“Be still,” Ba’Sel snapped.
Relief poured through Leitos and he relaxed, allowing Ba’Sel to run, carrying him like a sack. The warrior’s labored breathing was harsh and erratic, amplified by the close confines. His footsteps thudded like a drumbeat. A howl from behind seemed to slam into them with physical force, and then the shriek of claws tearing at rock filled the narrow space.
“We will make it,” Ba’Sel muttered to himself. He kept repeating those words, as if they were a command. All at once he flung Leitos ahead, and he bounced off a rough stone wall and sprawled in the sand.
Ba’Sel’s figure danced between the advancing wolves’ burning red eyes and Leitos. There came a grating noise that drowned out the wolf’s growls, then a roar of falling stone filled the passageway. Dust billowed, leaving Leitos coughing uncontrollably.
Rough hands pulled him to his feet, and Ba’Sel wheezed, “We must keep going. They will soon dig their way through.”
Despite his warning, he moved away and rummaged around back toward the rock fall. The sound of metal scraping over stone, followed by a shower of sparks, drew Leitos’s attention.
In the stuttering light, Ba’Sel knelt over something, his back toward Leitos. The light vanished, leaving a dizzying afterimage. The flickering flash came again … faded … then a small flame burst to life on the end of a torch. Resin-dipped rushes flared bright with a hissing crackle, and Ba’Sel stood up. The natural passage proved no wider than two men abreast, and the ceiling hung a bare inch above the warrior’s head.
He handed Leitos a pair of unlit torches taken from a niche in the wall near the rock fall. “We are far from safety, and even that refuge may be in question now,” he said without explanation. “We must hurry.”
Cradling the torches, Leitos hurried after Ba’Sel. The passage twisted and turned, with many new passages branching off into the darkness. Footprints dimpled the sandy floor, but he could not have guessed how old they were.
Only when Ba’Sel’s torch began guttering out did Leitos see the first indication that people did more than walk these dark ways. At the junction of four passages, two small clay pots sat in a niche in the wall. Both had tops sealed with wax. After lighting a second torch, Ba’Sel cocked his head, listening. Far, far away, the grinding sounds of shifting rock slithered toward them.
“They are not through yet,” Ba’Sel said, relieved.
He handed Leitos the burning torch and moved to the clay pots. After studying faint markings on the tops of each, he chose one and went a little way down the passage. Leitos held the torch high, moving his head back and forth in a bid to see what the brother was up to.
Ba’Sel worked with haste, but carefully. After using a knife to slice away the wax, he set the top aside and poured a measure of thin oil into a bowl cleverly concealed behind a knuckle of stone protruding from the wall. He did the same on the other side, then made his way farther down the corridor, performing the same task a half a dozen times, until he was twenty or more paces back the way they had come.
Leitos studied the closest bowl and found that a small wooden lever sat under its bottom edge, and attached to that was a very fine black string. The line zigzagged back and forth from the bowls to the low ceiling through a series of tiny, nearly invisible metal rings. Like the first bowl, all the subsequent bowls, metal rings, and the line were invisible to anyone coming the way Ba’Sel had brought them. The last thing the warrior did was to unwind a tail of the line and stretch it low over the ground, farther down the passage from the last bowl. As he worked, the line tensed and released, jiggling the levers under the bowls.
When Ba’Sel came back and retrieved the second pot, he answered Leitos’s questioning look. “I am setting a snare. This,” he said, slicing the wax off the clay container, “is a gift given us soon after the Faceless One rose to power. An old woman, Hya of the Sisters of Najihar, showed us how to make it, just before her long years took her from us.”
“What is it?” Leitos asked, careful not to touch anything, as he followed Ba’Sel to the farthest bowl.
“The Blood of Attandaeus,” Ba’Sel said grimly. “The Nectar of Judgment. A single drop of any liquid sets it alight-we use oil, because it flows better and does not splash so easily as water. Nothing can smother its fire before it has burned away.”
Ba’Sel knelt on the ground and brushed clear a line in the sand, revealing a thin slat of wood. He pried up the slat and set it aside. Below waited a deep, narrow groove etched into solid rock. One end was open to a sloping gutter gouged in the wall under the bowl of oil waiting above.
With excruciating care, Ba’Sel filled the groove on the floor with what looked like glimmering crimson sand, replaced the slat, and then covered it with sand. They retreated a little way, and he repeated the task. By the time he began filling the fifth groove, sweat glistened on his brow. He daubed it away with his sleeve, took a few deep, calming breaths, and continued until the last groove was filled and covered. While he had no doubt of the destructive nature of fire, Leitos wondered aloud how such a trap could work.
“When the first enemy trips that far line,” Ba’Sel said, pointing down the passage, all the bowls tip at once. The oil is thin and flows fast, but not too fast. Once it ignites the Blood of Attandaeus, even a running intruder will not have passed this point before the flames trap it. Anyone or anything behind it will also be consumed.”
“What if more come,” Leitos asked, “after the first wave?”
Ba’Sel smiled humorlessly. “My brothers and I can set enough traps to destroy a small army. They may not be needed, for even the most bloodthirsty Alon’mahk’lar fears death enough to reconsider a useless attack. Nevertheless, I will set all I can.”
True to his word, Ba’Sel set many more traps along the way. The first two were rock falls like the one he had used to block their pursuers, the next was an even more elaborate snare using the Blood of Attandaeus, in which crumbly clay pipes routed the deadly substance overhead, and also along the ground. Other traps employed unseen mechanisms that hurled darts tipped in poison, or hinged grates arrayed with wicked iron spikes. The farther they went, the more deadly the contraptions became.
“They have to be,” Ba’Sel said, when Leitos asked after the reason. “If an enemy is tenacious enough to come so far, then they are truly a deadly foe.”
“Has an enemy ever come so far?”
“Only in our first Sanctuary,” Ba’Sel said, tying off a trip line which would unleash a fall of dust that, he explained, was laced with powder from a plant that dissolved the eyes and liquefied the lungs.
As they pressed on, he spoke of another matter. “Rumors say that the Faceless One is tightening his grip across Geldain, perhaps all the world. I have heard that the bone-towns are teeming with Mahk’lar and strange Alon’mahk’lar, not those brutish wretches that serve as slavemasters, but other things. Neither I nor my brothers know what this means, but there can be no question that the world is changing. I fear that the darkest days since the Upheaval are before us.”
“I was in a bone-town overrun with Mahk’lar and their vile creations,” Leitos said. “With Zera.”
Ba’Sel seemed about to say something, but then pressed his lips together, and led them into a series of ever tighter passages. At one point the main passage took a sharp turn around a jut of stone. Instead of continuing on, the brother circled around the protruding rock and got down on his hands and knees. “Stay close,” he advised.
They followed the flickering torchlight into a suffocating crevice. Going forward proved to be sweaty work that forced them to contort themselves around sharp rocks and tight corners. They finally emerged in a small chamber. In the wall to one side, a small opening overlooked a pool of water far below.