them out of their sight were Bradok and Corin. Bradok kept his eyes on Chisul’s still form until the receding passage obscured it. Poor Chisul-Silas’s son wasn’t such a bad sort after all, Bradok thought. He didn’t deserve to be condemned to an eternal death as an abomination of nature.
The loss of Omer and Chisul affected everyone. As the group moved through the shapeless tunnels following the pointing image of the Seer in the brass compass, the only real sounds to be heard were the intermittent demands for food from little Bradok.
The tunnel ended after another day’s travel. Beyond it a small cavern promised comfortable sleep for the first time in days. They all needed sleep desperately.
Four days after Omer’s death, however, Bradok was still haunted by nightmares. Every night he saw images of the boy’s pure blue eyes as the life drained out of them, and of Chisul, kicking his heels on the stone as the spores consumed him.
Rose told him the nightmares would pass and so would the bad memories.
Much told him it wasn’t his fault, that Omer and Chisul had saved them all.
All that was true, of course, but it didn’t assuage Bradok’s guilt. Somehow Omer’s death came to symbolize all the dwarves he’d lost on their journey. He felt himself to be a terrible leader.
As bad as the dreams were, they didn’t compare to the dread of waking. Every mile they walked, Bradok couldn’t help but wonder what new terror would emerge from the dark to steal away more of his friends. The number of the survivors kept dwindling. Every time anyone asked him to make a decision about something, he had to force himself to appear calm and rational. Inside, he felt worthless.
“You’re taking too much on yourself,” Rose said as they started out one morning after he had slept so badly.
“I’m the leader,” he said. “If we find food, I get the glory. If someone dies, I take the responsibility.”
“That would be true if you’d recklessly sent people to their deaths,” Rose said. “Chisul and Omer gave all they could to protect us. They were willing to fight and to die if necessary.” She put her hand gently on his arm. “Your leadership has kept us from losing more.”
She was right. Worse, he knew she was right, but he still felt guilty. But if he didn’t feel bad, he told himself, then he wouldn’t be worthy to lead. The kind of leader who didn’t feel the deaths of those he led would be a depraved leader.
Bradok wanted to answer Rose, but nothing he thought of seemed appropriate to say. He did notice that she hadn’t removed her hand from his arm. As his mind took hold on that, his senses suddenly became aware of something-something changed, different.
“Wait,” he whispered, holding up his hand.
Not all the others had heard him, but most stopped in response to the raised hand. Throughout the group, both men and women placed their hands on their weapons.
At first, Bradok couldn’t say what it was that had caught his attention. Nothing in the dim lantern-light seemed out of place, and no sound reached his waiting ear. Still, something had shifted.
A puff of air as gentle as a baby’s breath touched his whiskers, carrying with it a strange yet familiar scent. Bradok had to reach back into the archives of his mind to identify it. When, at last he remembered, he shouted.
More explosive laugh than shout, the sound echoed down the passageway as Bradok kept on laughing and laughing.
“Wha-?” Rose said, her grip on his arm tightening.
“Follow me,” Bradok said, turning to face his friends. “Quickly now.”
He turned back to the tunnel and dashed forward at a slow jog so even the stragglers could keep up. It had taken him some time to identify the odor that seemed to fill up the tunnel.
It was the distinctive smell of mountain trees, of pine.
The others smelled it too, and Bradok could hear their cries of joy and their ringing laughter joining his. The tunnel ended right before him, emptying out into a wide cavern virtually overflowing with peppertops and honey mushrooms, wall root, and blackroot. There was enough food to feed them for a year, longer if they were careful to cultivate new growth.
A dazzling burst of light burned at the far end of the cave. Bradok had to squint just to see the ground before him, but he did not stop running. Laughing like a schoolboy on holiday, he raced out through the opening and into a humid blanket of warm air.
The light overwhelmed him, however, and he dropped to his knees after a few strides, feeling the prickle of grass beneath him. Rose fell beside him, laughing as heartily as he had and rolling over him and into the grass. Before he knew what he was doing, he’d pulled her up and kissed her. She kissed him back and for a long moment, the two just lay there in the grass, joined together in a circle of blinding light.
Bradok let her go as his vision began to return to normal. They’d been in the darkness so long, it took a full ten minutes before he could see anything farther than a few feet away. When his vision did clear, it felt like coming out of a dream.
“What happened?” Rose gasped as her vision also returned.
Above them, the sky was burning red with great, undulating clouds that appeared black against the sky. They found themselves sitting above a little mountain valley lined with trees and green meadows. A coursing stream cut its way through the valley and continued on down the mountain into the far side.
Beyond the valley, however, smoke arose along every horizon, great black gouts that reached up and stained the sky.
“It’s as if someone burned the world,” Rose said in awe, clinging fearfully to Bradok’s sleeve.
Bradok thought back to Ironroot and Silas and the believers and all the signs and warnings there he had ignored. “I wonder if there are any other survivors besides us?” he said.
“Surely there will be,” Jeni said, coming up near them.
“There have to be,” Kellik said, close behind.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bradok said, turning to face his little group of friends. “Reorx has led us here, to this place. There’s food and shelter in the cave and timber aplenty here.”
“And ore,” Kellik said, pointing up to a red-stained rock on the mountain.
“Right,” Bradok said. “We’ll build a forge, and we’ll make the tools we need, and we’ll build a new home right here.”
“Can we really do all that?” Kellik’s son Rijul piped up.
“We don’t exactly have enough people for a city,” Lyra cautioned.
“We’ll do it,” Bradok said. “It’ll just take time.”
Rose hugged him close while all the survivors cheered. He knew it would take work, but Reorx had prepared that land for them.
Six weeks later, Rose shook Bradok out of a sound sleep. Outside the cave, the sun was peeking through the clouds. Since he’d had guard duty the night before, Bradok had slept late.
“Look,” Rose said, sticking her arm under his nose.
“What am I looking at?” he asked, groggily rubbing his eyes.
“Me! It’s gotten smaller,” she said boastfully.
Bradok studied her arm, staring at the gray patch of skin where the Zhome had first manifested itself. He hadn’t dared to look at Rose’s arm in quite a while, but the affected skin did seem to be smaller than he remembered it, much smaller.
“How?” he asked, looking intently at her arm.
“I thought the Zhome was getting smaller, but today I did something and it actually shrunk before my eyes.”
“What did you do?” he asked.
“I got hot,” she said. “So I took off the bandage to let my arm breathe.”
Bradok stared blankly.
“It’s the sunlight!” she told him. “As soon as the sunlight hit my arm, I felt it tingling and I saw the Zhome actually shrink.”
