Of Truth and Beasts

About to slip in, he paused and looked back. Chuillyon and his companions would come soon enough. No doubt Shâodh was tracking Wynn’s group. Sau’ilahk did not want to openly engage all three elves, but neither would he tolerate their interference. It was time to do something about Chuillyon.

But when Sau’ilahk looked down the tunnel, the faint light bobbed and winked. Wynn was moving again. There was no time to feed on Chuillyon here and now. What a disappointment, but perhaps something less personal but still deadly was required.

A simple servitor of Air would not be enough. Fire, in the form of Light, would also be required. It needed to be encased in Earth drawn from Stone, as well. A servitor of multiple Elements, in three conjuries, would cost him dearly. Then a fourth conjury had to intertwine with the others to give his creation the necessary spark of sentience.

He began to conjure Air. When its quivering ball manifested, he caged it with his incorporeal fingers and embedded it with Fire in the form of Light. A yellow-orange glow radiated from within his grip. Forcing his hand to become corporeal, he slammed the servitor down into the hall’s floor stones.

Sau’ilahk’s black form wavered as exhaustion threatened to overtake him. He was only half-finished, and the final two conjuries must be done simultaneously.

Around his flattened hand, a square of glowing umber lines for Earth rose on the hall’s floor stones. Within that, a circle of blue-white appeared as he summoned in Spirit and inserted a fragment of his consciousness. In the spaces between the shapes, iridescent glyphs and sigils of white appeared like dew-dampened web strands at the break of dawn.

Sau’ilahk called on his reserves, imbuing his creation with greater essence.

His hand began to waver before him. He exerted his will to remain present and straightened, lifting his hand from the floor. All glowing marks on the stone vanished.

Awaken! he whispered in his thoughts.

Another glow rose beneath the floor’s surface. It shifted erratically, as if swimming inside the stones. He raised his hand above it, fingers closing like a street puppeteer toying with strings, and the glow halted.

Stones bulged over it, and that light began to emerge. It rose out of the floor like a worm as thick as his wrist. Gray as the stone that birthed it, it wriggled away across the floor. Sau’ilahk had created such a servitor once before, with a gaping maw at one end, its body a vessel for poisonous gas.

Stop, he commanded. As it halted, he focused on its spark of sentience, and he drove it through the tall breach and into the tunnel beyond.

Hide in the wall facing the opening. When a life passes through, expel what you hold.

It would obey these simple instructions, drilled into its limited consciousness. Even if the two younger elves survived, without Chuillyon, they would turn back. Shâodh would insist.

Sau’ilahk drifted into the breach, weakened but satisfied, and he turned right down the tunnel to trail Wynn. 

Wynn’s thoughts turned over and over as she followed Ore-Locks. She wasn’t as dismissive of Chane’s concerns as she pretended, but her concerns differed from his. Clearly, he suspected that something had happened here after the seatt’s fall, though just what, neither of them could say.

“What is that?” he asked from behind her.

She saw black on the walls and floor again, but it wasn’t the same as before. Her crystal’s light caused it to shimmer.

“Chlaks-álêg,” Ore-Locks answered. “‘Burning stone’ ... a vein of raw coal.”

It crosscut their path where the tunnel floor dipped slightly in a circular hollow, as if a good deal of the coal had been dug out and removed from the floor and both side walls.

Chane slipped past Wynn into the left-side hollow. “And again here, look.”

Both Ore-Locks and Wynn watched Chane trace his widely spread fingers along deep, long gouges in the black wall. This time there were four parallel grooves.

Wynn spotted places in the coal vein where it looked like chunks bigger than her head, or even Ore-Locks’s head, had been gouged out.

“Ore-Locks, do your people use ...” Chane began. “Do they use ... beasts of any kind in mining?”

Wynn blinked at such a notion. What was he suggesting?

“No,” Ore-Locks answered hesitantly. “Not that I have ever heard of.”

Wynn didn’t like where Chane was going with this. She glanced up the tunnel, thinking of those broken skulls. Did Chane believe something had survived the seatt’s fall, something large enough to kill anything that remained or arrived later? Even so, any creature among the enemy’s forces couldn’t have survived all these centuries with so little to feed it. Unless ...

Wynn began to worry. What if whatever it had been had taken away the orb for its master? Was the orb already long gone, as far back as the war? Her thoughts turned back to the few scant lines she’d read in the volume by Volyno.