She grabbed Gaborn. He hunched in pain, holding his ribs. She propelled him toward the exit. “Go!”
Last of all, she grabbed Binnesman.
The green woman still held the front of the grotto. Another reaver slammed its head into the crevasse, trying to wedge its way in, and she lunged forward, slugging it in the jaw. Bloody gobbets of reaver flesh rained through the grotto.
Iome felt about blindly on the floor. Binnesman had dropped his staff and his pack. Iome hurled both through the small opening, then tossed her own pack through, and slid down the exit.
She gasped air, fresh air! She lay for a moment on her belly, chest heaving, trying to clear her lungs of the reavers’ curses.
“Foul Deliverer, Fair Destroyer—to me!” Binnesman called out weakly. In answer, the green woman came hurtling through the opening from above. She rolled downhill and landed against a stone wall with such a shock that if she had been human, she would have broken every bone in her body.
“Let’s get away from here,” Gaborn said. The ground still shook from the passage of reavers, and all around was a distant hiss.
Iome looked back. With all her endowments of sight and stamina, her vision began to clear quickly. It might take the reavers some time to dig through the grotto and find their escape route. But she had no doubt that they would follow.
Ahead, an ancient riverbed wound through the Underworld. There was still water in it here and there, small pools. Grotesque Underworld vegetation, like cabbage leaves, covered the walls. Tubers and hairy rootlike plants hung from the roof in twisted splendor, while giant fungi rose up like little islands from the tickle ferns that covered the floor. Still, there was something of a trail cut by the watercourse. It would be a hard path, a wild path. Where it led, Iome could not guess.
Their horses were gone. Gaborn was hurt. And the reavers were after them. A stalactite fell from the roof, shattered on the floor not a dozen feet away.
“Looks like we’re through the easy part,” Iome said.
6
The Shaft
Dare to be a leader. When faced with great peril, men will follow anyone who hazards to make the first move.
“Come!” Gaborn urged the group. “We have no time to waste.”
Come where? Averan wondered.
In the reavers’ tunnels, Averan knew the way. But here in this natural cave, without any reaver scents written on the wall to guide her, she was lost. The ground thundered beneath the feet of hundreds of thousands of reavers.
They had barely escaped the grotto. Averan gasped, struggling to clear her lungs of the reavers’ curses. “I’m blind!” She squinted. Her eyes would not focus. Instead, the cords in them convulsed and twitched, and Averan peered through a red haze.
“It will pass,” Binnesman promised. Averan peered at him, a vague shape in the darkness recognizable only by the color of light shining from his cape pin. For an instant his face came into focus. Such was the power of the reavers’ curse that the whites of the wizard’s eyes had gone blood red.
Averan’s eyes burned like poison. She had never imagined such exquisite pain.
The whites of my eyes are probably as red as his, she realized.
Binnesman felt in the pockets of the robe, pulled out a tiny sprig. “Here,” he said. “Eyebright!”
He broke the stem of the plant and wetted it with his tongue, then quickly painted a bit over each of Averan’s eyes. The pain drained away quickly as Binnesman ministered to the others.
Averan grabbed her pack and ropes, peered along the cave both ways, upstream and down. Along the sides of the cavern, stalactites dripped from the ceiling and stalagmites rose up from the floor like a forest of spears. Only the center of the cavern was clear of them. There, water had flowed swiftly once, polishing away the debris. Now the rivercourse was overgrown. Binnesman had called the plants tickle fern. Their fronds fanned slowly, as if swaying in an invisible breeze.
In her mind, Averan tried to construct an image of what the reaver tunnels looked like. But in her mind, the image was a tangled ball of yarn. Perhaps the Waymaker could have envisioned it, but she doubted it. The reavers didn’t negotiate the tunnels by sight. They didn’t use maps. They followed their sense of smell.
Averan sniffed. The reavers had a name for this kind of stone. The name was a smell—the chalky scent of blue-white cave pearls. If this deposit joined with any other reaver tunnels, she might be able to figure it out by the scent.
“Downstream!” she said. “I think this cave meets an abandoned reaver tunnel downstream.” A feeling of doubt assailed her. It would be miles from here, dozens and dozens of miles, and in a cave such as this, the trail might easily be blocked a hundred times.
Gaborn got up, squinting and gasping. He rested his weight heavily on his reaver dart, used it as a crutch. The blow he had taken to his ribs obviously pained him. So he merely stood for a moment, as if to let his endowments of stamina and metabolism heal his broken bones.
As he did, the high hissing sound of frustration came from the grotto above. Averan could hear the reavers clanking the stone with their knight gigs, trying to gouge their way through. With every blow, the floor of the cave shook.
Gaborn peered at Binnesman. “Can you seal the cave behind us?”
“Collapse the roof? That would be foolhardy,” Binnesman said. “I don’t have that kind of control.” He thought for a moment, and added, “But perhaps a small spell is in order.”
He climbed back up the tunnel to the mouth of the grotto, and returned a moment later, obviously pleased with himself.
The reavers still hissed, but the ground shook somewhat less.
“Let’s get away from here,” he said.
“What did you do?” Averan asked.
“There is a simple spell for softening stone,” Binnesman explained. “That is how you make a roof collapse, or destroy a bridge. But it is similarly easy for an Earth Warden to harden the earth, to make dirt as flinty as stone, and stone as impenetrable as steel. I hope to keep those reavers busy digging for hours.”
“So, you locked the door behind us?” Gaborn asked.
“One can only hope,” Binnesman said.
Gaborn led the way, climbing over stalagmites and boxlike fungi, wading through tickle fern. He carried his reaver dart in one hand, and his pack and ropes slung over his back.
So they ran. Each of them had taken endowments of metabolism, which served them well. But of them all, Averan was still the slowest. Her nine-year-old legs were shorter than any others, and she had to take three steps for Gaborn’s every two.
She struggled to keep up at first. But soon, it was Gaborn who slowed his party. Though his endowments would heal the blow he had taken to the ribs, he still wheezed in pain, even as they slowed.
The channel went down, always down. Often there were places worn away where there had once been wide pools. Most pools were dry, but in some basins a bit of water had collected. Averan could see scrabbers—a kind of blind lizard with winglike arms—that seemed to fly beneath the water. She raced through such pools, splashing water everywhere, lest she get bitten.
In other places, the walls of the old river channel narrowed where water had rushed down, and thus the path was much clearer. There was little sign of animal life. Large green-gray cave slugs oozed about, feeding on the tickle fern, and these in turn provided sustenance for some small blind-crabs. But Averan saw nothing big in here, nothing dangerous.
We’re still far from the deep places, she thought. Still far from the perilous realms.
This was a desert. Most Underworld plants drew sustenance from heat, and it was too cold for much to grow here. Thus, there were no large animals about.
Even after they had run for miles, the ground still trembled and thundered from the passage of reavers. It was growing distant now.