The Chosen (The Compendium of Raath, Book 1) (35 page)

A few days ago he could
have cared less what they thought of him, but his new circumstances
had left him feeling differently. There was something about Trance
Raynman that Halimaldie admired. The Kingsguardian spoke to him as
if they had been childhood friends. Halimaldie found that he liked
that. He'd only ever felt it with one other person, and that person
happened to be his brother who
had
been his childhood friend.

“My Well is almost empty,” Telin said.

“Your what?” Halimaldie asked.

“He means he's almost used his reserve of
power,” Trance said. “You pussy, Telin! Hang in there!”

“We're almost there,” Halimaldie assured
him. “If my navigation is any good, we're close to the mine
entrance.” It was hot this far south and Halimaldie was sweating
profusely. He couldn't be sure, but probably he had lost a good
stone of weight on this trip. “We should slow down or we might miss
it,” he said. He was indeed afraid that they would whiz right by
the mine and off into the wild wilderness.

“You're right,” Telin said. “Let's let our
powers go.”

Halimaldie almost fell out of his saddle
with dizziness and exhaustion as the world crashed back to real
time. Now everything felt slow and lazy; the pace of normal life
was a terrible drag. Halimaldie took a moment to look around.

“Strange trees and plenty of moisture,”
Halimaldie said. “We're definitely close.”

“Your navigation has been impeccable, Hal,”
Trance said. “I expected to be doing a lot more of the work around
here.”

“When your business is spread out over the
continent, you tend to know how to get around in it. My travels
aren't extensive, but they've been common enough. I've even been
here once in the very early stages, but that was by much longer and
more arduous means. I never expected to travel like this.”

“Aye. No one does.”

“There's a distinct slant to these trees
here,” Halimaldie said, pointing ahead of him. “If we follow that
we should come to a ledge. The entrance to the mine is carved into
the face of that ledge, and not too far off should be the small
mining town of Dunne.”

The Kingsguardians fell in behind
Halimaldie, following him down the slope and out of the swampy
forest. The horses had no trouble navigating the tricky footing,
fine stock as they were, and before long Halimaldie saw small
buildings off in the distance. A few minutes more brought them to
Dunne.

The air was quiet. Not even a birdsong broke
the silence. No one was coming or going from the town of Dunne.

“This isn't right,” Halimaldie said. He
scanned the town, an eeriness creeping into his gut.

“Did you really expect it to be?” Trance
asked.

The place was devoid of people.

Flock animals roamed the town, escaping
their man-made barriers to search for food now that their masters
were gone. Buildings stood silent and empty, some with doors and
windows open. Even the foliage around the town seemed limp and
lifeless, grasses bending over, trees hanging heavy. Halimaldie
felt a gripping terror that made it difficult for him to breathe.
The horses blew and danced nervously in the stillness.

“It's only been a month since someone loaded
those crates onto my ship,” Halimaldie said. “This is recent.”

“We're not going to get to the bottom of
anything by standing around,” Telin said. “We need to head into the
mine itself.” He put his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“I don't know if that's such a fantastic
idea,” Halimaldie said. “Don't you think we've seen what we've come
to see? Something's amiss. Now we go report this and someone sends
the Vaporgaard, or whoever deals with these situations.”

“You know better than that, D'Arvenant,”
Kelin said. “I won't ask ya to come with us, but we need ta get
into that mine and check it out.”

Trance and Telin nodded.

They kicked their horses and took off,
leaving Halimaldie to decide.

It wasn't long before he knew he couldn't
stay in this town alone, so he gritted his teeth and rode after
them towards the mine entrance.

Halimaldie and the Kingsguardians tethered
their horses outside. The animals would be useless in the tight
confines of the mine, and they were frightened besides. The
animals' nervous noises made Halimaldie all that much more tense.
He'd never been this scared in broad daylight before.

“Ya don't have to come down with us
D'Arvenant, but it would be best if you did.”

“It's my operation,” Halimaldie replied.
“I'll go.” He did not feel the conviction of his own words.

