Once, when the tightness of the passage around his chest kept him from filling his lungs all the way he had to fight a sudden and surprising terror. He could dimly hear Antimony talking behind him, encouraging him no doubt, but his own body and the drow behind him blocked most of the sound and the monk’s voice was no more than a murmur.
Maybe he’s not encouraging me, Vansen thought suddenly. Maybe he’s thought of something he forgot to tell me—that there’s a pit or an even narrower spot ahead… or to watch out for snakes or venomous spiders…
Stuck in a tight bend and trying to free himself, Vansen banged his head painfully on the wall of the tunnel. He felt a trickle of wetness on his head and assumed it was blood. A moment later his lantern flickered and went out, leaving him in complete and utter darkness.
His heart raced, tripped, and seemed for a moment as if it would not catch its rhythm again. He was choking—trapped in blackness and strangling! No air!
“Stop!” he growled at himself, although the sound was more of a gasp or gulp than actual words. Still, it was his own voice. There was air. The sudden terror that was making his heart pound and his head feel as though his skull was being squeezed in a monstrous fist was only that… fear.
What does darkness matter, anyway? he asked himself. You can only crawl, moving forward an inch at a time, Vansen. You are a worm. Do worms fear darkness?
It was a weirdly reassuring thought; after some moments his heart began to slow. He suddenly saw himself as a god might see him—a god with a sense of humor: Vansen was only a little creature where he didn’t belong, crammed in a tunnel deep underground like a dried pea in a reed—the kind he used to blow at his brothers and sisters when they were children. The earth surrounded him, but it cradled him, too. There was nothing to do but go forward. When he stuck in the narrow places he would simply wriggle until he managed to free himself.
Forward. Only forward, he told himself. No point in anything else.
How the gods must be laughing!
Sweaty, shivering, with mud stinging his eyes and every joint trembling, Ferras Vansen at last crawled out of the far end of the crevice into a small cavern that felt as capacious and airy as the great temple in Southmarch after the tunnel. Browncoal crawled out behind him, followed by Antimony, who clutched the drow’s rope like a child hanging onto a kite string. They ate and rested, unspeaking, and then when Vansen could stand without his knees shaking they made their way forward.
They encountered only a few narrow spots the rest of the way, and nothing like that long, throttling tunnel; at last, after perhaps an hour or two of steady upward movement they clambered up into a gallery that had clearly been worked by the hands of thinking creatures, with crude pillars of stone left to hold up the roof so that the long, low series of chambers had the feeling of a beehive or a garden maze. Vansen was just wondering who and what had created it when a spatter of arrows cracked off stones above them. Vansen and Antimony dove for cover, the monk yanking the drow’s rope so hard the little creature flew off his feet and tumbled like a child’s toy.
The attackers quickly found the range and arrows smacked against the rocks all around them. A chip of broken stone gouged Vansen’s cheek. The drow Browncoal, crouching beside Antimony, began to scream at the unseen enemy in his guttural tongue.
“Tell me what he says!” Vansen demanded.
“I don’t understand all the words.” Antimony listened as the others shouted something back. Browncoal called out to them again, an odd tone of desperation in his voice. “Our drow is saying we come in peace to talk to the dark lady,” he told Vansen quietly. “But the others—they are drows, too—say something about the rope around his leg. I think they do not trust him—they think we force him to tell lies for us.”
“Cut the rope.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Cut the rope, untie it, what you will. But let him go to them so they can see we speak the truth.”
“Forgive me, Captain, but are you mad? What will stop them from killing us then?”
“Don’t you understand, Brother? We cannot fight them. They have bows and we do not, and even now they may be sending for reinforcements. Let the drow go.”
Antimony shook his head but did as Vansen ordered. When he realized what the monk was doing, Browncoal’s eyes widened. When the rope fell off he began to inch away from his captors.
“Tell him to say to his fellows that we come in peace.”
By the time Antimony finished translating the drow was already several steps away, raising his arms as he walked toward his fellows. One arrow snapped out of the shadows but by good fortune missed him. Browncoal stared balefully at the place from which the arrow had come and no more were launched.
“Now we wait,” said Vansen.
“Now we pray,” Antimony corrected him.
Ferras Vansen had time to address several different gods before Browncoal returned with a troop of his fellows, all dressed in leather armor and wearing almost identical expressions of suspicion. Despite Antimony’s misgivings, Vansen surrendered his ax—the drow who was detailed to carry it looked like an ordinary man staggering beneath a side of beef. The drows used the rope that had bound Browncoal to tie Vansen and Antimony by the wrists. Then their former prisoner said something to them, sharp and short. Vansen did not need the translation, but Antimony gave it anyway, in a voice of weary resignation.
“He says, ‘March.’ ”
They climbed steadily for another short while. As they went, squinting drows and other, stranger creatures appeared out of the darkness on all sides until a good-sized crowd followed them. Vansen began to feel like the leader of a religious procession, but couldn’t help remembering that in some processions it was the beasts meant for sacrifice that were carried on the foremost wagons.
They finally reached a huge, high-ceilinged chamber like the inside of a domed temple. The narrow path wound up the outside of the cavern wall and had been widened in some place with wooden walkways fixed directly to the stone. A troop of full-sized soldiers waited there, alien faces stern and eyes bright in their dark armor, and Vansen thought at first they had reached their goal, but instead the guards stepped aside to reveal a massive armored figure sitting on a rock. For a moment Vansen thought it was the demigod Jikuyin and terror gripped him, but as the drows prodded him forward he saw that this new figure, although huge, was smaller than the monster that had held them prisoner in the mines of Greatdeeps, and less like a man as well. Its skin was covered with rough, scaly skin like a lizard’s and its heavy-browed face seemed a crude approximation of human features, as if some creator god had hurried through its making.
Even seated, the thing looked down on them. As Vansen approached, the bright, surprisingly small eyes watched unblinkingly.
“Antimony,” Vansen said quietly, “ask Browncoal to tell this creature that we come in peace to speak with the dark lady ...”
“You shall not need Master Kronyuul,” the giant said in a voice like stone dragged over stone. “As you see, I speak your tongue. The Lady Yasammez likes her generals to know our enemies well.” His chuckle sounded like a hammer pounding slate. He rose, towering far above even his tallest guards. “I am Hammerfoot of Firstdeeps, war-chief of the ettins. You are assassins.”