CHAPTER SEVEN

AIRSPUR LABYRINTHS
THE YEAR OF THE AGELESS ONE (1479 DR)

RILTANA FELT LIKE A GARMENT THAT HAD BEEN HIT REPEATEDLY and enthusiastically by a drying cane to knock out laundry water. Yet she was still soaking wet.

With an arm trembling from exhaustion, she pulled herself another foot through sucking mud. She found purchase with her boots on a protrusion. She pushed, extending her legs to their full length, trying to ignore the mud’s cold embrace, and edged forward several more inches. Dirty water dripped into her eyes. But her hands were even more muddy, and wiping at her face, she’d already learned, wouldn’t help.

Blinking furiously, she pulled herself forward another foot. How far along this tunnel had she come? She’d lost track. Riltana knew she was making progress, but to what ultimate end? Light streamed from the sunrod clenched in her teeth. Her jaws were getting tired, and she made an effort not to bite down so hard.

When that piss-drinking bastard flooded the cavern, she’d figured she was dead. The swirling water had knocked her around and flushed her down a drain that dropped almost vertically into the earth. She’d managed a few breaths, but not all had been of air. Her lungs still burned from the coughing jag that had consumed her after the rough water slide spit her out.

Riltana’s head had eventually stopped whirling. So she’d shaken her sunrod from glovespace and taken stock. She had discovered she’d washed up, or down more accurately, into a tunnel hardly wider than a gopher hole. Calling it a tunnel was generous; it was composed of nearly as much mud as air. She couldn’t recall the specific series of loops, slides, and plunges that had deposited her there; she’d been too busy flailing and trying not to drown.

So she began crawling. How long ago was that? Hours?

At least none of Kalkan’s hired goons had washed up near—

The tunnel gave way beneath her.

Riltana found herself falling in a wide expanse. She gasped, and the sunrod dropped from her open mouth.

She was in her element! Air streamed past, and she folded into it. Oh, gods—that was good! She threw her arms wide and asked the wind to bear her up. Though dank and cold, it answered, and her plummet slowed.

Without the sunrod, it was absolutely black, except for a spark somewhere below. How close was the floor of whatever cavity she’d fallen into? That spark was coming up quick! She strained to bring herself to a complete stop.

Not soon enough. Something came up beneath her and smashed her like a hammer. The blow knocked the air out of her, and she curled up and gasped like a fish out of the sea. Dull pain resolved from the shock of the fall in her ribs and her left foot. Once again, she was out of her element.

When her breath came back she groaned and blinked several times. Eyes open or closed, everything looked the same. The spark, probably of her dropped sunrod flickering out, was gone. Black was her whole world.

Moving air brushed her cheeks and tickled her nose with dust and old rot, reminding her of the cellar below her grandmother’s home. Like that, but wider, wilder … and more ominous. Plus the tang of something unpleasant. Riltana strained her head one way, then another, sniffing, and caught the offensive odor, musty and sickening, even stronger.

She wrinkled her nose. At least she’d found a place the Akanawater hadn’t recently flooded. She hated the water.

“Well, isn’t this a pretty picture,” she croaked. She was lost somewhere in the labyrinths of Airspur, probably in ruins of a city that had squatted there before the Spellplague had dropped a piece of Abeir over half of Chessenta.

The sound of a pile of sliding pebbles riveted her attention.

“Who’s there?” she called. Riltana heard an ugly note in her voice, the desperate keen of fear. Hold it together, woman. She took in a deep breath and stood. Ouch. She was going to have some bruises.

She tried again, louder, “Is anyone there?”

Her voice echoed into a surprisingly large distance before failing. Dread trailed cold fingers down her spine. Had she fallen all the way down to the Underdark?

Another clatter jerked her head around. Her eyes tried to open beyond the capacity of her skull.

She reached for the short sword sheathed on her back, and found it gone. It had been washed away! Her other hand automatically went to her calf sheath, and found the leather-wrapped pommel. A dagger was in her hand an instant later. The hilt was wet, but thank Tymora, it was good to hold honest steel.

“All right, come on, stop hiding in the dark like a coward, I’m ready for you!”

Nothing. Her heart thundered, and her spit dried to dust.

Another clatter, closer this time. And a strange chittering, like the sound insects make … What was it?

She cursed herself for a simpleton and snapped the fingers of her free hand. The curve of a miniature ceramic pot slapped into her palm. She raised it, and dashed it on the ground.

Blue-white incandescence exploded from the alchemical flare. It was blinding, but she turned her head at the crucial instant.

A heartbeat later and the flare’s illumination faded to a bearable level. Riltana saw that she stood at the bottom of a hollow shaped like an elongated teardrop, open on her left to a larger gulf of darkness. Besides the single large opening, dozens of miniature tunnels punctured the nearest wall at floor level, each one running off into lightlessness. Dust lay heaped everywhere.

She shifted her foot, and the dust crunched.

It wasn’t dust; the heaps were made up thousands of disintegrating cockroach casings.

“Gah!”

The musty odor intensified, clogging the air. A thrum, as of hundreds of tiny feet, vibrated through the soles of her boots as each of the miniature tunnels spewed a bristling swarm of squirming black cockroaches.

