Si glyph [https://i.imgur.com/mHhTdaF.png]

High in the shaft, Simon sat on a timber alongside Riga and Jonas, all perched like birds on a roof. For now, he thought, they were safe — as long as they remained entirely still. But sooner or later, they had to make a run for the main shaft and freedom. The problem was how to do that without being pursued and torn apart by the stone-wyrms.

He’d said he had a plan, and he did — sort of. At least, he had an idea. He just wasn’t sure it would work.

‘I must move to the wall,’ he whispered. ‘I think I can get rid of our friends for a while.’

He inched along the timber, easing his weight with glacial slowness. Earth is patient, he reminded himself. Earth is slow.

Reaching the wall took long minutes of agonising, inch-by-inch movement. Simon’s hands trembled with tension. He rested and breathed for a moment before scratching the sigil onto the rock.

Frowning, he stared at the faint mark. The wyrms responded to vibration, but how intelligent were they? How could stone have any sort of mind? Perhaps they simply reacted, like spiders summoned by a struggling insect in their webs. Yet the way they’d attacked the scaffolding suggested more deliberate reasoning…

Simon pushed his doubts aside and concentrated, burning the glyphs into his brain. The summoning built to a trembling pressure. He let it fly.

Instantly, his awareness expanded: he was huge, immovable, timeless, one with strata and planes of force, threaded with tunnels and veined with minerals. He was vast and he was nothing. As always, it was an effort to drag his focus back to himself, to his own insignificant physical location.

Along the way, he found the wyrms, twists of alienness within the rock. Stone, but beyond his control. They answered to another, and there it was, in the background, watching from afar with wry amusement.

Simon wrenched his awareness away from it. It was aware of him, but only vaguely, as something small and uninteresting. He didn’t want to attract its attention.

Already the summoning was fading, and he must act. Not here though — as far away as he could manage, at the limit of his control. He stretched out to the hard red granite of the cavern, feeling his way through the strata. With the last of his failing control, he slammed force into the rock.

The stone-wyrms twitched to attention, and that was the last impression Simon received before he sagged against the rockface, his body shuddering to distant tremors. He gasped for air. In the grip of the summoning, he had forgotten to breath.

‘Simon,’ Jonas hissed.

Simon waved to him vaguely. With every breath, he felt more himself. ‘Climb. I hope I’ve distracted them, but I don’t know how long for.’

A glyph [https://i.imgur.com/ZLENX3y.png]

The man Chase strode from one warm pool of gas-flame light to the next. As he walked, he whistled disconnected, unmusical snatches, and gazed around him, especially at women. He did not look behind. He did not know he was hunted.

Andra followed at a distance. Humans in her path glanced at her and quickly moved aside. Even they knew a hunter when they saw one.

Sam scurried behind her. She wished she could send him home. With her prey in her sight, she needed no assistance. The boy was a liability. But if she told him to go, he’d argue, or follow her, which might attract attention and spoil her hunt. So for now, she ignored him.

Chase turned a corner into a new street. A dark narrow place, little wider than an alleyway. Few people were about. A mangy dog scuffled at rubbish.

He climbed the steps of a tall building and entered. The door slammed behind him. Within, wood creaked under a man’s weight. His shadow passed before an upstairs window and disappeared.

Andra walked past and round a corner into the next alley.

‘That must be where he’s living,’ Sam said. ‘What do we do now?’

‘I speak to him. You stay here.’

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He frowned. ‘How are you getting in?’

She glanced around. ‘Climb the—’ She pointed to the iron pipe that ran from roof to street. ‘What?’

‘Drainpipe,’ Sam said.

‘Climb drainpipe,’ she said. ‘Go roof. Through window.’

‘He had a gun before,’ Sam said. ‘And his brother may be with him. I should come with you. You might need my help.’

She prodded him in the chest emphatically. ‘No. You wait.’

Sam glanced at the drainpipe and the building and back to her. ‘Are you sure? What are you going to do?’

There was a new note in his voice: not fear exactly, but uncertainty. Before this had been a game for him, a child’s game of hunting, and now — it was no longer a game.

Andra smiled. ‘Just talk. You wait.’

Si glyph [https://i.imgur.com/mHhTdaF.png]

The miner’s lamps swung as they climbed, turning the scaffolded shaft into a spider-web of shifting shadow. Not knowing how long they had before the stone-wyrms returned, Simon pushed his aching leg and shoulders to greater effort. Above him, Riga grunted, Jonas panted and swore.

A tunnel mouth loomed black above them.

‘To the right,’ Simon called. ‘And wait for me.’

