Jaleigh Johnson - The Howling Delve

• Название: The Howling Delve
• Автор: Jaleigh Johnson
• Жанр: Фэнтези

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"As you wish."

He told her.

* * * * *

"The Climb," Meisha chuckled bitterly. She regarded the round rat hole in the wall and the impenetrable darkness within. "More like a long fall."

Varan said hands other than his had tunneled the hole out of the stone. Meisha wondered briefly if those hands had been a dwarf's, and if one of them had carried a broken battle-axe. Varan's mark hung on the wall above the hole, warning the apprentices away.

Jonal stood hesitantly at her elbow. "Do you think it's true?" he asked in hushed tones, as if the wizard might overhear. "Do you believe the tunnel goes all the way down to the testing chambers?"

"And beyond—so he claims," Meisha said stiffly. She didn't know what to believe. She had no idea how far down the testing chambers lay. Varan had always teleported them between the spider and the star, with no indication of the distance traversed. If Shaera expected to find the entrance to Varan's hidden tunnels using the Climb, Meisha hoped she'd prepared for a long journey.

"He hasn't come out of the room?" she asked, though she already knew the answer.

"No," Jonal said. "He hasn't spoken to anyone since you entered his chamber. Will he come out," Jonal asked, "to aid in the search?"

"He will not," Meisha said, "until his experiment is complete. He claims that releasing the magic prematurely could endanger us all."

"Will you wait for him?" Jonal asked hopefully.

Meisha turned a stony gaze on him. The apprentice ducked his head.

"I suppose if I don't return, he'll inquire about our fates eventually," Meisha said, her voice rich with scorn. "Wait for me on this side," she told Jonal, "and do not follow."

Meisha knew her warning was unnecessary. In his heart, Jonal was a coward. He would never enter the dark passage to come after either of them. She saw it in his eyes.

She moved to the tunnel mouth and heaved herself up onto its stone lip. Speaking a word, Meisha blew on her outstretched palm. Her fingers began to glow. The orange light spread down her palm to her wrist. Varan had taught her the spell for light; the variation was her own.

By the glow of her palm she saw the tunnel stretching ahead of her in a narrow tube, and above her in a slender shaft. If Shaera was trying to find the testing chambers, she would have certainly gone forward. Meisha would have to follow, crawling on her belly for gods knew how many feet, and pray that at some point the path widened. She knew it would have to dip down. Far down, if the tales were accurate. And if she were attacked, it would be nearly impossible to mount a defense with spells.

"Lovely," she murmured, and she began to crawl.

* * * * *

Waiting, his claws tense, the fire beast felt the magic coursing through the Delve. He willed it to falter and rage out of control, to shake the caverns and tear his prison apart—it would only take a single misguided stroke of power, and the dwarves' ancient bonds would crumble.

How fragile the structures of mortals were. The beast's fire, his very presence, only served to corrupt the integrity of the Delve further—a consequence of his imprisonment that never ceased to delight him. By the time he won free, the entire stronghold would be suffused with his essence. His hunting ground would be complete, a place of nightmares that merely awaited prey. The beast relished the thought.

Content in his future, the beast settled back into the fire and waited for the dwarves to be reborn into their ghostly existence, so he could hunt again. He did not mind honing his skills.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Howling Delve

12 Uktar, the Year of the Serpent (1359 DR)

Meisha thrust herself forward another foot. Her stomach felt raw through her coarse linen shirt. Sweat poured down her face, dripping salt in her eyes, but she kept crawling. The physical discomforts kept her mind occupied. She would endure almost anything to keep the memory of the dream at bay.

The beast of fire and claws. Every time she had the dream, the presence was there, stalking the helpless dwarves. She watched them die over and over again.

Ten more feet, Meisha counted in her head. The stone chilled her flesh, making her lightheaded and feverish.

She pressed her face against the ground. The taste of rock and dirt and something foreign filled her mouth.

A wave of nausea hit her gut. Meisha turned her head to one side and gagged, spitting to clear her mouth of a taste worse than bile. Instinctively, she tried to curl up in a ball, but the tunnel bound her in the shape of a worm.

Meisha forced herself to breathe deeply, to push away the tight fear in her chest.

"You've slept on stone every night for the past four years," she said aloud, just to hear the sound of her voice. "This should not disturb you now."

Perhaps it was because she found herself so far from Varan's circle of protection. She'd always felt more at ease in the wizard's presence. Possibly his magic in some way mitigated the oppressiveness of the Delve.

