The Pilgrims

12

They hadn’t gone much further before something approached, making the chittering noise they’d heard through the walls earlier. They began to double back, but the sound came from behind too. Gleaming yellow lights appeared at both ends of the tunnel, bright as candle flames. The lights were eyes and the groundmen who approached were no higher than their waists. They looked human enough — bald little heads, pointy noses and ears — but their stocky bodies were covered in mats of brown or grey fur. Four came from ahead, three from behind, all nattering angrily.

‘Hail, tunnel masters,’ said Sharfy, bending low to kiss the floor. He gestured urgently for Eric to do likewise. Kiown did the same, making his kiss far more passionate and drawn out than was perhaps necessary. The groundmen watched this carefully as though to ensure the large people were suitably humiliated, then stared at Eric silently, the gleaming candles snuffing out for a moment when they blinked. Their small faces were bunched in shock and anger. ‘Toll?’ Sharfy sighed, nodding at Eric. ‘Pay?’

‘Toll!’ one of them snapped back in its high voice. ‘Pay!’

Sharfy dug in his pockets, coming out with Eric’s bus schedule. He handed it over. ‘Otherworld writing,’ he said as extravagantly as a game-show host. ‘Otherworld language. Real, very rare. Hard to get.’

They took it, pawing the pages, grappling with each other for the chance to get close enough for a look. For a long while they muttered and whispered. The language wasn’t the same they’d been speaking to Sharfy, but Eric caught words here and there:

‘Messages! See? Numbers.’

‘That line. See? Like map mark.’

‘My turn! My turn!’

‘Different paper. Shiny, green!’

‘My turn! Give!’

‘Careful! You rip!’

‘We share. Lots time. Shut up.’

‘Enough? Let pass?’

‘They have more. Perhaps. Ask?’

‘Ask!’

Their apparent leader — one with thick dark eyebrows that made him look furious — reverted to the normal tongue. ‘More! Not enough. Pay more.’

‘We pay more later,’ said Sharfy. ‘When we get through the tunnels safe.’

‘Pay more!’

‘No more,’ said Sharfy. ‘Don’t be greedy. We gave you lots. Then you kicked my friends out of the cavern you sold us. You don’t keep bargain, no one bargain with you again. No more toll for you.’

The groundmen conferred amongst themselves. ‘Leave it be,’ said one in its own tongue. ‘Tallest has sword. Ugliest has knives, enchanted. Send them down left tunnel. Traps there to kill them. Steal from bodies.’

‘Don’t send! Traps broke. Devils came through. Set off traps. No good.’

Sharfy and Kiown watched the groundmen, their faces indicating they didn’t understand a word. Eric tried to catch their eye, but they didn’t look at him.

‘Send other way,’ the groundman leader said. ‘Devils still there. Right passage. Wide cavern. Lots devils. Close off this way. No escape.’

‘Yes! Good!’ A burble of chittering noise broke out; it seemed to be laughter.

‘Toll enough,’ one of them said in the common tongue. ‘We go. You pass right tunnel. Left trapped. Middle blocked off. Go right. Only way through.’

The groundmen scurried back up the tunnel. Several little kicks hit all three of their shins as the pack of them passed. Soon they heard the sound of stone sliding on stone. Behind them the way was now blocked off. ‘Little bastards,’ muttered Kiown. ‘Ever tried groundman, Sharfy? Tastes rather like puke but at least you know one of the little fuckers died to make it.’

‘They can’t tell us which way we have to go,’ said Sharfy, nervously fingering the scar on his lip. ‘Can’t shut us off, either. If we pay a toll, we’re free. How it’s always been.’

‘Didn’t you guys understand what they were saying?’ Eric whispered. ‘They said they’re going to send us to devils.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what they said. I could tell you didn’t understand them, but I didn’t want them to know I could. So I kept quiet, let them talk.’

