Called to Darkness

by Richard Lee Byers

  As it turned and looked up, she spotted two more standing farther away. One held a shepherd's crook, which it presumably used to herd the several goat-sized beetles crouching around it.

  Though all but certain she and Holg were going to have to fight—so far, pretty much every creature they'd encountered in the Darklands had wanted to kill them—Kagur nonetheless took her hand away from her sword hilt and raised it in a sign of peace. The old man made the same conciliatory gesture.

  The gray things surprised her. They simply stood watching as the two humans withdrew back down the slope.

  That by itself wasn't enough to make Kagur feel secure. She and Holg kept retreating until they put three more of the rises between them and the giants.

  Then she listened and peered about. Everything was silent, and nothing was moving within the halo of crimson light.

  Safety, or at least the appearance of it, evoked another jaw-clenching spasm of frustration. "Curse it!" she snarled. "I was sure those were Eovath's footprints in the mold!" But new growth had blurred the tracks, and she supposed they'd actually belonged to one of the furry creatures.

  Holg sighed. "I thought so, too."

  "Do you have any idea where we lost the real trail?"

  "Honestly, no."

  "Then ask your spirits."

  "I wish I could. But I've already channeled too much power. I need rest before I perform any more divinations."

  She glared at him. "We rested just a little while ago." Or at least she believed they had. It was difficult to be sure in the unchanging darkness, but she still felt relatively fresh.

  Holg scowled. "That doesn't change the fact that I've prayed a number of prayers since."

  Nor the fact that you're feeble and useless, Kagur thought. But the unspoken retort gave her a twinge of shame. It wasn't fair.

  To her eyes, Nar-Voth had looked no different than the caves above it, but she hadn't needed Holg to advise her that they'd passed from the uppermost layer of the Darklands into Sekamina. Here, they discovered chambers far bigger than any they'd encountered previously, spaces where they could hike for miles without ever catching a glimpse of wall or ceiling.

  At first, the broad, high spaces eased her. Irrationally so, she supposed, considering that whether a space was large or small, she could see no farther than the reach of her torchlight. Still, the mere knowledge of ample room blunted the nagging feeling that she was in constant danger of being crushed.

  Soon, though, she realized Sekamina had presented a new hindrance to the hunt. It had been difficult enough to track Eovath through Nar-Voth, but at least in those confined spaces there had generally only been a few ways the giant could have gone. This hole, or that one? Down the tunnel, or up the cliff?

  By contrast, in the huge caves of the middle region, the possibilities were far more numerous, and the floor was often naked stone, with no plants to bend or break and no earth to hold an impression. Thus, the seekers had to resort to Holg's powers of divination more frequently, and it slowed them down.

  "You know," Kagur said, keeping watch, "that the longer it takes us to catch up with Eovath, the longer he has to pursue his schemes."

  "I do," Holg answered, pulling the stopper from his waterskin. "But if the spirits don't see fit to help me in ways they never have before, I can't force them. Perhaps we should take comfort in the fact that they don't believe they need to."

  Maybe, thought Kagur. Or maybe they're just stupid.

  Eventually, Holg felt strong enough for the ritual. He whispered the incantation, and a bronze fetish that looked like a wavy flame slithered along the ground.

  Following the prompt, they hiked to where the long, regular swells in the ground flattened out. Somewhere out on the plain before them, motes of blue and green glowed in the air like stars. For an instant, the thought of the sky—the real sky—made Kagur's chest ache, and she scowled the feeling away.

  "Am I seeing lights?" Holg asked, squinting.

  "Yes, and before you ask, I can't tell what's making them. We'll have to get closer."

  They prowled onward. Kagur kept her eyes moving, looking for trouble, and listened and sniffed the air as well. The underworld still frequently surprised and confounded her, but she had learned the importance of using her other senses to detect dangers lurking beyond the feeble reach of sight.

  Still, despite her caution, she didn't detect the creature until it pounced into the torch's circle of crimson phosphorescence. Pale, stooped, and hairless, with enormous bulging eyes and pointed ears, it gripped a dagger in either hand and gathered itself to spring.

