A stone archway appeared in the shadow of one of the trees, shrouded with vines and leading down into the earth. The portal was shaped like a snake’s mouth, fangs protruding from scaled stone lips, twice as tall as him and as dark as death within. His feet stuttered to a stop, and that old, formless dread surged up inside his guts. “No,” he gasped. The carbon and silicate molecules of the stone entryway danced before his inner eye, locked together in delicate, branching polyhedrons whose facets pulled at his mind, begging to be enumerated.
Renna hauled him back into motion. “No choice!” she growled. “Close your eyes if you have to.”
He longed to tell her that closing his eyes made it worse, but his tongue wouldn’t respond. If he closed his eyes, it merely eliminated all connection to the surface of things, allowing his mind to dive into Chaos. It was one of the reasons he hated being in the dark. Aaaand too late to do anything about it regardless. They pounded through the archway, stumbling down stone stairs. What they were doing could have been called “falling” with roughly the same accuracy as referring to it as “running.” See, that’s funny. Why can’t I say that? Probably because I’m too busy falling.
The stairs spiraled down and down and down. Why are there stairs? Snake people don’t like stairs. All the trees had ramps instead. Did they make these for someone else? Did they make them at all? Maybe this was here before the Naga. Not liking the stairs wasn’t stopping the Naga – their voices rang out behind as the monstrous things followed them down. Guyrin marveled that he had managed to keep his feet under him this long, and with a shock realized that it was because he was watching where he was going. How can I see anything? It was dreadfully dim, but not the pitch-blackness that he feared. Risking a glance away from his stumbling steps, he saw that the stairwell was tall and wide, carved from bare rock, and that some kind of glowing, shelf-like fungus clung in the cracks of the stone, casting a pale light only a little dimmer than good moonlight. It was enough to make out the steps, at least. He could see the bobbing heads of his companions as they raced down into the bowels of the earth.
“Where are we going?” Kest called ahead to Tychus.
“There is a whole network of tunnels ahead,” the Naga responded breathlessly. “Maybe we can lose them in the maze.” Tychus was keeping pace with the humans admirably despite lacking feet for the wide, deep steps. No doubt the ones behind us will do just as well.
“We don’t want to get lost down here,” said Gamarron. “We should find a narrow spot and turn to fight.”
“Fight?” laughed Tychus. “No thank you! There’s no need; we can just keep going. This is the entrance to the Great Deeps – we could go anywhere, follow them anywhere. Give me some time to figure out the path, and we can take the Passages all the way to your Black Isle.”
“These tunnels run under the ocean?” Even out of breath and racing down the stairs, Gamarron managed to sound skeptical. “Unlikely.”
“It’s true,” the Naga protested. “The gods lived down there, and according to the books there’s some great holy city in the center of everything. I don’t know about that exactly, but our leaders send scouting parties down the tunnels all the way out to the islands sometimes, and they always come back.”
The pulleys and levers of Guyrin’s mind ground to a halt at the mention of tunnels under water. Fear coiled in his belly like a meal of slugs, and he imagined crawling on hands and knees in utter darkness, sea water seeping through walls of loose, crumbling dirt, the cold ocean invading the space and slowly filling the claustrophobic passage. One ton per cubic meter of water. Say a tunnel is one point five meters across. Square that at a water depth of, say, three kilometers… that’s six thousand seven hundred and fifty tons of water directly over your head at any given moment. He was having a hard time breathing, and it wasn’t just the running. Even separated by fifty meters of rock, that much weight could crush a tunnel in a heartbeat. Or even just a crack that let the water seep in…
Gamarron thought hard for a long moment, and the scrape of feet on stone and distant shouts were all that they heard. Then: “We lose the pursuit in the tunnels or find a place to fight. Then we can worry about which way to go.”
Guyrin was lost in calculating the force exerted by the water pressure invading a hairline fracture in granite bedrock. He knew he shouldn’t, but he couldn’t stop himself. He concluded that the likelihood of being struck by a jet of pressurized water pushing through the seabed was only slightly smaller than that of getting crushed by a tunnel collapse or drowning in a slowly-filling, pitch-black tunnel too small to stand up in. He heard himself whimpering and tried to stop. He wanted to close his eyes, but then the Chaos would beckon even more strongly, and he felt his will weakening. He didn’t dare touch it. Not without being told. He plucked at Renna’s arm, trying to communicate his distress, but she just kept pulling him along. Down, down to where they were all going
