Adrian Tchaikovsky - Empire in Black and Gold

We went on a bit slower after that. The roof was lower, for a start, and the walls had become oddly slick and nasty to the touch. The floor was slippery, and sloping too, and the lanterns didn’t seem to be giving out enough light even for me. I could hear the two Wasps breathing harsh and hoarse in my ear, and a lot of other little scuttlings and scrabblings as well. Nobody was much looking forward to stepping on the next centipede, or whatever other venomous residents we might disturb. You didn’t get scorpions so much in the Commonweal, but my little spider brothers certainly put in an appearance, and I didn’t have the Art to warn them off. Skessi was sticking close to the light, now. He might not have the fear of the dark that the Wasps had, but he was now somewhere he couldn’t make much use of his wings. In the Lowlands the Fly-kinden love little tunnels. Their warrens are mazes of chambers and narrow vertical drops and the like that make it impossible for any bigger kinden to get around. I think Imperial Fly-kinden don’t like being enclosed so much. Certainly Skessi wasn’t at all fond of it.

Then came the bad news. The whole thing led to a wall: a dead end.

We argued then, or at least the Wasps threw accusations and we tried to defend ourselves. The loot we’d found already might as well not have been there. They wanted the big haul, worth absconding from the army for. Harsh words were exchanged, a free and frank exchange of views, until Merric got free and frank enough to shoot at Fael. His sting went wide, from poor light and Fael throwing himself flat, but it knocked a chunk out of that wall, a chunk the size of your hand.

I won’t swear something moved beyond that gap, but Skessi was shouting that it had, and then a great deal was moving all at once because the tunnel saw fit to collapse.

Not all of it, and not all at once, but Fael just pitched forward into what was suddenly quite a big hole, though too many stones and stuff in the air to use his wings. I felt the earth beneath me shift, and I scrabbled back and back, Art-clinging from stone to stone, and feeling each one move as I trusted it. One of the lanterns smashed and the other one went out, and it was all suddenly very black, and everyone was shouting.

We got to a stage when the only noise was us, though, and all the loose stone that was going anywhere had gone. Roven had somehow shielded his dead lantern with his body to save the glass, and now he coaxed a little light from it. The place had undergone severe redecoration. We counted the two Wasps and me, and Skessi had got clear, of course, because his kind always do.

‘Fael?’ I called. I had no idea what shape the plan was in just then, but the plan needed Fael, for starters.

‘Here,’ came a weak voice, and then, with extreme urgency, ‘Down here, quick!’

I started forward, and Roven came with me, lantern out. The first thing we saw was that the place was crawling with critters. There were little centipedes, finger-length, and worms and slugs and some kind of palm-wide albino cricket that just looked as if it would be bad to touch. The tunnel we were in had just gone, a few feet ahead, but it had gone into a lower level that none of us had guessed at. Roven tried to get some light down there, and the first thing we saw were the bodies.

I hadn’t thought Fael was telling the truth, perhaps he hadn’t either. There hadn’t been bodies in the other place, just a little loot and the writing that put us onto this one. There were bodies here though. Before the stones had fallen on them, they had been standing up in armour, and one of them was still on its feet, propped up in an alcove with its bony hands about a sword hilt. The rest were in pieces, and the dried skulls seemed to leer and scream out at us when the lantern light hit them. There was plenty else to catch the light, though, and it was mostly gold. Fael was lying there surrounded by a Monarch’s ransom in gold: the armour the corpses had been wearing was all precious metals and enamel and gems, and there were other pieces: jewellery, masks, inscribed tablets, and all of it enough for any two of us to live on till the end of our days. No coins, of course, because even these days the Commonweal runs off barter and goodwill, but all the same there were lots of these little ingots of gold that I’d never seen before. There were weapons, too, fine ones, and some pieces of gilded armour that were big enough for one of the giant Mole Cricket-kinden to wear, and were surely just for show. There were spread quivers of white-shafted arrows with elegant pearl-hafted bows, and dragon swords with inscribed blades.

‘Start passing it all up,’ Roven snapped, a barbarian at heart, and signalled for Merric to go down to help. Merric was having none of it, though. He was staying well back from the edge. Something had spooked him. At the time I thought it was just the danger of another collapse.

‘I don’t think I can fly, not carrying any weight,’ Fael said. He was sitting up, and I couldn’t see any obvious hurt. I got it: this was part of the plan.

‘I’ll go down and help,’ I said, but Roven pushed me back, grabbing Skessi by the collar before the fly could scoot away.

‘Starting shifting it up here,’ he said, virtually throwing the Fly down into the pit. Fael was already kneeling by then, gathering up stuff into a sack. The Fly ended up hovering above the room’s centre and, in a rasping voice, asked, ‘What’s through there?’

There was an archway, you see. The pit Fael had fallen into wasn’t just on its own. It must connect to some other set of tunnels. The archway was big, ten feet high at the keystone. The whole chamber was big, for that matter. It dwarfed the dead guardsmen someone had posted down there.

‘Forget about through there,’ Roven snapped down. ‘Just bring up the treasure.’

Skessi got the first sack, and very nearly couldn’t get it airborne. With a supreme flurry of wings he got it to where Roven could snag it, and then Roven would have tilted head forwards into the pit if Merric hadn’t grabbed him. By that time Fael had a second sack of loot just about ready, but he was doing a lot of looking about and twitching, and I took that as being plan two, part two.

‘Did you hear that?’ he called out abruptly. Skessi dropped the sack he’d just been passed, and vaulted into the air again.

‘There was nothing!’ Roven bawled. ‘Bring the loot up, you little pin-sucking bastard!’

‘I heard it!’ Skessi squeaked. ‘Something’s coming.’ He was fumbling for the sack.

‘Nothing’s coming!’ Roven shouted back. I thought he was shouting so loud to block out anything that he might hear. Merric had retreated a good ten feet back down the tunnel, eyes wide. He’d have run, I think, if the lantern hadn’t still been by Roven’s feet.

Skessi got airborne again, straining furiously to lift the sack up to us. Behind him, Fael gave out a dreadful shriek.

‘Avaris!’ he cried. ‘Run! Just run! Leave the loot and run!’

That was my cue. I followed his exclamation with a blood-curdling wail and just bolted, and to my glee Merric was already outpacing me to the exit. It was pitch dark, but there was only one way to go, and we went. Skessi overtook me before I hit daylight, keening like a madman. I heard Roven behind, lumbering and cursing and bouncing off the walls. The last we heard from Fael was a high, rending scream, wordless and filled with horror. I could barely stop grinning.

It was still daylight outside, of course, and that put a little bravery back into them. We rendezvoused at the camp, where the hobbled horses were skittish and the beetle was practically dancing with anxiety, and I saw that the plan hadn’t quite worked.

I had to hand it to Roven for utter single-mindedness. He had fled just as we had fled, but he’d had both the self-possession and the sheer Art-fired strength to drag both sacks of treasure along with him. We were out and we were rich, which was all good for the two Wasps, and not much fun for me. I had no illusions that they’d give me any kind of share.