by Tad Williams
“Is it not magnificent?” Antimony asked. “Who could have guessed this lay on the other side of Tufa’s Bag? I could almost forgive this beast and his kind for trying to kill us, just for bringing me here. This is what it must have been like when my ancestors first explored the Mysteries!”
Vansen wasn’t exactly certain what that meant. “It’s certainly beautiful, but we must get moving.”
“Of course, of course.” The monk said something to Browncoal, received a reply, then turned back to Vansen with a pained smirk. “He says he is sorry he had to reveal this to me to save his own skin. He had hoped neither my people nor the Qar ever found out about these caverns so his people could claim them for their own. In that way, at least, he proves himself kin to us Funderlings.”
The two little men led Vansen around the edge of the subterranean lake, which seemed almost as large as one of the lagoons in Southmarch Castle overhead. No matter where he looked down he could find no end to its depths, but from one or two angles he fancied he saw movement in the deepest shadows, although he told himself (and in fact hoped quite strongly) that it was only a trick of the lights he and his two companions wore.
Browncoal led them through the lake cavern and out the far end, where some ancient drainage had carved a sort of narrow valley down at an even steeper angle. They followed this low-ceilinged canyon, doing their best not to touch the delicate crystals like cone-shaped snowflakes that clung to the walls and disintegrated at the slightest touch. Antimony even wept after accidentally shattering one large and exuberant example that had sprouted sideways from the rock like a miniature tree, the trunk ramifying into ever more exquisitely narrow sprays of translucent stone. The drow Browncoal watched the unhappy monk in silence, his dirty face twisted in an unreadable grimace.
As the little company traveled deeper and deeper into the strange caverns Vansen saw things he could never have imagined—chambers hung with branching structures that might have been monstrous stag’s horns, and caverns filled with chalky pillars that grew both upward from the floor and down from the ceiling, as if two pieces of bread had been spread with honey, pressed together, then slowly pulled apart. Often beauty and danger came together as the travelers made their way along narrow tracks or over slender bridgelike structures with pits of empty blackness yawning below them.
Who would have guessed that an entire world lurked here beneath the ground? Vansen thought as they passed pools with eyeless white crabs and fish that darted away from their intruding footfalls. In some of the larger caverns bats roosted in astounding numbers—once they disturbed such a dormitory and the shrieking, flapping cloud seemed to take a good part of an hour to clear the chamber, the little creatures were so numerous. But more often Vansen followed his guides through confined spaces where he often had to crawl on his elbows and knees, or even on his belly, wriggling like a snake through narrow holes so that soon every part of him had been covered in mud and grit.
Finally they halted in front of one such gap, a crevice so small Vansen did not believe even his companions could get through it. He put down his pack and crouched beside it, measuring. It was no wider than the cubit between his elbow and fingertip!
“I cannot fit through a space so small,” he said.
The drow seemed to understand him; he said something in his guttural speech. “He says you must go,” Antimony translated. “This is the last narrow passage.” He frowned, listening. “Although he says that this is why they did not try to attack this way. It was too narrow for the ...” He fell silent. “He calls them the Deepings—I think he means the giants we call ettins. They could not fit through this tunnel and it was too long to widen—someone would have heard so much work.”
Vansen suppressed a shiver. “None of this matters. I will not fit.”
“Then he says you must go back,” Antimony reported. “There is no other way to reach the dark lady.”
But Vansen knew that only he could speak to her—only he had a chance to end this before every living person in Southmarch, big and small, aboveground and belowground, had been slaughtered. “Very well,” he said at last. “I’ll try. Can you take my armor and my weapon?”
Antimony considered for a moment. “Not and carry the rest of the food and water through a narrow place. I am not that much more slender than you—Nickel says I eat enough for two or three Metamorphic Brothers.”
Vansen did his best to smile at the monk’s weak joke. “Then I must leave the armor—but I will push the ax in front of me. So how will we do this?” Vansen asked. “Should I go last?”
