by Gwynn White
“Best to be done with it and rest easy tonight,” I overheard him explaining.
“Surely there is no need for all of us to escort them,” wheedled one disgruntled councilman.
“You are absolutely correct, Thelonius. Thank you for volunteering.”
“But I didn’t—”
The magistrate passed his lantern to the unfortunate man, and I saw wispy curls atop an aging, spotted brow as the golden light shone over his skin. I was jealous of the oiled cloak he wore over his shoulders, its protection largely keeping him shielded from the rain. My own clothes were tatty in comparison, and the rain was persistent in its downfall, so even the light drops that tickled my scalp were steadily soaking every thread of my shirt and leggings.
Arwin looked my way, and my eyes met hers briefly before they looked away from her scar. “I know you,” she said.
“You may have seen me a minute ago. Bloodied, beaten, being threatened by a big man with a sword?”
“Not what I meant, Mal.” The way she said my name made it sound like a curse. Which, of course, was the general consensus of the townspeople. I had hoped that since she, too, was an outcast, maybe Arwin held a different opinion.
“I recognize you, too,” I said, not mentioning that it was her hideous face that was renowned in Pointe.
Arwin seemed to know the reason, though. She let the veil of hair once again conceal her face. “Doesn’t that hurt?” she asked, pointing.
I craned my neck to look at the arrow. It seemed a petty thing to worry about, something that wouldn’t matter in a few hours, in any case. But the steady trickle of blood that escaped the wound was making me feel sick to my stomach. “It’s fine,” I lied.
“Let me take a look at it.”
“No, don’t!” I tried to reach up to stop her, but my arm only raised a foot or so. The muscles in my shoulder screamed in protest, and my mouth involuntarily did the same.
“You’re stubborn, and a fool,” Arwin said. She marched over and placed one hand against the butt of the arrow. “This is going to hurt.”
I wanted to shout again, but my cry turned into a gasp as Arwin quickly forced the arrow the whole way through. It split open the front muscle of my shoulder as it came out the other side, and I desperately wished for a strip of leather to bite down upon.
“Gods!”
“Don’t be such a baby.”
The magistrate took note of what we were doing, and he looked down at me with a pitiless gaze. “He cannot travel like that,” he told one of the councilmen.
A few minutes were spared for one of the men to strap a clean enough bandage over the holes in my shoulder.
“Let’s be quick about it,” grumbled the unlucky councilman, Thelonius. He purposefully bumped into my bad shoulder as he stumped his way toward the northern trail.
Next to me, Arwin shivered in her torn clothing, her own attire resembling rags unfit for wiping dishes. “We won’t be in the rain long,” I told her, but she seemed no more reassured. In fact, it seemed as if she hadn’t heard me at all.
We nearly made it to the edge of town when a miniature earthquake rumbled beneath our feet. I turned and saw a bulbous figure waddling hurriedly through the rain, and I recognized the wobble of his extra rolls just before Answorth stepped into the lantern’s light.
“My sword,” he huffed, red in the face. “What…did you do…with my sword?”
I took a step back, and it was clear that neither Arwin nor Thelonius was going to help me. “I’m sorry, Answorth,” I told him. “There was a spriggan in the Grimwood, and it attacked me and the Brigade—”
“Absurd!” roared the beet-faced man. His chins quivered in anger. “Spirits take you, boy, if you don’t stop lying this instant!”
“I’m not lying! It charged me, and there was nothing else—”
Answorth snarled and waved me off like a pesky mosquito. “Sod it. I’m done with you.” He spit on the ground before my feet. “Take the Walk and never come back.”
I stared at him in shock. It was no secret that he would’ve been mad at me taking his sword, but it was hardly as if I had lost the blade on purpose. He had always been a verbally abusive git, but he had also been the only person always there for me. And now he left me by the wayside, like a hollowed-out fruit no longer of use.
My body started to tremble, and I was fairly certain it had nothing to do with the rain.
