“You think you would have survived?”
“Most assuredly,” he said, his shield flaring just enough to make it briefly visible.
“Why do you need to be using your magic right now?”
“Yeah, don’t you trust us?”
“Not especially,” the wizard said, “but I do have an obligation to apprehend the fugitive and your help would be invaluable.”
“You want us to do our jobs? Down here? This place is trying to kill us. We need to get out of here.”
“He’s right.”
“I told you, we should leave him.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“What was that?”
“What was what?”
“I thought I heard something.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“No, he’s right.”
Everyone fell silent.
Click … click … click. Chitin on stone.
“Quickly, follow me,” the wizard said, racing through the cordon of overseers surrounding him and heading toward the underground road. Several overseers followed him without hesitation, while a group of five stayed where they were, listening to the darkness.
Click … click … click.
Alexander saw it emerge from a stairwell, crawling up onto the wall and then to the ceiling where it coiled around a pillar, eyeing the five remaining men.
A centipede. Twenty-five feet long and two feet wide, with barbed black chitin covering the entire length of its segmented body, two-foot serrated mandibles surrounding its mouth, two multi-jointed legs ending with oversized pincers jutting from its body a few feet behind its head, a foot-long stinger on its tail.
“The wizard can make light,” one of the overseers said, holding up his lamp so he could see how much oil he had left.
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Maybe we should stick together.”
They all nodded to each other before starting toward the passage.
centipede launched from the top of the pillar, uncoiling quickly yet silently. It hit one of the men in the middle of the back, slicing him clean in half with its mandibles, crashing into the ground with a clatter and using the momentum to carry it into the remaining four men, taking two men’s heads with a pincer each in lightning-quick strikes. The last two men got the worst of it. The centipede coiled around them both, raking them with its razor-sharp barbs, stripping flesh away in chunks and filling the underdark with screams that died out in gurgling gasps.
Glistening with blood, the centipede froze in place, its antennae flicking this way and that. After a moment, it began to eat.
Alexander opened his eyes and closed the door to his Wizard’s Den, bringing up the light and gesturing toward the table. He spent a few minutes explaining what lay ahead, both the overseers and the centipede. He had never liked bugs, but this one really made his skin crawl. He did his best to describe it in complete detail.
“That sounds quite beyond me,” Jack said.
“I suspect that it’s beyond me as well,” Lita said.
“I’ll kill it,” Anja said.
“No, you won’t,” Alexander said. “It’s fast, and every part of it is deadly. We’re going to avoid it.”
“What if we can’t?” Anja asked.
“Then Jataan and I will kill it.”
“I’m going to help too,” Anja said.
“No, not with this thing. It’s too fast. Besides, we’re going to avoid it,” he said pointedly.
She frowned.
“It seems like this road is heading in the right direction,” Jack said. “Are we going to take a detour to avoid that chamber?”
“No, we’ll wait,” Alexander said. “I want to give the overseers time to get well past us. Hopefully, the bug will finish eating and go take a nap.”
Chapter 33
Alexander crept along the wall, the fingers of his left hand lightly brushing the stone. One by one, his companions followed behind him through the dark. He held Luminessence, but kept its light extinguished, fearing that any illumination might alert the centipede to their presence.
Even in total black, Alexander could still see the colors of things, so he was confident that he would see the predator insect in time to take refuge in the Wizard’s Den. He had wondered why this underground road seemed so desolate. Now he suspected it was because it was part of the centipede’s hunting grounds.
They walked for a long time in complete darkness. Alexander had to remind himself to relax his muscles; he kept finding himself so tense it was giving him a headache. He was starting to think that his plan had worked, that the centipede had moved along, but then he saw a slight glimmer of color on the floor ahead.
He stopped, listening for a moment before lighting the hall with Luminessence. Five overseers were torn apart, their blood still sticky, parts of them scattered haphazardly down the passage. The centipede had eaten only part of one, leaving the rest to feed some other denizen of the underdark … or to rot.
Alexander noted the unusual trail of blood leading back toward the intersection chamber, two wavering patterns of tiny streaks of red running generally parallel. As they gained distance from the grisly scene, the blood trail diminished, then vanished altogether. Alexander extinguished his light again, relying on the wall and his magic for guidance. They crept forward slowly and quietly.
Click … click … click.
He froze, listening intently and looking ahead with his all around sight. They were only a few hundred feet from the intersection room. The centipede had returned to the top of one of the support pillars where it was lying in wait, clicking its pincers every so often.
Alexander opened the door to his Wizard’s Den.
“Let’s see if we can draw it out,” he whispered. “I’d rather fight it in this corridor than in the intersection room. If things go badly, we’ll retreat into the Wizard’s Den.”
When everyone had made what preparations they could, Alexander lit the corridor with Luminessence, filling the passageway with light for hundreds of feet in both directions.
Click … click … click.
The creature started toward them, tentatively inching down the underground road, but then turning and scurrying away when it reached the edge of the light.
“I guess it doesn’t like light.”
“Good to know,” Jack said, checking his vial of night-wisp dust.
They approached the intersection room cautiously, stopping at the threshold to look and listen before venturing inside. The centipede was nowhere to be seen, but the remains of overseers were scattered across the floor … a grisly reminder that it was still out there.
“I see light,” Jack said.
In the distance, down the corridor leading toward the chasm, flickered several faint points of lantern light.
“Overseers,” Alexander said. “They’ve seen us for sure. Let’s keep moving.”
He led them out of the intersection room along the same road they’d been traveling, farther into the underdark, no longer attempting to conceal their location by keeping the light low, but instead letting Luminessence fill the passage with bright and clear illumination. While it would give away their position, he hoped it would also keep some of the more unpleasant denizens of the deep from bothering them.
They began to notice bits of bone and splotchy stains on the floor. When they came to a doorway without a door, Alexander drew the Thinblade before angling for a look inside. The room was twenty feet on each side. Remnants of past meals were scattered around a large pile of eggs mounded up in one corner.
“I don’t like the looks of that,” Jack said.
“No. Let’s be somewhere else when mama comes home.”
“The overseers have reached the intersection room,” Jataan said.
“Yeah, and it looks like a lot of them, too,” Anja said.
“Right, let’s go,” Alexander said, setting a faster pace than before.
Echoes of unintelligible shouts from behind them filtered down the corridor, but the only thing Alexander could make out was anger. He didn’t relish fighting the overseers, but they seemed like a far more manageable foe than the centipede.