  Kagur poised her shield—now wrapped in cloth to mask the cool fire still burning on its surface—to hold the beast-man back, dropped the fungus torch, and reached for her sword. But as the blade hissed from the scabbard, other creatures like her would-be attacker scrambled out of the darkness behind it. They grabbed their fellow, shoved it to the ground, and kicked it until it waved its hands in a gesture of surrender.

  As the other creatures allowed it to get back up, some of them glowered in the humans' direction and even bared jagged teeth, but none of the others tried to make an actual attack. Instead, many with net bags of fungus or rock slung over their shoulders, they marched off in the same direction Kagur and Holg were headed.

  "First," said Holg, "the giants with too many hands let us go on our way without a fight. Now, these things are doing the same, even though it seems to run contrary to their natural instincts."

  "I think we're on some kind of truce land," Kagur said.

  "Sacred ground."

  "Maybe."

  As she and Holg stalked on, Kagur glimpsed still other creatures moving in the same direction. More giants with four hands dragged travois laden with glowing green crystal. Dark creatures whose humanoid features ended at the waist, giving way to the bodies and legs of giant spiders, led bear-sized lizards on strands of webbing. Stinking of decay even at a distance, shambling figures pushed carts that were also cages.

  In time, when Kagur and the shaman drew close enough, the lights in the air began to illuminate their immediate surroundings. Some shined through doorways and windows. Others spilled their glow on balconies and walkways. In both cases, they revealed patches of a pair of towering cavern walls sculpted into an immense, hive-like habitation.

  Kagur shook her head. She'd heard tell of the stone cities beyond the tundra, but had never before seen one. It somehow felt like a strange joke that she was getting her first look at one here in the depths.

  "It's not a holy place," she said, "or at least not chiefly. It's a place for trade."

  "Interesting," said Holg. "Maybe Eovath stopped here for provisions."

  "And maybe he told someone where he was going. Or somebody just happens to know how to find the place where the sun shines in the depths."

  Feeling eager, and at least a little more confident that nothing in the immediate vicinity was too likely to attack humans on sight, she quickened her stride, and Holg hurried after her. When she noticed that all the other travelers were converging on a cluster of blue lights at ground level, she headed that way, too.

  The blue lights turned out to be glowing crystals hanging from tripods made of long, spindly bones. The shining illuminated four hunched, squat figures that walked on two legs but possessed the wedge-shaped heads, tails, and glistening scales of snakes.

  Apparently, travelers were required to present themselves to these sentries—if that was the proper term for them—one group at a time. The snake-people looked over the newcomers' possessions, and then the leader made a pronouncement in its sibilant speech.

  This often led to one of the wayfarers responding in what even Kagur could recognize as protest. Then they argued back and forth, until the travelers surrendered either a portion of their trade goods or something their spokesman carried on his person.

  "Can you see what's happening?" Kagur whispered.

  "More or less," Holg answered. "A person has to pay a toll to en
ter the fair."

  "Can we?"

  "I hope so. We aren't bringing goods to market. We simply want to buy. For people like us, the fee could be minimal."

  Kagur hoped he knew what he was talking about. The whole arrangement seemed like nonsense and thievery to her.

  "We need to be able to talk to them," Holg continued. He murmured, and light flowed along the curling lines cut into his staff. He then repeated the prayer and squeezed Kagur's shoulder at the end of it.

  Abruptly, despite the inhuman tones and the fact that she was hearing several different languages, she understood all the conversations taking place around her. She even sensed that if she wished, she could join in without difficulty. Though Holg had told her how his magic could open her ears and quicken her tongue, it was still astonishing to experience it firsthand.

  The old man grinned at her. "It's reassuring that nobody's saying, ‘Those two humans look delicious.'"

  As was often the case, his good humor inspired a flash of painful memory, of warmth and laughter shared with her parents, other Blacklions, and even Eovath. She scowled and turned away.

