Usim cut the argument short by limping over to Tansy and letting her lift him onto her back. He wrapped his arms around her broad neck and she held him in place with one hand and left the other free for her weapon. I started off, retracing our steps. Wren fell in with me a few seconds later, her sword drawn as she scanned the street ahead.
Tansy stayed in the rear to keep Usim safe, which impressed me. I thought she’d hyperfocus on protecting me, but instead she focused on protecting what mattered to me. Apparently I’d been underestimating her.
“You know about the Old City?” I asked Wren.
“Only from reports.”
“There’s kobolds, wraiths, and redworms, they told me. Nobody said anything about skinbears.”
“There’s wraiths down here?” she asked.
“Apparently.”
“Good thing we’re not sticking around. A wraith is a death sentence.”
I paused at a fork in the road. A cloud of gnat-like bugs hung in the air as I frowned to my right, then to my left. I didn’t remember which way we’d come from, and when I looked at Wren, she shrugged. Then she glanced over her shoulder and asked, “You remember the way?”
“Nope,” Tansy said.
“Sorry,” Usim said.
“Neither of you can track?” I asked Wren and Tansy. Surprised, because what kind of fantasy-world warrior-people couldn’t track?
“Not on a stone floor that’s been heavily-trafficked by a pack of skinbears,” Wren told me.
“‘Heavily-trafficked,’” Tansy repeated, in a faintly mocking tone.
“Don’t tease my mom,” Usim said, looking down from where he was now sitting on her shoulders. Apparently he’d climbed up higher while I hadn’t been looking. His hands griped her thick, braided hair and his skinny calves dangled in front of her.
“Who talks like that?” Tansy asked. “‘Heavily-trafficked.’”
“You hush,” he said. “Mom, can you please at least try?”
So Wren paced off the left-hand fork, frowning at the floor. Then she moved to the right, and frowned some more. Finally, she took a few steps, zig-zagged, then squatted and peered at a vague mark on the ground.
“Does this look like a boot print to you?” she asked me.
I squinted at the curve in the dirt. “Yeah. Yes. Well, that or the edge of toe-pad. One or the other. Or, um, something else completely.”
“Great,” she said, and started off in that direction, following the right-hand fork.
I followed. The walls still glowed faintly and the ceiling was still packed vine. Other than that, the hallway looked like a mine-shaft or dungeon. We passed a few open doorways, or at least rectangular holes in the wall, and only paused long enough to check that nothing would jump out at us before pushing past. We needed to return to the cellar quickly, before the Sixers cleared that bottleneck.
We needed to disappear into Ryetown with an entire army on our asses.
Except nothing looked familiar. We’d only sprinted through the city for a short time while chasing the skinbear that had snatched Usim, but we’d been moving pretty fast. Still, I expected to recognize something after walking for five minutes. Instead, after the hallway curved for a while, one wall suddenly turned into what looked like a coral reef, with a thousand mutant cauliflower-like growths.
“We definitely didn’t come this way,” Tansy said, behind us.
“We’ll go back to that first fork,” Wren said, turning with a parade-ground abruptness.
Tansy snorted. “I guess neither of you have the Gem of Not Getting Stupidly Lost?”
“GPS,” I said.
“What does jeepies mean?” Usim asked.
“Sorry. It’s, um, a swear where I’m from. Jeepies!”
“You okay up there?” Wren asked Usim, craning her neck.
He nodded from his place on Tansy’s shoulders. “I’m good, mom.”
“Of course he is,” Tansy said. “He’s got the Gem of Olifarn Height.”
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Wren gazed at her son for a long, meaningful moment. Usim, despite being orange-skinned, flushed. She touched his knee, then gave a faint smile and stalked off, retracing our steps
I trotted to catch up with her, less interested in the family moment than the weird coral reef growths on the wall. What the hell were they? I almost asked, but this probably wasn’t the right time.
“What you really want is the Gem of the Olifarn Nose,” Tansy murmured to Usim behind me. “I don’t know how you all walk around with those tiny things. It’s embarrassing. That’s why there’s that old saying, ‘Everyone wants to smell like an ollie.’”
“That’s not a saying,” Usim told her.
“An old, old saying. You probably never heard it, on account of your tiny ears.”
He gave a bleat of laughter. “I know what you’re doing, Miss Tansy. You’re trying to cheer me up so I’m not afraid.”
“Don’t be dumb!” Tansy trumpeted. “I’m to cheer me up so I’m not afraid.”
Usim laughed again. “Well, is it working for you, because--”
“Shht!” I hissed, at a twang from my webtouch sense.
An alert. A warning of imminent danger. I raised a hatchet and stopped short, focusing on the empty hallway in front of us, stretching back toward the intersection where we’d taken the wrong turn.
Wren tensed beside me, while Tansy spun to scan behind us, her longsword suddenly in her hand.
