The Gathering Storm (Crown of Stars 5)

“I hid the horses. What happened? How did they find us? Did you kill them?”

“No. I don’t know. Shades came out of the trees. Ai; God! They’re probably still wandering nearby! Let’s get out of here!”

Erkanwulf’s eyes got very round, and his mouth dropped open, then snapped shut. “Here.” He thrust one lead into Ivar’s trembling hands. “I’ve heard they come back to eat their kills. We’ll take the Carter’s track until light. They can’t abide human-made roads.”

“A-are you sure?”

“I’m sure that elfshot kills.” He, too, started to shake with fear, making the lantern light jig across the corpses. The lack of blood made the scene more gruesome. The corpses had already begun to stiffen.

Erkanwulf snuffed the lantern, hoping that the moon would give enough light to guide them. They fled east along the track, walking until dawn with the nervous horses on leads behind them, but they were too afraid to stop. When dawn came after an eternity of walking, they found a deer trail that wandered east, and they kept going at a steady walking pace because, after all, fear prodded them on, so it was only when they reached a stream and had to stop the horses from drinking too much cold water while overheated that they remembered that while they might march on they had to rest and graze the horses.

“Why didn’t they kill you?” Erkanwulf asked after they had watered and rubbed down the horses and turned them out to graze.

Ivar washed his face and drank from the rushing stream before he answered. “I don’t know.” He touched the ring, but its polished surface told him nothing. “I just don’t know.”

3

HE lay winded and gasping, recovering from the panic that had seized him just before the last of his air gave out. For a long time he sprawled in blackness, his only reference points the touch of water on his toes and the grind of pebbles and sand against his skin where he had dragged himself out of the flooded tunnel. The ground sloped gently upward until, at the limit of his reach, it humped up into a curved shelf of rock. The air swelled thickly in his chest; it seemed as heavy as the darkness surrounding him. He could see nothing, not his hand, not the floor, not even the armband that had before this faithfully lit his way in the depths.

After a longer while he shouted, but the caverns swallowed his voice. He heard no answering reply nor the scuffle of curious scouts.

Again he called out.

Again, silence answered.

Buried deep under the ground one heard silence in an entirely new way. No sound but that of his own breathing disturbed the air. If he shifted, then his knee might scrape rocks; his toe might lift out of the cold bath of water and cause a droplet to splash. That was all.

He stood and reached above his head, searching, but could not touch ceiling. He took in air, called out again, and a fourth time, and a fifth, and each time the sound of his voice faded and failed as he stood in a stillness so lucid that he finally understood that this was a dead place where nothing lived. He had swum into a blind pocket.

Without light, he could not explore to see how wide this cavern spanned or where tunnels might spear into stone to make roads that would lead him to light or help. He dared not move away from the water lest he could not find it again and, thus trapped, starve and die.

If he could not explore, then he would have no choice except to swim back to where his companion waited, where there was food and a chance to live buried in a gravelike prison. This taste, like defeat, soured in his mouth.

There had to be a way out.

“What are you?”

He shrieked and leaped backward, stumbling into the water, slipping, and falling to his knees. Then he began to laugh, because he recognized that rumbling whisper. The creature had been crouched in front of him all along, yet he had not sensed it. It made no sound of breathing. Now, it scraped away from him, retreating from the unexpected laughter, and he controlled himself quickly and spoke.

“I pray you, Friend, I am a messenger. I am come from your own tribesmen who are lost beyond this tunnel.”

“They are lost,” agreed the voice. “One among us watches since the time they are lost. If the deeps shift, then the path may open. How are you come through the poison water?”

“It is not poison to me. I am not one of your kind.”

“You are not,” it agreed. “We speak tales of the long-ago time when a very few of the creatures out of the Blinding dug deep. So do they still, but only to rob. Once they brought gifts, as it is spoken in the old tales. Once there was obligation between your kind and ours. No more.”

The words made his head hurt. Each phrase was a bar prying him open, cracking the seals that bound him; thoughts and memories spilled into a light too bright to bear. A great city. A journey through the dark.

Adica.

“No more,” he echoed, pressing his face into his hands as his temple throbbed and his skull seemed likely to split open. But despite his pain, he had a message to deliver. “Can you help them? Some still live, beyond the tunnel, but they are trapped. Can you help them?”

“Come,” said the voice. “The council must decide.”

It shuffled away, but he had to call after it.

“I can’t see to follow you.”