“No. If you are as necessary to this envoy as you say you are, I do not want to be stuck on the far side from Funderling Town, unable to go back but unable to pull you out. If aught goes wrong, someone must be able to return for help. And I am certainly not trusting that inbred creature to go first. If you did get stuck, that would be the last we saw of him. No, I’m afraid you have to lead the way, Captain Vansen. Our little friend will follow, and I will be last.”
Ferras Vansen took off his byrnie and his padded undershirt—the change sent a chill through him so that his teeth chattered a little. He looked over to the drow, who was watching the proceedings with squint-eyed interest. “Don’t let him hamstring me,” he told Antimony.
“Don’t worry about that, Captain,” the monk said with a grim set to his jaw as he gathered the coils of the prisoner’s rope. “If he tries to do anything he shouldn’t, I’ll pull the leg right off him.”
“Yes, well, don’t kill him,” Vansen said. “We may still need him on the other side. Do I go in head or feet first?”
“Depends on if you want to travel in light or in the dark.” Antimony pointed at the Salt Pool lantern tied around Vansen’s brow. “No, you must go head first, Captain. Your shoulders are the widest part. Remember to lift your arms when you need to make yourself narrower. And do not fear—I will be behind you.”
Vansen took a deep breath, then a few more, but he knew he could delay no longer. He crawled to the hole. How could he ever get himself into such a tight space?
“One arm up, one arm down if you can manage it,” said the monk. “It will give you more choices of how to move, and it can make you even narrower.”
Vansen pushed his ax into the tunnel and then crawled in after it. To his surprise he managed to shift his shoulders and torso through the first tight space. The tunnel opened up a little after that, although he still could not bring his arms down below his head, so he nudged the ax ahead and then wiggled after it like a snake.
A very slow, clumsy, and frightened snake, he could not help thinking.
Everything in Vansen revolted at the idea of forcing himself ever deeper into the earth this way. Even the warm, moist air he was breathing began to feel thin and inadequate. The tunnel was not, as he had half-imagined, a single smooth passage like the burrow of an animal—it had been created by the accidental spaces left between huge slabs of fractured stone. He began to think about tremors, those times that the earth shrugged like a sleeping giant. If it did that now, even the smallest shift, he would be obliterated like a grain of wheat caught between millstones.
Once, when the tightness of the passage around his chest kept him from filling his lungs all the way he had to fight a sudden and surprising terror. He could dimly hear Antimony talking behind him, encouraging him no doubt, but his own body and the drow behind him blocked most of the sound and the monk’s voice was no more than a murmur.
Maybe he’s not encouraging me, Vansen thought suddenly. Maybe he’s thought of something he forgot to tell me—that there’s a pit or an even narrower spot ahead . . . or to watch out for snakes or venomous spiders . . .
Stuck in a tight bend and trying to free himself, Vansen banged his head painfully on the wall of the tunnel. He felt a trickle of wetness on his head and assumed it was blood. A moment later his lantern flickered and went out, leaving him in complete and utter darkness.
His heart raced, tripped, and seemed for a momen
t as if it would not catch its rhythm again. He was choking—trapped in blackness and strangling! No air!
“Stop!” he growled at himself, although the sound was more of a gasp or gulp than actual words. Still, it was his own voice. There was air. The sudden terror that was making his heart pound and his head feel as though his skull was being squeezed in a monstrous fist was only that . . . fear.
What does darkness matter, anyway? he asked himself. You can only crawl, moving forward an inch at a time, Vansen. You are a worm. Do worms fear darkness?
It was a weirdly reassuring thought; after some moments his heart began to slow. He suddenly saw himself as a god might see him—a god with a sense of humor: Vansen was only a little creature where he didn’t belong, crammed in a tunnel deep underground like a dried pea in a reed—the kind he used to blow at his brothers and sisters when they were children. The earth surrounded him, but it cradled him, too. There was nothing to do but go forward. When he stuck in the narrow places he would simply wriggle until he managed to free himself.
Forward. Only forward, he told himself. No point in anything else.
