Long, Dark Road

by Bianculli, Susan

  “How do you make magical items?” asked Heather.

  Ragar frowned. “I do not know. Perhaps Auraus might.”

  At her name, the Wind-rider opened her eyes. “I cannot exactly tell how far the crack in the floor goes, but for the short length of time my spell was active it felt like a tunnel that does not go straight down, but does go at a sharp downward angle.”

  “Okay, we have a clue now. Let’s have dinner quickly, and get moving,” I said firmly.

  Not too much later we were all done and were standing around the hole in the floor.

  Dusk said, “Give me the carpet, Lise. I will go down with it, and if the tunnel opens into the ceiling of another cave, I will spread the carpet for us to stand on.”

  “Hey, shouldn’t I be the one to do that, chica?” Jason asked. “I have the training in climbing both up and down from places.”

  Jason was referring to his time in the Urban Survivalists, the New York street gang where they had stolen stuff to stay alive. He’d learned things like lock-picking, stealth, and second story work—that last which might be more useful now.

  “You cannot use the carpet,” Dusk reminded him.

  “Oh yes I can now,” said Jason smugly as I frowned at Dusk. “Remember?”

  The Miscere Surface-elf looked startled—apparently he had forgotten.

  “Do you have the kind of training that Jason has had?” I asked Dusk.

  “I confess I do not, but I do have some climbing experience,” the amber-eyed Surface-elf replied.

  “Tree climbing experience,” Auraus put in, shooting a look at him.

  Dusk frowned slightly at her but nodded his head at her qualification. I thought for a moment, but in the end it really didn’t matter who went first—we all would eventually have to go down.

  “Dusk, why don’t you go first,” I finally said. “And then Jason can go to help you if it’s needed.”

  Dusk and Jason exchanged glances, and then Dusk put his plan into action. Seeing Auraus’ nervousness growing, the amber-eyed Surface-elf gave her a quick kiss of reassurance before tying a magical torch to his belt for light and disappearing into the crevice while balancing the carpet on his shoulders.

  “How far down did your spell sense?” I asked Auraus to distract her after Dusk was out of sight.

  The golden-haired Wind-rider frowned in reply. “Not far; I am still young and fairly inexperienced.”

  “None of the tunnels we have been in have been all that long,” Ragar said reassuringly with a wink at me. “We probably will not have to climb down this chimney of rock for long before getting into the next open area.”

  His words reminded me of the chimney we’d had to climb up to escape the keep during our first visit there. I smiled a little as the memory of that escape helped settle my nerves—which probably was what he’d been trying for.

  “Hey, Auraus?” Heather spoke up unexpectedly, “Can you answer the magic item question?”

  I shot a grateful look at Heather. It turned out that the Wind-rider had not heard our conversation while spell-casting, so we recapped it for her. She shrugged when we were done.

  “That was not part of my past Priestess training. That will come later, when I have more experience and power,” Auraus said shortly, twisting her long, slender fingers together, her eyes never leaving the crack in the floor through which Dusk had disappeared.

  Realizing we were not going to distract her, we waited as calmly as we could for some sign from Dusk. Time went by with no signal from him at all. Ragar, Heather, Jason, and I started trading looks, and Auraus’ grey eyes started looking more and more anxious. Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  “Okay, Jason? Go down and see what’s happened. Maybe Dusk has gotten stuck somewhere out of hearing range,” I said.

  Auraus gave a start, a look of terror crossing her face, and I could have kicked myself for my thoughtlessness.

  “Sorry, Auraus,” I muttered, embarrassed.

  Jason threw me a jaunty salute and then gave me a quick kiss. Arming himself with a magical torch, he climbed down into the hole.

  Just before he vanished from sight I called down into the tunnel, “If you don’t communicate with either a shout or a re-appearance by the time I reach a count of three hundred, we’re coming down after you!”

  “Sure thing, chica,” he said, his voice sounding both echo-y and dull at the same time.

