‘Worse things to die for,’ said Silo, and they didn’t speak any more for a while.
Trinica. If it all finished here, then it would have finished badly with her, and he couldn’t face the idea of that. Despite the ignominious way she’d kicked him off her aircraft, he’d only thought of it as a temporary setback. Something to deal with after he’d got the Iron Jackal off his case. But if that really had been their last meeting, it was a damned pathetic way to be remembered.
The cleft ended in slope of rubble, where the water splashed down over the rocks into the shadows of a long cavern beyond.
They splashed out of the cleft and made their unsteady way down the slippery rocks. Frey’s legs were soaked, and his socks squished in his boots. Once on steady ground, they tried to get an idea of the cavern they’d found themselves in. It was dank and chilly, kinked and narrow, cluttered by protrusions that bulged from all angles. The stream ran through it in a trough of its own making, carved over centuries through the relentless indifference of nature.
There were no obvious exits in sight, but the cavern extended far beyond the reach of their torches, which showed them little except for the tips of the stalactites that hung menacingly overhead.
There was another shriek from a ghall, this one much closer, loud enough to make Frey jump. He turned on his heel, holding his torch high. There, just on the edge of the light, high up on the walclass="underline" eyes ! He cried out and raised his pisto l, but suddenly he had nothing to aim at. He could have sworn he saw a glitter of light, reflected from the wet orbs of something monstrous. But when he moved closer and thrust out his torch, there was nothing there. Only an angular hole, a patch of darkness in the red rock.
‘There was something there,’ he said, breathlessly. He was frightened by how much it had frightened him.
‘Calm down, Cap’n,’ Silo rumbled. ‘Ain’t one of ’em you got to worry about. It’s when you got ten of ’em you should be scared.’
‘Well, I’m getting an early bloody run-up on it, alright?’ Frey snapped. Then something splashed in the water right by his boot heel, and he spun around and fired.
The report of his pistol was dreadful in the silence. Frey listened to the echoes bounce echwedoff up the tunnel, his nerves jangling, a wince frozen on his face. He sucked in air over his gritted teeth.
‘That was a fish, wasn’t it?’ he said.
‘Yuh,’ said Silo.
There was a quiet hissing coming from the edges of the cavern now. An unmistakably sinister sound. The ghalls, out there in the dark.
‘Stream goes that way, Cap’n,’ said Silo.
‘Right,’ he said, and they followed it.
Twenty-Six
What are they waiting for?
Frey had no idea how long the torment had gone on. Minutes? An hour? More? Perhaps it was his imagination, but the torches seemed to be burning with less vigour than before. And all that time, the ghalls had stayed out of sight.
He could hear them. He heard their soft hisses, from behind, to his left and right, overhead. He heard their quiet, hoarse croaks, an occasional distant screech. He caught glimpses of quick scuttling movements, and dusty falls of pebbles that tapped and skittered down the cavern walls. But he never got a look at them.
The dark, he told himself. They’re waiting for the dark.
Progress through the cavern had been slow. The stream had deepened too much to wade through, and the tunnel walls crowded up to the banks so that sometimes they had to edge around protrusions which threatened to push them in. Every metre gained was made with careful treads, in expectation of an attack at any moment. They dared not let their guard down. But the torches were burning low, and the dark was growing stronger. The massive dark that lived underground.
‘Problem,’ said Silo, up ahead. Frey moved closer to the Murthian to see what new obstacle had been put in their path, his pistol ready and eyes scanning the blackness.
He saw the trouble immediately. They’d reached the end of the cavern. The stream they’d been following ran right into the stone and disappeared.
‘Goes under,’ said Silo.
‘Can we swim under with it?’ Frey asked.
Silo pointed meaningfully at his torch.
Frey shook his head at himself. ‘Right, yes. Water puts out fire. I remember.’ He was so jumpy, he wasn’t even thinking straight any more.
Silo moved the torch around, and found a hole in the wall, a metre off the ground. ‘Way through, maybe,’ he said.
Frey stuck his torch in the hole. Beyond was a tunnel that looked even narrower than the shaft they’d climbed up earlier. He’d barely be able to fit his body into that space.
‘I am not crawling through there,’ Frey said.
There was a chorus of shrieks from the darkness behind him.
‘Although,’ he added hastily, ‘a little light wriggling would probably be okay.’
He pushed himself into the tunnel, moving awkwardly on elbows and knees, his torch and pistol held before him. Belatedly he realised how terrible it would be if this was a dead end, or if something was waiting for them at the end of it, but by then he was in. Silo made a mark on the wall and came cramming in after him.
Real claustrophobia attacked him now. He couldn’t move in any direction but forward. If he’d been certain of a way out at the other end, he might have been able to bear it more easily. But it was just as likely that this narrow passage would pinch closed or bend in a way his body couldn’t follow.
‘You can do it, Cap’n,’ said Silo. ‘Ain’t no worse than what we already climbed through.’
He realised that he’d stopped, paralysed by the thought of being trapped. He took a shuddering breath and got moving again.
He should never have clambered in to this tunnel. He should never have insisted on going with Silo to the settlement, when Silo was clearly trying to save him from the danger. He should never have picked up that bloody relic and got himself cursed. They were just the latest in a long, long line of bad decisions that he could trace all the way back to one moment, the mother of every calamity that had befallen him since.
Running out on Trinica on their wedding day.
I should’ve made up with her. Shouldn’t have left it like I did.
Too late. Far too late. But at least he had Silo here with him. At least there was that.
The tunnel widened out by a fraction. Frey gave heartfelt thanks to Silo’s goddess. He reckoned it was worth currying a bit of divine favour at this point, whether he was Murthian or not.
Eyes and throat burning from the smoke of his torch, he made progress. The tunnel curved to the left, but not lef latestightly enough to jam him. His cutlass caught on the rock for one heart-stopping instant, but it came loose with a tug, and he was off again.
Keep going forward. Keep going forward. He repeated it over and over in his head. It was the only thing stopping him from falling to pieces, and he focused on it furiously.
Then, a sight more wonderful than a hundred chests full of ducats: the end of the tunnel! The cold, black opening would have seemed forbidding in other circumstances, but now it promised freedom, and Frey squirmed towards it as fast as he was able.
He was almost there when a face out of his worst nightmares appeared in the gap. Something that seemed to be all mouth, with double rows of long, thin, transparent teeth gaping wide. It had night-black skin, shiny and wet as a seal’s, and bulbous eyes, like a deep-sea fish he’d seen preserved in a museum once, when he’d been dragged there by Amalicia Thade once upon a time. It was a monster out of prehistory, brutally hammered on evolution’s forge and then tossed aside for more elegant things.
Its jaws gaped as it shrieked at him. Frey yelled in response, panic-fired and put a bullet point blank through its tonsils. It fell away with a puzzled squawk.