One moment, Syd was standing in a dark alley. The next, he was several layers underground. He rocked unsteadily on his boots, his brain struggling to catch up with the swift change of bright sky and biting air to complete darkness and unyielding stone. It felt like he’d lost time. Not a lot, just a second or two, but the sensation left him feeling strange and off-kilter. He blinked. Once, twice, until his eyes adjusted to the lightlessness. Wherever Eko had dumped them, it was down far enough that the lamps the city maintained for the sewer system were nowhere to be found. It was no real problem. Syd could see just find in the dark and so apparently could Eko, which put them at an advantage. Without lantern-light to give them away, they would have a better chance of taking their prey unawares.
He felt a tug on his fingers as Eko finally let his hand go. Syd watched as she brushed the ashes of the spent mushroom from her free hand. She was wearing what he had privately dubbed her ‘hard work wear’: a set of coveralls two sizes too large, made from the same soft material as her usual dark dress, and a sturdy pair of miner’s boots. Her coily hair had been subdued into a pair of braids today, kerchief tied firmly in place above them. Even though her clothes today were purely practical, Eko had not surrendered her earrings. Six delicate silver hoops; three through each ear that clinked softly together as she moved. The mage sent a pensive look around the tunnel. “Where the hell are we?”
Syd shrugged. All around them were broken bricks and hard packed earth. The passage was barely wide enough for the two of them to stand side by side. The air down here was unmoving, stale, and laden with water. Syd’s monster tensed in discomfort. Syd had to agree with the feeling. They had not been meant to be so confined. Syd felt buried, sealed in. His heartbeat hammered hard in his chest and sweat crawled icily down his neck. Without the sky above them, they were lost, unbalanced. He took a deep breath, shoving against the tide of panic rising in him. They were not alone down here; their mage was calm and capable. Eko would not leave them down here to die.
Right now, she was looking at him expectantly, and Syd remembered that she had asked him a question.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said, his voice sounding rougher than he wanted. “Definitely below the lowest excavated level, if I had to bet on it.”
Eko stepped out deeper into the tunnel. “Jeriko’s been busy,” she said, starting down the path. Being smothered beneath a countless weight of bricks and mountain didn’t seem to bother her one bit. She ran light hands over the wall, tapping on the worn-down runes carved there. “Travelling this deep into the mountain is far past what’s reasonable to just hide from Magehounds.” She twisted around to face him. “What’s he doing down here, I wonder.”
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Syd said, finally getting his feet to move. He eyed the dark stretching before them suspiciously. “Keep your eyes peeled, it’s more than just ghouls down here.” The wards that had been set up around Osso however many thousand years ago kept out the bigger monsters, but the littler ones had no problems getting in. And if the drunks at the bar were to be believed, more and more were finding their way in each year. One of the jobs they gave to their recruits was to do sweeps down here every month or so. It was good practice for when they were out on their own, but not a one came back without some sort of injury.
Eko rolled her eyes as she rummaged in her bag and produced another mushroom, carefully peeling off the marked-up paper she had wrapped it in.
Syd tensed. “More shadow walking?”
His mage shook her head, frown cutting deeper as she studied their surroundings again. “This far into the mountain, we’d be just as likely to end up inside of a wall if I tried.”
Syd’s chest got tight. “Were we at risk of that?”
Eko’s grin flashed white in the dark. She said nothing, but Syd caught the affirmative in her silence.
If he thought about getting sealed underground in a brick wall too long, he would go mad down here. So, Syd buried that fear and started walking. “So, what do we do now?”
“Now,” Eko sighed, removing a quill pen from her bag, “We rely on rougher methods”
She pushed the quill into her thumb until blood welled up around the nib. “This is a pathfinding spell.” With quick, sharp motions, she scrawled whirling lines of tight script onto her open palm. When that was done, she sat the new mushroom in the center of the markings. Before their eyes, the fungus began to glow, filling with a sickly purple light as Eko’s magic rose in the tunnel.
“The mushroom glows.”
“The magic inside of the mushroom glows,” Eko corrected shortly. She pointed a finger to the slightly pulsing arcs of sickly purple color that now peppered the tunnelway. “And so too do the traces of any magic that matches it nearby.”