“Come on, lad,” the old councilman beckoned, his voice softened by pity.
A small hand grasped at my own. “It’ll all be over soon enough.”
We all ignored the grim portent of Arwin’s words.
The rain stopped a while later, though that did nothing for our already-soaked clothes. Thelonius was unperturbed as ever under his cloak while I rubbed vigorously at my arms. I felt cold and numb all over, but I needed to keep the blood flowing somehow. The climb up to the entrance of the mine was just the first part of the Walk.
“Massage your chest, not your arms,” Arwin said suddenly. I looked her way, and in the process of not looking at her garish face, my eyes quickly found her leading by example. Her hands were working circular motions against her chest.
I turned away quickly. “Thanks, but my arms feel colder right now.” It was a lie, but I knew the empty feeling in my chest was a result of Answorth’s abandonment of me, not the weather.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “I was on the streets for a long time, I know how to keep warm in the rain.” Her hands continued their distracting motions, and if her face hadn’t been so hideous, I might have been intrigued by what was underneath the cloth. “Your heart is what is important. Keep your chest warm, keep your heart beating, and your arms will take care of themselves.”
I ignored her, and my arms came to life a little more.
“Stubborn idiot. Die of the grippe, see if I care.”
“We’re very near to the entrance now, children,” Thelonius announced.
The path so far had been illuminated only by the single lantern the councilman held, and its light reached out now to outline the gaping maw of the abandoned mine. Many years ago, the shaft had served as both a mine for the people of Pointe to collect precious minerals as well as a means of travel to our closest neighbor, Waite Hill.
Now, ominous echoes issued from its depths like the hungry rumblings of a sleeping giant.
“I expect you’ll leave us now,” I half said, half asked to Thelonius.
He grunted. “Somebody needs to make sure you lot go in.”
“Well, there goes my plan,” Arwin sighed. Her shoulder bumped mine hard as she stepped toward the entrance.
I didn’t want to seem like a coward in front of a girl, but some questions were worth voicing. “Can we have the lantern?” I asked hopefully.
“Won’t do you much good,” he replied. “Carry fire in there, it’ll be sure to see you before you see it.”
“Uh…‘it’?”
“This tunnel ain’t gonna walk itself,” Thelonius said, an edge to his voice now. “The lantern’s mine. The Walk is yours.”
There was nothing else for it. I dredged up what courage I still had left in my soaked, shivering body—really scraped at the pit in my stomach where fear was quickly gobbling up the last strips of courage from my beating heart above—and let my feet carry me forward numbly even when the twitchy muscles in my legs were telling me to run, to make a go of escaping and, if not secure my freedom, at least force Beyland and his Brigade to end my life quickly.
Before I knew it, though, the mine shaft welcomed me beyond its mouth, swallowing me up in its shadowy embrace.
5
I reached out and placed a guiding hand against the roughly hewn wall of rock to my right; it felt bumpy and uneven, so sharp in some places that I feared blood would trickle down and join the damp moistness that clung to the walls and slicked the inside of my palm as I blindly groped my way forward.
Damn Thelonius, I grumbled silently. Damn him and his stupid lanter
n.
An eerie wind suddenly blew in my face, coming from deeper inside the mine, like the exhale of some sleeping giant under the mountain. I shivered again, and this time it wasn’t from the cold.
“Arwin?” I called out softly. My voice came out as more of a squeak, its small noise smothered and absorbed by the confining walls. “Arwin,” I said again, more insistently, her name a hiss on my lips.
“What?”
Her response came from less than two feet to my left, and I smacked my head against the rock behind me as my body jerked away from her sudden closeness. My hand flew to where the impact had occurred, and it came away feeling thickly moist, tacky. A warm trickle of blood made its way down the back of my neck, and I bit back the stream of curses poised on the tip of my tongue.
“I can’t see anything in here,” I told her.
