He stood and reached above his head, searching, but could not touch ceiling. He took in air, called out again, and a fourth time, and a fifth, and each time the sound of his voice faded and failed as he stood in a stillness so lucid that he finally understood that this was a dead place where nothing lived. He had swum into a blind pocket.
Without light, he could not explore to see how wide this cavern spanned or where tunnels might spear into stone to make roads that would lead him to light or help. He dared not move away from the water lest he could not find it again and, thus trapped, starve and die.
If he could not explore, then he would have no choice except to swim back to where his companion waited, where there was food and a chance to live buried in a gravelike prison. This taste, like defeat, soured in his mouth.
There had to be a way out.
“What are you?”
He shrieked and leaped backward, stumbling into the water, slipping, and falling to his knees. Then he began to laugh, because he recognized that rumbling whisper. The creature had been crouched in front of him all along, yet he had not sensed it. It made no sound of breathing. Now, it scraped away from him, retreating from the unexpected laughter, and he controlled himself quickly and spoke.
“I pray you, Friend, I am a messenger. I am come from your own tribesmen who are lost beyond this tunnel.”
“They are lost,” agreed the voice. “One among us watches since the time they are lost. If the deeps shift, then the path may open. How are you come through the poison water?”
“It is not poison to me. I am not one of your kind.”
“You are not,” it agreed. “We speak tales of the long-ago time when a very few of the creatures out of the Blinding dug deep. So do they still, but only to rob. Once they brought gifts, as it is spoken in the old tales. Once there was obligation between your kind and ours. No more.”
The words made his head hurt. Each phrase was a bar prying him open, cracking the seals that bound him; thoughts and memories spilled into a light too bright to bear. A great city. A journey through the dark.
Adica.
“No more,” he echoed, pressing his face into his hands as his temple throbbed and his skull seemed likely to split open. But despite his pain, he had a message to deliver. “Can you help them? Some still live, beyond the tunnel, but they are trapped. Can you help them?”
“Come,” said the voice. “The council must decide.”
It shuffled away, but he had to call after it.
“I can’t see to follow you.”
“See?”
“I am blind in this darkness.”
It said nothing, and he tried again.
“The light above that blinds you, that you call the Blinding, is what I need to see. This place, where you can see without light, it is a blind place to me.”
Out of the blindness cold fingers grasped his arm, tapped the armband, and jerked back. “Poison water!” It hissed and gurgled and went still, as though that touch had poisoned it.
He waited, and after a bit it spoke again.
“Such talismans we make no longer. The magic flees after the great calamity. Hold to me and follow like a young one.”
He reached out, grasped its cool hand, and trusting that it did not mean to lead him to his doom, he stumbled after it as it moved away with a strange rolling gait into a blackness so profound that he might as well have been walking into the pit.
The earth trembled beneath his feet, rocking him, then stilled.
“What was that?”
“The earth wakes,” said his guide. “The wise ones shift their feet, and the deeps tremble.”
“Ah.” His head was hurting badly again, and so they walked for a long while without speaking. He had to concentrate on walking; because each step jolted the pain in his head to a new location and back again, he came to dread the movement although he had no choice but to go forward.
After a long, long time he had to rest.
“I must drink,” he said to his guide, “or I will fail.”
“Drink?”
“I thirst. I must have water or some wine or ale, something to moisten my tongue and body.”
“Wait here.” The creature let go of his hand and before he understood what it was about, he heard it scrabble away over or along the stone and knew himself utterly lost.
He had no choice but to trust it—otherwise he certainly would die—so he lay down on the stone and slept. It woke him an unknown time later and put into his hands a bowl carved out of rock and filled to the brim with a brackish but otherwise drinkable water. When he had drunk it down, his head didn’t hurt quite so badly and, although his stomach ached with hunger, he could go on. They walked on for what seemed ages upon ages or a day at least up above where the passage of the sun and the moon allowed a man to measure the passing of time. Time seemed insignificant here, meaningless. Twice more the stone shuddered and stilled beneath and around them, causing him to pause as he swayed, heart hammering with instinctive fear, although his guide seemed untroubled by the shaking.