‘You couldn’t understand them,’ said Sharfy. ‘No one does. They have about a hundred languages. Most of it’s code inside other codes. Not even the castle people can speak it. No one can. Why you think they want Otherworld language so much?’

‘I’m telling you, I heard some of what they were saying.’

‘I don’t believe you,’ said Sharfy, crossing his arms.

Kiown looked from one to the other. ‘Mmm! Ironic. Sharfy won’t have a word of it. Sharfy’s bagged himself a genuine exaggerator! Fine, fine work. What else did they say?’

Eric thought back. ‘Something about the left tunnel being trapped. But that devils set the traps off, and they’re no good now.’

Kiown rubbed his chin. ‘If there’re traps, it’s worse than devils. If even one trap is still set? Whoever gets it will be waist-deep in the floor, stuck tight. Below, they’ll poke your butt and legs with spears until you drain dry. Most unfriendly. So, we go the way the groundies wanted us to. They didn’t see our pit devil masks! Sharfy, do I speak sense?’

‘If you do, speak it quieter,’ Sharfy answered sullenly. ‘They might be listening.’

Kiown tossed Eric the mask he’d worn, and got the other out of the knapsack.

‘Now hold on a minute. There is no way he understood what they were saying,’ Sharfy insisted. ‘Do you know how many have tried to learn groundmen tongue?’

‘Someone’s not very bright,’ said Kiown, a hint of anger changing his long, lean face dramatically with just a few twists and lines. ‘When we went through the door, we spoke their tongue. Or at least, it sounded like it to them. I bet we could understand all speech in Otherworld, just like Loup said. Now Eric creeps into Levaal — for reasons he certainly isn’t volunteering, one notices — and gets past the war mages in circumstances most mysterious and peculiar. Guess what? He speaks every tongue! If not speaks it, at least understands it.’ Kiown turned to Eric almost menacingly. ‘You can probably converse with elementals on the Misery Flats. Chat with hounds and horses, with trees and birds and buzzing flies. Bzzzz!’ Kiown paced around him, peering at him as if he were a prized farm animal. ‘I bet he could even understand castle speech, that the high-ups use, hidden by magic and all. Hmm! Do you know what this means, Eric?’

‘I’m sure you’ll tell me.’

Kiown did, pointing an accusing finger: ‘You are now property of Anfen’s band, which is us. And you are a very valuable trinket! Which is good and bad for you. As a valued trinket, you will have food to eat and people to protect you.’

He knew where this was headed. ‘But you can’t let anyone steal me, either?’

‘Correct! So. If you wanted to go back to your own world, I’m afraid not. Discussion over.’

Eric shrugged. ‘You seem to forget that I was sent here. I’m not meant to return yet.’

‘Sent here?’ Kiown looked at him, and a flicker of doubt went across his face.

‘Don’t tell him,’ said Sharfy. ‘Kiown’s not in charge. Save it for Anfen.’

‘Well and true,’ Kiown said. He produced a little jar half filled with paste, which he rubbed on his clothes, neck, legs and arms, then passed it around. It smelled musky and unpleasant. ‘Put on that mask,’ said Kiown. ‘This could prove a good little test of things. If you heard the groundmen right, we shall have to sneak past some devils. Then we’ll know Eric was right, and Sharfy was wrong. None shall be surprised.’

‘Coincidence,’ Sharfy said sourly. ‘We already seen the tracks.’

Kiown grinned. ‘One day you’re going to be telling the story of how you lost nearly a hundred arguments, with a thousand people who were all way, way smarter than you. As in, so much smarter you wouldn’t believe-’

‘Fuck you.’ Sharfy’s hand went to his knife.