And in the sudden, taut silence ... I couldn’t sense anything threatening. I wasn’t even sure if I’d felt a warning in the first place, not really. Maybe I’d just imagined that flash of danger.? Still, I made myself focus. Water dripped around us, as condensation drizzled from the vines overhead. Weeds grew here and there, pale wormy-looking things. The dingy white walls glowed faintly, casting almost no shadows, and the flagstoned floor was weirdly smooth except for the occasional deep, jagged crack caused by the entire underground city settling lower over the centuries.
Rubble lined the sides of the hallway. Boulders, tumbled stone fences, and parts of fallen walls lay in scattered chunks, pushed to the sides to form the clear aisle in the center. I half-recognized bits of furniture and household goods as a chair-back, shattered crockery, a rusted rake. Mounds that might once have been cloth rotted among formless lumps that had been abandoned during the evacuation of these blocks, or maybe during the explorations later, when this section had been closer to the surface and merely called the ‘cellar.’ Or whatever term they’d used back then.
We stayed in place for a full minute. Motionless, scanning, listening to the plink, plunk of condensation.
Then I said, “Maybe it’s nothing.”
“Maybe Alex is trying to cheer us both up,” Tansy told Usim. “And he’s just bad at it.”
“Well, if you can’t smell anything with your magnificent nose,” he said. “I’m sure there’s nothing here.”
“‘Magnificent’ or ‘majestic,’” she told him. “I’ll accept either one.”
A quick series of expressions flitted across Wren’s face: angry, embarrassed, unsure. She didn’t like Tansy chatting with her son, but she’d basically given him into our care, so she couldn’t say anything. I was pretty surprised--by which I meant ‘absolutely shocked’--that she’d entrusted him to us. She’d gone in a heartbeat from trying to kill us to putting with her beloved son’s life in our hands. I guess she didn’t have a choice. If Six Coves took Waldhill Island, there’d be nowhere for her and Usim to hide. They’d catch her sooner or later. She didn’t care about that, though, she didn’t care about herself. All she cared about was her son.
So she’d decided that she’d surrender. She’d accept whatever punishment the Six Coves military--this viceroy--meted out, in the hopes that they’d leave Usim alone. That they’d let him live. And that calculation had taken her like zero time.
Impressive. Brave, clever, and adaptable, too. Maybe that’s where the kid got his smarts. Of course, it was even more depressing than it was impressive, at least for Usim. Commander Wren deserved whatever she got, but the kid didn’t deserve to lose his mother.
Well, he’d be okay. Eventually. Maybe. Though first we needed to find the above-ground city again, and to hide for a few weeks or months or whatever. You’d think that you couldn’t misplace the entire surface of a planet, but I had no idea which way the exit was, or how to--
Three rocks launched at me from the side of the hallway.
Big ones, the size of basketballs. Mouths gaped open in the pitted surfaces. They hinged as wide as PacMan’s mouth and had as many teeth as Jaws. Claws curved at the end of skinny arms that unfolded from the rough stone.
Goblins! Holy shit, those weren’t boulders those were actual goblins. They were four foot tall bipedal monsters with hairless extra-large heads that still looked almost exactly like the rocks lining the hallway.
INTUIT: Kobold Scout, Level 7
Oh, kobolds.
There were eight or nine of them in total, I didn’t take the time to count because a bunch were swarming us from the front. We must’ve passed them when we’d come this way, and not noticed them hiding among the actual boulders. Then they’d sprung at us on our return. Well, or maybe they’d been following us, and when we turned around they’d camouflaged at rocks? Not, uh, that that was the most pressing issue at the moment.
I juked sideways to avoid two of the attacking kobolds and braced to meet a third that was leaping at my throat. Wren hurled a dagger past me at a lichen-stained kobold that was veering toward Tansy and Usim. I heard a thump of impact and I chopped the leaping kobold in half while Intuit was still active and the tag on that same monster changed into this:
INTUIT: Kobold Scout, Level 6
It was weird, seeing the kobold lose a level as it died. A moment later, things got even weirder, because the notification didn’t overlap with the bleeding, bisected body at my feet. Instead, the words sort of hung in the air in the center of the hallway. Also, level six seemed pretty high for such skinny-limbed, short creatures, much less level seven.
On the other hand, those PacMan teeth looked fearsome, and hadn’t Tansy said they could chew through metal? They had one other advantage, too. As two of them circled me, they stalked in perfect synch; they were pack hunters. They moved like a team, not like individuals--and sure enough, the two of them swarmed my legs at exactly the same time, trying to ensure that one caught me from behind.
Also trying to rip off one of my kneecaps with their overside goddamn teeth. The taller of the little shits focused on my patella like a hunting owl focusing on a field-mouse, and the predatory intensity in its beady eyes repulsed me.
And, to be honest, frightened me a little. Hey, I still wasn’t used to inhuman monsters, and the bipedal ones were even freakier than the spiders and snakes.
Still, I managed to harness my fear, and used the spurt of adrenalin to hack at that kneecap eater with my hatchet. My blade cleaved deep into its head then I whipped myself in a circle to avoid the oversized teeth of the second, which closed with a snap an inch from my ass--and then I jerked at a warning from my webtouch senses and kicked a third kobold with my angry revulsion and my increased strength and my heavy boots.