The Pleasure of Memory (55 page)

“I can’t just leave you here,” Mawby whispered, though he knew that was exactly what he’d have to do.

“Be reasonable, Maw,” Ven whispered, “I’m…I’m dead. You’re all that’s left. You have to go after him. Help Goudt. You have to stop him. He can’t take the stone back to that loveless wyrlaerd.”

∞

Chance lay on his belly staring down over the ledge into the darkness below as fire raged through the cave behind him. The smoke broiled along the ceiling, thick and brooding. It choked the life from the air and burned his eyes. And yet, despite the threat, despite the imminent danger of suffocation or worse, he couldn’t pull himself away from that dreadful abyss.

He’d watched in horror as Beam and the Vaemyd rolled over the edge. He’d heard a profound splash, heard a few seconds of disturbance in the water, and then nothing. There was only silence as thick as blood. He held a torch down over the side, extending it as far as he could reach. The dark water glistened far below him.

“Beam!” he yelled again.

The name rolled desperately off into the darkness.

“Beam!”

There was no response, only another chorus of hopeless echoes.

“Beam!” he shouted into the night.

He dropped his head against the stone floor. He felt suddenly hollow and confused. How could this be? How had it all come to this, to this moment of sudden failure? It was too much to bear. His world was crumbling away, one piece at a time like a decaying monolith. First, the sabotage of his sentries, then Luren and the attack of the wyrlaerd, and now this! In that moment, he only wanted to stay right there where he was, laying at that hopeless abyss in the burning darkness, and sink into a deep, unending sleep.

A distant sound rose up from the darkness beneath him. It sounded miles away. It was faint and barely recognizable.

He lifted his head. He stopped breathing and listened. Perhaps it was nothing, just his angst playing games with his mind.

Then he heard it again. It was a voice.

He leaned deeper over the side, cupped his mouth, and screamed, “Beam!”

Finally, a clear word drifted up from somewhere deep in the abyss. “Chance!”

“Beam!” he yelled back, “Beam, I’m here!”

No one answered. He leaned deeper over the side. He swung the torch back and forth below him, but found nothing but inky darkness.

“Beam!” he called again, “Is that you?”

“No, it’s the Queen of Pendts! Who the bloody hell else would it be?”

A pulse of relief as physical as a scream seized Chance. “Thank the gods!” he yelled back, “Are you hurt?”

“Hell no! Having the time of my life! No need to rush!”

“I’m coming!” Chance yelled back, “Hold steady!”

He pushed himself up from the edge and looked back into the room. Flames now fully engulfed the entire east side of the room. A thick cloud of black smoke roiled across the ceiling like an impending storm. The hot air burned his lungs.

His pack lay a few yards ahead of him where he’d dropped it on their arrival. He crept forward and seized it, then grabbed his staff and climbed down over the edge. Before he began the descent, he remembered Beam’s weapons. They were lying on the floor just outside the flames in the middle of the room.

He set the bag and staff on the ground and crawled back up over the edge. Burying his nose and mouth in his sleeve, he scuttled forward. He grabbed the weapons belt with the quiver and bow, and threw it across the stone back toward the edge. The heat was nearly unbearable. The smoke scalded his eyes so that he could barely see. Coughing violently, he crawled a few feet deeper into the fire, snagged the sword, and tucked the blade through his belt. Before leaving the inferno, he crawled to the wall near the ledge where the fire hadn’t yet taken control. He quickly grabbed two more torches from their sconces.

He returned to the edge and again dropped over the side so that he was standing on a lower rung. He was coughing harder now. He couldn’t draw a decent breath. He heaved the weapons belt and their pack up over his shoulder, and then took all three torches in one hand.

“I’m on my way!” he called down to Beam, "Cover your head!" Then he dropped his staff over the side and began the laborious climb down to the water.

Beam’s hollow voice bounced up from the darkness beneath him. “Good gods, are you coming or not? Not exactly a bathhouse down here!”

The familiar scent of stale, dank water grew more intense as he descended, but the smell was like nectar compared to the smoke. At least he could breathe here. Once within a few feet of the water’s surface, he held the torches above his head and dropped into it. The icy water rocked and slapped the walls with the excitement of his arrival. Beam was nowhere to be seen.

