EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (368 page)

The noise abated, and all the world fell into silence as suddenly as it began. My right arm burned; I’d fallen on it, wrenching the tendon. I lay sprawled on the ground, cloaked in the pitch black, surrounded by silence. The pain eased, and I was convinced I was dead, crushed under the tide of stone, and I could think of nothing.

The sound of coughing made me realise I had been holding my breath.

“Ren? REN!”

“Khavi!” I inhaled a lungful of stone dust and began coughing too. “
Khavi
?”

Slowly the glowbug’s fear died, and the light returned. I found Khavi, cowering with his hands over his head. I linked my arms with his as we coughed and choked down air, fighting to breathe.

The rumble of moving earth tore my gaze to the great iron gates of Atikala. They were buried under a mountain of stone, and I knew somehow that this was the end of my home, and that things would no longer be as they were.

I scraped my broken claws and bleeding fingers on the pile of unyielding rocks, pulling aside chunks of soil and debris. My breath came in ragged gasps, choking on the thick limestone dust that filled the air and caked my scales in a layer of white. I dug in a frenzy until I hit a flat slab of iron. One of the gates to the city, bent and twisted out of shape, blocked my tunnelling. I hooked my fingers underneath and tried to move it.

My injured arm screamed at me to stop. I ignored it. Despite my efforts the ruined gate wouldn’t budge. It weighed tonnes, and the stone above it was heavier still.

I moved over, trying to squirm underneath it. The faint smell of blood, not mine or Khavi’s, met my nostrils. I shifted a tiny rock, and a hand, fingers twitching, reached for me. A survivor.

No. This was a fleshy, pink hand, not the scaled limb of a kobold.

Fear silenced the pain in my arm; there were none but kobolds inside Atikala. Where had this creature come from? I needed to find out. Had we been attacked by gnomes? Had saboteurs bought down the gates? The leaders would interrogate it, but only if I could save it.

“I’m coming!” I said, then braced my legs against the stone and pulled.

I fell on my rump. The arm was severed at the elbow. The fingers continued to twitch, as though the hand were reaching for me, trying to grab me and drag me down with it to the lands of the dead.

The owner couldn't answer any of our questions. I threw the limb away.

How deep had the stone collapsed? “It’s no good here!” I shouted to Khavi on the other side of the tunnel. “I’ll start on the left side!” I had to find someone, anyone. A living soul. But if we couldn't, I needed to get through to Atikala. To save my home.

The gate and the arm meant we were close. I moved to another part of the blocked tunnel. We had no shovels, nothing except our claws. My short sword was far too weak and thin and Khavi’s two-handed blade too unwieldy.

“I’m through!” Khavi said between laboured gasps. “I can see the main cavern!”

One opening was all we needed. I looked to the blood-soaked arm I found, now still. There was a body further in there. A monster. But beyond that were kobolds just like me, crushed by the stones. I could do nothing for any of them. They were dead, and if they weren’t, they soon would be. Trying to save anyone at the wall was hopeless. If anyone was alive, they’d be on the other side. Further down, in the deep caverns. That’s where the wyrmlings were. The hatcheries full of eggs. They needed saving most of all.

Abandoning my fruitless attempts to dig through a hundred times my weight in stone, I dragged myself to my feet and staggered towards Khavi, staring hopefully at the hole he made. It was under a foot wide—hardly enough for even the most diminutive of kobolds to fit through. Several of his rust coloured scales had broken off, and he was bleeding, little trickles of black blood painting dark circles on the ground.

“Can we widen it?” I asked, inspecting the sides. It was a crack between two boulders.

“I was hoping your magic might be able to help,” said Khavi.

I clicked my jaw, grinding my fangs together. This conversation was old and stale, one we’d had too many times. “Dragon magic creates fire,” I said. “I’m not a dwarf. I can’t talk to stone.”

There was more to it than that, but a complex discussion on magical theory was not a priority at this stage, and even if it was, Khavi would never understand.

“Well, you’re thinner than me,” said Khavi. “Maybe you can squeeze through, then get help.”

The thought had already occurred to me. Khavi helped me tug off the weapons and armour, and they clanked against the rubble with a dull thud, a sound that should have been a lingering hollow echo. The world was smaller now. It closed in on the two of us, resisting our efforts to help anyone who had survived.

I crouched down to the edges of the crude hole Khavi had dug, then squeezed up against the entrance. I almost fit. I sucked in my middle, tightening the muscles holding my bones together, wriggling and writhing. Getting through meant helping the rest of the city. Getting through was my duty. The crying of my arm was joined by other parts of my body as they scraped, squeezed, and dragged through a hole that was just too small.

My scales snagged on a jagged edge. I was stuck. Then Khavi kicked me in the backside. Twice. The force tore several scales off my injured shoulder, and a third kick sent me through. Gold blood trickled from my wounds.

“Thank you,” I said, groaning as I pulled myself up to my feet and looked towards my home.

Atikala was crushed under a mountain of stone. Its high domed ceiling, once smooth and polished to a mirror shine, now lay on the floor, jagged and cracked like a mouth full of broken teeth. The bowl that was the limestone cavern of Atikala was filled with stone and debris, reaching almost up to the collapsed gate to the city. Tens of thousands of lives had been snuffed out in an instant. Generations destroyed. Our culture, our history, entombed beneath the stones.

My eyes darted from rock to rock looking for movement, looking for hope, but there was none. Had I not known the truth, had I not seen it with my own eyes, none could tell that a city once stood here. The glowbugs that once carpeted the roof had fallen with the ceiling. Everywhere the glowing fluid from thousands of crushed bugs made jagged yellow lines, seeping out through the cracks in the fallen roof. Underneath all that stone was every single kobold I’d ever known; my entire life was consumed by the falling earth.

