Month 1, Day 6
The thing had us trapped in the middle of the arena. It had come down the great trunk from the hole in the roof and dropped into the center, onto the low floor at the bottom of the rings. Every archway around us was packed solid with the black things, thousands deep, shoulder to shoulder, no gap anywhere to get through. We had tried to run for them and been driven back, so there was nothing left but to fight.
It went for Jonas first. One long arm swept down at him, and he threw himself sideways off the step a breath before it landed. The stone where he had stood broke apart, and chunks of it skidded away down the rings. Jonas came up on the bad knee, gasping, and scrambled lower.
It didn't chase him. The arm drew back, and the huge eye swung over the rest of us, slow, picking which one to frighten next. It wasn't trying to kill us, not yet. The thing smashed the steps just to watch us jump clear, in no hurry at all, and we kept jumping.
Basha was shouting over the noise, holding us together. "Spread out! Don't give it a bunch to swing at. Behind the high steps, go!"
We went where she put us. The dwarf got close and put the blue hammer into its leg with everything he had, and the blow shuddered back up his own arms and the leg did not so much as shift. Whatever the blue had done to the small ones upstairs, it did nothing to this. Nikita held off to the side with a spear, watching the eye, waiting for it to hold still.
The thing knew we couldn't hurt it, and it took its time. It swatted Viktor off a step and down into the dark, and the crashes rolled around the round room and came back off walls I couldn't see. Dust kept rising into the torchlight until I could barely make out the far side of anything.
Even in the middle of it Basha kept counting us, her eyes going from one of us to the next and back, the count she ran after every fight. She was still at it when the thing came at the middle of the group, where most of us had bunched together without meaning to.
Jonas was the slowest of us on the bad knee, and he was right in front of it. Basha got to him before the arm did. She grabbed the back of his shirt and threw him down the steps and out of the path, and that put her in the gap where he had been, her spear barely up.
The arm caught her square in the chest and drove straight through where she stood. Her spear with the milky stone tip flew out of her hands and rang on the steps. She hit the stone behind her hard, and her body bent at angles a living body does not bend at, and she did not get up.
"BASHA!" Rafi's scream tore out of him raw, and he lunged for her, but the arm swept back across and he had to throw himself flat to keep his head.
I knew she was dead. It landed on me the same second the arm did, flat and certain, that she was gone, and there was no time to do one thing with it. None of us had a breath to spare for her. The thing was already turning back into the middle of us, and we ran.
Around me the rest of them were coming apart. The line Basha had held broke the second she went down. People ran in every direction with no plan left in any of them, and the thing knocked them flat one after another, almost lazy about it. For those few seconds we were finished, and we all knew it.
The arm that had killed her came back around, and I got under it but not clean. Its hand caught my shoulder on the way past, and the hit went down through me and threw me off my feet and down two steps. I landed on the stone with the wind gone out of me, and my sword struck the edge of a step and snapped near the hilt, and the broken end skittered off into the dark.
Pieces of broken blue lay scattered down the step where I had fallen, bits knocked off all our weapons. One of them by my hand had a sharp edge and a point. Grabbing it was not a plan or even a thought, just my fingers closing on something while the rest of me had given up. The point went into my palm and the blood came warm, and I pushed the piece down into my jacket pocket. If I was going to die in this hole, I wanted to die holding something. There was nothing more to it than that.
The thing lost interest in us for a moment. It walked back to the center of the floor, under the hole in the roof where the great trunk climbed up into the dark, and it turned to face the archways. Both arms went up. When it called out to them, its voice reached every ring of the place.
"Brothers! Come and see what they sent down to us!" A laugh broke in the middle of it. "They sent children. Children with little toys to wave at me."
From every arch the sound rolled back, thousands of them answering low and glad, until the whole arena filled with the noise of them.
While its back was to us and its arms were up to the crowd, Nikita took his chance. He had worked around to the side without my seeing it, low between two broken steps, a spear laid back along his arm. Now he rose, his arm came through, and the spear crossed the whole floor and went into the eye to the wood of the shaft.
The taunt turned into a scream. That sound drove through me and shook grit loose from the steps, and dust came sifting down through the torchlight. Both of the thing's hands clapped over its face, and it reeled back against the foot of the trunk.
A noise went around the archways then, thousands of them at once, and it was not a glad noise anymore.
Rafi grabbed my arm hard. "It bled, Aleks, did you see, it actually... the eye, go for the eye!"
Then the dark started coming out of it. Around the spear, where the point had gone in, something dark welled up and ran down the thing's face, thick and slow, almost liquid. It dripped off onto the steps below, and the stone went soft and pitted and crumbled away wherever it touched. I had no idea what it was. Whatever the spear had opened, it was something that should have stayed shut.