Not enough, Meisha thought. She ached for the sunlight and the heat, almost as much as she craved the fire inside herself, the power of it. Living in a deep hole in the ground had never stopped feeling unnatural to her.

Was the presence in her dream merely a manifestation of that wrongness?

No, it was more than that, Meisha knew. There was something wrong with the Delve, something Varan chose to deny or ignore. She didn't know which state of mind was the more foolish.

Pushing herself back up to her elbows, Meisha began dragging herself forward again.

Ahead of her, a rock outcrop burst into soft glow. Before she could react, a cold hand closed around her ankle.

A scream ripped from Meisha's throat. The sound echoed down the tunnel. Power flared involuntarily in her mind.

She flipped to her back and splayed her fingertips. Fire rolled down her body, an inch-thick gout of flame that lit up the passage.

When the flames died, the glow had gone, and the only sound was Meisha's ragged breathing. The passage sat empty behind her.

"Show yourself!" Meisha shouted.

The answering silence mocked her. Meisha threw her hands up against the curved stone ceiling, emptying her fear and the fire into the rock. Orange clouds of flame licked along the tunnel in either direction until her anger spent itself.

When the flames grew cold, she regarded the blackened stone above her. Meisha felt some small satisfaction knowing she could leave a mark on the Delve's impenetrable armor.

Reigniting her light source, Meisha squinted into the distance ahead of her, and saw that the tunnel dropped off sharply ten feet ahead of her. She hadn't seen the precipice earlier.

She crawled to the edge and saw a steep, angled drop of roughly fifteen feet. Crawling blindly, she might have fallen over the edge and broken her neck.

Cold sweat pricked her scalp. Meisha closed her eyes and pictured a dwarf's face, for she had no other explanation for her mysterious rescue.

"My thanks," she whispered.

She still had to navigate the steep drop. Feet first, the fall might have been manageable, but Meisha had no way to reverse her position in the tiny space. Shaera, an air savant, would have bypassed the drop easily. Meisha knew few such spells, but would have to learn more, she thought. She'd never trusted magic that did not involve fire. Flame felt natural to her—rendering her body light enough to float down a fifteen-foot drop, did not.

Calling the little-used words to her mind, Meisha cast the spell. Outwardly, she felt no change, but she could sense the release of magic from her spirit, and knew the spell had worked. Still, as she shimmied to the edge of the drop, she felt a hint of trepidation.

She grasped the stone ledge and somersaulted, releasing the ledge before she hit her back against the rock. Slowly, lighter than the stale air in the cavern, she drifted to the floor below.

What seemed like a tenday later, when her feet touched the ground, Meisha sank into a crouch, grateful for the chance to bend her knees. Her spine cracked as she swiveled around to loosen her sore muscles.

By her light spell, Meisha could see the passage angled off to the right, the formerly smooth tunnel walls pockmarked with crags and fissures.

She drew her hand along the ground and found what she had hoped to find. Shaera's footprints hugged the wall. They moved steadily, and Meisha saw no traces of blood or torn clothing to indicate injury. She breathed a little easier as she continued on down the tunnel.

In the quiet, with half her mind alert on the trail and watching for danger, Meisha's thoughts drifted at random. Varan's words came unexpectedly into focus.

You've never shown any indication of friendship. . . .

She'd grown up on the streets of Keczulla, running in packs with other children of the same age and situation: a perpetual state of half-starved viciousness. She would never have risked her life for any of the other Wraiths, not when a loaf of bread was worth killing for. Why did she care about the future of a nobleman's daughter like Shaera? Why was Shaera worth risking her life for, when the Wraiths were not?

They had nothing in common. Shaera was refined and educated as Meisha never would be. The girl had never experienced the kind of hunger that was an acid in the belly, blighting any other rational thought.

Perhaps it was simply that Varan didn't care. Her teacher had the capacity for kindness; she had seen glimpses of emotion behind his power, but ultimately, the will was not there, Meisha thought.

Twice now, she'd been disappointed by those she'd chosen to trust. Yet here she was, groping in the dark after a stupid girl who hadn't sense enough to take a companion on her fool's errand.

Meisha picked up her pace, aware of a downward trend to the passage. At first she hadn't felt it, and if the rate of descent didn't change, she might have miles of tunnel to cover before she reached the bottom.

She stopped briefly to eat cold meat and a biscuit she'd taken from the stores. Before discovering the lower tunnels, Varan had kept a well-stocked food supply that often included fresh fruits and vegetables Meisha had never seen before. She hadn't thought to ask where they came from, until they were gone.