He turned slowly with the torches held up before him. The black, oily water simmered and swelled beneath the light. “Where are you?” he called as he scoured the darkness.

Beam didn’t answer.

He waved the torches across the back wall. “Damn it, Beam, where the devil are you?” He felt a growing panic at the thought that he may be seconds too late. “Beam!”

“I'm here!”

It came from his right. It was farther down the tunnel than he’d expected. “Hold on,” he shouted, “I'm coming!”

Chance waded a few yards through the water and soon spied the dusky form of his friend holding tight to the wall just ahead. As the torchlight diluted the darkness, he saw that Beam was nothing like ‘great’. He had one hand tucked into a narrow crack in the wall above him, and was only barely holding himself above the waterline. His dark, wet hair pasted his head like a skullcap. His beard was a tangled mess, and the part that was above the bobbing waterline was stained with blood. One eye was a beefy pulp, and his nose was bent and swollen. Under his free arm floated the limp form of the Vaemyd.

“Damn me!” Beam whispered hoarsely, “I don’t think I’ve ever been happier to see anyone in my life. I was sure you'd left through the hatch.”

“Never,” Chance said, “I’d never leave you. Besides, the hatch isn’t an option anymore.”

“Gods almighty, it's good to have some light again!” Beam readjusted his hold on the unconscious warrior. “I didn’t want to die down here like this. Not alone. Not in the dark.”

“Doesn’t look like you were alone.”

Chance held the combined torches out before the warrior’s face. Her disheveled yellow braids floated on the water like dead cave snakes. Her eyes were wide but vacant. White and waterlogged, she looked as close to dead as a living person could.

“She went limp when we hit the water,” Beam whispered, “I only found her because I was floundering for the wall and she bobbed up between us. Guess the darkness must’ve finally provoked the fear.”

“Let me take her.”

Chance slipped his arm under her shoulders and handed the torches off to Beam. Being nearly a foot taller, he’d be able to manage her with less risk of drowning. He shifted the Vaemyn's weight, braced his shoulder against the wall, held his free hand out above the water’s surface, and connected with the caeylsphere. An instant later, a blue light singed the darkness as his staff glided into view. He took it and looked back at Beam, nodding in the direction of their retreat, and said, “We've got to get back to the intersection. That's the nearest dry land. The other way’s a dead end.”

Beam waded alongside him. “Whatever you say, Brother. I don’t have the strength to argue.”

Chance started moving forward with the Vaemyd in tow. “Blood of the gods,” he said over his shoulder, “You have no idea how happy I am to see you alive.”

“I’m thrilled to be seen,” Beam said quietly.

Chance turned a bit and looked up at the glowing orange ledge simmering high above them. Then he looked back at Beam. “It’s a respectable drop,” he said, “You shouldn’t be alive.”

Beam glanced up toward the light of the flames, but then quickly turned away from it. “Figured I stood better odds with the fall than her fists,” he said, “But damn me if it didn’t hurt a hell of a lot more than I’d planned.”

“You went over the side on purpose?”

“It was that or let her beat the sin out of me.”

“That has got to be the single most foolish thing I’ve ever heard of anyone doing.”

“At least I still have all my teeth,” Beam said.

“Well, I suppose that’s something,” Chance said back.

Beam suddenly stopped. “Wait! The sword. I for—”

“I’ve got it,” Chance said quickly, “It’s safe, tucked in my belt.”

“Thank Calina,” Beam said, “You’re a quick thinker, Brother.”

Minutes later, they trudged out of the water and up onto the rough hill created by a collapsed section of ceiling at the intersection of the first tunnels they’d only just left an hour or so earlier. Together, they dragged the warrior around the hill. This was an intersection. A second tunnel deviated sharply east from their original tunnel, running slightly uphill through a wide wooden arch carved with an odd collage of hammers and chisels and other Baeldonian tools mixed with runes of the same origin.

“We should’ve taken this one in the first place,” Beam said, as they passed through the gaping arch, “And as I recall, I recommended just that.”

“I told you before, this tunnel turns due south just two or three miles down the line. It takes us twenty miles out of our way. Sanctuary North was the closest dependable exit to the surface.”