  I watched until his light faded from view. As soon as I could not see the torch’s illumination anymore, I started my slow count.

  “… two hundred ninety eight, two hundred ninety nine, three hundred,” I finished sometime later.

  During my count the others had all gathered around to stare down into the depths of the hole with me. When I stopped counting, we all exchanged glances.

  “Something’s wrong,” Auraus said with a quaver in her voice.

  “I agree,” I said grimly. “They’re obviously in trouble of some sort, and we have to go help them.”

  Ragar said, “I will go first, Lise,” he said. “If they fell, I have a better chance of stopping us from falling. I am larger than they are and can brace myself better.”

  “All right,” I said. “Ragar first, then Heather, then Auraus, and I’ll bring up the rear.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Auraus not to climb down after me, but I thought it would make her keep moving better if someone was following her. It turned out the crack in the floor went down a lot farther than I’d thought. I was beginning to feel hemmed in even though I was the last one in line, and I tried to dissuade myself that the walls were closing in on me as I went down. It didn’t help any that the crack narrowed and widened unpredictably. And if I was feeling claustrophobic, I could only imagine how Auraus felt. I kept on encouraging her every couple of minutes to help keep her from freaking out, but I didn’t admit to her that hearing my words out loud was helping me, too. After some uncountable time, the Wind-rider suddenly stopped in front of me.

  “Auraus, keep going,” I urged.

  “No,” she said flatly.

  I was flabbergasted. “What do you mean?”

  “I think you mean ‘yes,’ intruder. Come on out. And bring your companion with you,” said an unexpected and unfamiliar voice.

  My heart started pounding.

  “We have your companions,” the voice went on calmly. “You can either come out under your own power, or we will come up and drag you down.”

  We? I thought. Oh, no. Could it be…?

  Auraus looked at me grimly over her shoulder. “It seems we have run into an Under-elven scouting patrol.”

  Chapter 12

  My heart dropped into my boots as my worst fears came true. We’d run into the Chirasnivians before we were ready.

  “Are you coming out? Or are we coming in?” asked the voice, impatience tingeing the original calm.

  Auraus sighed, “We are coming.” She looked over her shoulder and mouthed Run, Lise!

  For an instant I hesitated, but I knew if we all became prisoners of the Under-elves, how could we rescue Arghen? Then a pang shot through my heart. Jason! They had Jason again! I knew then I needed to remain free to rescue him and everyone else. Leaving my pack where it was as Auraus started making her way down very slowly, I turned and scrambled back up the narrow passageway.

  “Stop, Surfacer!” the unfamiliar voice yelled.

  I heard Auraus cry out in pain and, glancing over my shoulder without stopping, saw her rudely yanked down the tunnel out of sight. A scuffle echoed back up to me, and I guessed that the Wind-rider was trying to block the Under-elves from coming after me as long as she could. I climbed as quickly as I dared, but my big problem was where could I go? There had been no side tunnels—just this long crack. I kept scrambling upwards anyway as the sounds of pursuit behind me. When the crack reached one of the straighter parts, there was a sproing and a whizz, and a tiny, grey crossbow bolt nearly parted the hair on top of my head. It bounced off the stone wall and
almost fell backwards into my face. I saw that the tip had a smear of green on it as I dodged the bolt’s fall, which reminded me that Under-elves liked to poison their weapons.

  “If you do not stop, the next bolt will be one finger’s width lower,” said a surly voice.

  I wasn’t stupid. I stopped.

  “Good. Now turn around and come back down.”

  I turned reluctantly around and saw a male Under-elf in a blackened chainmail suit standing braced in the passageway, a dull green sash crossing from shoulder to the opposite hip bearing a symbol I didn’t recognize, one wrist-mounted crossbow trained on me. My hand twitched towards my sheath—could I run him through with my saber before he got another shot off at me?

  He must had seen my small movement because he said, “Do not be foolish. We have all your companions already down in the travel tunnel below. We can just as easily bring your corpse down to them instead of bringing you in alive.”

