David Farland - Lords of the Seventh Swarm

“Don’t worry, darling,” Gallen whispered, emphasizing the brogue accent he’d all but completely discared in the last months. “I’ll not let nothing bad happen to the prettiest girl her Clere.” He clenched her hand reassuringly.

Maggie smiled, but kept her mouth shut. None of them really should be talking, even though it looked certain that no sfuz were close by.

For another hour they hiked, backtracking from one cavern to the next, climbing up higher whenever possible. In one passage, they finally found a trail that had seen some use, and Gallen tried following it-climbing vertical trees as if he were a sfuz, squeezing through a tunnel so narrow Maggie feared she wouldn’t be able to make it.

When they reached the end of the tunnel, they found they hadn’t come to a sfuz lair, but had reached something vast yawning pit filled with the shells of some crab like animals, along with hundreds of skeletons. At first Gallen imagined that the sfuz had disposed of bones here, but movement in the pit caught his eye. It wasn’t shells, but actual crablike insects, each with a dozen thin legs, climbing among corpses-sfuz corpses. In this graveyard, scavengers fed.

The fact that some sfuz died at all suggested that not all of them were allowed to drink from the Waters of Strength. Gallen wondered. Like any great treasure, some would horde it, deny it to others. Gallen guessed that these were the lowest of the sfuz, the wasted, those who did not merit immortality.

Gallen turned away in disgust, listening to the clacking jaws, the faint scrabbling of insects. Worse yet, among the corpses, some dead sfuz had burn marks. These were sfuz Gallen had killed only the day before.

Maggie sat at the edge of the stinking pit, put her head in her hands, trembling from weariness.

“Come,” Gallen said. “We’re not far from their lair. We have to keep moving.”

He took them back the way they’d come, past their previous path. Not a dozen yards from where they’d first joined the sfuz trail, they turned a bend, found an opening to a tunnel with a road ten times as wide as the trail they’d been traveling.

The road was trampled hard as cement. The walls rose dozens of meters, and Gallen could see fresh wooden beams shoring the walls of this tunnel. This wasn’t just some wild path through the tangle-it was a highway.

We must be near Teeawah , Gallen realized, looking northward along the subterranean highway. There was an odd reek in the air, the sour smell of sfuz hide, almost nauseating in its intensity. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of sfuz must live here.

As Gallen stumbled onto this thoroughfare, he stood a moment, unsure if he should go forward. How could he hope to reach the city undiscovered?

Yet even as he worried, his mantle picked up a strong, clear radio signal. dronon were coming, and one of them was relaying a report to its masters. Down the bend, on the highway leading out of the city, lights shone.

Gallen raced back to the narrow trail off the highway, urging Maggie to hide her glow globes, and the small group scurried back down the corridor. In moments the highway tunnel filled with the echoing sounds of a dronon march, the clicking of mouthfingers over voicedrums, the rattle of weapons against carapaces.

Zeus, Maggie, and the bears scurried farther down their narrow tunnel, squeezing round a corner. Gallen halted far back in the darkness, listening. In the shadows he knelt in the dirt, mouth pressed close to the moldy humus, and peeked out at the highway, letting his mantle capture and illuminate the image.

A dronon Vanquisher suddenly filled the passage before them, flashed a light over Gallen’s head, and fired a pulp gun blindly, just to make certain the passage was clear. Dirt sprinkled down on Gallen, and he dared not move. In half a second, the dronon moved on, and Gallen saw the marching bodies of others come into view.

The dronon had come in force. For ten minutes he watched dronon, hundreds of them, marching in formation, scurrying through the cavern like roaches, weapons at ready. Twice more, scouts glanced down his long passage, each flashing a strong light into the crevice. Gallen drew back around the corner, out of sight. Sweat poured down his brow. Gallen seldom became frightened, yet his heart pounded.

When the echo of footsteps dimmed, when the dronon had passed, Gallen sat, trying to calm himself. Twelve hundred. A contingent of twelve hundred Vanquishers, all armed with incendiary rifles and pulp guns.

Gallen waited, unsure what to do. He didn’t want to follow the dronon. It would be better, perhaps, to put as much distance between himself and the dronon as possible. But his gut instinct told him that the highway out there led to Teeawah.

He looked back to Maggie for counsel. “What now?” “Follow them,” she whispered. “To the city.”

Gallen nodded, uncertain. His arms and legs trembled, but not from fear-it was the ground trembling beneath him. Not the deep rumbling of an earthquake, not even the milder reverberations of a mistwife moving through its tunnel. Smaller.

Gallen stilled his breath. Distantly, he heard small-arms fire.

The dronon firing pulp guns. The concussions caused the tremors. For two solid minutes, the rumbling continued, and Gallen finally recognized a crackling, too. The sharper retorts of incendiary rifles.

A battle raged, nearby. Here, underground, sound wouldn’t carry far. Gallen smelled smoke, a smoke he realized might take weeks to clear from the tangle.

Suddenly, down the highway, just outside his little tunnel, the whistling cries of sfuz erupted, rapidly drawing close. Hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, were fleeing the city, Gallen thought.

But something was wrong. The pitch of their whistles wasn’t the high, desperate whine he’d heard before from retreating sfuz, but rather the low cries of hunters.

The dronon guns had gone silent.

“Damn,” Gallen whispered, unprepared for the revelation.

The dronon had reached Teeawah. And died?

How many sfuz were out there? Twelve hundred Vanquishers, gone just like that.

We’re next , he thought.

He turned back, urging the others to flee down the narrow trail. Zeus took little encouragement, retreated the way they’d come. Gallen wondered how safe it would be. Their trail led to a dead end through one corridor and to the mistwives in another.

And the dronon should be following us , Gallen realized. The Seekers should be on our trail. He couldn’t retreat.

But sfuz and the city lay ahead. He couldn’t go forward.

When they reached a small chamber where ancient limbs thrust up from the floor, Gallen called a halt. “Zeus, spread some of this down the corridor,” he said, tossing Zeus the canister of exploding foam. Zeus took it, disappeared up the trail.

Gallen heard the hiss of foam as Zeus sprayed the floor and walls. In sixty seconds the foam would set; anything that touched it thereafter would explode in a fireball.

“Maggie, you and the bears take cover here between these branches, and break out some food. We need some rest.” He indicated the two largest partially petrified tree branches, which thrust up. From behind them, they’d have some protection.

Maggie sat and drew her heavy pistol, a conventional weapon with high-explosive charges and a silencer. No sooner had she got down than the sfuz found them.

Several dozen charged down the narrow corridor, whistling in anticipation. The sfuz boiled through the cavern opening like ants, grasping the cavern wall with their strong fingers, apparently unmindful of gravity. Some were running along the ceiling, others erupting around walls, while yet others scampered along the floor. They seemed intent on finding their prey, mindless with rage.