Stardeep

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Stardeep, Underdungeon

A wind, bearing alien odors, brushed Raidon's face. He wondered by what dark, subterranean route the air had traveled, and for how long before caressing his face with its feathery, unseen hands. Black lakes, unlit mansions of stone, warrens of crystal, caverns housing forgotten secrets-who knew the depths of these passages whose extent was large enough to generate its own breezes, perhaps its own weather?

Raidon followed a conflicted woman. As they strode white-washed subterranean tunnels, Kiril muttered and mumbled as if possessed. More than once he saw her hand move toward the hilt of the blade she wore on her hip, only to flinch away before contact.

An obsession, certainly, perhaps something like the tie that bound him to his grandfather's daito? True, his fixation had given way to something less obviously lethal. The amulet bequeathed him by his mother had led him into a world beyond any he could have imagined. Was it not obsession that yet held him fast to Erunyauv?'s legacy? This amulet of a Sign whose significance he didn't fully comprehend would point him toward his missing mother. With it, he could discover why she left him. If not obsession, something powerful, whatever its name, gripped him.

"Look at this!" came Adrik's startlingly loud call from behind. Raidon whirled, ready to defend the small group.

The sorcerer pointed to a greenish stripe of mold running along the wall of the tunnel, only a half-pace above the level of the floor. Raidon had earlier noticed the mold and discounted its appearance as unimportant. A sputtering light flamed and smoked from the coin Adrik clutched in his left hand. The illumination was born of a quick series of syllables the sorcerer uttered when they'd left Sild?yuir's light behind.

Kiril turned, one eyebrow raised in a question. Xet, riding her shoulder, belled a short, rising tone.

"Fungus wouldn't grow in such a uniform line unless this tunnel periodically floods," replied Adrik. "But then we'd see a parallel stripe on the other wall."

"What of it?"

"No matching stripe, no flooding. The only answer is that there must be a reservoir of water behind this wall. It must seep through, providing moisture enough for this growth!"

The swordswoman snorted, turned, and continued stalking forward.

The sorcerer swiveled to flash Raidon his eager expression. The monk said, "I missed that, Adrik-you have eyes for this sort of delving, it seems."

The sorcerer smiled at the compliment, at the same time raising a finger as if to make a further point. The monk turned and followed Kiril before the man could expound upon mold, moisture, their musty relationship, or some related topic likely to interest the monk not in the least. He appreciated Adrik's boundless enthusiasm for diverse topics-truly, he did-but in their present circumstance, he preferred to avoid such distractions.

Even as Raidon allowed introspection to sap his focus, he noticed the narrow tunnel through which they'd progressed was gradually widening. Far ahead, blue-green illumination seeped into the tunnel, staining its white walls with alien color.

"Kiril," Raidon said, "pause a moment. What does that glow ahead presage?"

The elf shook her head. She muttered, "How would I know what lies ahead? The only way to know is to move forward and look. One way or another, these tunnels lead into Stardeep's heart. Don't ask stupid questions, Telflammer."

Raidon cocked his head, wondering if she baited him purposefully. Now that they both knew his mother was native to Sild?yuir, referring to his Shou origin seemed a slap in the face. Or perhaps it was her implication that he had asked a frivolous question. Or perhaps he was merely losing his focus. .

He pushed the irritation from his thoughts with an old mantra: Have no limitation as limitation. His thoughts couldn't be swayed by her words or attitude-only he could channel his mind-others' words imparted information only. They couldn't change the tracks of his knowledge or attitudes unless he allowed them to do so. He was free unto himself, not bound to limitations others tried to place upon him.

It was becoming clear, however, that Kiril Duskmourn would try even the serenity of Xiang Temple master.

The intensity of the light grew as they approached, and the tunnel fell away to reveal a wider space. One side of the tunnel fell away to become a ledge skirting the edge of a deeper cavern filled with strange growths.

