Tim Lebbon - Dusk

Five hundred steps after this narrow stretch, Trey began to notice something in the air. A smell. The smell of people.

And beneath it, so distant as to be almost imaginary, the tang of blood.

“How long have we been moving?” his mother asked.

“A shift,” Trey said.

“A topside day,” she muttered. “I need to sleep, Trey. Very soon, I’ll need to sit and sleep. Are the Nax following? Do you think they have our trail?”

Trey sniffed and knew that there was a menstruating woman in the group that had come this way before. For a hopeful moment he thought that could be the blood he sensed, but there was something else. He kept up the pretense, though he knew it was false.

He had chewed a finger of fledge a few hours before. He had cast his mind back several times since then, searching, watching the way they had come, to see if anything was following. Clumsy though this casting was-he was doing it on the move, trying not to let his mother know what he was doing-he was certain that the psychic picture he drew of the empty seam behind them was true.

“Nothing’s following us,” he said, and his mother breathed a heavy, heartbreaking sigh of relief and exhaustion. “But, Mother, someone has come this way before us.”

She sniffed at the air for a few seconds, an old person’s heavy, unsubtle inhalation. “I smell nothing,” she said. “I used to have a nose like a cave rat, though I know I’m old now. Are you sure?”

“I’m sure,” Trey said. Because there is blood here. Human blood. He wished he had cast forward too, but now that he smelled the blood he was afraid. If there were still minds to meet, he would meet them soon enough.

“How far away could they be? Surely not that far. Nobody had a chance to get into these caves much before us.”

“We had to get across the cavern from our side,” Trey said. “Then we stood talking with Grant for a while. We’ve rested a good few times, and when the seam narrowed…”

“I slowed us down, I know. But still, they can’t be more than a couple of hours ahead.”

“Probably not.”

“We should try to reach them, Trey. I’ll do everything I can, I’ll breathe harder, I’ll push harder. Let’s go and meet up with them. The more of us there are, the better the chances of reaching the rising in one piece.”

“I guess so.” The pause stretched into an uncomfortable silence.

“Trey?”

“There’s blood, Mother!” he blurted. “I can smell blood. It’s one of the women’s time, but it’s not only that. I’m afraid of what we’ll find.” He started to cry silently, and his mother knew. Not because of the smell or the way it changed his voice, but simply because she was his mother.

“Oh Trey, we won’t know until we get closer. Maybe one of them was injured. Perhaps one of them fell and cut themselves, or ran into some stingers. With our own people ahead of us and the Nax behind, I know which I choose.”

Trey tried to stifle his sobs but failed. The shock of what had happened hit hard at last. Beneath it, always there but so easily shut away, was the idea that it was all his fault. He had touched on the mind of the Nax and sensed the strange happenings topside that had woken it, but still, if he had not disturbed the fledge demon, perhaps it would not have come at them. It was a crazy idea, but right now he felt crazy.

“I’m proud of you, son. Your father would be too.”

“I’m useless!”

“No, I don’t think so. Let’s go. Trey, I can’t lead the way. Next to you I’m blind in these caves.”

THEY MOVED ON. The smell grew in strength, and Trey could make out now that its source was stationary. They passed through another narrow seam, this one sloping steeply, and they had to slide down feet-first. His mother managed on her own, though Trey could sense the effort draining her final reserves of strength.

For an hour before they found the bodies the stench was strong and sickening. Blood, insides, shit, everything that went to make up people laid bare to the air. It went a little way to prepare Trey and his mother for what they found.

The bodies were scattered across the floor in a wide part of the seam, ground into the walls, their clothes ripped and soaked with blood. The smell was bad enough, but the feel of the human wreckage beneath their shoes was enough to make them retch.

“Anyone alive?” Trey asked, already certain of the answer. For some reason talking to the darkness made him shiver. He felt as if he were conversing with wraiths.

“Let’s move on, Trey,” his mother said.

“The Nax may be ahead.”

“Well, they’re behind us for sure. I think whatever did this came at them from up ahead. There must be ten dead folk here, and most of them are in one huddle. One or two back here, nearer to us, as if they were caught trying to run away.”

Trey turned his head left to right, sniffing. She was right.

“The Nax probably found another way through. Whatever Grant may have said, those things have been down here thousands of years longer than us. They know their way around. The one that did this is probably back in the cavern right now…”

Sonda was here. Trey stopped breathing, terrified of the scent he had just caught. It was the dusky, slightly spiced hint of Sonda’s skin, the warm herby smell of her breath… and drowning it all, her blood.

“Oh no!” he said, leaning forward until he slumped down onto the ground. He pleaded with the dark, asking its wraiths to prove him wrong, but there was no answer. Sweet Sonda, barely aware of his existence, yet at times throwing him a coy smile that set him alight and fueled many guilty fledge dreams, and many castings to seek her mind. He had always drawn back, guilty and respectful, but how he wished he had been more brash. He had thought he’d seen love in her eyes once, but he had so little confidence that he believed it must have been for someone else, left over from a previous thought as Sonda chatted to him in a food cave, smiled, ran a hand through her braided hair. Love in her eyes, warm and bright and so often hidden in the pitch darkness of the caves.

His mother held him and tried to give comfort, but for a while Trey was far away.

LATER, TREY PUSHEDthem on. They had to move quickly, although deep down where he barely even knew himself, he no longer believed they could escape. They had been given this subterranean world for a short-term loan, allowed to plunder its wealth, wound it, pull fledge from its ancient seams as if drawing blood from the veins of the world. Foolish, smug in their pride, thinking they now ruled this place. Even after the Cataclysmic War the fledge miners had considered themselves insulated from the rot setting in topside. They had heard of the strange things happening to the land, as if the ties that bound it together safely were slowly snapping and unraveling. And stories had filtered down with topside runners of the world slowing down, tales that the retraction of magic had murdered the peoples’ confidence. Three centuries after the withdrawing of magic, humankind topside was like an old person waiting to die. Still eating, still drinking, still dreaming, looking to the rich past more than the short, doomed future.

Down here, smug and foolish, the fledgers had believed themselves safe. Now they were being shown just how unimportant they were.

Any petty plans Trey had once entertained for his future were slaughtered as surely as Sonda and those others, ground into the rocks and spilled across cold stone by the Nax, who truly knew and possessed this place. Fledge demons, the humans had called them, unconsciously classing them as monsters. People know so little.

So he pushed on, and his mother never once complained. They stopped now and then, licked moisture from the rocks, ate a handful of moss even though they knew it could make them sick. They needed the energy right now, the input of sustenance to carry them the distance to the rising. They hoped that Chartise was still there with the mules, ready to raise them up to the surface. All the while, unuttered, not even hinted at, the certainty in Trey’s mind that they were both destined to die down here. And he did not care. Grief and exhaustion had hobbled his mind and distanced him from the truth.