“Damn, lady,” Syd said, impressed. “You are pretty useful to have around.”
Had he been alone, Syd would have had to track down Jeriko by smell and sign. He could have done it, but this would shave their search time down in a major way.
Eko snorted against his praise. “First year students in mages’ guilds are expected to have breadcrumb spells like this memorized. It’s nothing special. That said, this spell has its limits,” she said. “I have to keep the range small or risk burning out the spell too quickly, and it only lasts as long as I have mushrooms to feed it.”
“Guess we should get a move on.”
Down they went, following the glowing patches of light deeper into the heart of the mountains. The only sounds that accompanied them was the scrape of their footsteps on stone, and the scrambling of small creatures in the dark. The further they went, the harder Syd found it to ignore the heaviness of the walls around them. Rather than sink into that, Syd figured it was a good as an opportunity as he was going to get to have some of his questions answered. He cleared his throat. “So about last night…”
Eko did not turn around, but she didn’t need to. With his dark vision, he saw her shoulders tighten beneath her coat. He could also imagine her arched eyebrow in his mind’s eye quite clearly. “What about last night?”
Fair question, a lot had gone down the night before, but Syd had his focus on one specific part of the whole thing. “You’re not human.”
Eko chuckled, a bright, harsh sound in the silent tunnel. “No, Syd I am not human. My eyes didn’t give it away?”
“I figured you were mixed with something he admitted. “What you turned into though, is not anything I’ve ever seen.”
This time, Eko did turn around. He had been right about her eyebrow. It was hiked up nearly to her hairline. Her full lips were stretched in a teasing grin. “In all your years, you’ve not heard of the Nochzangre?”
“I’m only eighty-three,” he grouched. Which was squarely adult based on Tongré standards – not elderly by any means – and it was no time at all to some other Folk on Roa. “And I have never heard of Nochzangre.”
They came to a fork in the tunnel, Eko turned right. “They were one of the Primordial races,” she explained. Syd’s feet paused. Primordial races. Beings that had been born at the beginning of the world. According to legend, there had been six total, one for each vital element. None of those original races had survived the destruction of the First World. What had happened to them, nobody knew, but if those legends were to be believed, only three descending lines from those elder beings had persisted. Ku’uda, folk born from the first folk of the Sea. Granihgul, distantly related to the first folk of Stone. Kanatao, the diminished descendants of the first folk of Fire.
“The Nochzangre, the progeny of Night xirself,” Eko began, “never left any halflings behind when the First World ended. All of them went back to Night’s embrace when xe called for them. All of them, except for a human witch who was pregnant at the time. Her husband was a full-blooded Nochzangre and she had been watching him carefully. When it became obvious that they would have to leave this place, she ran away from him.
With every spell she had at her disposal she hid herself away. Her husband gave up searching and her child was born into a new world. Cut to however many generations later and you get my father’s family. All traces of the Nochzangre in our family line are gone save for the eyes and a casual affinity for shadows. Thanks to having gifts on both sides of my family, I was born with an unusually large capability for magic for a child. Shadows called to me, and I answered.”
Syd lengthened his stride to keep up as Eko’s steps quickened. Her shoulders had gone tense again. “We were spending the winter up with my father’s family when it happened,” she said.
Her voice pitched downward. “My father’s clan, the Odzobek, is influential Obsihichee clan with my grandmother serving as clan head for longer than I’ve been alive. While we were there, an upstart head from one of the smaller clans came to visit. I was eleven at the time. Too young to know what exactly the dispute was about and too busy playing with my cousins Chilii and Tuqir to care.”
It was hard to imagine the perpetually scowling mage he knew doing something as carefree as playing with other kids her age. She bent to examine a glowing spot on the tunnel floor. The light threw shadows across her face. Eko’s expression had gone hard and haunted, eyes unseeing as she worried her lower lip between her teeth.
“If it’s too painful,” Syd said, watching her scratch anxiously in the glowing dirt. “You don’t have to tell me anymore.”