Riga reached the tunnel first. She extended a hand to pull Jonas up, and both of them helped Simon.

He leaned against the wall. ‘I must check on the stone-wyrms.’

The summoning went quicker this time, since he knew exactly what to do and what to look for. To his relief, the wyrms were still some distance away. He renewed the tremor that had drawn them off before, and they responded by moving toward it.

Normal awareness returned. He sagged against the wall, trembling. ‘We’re safe for the moment. It’s working.’

‘What’s working?’ Riga said.

Simon took a shaky breath. The tunnel they stood in was a narrow cross-cut. If they followed it, they’d rejoin the haulage level in a half-mile or so. ‘Come. We need to keep moving.’

He led the way. Riga brought up the rear.

‘Are they going to come after us again?’ Jonas said.

‘I’m setting off a small earth tremor, back in the cavern near the tomb,’ Simon said. ‘The vibration draws them away from us.’

‘So we go back to the shaft and get out?’

‘I can keep drawing them off by repeating the summoning. But there’s something else down here. I think it controls the wyrms. As yet, we haven’t attracted its attention, but I doubt that will last.’

‘Then we had better hurry,’ Riga said.

As long as the wyrms behaved themselves, it shouldn’t be difficult to reach the main shaft. The ledge Simon had made before would still be there, allowing them to reach the lift cage. But once in the cage, he couldn’t repeat the summoning, and the vibration of the hoist would almost certainly attract the wyrms. The damage done to Sark suggested they were quite capable of reaching the surface.

‘We need to stop the wyrms from following us up the shaft,’ Simon said.

‘They don’t like my fire-bolts much,’ Jonas said. ‘I have a few of those left.’

‘Not enough.’ Simon shook his head. ‘But you’re right, they were damaged by the blast. A bigger explosion might destroy them.’

He stopped and repeated the summoning several times before they reached the haulage road, and several more times before they reached the main shaft. As fatigue set in, each was a little harder than the one before. He wasn’t sure, but he felt the wyrms were returning more quickly too.

He led them past the main shaft, down a side tunnel to the store.

The light of their lamps played over hundreds of casks of powder, stacked to keep them from the damp floor. The peppery smell of the stuff hung in the air.

‘What is this?’ Jonas said.

‘Blasting powder,’ Simon said. ‘The miners use it to break up rock. We’re going to shift as many barrels as we can to the main shaft.’ He picked up the nearest cask. It dragged on his arms, heavy as a small child.

Jonas hefted a cask. Riga tucked one under each arm. They hurried along the tunnel to the base of the main shaft, and set the powder casks down in the middle, where the hoist chains dangled.

‘More casks,’ Simon ordered.

Jonas and Riga trotted back to the store. Simon scratched the familiar sigil into the wall of the shaft.

The stone-wyrms were nearer this time, much nearer. Either he had misjudged the timing, or they had realised his lure was a false alarm — as a spider will, when you repeatedly shake its web with a twig: at first, it pounces on the intruder, thinking it a meal, and then it grows more reluctant, and finally retreats and sulks.

When the summoning faded, the stack of casks in the shaft had grown. Simon headed for the powder-store. Jonas grinned at him as they passed in the tunnel. The fire adept was carrying one cask and kicking one along the floor before him; not a practice Simon would recommend, normally.

Simon trudged between the store and the shaft and back again, and again. The other two were shifting barrels twice as fast as he could. He kept working. Pain pulsed in his bad leg. His arms and shoulders and back ached from the weight of the casks. His head hurt too, the dull spiteful ache of too many hours without sleep, too many summonings without rest.

The stack of casks in the shaft grew. Each trip, he walked farther into the recesses of the storeroom to fetch the next cask. And all the while, time ticked away, and the wyrms might be returning.

Time enough. He had to check on the wyrms.

When he came to draw the sigil, his hand shook with fatigue. He was tired and his whole body hurt and it was hard, harder than it should be, to focus on the glyphs. The summoning built slowly. It hung over him like pain and dread. He screwed up his face and forced himself to concentrate, telling himself this was the last time.

Earth answered. In its hugeness, he was tiny, and all pain was far away and very small. The stone-wyrms though — they were close. Far too close for comfort, and coming nearer. Even in the depth of his trance, Simon’s gut lurched in alarm.

This time, the wyrms moved fast and purposefully, and beyond them, he could sense that Other, the watcher. A Power in the Earth, but not of it — more human in scale and motivation, yet also larger, more powerful. Before it had noted them in passing, without interest. Now it turned its attention to the scurrying humans.

It came, and the stone-wyrms came with it.