The day passed in a haze. Talia cycled, played with Menace, and took her watch shift, only getting sleep when her mind finally succumbed to exhaustion, leaving her slumped against the backboard with her journal splayed out in front of her and An Exploration on the Mechanics of Arcano-Suns half-shut at her side.
Unfortunately, her exhaustion only meant that the nightmares didn’t jolt her awake. Her sleep was plagued by visions of sapients standing on a bed of molten magma, their very skin igniting under the intense heat. Fingernails melted to puddles and hair disappeared in acrid smoke. Eyeballs burst and teeth cracked and blackened. The dead’s skulls glared at her in accusation. Hanmul’s scorched bones did nothing to hide his disgust and disdain.
“You killed us,” he screeched, his voice tinny and toneless, “your secrets, your arrogance killed us. You could’ve saved us—”
A chorus of the dead rose from the magma around her in monotone symphony, all muttering and moaning in that same toneless, mechanical voice. Oily tar dripped from the darkness high above her and suddenly Talia found herself trapped against the molten rock with them as they chanted unintelligibly. Guilt bubbled up in her like a putrid torrent, coating her tongue with bile as her limbs caught alight.
Then the dream shifted. Darkness turned to blinding light and the flames devouring her body turned to a haze of purple runes. The tar, oily, still sluicing from the ceiling, became a morass of angry red script, almost like—
Pain pricked into her neck and Talia woke with a start, fumbling at her waist for her sword.
MREOW
Oh shit!
The arcanist scooted over, uncovering an angry Menace, his orange eyes glaring at her. A twinge of pain on her neck and the wet warmth of blood mixed with cold sweat running down into her armour told their own story.
“Sorry, boy,” she muttered, running a hand through her sweat-soaked hair, “Didn’t mean to smush you.”
She sent a tendril of psionic power into the kit’s mind, trying to explain that it was an accident through a mix of images and feelings. Surprisingly, her ad-hoc apology worked better than she’d even expected. With a heart-melting little meep, the mirage lynx fluffed up, slipping his head under her arm and crawling his way up onto her chest where he plopped down in a puffy white ball and disappeared.
Talia froze, not wanting to ruin the moment of unexpected closeness. The kitten had been letting her pet him, but only begrudgingly, almost as if he was alright with it as long as he was rewarded with jerky. This was the first time Menace had actually initiated contact on his own—well, non-violent contact— and it made the psion re-evaluate just how much the cat understood when she communicated with him.
Hesitantly, careful not to startle him, Talia raised a hand and began running it through his fur, causing iridescent ripples where the two met as the patch she was in contact with fizzed back into blurry visibility. She sighed, sagging back and staring at the ceiling, just taking a second to enjoy the unexpected comfort of the lynx’s velvety soft coat.
Then he started purring. A deep, soundless thrum that permeated her chest soothingly, rocking her eyes closed and pulling the tension from her bones.
I was going to just get up and get started, but…
Talia took a deep breath, pulling an inquisitive mreow from Menace. She patted him on the head gently, rubbing his ears and feeling the nascent nubs of horns on his forehead.
“Thanks buddy,” she sighed, closing her eyes and allowing the toxic mix of nightmares to fade to the back of her mind.
This time, she didn’t dream.
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Talia slumped atop her chassis of the ash lance, head resting atop her arms and body swaying with the irregularities on the floor of the cramped tunnels under the wagon wheels. To any that saw her, she must have appeared to be bored and barely standing on her feet. Which wasn’t exactly wrong, unless you considered that she didn’t need her eyes to remain vigilant. Her mindsense swept the corridors ahead and behind them, its range at the sides greatly limited by thick, hard olivine.
Regardless of any criticism of her alertness, the psion was distantly aware of the presence of every member of the expedition, not to mention the rare insect or rodent that inhabited the bleak tunnels. How the critters survived was beyond her. The warren of tunnels was devoid of anything that any creature would even loosely describe as food.
But that didn’t matter.
Aanyyy time now, we’ll be out of this claustrophobic hell and back on the Ways. Feels like a lifetime since we’ve had space to move, let alone a real road.
If Calisto’s estimates could be trusted, the caravan would abut out of the natural cave system and back onto the Ways soon. Beneath her, the tunnel drake pulling wagon one heaved and chuffed, its eyes spinning wildly and its muscles twitching. Talia shuddered as she examined the effects of eritroot on the beasts.
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The stimulant was popular amongst miners and quarriers, giving a burst of strength and energy at the cost of poor focus and a harsh come down afterwards. Sapients usually took a spoonful of the ground stuff steeped in their tea. Apparently, such a dose would be was nothing for a beast, as she’d seen wagon one’s driver—Michael, or was it Mikael?— drop a whole crushed bulb into the drake’s feed bag.
Though she now understood Copperpike’s hesitancy when it came to the drug, none would be able to deny its effectiveness. They’d been swerving through the tunnels as fast as was reasonably safe, slowing only for tight corners and sudden inclines.