Puff balls, fungal draperies, fronds, and toadstools grew in thick profusion within the wide depression, all glowing with varying shades of bioluminescence. Sprouting up through a layer of turgid black ooze were small, yellow protrusions, as wide and thick as fingers. A few toadstool caps grew so tall they towered above the level of the catwalk to brush the ceiling and spread flattened, mushroomlike canopies overhead. A smell like baking bread, citrus, and rotting flesh wrinkled Raidon's nose. A bluish glow hazed the air.

"Breathe carefully," advised Adrik, who placed a fold of his robe over his mouth. His muffled voice came again. "Spores."

Kiril grunted, "I wouldn't have guessed such a garden could survive in these darks. I wonder on what sort of rot this plot grows." The crystal dragonet belled unhelpfully.

She shrugged and walked onto the tunnel catwalk. Some hundreds of paces ahead, the ledge plunged into a smaller tunnel.

Raidon and Adrik followed her. Halfway across, the monk glimpsed a shape moving through the fungalscape. Turning his head, he saw some sort of. . humanoid. It was a bulky, hunch-backed humanoid composed of mushroomy flesh partly covered in a bony black carapace. Its head was a puffball suffused with wavering filaments. The creature used daggerlike obsidian claws to slash its way through the fungal garden. Luckily, it was moving away from them. Raidon estimated its size equal to a giant.

The monk monitored the lumbering fungus hulk as they made their way along the ledge. Just as they reached the edge of the cavern, he saw the creature pause, then swivel its bulk. Before its polyp-sprouting face fully turned to regard the travelers, they ducked out of the wide cavern into the narrow confines of another tunnel.

Raidon doubted the creature could fit into the tunnel if it decided to follow. While the monk was confident of his prowess, he wondered if the techniques he favored against living foes might be useless on beasts composed of animate fungus. Could it even feel pain? Still, flying elbows crushed vegetable flesh as readily as animal.

Like before, the tunnel walls they traversed were smooth and white, except for the stain of fungus running in a widening stripe along the right wall. The blue, luminescent haze remained as thick as ever in the tunnel. Also. .

"Adrik, bring your light closer, will you?" asked Raidon.

The sorcerer stepped over to Raidon with his lighted coin. Embedded in the wall were shells, bones, and teeth. More notable was a complete human figure, fully embedded in the wall and composed of the same white stone.

"What does this mean?" asked Raidon.

The sorcerer shook his head. "Magic, a massive concentration, once burned through here, but it is impossible to say how long ago."

"Did the elves do it when they created Stardeep? Or Sild?yuir?" asked Raidon.

Kiril, who'd paused at Raidon's first words, snorted. "This was here before Sild?yuir or the Traitor's dungeon were called out of the emptiness. Imagine the wizards' chagrin when they discovered the 'emptiness' was not so empty as everyone assumed. Races older than elves roam the worlds, and not all ancient events are recorded in history books."

Adrik brushed his right hand along the forehead of the encased figure.

The air cracked as a fossilized arm suddenly burst from the wall and snatched the sorcerer's wrist. Adrik screamed in concert with a wet grinding sound. The squeezing hand mashed the sorcerer's wrist like a piece of rotten fruit.

More loud cracks, and jagged lines appeared and lengthened on both walls. Pale limbs thrashed within widening fissures.

Raidon snatched the collapsing sorcerer and threw him over his shoulder. The hand gripping the sorcerer's wrist didn't relinquish its grasp but. . there was little left for it to hold. Adrik was a familiar weight across the monk's back. Time to push concern from his mind and act in the moment.

"Go!" yelled Raidon as he dashed past Kiril. The swordswoman broke into a run, and Raidon led her down the empty but rapidly filling tunnel. The forms breaking free of the passage walls were-what? Undead? Undead whose flesh had so long rested beneath the earth that rotting skin, organs, and bone had become hard as stone. Or undead whose life was drained by some unspeakable ritual.

Within the featureless faces, Raidon perceived hunger, raw and unstoppable, multiplying with each new corpse that kicked its way out of the confining walls.

Adrik's heartbeat was thready, uncertain, but at least it persisted. It wouldn't for very long, though, if Raidon couldn't apply a tourniquet to the man's bleeding wrist.