Once inside the new tunnel, they dragged the limp warrior over to a spot where age had disintegrated part of the wall so that it washed out into a sprawling bed of rock and gravel that ended in a fanned mound of sand. There, Chance pulled a wet blanket out of the waterlogged pack and laid it out. They positioned the warrior on her back atop it. Chance positioned the three torches with their heads together in the dirt beside her so their flames made something akin to a campfire. Then he squatted beside the fire and dug the elixir out of their wet pack. He took a deep slug from it. The heat radiated through him almost immediately.

He handed the vial off to Beam, then knelt in the dirt, closed his eyes, and let himself receive the tonic’s effects. The sense of calm instilled by the medicine was almost as welcomed as the warmth. After a few moments, he opened his eyes.

He laid his staff on the dirt beside him so that the caeyl end rested in the sand beside the torch campfire. Closing his eyes, he willed the caeyl light larger. The blue light intensified until it was nearly unbearable to look directly at it, and with that light came a deep warmth that ushered the chill from the air immediately surrounding them.

“This will help,” he said to Beam.

Beam dropped down on his knees beside the caeyl and the torches and held his hands up into the deep blue light. “I don’t know what chicanery you use to pull this weirdness off,” he said seriously, “But I’m not going to second guess it. Not so long as it stays this warm anyway.”

Chance pulled the Caeyllth Blade from his belt and handed it over to Beam. Then he returned to the pack. He pulled out the other blanket, wrung it out, and then dropped it on the ground beside the caeyl. He removed the leather wrapped packets of food and put them on the gravel beside the torches and caeyl light, opening each to allow them to dry. None of it, the meat, the dried fruits, the cheese, none of it looked particularly appealing. Everything was soaked like a bloated fish. The bread had returned to its primordial state, looking more dough than loaf.

“We’re getting low,” he said as he worked, “But I think we can salvage some of it. It won’t be savory, but it’ll sustain us. We should eat something now. It’ll help with the cold.” He handed a leather square of meat to Beam.

Beam waved the offer away. “I can’t,” he said, “I told you. It turns my stomach.”

“Well, we don’t have much else left. The meat’s suffering the water better than the cheese.”

Beam again looked at the proffered meat, and again just waved it off. “Nope,” he said, “Can’t do it.”

Chance couldn’t do more than simply shrug. He was learning to read the stubbornness in the man, coming to identify the nuances in his behavior that indicated when he could be pressed and when he simply could not. He laid the soggy packet on the blanket beside the Vaemyd. As he pulled the last blanket out of the pack, he thought about Beam dining most happily on that very same meat a few nights ago, back at the first Sanctuary. The meat resting before them now was still fine; nothing had changed since then. He’d been eating it himself. There wasn’t a thing wrong with it. It didn’t make sense.

“You’re more Vaemysh than not,” he said as he picked a wet chunk of meat out of the lot, “I suspect it’s some kind of latent trait you inherited from them, this inability to eat flesh. What I cannot divine is why it suddenly manifested, though I’m sure the Blood Caeyl has more than a little to do with it.”

Beam was kneeling on the other side of the warrior. He had his arms wrapped tightly around himself and was shivering a bit. He seemed to be studying her. “Doesn’t matter,” the half-breed said seriously, “I just don’t want it.”

“There’s barely enough fruit and cheese to last more than a few days, perhaps less now that it’s wet. It won’t stay edible long. It’s eventually going to come down to only meat until we get out of the tunnels.”

“I’ll worry about it then,” Beam said as he probed the inside of his mouth with his finger, “Besides, I think the bitch loosened a couple teeth.”

Chance shrugged and chewed his meat. He looked over at the Vaemyd. The firelight flickered against her pale skin in shades of green and yellow. Wet clumps of nearly white hair pasted her brow and cheek. Thankfully, her eyes had finally closed. Chance pressed a hand against her cheek, which was cold as death. “She's responding to the tunnel the same way you did back at the cave. She needs the elixir.”

Beam gave him a look that required no translation. Even through the broken nose and swollen face, the message in his eyes was clear.

“Don’t start, Beam,” he said firmly, “She’s in a bad state. I won’t let her suffer.”

“You can smother that idea in its infancy,” Beam said firmly, “I need some sleep.
You
need some sleep. Neither of us will get any if she’s awake.”