Eko cut him a look. “Nonsense,” she said, as if being tongue tied by a memory was beneath her. She started walking. “We three were inseparable in those days, even at bedtime. We would bunk together when I came to visit. So, when the talks went south and the young clan head decided to use force to get his way, the three of us were all too easy to find.
“Chilii was the one he really wanted. As my grandmother’s heir, was the most valuable hostage. He was planning to use her to bargain and get my grandmother to agree to his demands. Tuqir and me were just a bonus. They snuck in, snatched us out of bed, tied us to the ruks they had flown in on, and flew out.” Her words came out flat, emotionless. It reminded Syd of the way he used to make mission reports back when he had served in the Vanguard. For him, the only way to get through the searing memories of gore and loss was to strip it of any emotion. To remove himself from the telling. He suspected Eko was using the same tactic. “We flew for a full day,” she told him. “I remember staring out into the open sky and being terrified of rolling off the back of the bird and falling to my death on the mountains below.
“They flew for a full day before we stopped to rest. We had been on separate birds but when we landed, they tied us up together so we would be easier to keep an eye on. When they first took us, Tuqir had fought them. Xe tried xir best, but a thirteen-year-old kid is no match for hardened warriors. They had to resort to beating xir unconscious. When they tied us together, I remember seeing Tuquir was still bleeding and could barely stumble on xir own. Chilii couldn’t stop crying.”
“And you?”
“In shock I think,” Eko admitted. “I hadn’t spoken since they took us. It had all happened so fast. I just…retreated into my head, I think. I was terrified and after what seeing them hurt Tuqir, desperate to escape. I had been shadow-walking for a couple of years at that time. Up until that point, though, I had never gone more than a few feet or taken anybody with me. But the way I saw it, I didn’t have much of a choice. We didn’t know they wanted to bargain with us. We thought they were going to take us to their keep and kill us. That night when everybody had bedded down, I told my cousins to take my hand, and I let the shadows swallow us whole.”
Syd could feel the darkness of the tunnel press in around them. What must it have been like, to be so small and lost?
Eko craned her neck back to look at him, a joyless smile on her face. “I had intended for us to drop back at my grandmother’s keep. I kept the image in my mind as clearly as I could. But back then, my handle on magic was tenuous at best and I hadn’t yet gotten the hand of working within the tides of wild magic. We were thrown deep into the timber. We had no supplies and no idea where we were. And we were terrified of what our captors would do if they found us again.
“Even worse,” she said. “Was that my little trick had siphoned more magic than I thought, and I was toeing the line of a burnout. While we wandered the woods, I kept the shadows close to us, cloaking us from anyone who might be searching. I never let it up, and the drain of it began to consume me. Fear is a powerful motivator, and I was too afraid of recapture to notice that I was dying.
“Our second day wandering, my ears, nose, and eyes began to bleed. My brain felt like it was boiling in my skull. Our third day, I stopped being able to tell the difference between reality and my imagination. In that state, my legs couldn’t support me. Chilii and Tuqir had to drag me. They begged me to let the shadows go. I refused, convinced that the second I did would be when they would find us again.”
Syd’s blood ran cold. Even knowing the end result, Eko alive and breathing before him, he found himself scared for the little girl she had been. The kid dying hurt and afraid in the woods. He was fortunate, he guessed. All of the horrible things that happened in his life had been done while he had been grown. What kind of scars did such things leave on a child?
“That night as I lay shredded and roasting from the inside out, a voice called out to me from the shadows. It told me I would not live to see the sun rise. It asked me what I wanted. I thought it was just my mind playing tricks again, so I answered. I told it: ‘I want to go home. I do not want to die’.”
“The voice said it could help me if I gave it my true name. I was desperate, so, I did. When I woke up, we were back in the keep’s front courtyard and my body looked the way it had last night. My grandmother recognized it right away,” she said. “I had been given a body like our first ancestor. The halfling the witched birthed all that time ago.”
They came up to a pile of dislodged earth and stone blocking the path. It rose nearly to the ceiling of the tunnel, but he could see purple light pulsing through a small space at the top. Syd climbed the debris and started to clear out a space big enough for them to wriggle through. “Did you find out who changed you?”