The tunnel emptied to another cavern, smaller than the last one and roughly circular. Within this space the blue haze was thicker than ever. Broad black mushrooms sporting red pustules clustered at the room's hub. Looming among the ceiling-high toadstools was another ambulatory fungus hulk, like the shambling form Raidon had glimpsed in the previous cavern, but possibly bigger. Or perhaps it was the same one?

Limestone attackers flooded in from all sides, eroded and broken, possessed of an inarticulate fury. A wave of seven burst into the mushroom ring, intent on the towering creature within. The fungus hulk, its posture already hunched, lashed out a massive limb, batting all but two of the creatures across the chamber in arcing trajectories. The other two simply shattered.

"The hulk fights the undead!" exclaimed Raidon. An undead burst from the floor beneath him. He evaded a pale claw, barely maintaining the bleeding Adrik across his back. "Let's join it!"

Not waiting for confirmation from Kiril, Raidon plunged in amongst the woody stems, moving until he stood within ten paces of the native creature. The fungus hulk, possessing no eyes, nonetheless seemed to measure him in its regard. A heartbeat later Kiril joined them, her chest heaving as she fought for air after their mad dash.

The fungus hulk seemed to nod, a movement that involved most of its body, then it turned to stave off another wave of attackers.

Raidon let down Adrik, who moaned. "Hold on, friend," he told the sorcerer. Three more groups of stone-hard undead shuffled toward the mushroom cluster, plus five or six more lone shufflers. If he could snatch even an instant to care for his friend-

The monk dodged outside a white fist's trajectory. As the blow flashed past his head, he grasped it. Using the creature's own force, and assisting by twisting his hips, he swept the undead from its feet and into one of its advancing companions. The arm broke off the one he used as an improvised ballista, and the second toppled and fell.

Two more charged him, one straight on, the other advancing toward Raidon's right flank. The monk ran toward the closer one. Before it could wrap him in its rigid arms, he ran up its slablike front and poised on its head. His balance on the precarious perch was better than he'd imagined. The creature stumbled to a halt, confused. It batted at its own head, but Raidon evaded its grasp with well-timed hops. The other undead, intent on reaching him, careened full speed into the one upon which he stood.

The collision propelled Raidon into the air with double the force of a simple jump. He tucked his feet, accelerating himself into a midair spin. He drew his daito as he dived into a rolling landing, simultaneously sweeping the daito into the neck of another undead.

His blade, for all its provenance, became lodged in the fell thing's throat. Despite knowing better, he wasted a heartbeat vainly tugging at his grandfather's sword. He couldn't wrench it free! As he struggled, he was blindsided by an unseen slam.

Raidon staggered back, blinking stars from his eyes, his hand stinging where the daito's hilt had been torn away. A warm trickle began somewhere on his scalp. He was lucky the thing hadn't gotten a grip on him. If it had. .

He looked for Adrik. Three undead obscured the sorcerer, battling Kiril, who'd apparently moved to guard the fallen man.

She'd drawn her sword! Argent flames raced along its length, threatening to mesmerize the monk. She sheared through one's arm, another's head, and cut the last in half. But five more jogged forward to take their place.

The fungus hulk remained standing, its head rising high above the scuffle. Its arms worked continually, battering, batting, and crushing the endless rush of undead. Heaps of broken stone were building all around it, piece by piece, and billows of powdery dust swirled in the blue haze. Wounds accumulated across its carapace, oozing bluish fluid.

The fungus hulk, Kiril, and the monk formed a rough triangle. Back to back, they were stemming the onslaught.

But for how long?

His skills had rarely been matched in his temple. But for all his expertise, his talent was better used against foes whose flesh was living, or at least supple. Of the many lessons he'd learned at Xiang, one was fundamental. In a fight, a defender either treated himself as the center and moved his foes around him, or he treated his foes as the center and moved around them. Raidon was a master of the former fighting style. Unfortunately, it was a style unsuited to fighting animated fossilized corpses.

