by Layton Green
He felt bad as soon as he said it. Her face darkened as she strode ahead of him.
Even when the light grew dim, enough natural illumination seeped through the cracks in the ceiling. Still, Selina cast a light spell at times to aid their passage, both to check for traps and to expose any dangers lurking in the shadows. When the lengthy passage they were following spilled into an intersection, Will was surprised to find an alcove with a flight of roughhewn steps descending into darkness. Beside the steps, another dagger-and-crown symbol had been carved.
Coba stood rigid atop the steps. Maya said something in his language, and the guide responded with a curt nod. It made Will uneasy to see the easygoing Mayan so on edge.
“His people believe the deeper caves in the Yucatan lead to Hell,” Maya said. “These steps probably lead to a ritual chamber of some sort.”
“That’s comforting,” Will muttered.
Mala lit a torch. Selina used the flame to ignite a light spell that lit the way with a dull orange glow, reinforcing the imagery of a descent into the mouth of Hades.
Will counted three hundred and fifteen steps. A short passage at the bottom led to a spacious natural cavern converted into a temple that sent chills along his arms.
A blocky limestone pyramid filled the center of the grotto, surrounded by steles with carved demonic faces. An emerald pool the size of a hot tub fronted the pyramid, ringed by a stone ledge covered in runes. The pyramid had no apparent entrance, though Will had the strange feeling it wasn’t empty.
Multiple passages led out of the cavern. As the party spread out to look for the Alazashin symbol, Will approached the nearest wall and realized the surface was inset, top to bottom, with human bones.
The entire cavern was one giant ossuary.
“Over here!” Mateo said, pointing out another dagger-and-crown above one of the passages.
The entrance grotto was just the beginning. The cave system below the long staircase turned out to be a vast network of bone-strewn pools and ruined temples, mysterious stone columns, and elaborate sets of runes covering the walls and steles. Water was everywhere, trickling from heights unseen, pooling at their feet, dripping off the jagged tips of cave formations.
The floor grew so muddy that Will’s boots squished with every step, and his fascination with the ancient scenery ended when the damp earth revealed something ominous: footprints.
Coba grimly pointed out the first set: two feet twice the size of a normal man’s, but with a uniform, flattened surface. As if the owner had no toes or arch. Even stranger, the footsteps continued for ten yards and then abruptly disappeared.
“Any idea what they are?” Mala asked.
As the guide gave a grim shake of his head, Mateo rose from inspecting the footprints. “What lives down here?”
“Frogmen, giant salamander, bats, harvesters, troglopods.” Coba shrugged. “This far out? Who knows what else?”
They had no choice but to warily continue. The footsteps appeared and disappeared in random fashion, vexing all attempts to decipher their pattern, causing everyone to grow increasingly tense. The only consolation was that the passage sloped gently upward. Maybe they would reach the surface before they met the owner of the strange tracks.
Will had lost track of time. It felt as if they had been trekking for two days straight, and Mala finally called a halt when they reached a muddy cavern dotted with man-size stalagmites. Multiple openings led out of the grotto. After locating the next dagger-and-crown symbol, they set camp on a dry patch in a corner of the cavern.
After a meal of cured beef and water that Coba had drawn from the nearest sump, Mala declared a double guard. She and Will took first watch. Selina and Mateo volunteered for the second. Will had noticed the two of them exchanging approving glances, and often walking side by side.
Mala shook out a glow stone and sat cross-legged with her back against the wall. Normally Will would have welcomed the chance to try to chip away at her armor, but both of them were focused on staying quiet and watching the entrances to the cavern.
As his adrenaline ebbed, he couldn’t stop yawning, and as soon as Mala signaled their shift was over, he bent to wake Selina. When the sylvamancer opened her eyes, Will thought he saw movement behind her. He blinked. Though he might have been hallucinating from exhaustion, he could have sworn the cavern floor just rippled.
“I think I saw something,” he whispered.