“No,” Eko admitted bitterly. “What’s worse, is I don’t know why.” She pointed to herself. “Like I said, I was out of my mind by then. I didn’t ask any questions, and I should have. I’m sure countless small children have died in Tolko’s woods over the years so what made that thing take interest in me?”
Thinking, Syd pushed more dirt aside. “Whatever it was, it kept you alive,” he told her. “That’s worth something.”
“It’s a bill that will come due eventually,” Eko told him. “And I have lost countless nights worrying over it. This form has an exponentially higher tolerance than a human body. After my change, I had more capacity for magic at eleven than most grown mages achieve in a lifetime. I feel like I underpaid, and whatever changed me will come to balance the scales.”
Syd and his monster both snarled at the thought. He reached down to help her climb over the rockslide. “Who else knows,” he asked as he pulled her to the top.
Eko’s eyes were steady meeting his. “My immediate family, my father’s mother, and you now.”
“Small circle.”
“Very much so,” Eko sniffed, sliding down the other side. Very primly, she brushed the dirt from her coattails and fixed him with a warning glare. “So don’t go running your mouth about it. I don’t like to advertise.”
“My lips are sealed.” Other words bubbled up in his throat. She had given him her trust, told him about something incredibly traumatic and altering in more ways than one. It would be fair, right, to give her an equal part of himself. The words sat ready on his tongue, a truth he should share. Syd’s own fear held him fast, fear of changing that look in her face. Silently, he wrestled with indecision until a hissing shadow broke him from his turmoil.
It came arcing out of the darkness, all razor teeth, claws and feathers.
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The mage swore in surprise, but this time, Syd was ready. He slid in front of Eko, shouldering her backward a few paces. In the same fluid motion, he brought his swords high, just in time for a pair of jaws to clamp down onto the metal. Setting his feet, Syd thrust the creature backward, putting most of his weight behind the throw.
Before he set the fledges loose in the sewers, Syd made sure to drill in their heads the main rules for the monsters they would encounter down here. The rule for voreks was simple: They travelled in packs. For every one you see, assume ten more are inbound.
He took stock. The tunnel was too small for him and Eko to fight side by side without falling all over each other. And for all her competence, nothing Syd had ever seen in Eko made him think she was adept at fighting in close quarters. This would go quicker if he didn’t have to worry about skewering her on accident. “Stay behind me,” he ordered.
Maybe she was still unsettled from her storytelling, but for once, his mage did not argue. He caught her raised brow before she stepped even further back, took a seat on the rockslide, and tucked the mushroom away in her pocket for safekeeping. “Make it quick,” she commanded. “And don’t get killed. Dragging your corpse topside would throw us off schedule.”
At her tone, both Syd and his monster laughed. Their witch’s suspicion was amusing. That was alright, she would learn.
It did not matter how many monsters came screaming down the tunnel, Syd was the only thing to be afraid of down here.
Syd couldn’t help the burst of feral excitement at the noise that came bouncing off the stone. The beast that shared his soul roared in anticipation. Lightning jolted through his bones. Syd gripped his cleavers and rocked on the balls of his feet. It had been a long time since they had been in a good fight. A horde of voreks seemed promising.
Another shot out of the dark, and then the game was on.
Syd caught two on his blades, checking his stance so they could not push him back. A third made a leap for him, landing sharp claws onto his exposed arms. Since his hands were full, Syd took a massive bite out of the voreks’ flank. Tongre ancestry meant that he had teeth like razors, and they had no trouble at all shearing through the creature’s scaly hide. Hot, thick blood coated his mouth as he bit down. The voreks screeched loud enough to make his ears ring. Syd snapped his head back, taking a large chunk of flesh with him. Syd was no stranger to raw meat, but voreks flesh tasted oily and bitter. So, he spat instead of swallowing.
The tide kept coming, and Syd hacked away with gleeful abandon, relishing stretch of his muscles and the impacts on his fists. It was a wonderful half-mad haze of violence that gave him a perfect outlet for the tension that had been building ever since they’d gone underground. He drove his bloody blade into yet another feathered neck. With a scream, the final voreks died and the tunnelway was once again silent.
