shadow monster gathered on the porch and in the yard beyond.

  She wanted a rain of spears, lightning bolts of shadow. She wanted nothing left outside the cabin but craters. The cabin shook, but Marsh ignored it. She wanted…

  “Uh, Marsh? Marchant? Trainee Leclerc?” Roeglin’s voice was tentative. “Marsh? You can tell the shadows thank you, now.”

  At this, Gustav cut in.

  “Yes. Please tell the shadows thank you. There are no more shadow monsters outside.”

  “Marsh?” She felt fingertips very tentatively poke her shoulder. “You with us?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “You gonna tell the shadows it’s all okay now?”

  “You sure?”

  “Oh, yes!” Gustav sounded extremely sure. “It is very okay out there.”

  “And we need to leave for Ruins Hall.”

  “Oh.”

  They couldn’t do that while the lightning was still falling.

  “Please tell the shadows everything’s okay.”

  Roeglin’s voice had taken on a coaxing tone, as though she was something wild and unpredictable that he didn’t want to upset. Marsh wondered why, but she agreed to do as he asked.

  “Okay.”

  She drew a deep breath, thinking of the shadows, her guardians and protectors.

  “Thank you,” she said. “You can return.”

  She pictured the ceiling from which she’d called them, thought of it as calm and still and not roiling with power. She felt the air around her calm and heard sighs of relief.

  “All good now?” she asked, and the fingertips became a palm patting her shoulder.

  “All is very good,” Roeglin told her, and Marsh found her own place in the dark.

  9

  Chocolate Farms and Rui
ns Hall

  “I’m sorry,” Marsh blurted when she woke—and was abruptly hushed by someone kneeling hastily beside her and covering her mouth with their hand.

  For a moment, she came close to panicking, but Roeglin’s voice sounded in her head.

  Someone’s here. Please be quiet until we know if they’re friendly.

  Oh. Okay.

  Marsh nodded and closed her eyes, listening for the sound of footsteps approaching, or voices. Voices would be better. As if on cue she heard voices, adult voices, softly murmuring, and then the frustrated yell from someone much younger, followed by an all-too-familiar piping treble that echoed off the cavern’s ceiling and the cabin walls.

  “Marsh!”

  Marsh sighed. She knew that voice. She also knew they were in trouble when the pitch went up a notch, and her name was called again.

  “Marsh! Is me! You come out. Right. Now!”

  “Aysh!” Tamlin was clearly frustrated, and Aisha was just as clearly having none of it.

  “Is too here. Rocks say. Shadows say! Is. Too. Here.”

  Since when could Aisha talk to the shadows?

  “Aysh!” Tamlin had obviously lost his grip on his sister, again. There’d be no stopping her if she knew she was right.

  What in all the Deeps was Aisha doing running with Tamlin’s team? She was supposed to be in the repair team behind the one Shadow Captain Envermet was leading, not in the one her brother was running messages for. What had gone wrong?

  Obviously, the same thought had crossed Roeglin’s mind, and he stepped over Marsh, making his way to the door and through it.

  “Don’t shoot,” he called, and Aisha gave a shriek of delight.

  “Roeglin!”

  Marsh struggled to get herself off the floor, grateful when Gustav helped her to her feet.

  “You okay?” he asked. “Because that was quite a display you put on.”

  “How long was I out?” Marsh demanded, and then remembered her manners. “And I’m fine, thanks.”

  Actually, she felt anything but fine, but she wasn’t going to admit it. Marsh made her way out the door, trying to walk straight and not weave like a drunk after a long night out. When she got there, she stopped and stared. The floor outside the cabin was pocked with small craters and scarred by shadow. She looked at the cavern’s ceiling, and the shadows sat there, calm and unperturbed.