  “Not if I skewer you first,” I countered with false bravado.

  The Under-elf smiled a nasty smile. “Try it, abomination.”

  I blinked in surprise at being called that. But, realizing he really held all the cards here, I held my hands up in surrender. The Under-elf looked like he was a trained warrior like Arghen. Despite my strides in the last weeks, I was still just a young teenager learning the ropes. He was right—it would be foolish of me to take him on alone in this confined space, especially against his poisoned crossbow bolts. Satisfaction flashed in the warrior’s amber eyes for a moment at seeing my silent capitulation, and he beckoned me down towards him. When I was within reach he disarmed me of my Goddess-gifted saber and belt knife. He had me slither around him so that he was behind me, and he kicked my pack along the ground into the backs of my legs as we climbed the rest of the way down.

  We came out into a huge cavern made of stone colored a variety of grey shades with a soaring roof relatively clear of stalactites and stalagmites. This told me there was no water nearby, or there would have been both kinds of stone formations. I took my first breath of relatively fresh air in a long time, provided by the white air moss intertwined with the lighted lichen on the stones walls and ceiling, staples of the Under-elven travel tunnels. The various tunnel entrances scattered around the cave’s perimeter made this a Cavern of Convergence, one of the huge places underground that intersected several travel tunnels that connected those Under-elven city-states that were relatively nearby.

  My companions, who had also been disarmed, were being held at crossbow point not too far from me by three Under-elves scouts dressed like the one who’d followed me. I guessed this group was probably the Duty Patrol for this area of the tunnels. In the past, Arghen had occasionally spoken of his time in the Relkanavian Duty Patrol. Around campfires at night on our various journeys, he’d told us of the monsters he’d fought, and the spies he had caught, in the name of keeping the travel tunnels near his home city-state clear of intruders. That is what we were to these scouts: intruders. But the scouts’ presence here meant that we were within a day or less of the Under-elf city-state they came from, so that was at least something.

  It would be really good timing if those guides Frelanfur talked about would show up right now, I half wished, half prayed.

  I swallowed nervously as my pack was flung by my captor across to the far wall of the tunnel out of reach. It landed on top of the others’ already haphazardly piled there on top of the still rolled up flying carpet. I looked longingly at the cloth-wrapped metal iron bars I could see peeking out of the top of Heather’s, Jason’s, and my packs. The bars, fortunately, were securely enough strapped inside our bags to prevent them from casually falling out. Scanning up the walls above our items, I was surprised to see that the symbols written there didn’t look like the ones I’d seen in the Chirasnivian tunnels. Then it hit me: the sashes that these Under-elves were wearing weren’t in the colors I’d come to associate with the Under-elven military of Chirasniv, either.

  “Where are we?” I asked no one in particular.

  “It appears we are near the city-state of Kelsavax,” Dusk’s voice replied with no emotion in it.

  Kelsavax? Not Chirasniv? I wondered to myself. Why had Frelanfur brought us to this city-state’s territory and not to the area around Chirasniv?

  While I assessed our odds about surviving a fight with this quad, the Under-elves argued among themselves about what to do with us. The female scout was the first to speak and was in favor of just killing us then and there. A male scout reminded the other scouts of the honor it would bring the patrol to bring in the largest group of Surfacers that had ever been heard of breaching the Sub-realms of Kelsavax. A different male scout reminded the Duty Patrol members that they were technically outnumbered, and that they might find it more troublesome to bring us in than to kill us. The last scout, another male who wore the markings of a Sub-leader in the military, remained silent.

  I whispered to Dusk, “The guy who brought me down here called me an ‘abomination.’ What’s up with that?”

  “Never mind that, we need to take them down,” Ragar interrupted in a soft growl to me. “We are six to their four, and we have the … you know what.”

  His green cat-pupiled eyes flickered over to our packs, and I knew he was referring to the iron bars. Auraus stared at Dusk with a tinge of hysteria in her grey eyes, but he looked without expression at me as if not wanting to influence me one way or the other, leading me to believe he would advise a decision either way of fighting or submitting. Out of the corner of my eye I saw all four scouts stiffen. Their Elven hearing had all too obviously been paying attention to us even as they argued among themselves.