Syd sucked in great heaving breaths of blood laden air, wiping away the thicker bits of gore that had gotten on his face. Then, he remembered.
The sharp joy of a good fight dimmed in his chest, replaced with acrid anxiety. Slowly, almost afraid to, he turned to face Eko.
The mage was watching him, wide eyed. Her mouth hung open in shock. Syd’s heart sank. He’d gone too far. She was probably terrified of him now. His nose couldn’t parse anything past the blood in the air, couldn’t smell that telling sourness of fear on her. The silence grew, ballooning into something foreboding and heavy behind his ribs as Syd waited. For her smooth voice to sharpen in a scream, for those night sky eyes to fill with revulsion.
But his mage did nothing of the sort. Instead, Eko pushed off of the wall, eyes on the mess he had so gleefully made. Carefully, she picked around voreks pieces until they stood toe to toe. She scowled down, drawing his attention to the splotches of voreks blood that now stained her coat. Her little nose wrinkled up in distaste. “You could have at least tried not to make such a mess,” she complained. “Do you know how difficult it is to get bloodstains out of wool?”
The balloon in him popped. Relief rushed through him so quickly it almost made Syd’s knees buckle. He tried for a smile, all too aware of the thick blood smeared across his jaw. “Messes are fun,” he said joked.
Eko wrinkled her nose. “Spoken like someone with a high laundry bill.”
She looked around at the mess of voreks parts splattered all across the stones. Her face narrowed as she bent over to one of the more intact corpses. Muttering silently to herself, she plucked the least bloody feathers from its body, stowing them away into her bag. She paused, leaning in to get a better look at its skin. “Its hide is corroded,” she said. “And these wounds look fresh.”
“There are some bigger creatures down here that spit acid,” Syd said. “But they usually stick to the riverside parts of the undercity.”
Eko shuffled between the corpses. “Claw marks,” she noted. “And more burns.” She lifted the leg of one. She turned back to him the gears, in her mind turning nearly loud enough for Syd to hear. “They were running from something.”
“Or someone,” Syd said, noting the stab marks in the one closest to him. “And it seems as if we’re headed right for it.”
XXX
With every step they took, Memphis’ anxiety grew. He squinted against the flickering light of Lily’s handlamp and glowered. They had left the sewers behind an hour or so ago. It was difficult to keep track of town without the sun to go by. Memphis usually kept a mechanical timepiece in his pocket, but with the threat of monsters around, he did not want to risk putting his gun down to check it.
The tunnel system below Osso was incredible. Memphis could not help the awe he felt as his boots scraped across the broken cobblestones. He had expected it to be cave like down here, but the undercity was the opposite. True, there were boulders and strange, luminescent plant life, but the walkways they took were paved. The walls were so narrow, they could only walk single file, but they were walls – at least partially. Rockslides and collapsing tunnels had buried most of the surrounding structure in loose earth. Some of the routes they followed were sealed off entirely by boulders and detritus, forcing them to backtrack and find other paths. The mountain was slowly swallowing this place, but the truth was undeniable. The undercity had been made with mortal hands and the fact that it was intact enough that Memphis could tell was a testament to the builders.
Up front, Anujak let off a soft snarl. Memphis felt his pulse pick up, anticipating another monster attack, until he saw his partner clawing at a soft mound of earth that had piled up beneath some boulders. Jaguar claws were not specialized for digging, but Anujak made it work, throwing great clods of dirt out of the way. There, at the bottom of it all was not more broken bricks but a hole. It was barely three feet across, the perfect size for a grown man to fit through. Memphis whistled, “Good work, kid.”
Anujak’s tongue lolled out in a wide, feline smile.
Squeezing his way around the captain, Memphis bent to get a better look into the pit. The lamplight did its best, but he could only see a few feet inside. The dirt inside of the hole sloped downward into the darkness. He strained to hear anything coming up from below, but no luck. Memphis sighed. He twisted back around to his partner and the captain.
“Hand me the lantern,” he told Lily. “I’ll go in first and make sure it’s clear.”
The captain’s face soured. “Don’t do me any favors,” she said darkly.
