.
Unlike the undead, the Huadean version of zombies, which are just gidim that can reanimate and control corpses with demonic power, larvae are fully bound to their skeletal bodies to the point of repairing themselves when injured, albeit with the use of demonic magic rather than Healing. They also move just as fast as humans. Undead aren’t as slow as in Night of the Living Dead, but if the corpse isn’t fresh, their top speed is a trudge.
These two warriors were convinced that something was present in the grass just outside their perimeter. They weren’t trudging. They were sprinting, and the one who had been on guard duty was pulling his sword.
Adrenaline surged as my mind went into high gear. I could feel Brigitte turning into a wound spring in my arms in the same moment.
One of skeletal warriors was pointing to his left as he himself went right. I heard a hoarse voice shouting as they rushed toward us.
“Hiisda mumo!”
I could remember enough Regaritan to suspect that was the language he used, but at that moment I couldn’t decode it. My Regaritan is no better than my Japanese. But I could interpret their actions– fanning out to cut us off on either side– and I could interpret the characteristic tone of a shouted order. The sarge in charge and the private following him were about to box us in.
I only had one direction to bolt in which I could feel confident. My wings were ready for it, so, with a mighty wing beat, I leapt into the air, straight up.
At roughly the same moment, the lead warrior reached the edge of the webwork we had been attempting to pick our way through. He didn’t brake at all. He just ran straight into it.
In that instant, the entire grassy area erupted with Dark and Earth mana, as the faint lines manifested into cords forming a net which curled up from the ground. The edges of that net arced up and over, barely missing my feet, and closed like a gargantuan mouth over the skeletal warrior, wrapping him into a bundle.
I had risen high enough that I was about to hit the wall which was curving over our heads. I flew forward, then turned sideways so I could look at the camp below. It took me a few wingbeats to think through why that skeleton had gotten himself captured. Clearly, he had decided that the quickest way to snag the unseen intruder was to just trigger the trap himself.
Quick thinking, but my pre-planned escape route turned out to be the one direction that could avoid the trap.
I flew away from the camp on wing power alone, using only enough mana to stay aloft. That was a safety measure against creating a mana flow large enough to become an ‘environmental effect’ that my Cloak wouldn’t hide.
I turned my flight into a broad semicircle around the base, so I could watch their response. Worst case would have been if their chain of command were reacting rapidly, manning the perimeter or sending out interception patrols to catch us, with alarms blaring. It would mean the entire base knew or at least saw a high likelihood that someone had just snuck through their perimeter. But all I saw was a crowd of larva soldiers converging on the trapped presumptive sergeant, while a solitary imp from that pavilion where the higher demons were meeting made his way over to investigate the ruckus.
My stress level went down a lot. For all the commanders knew, one of their idiot lower demons had just stumbled into the trap on his own. They weren’t raising a general alert yet.
I turned to head in the direction where the map in my head told me we should find the connection to the cavern where Amelia should be, but we were miles from where I expected to find any of the connecting passages. With me flying slowly to maximize my stealth, it would take several minutes.
The landscape below me was revealing many things as we passed over it. Unlike the cavern in Carael, this place had inhabitants. I spotted a gnome settlement, and in another area, barrack-like rows of cabins in the middle of farmland. My fairy sight showed intense mana in the crops, typical of the plant species that can grow in places like this. After passing a long stretch of forest, I saw a small cluster of crude shelters that I thought might be more demons, until I saw a pair of troglodytes cleaning an animal carcass. The pair looked like classic artist’s renditions of cavemen, which is more or less what they are, although they have low-grade monster biology.
Brigitte seemed to be slightly less tense than she had been. In a low voice, I asked, “Has your heart restarted yet?”
“Not quite,” she said, equally quiet, her voice shaking with nervous laughter. “That was awfully close.”
“Thanks for putting up with having to ride like this,” I told her. “Had you been on your feet when that guy came at us, I don’t think we would have escaped before the trap went off.”
“Did I just hear you say, ‘I told you so’?” she asked with a rueful smirk.
“Yup,” I admitted casually, not suppressing a brief grin. Why deny it?
She gave a quick, silent bark of laughter and shook her head. Then she asked, “We’re heading to Her Highness now, right?”
“Yeah, about that…”
Her eyebrows instantly flattened, and her ears dropped slightly. Brigitte has absolutely no poker face. “We’re not?”
With a sigh, I explained, “We are, but we aren’t in the cavern where she seems to be.”
