Alex kneeled and pulled the grass and dirt away from it. After a few minutes work, he was able to wedge the trap door free. He looked down into the utter blackness of the space below the wood and shuddered. He remembered how disorienting the darkness had been in the tunnel. Even though he had simply crawled straight ahead, he had felt dizzy and lost.
“I’m going to crawl the tunnel again, but this time I am not going to do it in the dark.”
“Good. I will build us some torches,” Senta-eh said.
“It’s no fun crawling through there. The space is very tight.”
“Are you saying I am fat?”
Alex looked at her lean figure and laughed. “No one would ever say that. I’m just saying it is not fun crawling through the blackness.”
Senta-eh was already plucking dead grass here and there that she could wind around a limb and make a torch. “You might come out on the other side, see the door and step through it. Then I will not get a chance to say good-bye.”
“Here. Sit,” Alex said. Monda-ak dropped immediately at the command, but Alex ignored him.
Alex and Senta-eh sat cross-legged on the grass, knees touching. He reached out and held her hand. It was not the soft hand of someone who had never known hard work. It was calloused from practicing her archery and the skin was rough from sparring practice. They were the hands he loved.
“I would never leave you like that. I don’t ever want to leave you. I want to be with you, always. If I didn’t have Amy-eh waiting for me on the other side, depending on me, I would never leave you.”
Senta-eh smiled, but there was no joy in it. “No matter where you go, you lose. It is a horrible place to be. I am sorry. Your first obligation is to your daughter. That is what I want for you. But selfishly, I want you here with me. Always.”
Alex leaned forward and kissed her, long and slow.
When she sat back, there was happiness in her smile and sadness in her eyes. “We will see now if you stay or if you go. I’ll build a fire while you gather what we need for the torches.”
Alex wandered off in a slight daze, the feel of her lips—which were soft—on his.
If a door is there, can I step through it and leave her? A picture of Amy, still four years old in his mind, flashed. And how can I not?
He cut down two branches that they could use as the handles for their torches and returned to where Senta-eh had built a fire. Together, they wove grass and talked about anything other than the fact that he had just kissed her. When they had run out of topics enough to wonder about the weather, Alex said, “I think we’re good to go. I’ll drop in first. Stay close behind me—we don’t know what manner of creature might have found the tunnel and made it their new home.”
“I will be close enough behind that you will feel my flame on your posterior.”
He called Monda-ak to him. “We can’t take you with us, but we won’t be gone long. You know I would never leave you. I need you to stay here and guard the horses. If anything bothers them, kill.”
Monda-ak’s tail thumped lightly. He understood.
Alex scratched the dog behind the ears, and crawled head-first down into the tunnel.
Douglas Winterborne had been soft and pudgy, but obviously he wasn’t a large man, as the entrance to the tunnel was tight. Alex held the torch out in front of him and crawled his way forward.
Having some source of light made the tunnel somewhat less disorienting, but no more comfortable.
Alex crawled forward and down seven or eight feet, then the tunnel leveled out. At that point, it got a bit larger and Alex couldn’t help but wonder who had dug it for Winterborne. He was sure the man hadn’t dug it himself.
A new memory came front and center in his mind: Lanta-eh telling him that Draka-ak had killed all the craftsmen who had built his escape route from his quarters.
I can see Winterborne doing the same thing. Bastard.
After he had crawled for what felt like a very long time, he saw something ahead of him that he had totally missed on his blind crawl through the tunnel—a second tunnel that branched off to the right. Alex closed his eyes, remembering. He was sure he had clung to the left wall of the tunnel, so he likely had crawled right past it without even knowing it was there.
Alex stopped suddenly and, sure enough, felt a warmth on his posterior. She had not been kidding. At the spot where the second tunnel branched off, the tunnel also enlarged. He scooted forward and moved slightly off to the right, looking down into the right branch of the tunnel.
Senta-eh crawled up beside him, a question on her face.
“When I crawled this in the dark, I never saw this tunnel. I went right by it.” Alex’s voice was muffled in the close quarters and sounded unpleasant in his own ears.
“What do we do?”
“I need to see what is down there.”
“If what is down there has babies, or sharp teeth and claws, we might regret that choice.”
Alex considered that, but looked at the tunnel. The walls were smooth. They were dug by men, not by animals.
“It will be all right. I think there was something down there that Doug-ak wanted. I want to see what it is.”
Alex turned and crawled forward and, once again, down. He expected the tunnel to level off, but instead, it continued to descend. It was an eerie feeling, climbing so far down beneath