Riltana leaped upward as the swarms converged to carpet the cavern floor. The attar of roaches was like a blanket of stink trying to smother her. At the top of her trajectory, her free hand grazed a sloping wall of the hollow. She corkscrewed her legs to change her facing and slammed the dagger in her other hand into a crevice in the stone even as she began to fall back. The concave slope and her improvised rock brake arrested her slide before she fell back to the floor.

Her breath came in great gasps. The light of her flare continued to flicker in the cave’s center, throwing highlights off thousands of skittering, oily bodies. She hated cockroaches. She’d invested a serious chunk of coin in a charm for her loft expressly fashioned to exterminate the little buggers. The wriggling scene before her was like their revenge.

Something occluded one of the miniature tunnels. A cockroach the size of a dog. The insect squirmed out into the mass of its tiny cousins, and began to unfold sooty wings. Two more scuttled out after the first.

Time to go!

Riltana studied the exit in the cavern’s wall, almost directly opposite the surface she clung to. She sought the wind’s regard, despite having just enjoyed its favor to save herself from a hard introduction to the cave floor. Air was a temperamental element, and calling on it overmuch exhausted its goodwill.

A breeze answered, briefly clearing the air of the cockroach odor.

She fell into it, arms wide to guide invisible wings of rushing air. Riltana flew across the chamber and out, even as two of the entirely-too-large cockroaches lifted off the ground in pursuit.

She hurtled into a tunnel larger and dryer than the one she’d been forced to bellycrawl through. The wind released her and she rolled into a landing that saw her back on her feet facing the hollow. Sure enough, the alchemical flare’s failing light outlined the shapes of two monstrous winged bugs coming after her. At least the carpet of cockroaches hadn’t yet spilled out of the teardrop hollow.

Riltana found a new dagger on her other calf.

One roach buzzed straight for her, mandibles clacking. She ducked beneath its malodorous bulk, and plunged her dagger straight into its abdomen. It squealed, sounding far too much like a genasi child. The sound startled her so much she lost the dagger.

The second roach came at her from behind, hovering like a giant dragonfly. She twisted away, but it managed to lacerate her shoulder with a pinching bite. White pain spiked across her vision. Riltana staggered.

“Shit-sucking bugs!” she screamed, and reached for the two daggers hidden along her forearms. Only one was where it should have been. She palmed it and jabbed at the closer roach, but the point skipped off its dull carapace.

It lunged for her face, mandibles straining to clutch her. She slipped left, and in a moment of inspiration, slashed her dagger through the thing’s wing. The sheared membrane twirled off one way, and the bug crashed to the floor, the intimidating drone of its presence suddenly reduced to the sound of one wing slapping the rock.

Riltana grunted with animal rage as she kicked the thing as hard as she could. Her boot tip, steel-toed to make it a weapon nearly as fearsome as a mace, crunched through the carapace. It squealed as its sibling had, and she kicked it again. The arch of her foot lofted the roach back up the tunnel toward the hollow.

Speaking of the bug’s sibling … she whirled. The one she’d stuck first lay unmoving a few paces up the rocky corridor. She sidled over to it, ready with her boot if it so much as twitched. It lay on its side. The hilt of a dagger in the thing’s abdomen twinkled in the rapidly dwindling light of her flare. Riltana snatched the dagger and jumped back. It remained convincingly motionless.

Good.

But the alchemical light was almost used up. Her sunrod was gone, probably broken.

Riltana shuffled farther away from the hollow as the flare snuffed out. The sound of thousands of roach bodies scraping on rock persisted, but in the complete darkness, seemed to grow louder. Was it really, or was it only in her imagination?

She gingerly reached out until her hand grazed the tunnel wall. She used it as a guide to move away from the unsettling noise.

As the adrenaline from the fight faded, the ache in her ribs and foot returned. She was bone-weary and bruised. Hungry too. What she really wanted to do was—

A rock caught her boot. The steel toe kept her foot safe from stubbing, but off-balanced in the blackness, she fell.

The pinch in her ribs expanded to become a fiery bar trying to lift free of her skin. Riltana gasped. Then she swallowed the curse that came so naturally to her lips. She didn’t want to attract the swarming bugs out of the hollow. Instead she lay in the dark, tears running from her eyes, until the new pain faded enough for her to sit up.

Too bad she hadn’t thought to double up on light sources. Her gloves, as fantastic a treasure as they were, could only hide away a total of five objects, and she always kept one space open, in case she “acquired” an interesting piece of artwork or other finery that required quick transport.

With the sunrod and alchemical flare gone, her hidden resources were down to a small yellow marble she called the Prisoner’s Stone, and the scarf.

She’d pried the yellow sphere from the eyesocket of a statue of the primordial named Karshimis. That escapade had nearly cost Riltana her life. But the stone had proved worth the risk. In the right situation, it was a lifesaver.

Unfortunately, with no prison bars, cuffs, or vault doors to impede her escape, this wasn’t one of those situations. Which left the pale length of fine cloth.

The scarf had to be more than a simple piece of fabric for her double-crossing client to go to so much trouble for it. What had that lying bastard claimed? That he’d only wanted it taken from Demascus at the “appointed” time? Crazy talk.

