Lindsay Buroker - Dark Currents

You give me hope though. That we can eventually influence Emperor Sespian and I can communicate with him to find a better solution for my people. I have come to trust you.

“Thank you, Basilard,” she said, though his honesty only made her feel guiltier for withholding the truth from him. “I don’t know all of Sicarius’s secrets, and it’s not my place to share the ones I do know.

“Found something,” Maldynado said.

“What?” Amaranthe rushed to join him for reasons beyond curiosity.

He rotated a cobweb-cloaked chalkboard standing on wheels in the corner. A giant diagram was tacked on the backside. Several warrens of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines crisscrossed the paper.

“The mines.” She tapped a circle that represented the northernmost one.

“You’re welcome.” Maldynado puffed out his chest.

Amaranthe traced the line leading from the circle. “Different levels, twists, and forks. This is a maze.” She squinted at words scrawled in the faded ink. “Not to scale. Not representative of all tunnels. See Document Four A dash Six for complete map. Uhm, anyone seen that?”

Maldynado deflated. “Er, no.”

Basilard shook his head.

Amaranthe eyed the broken desk and surrounding furniture.

“We’ve searched everything,” Maldynado said. “If there were other maps here, I figure that fungal mass ate them.”

“I told you it wasn’t wholesome.” She ticked her fingernail against the chalkboard. “It doesn’t look like the adjoining mine connects to the shaman’s. The only other way into his is…”

Maldynado pointed to a long, vertical line that connected with the mine of interest. “Looks like a backdoor to me.”

“Looks like a long drop down a hundreds-of-feet-deep shaft to me,” Amaranthe said.

“Enh, we’ve got rope. And Sicarius has trained us all to be expert climbers. Of course, I was already an expert.”

Basilard’s eyebrows flew up. Last month, you fell.

“That wasn’t a fall. It was a premature release, due to that beautiful lady ranger who was strolling along the base of the cliff. She had the biggest-”

“Problem,” Amaranthe said.

“Hm?” Maldynado asked.

“I suspect this shaft only exists for water removal purposes. There’ll be a steam engine on top that was designed to power a pump far below.”

“Well, it won’t be working, right? Unless the shaman is doing a little hobby mining on the side. Maybe the shaft is big enough that we can climb down it around the equipment.”

Basilard shook his head slowly, catching on before Maldynado.

“If they needed a pump during the mine’s heyday,” Amaranthe said, “it was because the lower levels filled with water. If the pump hasn’t been operating…”

“Oh,” Maldynado said. “Guess we should have brought the diving suits along.”

Amaranthe tapped the vertical line. “I’ll have you, Basilard, and Akstyr check it anyway. If it’s flooded, you come back and go in the front. With luck, I’ll get the shaman out of his warren by then and give you time to search for Books.”

Maldynado shared a bewildered expression with Basilard. “How’re you going to do that?” he asked. “And what will Sicarius be doing?”

“Nothing he’ll be happy about,” Amaranthe said.

B ooks scraped and poked at the dirt around the rocks in the wall nearest the white box using the broken piece of iron he had found earlier. He kept running into slabs of rock too large to dig around. His fingers bled, he could not see what he was doing, and more hours than he could guess at had passed. His cracked lips craved water. His stomach growled so ferociously it was drowning out his side of the conversation he had been having with it. He had stopped worrying whether or not it was healthy to talk to himself.

At least the pile of dirt and stones gathering on the floor beneath the wall was growing. If he could reach the back of that box, perhaps…

Soft clacks sounded in the tunnel.

Books pulled his makeshift chisel out of the hole and sat, leaning against the wall. He brushed the rubble beneath his legs as a tiny red light marched into sight. One of the spiders.

In the darkness, Books could make out none of its features, but he had no trouble picturing the thing. The red light turned toward him, a thumbnail-sized dot against a black backdrop.

“How about asking your master to send dinner down?” Books asked.

The red light shifted from side to side, giving the impression that the spider thought him suspicious. He propped an elbow on a knee, hoping to appear the perfect image of a bored and unambitious prisoner. A bead of sweat streaked down the side of his cheek, perhaps belying the facade.

What kind of mental capacity did the shaman’s inventions possess?

The light continued to beam at him. The reverberations from the distant machinery pulsed against Books’s back. Water dripped and spattered into a pool somewhere in the depths.

Finally, the light winked out as the spider turned to skitter up the tunnel, out of sight. Up, the direction Vonsha and the shaman had gone.

Books returned to his hole and doubled his efforts. If the mechanical creature was off to tattle on him, he might not have much time. Sweat soon bathed his brow and dampened his shirt. His bones ached from scraping and pounding at the earth, but his efforts were rewarded. His makeshift file thunked against a new material.

He wriggled his fingers about until he touched flat metal: the backside of the box. He tapped it a few times, fearing some magical punishment for his brazenness, but nothing happened. Books dug around it carefully. Minutes trickled past, but eventually it came loose in his hand.

Not sure whether to pull it back through the hole or try to hurl it down the tunnel, he stuck his free hand out to test the barrier. It remained in place.

Books tried to drag the box through the hole so he could examine it in the cell. It bumped the edge and fell to the ground.

“Dead deranged ancestors,” he growled.

All that time spent, and he dropped the thing. He twisted his arm, trying to reach through the hole and to the floor outside. His fingers swiped only air.

He yanked his arm back into the cell, scraping his shoulder in the process. Fists clenched, he lunged to his feet and kicked the barrier.

His foot met no resistance, and he almost pitched over backward.

Books’s anger evaporated. He probed the front of his cell, but the barrier was indeed gone. He stepped outside.

He could see nothing in the black tunnel. Arm stretched forward, he took a couple of tentative steps up the passage…and smashed into the barrier. Lovely. It must simply stretch across any opening parallel with the box. He found he could kick the device and push the barrier farther up the passage. He knelt, figuring he could angle it so he could pass, but he paused.

Presumably, the exit lay somewhere up the tunnel, but the shaman waited there too. And Vonsha had mentioned constructs.

Books left the barrier as it was and headed the opposite direction, deeper into the mine. Somewhere below him, machinery worked. Maybe he could sabotage something important, draw the shaman down to check on it, and slip past him to escape.

“Sounds easy,” he muttered, sure it would be anything but.

Groping his way through the darkness, he kept the ore cart track to one side and followed the wall with his hand on the other. Regularly placed wood timbers supported the ceiling and donated slivers as he brushed past them. The sound of dripping water grew louder, and he formed a hunch about the purpose of the distant machinery.

When he rounded a bend, the darkness receded. Another bend took him into a natural cavern with small globes of light mounted on the wall like torches. A serene pool occupied half of the space with the water lapping over the tracks in spots. Several pieces of machinery hunkered on the other side of the cavern. Steam-powered excavating equipment, most of it rusted beyond use.