The cave system spiralled upward overall, sometimes deviating left or right, but always seeming to always return to its heading. If Talia hadn’t known better, she’d have guessed that the warren had been carved out with intent. As it was, a glaze of magmatic glass and altered olivine, coupled with the pool of magma they’d left behind implied that the passageways had once been full of molten rock at some point in the distant past.
Her speculation was cut off as the wagon bent around a corner, emerging into a widened passage that opened up sharply. Talia’s dark vision revealed the opening for what it was—they’d arrived. After a month off the proscribed path, the expedition had finally rejoined the Ways.
Karzurkul was within arm’s reach.
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Gods, I think I’m going to retch.
The air around them was filled with the sickly scent of dead things. Dead beasts, big and small, lay rotting in heaps across the road. A pack of sarkians—small reptilian scavengers—scampered away from the carcass of a wyrm that hung half-in half-out of a tunnel it had carved for itself. Its tube-like, scaled girth had collapsed on itself and the smell made it clear that it had been dead for weeks, if not a month.
Its triangular maw was nowhere to be found.
Whatever can rip the head off a fully grown wyrm…
Talia shuddered and hoped that the perpetrator was long gone.
Knowing, my luck, it’ll be sleeping in front of the gates to the city.
She suppressed a black chuckle, turning her attention back her mindsense. This section of the ways was teeming with life—mostly scavengers—small skittering things that tugged putrefying flesh from corpses and picked at drying bones. Thankfully, there was none of the flickering that characterized aberrant minds, nor anything particularly large—or a least, particularly intelligent.
The caravan pressed onward, their speed increasing markedly now that they had a real road to follow. The silencing enchantments on the wheels worked feverishly, to the point that Talia worried they might run out of mana in the few hours it’d take them to get to the city.
Why they put the mana-funnels on the axles themselves is beyond me, basically means the wagon has to stop to fill up. Maybe—nope, getting off track, Tals. Focus.
Right on cue, the wagon rolled over a bloated corpse, spewing a splatter of viscera and giving Talia a lungful of noxious gases. Though the carcass was small—some kind of rodent—its decaying body packed a punch. She choked and clutched her mouth, swallowing frantically as tears filled her eyes.
Oh, by Wyrr’s wrinkled prick that’s—
—bleurg
The psion felt mirth from the direction of her fellows on the roof as she puked over the side of the wagon, throwing up her already meagre breakfast, making sure to catch her clicker as it popped out of her mouth. The squad of delvers nudged each other, taking advantage of the prime opportunity for levity amid all the tension.
Talia was unamused. She flipped them all a pretty universal hand sign with one hand and pulled out her waterskin with the other to rinse her mouth. If circumstances hadn’t prevented it, she would’ve been grumbling and doing her best imitation of her surly old master.
Crotchety old men aren’t born, they’re made—by the childishness of immature idiots.
When the wagon swayed, running over yet another corpse, Talia was ready, her nose pinched shut and her lips clamped. Unlike the four others. She grinned vindictively when the youngest succumbed just as she had, though unluckily for him, he’d have to explain the disappearance of his clicker to Han—Dhustrun. When his comrades turned their silent mockery onto a new victim, she gladly joined in.
Who said vengeance was best served cold?
Talia frowned, looking away from the young man—his forlorn gaze locked on the vomit-covered clicker disappearing behind them— and turning her attention forward.
What’s that noise?
Glancing at the still silently chuckling delvers, none seemed surprised, though the sound was impossible to miss: a deep thrumming rumble that murmured through the tunnel, steadily growing louder.
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The sound became clearer as the wagon train hit the halfway mark. The thrum had turned into the rushing, rumbling drone of vast quantities of water hitting a cave wall, or maybe a lake.
A fucking waterfall. That’s what we’re hearing. Guess no one thought it was important to mention.
Talia got distracted imagining just how much water would have to be flowing for them to be able to hear it from kilometres out. The echoing quality of the Ways certainly helped, but even then, it had to be an inconceivably large cascade for the sound to carry so far.
On the bright side, anything hunting by sound is screwed, and good luck hunting by scent in this impromptu graveyard.
The thought buoyed her, and she allowed herself to hope that the struggle of the journey was over, for now. They’d almost certainly have to fight their way back to Karzgorad, but by all appearances, to both her eyes and her sense, the journey ahead held only scavengers and bones. Anything large would have either moved on after eating its fill or served as a meal to the winner of the primal battle.
Though it could be argued that the real hardship was about to begin, what with the enormity of their task, at the very least, they’d be able to put fighting behind them for a while.
The way back on the other hand.
Worries for another day, Tals. Eyes up and stay sharp. Let’s not forget about the Aberrant so quickly, shall we?
The psion shook her head, frowning at the pit in her stomach, the one filled with screams and molten rock. For a moment, she thought she smelled the scent of burning flesh in her nostrils and the stifling heat of an inferno on her face. The drone of the waterfall, if she listened closely, carried muffled hints of agonized screams cut short.
Perhaps, once they’d arrived, another visit with Lazarus was in order.