She sheathed her remaining dagger and produced the wrap. She couldn’t see it, but she was able to detect its slight weight across her palms when it appeared. Riltana wound one end around her left fist, and pulled the other end tight. Even through her gloves she could discern the scarf’s silky smoothness. She brought it closer to her face and sniffed.

The odor reminded her of a parchment shop. Without her eyes, touch, smell, and hearing were all she had to go by; she wasn’t about to lick it.

She said in a bare whisper, “Scarf, show me your power.”

Riltana felt stupid, huddled in the dark, talking to an inanimate textile.

No response.

“Damn it, if you’ve got something inside you, now’s the time to reveal it, or I’m going to stuff you in a roach hole!”

Hairline threads of light raced through the fabric, and she sucked in a quick breath.

More light gathered in bundles that traced through the scarf’s weave like tiny falling stars.

Riltana was rapt as the glimmers slowed, then letters like moonlight threads scrolled between her hands. Written on the scarf’s surface were the words:

Relief surged through Riltana. She was going to live!

The scarf was an item of power, and it knew the way out. She whispered, “You bet! The Sword, I promise. Just tell me where I need to go!”

The scarf flexed in her hands of its own accord, like a snakeskin suddenly come under some sort of spell of animation. She let go of one end.

The loose end of the wrap rose in the air, reminding her even more of a serpent, and pointed. It produced a directed shaft of illumination like the beam of a bull’s-eye lantern.

She pulled herself to her feet and managed a pained grin. Her rib pinched and her left ankle complained, but hope was almost as good as a sip of magical balm.

The thief shuffled forward, and the scarf twisted to point the way.

The tunnel was more of a fissure than a walkway. Riltana shook her head. Had she attempted to feel her way along, it seemed inevitable that she would have caught her foot in the central crevice, or fallen into one of the many natural chimneys. Even with the illumination provided by the semisentient scarf, the going wasn’t easy. She hurt too much.

Time passed. She made progress, but her good spirits eroded with the jolting pain that burned up her heel each time she came down on her left foot, and she revised her earlier sentiment.

Hope was not anywhere close to as good as a magical balm.

Why didn’t she carry a healing potion in her gloves? Because her oh-so-clever plan of keeping one space empty was the strategy of a moron. As her breath hitched with a new jab from a rib that was probably fractured, she formulated a new plan. If she made it out of these godsdamned tunnels, she’d buy an elixir. If she later happened upon something more valuable than a sunrod, balm, or flare, she would simply replace one for the other. Brilliant.

The passage Riltana followed broke into a divergence of several crossways. The scarf chose one. She hobbled in the direction indicated. The corridor she took sloped upward. A rivulet of liquid trickled down its center too. That seemed promising, but she was wary of another flood.

She said, “Scarf, how do you know which way to go?”

More words flowed across the length of fabric:

“What is recorded? Those who are selected to die? I don’t understand.”

Apparently, that was all she was going to get. New words stubbornly failed to glitter on the wrap.

“Fine, be that way.”

The slope was sapping the last of her reserves. And it was getting muddy. Gravity and gunk joined forces to grasp at her boots with each step. She paused to catch her breath. The scarf twisted in her grip and almost pulled free.

“Hold on,” she wheezed. “I just need a moment to rest.” She put her hands on her knees and let her head sag. Riltana wanted to sit, but she was afraid if she did so, getting up again would prove too daunting.

When her breathing finally calmed and heartbeat slowed, she resumed her slog.

She lost exact count of the number of rests she had to take; more than five, but less than ten.

When the scarf went limp and dark, she sagged and nearly fell herself. Gray speckles impeded the edges of her vision, visible against another light flickering ahead.

Another light?

She forced herself up the tunnel and entered a large chamber illuminated by a growth of bioluminescent fungi on the walls and ceiling. The place smelled of garbage. Puddles of mud and water covered portions of the floor. She blinked, and realized where she was: the Sepulcher.

She was going to live! A grin stretched her mouth, and she hobbled forward, toward the tunnel through which she first entered this cursed place, making her way around the muddy pools of slowly draining overflow. The residue of the flood that—

“Who’re you?” croaked a voice.

Riltana spun, and nearly fell over as dizziness racked her.

A little man in shoddy leather armor perched on a rock. The figure clutched a ratty bag in one hand, a club in the other. The greenish skin and distorted face told the rest of the tale: it was a goblin.

It looked cautious and ready to flee. Good. Riltana had dispatched her share of the thieving little bastards. Goblins had moved in recent years, like colonizing rats, into the dark alleys and uppermost portions of the labyrinths beneath Airspur. They were becoming more than a mere nuisance, especially for someone like herself, who also preferred to work in the shadows and underbelly of the city.

“Scamper off, blister, or I’ll cut you,” she said in her most intimidating voice, which was ruined as a coughing jag descended.

By the time she had her breath back, stars were dancing across her vision. At least the goblin had disappeared off the rock.

A sinister titter behind her was all the warning she received. Weakened as she was, it wasn’t enough to avoid the brutal club that smashed into the back of her head.