Pride, Memphis thought, gets folks in just as much trouble as pure recklessness, if not more. “It’s not a favor,” he told her flatly. “We need Anujak to find the way and you to back us up with the town. Right now, I’m the most expendable.”
Lily clenched her jaw but handed the handlamp over. “Be careful, Magehound.”
She did not have to tell him twice. A long time ago, Memphis would have been all fired up to take Jeriko out come hell or high water, risk to himself be damned. He would have been excited to be delving through underground ruins for the prospect of adventure alone. That had been the enthusiasm of a boy raised on his grandfather’s tall tales. He wasn’t that boy anymore. These days, Memphis had a lot more to live for. He reached for his inner breast pocket, where a small sketch of Des and Khadi rested. Memphis did not want to be the first man into the unknown, but it made the most sense. He held his revolver at the ready, and with the handlamp in his other fist, slowly entered the tunnel.
He took each step slowly. It would be just his luck to disturb the dirt and go sliding ass over teakettle into some waiting monster’s nest. But there were no monsters waiting at the bottom of the slope. Memphis held the lantern high, the orange light flickering off walls not covered in runes, but mosaics. Whole sections of tile were missing from some parts of the wall, but they were still enough that Memphis could only swear softly in awe.
Delicate tiles painted deep blue, black, and green gave the walls the illusion of iridescence. It served as a backdrop for skeletons to dance upon. Crafted in all shapes and sizes, they almost seemed to move jauntily around the walls. Their skinless grins were wide, manic. Some danced with partners, others danced with animals, or alone. They covered the walls and when Memphis looked down, he saw them on the floor as well. Although there was madness in their poses, their placement was not random. The tile skeletons wove concentric circles from floor to ceiling, each tier seeming more frenzied than the last. At the top of the circle an eye stared down wide and unseeing, tiled in striking green. Where its pupil was meant to be, an orb of amber was inset instead. It was a perfect cider orange, unblemished by a single cloudy spot on the surface and inside rested the bones of a serpent.
“Memphis.”
“Come on down,” Memphis said. His voice had gone soft, as if something in him was hesitant to disturb the place. He coughed and added more force to his next words. “It’s clear.”
He heard scrabbling and the slide of dirt moving as Lily and Anujak climbed down.
“Seriously, Magehound,” the captain was saying as she descended. “The point of scouts is communication. You’re useless if I have to call…in...after…” Lily’s words dried up as she took in the artwork around them. “What is this place?”
“I was hoping you could answer,” Memphis told her.
The captain simply shook her head, gaze stuck on the eye above.
Anujak recovered first, padding around the room to sniff at corners for Jeriko’s trail. He slapped a paw against one of the skeletons that had been placed at eye level on the wall. This one was mid-leap, holding a platter filled with fruit above its head. The exact same image was mirrored across from it, the space between just large enough for a human to step through. Anujak slapped the skeleton again.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Memphis said. “Keep your head on.” Lantern high, he stepped closer to examine the space. This was also a place where some of the tiles had fallen away. Almost indistinguishable from the mortar cracks, there was a straight seam running upward.
“I need your help over here, captain,” he said before putting the lantern handle in his teeth and placing both hands on the wall. The good captain caught on quick. She moved in beside him to do the same. Below them, Anujak pressed his shoulder onto the tiles.
“All at once,” Lily instructed. Then, she began to push. It barely moved, just a scrape of stone one stone, before Memphis heard the dry grinding of some mechanism releasing inside the wall.
All around them, the room began to shake. Anujak roared in alarm. The walls around them began to buck and shudder, throwing plaster dust and small tiles down onto them. Memphis lurched toward the wall, smacking the side of his face against the mosaic hard enough to make his teeth ring. Lily gave a shout of warning, pushing him to the side just as a large piece of ceiling came crashing down right where he once stood. Then, it all just, stopped.
Coughing, the Magehound rolled onto his hands, taking stock of his barked knees and bloody lip.
“Well,” he said, into the tense silence. “I guess that wasn’t so bad.”
In the spot they had been pressing on, was now a doorway. Much dustier and more bruised than they had been a moment ago, Memphis and his party stumbled through. He barely took three steps forward when his foot stepped out over nothing. “Shit.”
