But Erimdag didn’t ask me, and I didn’t know whether to be pleased about that or insulted. He’d already realized I wasn’t truly one of these people.
“I don’t care who this guy is,” I said. “He’s not stopping me getting what I came here for.”
After Kayla and Tosvig got some sleep, the rest of us had some of Cleavon’s paste and felt our exhaustion leave us instantly, I felt warm inside, as if dabbing a little paste on my tongue burned the sleep out of me. I knew I would accrue a debt of tiredness when this was over, but it was worth it. I felt like I could go for days now.
So, we set out. Tosvig led the way, though so far there was only one tunnel that led down into the belly of the mines. There would be more turnings and passageways to choose from later, and that was when they would need to use the words of the song to guide us, but it was as simple as following the tunnel for now.
Judah settled in beside me and matched my steps. The rest of the group were ahead of us, all except for Kayla, who walked behind.
“You saw the Runenmer, did you not?” he asked me.
I nodded.
“That is something I have never done. Few of us have.”
“You’re lucky.”
“Adi-Boto wasn’t so lucky. He had barely learned to walk when he saw the Runenmer’s demons devour his parents. It was only some deeper survival instinct that kept him hiding in shrubbery while the demons tore his folks apart. Chief Tugun, our leader before Fergus, found him wandering the wilds, alone, and skinny as a reed. Adi hasn’t spoken much all his life, except when he is drunk. Or when he has nightmares. The scars of what he saw took his words from him.”
My mind flashed back to when I had seen the Runenmer summon creatures from his runes. To the screams and the sprays of blood and sound of demons tearing through flesh and bone.
“I don’t know what I’d do if I saw that when I was a kid.”
“You’d either give up, or you’d do what Adi has done; train like hell. Those are the two kinds of people in the wilds, Isaac. The people who give in, and those who fight.”
The group ahead of us stopped. Way in front, Tosvig held his hand in the air. We waited in silence, all of us listening but hearing nothing but our own breaths.
Finally, Tosvig dropped his hand, which was the signal that it was safe.
I soon saw what had made him stop; ahead of us, the tunnel opened into a cavern. I followed the others into it, where I saw the ceiling rise twenty feet above, and the cavern was so wide around me that it felt freeing, like taking a deep lungful of air after holding my breath. I hadn’t realized until now what affected the cramped tunnels had been having on me.
On one side of the cavern, the ground dipped and curved to form a natural basin filled with water, though I couldn’t see where the water had come from. Nothing seemed to be dripping from the ceiling.
On the other side, there was no wall, and beyond the edge of the ground was a sheer drop. Looking into it made my stomach lurch. It seemed so dark, so endless. I backed away, resolving to keep an eye on that part of the cavern.
“Look,” said Harrien, running across the cavern. He stopped in front of a giant set of metal doors.
CHAPTER 40 – Dwellers
The sight of the doors was a relief. I was sick of walking in darkness. Sick of checking the ground for piles of crap. Sick of nothing but tunnels. At least a door would lead somewhere new; maybe a cool underground bar with a log fire and lots of ale.
Judah strode over to them. “No etchings,” he said. “No circle. Is this one of our doors?”
There was something strange about these doors. Something modern, I guessed I’d call it. They didn’t look particularly dangerous, but we still needed to be careful.
“Don’t touch them yet,” I said. “I’ll use the yellow alchemooze and see if there are any traps.”
Too late. Judah already pushed on the doors, straining against them. “No. Will not budge. No handles, no locks, no etchings.”
One after the other, they all tried to open them. It was when Tosvig, Judah, Harrien, and Kayla all strained against them and didn’t produce any effect that we knew the doors weren’t going to budge. These weren’t the same as the doors that had led us into the mines.
“Is this door mentioned in your song?” I asked.
Judah shook his head. “The song doesn’t speak of it. But we must trust our senses, as well as an ancient tune.”
