Barrick sighed, coughed until he doubled over and spat out blood and ash, then climbed back onto his feet.
Many of the tunnels started out with an upward slant, but soon tilted back down again. The only certain way to know that he was climbing was to find stairs. But Barrick Eddon was not the only one with that idea: half the lost, shrieking creatures in the smoky depths of Greatdeeps seemed to be looking for a way to the surface. The others, for reasons he could not imagine, seemed equally determined on rushing down toward the place where Gyir and the oneeyed demigod had died, a cavern that had already collapsed in fire and black fumes when Barrick had crawled away from it perhaps an hour ago. Sometimes he actually had to wade through a tide of maddered shapes, some of them as big as himself, all hurrying as fast as they could down toward what must be certain death. He had lost the ax when the ceiling fell; now he found a spadelike digging tool that someone had dropped, and used it the next time the tunnel became frighteningly cramped, clearing his way with it, hitting out when he needed to against the claws or teeth of frightened refugees.
As he climbed higher through the mine the stairwells opened onto rooms and scenes of which he could make no sense whatsoever. In one broad cavern which he had to traverse to reach the bottom of the next stairwell, dozens of slender, winged creatures were savaging a single squat one, their voices a shrill buzz of angry joy—their victim might have been one of the small Followers like those that had attacked Gyir in the forest, but it was hard to telclass="underline" the silent creature was too covered with blood and earth to be certain. Barrick hurried past with his head down. It reminded him of his own vulnerability, and when he saw the dull glow of a blade lying on the stairs where its owner had dropped it, presumably in panicked flight, he dropped the digging tool and picked this up instead. It was a strange thing, half ax, half poniard, but much sharper than the spade.
A couple of floors up the stairwell suddenly filled with small, pale skittering things which seemed to care little whether they were upside down or right side up; just as many of them raced across the ceiling and walls as along the floor. Their bodies were bone-hard, round and featureless as dinner bowls, but they had little splay-toed feet like mice. The scrabbling, clinging touch of those tiny claws disturbed Barrick so much that after the first one landed on him he hurriedly brushed off all others.
Barrick Eddon was staggeringly weary. He had climbed several staircases, some taller than anything back home in Southmarch, and also two high, terrifyingly rickety ladders, yet he still seemed no closer to the surface: the air was still as dank, hot, and choking as before, the other slaves and workers just as confused as they had been a half dozen levels lower. He was lost, and now even the strength that terror had brought him was beginning to fade. Things fluttered past in the dark tunnels and shadowy figures slid across his path before vanishing down side passages, but more and more he seemed to be alone. That was bad: to be alone was to be obvious. The monstrous demigod might be dead but that didn’t mean Jikuyin’s surviving minions would just let Barrick go.
He grabbed at the first creature he found that was smaller than himself, a strange, hairless thing with goggling eyes like a two-legged salamander, the last of a pack that slithered past him in a stairwell. It let out a thin shriek, then before he could even find out if it spoke his language it fell into pieces. Arms, legs—everything he tried to grab dropped off the torso and the whole slippery, strange mess tumbled from his grasp and then hopped and slithered away down the stairs after its fellows. Barrick was so startled that he stood staring as the hairless creatures (trailed by the one he had captured, still in its constituent parts) hurried down and out of his sight, then was almost crushed by a large, hairy shape chasing after them.
The hairy thing was on him and then past him so quickly that he only knew it was one of the apelike guards by its foul smell and by the scratch of its fur as it forced its way past him down the narrow stairwell. He stood for a moment after it was gone, gasping, grateful that it seemed more interested in the hairless things than in him.
Maybe they’re good to eat, he thought miserably. Barrick wasn’t only aching and tired, he was famished—the guards hadn’t bothered to feed them before dragging them off to the gate. I’ll be killing and eating the horrid things myself before long, and glad to have them... Just as he reached a landing, lit fitfully by a pair of guttering torches, a small shape dashed out of one of the side passages. The little, manlike creature took one look at Barrick and turned to run back the way he’d come, but Barrick lunged forward—surprising himself almost as much as the newcomer—and gripped the creature’s knotted, oily hair with the fingers of his good hand.
“Stop or I’ll kill you,” he said. “Do you speak my tongue?”
It was a Drow like the one which had ridden the burning wagon, tiny and gnarled, with bristling brows, a wide, onionshaped nose and a ragged beard that covered much of its face. It was strong for its size, but the more it struggled the tighter Barrick held. He drew it toward him and laid his found blade against its face so it could not fail to notice. He struggled not to show the creature how much it hurt him just to hold the blade with his bad arm.
“Nae hort,” it cried, the voice both gruff and high-pitched. “Nae hort!”
It took a moment. “Don’t...don’t hurt you?” He leaned closer, glaring. “Don’t think to trick me, creature. I want to go out, but I can’t find the surface—the light. Where is the light?”
The little man stared at him for a long moment, then nodded. “Yow beyst in Rootsman’s Nayste—ouren Drowhame. High in mountain, beyst, wuth caves and caves, ken? Wrong way to dayburn.”
If he listened carefully, he could make sense of it. So he was climbing inside the mountain itself—no wonder he couldn’t find the surface! He was relieved, but if the creature considered the weak light of the shadowlands worthy of being called “dayburn,” he hoped it never found itself in the true light of day on the other side of the Shadowline.
“How do I get out. Out to...to dayburn?”
“Thic way.” The Drow squirmed gently until Barrick loosened his grip. It turned and pointed with a stubby, crack-nailed finger. “Yon.”
Barrick gratefully transferred his blade to his good hand. “Very well. Lead me.”
“Willae set a free?”
“If you lead me to the dayburn, yes, I’ll free you. But if you try to run away from me before we get there, I’ll stick you with this!” He was sick of blood and killing, but he didn’t want to spend the rest of a short, miserable life in these caverns, either.
Barrick didn’t know if it was a good or bad sign that the farther the creature led him, the more deserted the corridors became. They moved mostly horizontally at first, through rooms that clearly had some kind of function, mostly as storehouses stacked with bent and broken digging tools, battered, empty ore buckets, broken wagons awaiting repair, ropes and other supplies, or with less comprehensible things—piles of what looked like fired clay chips covered with incised marks, leaking bags and barrels of different colored powders, even one chamber so misty and chill that at first he thought they had stepped out of the mines at last and into the midst of a terrible winter storm. He was several paces into this last cavern before he realized they were still deep under the earth, and that the tooth-chattering cold was because the room was piled high with blocks of snow or ice. But why? And where could such things come from?
The answer to the second came a few moments later, as he began to see what was stacked along the walls, largely hidden by the mist. Corpses, although of what it was hard to tell, because they had been quartered as if by expert butchers. His already cringing spirits plummeted even farther. What was the reason for such madness? In a trembling voice, he asked the Drow, but the creature only shrugged its ignorance.