How the gods must be laughing!
Sweaty, shivering, with mud stinging his eyes and every joint trembling, Ferras Vansen at last crawled out of the far end of the crevice into a small cavern that felt as capacious and airy as the great temple in Southmarch after the tunnel. Browncoal crawled out behind him, followed by Antimony, who clutched the drow’s rope like a child hanging onto a kite string. They ate and rested, unspeaking, and then when Vansen could stand without his knees shaking they made their way forward.
They encountered only a few narrow spots the rest of the way, and nothing like that long, throttling tunnel; at last, after perhaps an hour or two of steady upward movement they clambered up into a gallery that had clearly been worked by the hands of thinking creatures, with crude pillars of stone left to hold up the roof so that the long, low series of chambers had the feeling of a beehive or a garden maze. Vansen was just wondering who and what had created it when a spatter of arrows cracked off stones above them. Vansen and Antimony dove for cover, the monk yanking the drow’s rope so hard the little creature flew off his feet and tumbled like a child’s toy.
The attackers quickly found the range and arrows smacked against the rocks all around them. A chip of broken stone gouged Vansen’s cheek. The drow Browncoal, crouching beside Antimony, began to scream at the unseen enemy in his guttural tongue.
“Tell me what he says!” Vansen demanded.
“I don’t understand all the words.” Antimony listened as the others shouted something back. Browncoal called out to them again, an odd tone of desperation in his voice. “Our drow is saying we come in peace to talk to the dark lady,” he told Vansen quietly. “But the others—they are drows, too—say something about the rope around his leg. I think they do not trust him—they think we force him to tell lies for us.”
“Cut the rope.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Cut the rope, untie it, what you will. But let him go to them so they can see we speak the truth.”
“Forgive me, Captain, but are you mad? What will stop them from killing us then?”
“Don’t you understand, Brother? We cannot fight them. They have bows and we do not, and even now they may be sending for reinforcements. Let the drow go.”
Antimony shook his head but did as Vansen ordered. When he realized what the monk was doing, Browncoal’s eyes widened. When the rope fell off he began to inch away from his captors.
“Tell him to say to his fellows that we come in peace.”
By the time Antimony finished translating the drow was already several steps away, raising his arms as he walked toward his fellows. One arrow snapped out of the shadows but by good fortune missed him. Browncoal stared balefully at the place from which the arrow had come and no more were launched.
“Now we wait,” said Vansen.
“Now we pray,” Antimony corrected him.
Ferras Vansen had time to address several different gods before Browncoal returned with a troop of his fellows, all dressed in leather armor and wearing almost identical expressions of suspicion. Despite Antimony’s misgivings, Vansen surrendered his ax—the drow who was detailed to carry it looked like an ordinary man staggering beneath a side of beef. The drows used the rope that had bound Browncoal to tie Vansen and Antimony by the wrists. Then their former prisoner said something to them, sharp and short. Vansen did not need the translation, but Antimony gave it anyway, in a voice of weary resignation.
“He says, ‘March.’ ”
They climbed steadily for another short while. As they went, squinting drows and other, stranger creatures appeared out of the darkness on all sides until a good-sized crowd followed them. Vansen began to feel like the leader of a religious procession, but couldn’t help remembering that in some processions it was the beasts meant for sacrifice that were carried on the foremost wagons.
They finally reached a huge, high-ceilinged chamber like the inside of a domed temple. The narrow path wound up the outside of the cavern wall and had been widened in some place with wooden walkways fixed directly to the stone. A troop of full-sized soldiers waited there, alien faces stern and eyes bright in their dark armor, and Vansen thought at first they had reached their goal, but instead the guards stepped aside to reveal a massive armored figure sitting on a rock. For a moment Vansen thought it was the demigod Jikuyin and terror gripped him, but as the drows prodded him forward he saw that this new figure, although huge, was smaller than the monster that had held them prisoner in the mines of Greatdeeps, and less like a man as well. Its skin was covered with rough, scaly skin like a lizard’s and its heavy-browed face seemed a crude approximation of human features, as if some creator god had hurried through its making.