I stared at the door. The metal was a dull grey color, completely unremarkable. But that was what bothered me. It reminded me of elevator doors. That couldn’t be right.
As I walked over to join the others, I heard a sound.
Scratching? I listened harder. It sounded like rocks scraping away from a wall.
The sound began to multiply all around me, and a rush of adrenaline hit me. Something was wrong.
“Swords out,” I said.
And the others all turned to face me, just as something joined us in the cavern.
Not just one something, but two somethings. Three, four, then more and more until soon a dozen somethings joined us in the cavern.
Some scuttled from the precipice to our left, while others had squeezed out of cracks in the stone walls and ceiling. It had only taken a few seconds for them to emerge and then surround us, forcing us back.
Judah, Tosvig, Cleavon, and Harrie pressed back against the doors, while Kayla, Erimdag and I stood in front with our weapons drawn.
The somethings that were surrounding us resembled spiders, with swollen abdomens and four spindly legs either side. But rising above their bellies were their torsos and heads, humanoid in shape but with skin that looked like coal.
Their eyes were barely visible, more like pinpricks, and their oversized noses covered half their faces. Their ears were long and dropped from the sides of their heads like wilting flowers. Every time they took a breath, their nostrils flared, and their ears puffed up, before sagging again.
One of them bared its teeth, revealing a row of sharpened fangs on its top gum line, and smaller, blunter teeth on the bottom. They were the strangest thing I had ever seen. Given the things I’d met in the last two months, that said a lot.
The worse thing was the noises they made. The sound of their legs click-clacking on the stone. The strange sounds they made to each other; mixtures between insect-like chirps and low growls.
“Dwellers,” said Erimdag.
“You know these things?”
“Give me my alchemoozes.”
“No. Tell me what you need.”
“Throw red ooze around us. The fire will keep them at bay; they hate heat and light.”
“Then give me your gloves so I can handle the ooze.”
“The ooze won’t light on your skin. Do you think we gnomes are chuttin’ stupid? We wouldn’t be able to handle the stuff if it burned us.”
“You could have told me that before now.”
“I found myself under your power. Knowledge was the only thing I could keep to myself as a weapon.”
“You walked into our power, actually.”
I couldn’t blame him for keeping secrets, because he was right. In his position, alone and unarmed, I’d have kept all my secrets. Any knowledge he had that we didn’t, might have given him a chance to get power over us.
I took the red alchemooze from my bag. In our journey through the mines so far, we’d used both red and yellow alchemoozes to light our way. This left me with one yellow and four red tins left.
I opened a tin of red and scooped some ooze into my hand, before flinging it away from me. It landed ten feet ahead and caught fire, the flames flickering and cast soft light in the cavern. I repeated this until the tin was empty, leaving me with just three red oozes left.
As much as I hated using things – living in this world had made me discover that I was a hoarder – it was worthwhile. The four splodges of ooze burned in a vague semi-circle ahead of us.
If we wanted, we could have just walked in-between the p
atches of flame, but to the dwellers, it was a barrier. They shied away from it, retreating into the darkness of the cavern walls way beyond us. I guessed it made sense that things dwelling in darkness would fear the light.
“Careful; they stick to the shadows until they are ready to strike,” said Erimdag. “While we have light, we’re safe. But step into the darkness, and one strike is all it takes. I saw one of these freaks bite a gnome’s head in two.”
“You knew these things were here all along?”
The light glowed on Erimdag’s face now, and I saw a strange expression. Fear mixed with anger.
“Not in this mine, no. I know of them, as I said, but I have never been here before.”
“The Originals never sang of dwellers,” said Tosvig.
“Dwellers may not have lived here when your ancestors made their pretty songs,” said Erimdag.
“Careful with your tongue, gnome. Or I will take it.”
“First you threaten my hands, now my tongue. Anyone would think you have body issues,” said the gnome, staring at Tosvig’s arm stump.
“Kill the gnome. I’m sick of him.”