“It’s supposed to be a straight walk down.” Arwin didn’t sound so sure of herself, though, and I felt her hand fluttering around in the darkness. “If you need someone to hold your hand, though, I won’t tell anyone what a coward you are.”
Her words made me smirk in spite of myself. As if there were a chance of either of us ever going back. Even if she did spill her guts about how scared I was after we reached the end—if we reached the end—there was nobody on the other side who would care. We were just two outcasts from that mountain village that had gone silent years ago.
I reached out and grabbed her hand. “No one will know,” I said, because it occurred to me then that it wasn’t my cowardice she was afraid of spreading.
It was too dark to see, but some part of me sensed a nod from her, and then she pulled me forward.
Less than a minute later, when I looked back in the direction from which we’d come, there was no sign of rain-soaked Thelonius or his stupid lantern. The mine was so dark, and so steep in its incline, that all I saw in every direction was black. Arwin and I shuffled forward with small, hesitant steps, trying our best to keep quiet and not disturb the creature that haunted and hunted these shafts.
And they were indeed shafts, plural. The mine wasn’t a single hole burrowed from Pointe all the way down to Mitbas, the town nestled at the bottom of the mountain on the other end of the main shaft; instead, dozens or even hundreds of minor shafts segued from the main tunnel. I could feel the faintest draft waft against my face each time we passed one, and each time I feared the monster of the mine would jump out at us, eager to snack down on the unfortunate pair of troublemakers exiled to die in the dark.
But this never came to pass.
Maybe a half hour later—it was impossible to keep track of time in that place—Arwin gripped my arm with a painfully tight grasp and gasped. “I see it, up ahead!” I could only guess that she was pointing toward whatever she saw.
I pulled her arm from mine and hissed, “Keep your voice down!” My wounded shoulder protested the sudden movement of batting away her clingy hand, and it sent a pulse of pain that nearly knocked me to the ground. “It might hear you!”
“There’s nothing in here with us,” Arwin argued. “Stop being such a wimp. Besides, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
Maybe we’re already dead, I mused. Would we know if we’d died? If we’d been killed so suddenly that our minds just kept walking forward while our bodies lay mangled on the ground somewhere back a ways? I put my good hand on my shoulder and kept moving. Dead or not, the light at the end of the tunnel was a welcome shift from this all-consuming darkness.
“Come on,” I told Arwin, “lead the way.”
She took larger steps forward now, pulling my hand away from my shoulder to drag me behind her. Eventually, I too saw the pinprick of light at the end of the tunnel, and my heart sunk a little in my chest. It was still so far away, and the goosebumps on my arms told me that she was wrong, that we weren’t alone in this mine.
Before long, a putrid odor suddenly filled the air, and I held my trembling arm against my nose to block out the smell.
“What’s that stench?” I felt Arwin pull her hand away, and I knew she was doing the same thing I was, trying her best to cover her nose.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe something died down here.”
“Or maybe it’s the smell of something living…”
I turned my head in her general direction. “So now you believe in the monster?”
“Shut up,” Arwin said, her voice muffled. “Let’s just keep going, we’re almost th—”
Aeeeeeoooorrrrgggg!!!!
“What in the Depths is that?” Arwin swore.
“You know what it is,” I growled, and I searched desperately for the source of light that marked our salvation. The thing’s screech had done something to my equilibrium, though, and the mine shaft swirled around me as I stumbled and fell to my knees, my eyes shut tight against the pain. “Arwin? Arwin!”
Footsteps echoed off the walls, loud at first but becoming softer—she was running. She was leaving me.
“I’m sorry,” she called back. “But only one of us needs to die!”
Was that true? How quickly could the mine monster devour a grown man? What about a bony youth? I wasn’t sure I could even blame her; I didn’t know if I’d do anything differently in her position.
“Depths take her,” I swore, and spat a globule of phlegm and blood onto the ground. I turned my head this way and that until my forehead was more or less aligned with the sound of her footsteps, and then I opened my eyes. There was the light!