  The snake-things—she heard the term "serpentfolk" whispered among the other petitioners—permitted a group of spider-bodied people to pass on through. That brought Kagur and Holg to the front of the line.

  The serpentfolk looked them over with their yellow eyes. Forked tongues flickered from their mouths as though to taste the smells in the air. The reptiles had no facial expressions that Kagur could discern, and the way their bodies flexed and twisted at every point made their stances equally hard to read. Still, she sensed they were surprised.

  After a few moments, the leader hissed, "Uplanders?" It meant: did they come from the surface world?

  "Yes," Holg said. "May we enter?"

  "If you pay," the snake-thing replied.

  "I'm a healer. If someone is injured or sick, I can tend him."

  The guard bared its fangs. "My folk live or die by our own strength." It pivoted toward Kagur. "Your sword."

  She shook her head. "No. But this is a good cloak."

  It was also a garment she didn't need anymore. Though neither she nor Holg understood the reason, the Darklands had turned out to be warmer than the snowy but sun-warmed tundra high above them.

  The sentry gave a short spit of a hiss that, thanks to Holg's magic, she recognized as derision. "A savage's garment. We wear better."

  That was debatable. Intricate embroidered patterns adorned what once might have been a vividly purple tunic. But it was threadbare now, and the dye had faded.

  Moving in its flowing, unsettling fashion, the serpentfolk turned back to Holg. "Your staff. Or one of the baubles hanging around your neck."

  Holg shook his head. "I need them as much as my friend needs her sword."

  "You'd better have something." The leader waved a clawed hand at the miscellany of creatures waiting behind the humans. "You're holding up the other travelers. Wasting their time and ours."

  Holg's mouth tightened. Then he opened the pouch on his belt and brought out a golden oval with an ivory cameo framed inside it. The carving depicted a smiling woman with a long nose and curly hair. The ornament had a wire loop at the top to string it on a chain or cord, but that part was missing.

  "I have this," the shaman said. "A famous artisan made it."

  The guard snatched it, then attempted to mask its eagerness after the fact: "It will do. Move along."

  As they proceeded, Kagur succumbed to a twinge of curiosity. "Was that a memento of your time in the southlands?"

  Holg sighed. "Yes. It bore the likeness of someone dear to me."

  They walked on in silence for another moment. Then, feeling like she was lifting something heavy, Kagur said, "Sorry."

  The old man squared his bony shoulders. "It's all right. She would have wanted me to part with it if that was what it took to stop your brother. In fact, she would have booted me in the stones if I hadn't."

  Carved with rearing and intertwining serpents, the two high, sculpted cavern walls met at a right angle. Now that Kagur was close enough to view them clearly, she was both relieved and obscurely disappointed to realize they didn't constitute quite the teeming habitation of countless reptile-people she'd been anticipating. Many of the windows and doorways were dark, and most of the elevated paths empty, lending the heights, for all their forbidding grandeur, an air of desolation and decay.

  The triangle of ground between the walls was livelier, for it was here that diverse creatures were doing their bartering, some from tent-like stalls of hide and bone. The babble of myriad inhuman voices and the grunts, growls, hisses, and screeches of the beasts the speakers had brought to market echoed from the surrounding stone. A tangle of smells, some merely exotic but many foul, thickened the air, with a carrion stink the strongest of all.

  The press, the strangeness, and the sheer ugliness all scraped at Kagur's nerves, but it wasn't going to become any more appealing while she stood and contemplated it from the outside. She took a breath and headed into the crowds. His staff tapping, Holg walked along beside her.

  Small as a toddler but with a white-bearded face as wrinkled and aged as the shaman's, a little man in a pointed red cap and iron boots called out in a high, quavering voice. "Who will trade, who will trade for my clever helpers?"

  The "clever helpers" were an assortment of severed hands, some human-looking and others less so, set out on the ground around him. Many lay motionless, but a couple twitched and flexed, while one was even walking around on its fingertips.

  The little man grinned at Kagur and Holg. "I'll bet you can't find these in your Upland markets. You won't believe how useful they are, especially when you have both halves of a set." He clapped his own hands.

