Chapter Thirty-Six
THIRTY-SIX
HAWK
Something about this is all wrong.
I can’t quite shake the feeling of wrongness even as I continue to dig in Drop Twenty-Seven for hours on end. It’s definitely collapsed in on itself—even now there’s the occasional rumble of stone indicating movement in the rocks. Cave-ins happen all the time. It’s a hazard of the job. I’ve dug out dozens in my time…but something isn’t adding up and I can’t quite figure out what.
It bothers me as I dig through rock, tossing boulders into the magic portal held open nearby by Master Siskin’s partner. He’s not as high ranked as Siskin, but Siskin shares his toys with his lover, and so Tern has been here at my side all night long, keeping the portal open so I can remove the rubble.
The thing that strikes me the oddest about this is that we’re the only two here.
Cave-ins are always a threat when dealing with the cavernous ruins. Old Prell fell into the earth, and so it stands to reason that it would keep collapsing in on itself without much prompting. That’s not the strange part. It’s that no one else has arrived to assist. The other Taurians I normally work with on rescues are out of the city, of course, but someone else should be taking their place. There should be a handful of us here, trying to keep it together despite the moon’s near rising.
If someone is in danger—buried under the rubble—shouldn’t someone care enough to send more than just one tired Taurian down into the tunnels?
But perhaps they’re just late in showing up. I continue in my rescue efforts, tossing great slabs of rock out of the way and rolling a boulder into the portal. I work until I’m sweating and covered in a fine layer of dust, and then pause to take a sip from my canteen. As I do, I glance over at my silent, yawning companion. “Where are the others?”
He blinks at me, sleepy. “What others?”
“The others coming to assist with the rescue.”
“Oh.” He ponders for a moment. “I don’t know. There are usually more Taurians for a rescue, aren’t there?”
“Usually,” I agree. I wipe my brow and get back to work, but I can’t shake the niggling feeling that something about this is off. After a while, I notice dawn light streaming in through the portal, and still no one has arrived to help. The rocks are getting larger, to the point that even a Taurian can’t lift them, and the only other one here, Tern, isn’t going to be much help, physically. I wipe my sweating face and fight the feeling of annoyance rising through me, because mistakes happen. Paperwork gets lost. “The rest of the rescue team still hasn’t been diverted this way.”
“It does seem so,” Tern agrees. “Someone should be coming by to spell us.”
I nod, eyeing the collapsed tunnel. I don’t want to leave if someone is trapped in there, but at the same time, I can’t dig out the entire thing on my own. “What team is assigned to this drop again?”
“Grosbeak’s team,” he says immediately, pulling out a parchment roster and eyeing it. “His Five fledglings.”
A fledgling team. A nightmare scenario. “And no one is here to dig them out except us?” I take the roster from him and read down it carefully. Surely not everyone is deployed in the tunnels because of the lordling and his bounty? I’m used to being called in on rescue missions but not everyone goes into the ruins. Even so, I scan the list, looking for a team that might be working a nearby drop so they can come assist…and then I pause. “Grosbeak’s Five are at Drop Seven. This is Drop Twenty-Seven.”
“But—it’s caved in? This is the right drop tunnel.” Tern leans over my shoulder, looking at the roster, and points a dusty finger at the bottom of the page even as the portal sputters out behind him. “They’re listed on here twice.”
So they are. I skim the roster list, looking for anyone else who might have been assigned to this particular drop, but there’s no one else. Just Grosbeak’s Five, and they might not even be here. “Who exactly reported this tunnel collapse?”
Tern digs in his pocket for the message and holds it up to the lantern we have sitting on a nearby rock. “Ah. Here it is.” He glances up at me. “The tunnel collapse was reported by Guild Master Magpie.”
Magpie? What’s she up to now?
And why does she want me out of the way?
ASPETH
I wake up to a small, sticky hand patting my face, and a throbbing pain above my ear.
Everything aches. I open my eyes, whimpering when it’s just as dark with them open as it is with them closed. The tunnel collapsed on us. Magpie turned against us. Barnabus tried to kill us. Maybe he succeeded. Maybe I’m in the death god’s entrance to hell.
The small, sticky hand pats my cheek again. “Kipp? Is that you?”
This time he gives me a little squeezing pinch on the cheek, like an old grandmother. I suppose that’s him reassuring me. I flex a hand, and rocks clatter away from my fingers. Everything seems whole, if a little bruised. I think that’s a good sign. I’m lying against something warm and soft.
I try to sit up, only to smack my forehead against rock. “Ow!”
Kipp pats my cheek again, and then I hear the sound of rummaging. There’s the click of a striker, and then light flares. Kipp has a stub of a candle in his hand, and he holds it up.
It’s worse than I thought.
The pocket we’re in is surrounded by tumbled rock. The rocks themselves are oppressively close to my face, and if I sit upright, I’ll be face-first into the rubble. I stretch an arm out and touch a toppled Prellian column, against which Lark’s shield and Kipp’s house and my quarterstaff have created a kind of triangle of protection for us. The top of Kipp’s shell house is broken into a dozen pieces, but the little guy seems none the worse for wear. He holds the candle stub up to my face, peering, and I realize that my spectacles are broken.
For some reason, that makes me angrier than anything. Does Magpie realize how fucking hard it is to find spectacles that fit just right? Ugh. I pull them off and toss them aside, and as I do, I notice I’m lying atop another person.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit.