Selina sat up and expanded the dull gray light from Mala’s glow stone, illuminating the cavern. Will gasped: the entire cavern floor seemed to be moving. As he watched in disbelief, the foot of thick mud covering the ground flowed together at various points and then heaved upward, coalescing into a dozen eight-foot tall mud creatures with melting faces and vaguely humanoid shapes. The creatures had giant spikes along their backs and horns jutting out from their heads, camouflaged as stalagmites from a distance.
In silent unison, they advanced on the party. Will scrambled to unsheathe his sword.
“Rise!” Mala shouted. “Gunnar, Mateo—to arms!”
Will rushed to her side as the sleeping members of the party gained their feet. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Selina thrust her palms at the nearest mud monster, driving it backwards. It flowed back into the ground, dissolved, and reformed.
The monster closest to Will swung a huge fist at his face. He ducked and cleaved through the limb. Instead of falling off, the arm resealed without visible effect.
Beside him, Mala had a similar experience. Her short sword whisked through the mud creature, carving it up a dozen times before it reached her, but the creature kept coming and backhanded her across the cavern floor.
“Sharp-edged weapons don’t hurt them!” Will shouted.
The party was backed into a corner of the cavern. Will tried to run to open ground, but the two monsters chasing him turned to mud and flowed along the ground faster than he could sprint. One emerged right behind him and grabbed him by the waist. The other creature lowered its head and thrust its spear-like horn at Will’s chest. Just before it connected, Gunnar’s war hammer smashed into the horn, shattering it. The mud monster made a low-pitched moaning sound that set Will’s teeth on edge.
“Duck!” Gunnar cried.
Will lowered his head as the big man swung, then heard a thud as the mudman’s arms released him. Will turned and saw the thing stumbling in a circle, its head lopped off. As Will watched in horror, it sank into the mud and rose with a new head, even taller than before.
A group of the creatures had Yasmina surrounded. She whipped her staff in a circle, knocking off chunks of mud but barely slowing them. Will ran to help her, raising his shield to protect against the fists and horn thrusts, then using the shield as a battering ram. Mateo noticed and used his buckler in the same manner. They managed to reach the wilder, but more mudmen flowed in to surround them. Another group had Gunnar and Mala pinned against a wall. It was only a matter of time before they broke through.
Mateo used his sword like a whip, slicing up the mudmen but barely slowing them. Coba was running and flipping around the cavern, trying to stay alive. His only weapon was a small, ineffective dagger. At one point he shimmied up a ten-foot stalagmite, but one of the creatures dissolved at the bottom of the cave formation, flowed up it, and reformed at the top with Coba in its grasp. Selina saved him by causing one of the broken horns on the cavern floor to fly into the air and drive into the mudman’s back. The thing flinched long enough for Coba to flip off the cave formation.
“Fire!” Mala said. “Try fire!”
Selina grabbed a torch and flew high above the cavern to light it. She blew on the flame, igniting it like a blowtorch in the face of the nearest mudman. The creature moaned and hardened, slowing as its flesh dried out. It toppled to the ground, dissolved into the mud more slowly than usual, then reformed once again.
Will’s arm burned from using his shield as a battering ram, and he could see that everyone else was tiring, too. He doubted they could hold on much longer.
“Mala!” Selina shouted. The sylvamancer was wreaking havoc by violently pushing the creatures together, causing them to merge and reform. “Get everyone through the passage!”
Keeping the sash in her hand, Mala spun like a whirling dervish, using the weighted ends of the weapon to distract the creatures. “I’ll try!”
“Do it now!”
Mala reached into a pouch and withdrew a handful of firebeads. She threw them at the mudmen surrounding her and Will. The flames hardened their heads and torsos, allowing her and Will to break through. Mala shoved a pile of beads into his hand, and together they freed the other members of the party from the enclosing circles.
Will didn’t know what Selina had planned, but the monsters were regrouping quickly, and a number of them still blocked the exit passage marked with the dagger-and-crown symbol. “You have to fight through,” Selina said grimly. “What magic I have left I will need.”
Will held out his hands to Mala for more firebeads. She shook her head. “We used them all.”