He fell back, kicking, chopping, and evading until he stood only a few paces from Kiril. He yelled, "These creatures attack us without end! Are they truly undead, or is the earth itself forming and spewing them forth, mockeries of life meant to deprive us of ours?"

The ferocious but strangely vacant gaze of the swordswoman, as she methodically destroyed every monstrosity that strayed into her reach, gained some measure of animation. She muttered, "If they're being created as quickly as we can destroy them. ."

"Then we are doomed if we make a stand here," finished Raidon, sidestepping the bull rush of a towering stone humanoid.

Kiril gritted her teeth and said, "Hear that, bastard? This fight is concluded already-you're just too dim-witted to recognize it." Raidon realized she spoke to her blade. "Ease up on me, and I can get us out of here. Should I die here, you'll be without a wielder. You'll have no vessel for your damned piety. We're close to Stardeep. Have you considered this uprising might be a ploy of the Traitor. ."

She suddenly pirouetted in a full blazing circle, smashing half a dozen advancing figures to rubble. She continued, ". . though these. . undead or stoneborn … do not have the feel of something left behind by aberrations. They are something different. I doubt they are tethered to the Traitor's will."

"But they are no less a threat. We must flee someplace safer, somewhere we can tend Adrik. And, I tire," confessed Raidon. He didn't have a magic blade to feed him limitless strength, or to mend his bones and stitch his flesh when he miscalculated. The blood flowing from his scalp threatened to obscure vision in his left eye. Several cuts on his arms and chest threatened to spill blood, but were restrained from gushing only through his strict control and focus on his body. If one more stone fist penetrated his guard and smashed him, he might fall.

The animate stone with Raidon's daito embedded in its neck trundled into Kiril, arms wide, undeterred by the length of steel. It knocked her back two paces. Her eyes lost their moment of coherence. She yelled in an oddly resonant voice, "Pretenders at life, feel the Cerulean Fire!" She lopped the arm, upper chest, and head from her attacker as if it were formed of clay, not stone.

The daito clattered free and Raidon retrieved it with an easy motion. He sheathed it immediately. He couldn't risk using it again, and more importantly, he did not want to view any damage upon the weapon from his brash attack.

Abruptly, a colossal hand reached down and plucked Adrik from the ground. Raidon yelled, but the fungus hulk turned and thundered clear of the mushroom grove. It ran toward an opening in a far wall, bowling over several stony attackers who failed to clear its path.

"Kiril, we must follow-that thing has Adrik!" The monk backed quickly toward the retreating fungus hulk. Had they been fooled by the hulk? Did it think the fallen sorcerer was food?

The swordswoman, with an obvious effort of will, also fell into a retreat. She called, "Follow it-the creature forges a path for us, knowingly or not!" Above her, the circling dragonet pealed an ongoing commentary on the battle raging below it.

As soon as Kiril committed to the withdrawal, Raidon turned and accelerated toward the hulk's broad back. Few things could hope to match the monk's unhindered speed. Dodging a few grasping arms, he caught up with the beast that clutched Adrik. He was right behind as it plunged into a wide tunnel.

The spore haze seemed to move with the creature. The light emitted by the haze gave everything an unearthly blue tint, a halo of sorts. By its illumination, Raidon saw the tunnel ahead was clear of stumbling fossils. So far.

The strange creature held the sorcerer securely in one arm, nestled against its chest like a mother might hold a babe. The pose lent Raidon sudden reassurance-for whatever reason, the fungus hulk was protecting Adrik. Intuition told him that as long as the creature lived, Adrik would be safe.

Raidon's shadow suddenly deepened and stretched ahead. Kiril and Angul must have entered the tunnel. He glanced back, saw the elf managing a pace quicker than he would have supposed, though her blade probably fed her speed. That sword, cursed though she proclaimed, was a relic of power unlike Raidon had ever seen.

In their wake, a flood of stone-clasped marauders followed.