“We’re not even in the same cavern?” she demanded. “What’s the point of coming, then?”
I pursed my lips, deciding on the best way to explain it.
“I cannot remember any connection between the cavern that she’s in and the surface. I think it only connects to other caverns. Such as this one.”
I said that, but this cavern and everything about it was giving me a horrible sense of disorientation. The walls weren’t in the right place, the cavern floor wasn’t in the right place… the map in my mind was fuzzy in comparison to my mental map of the world from Tiana’s life in central and northern Orestania and parts of the Dragonsbacks. The positions of things from ten thousand years ago no longer matched up properly, with the landscape having changed, the mountains having eroded, the rivers changing their courses, lakes vanishing or appearing. It ate at my confidence in the accuracy of the data my upper realm self had so carefully memorized for me during my last visit above.
Brigitte’s frown grew deeper. “That’s weird. If it’s that hard to get to that cavern, how did the princess end up there?”
“That’s an incredibly good question,” I admitted, “but we have to wait and ask the princess.”
Her lip twisted at the annoying answer, but it couldn’t be helped. That was the only answer I could give her.
“We’re flying a long ways, aren’t we?” she asked.
“We’re a long distance from where Amelia is. The place we entered on the surface was already about two miles north of the spot that the Wind spirit brought me to, on my first visit to the plateau. The place directly above the spot where it could most closely place Amelia. Between staircases and ramps, we’ve been walking a solid eight hours since we entered it. It’s getting close to sunrise up on the surface. So we’ve gone a long distance further away.”
“We haven’t been walking in a straight line, though.”
“That is true, we have not,” I agreed. “While we were taking the staircase descents, the individual staircases headed every direction at one point or another. But the groups of staircases generally headed straight down, when adding the segments together. The distance we’ve traveled was while walking in those long, shallowly sloped tunnels. And those have consistently zigzagged north and east, moving us consistently farther away from Amelia.”
Brigitte frowned, but she didn’t question my claim. Many times in the past, I had confirmed my reliability as a walking compass while journeying with the Hero’s Party. In addition, Uncle Arken had explained to the other party members that a perfect sense of position and direction was a fairy racial skill. It might have occurred to her for a moment to wonder whether that skill was valid underground, but she didn’t bring it up.
But the cavern had appeared at least close to the spot that my mental map put it– the entrance had been at least two hundred paces too far to the west. The cavern floor itself was in the wrong place, at least fifty paces higher than I expected. Since Relador had taught me that magic could interfere with my sense of direction, I had to consider the possibility that I wasn’t as reliable a GPS as I was claiming to Brigitte.
As she wasn’t arguing, I continued. “Currently, we are below the mountain to the north of that stream that we followed to reach the Gado valley, and we are to the northeast of the North Peak of the Giant’s Fortress. We’re on the far side of that mountain from the plateau.”
I didn’t say it, but to put it another way, we were a whole lot closer to that open-air bath that Arken had dug for me than we were to the village where the Hero’s Party was waiting.
Rather than going straight toward her, which we couldn’t do, we were flying south. The larger caverns of Ilim Below are enormous tunnels. The largest ones, like this one, are compound tunnels, parallel excavations with occasional cross-connector tunnels linking them. In this cavern’s case, it was three parallel tunnels, weaving back and forth slightly and not consistent in their distance from one to another, but mostly traveling north-south.
We were in the westernmost main tunnel, approaching one of those connecting galleries, a tunnel about a quarter of a mile across, which cut diagonally across the three main tunnels. Beyond this connector, the last connector gently curved, linking the ends of the three tunnels. For reasons only known to Gaia, the diagonal tunnel extended westward to link with a similar westward extension to the curving tunnel, creating a little triangular annex. I say ‘little’, but both these connector tunnels were a quarter mile wide, and this extension stretched nearly a mile west, back in the direction of the plateau.
The end of that triangle was the closest spot in the cavern to Amelia’s position. My memory described a grid work of small tunnels adjacent to the triangle, leading in Amelia’s direction. My memory wouldn’t provide a clear explanation for the peculiar gridiron pattern of tunnels, but I knew it had something to do with a settlement of some sort that had once existed here. Amelia’s cavern, too, had been associated with that settlement. I should be able to head into that triangular annex and, at the vertex, find a dozen exits heading in Amelia’s direction.
As we reached this area, my uncertainties over my mental map exploded. I did not see the landscape where I planned to search for the tunnels connecting to Amelia’s cavern. I did not see a settlement, or any other kind of land feature.
I saw open water.