  All the clever helpers sprang to life. A freakish pair, the left with an extra thumb and the right with seven fingers, reared up on stumps of forearm and threaded a needle. A slender one with gleaming black skin picked up a spoon made of stone and stirred the air. A scaly pair mimed the act of strangulation.

  Holg shook his head. "The other folk here at the market don't mind you trading body parts harvested from their own kind?"

  The tiny man leered. "We all keep the peace in this cave. Now, if they were to catch me in another ...but they never will. No ghoul or gug is cunning enough to trap a redcap. So tell me, which pair do you fancy?"

  "None of them," Kagur said. "We're looking for a giant twice as tall as I am, with blue skin, yellow hair, yellow eyes, and a battleaxe. Have you seen him?"

  The redcap stroked his tangled beard. "I'm trying to remember."

  "Do you know where the sun shines in the depths?" Kagur persisted. "That's where he was headed."

  "Well, now," said the tiny man, "that almost sounds familiar ...but no, it's gone again."

  "You want a bribe," Kagur realized.

  "Indeed he does," Holg said. He pointed his staff at the little trader. "How about this?"

  Golden light glowed from the carved swirls on the rod. The redcap hissed, covered his eyes, and recoiled. The clever helpers smoked and flopped about until the radiance faded away.

  "You can't do that!" the little man snarled. "Not here!" He looked around. "Guards! Help!"

  Kagur put her hand on her sword. "Be quiet."

  "Yes," Holg said, "calm down. I didn't hurt you. I was simply making a point."

  The redcap glowered. "What point?"

  "That I'm a formidable person myself. So is my friend. You should see her wield that sword. As you will if you trade us bad information. We'll come back and find you."

  The little man hesitated. "Your blue giant was here. I saw him. But I don't know which way he went when he left, and I never heard of any sun shining in the Darklands. That has to be nonsense, doesn't it?"

  "We hope to find out," Holg said. "Thank you for your help."

  As he and Kagur walked away, she asked, "How did you know the little man meant to cheat us?"

  The shaman grinned. "I
actually wasn't sure. But in my experience, the more you look like an outlander, the more likely a merchant is to assume you're gullible and try to take advantage. We're as strange to these folk as they are to us, so I thought I should make the point that we're not gormless marks, even if we look the part."

  Kagur mulled that over. "We'll have to make the same point to everyone who claims to have knowledge to trade."

  "Maybe not everyone. But if somebody stinks of slyness and deceit like that one did, then yes."

  "Even if someone can help us, with your ornament gone, we'll need something else to trade."

  "My services. The serpentfolk apparently scorn the healing arts, but others may feel differently, especially if they're ailing. Or I can perform divinations." He smiled. "The spirits sent me here, so if need be, they ought to be willing to stoop to a little common fortune-telling."

  The potent stench of rot drifted from a spot twenty paces beyond the redcap, where hunched, shriveled vendors dickered with others of their own kind. Despite the fangs in their mouths and the claws on their fingertips, they had a disturbingly human quality to them.

  Kagur turned to Holg. "Are these dead people?" she asked.

  He nodded. "Ghouls. I never knew they burrowed so deep below the graveyards."

  One ghoul shambled back to a cage cart, an ungainly conveyance with stone wheels and bones for bars, and dragged out a hairless, bat-eared creature like the one that had attempted to attack Kagur on the plain. This specimen, however, was doughy and obese and had an air of cringing, drooling imbecility. The dead man who was taking possession of it knotted a leash around its neck.

  Leading an enormous black scorpion with bound pincers and a capped sting, two more beast-men passed by. One bared its crooked fangs at the transaction, but neither attempted to interfere.

  Kagur inferred that no one was allowed to molest people—or things—who entered the market of their own free will. But anyone who came as a captive was livestock, plain and simple.

  Down another aisle, one of the gray-furred giants traded dreams. "Dreams of lust!" it rumbled. "Dreams of glory! Dreams of revenge!"