Kiril held her sword like a standard. She marched beneath its haughty certainty. Angul burned like a brand, with a cerulean fire unique to it, illuminating the wide, high tunnel down which she coursed. The hard-edged light Angul shed fought with the softer, bioluminescent haze that clung to the fungus hulk, which bloomed along the same tunnel. The enigmatic creature yet gripped the sorcerer in a tender clutch. The beast bled ichor from scores of wounds. It had lost so much internal fluid without impairment Kiril wondered if the ichor was necessary for the creature's survival.

Such certainly wasn't the case for Adrik. A portion of the elf's mind, free of sword-influence, worried about the injured, too-quiet sorcerer. What did the great striding creature want with him? It didn't seem to wish any of them harm; rather, it had fallen in with them as if an old ally. Perhaps it was as concerned about the undead uprising in its quiet tunnels as they were. The horrors rumored to stalk Stardeep's underdungeon had proved all too real. No wonder so few had ever managed to make the trek between Sild?yuir and the dungeon proper.

As she held Angul aloft, she noted on the back of her left hand the ugly burn scar she'd received more than half a decade ago, years after she'd set aside her duties as a Keeper. A too-close encounter with the magma heart of an active volcano. Nothing to do with Traitors, aberrations, ancient gods, undead, or fell sorceries. Seeing that scar pulled her more fully from Angul's mental grip. She took a deep breath. Gliding above, pacing her as it did so effortlessly these days, Xet chimed upon noticing her regard, as if to ask if she were returned to her right mind. She was, but she didn't sheathe the sword.

Behind them moved a cluster of ravenous fossils, and if her vigor evaporated, she'd fall behind into their remorseless clutch.

Then came a sound so hideous Kiril saw Raidon flinch. It was the sound of demons screaming torment, or the tortured cries of a thousand victims bawling out their last breath after days on the rack. It was a sound she hoped never to hear again.

The sound came from ahead. But no path was possible other than the direction of the hellborn screams. They continued their mad dash, and moments later, elf, half-elf, and fungus hulk emerged into a vast cavity.

The roof rose steadily upward and was crowned by a violet flame that stuttered and flared, one moment dim, one moment sun bright.

The light illuminated an army of hundreds, perhaps thousands of hard white figures in the midst of a terrible riot, all trying to crowd into a space beneath the light on narrow streets in the ruins of a blasted city.

Here and there, amidst the white backs and pale eroded heads, she saw the silhouettes of Knights. By the Sign, how had they come here? Many fought alone-isolated clashes surrounded by a sea of undead, each desperately swinging a weapon against a teeming mass that didn't register pain or loss. For each Knight she saw standing, she spied three more being ripped asunder by red-stained undead.

Despite the decimation of what must have been half an Empyrean company or more, the undead seemed more intent on reaching a central pyramid built of their stony brethren, which squirmed and buckled, but held its shape well enough to support a blood red throne of rough-cut crystal.

On one side of the throne a fossil, caped and crowned in violet luminescence, brandished a staff of deadly energy. Was it the Traitor, or some fell working created by the Traitor? No, Angul thought not. But yet. .

On the other side of the ruby throne appeared a male star elf who wore the trappings of a Keeper! And in this man's hands, a blade whose outline was night's progenitor.

Something in Angul stuttered. It imparted to her, That sword is somehow familiar. .

Kiril gasped. Angul had never before betrayed even a hint of uncertainty in the entire decade she'd wielded him.

At that moment, the fungus hulk gave voice to what sounded like a despairing moan. It crashed to the ground, turning its body as it buckled, protecting the man it held from its weighty fall. Kiril touched Angul's tip to the creature's lichen-covered carapace.

Dead, pronounced her blade. A sacrifice for a righteous cause. Turn aside now, and go to that Keeper who yet holds faith with the Sign!

Kiril winced. The blade's implication was that she, Kiril, did not hold such faith. .

I will see us through this press, promised her sword. His fire fumed and grew, new strength rushed into her limbs, and surety of purpose infused her will. The last thing she saw as she plunged into the mob of animate neoliths was the monk bending to cradle Adrik's lolling head.