Dusk by Tim Lebbon Page B

led the way unerringly, and his mother followed, sighing, grunting, breathing heavily but never once complaining or asking him to stop.
    Once or twice Trey mused that they really could linger here. But then he remembered that brief touch with the mind of the hibernating Nax—the fury, the rage, the hunger—and he knew that they had to go on. They may be out of immediate danger, but the Nax were unlikely to be sated with only one cavern. There were mines throughout the Widow’s Peaks, and probably long, arduous routes between them, untraveled and impassable to humans but known to the creatures who truly owned this underworld.
    And so they moved on, resting now and then, licking mineral-rich moisture from the walls. And every step they took frightened Trey more.
    They were leaving behind danger, but they were also moving away from the only life he had ever known. The people in the home-cave were his people, the pale fires and the moss pots and the stingers and the blind spiders and the cave rats and the mayors, the Church and the constant, comforting distant roar of the underground river . . . all his, all part of the memories that made his life. He always worked hard at the fledge face, but once back in the cavern he was contented, happy in the knowledge that he did his bit for their underground community. Sometimes there were thoughts of going topside, but it was curiosity more than desire. He was interested in why people would choose to live up there when there was obviously so much more to living down here. Certainly there were dangers in the dark—stingers took one or two people each year, and cave-ins, though infrequent, were often deadly. But he had heard about the inimical inhabitants of topside as well: the tumblers that roamed the surface of the hills, sweeping up children and unwary travelers; the bandits on the plains; raids along the coastal towns by savages from the sea. And fighting in the towns, a malaise in the villages. People topside, it was said, had no care anymore.
    Trey felt comfortable history staring at his back and mourning his leaving. Before him, with every step he took into the darkness, lay his future.
                   
    THEY ENCOUNTERED A nest of stingers. There were only a few and they were small, no bigger than a man’s fist. And because they surprised the creatures, Trey was able to unsheathe his disc-sword and slice most of them down before they even had a chance to attack. The surviving stinger came clicking at them, aiming for Trey’s mother, but Trey kicked out at where he felt the thing passing through the air, knocked it into the stone wall and struck it down with the disc-sword. Sparks flashed, and in their brief light he saw the creature dying in a splash of its own blood.
    They moved on. Trey was pleased that he had seen them through this danger, but it only went to remind him that there would be more challenges ahead. And not all of them would be stingers.
                   
    TIME TURNED THEIR escape into a long, painful haul instead of a panicked flight. They were both still conscious of the danger behind them, but the effort of navigating the seam occupied most of their thoughts. They had already made their way through one narrow passage—at least three hundred steps long—in which Trey’s mother had almost ground to a halt, too exhausted to pull herself through. He had tied his belt beneath her arms, hauling her after him like a mule pulling a fledge-laden cart.
    Five hundred steps after this narrow stretch, Trey began to notice something in the air. A smell. The smell of people.
    And beneath it, so distant as to be almost imaginary, the tang of blood.
    “How long have we been moving?” his mother asked.
    “A shift,” Trey said.
    “A topside day,” she muttered. “I need to sleep, Trey. Very soon, I’ll need to sit and sleep. Are the Nax following? Do you think they have our trail?”
    Trey sniffed and knew that there was a menstruating