Gerrod in one hand, the Quel effortlessly began to burrow in the ground.
“No! I can’t! Stop!” He struggled to free himself, but his horrific keeper took no notice of his weak efforts. Visions of being buried alive shook Gerrod’s very being. The earth grew nearer and nearer; he might have been sinking in quicksand. Already, most of the Quel’s unsightly form was covered with dirt. Only the wrist and hand that held his captive were still visible.
The warlock took a deep breath and barely had time to hold it before his face met the ground. He shut his eyes and prayed that death would be quick.
Loose dirt tried to enter his nostrils. Gerrod could not move his hands forward and was forced to exhale through his nose in order to clear it. He began struggling for more air.
The Quel and he broke into a vast tunnel.
Light of a limited source allowed him some inspection of his surroundings. The dim glow came from several crystals lined along the tunnel wall. Those nearest were brightest. Gerrod tested the air-having no other choice by this time-and found it dry but breathable.
He was aware that this could hardly be the same tunnel that his present guardian had come from. Most likely, it stood some distance beneath or to the side of the one the Quel itself had burrowed. Why it had chosen to make a path of its own rather than take this one in the first place was a question Gerrod doubted the Quel would answer even if the two of them could understand one another’s language. Like Zeree’s Seekers, the earth dwellers had mind-sets much different than those of the Vraad. Perhaps this tunnel was specifically reserved for the transportation of surface creatures like himself.
Satisfied that his charge was in fair shape, the Quel pulled the Tezerenee to his feet. From somewhere a long, needlelike spear materialized. Gerrod could not recall seeing it before, but there had been no time for such unimportant observations until now.
The Quel pushed him ahead and leveled the spear. Gerrod understood his meaning and hastened to comply.
He had walked only a few yards when he began to sense the intense aura of sorcery all about him. Some feature about this place seemed to draw from the natural forces of the land. Gerrod was near a place of power, a well of magic of sorts. It was not merely the crystals in the walls; their only purpose seemed to be to light the portion of the tunnel where travelers happened to be. Still, Gerrod had enough knowledge of crystal sorcery to realize that the Quel might have other gemstones that gathered the raw energy of the world for their later manipulation. There were many things that could be achieved through that particular magic that normal Vraad sorcery-and possibly even Dragonrealm sorcery-could only struggle in vain to achieve.
If I can find those gemstones… There might yet be a way out of all of this, Gerrod decided.
It occurred to him than that he had not felt any dizziness since being brought to the tunnel.
He turned on the Quel, who froze and readied the spear, and cast a crude but deadly missile of fire at the creature.
The armadillolike horror hooted in derision.
Gerrod’s mouth hung open as he desperately tried another gambit. He could sense the power around him; why could he not cast even the simplest of spells?
Sufficiently amused, the Quel ceased hooting and jabbed at him with the spear, clearly desiring that the tiny, weak thing before it stop playing and keep walking. Gerrod did so, his resistance all but dead. Whatever caused power to gather here was drawing what he attempted to summon even before he could make use of it. The warlock was as helpless as ever. His only consolation lay in the fact that he no longer suffered from any dizziness.
It did nothing to soothe his weary mind.
The Quel proceeded to steer him down tunnel after tunnel after tunnel. It was not long before Gerrod gave up trying to memorize his path; the tunnel system consisted almost entirely of one winding trail crossing another. There were at least two points where he was almost certain they had backtracked. His guard, however, continued to steer him along with purpose.
Claustrophobia began to set in. They were on a downward route-at least that much Gerrod had been able to tell, little good it did him. The tunnels were growing narrower. He pictured the many tons of earth above him and what would happen to the tunnel should a slight tremor occur. It was with great relief that he finally noticed the brilliant illumination far down the opposite end of the latest tunnel. So certain was the tired warlock that they had somehow reached the surface again that he almost started running. Only a reminding hoot from the Quel behind him kept him from doing so. For the rest of the trek Gerrod struggled to maintain his composure. A spear in his back-through his entire torso, more likely-would make his return to the outside world a short one, indeed.
It was not until he was mere yards from the mouth of the tunnel that it became clear that this was not the sun that glowed so bright.
Gerrod stepped out into the last domain of the Quel.
To call it a city was perhaps to use a misnomer. There were no streets, no buildings as a Vraad would know them, and the Quel he saw moving around were not going about the mundane daily activities that made up city life. Gerrod had spent a few days in the Vraad colony during its first years, mostly at the request of Dru Zeree or his daughter when they needed his assistance with some project, and he recalled some of the things he had seen his people doing in order to get through yet another day. The creatures before him, some so distant they were little more than shapes, moved with purpose. Whether they climbed the walls of the massive cavern, burrowed from one tunnel to another, or simply walked across the smooth floor, they traveled as if their existence depended on it.
He looked up and found what he had taken for the sun. The ceiling of the cavern was dotted with thousands of crystals, but, unlike the gems in the tunnels, they were not the actual source of the light. Instead, he saw that the light came from elsewhere, perhaps even the surface, and was reflected again and again by the array spread throughout the ceiling. It was a masterful manipulation of the crystals’ natural abilities and required no sorcery- something that would have been impossible under present circumstances anyway.
The Quel who guarded him had come to his side and was also staring out at the city, but not for the same reason. It located another of its kind, who looked more or less exactly like every other Quel that Gerrod had seen, and signaled to it. The other monster hooted a short reply and climbed along the wall toward the duo.
Both fascinated and horrified, the warlock could only watch. That such huge beasts could move about so nimbly down here and climb from one precarious position to another was astounding. He hoped they did not plan on having him attempt to mimic their skill; if so, it would be a short climb-and a fatal fall.
“Sharissa Zeree,” he whispered. “What have you gotten me into?”
Gerrod soon found that he had once more been turned over to another guard. The newcomer looked him over, reached out with a speed remarkable for its size, and wrapped the helpless Tezerenee in a one-armed bear hug. While Gerrod struggled to keep from being cracked into small pieces, the massive, armadillolike creature managed a handhold on the wall and pulled itself out of the tunnel and into the huge cavern. One-armed, the Quel somehow scurried across the wall for some distance before diving into yet another tunnel. Even as it landed on its feet, it released its prisoner. The warlock fell to the floor an ungainly sight.
More tunnels followed. Gerrod was convinced that this was to be the rest of his life. He pictured himself going from tunnel to tunnel-with occasional panic-filled rides in the arms of leaping Quel-until he came out of the other side of the world. Would that be the other continent? he wondered. Likely not. With his luck it would be the bottom of the middle of the sea.
He tried another spell at one point, a spell whose results would be for his eyes only if it did succeed, but the strange power that the Quel race controlled still held sway. Sorcery would not save him here; he would have to rely upon his mind and body.
When they came at last to yet another lit cavern, the warlock gave it only a cursory glance at first. It held only a few Quel, who darted this way and that or stood conversing near the center, and not much else. A few tunnels dotted the sides of this chamber.
There was a pause that dragged out much too long for Gerrod. He turned to his captor and, though he knew the creature understood him as well as the warlock understood a drake, asked, “Well? Which way?”
He nearly lost his composure when the guard looked down at him as if listening and then abruptly pointed toward the group clustered around the center of the chamber. It was pure coincidence, the Tezerenee told himself. The Quel could not possibly understand him; that had already been proven… hadn’t it?
A deep grunt from his companion warned him that he had a very short time limit within which to respond to its command. The needle spear that this one also carried emphasized more than that particular point.