‘Oh hush.’ Kiown stood on tiptoe, examining the marks on the roof. ‘Hmm. Not far from the grain-wagon tunnels, this way. If there are devils in this tunnel, I will be puzzled. We’re smack bang under the castle. They should not be here at all. Now listen: we are in disguise. If we see devils, we will crawl on hands and knees to be extra safe. Do not speak, or they shall know that you are not in fact a pit devil, and be truly pissed. They shall proceed to savagely maul you. And maybe everything else in sight, including each other. They’re like that. A bit unbalanced in the head, like Sharfy. Maybe they, like him, have heads stuffed with traumatic memories. And foul secrets. Who can say?’

Sharfy looked at Kiown darkly, and suddenly looked more like doing him harm than he had earlier with his knife drawn. Seemingly oblivious, Kiown said, ‘Eric, do you understand?’

‘I hope so.’

‘Mmmm. So do I. Because if you don’t,’ he cackled nervously, ‘we’re all going to die.’

The musky stink of their pit devil scent was dizzying, and soon pushed all other observations to the background. When the walls widened out they came to a spectacular mosaic, spread over a large area of the wall and linking up with another, set some way distant, its blooming light beams crossing the first’s, to form a huge three-dimensional portrait on the opposing wall. A lush garden was depicted, a scene of feasting and joy, the groundmen looking far nobler in this artwork than they’d been in person. Eric only just spotted the dead ‘evil giant’ in the grass amidst this splendour, the corpse seemingly a decoration like the flowers and jewels. He had to hand it to the little people, they knew a thing or two about holding a grudge.

As yet there’d been few of those slitted tracks in the stone. Then they came to a part of the tunnel where the lightstones were sparse. Ahead, something moved which Eric’s eye had marked as just an outcrop of rock on the cavern’s side wall, some way off the path. It might have been a large dog’s silhouette, but for the two pointed horns atop its skull, visible against a distant slab of lightstone. The others had missed it. He tapped Kiown’s shoulder and pointed.

Kiown pulled the mask down over his face and got on hands and knees. Sharfy straddled his back, hiding his head under the much taller man’s shirt. Eric gingerly slid his own mask on, and kneeled down too. Perhaps the thing heard them, for its head turned their way and it made an inquisitive sound.

They began their crawl. Beyond the first pit devil, another raised its head their way, and another, all little more than black shapes in the gloom. Rounding a bend where the light was better, they suddenly found dozens climbing over the cavern’s walls and floor. Little clicking sounds came from their claws across the stone; now and then there were faint inquisitive growls. Kiown balked to see so many, and looked nervously back the way they’d come. So quietly Eric could barely be sure he heard it, the redhead whispered: ‘We … are … dead.’

By the path now were scattered piles of small, broken bones. To their left, the nearest pit devil stood perfectly still. Its head slowly turned to watch them crawl by. Its eyes were blank pits. A ridge of naked white bone above its nose, dividing left and right, curled up as twin lumps in the brow, and seemed to pierce the forehead like a weapon driven through it. That aside, strangely, it did not look too far from human. But its eyes expressed nothing at all: no intelligence, emotion or even hunger. They were perfectly dead, and its lethal mouth hung wide open like something with broken hinges.

When they were safely past the first, there was a scuffling, grinding sound. It was trailing them, mindless as a sheep just following the herd. Kiown halted, subtly gestured for Eric to do the same. The pit devil made a sound in its throat then slowly loped past them on all fours, its shoulder brushing against Eric with intense warmth. It continued ahead, movements lithe and seeming to defy gravity slightly. Its clawed feet and hands left gouged slits in the rock floor like knives through wet clay.

To their left and right, yet more of the creatures watched them with distinct interest. Some were high up on the walls, even hanging from the cavern’s roof by their claws. As Eric began to wonder if the path through these fiendish things would ever end, he was amazed to discover he understood the gargling, snarling sounds they made.

‘Hunger. Builds.’

‘Shape. Moves. Comes.’

‘Scent. Good.’

‘Pack. Need …’

‘Teeth. Bone. Horns.’

‘Scent. Natural.’

‘Climb. Dark.’

‘Seek. Hunt.’

He shuddered.