I stopped at last in a narrow, branching corridor and leant against the wall. My shirt was damp with sweat and I stripped off my jumper, tying it around my waist, before holding my breath and listening for a slow count of sixty. Nothing. I looked into the future and realised no one was coming. I was alone.
I’ve never liked being underground. Air’s more my element, even if I’m not close enough to it to use its magic; I like being high, able to see. Here beneath the earth, I felt tense, on edge. The air felt different: dry and stuffy. I could imagine the thousands of tons of earth and rock above me pressing silently down, and I forced myself to stay calm.
I think the only thing that stopped me from losing it was knowing I could find my way back. I was lost of course-there was no way I could have marked my passage in that flight, and the pitch-black tunnels would have turned me around in seconds. But as long as I have my magic, I can never stay lost. With enough time, I can always find the path.
Except in this case, the path led to about fifteen angry men with guns. I took stock of my position. No food, no water, no equipment, no friends. I had three choices: stay here, go forward, or go back.
In the end I went forward. It wasn’t so much a choice as a lack of one. I’ve been in a lot of really bad situations over the years and one of the small consolations is that you don’t have to worry much about consequences anymore.
The upper levels had had open chambers and rooms, which had narrowed down into twisting passages as I’d descended. Now, as I kept walking, I noticed that the passages were starting to open out again. They’d stopped sloping down, which was some consolation, but I knew I still had to be far beneath the surface. The tunnels would have to climb back up a very long way to reach another exit, which I was frankly starting to believe was pretty unlikely.
After a while-I couldn’t say how long-I became vaguely aware that something was different. I was making steady progress but it was getting harder to see what was coming. The corridors and passages were fuzzier, more difficult to tell apart. I felt as though I was walking down a long, straight tunnel but when I looked again I thought I saw a fork. I looked again and saw a T junction. Then I couldn’t see any tunnel at all.
I slowed and scanned around me. I was in a large chamber. No, not large-huge. I looked back, disoriented, trying to figure out where I’d left the tunnel, and realised there was no tunnel. There was nothing around me but open space. I stopped and heard my footsteps fade into the distance. They didn’t echo.
I was standing in a vast cavern. The walls were ragged and irregular but their edges were smooth. The colour of the stone ranged from grey to brown, and in places I could see the dull glint of crystal. A moment later I realised that I was able to see. There was no light, yet everything was visible.
Slowly I began to walk again, and as I did I noticed that something was wrong with the perspective in this place. Distances didn’t seem right, somehow. At first glance I’d thought the cavern was maybe a few hundred yards, but as I walked I realised it was taking far too long to reach the centre. The place was miles and miles wide, the roof so far above I couldn’t even see it. At the centre were craggy rock formations, and as I kept walking, they grew larger and larger until I realised that they were the size of hills. There was an entire mountain range at the centre of this place, curled around where I was standing, rising at the centre in a line of jagged peaks and descending on either side to form the shape of a crescent moon. To my left the mountains trailed away to a smooth point, while to my right they ended in a massive rock formation like a mesa.
The mesa rose into the air.
I stopped dead. The mesa was high off the ground, supported at an angle by a titanic pillar of rock. As I watched, it swung in my direction, crossing the miles between us with a kind of lazy grace. The mesa came to rest in front of me, towering over me like a skyscraper while I stood motionless.
Then the mesa opened its eyes.
It wasn’t a mesa. It was a head. The pillar of rock was a long, serpentine neck. And what I’d thought was a mountain range was the thing’s body. Two enormous eyes, each the size of a castle, focused on where I stood. They looked like rough-cut diamonds, with no pupils I could see.
I stood very still. Piece by piece, I slowly realised what my eyes had seen but my brain had refused to put together. The mountain range was a body, the folded hills beneath them two legs. The line of peaks was the ridge on its back and the trailing edge of mountains to my left was a long, serpentine tail. But it was the head that held my attention. It was long and wedge-shaped, the two eyes set far back before a pair of swept-back horns each the size of a tower, with two nostrils set at the front. Now that it had turned to face me, it was completely still. If I hadn’t seen it move, I would have thought it was some impossible rock formation.
The dragon watched me, silent and unblinking.
“Um,” I said. “Hi.”
It was, looking back on it, a pretty stupid way to introduce myself.
“Um, sorry to bother you,” I said. The creature before me didn’t react, and I raised my voice a little. “Didn’t mean to intrude.”
The dragon stared at me. I don’t know much about dragons. Nobody really does. Maybe it couldn’t hear me, any more than a human can hear an ant. I began to back off. “I’ll just leave you in peace-”
STAY.
The voice went through me as though I were hearing it with my whole body. It felt like an earthquake, thunder through distant caverns. I stopped.
ARACHNE.
I hesitated. “Yes?”
YOU WILL AID HER.
I hesitated again, trying to figure out what to say. It didn’t sound like an order. It was more like a statement. “I’m going to,” I said at last. “If I can.”
The dragon watched me silently. “Okay,” I said slowly. “Arachne’s above. She’s in her lair. She’s hurt.”
I waited for an answer. Nothing came.
“Can you go to her?” I said at last.
The dragon didn’t answer. I didn’t know what was going on. “If I brought Arachne here, could you help her?”
YES.
“Is there, uh … any way you could help me with that?”
The dragon reared its head back, opening its mouth like a chasm. There were teeth inside, glinting dully. One of its enormous front claws rose up out of the earth and broke off a tooth with a thunderclap. Then the claw descended towards me.
I would have fled then if I could. One brush from that claw would turn me into a bloody smear. I knew I couldn’t possibly get away but my instincts shouted at me to run anyway … and yet I couldn’t move. All I could do was watch that claw descend, bigger and bigger-
The claw was gone. The dragon was back as it had been. Its enormous diamond eyes watched me. GO.
Darkness.
I was lying on stone, face down. It was pitch-black, and the air was warm. I was back in the tunnels.
I sat up, searching around me with my divination magic, watching the futures of myself exploring. I was in a small tunnel with a smooth floor. One end sloped upwards slightly and I had the feeling it led back the way I had come. There was no cavern nearby, and looking into the futures, there was nothing like it within my range. It didn’t seem to exist.
I shook my head, disoriented. My memories of the cavern felt hazy, confused, and didn’t seem to make sense. Had it been real? Or a dream, my mind playing tricks from exhaustion?
Either way, I’d been down here for hours. The tunnels felt dead, empty. If Belthas’s men had been going to search this far, they would have caught up to me by now; they must have given up and gone back. Looking into the future, I couldn’t see any sign that the tunnels ahead were going to start sloping back up towards ground level. I turned and began retracing my steps.