David Farland - Lords of the Seventh Swarm

Gallen tried to follow the tracks back to a lair, but they led around the lip of a dangerous sinkhole, then climbed directly up a steep tree. Still, they were getting near the lair.

“Maggie,” her mantle whispered. “I have just received a message from the ship. The dronon are making a powerful sensor sweep of this area. They’ve discovered the ship’s location.” Gallen turned and frowned at Maggie. Apparently, his mantle had just relayed the message to him.

It had taken Gallen and Maggie two hours to fly their ship into this mess. They’d snaked through dozens of passages, gone up almost as much as they’d gone down. Even if the dronon knew their ship was here, it could take them hours to find a path to it. Once they did, they’d follow Maggie’s scent.

She imagined dronon Vanquishers, thousands strong, hunting through this tangle. She wondered what would happen when they met the sfuz.

“Gallen,” she hissed. “We have to stop!”

Gallen halted. The light from her glow globe cast enormous shadows, shadows that frightened her because for a moment she thought she saw something huge and black struggling toward her from a passage.

She went to Gallen’s side. “The dronon will be hunting here,” she whispered, “And the sfuz. Maybe we shouldn’t try to get so close to Teeawah.”

Gallen looked up toward the passage that had frightened Maggie. “We don’t know how close we are, yet.”

“Close enough so their children play in these passages.”

Gallen looked forward eagerly, then frowned as he glanced at the trail behind. “I don’t know what else to do.”

Maggie’s heart pounded. Her mouth felt dry. She unstrapped the canteen from her back and took a swig. She didn’t know what to do, either. The tension in the air was so thick, she could hardly swallow. She nodded, let Gallen lead them forward.

He can’t do it all, Maggie thought. He can’t lead us. He can’t fight for us. He can’t do it all. Think.… Think . She didn’t want to go forward, could barely force herself to keep up.

They hurried up the passage, came to a bend. Gallen halted. To their left, a great hole opened, perfectly round. This one was twice the diameter of the one they’d encountered earlier. Another mistwife. Huge. Huge.

Maggie’s heart pounded. Gallen and the others tiptoed ahead.

Think, Maggie told herself. She reached into her pockets, shoving her fists in to get warm; her fingers closed around glass.

She pulled it out. The bottle of scent from the perfumery. She stopped, considered it for a moment.

The dronon would follow her, chase her with their Seekers. She couldn’t let them find her.

She motioned with her hand for Gallen to come back. He had already gone fifty meters ahead. He returned reluctantly.

Maggie didn’t dare speak. Instead, she reached up, fumbled with his robe. Its nanoscrubbers could hide her scent,’ clean it from the air as she walked. If she wore his robe, she hoped, she’d be almost undetectable to the Seekers.

Gallen frowned at her, confused, tried to pull her forward. Apparently he thought she was only cold, and he considered this a poor place to give her the loan of a cloak, but Maggie refused to be led away till she had the cloak off him and over her own shoulders. She pulled the hood up over her head, then took the bottle of scent, carried it to the lip of the great hole in the ground, the mistwife’s passage.

The dirt here was slippery, loose. If she got too near the edge, she’d fall in. But she had to do this, had to reach out over that dark hole and pour a few drops, a few precious drops of her scent down that hole.

When she finished, she put the stopper back on the empty bottle and dropped it into the thick humus at her feet, covered it with dirt, then fled.

Every second, she listened for the sound of something rushing up that shaft, something shrieking and tumbling. If this monster came after them, they might not escape.

When she’d gone a few hundred meters, she sighed in relief. Yet her relief was short-lived.

If I made it safely, won’t the dronon? she wondered. She’d hoped the mistwife would kill any Seekers that came after her. She’d imagined the machines hurtling over the lip of that pit, and the dronon buzzing away, crashing into the jaws of the mistwife.

But what if no mistwife lived down that hole? The pit was vast, twenty meters in diameter. Perhaps its maker had died centuries ago.…

Maggie couldn’t know, might never know. She only knew she had to keep running. By now it was late afternoon. The sfuz would be waking, leaving their chambers. The group needed to find a place to hide.

Gallen glanced back down the trail behind him, watching for sign of pursuit, then looked ahead again. Before them was a small pond, water pooling from a rock cliff, that stretched up into the darkness. The pool appeared deep and still. Tiny blind fish and insects swam in it, yet Gallen dared not drink that water, for it had an unhealthy green tint to it. Besides, it was not the solemn pond, with the sound of dripping from above, that interested him. It was the cliff.

The weathered yellow stone had been swept smooth eons ago by wind and rain, yet here in the tangle, it looked as if wind would never touch it again.

Still, on the cliff before them faint pictographs could be seen in dim green characters. A bird, with both wings spread, looking up to its right. Lightning bolts seemed to be flying from its eyes. Zeus stared at it, mesmerized, mouth open in wonder.

“What is it?” Orick asked.

“A Qualeewooh,” Zeus said, “who wears no spirit mask.”

Gallen wanted to say something in response, but he, too, suddenly felt a sense of wonder. Even the most ancient depictions of Qualeewoohs he’d seen portrayed them with spirit masks. But if the masks were created to be receivers so the Qualeewoohs could hear the voices of their ancestors, then there would have been a time before the ancestors spoke, a time when no Qualeewooh yet wore a mask. A time before the Waters of Strength.

Gallen shook his head. This particular chamber in the tangle was fairly large, but had no openings to either side. It came to an abrupt stop at the cliff face. Here, the trail ended.

The last fork in the trail that Gallen had seen was hundreds of meters back. Even if he knew where an entrance to Teeawah was, he knew he wouldn’t reach it easily. That in itself made him uneasy, but he faced another challenge. It had been three hours since the dronon had pinpointed his ship.

The dronon were now hunting them, deep in the tangle. His mantle picked up their radio chatter-the incessant clicking of dronon mouthfingers over a background of static. It wasn’t coming over just a few channels, but over hundreds or thousands.

The dronon must be crawling through here en masse, he realized. More of them than he’d imagined possible were filtering through the tangle. It was only a matter of time before they found him. Gallen couldn’t afford any more blind alleys or delays.

“Come on,” he whispered, leading the party back the way they’d come. Maggie turned and hobbled, neck bent, nearly stumbling with fatigue. For the past four hours they’d been climbing up and down, seeking routes through the maze. They’d found few signs of sfuz-excrement here, a hole dug there.

Gallen realized that they’d come too low. The entrance to the city must be higher up the cliffs. Down here, where nothing lived, the sfuz did not bother to hunt. That’s why he’d found so few tracks.

Gallen walked with Maggie, holding her hand, trying to give the comfort she needed. He watched her face bobbing, unsteady light; saw that more than the energy had drained from it. Her hope, too, was going.