I scramble away as best I can—not easy considering that the room I have is less than the size of my clothing trunk—and try not to panic. Gwenna and Mereden are under Lark, who tried to protect them with her body. I roll Lark off of them and she groans, her clothing torn. We wake each person up as best we can. Gwenna has a bloody nose and Mereden is scratched up, her ankle swollen. Lark clutches her ribs but considering that we’ve just survived being buried in a cave-in, we’re doing amazing. “Is everyone all right?” I manage, wiping at a strand of blood trickling down my cheek. “No one trapped under anything?”
“I’m trapped under a shit ton of rock with four other people,” Lark jokes, and then winces, pressing a hand to her waist. “Oh, fuck, that hurts.”
“Let’s not think about the shit ton of rock, all right?” I offer. “Let’s think about how we can get out of here.”
“We can’t,” Gwenna states, holding a length of ripped sleeve under her nose to stem the bleeding. She hunkers down between myself and Mereden, and we’re all crammed in here like matchsticks in a tinderbox. “If we move something, we could collapse the entire tunnel on us and die for sure.”
“Well, we can’t stay here.” Already the rocks just overhead feel oppressive. I want to stretch my legs and stand upright, and the longer I can’t do it, the more I feel the intense need to do so. I focus on Kipp and his tiny candle, already burning down to nothing. “Let’s think. Where are our supply bags?”
“Buried,” Mereden says in a small voice. “Just like us. I can examine everyone but I don’t have anything to treat you with.”
“It’s fine. We’re fine.” I keep a bright smile on my face. “I’m good, but look over the others.”
Mereden does a quick check, but there’s nothing to be done for Gwenna’s busted nose or Lark’s ribs. They need a guild healer.
“I’m good,” Lark says. “Had worse in a bar fight.”
“I just want out,” Gwenna moans.
“We’re working on it.” Gwenna whimpers with distress at my reassurance, and I reach over and grab her hand, holding it tightly. “Kipp. What else do you have in your house? Anything we can use for light?”
He scrambles up to his shell again and digs into the side, squirming his way under a broken piece and tossing out a few more bits. There’s a bag full of stale cookies, a bundle of string, a handful of nuts, and one more tiny candle. We have no water to drink, very little food, and I’m trying hard not to think about how much rock could possibly be over us.
“Thank you,” I tell Kipp, and hand the cookies to Mereden and Gwenna, because they’re both looking shaky. “You two eat these.”
I expect Lark to complain, but she doesn’t. Even clutching her ribs, she seems more settled than both Gwenna and Mereden, who look like they might fall apart at any moment.
I keep talking in order to seem like I have everything under control. “I think with the nuts and a bit of ripped fabric, we might be able to make a candle that will burn longer. In Prell, they used nut oil in their candles and that’s why it left greasy smears on a lot of the paint in the ruins—well, it isn’t important. The important thing is that we’re not going to run out of light, all right? We’ll figure something out.”
Lark nods. “Once I catch my breath I can try to see if any of the rocks are loose.”
“No, you stay where you are. Kipp, are there any cracks in the rocks that you can squeeze through?” I shift my weight, nearly hitting my head on the oppressively low ceiling again. “If so, see if you can figure out the best way out. If not, just let me know. We’ve got options.”
“Options?” Gwenna lets out a hysterical bark of laughter. “What fucking options do we have? Die fast or die slow?”
“No,” I say firmly. “First of all, if we can’t find a solution out of the…rubble, then we wait here.” I don’t use the words cave-in or buried alive even though it’s the first thing that comes to mind. Since Gwenna is still panicky, I decide to go further with my lies. “There was a team about thirty years ago that lived in the tunnels for a month before they were rescued. They ate moss and drank trickles of water that came in through the rock. We’ll be fine. People survive in the ruins all the time. We can wait for rescue.”
It’s not true, of course. I’m certain teams are rescued from dire cave-ins regularly but after a certain amount of time passes, it’s generally assumed that all are lost. I’ve read plenty of dramatic stories about such tragedies but I keep that to myself.
Kipp nods and points at the rocks, then heads into the jumble, squeezing between a few precariously perched stones even as the stub of the candle flickers and wavers. The rope around him slithers, and Lark hastily unties it from her waist, wincing the entire time. He’s a hero, Kipp. When we get out of here, I’m making sure that everyone knows how amazing he is. He’s kept his cool all this time, and I need to do the same. So I take the flickering stub of the candle and light the taller one. “Everyone untie and give Kipp some slack to explore. Gwenna?”
“Yes?” Her voice sounds shaky even as she unties the rope at her waist.
“Do you think you can dowse for us if Kipp isn’t successful?”
She makes another hysterical sound in her throat. “Dowse for what?”
“For whatever tugs you,” I say, keeping my tone even and soothing. “If you can dowse for a way out, that’s perfect. If not, just dowse for an artifact and we’ll see where that takes us. We’re just considering our options.”
“Options. Right. Okay.” She sniffs and another line of blood drips from her nose. “Shit.”
“You’re all right. We’re all a mess right now.” I reach over and give her hand a squeeze.
The rope at my waist jumps. I’ve been so busy coaching the others that I’ve forgotten to untie myself. “Sorry Kipp,” I call out. “Hang on!”
It jerks out of my hands and snags against the rocks. Pebbles rain down on us. Gwenna screams and holds on to me, and just then, the entire ceiling overhead seems to shift and groan.
Oh, Lady Asteria, we’re going to die. “Under the shield,” I call out. “Everyone, try to get your head under the shield—”
The largest of rocks sinks inward, tumbling down, and I scream, waiting for the rest of Old Prell to collapse over us. Instead, Kipp bounces down and brushes dust and pebbles out of my hair, and I look up into a yawning cavern of darkness.
We’re out.
Sort of.