Strong arms snatched him around the middle as Lily hauled him backward, grunting with the effort.
Memphis heart beat a wild tattoo against his ribs as he righted himself. He had nearly stepped into a hole nearly twenty feet across, descending deep enough that Memphis could not make out the bottom. His stomach pitched and he looked to the captain. “That’s twice in five minutes you’ve saved my life. Thank you.”
Lily, looking a little pale herself, shook her head. “Keep it at two please,” she said. “You’re testing my reflexes.”
A spiraling staircase had been built into the side of the shaft.
It had probably been grand once, a path of polished wood that descended into darkness. Now, most of the planks that Memphis could see were splintered and rotting. Some of the sections were gone altogether. There was no railing, nothing to keep anyone from slipping off the stairs and breaking their necks on whatever lied below.
Memphis took a bracing breath and grimaced at his companions. “Down we go I guess.” Lily’s face was set in grim determination as she took in the stairs. Anujak strode forward, stretching his weight across the first two steps. The wood creaked under his weight, a cloud of dust and spiders puffed out, but the plank held. Slowly, he moved downward.
“Great.”
XXX
They had stopped for lunch. Eko sat on Syd’s left, chewing on her lunch roll while her mind ran rampant. She had spilled her guts all over Syd earlier. Like she had told him, that story was only known by the people in her house and one grandmother hundreds of miles to the north. What had possessed her to give that merc so much? But he’d listened, point to him. Bonus point he had managed to avoid the sympathetic platitudes most people fell back on when confronted with sad stories. Her ears burned in embarrassment even as a little warm spot brightened in her chest.
To avoid thinking about it too long, she shifted her thoughts to their hunt. They were deeper in the undercity than she had imagined existed. However, just because it was out of the way did not make it a perfect hiding spot. There were the voreks and the other monsters, not to mention the very real risk of getting lost down here. A risk that was amplified if one was an outsider. If Jeriko simply wanted to evade capture by Magehounds, there were a hundred better places to try his luck. So, what then, was so compelling about the undercity?
She moved to take another bite – then paused when the tunnel began to shake. The pebbles at their feet clattered together, clods of earth fell from the ceiling. Eko shot to her feet. “What the hell?”
As quickly as it came, the shaking stopped. Eko, let loose a breath she had not known she was holding, relieved. She knew the structures down here were fragile; experiencing it from the inside was something she had hoped to avoid. All told, that hadn’t been so bad. Just when her pulse was calmed down, the rumbling started up again. More violently this time, nearly throwing the mage off her feet. Whole bricks were falling from the tunnel now, crashing down around them like hail.
Before she could shout, Eko felt a tug at her coat as Syd snatched her up and twisted so Eko was on her back on the floor, his body curling around her. His arm was like an iron band around her middle, his other hand curling protectively over her head. As the rumbling intensified, he tightened around her. Dirt and dust rained down on them. Eko felt Syd’s body jerk as stones pelted his back. The shaking kept on.
She could not see, could not breathe for all the dust in the air. Her lungs seized in panic. They were going to die down here. She was certain. She bucked and squirmed, freeing her right arm from his grasp. Eko did not think threw the lid off her soul and stretched her palm upward. “Swallow.”
Power burst in her blood, ripping through her fingers. All around them was impenetrable darkness and a wall of noise. Then, nothing. The air was clear.
That had been entirely too close. Eko sagged in relief. Or at least she would have, if Syd had allowed it. He still had her in a vice grip. She wheezed, trying to force her lungs to expand. But the big merc wouldn’t let up. “Syd.”
She writhed, trying to get loose. It was no good, Syd had strength in spades and Eko couldn’t hope to match him physically. Oddly, it was not something she thought about often. Now, she had no choice. She managed to wedge a little space to crane her head up, only barely.
The eyes that met hers were wide fractured and feral. His pupils had gone to slits. There was nothing recognizable in them. Syd was gone, replaced completely by panic. He had stopped breathing.
Seeing him like that, felt wrong. Something in her rushed to fix it. She wanted to get free, but more than that, Syd scared was something that simply should not be.
