Tad Williams - Shadowrise

Browncoal led them through the lake cavern and out the far end, where some ancient drainage had carved a sort of narrow valley down at an even steeper angle. They followed this low-ceilinged canyon, doing their best not to touch the delicate crystals like cone-shaped snowflakes that clung to the walls and disintegrated at the slightest touch. Antimony even wept after accidentally shattering one large and exuberant example that had sprouted sideways from the rock like a miniature tree, the trunk ramifying into ever more exquisitely narrow sprays of translucent stone. The drow Browncoal watched the unhappy monk in silence, his dirty face twisted in an unreadable grimace.

As the little company traveled deeper and deeper into the strange caverns Vansen saw things he could never have imagined—chambers hung with branching structures that might have been monstrous stag’s horns, and caverns filled with chalky pillars that grew both upward from the floor and down from the ceiling, as if two pieces of bread had been spread with honey, pressed together, then slowly pulled apart. Often beauty and danger came together as the travelers made their way along narrow tracks or over slender bridgelike structures with pits of empty blackness yawning below them.

Who would have guessed that an entire world lurked here beneath the ground? Vansen thought as they passed pools with eyeless white crabs and fish that darted away from their intruding footfalls. In some of the larger caverns bats roosted in astounding numbers—once they disturbed such a dormitory and the shrieking, flapping cloud seemed to take a good part of an hour to clear the chamber, the little creatures were so numerous. But more often Vansen followed his guides through confined spaces where he often had to crawl on his elbows and knees, or even on his belly, wriggling like a snake through narrow holes so that soon every part of him had been covered in mud and grit.

Finally they halted in front of one such gap, a crevice so small Vansen did not believe even his companions could get through it. He put down his pack and crouched beside it, measuring. It was no wider than the cubit between his elbow and fingertip!

“I cannot fit through a space so small,” he said.

The drow seemed to understand him; he said something in his guttural speech. “He says you must go,” Antimony translated. “This is the last narrow passage.” He frowned, listening. “Although he says that this is why they did not try to attack this way. It was too narrow for the ...” He fell silent. “He calls them the Deepings—I think he means the giants we call ettins. They could not fit through this tunnel and it was too long to widen—someone would have heard so much work.”

Vansen suppressed a shiver. “None of this matters. I will not fit.”

“Then he says you must go back,” Antimony reported. “There is no other way to reach the dark lady.”

But Vansen knew that only he could speak to her—only he had a chance to end this before every living person in Southmarch, big and small, aboveground and belowground, had been slaughtered. “Very well,” he said at last. “I’ll try. Can you take my armor and my weapon?”

Antimony considered for a moment. “Not and carry the rest of the food and water through a narrow place. I am not that much more slender than you—Nickel says I eat enough for two or three Metamorphic Brothers.”

Vansen did his best to smile at the monk’s weak joke. “Then I must leave the armor—but I will push the ax in front of me. So how will we do this?” Vansen asked. “Should I go last?”

“No. If you are as necessary to this envoy as you say you are, I do not want to be stuck on the far side from Funderling Town, unable to go back but unable to pull you out. If aught goes wrong, someone must be able to return for help. And I am certainly not trusting that inbred creature to go first. If you did get stuck, that would be the last we saw of him. No, I’m afraid you have to lead the way, Captain Vansen. Our little friend will follow, and I will be last.”

Ferras Vansen took off his byrnie and his padded undershirt—the change sent a chill through him so that his teeth chattered a little. He looked over to the drow, who was watching the proceedings with squint-eyed interest. “Don’t let him hamstring me,” he told Antimony.

“Don’t worry about that, Captain,” the monk said with a grim set to his jaw as he gathered the coils of the prisoner’s rope. “If he tries to do anything he shouldn’t, I’ll pull the leg right off him.”

“Yes, well, don’t kill him,” Vansen said. “We may still need him on the other side. Do I go in head or feet first?”

“Depends on if you want to travel in light or in the dark.” Antimony pointed at the Salt Pool lantern tied around Vansen’s brow. “No, you must go head first, Captain. Your shoulders are the widest part. Remember to lift your arms when you need to make yourself narrower. And do not fear—I will be behind you.”

Vansen took a deep breath, then a few more, but he knew he could delay no longer. He crawled to the hole. How could he ever get himself into such a tight space?

“One arm up, one arm down if you can manage it,” said the monk. “It will give you more choices of how to move, and it can make you even narrower.”

Vansen pushed his ax into the tunnel and then crawled in after it. To his surprise he managed to shift his shoulders and torso through the first tight space. The tunnel opened up a little after that, although he still could not bring his arms down below his head, so he nudged the ax ahead and then wiggled after it like a snake.

A very slow, clumsy, and frightened snake, he could not help thinking.

Everything in Vansen revolted at the idea of forcing himself ever deeper into the earth this way. Even the warm, moist air he was breathing began to feel thin and inadequate. The tunnel was not, as he had half-imagined, a single smooth passage like the burrow of an animal—it had been created by the accidental spaces left between huge slabs of fractured stone. He began to think about tremors, those times that the earth shrugged like a sleeping giant. If it did that now, even the smallest shift, he would be obliterated like a grain of wheat caught between millstones.

Once, when the tightness of the passage around his chest kept him from filling his lungs all the way he had to fight a sudden and surprising terror. He could dimly hear Antimony talking behind him, encouraging him no doubt, but his own body and the drow behind him blocked most of the sound and the monk’s voice was no more than a murmur.

Maybe he’s not encouraging me, Vansen thought suddenly. Maybe he’s thought of something he forgot to tell me—that there’s a pit or an even narrower spot ahead… or to watch out for snakes or venomous spiders…

Stuck in a tight bend and trying to free himself, Vansen banged his head painfully on the wall of the tunnel. He felt a trickle of wetness on his head and assumed it was blood. A moment later his lantern flickered and went out, leaving him in complete and utter darkness.

His heart raced, tripped, and seemed for a moment as if it would not catch its rhythm again. He was choking—trapped in blackness and strangling! No air!

“Stop!” he growled at himself, although the sound was more of a gasp or gulp than actual words. Still, it was his own voice. There was air. The sudden terror that was making his heart pound and his head feel as though his skull was being squeezed in a monstrous fist was only that… fear.

What does darkness matter, anyway? he asked himself. You can only crawl, moving forward an inch at a time, Vansen. You are a worm. Do worms fear darkness?

It was a weirdly reassuring thought; after some moments his heart began to slow. He suddenly saw himself as a god might see him—a god with a sense of humor: Vansen was only a little creature where he didn’t belong, crammed in a tunnel deep underground like a dried pea in a reed—the kind he used to blow at his brothers and sisters when they were children. The earth surrounded him, but it cradled him, too. There was nothing to do but go forward. When he stuck in the narrow places he would simply wriggle until he managed to free himself.