When she resumed her walk, Meisha discovered an abrupt end to the tunnel after roughly twenty feet. The passage fell away again, but this time, instead of being sheer, jagged rocks riddled the drop-off.

Meisha leaned over the edge to touch one of the rocks with her fingertip. Filed, she thought, to a razor edge. She drew her hand back and smeared the dot of blood away.

The architect of the Climb had gone to a great deal of effort to make the descent from the spider to the star as long and as treacherous as possible. If it were the work of the Howlings, to guard their stronghold, how had the dwarves ever traversed such a passage? Surely, there must be an easier way to move between both sets of caverns.

But if such a path existed, Meisha thought, even Varan did not know of it.

Removing a length of rope from her pack, Meisha tied one end around the nearest protruding stone spike. She looped the other end through her belt and slowly fed out the rope as she walked down the slanted wall.

At the bottom of the short climb, she found the remains of the trap.

A pressure plate smeared with blood sat crookedly at the base of the wall. Meisha touched the plate and found it sticky. The trap had triggered recently. She examined the immediate area. Following a line of fissures in the rock, she saw that the release of weight had caved in a false ceiling directly above the plate, spilling a hail of large rocks down on the passage.

Meisha crawled amid the rubble, shoveling stones aside with her bare hands. Dust rose in dry clouds. Her eyes burned and watered. Meisha scraped an arm across them and worked mostly by touch.

Finally, her hands encountered something soft. She uncovered a spill of red hair, and gradually Shaera's upper torso came into view. Blood had dried in a mask over half her face. Meisha put her fingers against the girl's neck and found a beat. Miraculously, she had survived the trap.

The heat from Meisha's hands seeped into Shaera's cold flesh. The girl stirred, moaning when she tried to lift her head.

"Be still," Meisha hissed. She ran her hands along Shaera's spine. "Your back is broken, at least. I don't know how many other bones."

She hadn't expected injuries this extensive. Varan would be able to tend her, but Meisha didn't think she could risk moving Shaera far. Even with magical aid, the jostling would likely kill her.

"What do I do?" she whispered, gazing back and forth down the empty tunnel. She didn't know if she were speaking to herself, Varan, or the ghostly presence that had aided her. In any case, she received no answer.

Meisha sat down beside Shaera, who had lapsed into unconsciousness again. Meisha listened to her breathing in the silence and detected a faint gurgle she didn't like.

"Where are you, Master?" she said. She realized then how much she'd hoped for Varan to follow her. No matter what magical experiment he was juggling, he wouldn't let Shaera die here. For all his selfishness, he was not a monster.

Meisha wrapped her arms around her knees, intending to keep watch. The wizard would come, she was certain of it.

As soon as she allowed herself to relax, exhaustion stole over her. She dozed in fits, tucked between a wall studded with jagged spikes and the pile of rubble.

The only pocket of life for miles, Meisha thought faintly, and a fragile one it was.

* * * * *

She roused to darkness and stinging pain in her fingers. At first, Meisha thought it was the cold, but then she felt fur under her hands. Revulsion shook her instantly awake. She chanted the words to bring back her light.

Two rats crawled on Shaera's chest. Meisha swatted them viciously into the wall, impaling one on a spike. Her hands shook as she adjusted Shaera's bloody shirt, covering the ugly bites.

"Forgive me," she said haltingly. She'd forgotten Shaera's long-ago lesson, that light was the only thing that kept away the rats.

She brushed the hair back from Shaera's face, wondering how long they'd been asleep. The apprentice's eyes fluttered open and looked blearily up at her. She opened her lips a crack, but only air escaped, a thick wheeze that Meisha feared was Shaera trying to breathe through blood.

"Varan is coming for us," Meisha said urgently, even as the light in the woman's eyes started to waver. "Do you hear me, Shaera? You have to hold on a little longer." Her voice quivered; tears burned her throat. "I can hear them in the tunnel. Listen, they're coming down the slope."

Shaera licked her lips and whispered something barely audible. Meisha didn't understand the language, but the rise and fall of the words was familiar—the rhythm of prayer. When the words trailed off, the light in Shaera's eyes went dark.

Meisha sat perfectly still for a long time. Shaera's cheek rested heavy and cold on her hand. Absently, she wiped the blood from the girl's face with her sleeve. She should have done it earlier but hadn't thought to. When her face was clean, Meisha laid the girl's head back and closed her vacant eyes.