  “Chica?” Jason breathed, looking like he was half-eager for a fight, while Heather looked all cautious.

  I held up my hand. Right now the Under-elves had us at a slight disadvantage because of the poisoned crossbow bolts—but if we really wanted to, I was sure we could probably take them, even if they were all likely scads better fighters than we were. We had room now, we had two more people than they did, we had magic that could put them at a disadvantage and could deal with the toxic bolts. Auraus had said once she could handle poison, and as Heather now believe in the Goddess Quiris we didn’t have to worry about her not being able to be cured anymore. We also had a secret weapon on our side—the three iron bars.

  I was about to give the order to attack, but then the last conversation that Frelanfur and I had had flashed across my mind and mixed in with my wondering about the guides that he’d bargained with me about. All of a sudden I got an inkling of why the dragon had brought us here, and I shut my mouth.

  “What should our course of action be, Duty Patrol Leader Quorik?” the first scout meanwhile demanded formally in a sarcastic voice of the Subleader, who had not yet said anything.

  Before he could reply, I announced in a loud voice, “I want the Conductivus to decide our fate!”

  Everybody, including those of my own party, looked at me in shock.

  “How do you know of the Conductivus?” the Duty Patrol leader demanded harshly of me.

  I shrugged. “It doesn’t matter how I know, it just matters that I do know. I know that the Conductivus has the power to reverse any decision that has been made, because a Conductivus stands revered outside Under-elven law. And I am confident that the Conductivus will want to talk to me.”

  “She has no right to demand this!” said the female scout. “She is not even an Under-elf!”

  “And maybe not even a Surface-elf,” said the Sub-leader thoughtfully. “Or at least, if she is one, she and those two are sickly ones.” He pointed to Heather and Jason as well.

  “We are not sick!” said Heather indignantly. “This is just the way we look!”

  “But she knows about the Conductivus, which is suspicious in and of itself, Traxis,” said Quorik, frowning as if ignoring Heather’s words. “And the rest in this grouping do not look as a normal being should. One has what appear to be wings, one has amber
eyes like an Under-elf despite looking like a Surface-elf, and one is completely covered in fur. What if this is some kind of test? If they are a test and we go ahead and kill any of them before the Conductivus has ruled, then their ghosts will run to the Conductivus telling tales and we would find ourselves in the half-life along with them.” He looked at the other three scouts. “Since this is a first for us, I am willing to entertain opinions from you for now.”

  As Traxis scoffed at the idea of a test using Surfacers, I thought to myself, Half-life? Well, I guess they couldn’t call it afterlife because that’s reserved for the final destination after death. So “half-life” to describe ghosthood makes sense, I guess.

  An argument broke out among all the scouts at the invitation, but it was pretty much a foregone conclusion. As soon as I’d asked for the Conductivus, I somehow knew they’d have to listen. Which was what Frelanfur had been trying to tell me in our high-flying conversation. My request had bought us some time to figure out what to do from here. But why did Frelanfur bring us here in the first place?

  Chapter 13

  Under cover of the Under-elven argument, Dusk said to me, “Good thinking, Lise.”

  Auraus, a quiver in her whisper, asked, “But how does this help us?”

  Dusk took the Wind-rider’s hand and squeezed it in reassurance as Heather added in an openly scared voice, “And will it be enough? Or have we just postponed dying?”

  “I’ll take a postponement over instant death any day, nena,” Jason told her.

  “That dragon lied to us,” snarled Ragar quietly, his lip lifting to show one fang.

  “Did he, I wonder?” the Miscere Surface-elf said. “Lise seems to think otherwise. Lise? You said that the dragon had specifically talked to you about Conductivi, correct?”

  I nodded as we six exchanged glances among ourselves. We all knew the Under-elves were still listening to us, but it couldn’t be helped.