Dusk by Tim Lebbon

alone. That’s why I know there’s something wrong. I think there’s something going on topside that has enraged them and—”
    “And you want to go there?” Grant said, spinning around.
    “Trey . . .” his mother whispered, afraid.
    There was a series of screams from across the cavern, accompanied by several loud thuds. They did not last for long.
    “I’m saving my mother,” Trey said. “Anyone who wants to come with us, you’re welcome.”
    Trey and his mother left on their own.
    “They’re just afraid, Trey,” she said as they hurried past deserted caves and skirted the Church. “This is all they’re used to. It isn’t Grant’s way to be like that, he didn’t mean it.”
    “He’s going to get them all killed.”
    They continued in silence, passing by one of the mayors’ pillars, glancing up but seeing no sign of life on the balconies overhead. Each time they met someone Trey said, To the caves. Sometimes the miners would follow for a while before doubt took them and they slowed, trailing off, perhaps waiting for someone in authority to tell them what to do and where to go, not this lad wielding a disc-sword like a boy playing at war.
    Trey tried to close off his mind to those sensations thrown off the Nax like sweat flicking from a fighting man’s skin. But at the same time he listened for the sense of pursuit, a hint of the chase as a Nax zeroed on them. It never came. Whatever had noticed him as he squeezed the moss had obviously found something else to warrant its attentions.
    As they reached the opposite side of the cavern—the place where the entrance to the current working sat like an open throat a few steps up the cavern wall—there was very little light by which to see. Trey moved from memory, holding his mother’s hand and guiding her along. His ears were perfectly attuned to echo, distance and proximity, so each footfall told him just where he was. He grumbled in his throat here and there to launch a low, deep sound to echo back, and when he found a space in that echo he knew that the cave entrance was before them.
    He leaned back and brushed his hand across his mother’s cheek, stroking his fingertips across her lips in a sightless smile. “We’re here,” he whispered.
    They were alone. A dull red glow lit the center of the cavern, throwing two of the huge pillars into silhouette. Trey could hear another volley of crossbow bolts being fired, then another. It seemed that the militia were alive after all, and putting up a sustained fight. Again he wondered about Sonda and looked across toward her cave, but there lay only impenetrable blackness. He closed his eyes and went into a crouch, trying to cast himself across this disturbed space, but the mixed input from the Nax—which he had quickly been able to filter and block so that he received only a hint of the terrible sensations they were reveling in—prevented him from casting himself at all. Besides, the fresh fledge was wearing off. Perhaps when they were farther into the mines they would pause, Trey could take some fledge from his shoulder bag and try to discern Sonda’s whereabouts.
    A brief flush of guilt burned his cheeks in the cool darkness. There were two thousand others down here.
    “Come on,” he said to his mother, leaning close and pressing his cheek to hers. “I’ll look after you.” He hefted the disc-sword, turned and entered the mouth of the mine.
    They soon left behind the noise, the slaughter, the fighting and screaming. And within five hundred paces, gone too were the dregs of the Naxes’ psychic emanations, swallowed into the rock and fledge seams that had been their home for so long, miners and Nax both. Whether they would ever coexist here again . . . that was a concern for the future.
    Right now, Trey had to get them topside. He wondered what awaited them up there, and just why the Nax had risen in such a fury.
                   
    TWO THOUSAND STEPS into the new working, Trey and his