More of it kept coming, running off its chin in threads and pitting the steps where it dripped. Jonas made a sound behind me and went quiet. None of the things we had fought had ever done this.
The thing ripped the spear out and threw it down. Whatever game it had been playing was over. It came off the trunk straight at us, fast, and tore through two rings of steps on the way, and broken stone went everywhere. We were worse off now than when the fight began, and I knew it.
After that we gave up trying to hurt it and only tried to stay alive and keep it looking the wrong way. We broke up around the rings and used the smashed steps for cover, dropping behind the high ones when an arm came over, then moving again the second the stone broke under it. Rafi took hold of the whole thing, calling out where each of us should be.
"Keep it busy, don't stand still! Jonas, left with me, come on!"
Rafi and Jonas went wide to the left, banging their blades on the stone and yelling to drag the eye their way. Over on the right the elf woman put blue arrows into its face, fast, one after another, hauling its attention back toward her. Every time the thing turned for one side, Nikita got a clean line on the eye from the other and threw.
The cover did not last. A fist came down on the step the elf woman crouched behind and burst it apart, and she scrambled back off her feet. Jonas screamed and waved his blade to pull the eye off her before it came down again.
But the spears were running out. They lay scattered all over the floor, fallen short, knocked aside, spent. There was one thing I could do that didn't take a strong arm. I held the torch up high in one hand so its light stayed on the eye for Nikita to throw by. With the other hand I grabbed the fallen blue spears off the floor and pushed them back into his, so he never once had to stop. Those arms came down close enough that I felt the wind off them, and I kept my eyes on the eye and the spears and not on the arms.
The eye was closing up, though. After every hit it sealed a little more, the dark stopped running, and Nikita's points began to skid off the side of it. We were losing the one thing that had worked. The thing found where the spears kept coming from, and its head came around and the eye fixed on Nikita and held there. It put its head down and went for him.
Nikita stood his ground. He dropped to one knee in its path and pulled his last spear back, and there was no time left for him to do more. The thing closed the gap in two strides.
"Get up, get UP!" Rafi was screaming and running, and he was never going to reach him in time. Jonas had both hands pressed over his mouth.
A spear came up out of the black at the bottom of the arena, from under the lowest ring where no torch had reached the whole fight. It flew flat and hard and took the thing through the open eye, deep. Its legs went out from under it. The full weight of it came down across the steps in front of Nikita, slid, and went still.
For a moment nothing in the arena made a sound. Up in the archways the thousands of them had gone dead silent. Their champion was down on the broken stone, and not one of them had a word for it.
Antoine came up out of the black at the bottom, walking, another spear loose in his hand. Not a mark or a fleck of dust showed on him, while the rest of us were gray with it. He stepped over the dead thing and looked at us, at the blood and the dust and the rest of us barely able to stand.
"It's dead," he said. His voice was flat and even, not even winded. "I saved you."
None of us said a word back. We had nothing left to spend on him. I knew where he had been the whole fight, down in that black at the bottom, out of reach of the arms, waiting for his moment. Nikita knew it too, I could see it in his face. But Basha was dead and the rest of us were not, so nobody said a thing.
For a few breaths none of us moved at all. Up in the archways the thousands stayed where they were, not a sound out of any of them, only watching. The only thing breathing hard in the whole place was us.
Then Mirae broke for Basha, and the rest of us went after her.
She dropped to her knees and pressed both hands on Basha's chest, hard, once and again. "Come on, come on," she said. "Get up. You have to get up, you have to..." She pushed down again, then took Basha's face and turned it toward her own. "Basha, look at me. Open your eyes, come on, open them."
Nobody told her to stop. I think every one of us wanted it to work as much as she did.
That was when the archways let go at once. Out of every dark mouth around the rings the black things came down the steps, into the center, toward us, more of them than the whole floor could hold. There was no line left to make, and no fighting that many. We were a breath away from going under them.
"Here, over here!" The dwarf was down on his knees on the arena floor a few steps off, both hands hauling at something. "There's a hatch, it goes down, there's a ladder, come on!"
In the middle of the floor, not far from the dead thing, a square block of stone had an iron ring set in the top. The dwarf heaved on it and the block lifted, and under it was a black hole with the top of a ladder just inside. A way down, the one way that wasn't packed with them.
"One at a time, go, move!" Nikita had it in hand before any of us could freeze. The dwarf swung onto the ladder and dropped out of sight. Rafi shoved Jonas down after him, then went himself. Only one body fit through the hole at once, and the things were on the lowest steps now, close enough that I could hear the wet sound of them moving.
Antoine went down without a word to anybody. The elf woman went after him. I hung back by the hole with the torch in my hand, last in the line, and that was when I saw Mirae wasn't in it at all. She was still over by Basha, on her knees, still pushing on her chest, still talking to her.