Gunnar roared and charged the group of mudmen, clearing away the front line with a huge sweep of his hammer. The rest of the party followed, using shields to break through. One of the mudmen speared Gunnar in the side with a horn, and another two grabbed Mateo. Yasmina pried one off by using her staff as a lever around its throat. Will bellowed and grabbed an arm of the other mudman and used his powerful grip to wrench the arm off at the shoulder. It felt like tearing apart rubber with his bare hands. Spotting a gap between the monsters, the party sprinted for the passage.
Selina remained alone in the middle of the cavern, surrounded. As a cadre of the subterranean creatures flowed towards Will and the others, rippling through the mud, Selina raised her arms, and Will heard a sound like thunder. Rocks and debris tumbled to the cavern floor as dozens of thick vines and tree roots shot down like missiles from the cavern ceiling. Just before they reached the floor, the organic projectiles angled towards the dagger-and-crown marked passage, poling straight through the mudmen. One of the vines wrapped Selina around the waist and carried her along.
Will watched in shock as an entire ficus tree, jerked by its roots from the world above, broke through the ceiling and fell to the cavern floor, joining the shower of rocks and dirt. The creatures flowed into the mud to escape the destruction. As soon as Selina joined them on the other side of the passage, she caused the mass of vines and roots to twist into an impenetrable barrier blocking the passage.
Not an ounce of mud seeped through.
Another day traversing long passages and wading through half-submerged grottos. Will flinched every time the ground squished underfoot. The party hadn’t slept in two days, but they stumbled forward, wary of another night underground.
Mala had applied a thin paste and a bandage to the wound in Gunnar’s side. The big man had grunted in pain when he took a few practice swings, but declared himself able to fight.
Will asked Yasmina if she could call for help as Elegon had in the Darklands. She replied that she didn’t have the skills of a mature wilder yet, and didn’t know the ecosystem. Call out to the wrong creature, she warned, and it might doom them all.
Just as Will thought he would collapse from exhaustion, they traversed a long passage that led to an above-ground cave marked by the Alazashin explorer. Will felt like whooping for joy as they emerged squinting into a jungle clearing dominated by a huge structure made of interlocking, flinty black stones. The construction was quite skilled, like nothing Will had ever seen.
At least a hundred feet across, and as high as a two-story building, the sinuous roof and bulky support columns gave the impression of a crouching animal. Though the structure appeared extremely old, no vegetation encroached. Mala studied the facade and turned to Coba. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”
The guide shook his head, peering uneasily into the jungle.
The vegetation surrounding the clearing was oddly sparse, as if thinned by hungry elephants. Coba pointed out multiple paw prints, all of them more than a day old. Jaguar, he said. The party branched out, looking for a clear path or another dagger-and-crown marking. An hour later, as the sun sank behind the trees, they returned to the clearing without a clue as to the way forward.
“This must be the place,” Mala said.
“If the map is real,” Gunnar pointed out, turning away when Mala stared him down.
Will turned to face the strange edifice. “There’s one place left to check.”
Though no one had stated it, everyone seemed wary of stepping inside. The ancient structure had an anthropomorphic presence, as if it were a sentient thing, watching over the jungle.
“Something wrong with jungle,” Coba said. “No small animals.”
Mala scoffed, but Yasmina said, “I sensed it, too. The animals avoid this place.”
“Unlike them, we haven’t a choice,” Mala said, and then strode towards the building. Everyone followed, though Coba kept glancing nervously into the jungle.
“It looks like obsidian,” Will said as they approached, “but you can’t build this out of that.”
“You can if you’re an artisamancer,” Mala said.
Archways spaced a dozen yards apart provided access to the interior. A cavernous main entrance dominated the western-facing side, bookended by two slender black towers.
Mala entered first. Will followed, gaping when he saw the prehistoric drawings covering the walls in faded pigments. Most of the artwork depicted half-human, half-jaguar creatures engaged in a variety of tasks: carrying water from a cenote, building dwellings in the trees, hunting game in the jungle.