I took off at a sprint, my leather-clad feet smacking against the damp floor of rock and dirt as I ran toward the light. A gust of hot air pressed against my back, its warm breath saturating the air around me and making it even harder to move, as if my arms and legs were now furiously pumping through a neck-high pool of water.
Another horrible call—Aeeeeeooooooorrrrrgggggg!—accompanied the cloying presence, the sound coming from every auxiliary shaft, from all around me. Just keep running, I urged myself as the bright light at the end of the tunnel grew larger, brighter, closer.
Something hard and wet smacked me in the forehead, clobbering me unconscious.
6
Oh, Mal, drangr, I didn’t mean to do that!”
Who was speaking? Didn’t mean to do what?
Blinding pain accompanied every syllable of those thoughts—or it would have been blinding, if I weren’t already incapable of seeing. My senses slowly came back to me. A foot twitched, a hand curled. Pain was good. Pain meant I was still alive.
Slowly, I opened my eyes, and as expected it did me no good. Everything was still black, indistinct. I felt warm breath on my cheek, and I rolled away from it instinctively. The monster was back, right next to—
No, it was Arwin. My brain finally caught up enough to recognize her voice. “What happened?”
“I, uh…you hit a stalactite. Are you all right?”
“Of course I’m not all right!” I snapped. “Let’s just…let’s get out of here.”
Arwin’s hand landed on my good shoulder, and then hit my chest before veering sideways to pat down my arm. It took me a second to figure out what she was doing, but then I clasped her forearm and let her pull me to my feet.
“There, see? You’re already looking better,” she said.
I gave her a sightless stare through the dark. “You can’t even see me.”
A pregnant pause passed between us, and then she grabbed my arm again and pulled me—gently this time—in the direction of the exit. “It’s just another minute or so,” she said, a note of calm breaking through the usual edge in her voice.
Another long moment was filled with only the sound of our footsteps before another thought made its way to my lips. “I thought you’d left me for dead back there.”
“I don’t know you that well, and Beyland seemed to have it out for you back in Pointe, but drangr”—she accompanied the curse word with a low whistle—“we’re about to get out of this alive. I won’t be the one to deprive you of life just because I
’m—” She cut off abruptly, and I sensed that she was looking away.
“Just because you’re…afraid?”
“Your words, not mine.”
The mouth of the cave was within view now, the one that led to the outside world on the opposite side of the mountain from Pointe. Vague features—scattered stones, a handful of stalagmites—were just barely visible through the haze of shadows between here and there. Arwin expertly led us around the obstacles on the ground, her feet moving much more surely than before. I stumbled alongside her, unable to see so well myself.
A tremor rippled through the earth as something big moved somewhere behind us.
“Run!” Arwin shouted.
She didn’t need to tell me twice. I stubbed a few toes and nearly stumbled face first to the ground once, but I threw myself headlong down the tunnel, following right behind her.
“Can you see what’s chasing us?” I yelled ahead.
Arwin spared me a glance over her shoulder. “What? Why?”
“You can see in the dark! Just tell me if it’s close, or if we’re going to make it.”
“Depths take you, it’s really close! Shut up and keep moving!”
My lungs burned, my legs screaming for air. Tunnel vision—literal tunnel vision—narrowed my sight until all I could see was the light of the outdoors. After so many hours cold and exhausted, all I wanted was to feel the sun on my skin. Morning awaited us just a dozen steps away.
And in the blink of an eye, we stumbled out of the darkness and into the light.
I gasped, breathing in the fresh air and relishing the taste of it on my tongue. Floral scents, morning dew, and, somewhere, the delicious aroma of bread being baked to be sold at market.
Arwin leaned against a nearby boulder as she recovered, her gasping breaths shuddering as the cool air reached her lungs.
I looked back at the mine shaft. “It isn't following us.”
“It never came out up top. Why would it down here?”