Eko’s free hand pulsed with pain, leaving bloody tracks as she ran her thumb along the crooked bridge of his nose. Taking in a shaky breath, Eko pulled up the voice she saved for when Mayer came to her with nightmares. “Hey.”
He did not respond.
“We’re alright,” she said lowly. She held his stare, hoping that whatever was looking through Syd’s eyes would hear the truth in her words. “We’re alive. We’re fine.” She did not know how long they stayed like that. She just kept repeating those words over and over. Until he believed them. Until something familiar came back into his eyes and Syd’s arms relaxed around her.
He eased up to sit, taking her with him before he let her go entirely.
“Sorry,” he said. “I don’t know what came over me.”
Eko suspected that wasn’t strictly true. But she let it go, knowing that this was the worst time to press him. “I think that was a perfectly reasonable reaction, actually,” she said, donning the academic tone that he liked to tease her about. “If you hadn’t, I would have. You merely beat me to the punch.”
Syd’s eyes lightened, but his jaw stayed clenched. “You didn’t, though,” he said. “You saved us.”
With her bad hand, Eko gave him a mock salute. “Weren’t you the one who said I was useful to have around,” she asked. “Just trying to live up to your expectations.”
Syd rose, shaking dust and small stones from his person. He must have been one big bruise by now, with how much fell on him. How he could move at all, Eko had no idea. Syd himself did not seem to notice. Instead, he got close again and snatched her wrist. “You’re hurt.”
She looked down. Black blood stained the front of her coat, dripping freely from her partially ruined fingers. Eko curled her injured hand to her chest with a wince. That had gone fairly well, all things considered. Especially since she had only ever practiced that spell in the yard. Once. At a fifth the size.
Syd, however, was staring like she had just grown a second head. “How did you save us?”
“A pet project of mine,” she explained, her mind latching onto technical details rather than focus on pain. “Combining my affinity for shadows with traditional spell structure to manipulate void space. I call it abcimancy.”
Syd looked around the cave. Where once there had been a tunnel, Eko and Syd now beneath a perfectly smooth crater nearly as wide as she was tall. The rock had been sliced so neatly it looked nearly polished. “That’s insane.”
“It’s incomplete obviously,” Eko flexed her fingers.
“That, I can help with,” he said reaching into a small pack at his hip.
Eko curled her hand closer. Her hand was throbbing, but the pain was manageable. It would hurt more if he touched it. “No, I’m good.”
He frowned. “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Hand it over.”
“Not funny.”
“I am very funny,” Syd deadpanned. He stuck his hand out, waiting for her move. “I’ve spent a lot of time looking after soldiers. I know the difference between something you can walk off and something that will be a problem later. Now let. Me. See.”
“Fine.” If only because she didn’t want to lose her fingers. Eko uncurled her bleeding hand, wincing as Syd pulled it toward himself. His hands were surprisingly gentle, but it still hurt when he touched her.
He rummaged around the pack at his side, producing the tiny tin of salve he’d used on her yesterday. “They teach abcimancy at your fancy Mage’s Guild?”
“No,” Eko chuckled. “This was more of a side project.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I grew a conscience,” she sighed because explaining the tangled mess of her last half-year at Jadcro was not something she was in the mood for. “And it didn’t fit well with the life of a Tower mage.”
That was not nearly enough words to explain what had gone down, but Syd was gracious enough to let her get away with it. He grinned sharply at her non-answer. “And running around sewers, getting all busted up suits you better?”
“Apparently so.” Admittedly, Eko was having more fun over the last two days than she ever had in her last years at Jadcrö. She looked down to watch Syd smooth the cooling jelly over her damaged fingers. “At this rate, I’m going to have to reimburse you for the salve.”
Not looking up, he grinned. “I’ll bill you later.”
Once she was wrapped, Eko grabbed a new mushroom. “After this, we’ve only got one left,” she said. “Jeriko has been quite the busy bee.”
Eko scowled as little purple motes of the spell floated in the air, arresting above them instead of drifting down the path they had been on. They made a soft cloud of pulsing light, rising higher into the crater Eko had carved above them. She craned her neck, following their path upward and scowled harder. “Are those floorboards?”