"Mirae!" I went to her at a run. The things were nearly onto the floor. "Mirae, we have to go, right now, get up, please."
"She's here." Mirae didn't lift her head. "Aleks, she's right here, we can't leave her, help me, take her arm, we can carry her..."
One part of me knew it was hopeless, another couldn't tell her no, so I grabbed Basha's arm and pulled with her. The body shifted a hand's width, no more. Behind us the things kept coming.
"ALEKS!" Nikita's voice came roaring up out of the hole. "What are you doing up there, get DOWN, now!"
There was one second left and one way to use it. I let go of Basha and tore Mirae's hands off her, both of them, and I had to do it hard.
"What are you doing?!" Her head came up and her face broke open. "Let go, what are you, no..."
I got her by the wrist. The torch was in my other hand and I needed both, so I let it drop. It hit the floor by Basha and rolled away, still burning. With my free hand I dragged Mirae up off her knees and toward the hole, and she fought me the whole way.
"Let go of me! She's right there, Aleks, Basha's right THERE, we can't just leave her..."
I didn't answer. There was no answer that wasn't a lie, and we were out of time for it.
We reached the hole with the things almost on our backs. I put Mirae onto the ladder and pushed her down into the dark, and she went because there was nowhere else to go. Then I came onto the rungs after her, my head still up in the arena one more second.
And I looked back. The torch lay burning on the floor an arm's length from Basha. Over her the first of the black things came all at once, a whole heap of them, climbing up onto her body. I pulled the hatch down before I could see the rest.
It dropped into its frame with a heavy boom, and the dark came down over all of us. The only light left was a thin grey line around the four edges of the hatch, from the torch still burning up there on the floor. Below that line, everything was black.
A short way down the ladder we reached solid ground, in a passage that ran on into the roots. Above us the things hit the hatch and hit it again, but they couldn't get a grip from the top, and it held.
And there in the dark, with nowhere left to run to, all of it finally came out of us.
Mirae was the worst. She had stopped at the foot of the ladder, put her back to the wall, and slid down it. The crying came out of her hard, nothing held back, a kind I had never once heard from her before. In between it she kept saying Basha's name, and "we left her, we left her up there with them." None of us could make her stop, because there was nothing to say that would.
The rest of us weren't far behind her. Jonas sat straight down on the ground and put his head in his hands and did not move or speak. Rafi was shaking all over, and he kept counting under his breath, low numbers, the same few over and over, getting nowhere. The dwarf only stared up at the grey line around the hatch. My own hand was still locked around Mirae's wrist, and it was a while before my fingers would open.
"So it could talk." Antoine's voice was the steadiest one in the dark, and there was something almost satisfied under the cold of it now. "It called us children. There was a master, it said, one that told it to be patient." A short breath through his nose. "I put it down anyway."
"You put it down." Nikita said it flat, from off in the black. He let it sit a moment. "After it was half blind and bleeding out of the eye."
"It's down. That's the part that counts."
Nikita didn't argue. He never spent words on that kind of thing. "It talked. None of the small ones ever talked. Whatever that was, it was something else."
No one had an answer. None of us knew what it had been, and the one who might have steadied us through not knowing was up on the far side of the hatch.
"Tell me where we are," the dwarf said. "Water. Food. Real numbers, somebody."
"Food's gone." Jonas's voice came up small from the floor. "Last of it was this morning. Water, there's a little. Not much. Careful, maybe a day. Less than that."
Nobody said anything to that for a while.
"We can't go up." Nikita again, when the quiet had run long enough. "Up is the hatch, and over the hatch is the whole city full of them. So it's down. This passage goes lower, into the roots. That's the only way left to walk."
"Down, then." Antoine said it in the tone of a man handing out an order, not taking one.
Nobody fought him on it. There was no fight left in any of us to spend.
I sat down against the cold wall with the rest of them. Mirae had gone quiet at last, breathing in broken pieces a step away from me in the dark.
Old Ben had gone down the day before, up on the rings, and I'd had no room to think about him until now. He was the steady one, the one who read the ground and always knew where the danger was. A thing still took him through a gap on his blind side when a torch died, the same kind of gap I'd spent the whole dungeon watching for. That made two in about a day, Ben and Basha, both of them people who had kept me alive in their own way. Nothing down here slowed down to mark it. You were there, and then you weren't.
And the thing my head kept going back to was a small one. After every fight, Basha used to count us, out loud, before she let anyone sit, so she would know who was still there. Down in that black hole, nobody counted. I did it myself in my head, going around the dark by the sound of them breathing. We were fewer than we had been that morning. No one was left to say the number out loud, and there never would be again.