And with that, the small party set off down
the dark throat of the mine.

T
rance grabbed a dusty torch from a very rudimentary sconce
and began to work with oil, flint, and tinder to light it. Finally
it caught and burst into violent flame. The mine looked like any
other that Halimaldie had been in. The stone and dirt walls were
thankfully dug a little wider than normal, as he had always felt a
touch claustrophobic when checking on other operations.

Halimaldie suddenly realized that everyone,
including himself, had their weapons out. Trance, Kelin, and Telin
had beautifully wrought blades that danced in the light. Kelin and
Telin were both holding shields in their other hands. Kelin's
shield bore a painting of some kind of multi-limbed beast, and
Telin's had a crest that resembled a horse with eagle's wings.
Trance held the torch in one hand and a glittering sword in the
other; his shield was still slung on his back, the surface too
marred and scratched to make out the image. And there stood
Halimaldie, holding his gold and silver daggers, feeling like a
joke considering his present company.

They edged along, Trance in
the lead. The ground was smooth save for a few ruts.
Could've been made by the wheels of a
cart,
he thought. But his mind kept
conjuring up images of Foglin claws scratching through the dirt as
they moved, and he felt more and more certain that they were all
making a huge mistake.

The tunnel branched and Trance looked back
at Halimaldie. “Do you know which way, Hal?”

“I don't know the inner diggings,” he
said.

“We should have searched that town for a
map,” Kelin suggested.

“Oh, I love diggin' around in dead people's
stuff,” Trance said sarcastically.

“We're goin' left, do ya see,” Telin said.
“We'll keep followin' the left-hand wall until we're satisfied that
we've scouted this place out or it leads us back to the entrance.
It's simple. An old trick to get out of mazes that my grandmother
taught me.”

They moved down the dimly
lit passages, Halimaldie constantly fighting the urge to turn back.
He could feel his own heartbeat in his diseased hand, and that
certainly wasn't helping matters. No . . . the beats seemed to come
in a different pattern. It wasn't his heartbeat, but something very
similar to how his hand had felt when he had been at the district
hospital with Yarrow. It pulsed in rhythm with
something
, but Halimaldie didn't
know what.

“Something's happening with my hand,” he
said, breaking the silence. “It's pulsing. I can feel it. I don't
know. Is that important? I think it's getting worse the deeper we
get.”

“What do you mean?” Telin asked.

Halimaldie felt like he probably shouldn't
have spoken of it, but the pulsing in his hand was becoming eerie
and he didn't like it. If he was going to die in here, which seemed
very likely, the smallest advantage could help. If his hand was
trying to tell him something, he would be foolish not to
listen.

“Something happened to it. Before we left.
After the boat, Telin, my hand started rotting, acting
strangely.”

The Kingsguardians looked at each other.

“Take off your glove,” Telin said. “Let's
have a look.”

Halimaldie sheathed his silver dagger and
peeled the glove away from his skin. Then he carefully unwrapped
the thin layer of bandages. The skin was still mottled with
blackness. Trance held the torch above it, but Halimaldie couldn't
see it pulsing from the outside. It just looked like a diseased
limb.

“What the hell is it?” Kelin breathed.

“It's like no disease I ever seen,” Trance
said. “No wonder you were wearin' your gloves, Hal. It's
gross.”

“The last time it felt this
way was when I was in the district hospital,” Halimaldie explained.
“That place was underground as well.”
Maybe something about the elevation?

“Let us know if it changes,” Telin said. “To
tell ya the truth, I'm growing kind of bored down here.”

“Don't listen to my brother,” Kelin warned.
“His boredom will serve him ill if we get ambushed. Stay
vigilant.”

The initial fear had start to wear off as
they traversed span after span of the abandoned mine. So far there
hadn't been any sign of the residents of Dunne or of anything else
that even looked mildly suspicious. Halimaldie started to wonder if
everyone from the town had just plain left.

“It's a dead end,” Trance said, his torch
illuminating the wall in front of them. “Nothing more to see here,
gentlemen . . . and Kelin.”

