“Right then,” the former Shadowmaster said. “Let’s get you roped up, Owen…”
“Wait,” Jonik said. He looked at the map in his old master’s grasp. The chasm he was pointing out was another of the shallow ones, those of which you could see the bottom when standing at the edge. There were dozens of those spread all across the hillside, all of varying depth, and they’d searched over half of them, all to no avail. Jonik shook his head. “We’re never going to find anything in these baby rifts,” he said. “It’s time we went deeper. Adult.” He jabbed out at random, prodding a finger at one of the rifts marked with a cross, signifying that they could not see the bottom. “That one. It’s time, Gerrin.”
The old Emerald Guard rubbed at his grey-bristled chin. “Why that one?”
“Why not? They may all link together down there anyway. Some of the shallow ones do.” Sometimes, when searching the bottom of a ravine, they had gone through a tunnel or cave and ended up in another, saving them time by searching two at once, or even three on one occasion. Jonik had the sense that there was a great underground world beneath them just waiting to be explored. Great caves and echoing caverns and colossal chambers with lakes and rivers within them. It was impossible to say how deep it all went unless they went down there and had a look. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe not. But from up here they’d never know. “We have to try,” he finished.
Harden’s face was dour. “We don’t know what’s down there. But my guess is nothing good. There are too many monsters roaming the world to have come from the woods and mountains.” He scowled over the edge of the nearest rift. “Half have been hiding underground, I’ll wager. And many will still be there.”
Gerrin agreed with the old sellsword. “We’ve all heard the noises…” he started.
“That’s just wind,” Jonik came in. He only half believed it. “It’s just the sound it makes when it rises from below us.”
“Sometimes. Not always. I know a growl when I hear one.”
“That’s just your mind playing tricks.” A part of Jonik agreed that there would be creatures down there in the depths, but that didn’t serve his argument, so he chose to ignore it. “If the Mistblade is down there, we have to find out.”
“It could be anywhere, lad,” Harden said. “Might have fallen through the world and come out the other side for all we know. Perhaps it’s time to give this up.”
“Give it up?” Jonik couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Are you ready to roll over and die so easily, Harden?”
“Been ready for that for a while, in fairness.” His grey lips twisted into a smile. Then he shrugged. “I’m not saying give up completely. Just that we need help. There aren’t enough of us for a project this size.”
“There might be if you pulled your weight.” Jonik couldn’t refuse the barb. He blew out a breath, frustrated. “Do you want to go and join the others, is that it? Ride off to Rustbridge and die alongside them?”
“I’d sooner not die at all. But aye. We ride to Rustbridge and maybe we find them. We could bring them all back here to help…be one big happy family again. A dysfunctional family of sailors and sellswords and soldiers, aye, but still…”
Jonik would not let the old man tempt him. “We don’t know what’s happening in the city and cannot spare the time.” He poked at the map again. “I’m going. If anyone wants to join me, they’re welcome.”
“I’ll go,” Sir Owen said at once. He had proven most dutiful had the Oak of Armdall. “If there are creatures down there, it would be wise to go together. All of us.”
“No,” Gerrin said. “We’d best keep someone up here should things go wrong. We all know who that’s going to be.”
Everyone looked at Harden.
The old man folded his arms. “What is this, some guilt trip? Well bugger you all. I’m beyond caring. You go for all I care. I wouldn’t go down there for all the godsteel in the Steelforge.”
That settled it. They returned to their camp to prepare, gathering provisions, dressing in the essentials of armour, hitching their swordbelts around their waists. Sir Owen made the bright suggestion that they gather up a large stack of green maple leaves to mark a trail, should they find the depths hard to navigate. Harden stood by all the while muttering of their folly and shaking his head.
“How long do you expect me to wait if you don’t come back?” he asked.
“We will come back,” Jonik said.
Harden gave a sigh. “I appreciate the optimism, lad, but that’s not an answer. How long?”
“You be the judge.”
“Give it three days,” Gerrin said. “If we’re not back by then, then you might want to consider going for help.”
