She continued her search, trying to think of it as an act akin to skinning an animal instead of looting a corpse, hoping to find a candle-end or a full canteen. She was surprised to find a heavy pack instead. Opening the strap, she felt around inside-there was a sheathed knife, neatly coiled rope, what felt like a small glass bottle, clothes, tasteless field rations, a full adventurer’s pack, just like the one Julen had been carrying. Why would he kill one of his captors but leave his pack behind? Perhaps she was misreading the situation. There were surely numerous other ways to die down here. If only she had some clue, some mark of passage.
Ahead of her, so faint she thought at first it was some hallucination brought on by her eyes straining for light in a lightless place, she detected a streak of pale blue on the floor. She approached it, going on hands and knees, putting her face inches from the floor, and it was unmistakable: a luminous chalk mark an inch or so long. A message from Julen? It seemed like the sort of thing a Guardian-trained spy might use, to leave messages and subtly mark a passage.
She kept moving, and soon found more chalk marks. Not bright enough to illuminate her surroundings, but unmistakable to her light-hungry eyes. Zaltys moved more quickly once she had a trail to follow and was surprised when the tunnel gradually grew lighter. Patches of bluish-green fungus spotted the cavern walls, fed by rivulets of water that oozed down, pooling in depressions on the floor. The light, though dim, was miraculous after so long in the limitless black, and Zaltys studied her surroundings. The tunnel was rounded and curving, rather like being inside the body of an enormous worm-a hideous thought. Multiple splashes of water on the stone indicated the passage of other creatures who’d tromped heedlessly through the puddles recently. Zaltys realized she might soon be faced with the choice of striking down Julen’s captors, or following them at a distance to see where they went. It would be nice to have his help, if only to make him carry his own pack, as the weight of all the supplies was slowing her down. It would also be nice not to be alone down there.
But she wasn’t alone. A snake, as white and unmarked as a derro’s eyes and easily as long as she was tall, slithered through one of the puddles and lifted its pale head toward her, tongue flickering. “How long have you been following me?” she whispered, because she was certain, somehow, that it was no mere passerby out hunting cave rodents. The snake looked away from her, moved smoothly a short distance down the tunnel, then paused, as if waiting for her.
“You could at least offer to carry something for me,” Zaltys muttered, and set off again. The tunnel gradually opened up, the walls moving away and the ceiling rising, and though there were still patches of luminescence, they were farther away, and dimmer as a result. At least she no longer felt as if she were crawling through a gopher burrow-there was a ceiling up there somewhere, but it no longer brushed the top of her head if she didn’t crouch.
The snake was almost invisible again, just a faint pale ribbon, but it seemed to be following the chalk marks just as much as she did-until it abruptly stopped, coiled up on itself, and flopped on its back.
Some snakes played dead when threatened, but there was no threat that Zaltys could sense-nothing on either side of her, nothing behind, nothing in front.
Guardian apes. Not that she literally thought there were apes down there, but she’d told Julen, in the jungle, that temple guardian apes would drop on you from the trees above, that in the wild you had to be aware of the world above as well as the world on all sides, and why would that be any different there?
She lifted the hand crossbow and swept it up over her head in an arc, rapidly working the reloading lever and firing off all five bolts in seconds. Something above her screamed-the sound was like tortured metal, not like any animal she’d ever heard before-and Zaltys dropped Julen’s pack and rolled away. Discretion be damned: she needed to see what she was dealing with. She grabbed a sunrod and struck its end against the uneven stone floor, squinting against the sudden explosion of brightness.
There were jellyfish in the water off the coast of Delzimmer, enough that the harbormaster sometimes organized culls to keep them from clogging up the waterways. She’d seen squid too, though usually on a dinner table or hanging up at a fish market.
The things that filled the air of the caverns above her were a bit like jellyfish, and a bit like squid. They floated in the blackness, their bodies wrinkled hemispheres like human brains, each dangling eight or ten long, wicked-looking tentacles. The one she’d injured lay sprawled on the ground, tentacles flailing, hideous beak opening and closing as it mewled. The beast had no eyes that she could see, which might explain why the others seemed untroubled by her light, but they were descending toward her like deadly spores floating down on a breeze.
Julen would know what these are called, she thought. One of his books would have told him about them. Perhaps they’re intelligent-maybe they have an arrangement with the derro, to let them pass unharmed, and hinder others.
She didn’t know what the things were called, but she supposed she didn’t need to know the name of their race to diminish its numbers. As the tentacles of the descending enemy reached toward her, and their injured fellow mewled and lashed, Zaltys prepared for her first battle in the dark.
Chapter Twelve
If the eyeless creatures descending all around couldn’t see Zaltys, then her ability to fade into shadow probably wouldn’t help much. She reloaded the hand crossbow and set it aside, but within reach. The creatures didn’t seem to be in any hurry, so she opened her bow case and removed her new weapon, stringing it quickly. A dozen creatures. She could manage a dozen aimed shots per minute, maybe as many as fifteen on an exceptionally good day, and range wasn’t a problem-unfortunately-as they were getting closer all the time. Shooting up was always awkward, but Krailash had made her practice shooting birds on the wing often enough. She took a mental snapshot of the descending creatures, dropped the sunrod on the ground, and nocked her first arrow.
The bow was a pleasure to use. She’d practiced with it, but that was nothing compared to using it in battle. It was a shorter bow than the one she usually carried, a compact bow, ingeniously recurved to provide the kind of power that longer bows achieved through the simple brute force of better leverage. The bowstring was beautifully made from the sinew of, no doubt, some legendary animal. She took an arrow-a shame to use an ordinary arrow in such a bow, an arrow kept by the barrel in the family armory, but she knew she should save her more exotic projectiles-from her quiver and nocked it, raising the bow as she pulled back the string. She pushed the bow forward with her left arm as she pulled back the bowstring with her right, straining until her shoulder-blades felt like they might meet; the draw on the bow was heavier than she was accustomed to, but not impossibly so. At full extension, her right index finger just touched the corner of her lips. She looked along the length of the arrow at her first target: the nearest hideous descending creature. Kill the ones nearest first, as she would have more time to kill the ones that were farther away.
Don’t look at the head of the arrow, don’t think of the bow at all, just look at the target. The bow is an extension of the will; the arrow is the instrument of that will.