I shook my head. “He’s already proven himself useful. Can we wait it out? They are too scared to attack us while the flames are there, and alchemooze burns for hours. The dwellers will get bored and scuttle off.”
“They don’t get bored,” said Erimdag. “Can you imagine how rare it is to have the prospect of meat down here? They must sustain themselves on moss and other things, or they wouldn’t be able to survive. At the same time, I saw them devour three of my miners. They will not just leave us. In fact, if we delay too long, a few of them will retreat to their nest in the depths and return with even more of them.”
“So the longer we wait, the deader we are. We need to fight our way out, slaughter them all so they can’t alert the rest of their nest about our presence. I need to know everything about them. Strengths, weaknesses, everything. First, how do you know about these things?”
Erimdag glanced away from me, at the four patches of alchemooze where the towers of flame reached waist height. It was hard to see much of the cavern beyond the glare of light, and just as he’d said, the dwellers had retreated to the shadows.
This felt worse than seeing them, worse than hearing their feet clacking over the stone. Just knowing they were still in the cavern, silent and watching, made a shiver pass through me.
Erimdag must have felt it too because he adjusted his coat collar to cover his neck and chin.
“There’s a reason we don’t mine as much as in the old days anymore, and instead we blast chunks out of the surface and scrape what we can. Dynamite is dangerous, but it’s got nothing on those spidery chuttas.”
“Chuttas?”
Tosvig smiled. “Chutta is to gnomes what bastard is to you, Isaac.”
Erimdag carried on. “I only know through what I was told. We had a mine out west, ten miles from Agnartis. The place was rich with copper, iron, zinc. Rich with something else, too. The miners carved a new tunnel deeper underground, and they musta got near to their chuttin’ nest. ‘Fore they knew it, dwellers were crawlin’ everywhere. The sound of their feet. I swear to Treah, the guys said they had never heard anything like it.
One minute there were fifteen of them, working just like any normal day. Next, they’ve already grabbed half of the crew. You hear their feet, and before you’ve even turned toward the sound, they’ve grabbed you. Treah alive, the screams! The sound of them chomping through my workers.”
He had started his story by saying they, but it was clear that Erimdag had been there that day. I didn’t know his reason for telling the story as if it happened to someone else. Maybe to distance himself from it all? Perhaps if he pretended it happened to someone else, it didn’t bother him as much.
But if that was the case, why had he followed us here and convinced us to let him come into the mines?
“Some miners made it out?” said Harrien.
“You’re a chuttin’ genius.”
“Do not speak to boy like that, gnome,” said Tosvig.
“Three of them made it out of the mines and back to Agnartis, but they were never the same again. They pretended to be, but they were lyin’ to themselves, to their families, to everyone. Life lost its taste for them. They had no energy, no motivation. All they wanted to do was sleep, but when they slept all they heard were the screams of their friends.”
He was silent then, and the only sound in the cavern was the quiet burning of the ooze. If I focused on the dark patches not lit by flames, I could see the dwellers lurking. Or I thought I could, anyway. Maybe my brain was imagining shapes. All the same, whether I could see them or not, they were there. Watching us. Waiting.
“The duke signed a bill of mining restrictions and safety standards after that,” said Erimdag. “Too late, but at least he did it. He forbade mining operations underground, and instead, we could only blast at surface rocks.”
I regretted asking Erimdag now because hearing his story seemed to have demoralized everyone.
I folded my arms and tried to project an air of confidence. “We have a few hours before the oozes burn out, and I still have three tins of it left. If the flames keep them away, then we have time to plan.”
“Not too much time. There is perhaps a dozen here,” said Judah. “But if more come from their nest, it is hopeless. They will wait out of flames and then overwhelm us.”
“So we need a plan to kill the ones that are here.”
“Right,” said Erimdag. “These dwellers have discovered us, and for the time being, they are only thinking with their bellies. They desire our flesh, and that base desire overrules other thoughts, for now. Their greed stops them from telling their nestmates. But the longer we wait, the more chance one of them will go tell the rest of the brood.”