Even seated, the thing looked down on them. As Vansen approached, the bright, surprisingly small eyes watched unblinkingly.
“Antimony,” Vansen said quietly, “ask Browncoal to tell this creature that we come in peace to speak with the dark lady ...”
“You shall not need Master Kronyuul,” the giant said in a voice like stone dragged over stone. “As you see, I speak your tongue. The Lady Yasammez likes her generals to know our enemies well.” His chuckle sounded like a hammer pounding slate. He rose, towering far above even his tallest guards. “I am Hammerfoot of Firstdeeps, war-chief of the ettins. You are assassins.”
“No!” Vansen took a step back. “We come to parley ...”
“Why should she parley with you? We will sweep you all away in days, both above and below the ground, and you know it. You come in desperation, hoping to kill our general. Do not worry! You will have your chance . . . but only if you kill me first.”
“What?” Vansen took another step back. “Don’t you understand? We come to parley!”
“Here, take up your weapon,” Hammerfoot said. “Give him back his ax. I shall have none.” One of the drows staggered forward with the Funderling ax. Vansen took it, in part out of pity for the creature who had carried the heavy thing some distance, but he did not lift it.
“I will not fight you,” he told the giant.
“Come, even you Sunlanders are not such cowards, are you?” Hammerfoot rumbled, leaning forward until his immense, cracked-leather face was no higher than Vansen’s own. “I will even let you strike first. Are you still afraid? Your ancestors were not so hesitant at Qul-Girah, where they killed my grandfather with buckets of burning pitch. Does only water run in the veins of their descendants?”
From childhood, and even after, when he became a soldier, Vansen’s quiet calm and slowness to anger had often been mistaken for cowardice. Only his captain Donal Murroy had recognized the fire that burned inside, that Ferras Vansen was a man who would put up with nearly any provocation to avoid a meaningless fight, but would battle like a cornered animal when there was no other choice. Still, Vansen felt hot shame rush through him at Hammerfoot’s taunts and the harsh laughter of
those Qar who could understsand what the giant said.
“Take me to the dark lady,” Vansen said again.
“Your path is through me,” Hammerfoot said. “Is it because you have left your armor behind?” The ettin peeled off his giant chestplate and let it drop to the cavern floor with a noise like a temple gong. “Come, Sunlander, come and die—or are you completely without honor?”
“Captain!” It was Antimony’s voice, fearful to the breaking point.
Everything in Ferras Vansen strained to take up the ax, to wipe the smirk off that great, leering face in a cascade of red—or whatever color a giant bled. He lifted the weapon, weighed it in his hands. Hammerfoot spread his massive arms to show he would not block the blow.
Vansen dropped the ax to the floor of the cavern. “I will not fight. If you will not take me to your mistress then you may as well kill me. I ask you only to let the Funderling monk return. Your Browncoal will tell you he came in good faith and only to translate.”
“I make no bargains with sunlanders ...” snarled Hammerfoot, raising his tree-stump fist over Vansen’s head.
“Do not kill him, Deep Delver,” a new voice called, icy as an Eimene wind. “Not yet.”
“Elders protect us,” Antimony murmured.
“Lady Yasammez!” Hammerfoot sounded surprised.
Vansen turned to see a small procession stepping down off the spiral track and onto the cavern floor. Leading it was someone he had never seen before but nevertheless recognized instantly. She was taller than Vansen himself and caparisoned in black plate armor. A long white sword, unsheathed and thrust through her belt as though it were merely a spare dagger, seemed to glow with a subtle light of its own. But it was the woman’s face that arrested him, stony as a ritual mask, hard as a figure carved atop a tomb. At first Vansen saw nothing alive in that face at all but the eyes, brilliant as slashes of fire. Then the fiery gaze narrowed and the thin lips curved in a mirthless smile and he saw that it was indeed a face, but one without kindness or sympathy.