A row of iron hoops inset into the ceiling confused him. He had no idea of their purpose, except to thread a curtain or tapestry through. In the northwest corner, rudimentary steps had been cut into the rock wall, leading to one of the towers. As Will walked over, he noticed a mural showcasing a group of jaguar-people cringing in awe before a giant cat. Outlined in black pigment with charcoal streaks, the monstrous feline stood higher at the haunches than the shoulders of the tallest human bowing before it.
Will glanced around and noticed similar scenes interspersed among the drawings. “Guys,” he said slowly, thinking about the sinuous shape of the building, “I think this is some kind of temple.”
“To what?” Mateo called out.
Will pointed at the gigantic cat. “To that.”
“Typical superstition,” Mala scoffed.
Coba couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the ancient rock drawing. “There are rumors of old races deep in jungle,” he said. “Worshipping old gods. Before my people, before sorcerer kings.”
“Everyone keep searching,” Mala said. “We need to find the next symbol.”
Will drew closer to the tower steps and, with a whoop of excitement, pointed out a small dagger-and-crown etched crudely into the black rock. With Mala on his heels, he climbed the steps and emerged on a crenellated platform at the top of the tower, just above the tree line. They scanned the jungle and saw nothing unusual.
Still no clue as to where to head next.
They showed the others, then descended as the last rays of sunlight slithered out of sight. “We have to find shelter in jungle,” Coba said.
“No,” Mala said, catching his shoulder as he turned to leave. “We camp in here tonight. It’s the safest place. We’ll set a watch on the tower.”
Coba did not look happy. The party ate a cold dinner, and Mateo volunteered for first watch. After Will thanked Gunnar for saving his life in the caves, the big warrior laid out his sleeping roll and wrapped his arms around Mala. In disgust, Will took his own roll and followed Mateo up the steps, deciding to sleep under the stars. He gazed at the twinkling heavens, the jungle a vast and tenebrous thing below.
“Will,” his cousin said, in a disbelieving voice. “Look down.”
At first Will didn’t understand. He was looking at the jungle and couldn’t make out a thing. Then Mateo pointed at their feet, near the e
dge of the tower, where a dagger-and-crown symbol glowed a soft silver-gray, as if painted with congealed moonlight. Just beside it shone the luminescent outline of a basic compass, with an arrow pointing due west, right off the edge of the tower.
When they shouted for the others, Mala led the charge up the stairs, her eyes widening when she saw the symbol. “Moon Paint,” she said, excited. “A favorite marker of the Alazashin.”
“What’s it made of?” Will asked. “It’s been here, what? Fifty years? How does it last so long?”
“Mage-enhanced phosphorescents,” Mala said in a distracted voice, peering off the ledge and into the darkened jungle. “I feared we had lost the way.”
They decided to celebrate the discovery—and calm everyone’s nerves—with a shot of grog. After the excitement waned and everyone except Will and Mateo returned below, Will fell into a deep, troubled sleep. He dreamt of his childhood, only instead of languorous days by the levee in New Orleans, he and Caleb had been raised as orphans in the slums of New Victoria. They were caught for not taking the Oaths and banished to the Fens. Disease ridden, emaciated, and on the verge of death, Will lost all hope until Val flew onto his and Caleb’s rotting plank one day, carrying their father’s staff and wearing a cloak with the insignia of the Congregation.
I’ve come to free you, Val said.
As Caleb held out his hand in supplication, Will pushed to his knees to greet his oldest brother. His mouth was too dry with thirst to speak.
Val smiled down at them. All you have to do is take the Oaths.
Will stared at his pockmarked hands, then lifted his eyes. Take us out of here, Val. Please.
That’s my greatest wish, brother. As soon as you swear allegiance to Lord Alistair.
Two men on the plank ran at Val, screaming filthy wizard. Val held out a hand, not even looking at them. Black lightning lanced from his fingertips and swarmed their bodies, reducing them to dust.
What have you done? Will whispered as he stumbled away from his brother. Those men had been friends. Who are you?