“What are you waiting for?” said Khavi, trying to see through. “Get the diggers to come and widen this hole. Then we can start searching for survivors in the other tunnels.”

“There are no diggers,” I said, my voice just a whisper. “There’s no
anyone
.”

“What?” said Khavi, hissing through his nose. “Bah. Hold on, I’m coming through.”

It took Khavi longer to get through, but when he finally scrambled out, he joined me in stunned silence, staring out at the ruins of the city that had withstood goblin attacks, gnome invasions, and countless waves of human raiders. Atikala had stood every test of time, survived every trial. Except this.

The silence of it was the worst part. The city only moments before had a sound, a distinct voice like no other. It was more than the chatter of voices, the clang of mining equipment, and the scrape of claws on stone. It was far too many kobolds crammed into a hollowed out stone cavern. This was the living and beating heart of my people. A collective organism, breathing, moving, talking. There should have been noise, a dull murmur like the constant company of a snoring spouse.

The only noise was our quiet breathing as we stared at the piles of rubble that used to be our everything.

“What do we do now?” asked Khavi.

The roof of the cavern stretched up, higher than I could see, a faint point of light at the top. I could not comprehend how high it was, but it was too far. I looked over my shoulder to the hole we’d come through, back down the corridor away from the city and climbing on a gradual slope. The tunnel led to the gnome settlement above and the humans on the surface above that. The tunnels led to our enemies. To doom.
 

“We leave I suppose. Go to Ssarsdale. Get help.”

Khavi stared out at the faintly glowing debris, his tail limp on the stone, eyes wide but pupils as small as buttons. “Ssarsdale? It’s a moon’s journey away by the tunnels, and they're surely collapsed. We’ll have to go over the surface. How will we find our way?”

I followed his gaze, watching the air slowly settle through shafts of light from beneath the rubble, but to my eyes they looked more like ghosts rising from the ground.

“Well, the only way to go is up.”

Chapter II

K
HAVI
AND
I
WANDERED
AIMLESSLY
through the winding tunnels that twisted and turned around the outskirts of Atikala. Miles and miles of empty passages, climbing and descending, looping back on themselves, forking and joining, impossible to navigate without years of experience.

The two of us had walked this path many times but not like this. Never with the aim of leaving. Always it had been on patrol, a path that took us from place to place and then home again.

Perhaps out of instinct or habit we followed that set path. We walked the route we would have taken had our patrol been with us. We didn’t know any other way. They didn’t teach us that. The further we got away from the city, the fewer cave-ins we found and the less debris we encountered, heightening the illusion of an ordinary day.

Our last walk through these tunnels as guardians of the community, soldiers in an army of soldiers. Except there were only two of us.

Two kobolds had never accomplished anything. Patrols were fifty strong and could deal with a handful of humans or a dozen gnomes. We won wars through attrition. By sheer mass of numbers. Two kobolds was a rounding error.

We were pretending to be a patrol, but we both knew it was a lie. We were warriors who had failed in our duty. Atikala was a tomb.

I wanted to crawl into a dark corner, curl up into a ball, close my eyes, and wait until the bad dream ended and I woke up safe in my quarters surrounded by my patrolmates.

But I had experienced enough dreams to know the difference between figments and reality. The weight of this knowledge burdened me more than my pack or my armour, heavier than the stones that had crushed Atikala.

The only thing heavier than that was my guilt.

“Maybe the patrols missed them,” I said for the tenth time. “Maybe the gnomes slipped through the mists between them.”

“The previous patrol would have checked the mists,” replied Khavi, “and they would have raised the alarm. If any gnomes had come through, the heat of the mists would have betrayed them.”

I shook my head. Not to disagree, but to quiet the guilt bubbling in my conscience. “Perhaps they tunnelled around them or devised some way to fool the mists. Perhaps the fey ones have found a way to defeat the power of the barrier.”

Khavi rolled his shoulders, adjusting the blade on his back. “You were not on patrol. You are blameless. It doesn’t matter how the gnomes did what they did, only that they did. It’s nobody’s fault.”

The tunnel began to slope and loop back around to the east, and my senses told me that we were now well above the cavern that led to Atikala. “Small comfort to Tzala and Yeznen and all the others.”

“Perhaps some escaped from the city,” said Khavi, “as we did. Tzala is a powerful sorceress. She could have gotten away.”

There was little hope of that. Kobolds either expanded or defended, either grew or consolidated. Atikala was in a consolidation phase despite the cramped conditions. There would have been few of our kind outside the city’s iron gates. “Maybe we should try to track down other survivors? There might have been a patrol out, or—”

We froze, a faint rumble and cave-in training took over. The ground trembled, and handfuls of rock and dirt dislodged from the ceiling. I cast my eyes to the roof.
 

The rumbling subsided though, and the world’s body stilled itself once more.

“An aftershock?” I managed to ask when my nerves came back.

Khavi looked at me, the skin around his eyes and nostrils pale. “This far underground?”

“The first tremorquake was enough to bring down the ceiling of Atikala,” I said, although I didn’t feel convinced. “I wouldn’t doubt anything at this stage.”

“Perhaps the gnomes are continuing their dark work,” said Khavi, giving voice to my suspicions. “They live just above, after all, and the collapse was mainly focused around the city. These tunnels are unaffected. Who else but their druids would have the inclination and power to do this?”

Druids were powerful, but there were other magics that could destroy a city. Something nagged at me. The pieces didn’t fit. “I doubt it,” I said. “If they had the power to destroy us before, they would have. Gnomes are relentless and wicked, but also impatient.”

Khavi nodded. “Agreed, of course, but we cannot discount the possibility. Atikala has—” Khavi’s tone turned bitter, “
had
few enemies. None other but the gnomes could be responsible.”