“Eight of us, against twelve or more of them. They can’t see us, and I’m assuming they make up for that with sensitive hearing and smell.”
Erimdag nodded.
“Well, that’s something we can work with. What else do we need to know?”
“They are fast, and their teeth cut through flesh like a sword slicing paper.”
“Lovely. Anything else?”
“It all happened so fast. All we thought about was fighting our way out,” said Erimdag. “All they thought about, I mean.”
“We have dynamite. We could blow them up.”
“When we were mining, we took weeks planning where to dig tunnels. And even then, carving a few feet of tunnel took days. We took so much care because we didn’t want to loosen the wrong rock and bring tons of stone down upon us.”
“So we don’t throw dynamite around down here. Got it.”
Judah arches and eyebrow. “Harrien, I thought you said Isaac was one who makes solutions?”
“He is! Usually. Sometimes.”
I shrugged. “To get to the good ideas, you have to clear away the shitty ones. I’m just throwing everything out there. If I get all the crap out of my head, I’ll think of something good.”
“We could hrr-chare them,” suggested Harrien.
“Only three of us can use magic,” I said. “That’s three blasts of chare at a time. The flames will send the other dwellers scattering back to their nest. If we’re taking them out, we need to try and kill as many of them at once as we can.”
I tried to think of a way to kill the dwellers without taking too much of a risk. Cycling through my spells in my head, I became convinced that magic wouldn’t help. Chare and Eisre both had the same drawbacks; their single-blasts and their casting time. My kinesis and shield spells wouldn’t help much, either.
So what about buffs?
The problem with getting buffs from raw flesh was that when the meat went bad, you couldn’t eat it. Yet, if you cooked it, it lost whatever gave it the buff. Salting the meat diluted the buff a little, but it meant you could keep it for much longer.
Right now, I had some unsalted rat meat and saker tu
rtle flesh. I had gotten them two days ago and hadn’t had a chance to preserve them yet. The rat meat had gone bad, but the turtle flesh seemed okay. What buffs I would get from the meat of a giant turtle was anyone’s guess.
Aside from that, all I had was some wolf flesh from our fight outside the mine, and some hellgre flesh that I had salted a while ago.
Aside from the buffs, I had something else in my inventory that would be useful; a nightwolf eye. Tosvig, Harrien, and I had eaten the other one so we could see in the dark when we killed the hellgre. I already knew that you could split a nightwolf eye and retain its night-vision effect, albeit for a reduced duration.
That could be an advantage here. The dwellers lived in the mines, and they were accustomed to the darkness and could move around in it. We needed fire and light to see, and they could feel the heat from the fire and their limited vision helped them sense the light.
So, any illumination we used was like giving them a warning that we were here. That gave them the upper hand over us.
But if we could see in the dark…
An idea was coming. Slowly, but I felt it was there.
“Does anyone have any buffs?” I asked. “Tosvig? Harrien?”
“Wolf,” said Tosvig. “And some black bear.”
“What buffs would we get from wolf flesh?”
“Speed. Sometimes vision, but not as good as if it was nightwolf flesh. Wolf flesh can enhance other senses, as well as stamina. When buffed with wolf flesh, one can go for hours.”
Harrien, despite the situation, laughed at this.
“And black bear?”
“Power,” said Tosvig. “Always power.”
“Okay, we’re getting somewhere. Any idea what saker turtle flesh does?”
Tosvig shrugged. “I never seen one. Only heard they existed after you told me.”
“Anyone else?” I asked.
All I got were shrugged shoulders and shaking heads. The way I saw it, the saker turtle’s two main strengths were its hard shell, and its size. Now, I doubted a saker turtle buff would make me grow into a giant like the massive turtle I had gotten the meat from. This meant the buff would probably improve my defense somehow. Maybe I would grow a shell or something.
Everything Is Worth Killing- Isaac's Tale Page 42