David Farland - Chaosbound

It was said that sometimes the wyrmlings sent out roving patrols, but Aaath Ulber’s champions met none. Perhaps the troops only moved in daylight now, when humans were most likely to be abroad.

Or perhaps Aaath Ulber was lucky.

When they neared the wyrmling fortress, Aaath Ulber paused and sent two champions to guard the front door outside the pinnacle, to keep the wyrmlings from escaping. By then, the sun was cresting the horizon.

Then the remaining six champions raced off through the countryside, seeking the wyrmlings’ hidden entrance.

Aaath Ulber merely sprinted into the rugged hills where he suspected that he might find a wyrmling trail, some fifteen miles west of the fortress, and followed his nose.

It is said that a hound dog’s sense of smell is sixty times more powerful than that of a man. Aaath Ulber had taken endowments of scent from three dogs, and like a wolf that can smell blood on the wind at five miles, he caught the odor of wyrmlings easily enough.

The scent carried him down out of the mountains, into a steep vale. By the time that Aaath Ulber reached it, the sun had risen, casting its silver light among the blue-shadowed hills.

The land here was almost too rugged for homesteads, but Aaath Ulber found a couple of rustic shacks that had belonged to goat herders and woodsmen.

All of the homes were empty. The wyrmlings had swept through the valley, ridding it of anyone who might have witnessed their patrols marching along the river.

At one shack, a pile of human remains revealed the fate of the poor inhabitants. Human arm and leg bones were scattered about in the front yard, the last resting place of a young family, and tooth marks showed that the wyrmlings had gnawed them well.

The wyrmlings’ scent led the champions to a shallow river, its bed graveled with rounded stones. Northern pines brooded along the shore, dark and stunted, growing so close together that a man could hardly walk through them.

The woods were soundless. No squirrels scampered up trees. No jays ratcheted. No stags bounded from the deep grass by the river and went leaping into the forest with their antlers rattling among branches. The only sound was the occasional clacking of a dragonfly’s wing as it hunted along the reeds.

“We’re getting close,” Aaath Ulber whispered to his champions. “The smell is growing strong.”

So the champions stopped and fed in silence, pulling rations from their packs—good white cheese with hard rinds, fresh bread, cooked fish that was still warm from the fires.

To an onlooker, it might have seemed as if they paused only for a minute there, but as Aaath Ulber’s body measured it, it seemed close to half an hour that they rested.

He knew that his men would need their energy. The coming day would be long and bloody.

When he finished, the champions ran. They did not run on the land, but over the surface of the water. With so much speed, it was easy enough to do.

Aaath Ulber had always wanted to try such a feat.

The water held beneath their feet well enough, but it was hard to get purchase, and harder still to change course. One tended to slide too easily, and stopping was all but impossible. It was much like running on ice, or upon spongy moss, but after a few moments, Aaath Ulber caught the hang of walking on water.

It required him to plan his turns. He could twist his feet a little, use the soles of his shoes to turn like a rudder. Starting required that he take little stutter steps, digging his toes into the pliant water, so that he splashed all of those who ran behind. To stop, he learned to dig his heels in, so that the resistance of the water slowed him.

As he splashed about, the water erupted beneath his feet in slow motion, the droplets hanging in the air like diadems.

All in all, he found water walking to be both a challenge and a joy.

The river gave a decent cover for the wyrmlings’ trail, for the water washed most of their scent away, and the stones in the streambed hid most of their tracks. But on the banks of the river one could smell dung and urine among the pine needles and leaf mold. In some places in the river, one could see huge footprints, twenty inches long and eight wide, there along sandbars and the muddy shore where the wyrmlings had marched.

So Aaath Ulber and his heroes raced over the water, negotiating the ripples of rapids, moving faster when the channel deepened into still pools.

Here and there, large brown trout fed, rising to leave rings of silver on the surface, and Aaath Ulber recalled days in his childhood when he would have had nothing more pressing than to sit and catch one.

The river channel led straight into the wyrmling fortress, three miles from where he’d joined it. The river itself poured out of a cavern in the rocks. The hole was tall and wide.

At the opening, the rock walls were covered with deep green moss. Tiny fairy ferns erupted from the cave wall in abundance, wild clover honeyed the air while a few wild blue mountain orchids on the riverbank gave off a scent like night and longing.

The party stopped for a moment, and Aaath Ulber sank into the water as they searched for any sign of wyrmlings in the woods at their side, or in the tunnel ahead. Aaath Ulber saw none, heard none. But he could not believe that the path ahead was unguarded.

He stopped, and the morning air was still and quiet, in the way that only the deepest woods can be. A strong wind tugged at his back, racing down into the cavern. It was as if the earth was inhaling endlessly.

“There is an old saying on my world about wyrmling fortresses,” Aaath Ulber told the others. “ ‘If it’s easy to get in, it will be impossible to get out.’ Beware, my friends: There are traps ahead.”

“Should we light a torch?” one of the champions asked.

Aaath Ulber shook his head. “It will foul our air. The wyrmlings use glow worms to light the ceilings and fire crickets to spark on the floors. The white skin of the wyrmlings themselves is faintly luminescent. We should have enough light to see by, even to fight by.”

Each of the champions had taken five endowments of sight, four of hearing. Aaath Ulber hoped that it would be enough to match the heightened senses of wyrmlings that had been raised in the dark for generations.

They raced into the long tunnel for nearly a quarter of a mile, running now on the water again. The channel was narrow and deep, the water as cold as ice.

Overhead, limestone formations dripped minerals, bands of yellow and white. Bats squeaked and clung to the roof.

Suddenly, a quarter of a mile in, a wonder was revealed: Aaath Ulber slowed and looked up in amazement. The cave widened into an underground lake, and overhead a great roof opened, perhaps fifty feet up. Glow worms by the tens of thousands lit the ceiling, and as Aaath Ulber peered at them with his wyrmling’s eyes, they seemed like constellations of stars glimmering in an eternal night.

Almost he dared stop, but the water was deep and he did not want to sink. So he merely slowed, plodding at perhaps eighty miles an hour, lost in glory.

The channel continued on, three more long miles, before suddenly it stopped. The river came cascading from a freshet above, and went churning off down the channel. But beside it was a wide roadway that had been carved with pick and awl—a tunnel.

The sour stench of wyrmling flesh issued from it, as if it was the lair of an old boar bear. Aaath Ulber could smell rotting flesh and bones.

He halted, raised a hand to warn the champions behind him. He could smell wyrmlings near, too near. He almost felt that he should be able to reach his hand out into the darkness and touch them.

He rounded a corner.

He expected a door here, a portcullis perhaps, or maybe a sliding wall of stone.