Harden grunted. They stepped out to the edge of the chasm Jonik had chosen, picking past the many rifts and scars into which they’d already spelunked. Some were shallow, barely four or five metres in depth, savagely gouged open by the claws of the Dread. Those had not required a proper searching; even from the side, you only had to glance down into them to see that there was no dead king lying down there, no misting blue blade resting among the rocks.
Others were much deeper, opened not by the titan’s claws, but his weight, the earth shattering and ripping apart as he landed and moved, fighting off the gruloks. The force of it had been beyond Sir Owen’s capabilities to describe. “Like a mountain had fallen over,” was his best effort, when telling them how the entire world had shuddered beneath him. It had caused the entire landscape to break apart, like a block of stone struck by a hammer, fracturing into a hundred cracks and fissures. It was a job for a much larger company of men, in that Harden was not wrong, and Gerrin had suggested that as well the day they’d arrived…but Jonik didn’t want to. This was his mission, his duty. If I can’t find that blade, no one can, he told himself.
And something was telling him to go deeper…much deeper. Was it just his gut instinct? A feeling? Or something more? In the quiet of night, when all was silent and still, Jonik might have sworn he’d heard a whisper, somewhere in the back of his head…the whisper of a voice he recognised, different but somehow the same…calling out to be saved. He could not say if that was just a dream, or desire, or the echo of a memory, but it nagged at him all the same. And it frightened him a little as well, he had to admit. Ilith had drawn him back from the precipice when he was about to plunge into the abyss, but Ilith wasn’t here. What if he should find the Mistblade, and be consumed by it as he was the Nightblade? What if he could not resist the lure?
He turned away from such concerns. Gerrin was at the edge of the chasm, stamping down at the earth with his feet, making sure it was steady and secure. Behind, Sir Owen waited with the stake, three or so metres back. “Is this a good spot, Sir Gerrin?” the younger knight asked him.
Gerrin nodded. “It seems secure enough to me. Go ahead, Owen.”
The Oak lifted the thick wooden stake above his head and drove it hard down into the ground, its sharpened end stabbing down through a foot or so of soil. Then he drew out his godsteel dagger, spun it around in his grasp, reached up and began hammering at the stake’s flattened top with the pommel. The weight of the godsteel, and the strength it gave him, made the rest of it simple enough. When the stake had been driven some five or so feet into the earth, the knight set about fastening the rope, then tested it, pulling and tugging with all his strength to make sure it would not yield. Jonik joined in for good measure; even with their combined strength, the stake did not budge.
“Should hold,” Jonik said. “Though probably best we don’t all go down at once.” He looked at Gerrin. “How’s the climb?”
“Sheer for about fifty feet. Then there’s a ledge wide enough to stand on. Looks secure. Beyond that the hand and footholds are plentiful, as far as I can see. There’s another platform below, but after that the dark takes over.”
Such as it was with the deeper chasms; the darkness that pooled down there, and the mists and fogs that still lingered, made it impossible to know their true depths. Sometimes they had dropped stones and rocks and listened for them to hit solid earth, hearing them crash and echo up from below, but they never knew if they’d hit the bottom or just landed on some ledge instead. When they did hear any sound, they would count out the time, and that would give them an estimate of the depth, which Gerrin would scribble on his map. Some of the rifts had no such estimate. The ones where they’d dropped stones and heard nothing at all. No echo far beneath them. No distant splash of water. Nothing. And this was one of them.
“What if the rope’s not long enough?” Harden asked. He peered over the edge, as the rope tumbled into the abyss.
“Then we’ll figure something out,” Jonik said. They had brought half a dozen long coils of rope with them from the Undercloak, and for this particular descent several of them had been lashed together, creating a rope almost two hundred metres long. If that didn’t serve, they had one last coil that they could use to lengthen it. “Best bring the other roll down with us as well,” Jonik said to Sir Owen. “We can tie it to the bottom if we need to.”
“And if that’s still not enough?”
“I don’t know, Harden. We’ll have to climb back up and choose another rift. Or just climb the wall without the rope if it’s doable.”
Harden shook his head. “Too risky. Perhaps you save yourself the trouble, and choose a shallower one? Why this one?”
“Because it’s deep.”