Halimaldie's hand was pulsing quite badly,
feeling as tight and puffy as a sack stuffed with too many coins.
His skin seemed ready to tear from the bone. He was glad to be
turning around to go in the other direction: up and out of
here.

But then he felt a pull on his hand. For a
moment it was as if ghostly fingers were drawing at it, urging him
back towards the dead end. The pounding was so powerful that
Halimaldie was unaware of any other part of his body as he walked
over to the bare wall and rested his pulsing hand on it.

“Hal,” Trance said. “What in the seven hells
are you doing?”

The wall pulsed, alive. It pulsed just like
his hand, the two rhythms reverberating off of one another.
“Something's back here,” Halimaldie said, half in a daze. He took
his gold dagger and plunged it into the wall as hard as he could,
suddenly becoming obsessed with his task.

He dug.

Dirt began to fly off in great chunks. It
came off easily. Too easily.

The wall began to fall away, clods of dirt
littering the ground.

“Hal,” warned Trance, holding the torch
closer so Halimaldie could see what he was doing. “Be careful.”

Halimaldie's hand pulsed infinitesimally
more and more as he inched forward. Finally his dagger punctured
empty space and the rest of the wall crumbled, falling to the
ground as dust.

“What did you find?” Trance asked. He held
the torch ahead again and what Halimaldie saw made him retch.

The ground was piled with
human bones, lit orange in the fire of the torch. If they wanted to
walk through this room, they would have to walk on top of them,
since the floor could not be seen. The smell of death didn't greet
him like he expected. There was
some
odor, almost like moss, but
somehow more pestilent.

Halimaldie could just barely make out the
odd growths that protruded from the walls and ceiling. They almost
looked like giant seed pods . . . or some kind of huge, thick hairs
. . .

A noise issued forth from the room. It was a
clicking, starting soft and slow at first and then speeding up,
becoming a frenzy.

Telin turned around, his face totally white.
“You three must leave here. Tell them what we saw.”

“What did we see?” Halimaldie asked, his
hand pounding in time with the clicking noises.

Telin didn't answer. He
grabbed the torch from Trance and touched it to the wall of the
room. Immediately it caught, flames licking the walls and their
strange protuberances. Halimaldie knew what they were the instant
he saw them in that flaring light.
They're
eggs.

“My brothers,” Telin said. “I will see you
on the other side.” He handed the torch back to Trance, then jumped
into the flaming room, sword and shield swinging wildly at lithe
black shapes that were bursting forth. There were so many of them.
Far too many. Foglins filled the room.

Or rather, the nest.

Telin's sword became a blur in the air,
whistling in and out, cleaving heads and limbs wherever he put it.
But it wasn't going to be enough; even Halimaldie could see that.
The fire and the sword could not cleanse that whole nest. He
doubted all three Kingsguardians at once could stop the number of
Foglins he saw inside it. The black shapes were trying to converge
in on Telin through the flames. There were too many.

Telin was merely buying time.

Halimaldie's mouth went instantly dry and
Trance grabbed him by the shoulder, turned him around and ran,
tugging him through the tunnels.

Halimaldie heard the clicking of the Foglins
behind him now and he could hear Telin's screams buried within the
cacophony. He couldn't tell if they were screams of victory or
defeat.

“Lightbearer!” Kelin yelled as they ran, but
whether out of pain or glory Halimaldie couldn't be sure. Probably
it was a bit of both. “Lightbearer!”

The thought of that many Foglins behind him
made Halimaldie run faster than he ever had in his life. His legs
felt like those of a wild animal, driving him onward with
immaculate precision. He vaulted every crack in the ground and
hurled himself over every abandoned mine cart. He burst out of the
mouth of the mine and back into blinding daylight. Without a word
the three men were back on their horses, leaving Telin's there.

They rode hard to the north for a few
moments, putting distance between themselves and the mine.

“Damn it, Kelin,” Trance cursed. “We're
clear. Help me with the bubble will ya?”