“We-uh-should-uh-”
A pair of anguished wails reverberated out of the opposite drainage tunnel, sparing Tavis the necessity of saying more. The screams did not end, but continued to echo through the darkness, randomly changing pitch and volume, as though the bodies from which they came were being played like living instruments. The gruesome music carried a steady undertone of crackling and splashing, and the basal throb of deep-throated chortling.
“Hiatea have mercy!” Brianna gasped. “What’s happening in there?”
“I don’t know, Majesty,” said Gryffitt. “But we’ll put an end to it soon enough.” He started to splash toward the tunnel, with the other two front riders close behind.
“No!” Tavis ordered. “Stay with the queen.”
“Begging your pardon, Lord Scout,” said Gryffitt. “But if that was me up there, I’d want some help.”
“If we try to help them, we’ll join them.” The two front riders had walked into an ambush, as Tavis had half- expected, but it hadn’t been firbolgs. “You men take the queen and start back up the tunnel. I’ll hold them here.”
“Them?” Brianna demanded.
“Fomorians,” Tavis answered. “Galgadayle told me to watch out for fomorians and verbeegs.”
The wails continued unabated.
“ Galgadayle told you?” Brianna sounded stunned.
“I pulled Avner’s sword out of his back,” Tavis admitted. “He won’t be doing us any more harm.”
“He has done more than enough already,” Brianna growled. “How-”
“If the fomorians catch you, they’ll do more!” Tavis thrust Brianna toward Gryffitt. “Take her and go.”
Several pairs of hands reached up to take the queen. “We’ll wait at the drift where we heard the water draining,” said Gryffitt.
“Don’t wait,” Tavis replied. “And if you must stop to hide, do it well. Fomorians see in the dark better than we see in daylight.”
As the front riders waded away, Tavis started toward the opposite drainage tunnel. He stopped when he heard Brianna uttering a spell. A pale silver light flared behind him. He turned to see his wife lying on the shoulders of her three bearers, a glowing dagger in her upraised hand.
“I thought we should see as well as the fomorians,” she explained. “And Tavis, try to come back. I’d rather Kaedlaw grew up knowing his father.”
“I’ll do what’s in my power, milady.”
The tortured screams of the two front riders finally died. Tavis waded into the darkness ahead and slowly made his way to the wall. He placed himself between a pair of rough-hewn support timbers, chimneyed up the side of the tunnel, and braced himself between the ceiling arches. He freed one hand long enough to draw his sword, then settled in to wait.
As the last sloshing echoes of Brianna’s departure faded away, Tavis saw a familiar blue glow flickering across the turbid waters below. Mountain Crusher. He grasped his sword more tightly and tried not to think of the fatigue burning in his thighs and shoulders. The magical light grew brighter, illuminating bands of blood swirling in the orange river. The weapon itself floated into view atop the water, spinning in the current and sweeping the walls with its cold, shimmering light.
The bow remained in one piece, with Thatcher’s hand still gripping the handle. The wrist was cocked at an impossible angle. The arm jigged and jagged in three different directions, then came to an abrupt end at the mangled elbow.
Two foul-smelling mangles of flesh and bone drifted into view. They had been twisted into grotesque parodies of human bodies, their limbs bent against the joints or torn off entirely. Organs that should have been safely tucked inside the torsos now hung outside. Tavis looked away, fighting the urge to retch.
Mountain Crusher brushed against a timber, then spun into the opposite wall and caught its string on a rock spur. The two bodies slowly bobbed past, lingering beneath Tavis so long that it almost seemed the spirits of the two front riders were torturing him for sending their bodies to such hideous deaths.
The crest of a gentle wave rolled down the tunnel, carrying the corpses away. A sweet, musky scent rose off the water, mixing with the smell of sulfur and musty wood.
A stubby, gray-skinned hand came into view. It had only three gnarled fingers, each ending in a sharp, broken nail that protruded from the tip like a muskrat’s claw. The appendage itself was as large as a human torso, its ashen hide mottled with black warts and crimson boils. The twisted thing advanced at a glacier’s pace, reaching out to dislodge the glowing bow. Tavis heard no sloshing water, no wheezing breath, no sound at all.
At length, a fomorian’s warty, pear-shaped head came into view. Like all of his kind, the hunter was hideously and uniquely deformed. One eye hung in the center of his forehead, and the other rested atop his pate. From one side of his head dangled a pair of drooping ears. His broad nose ended in a single cavernous nostril, and an ivory curtain of crooked teeth jutted over his thick lower lip. Though the brute was squatting on his haunches, he was so large that the wiry hair on his back brushed the ceiling in front of Tavis.
The fomorian’s two eyes worked independently as he advanced, one searching the tunnel ahead, the other scanning the walls and ceiling. One of the dark pupils swept past Tavis’s hiding place, then stopped midway down the wall and started to rise again.
The high scout leapt from his corner, aiming his sword at the eye atop the fomorian’s head.
The hunter flinched and turned away. Tavis’s blade drove straight through the thick skull. A torpid shudder of death ran down the brute’s crooked spine. The misshapen body went slack and slumped into the murky waters, filling three-quarters of the passage even lying on its belly.
A puff of hot, rancid air wafted over Tavis’s shoulders. Without pausing to dislodge his sword, he jumped off the corpse, angling toward the rock spur where Mountain Crusher had snagged. From the darkness behind the dead fomorian came the boulderlike fist of a second hunter. The blow caught Tavis in midleap and sent him hurtling down the passage into a timber post. He heard the muffled snap of cracking ribs, then lost his breath and dropped into the water.
A shower of rock dust, pebbles, and splintered wood splashed down around his shoulders. Tavis looked up. Above his head, the end of a rotten beam was sagging beneath a ton of broken, growling stone. A frustrated hiss sounded behind the dead fomorian as the second hunter tried to shove aside his companion’s bulky corpse. The high scout pushed himself away from the tunnel wall, less concerned with his angry pursuer than the drooping beam overhead.
The ceiling did not come crashing down, but continued to pour into the water in a steady stream of stone and dust. Suddenly, Tavis saw the mountain above him not as a solid mass of granite, but as a colossal heap of pulverized stone being slowly ground to dust beneath its own immense weight. Keeping one eye on the drooping beam, he reached out and lifted Mountain Crusher off the rock that had snagged its string.
A growl of rage sounded upstream. Tavis spun around, already pulling a wet arrow from his quiver.
A pair of silver eyes were glaring over the dead fomorian’s back. The orbs were as large as bucklers, and set so close that the edges almost touched. Tavis could barely see the rest of his foe, a creeping black silhouette slipping across the corpse’s humped back. To fit through the narrow space, the hunter had flattened out his body as though he were a mouse crawling beneath a door.
Tavis nocked his arrow and pointed the tip between the two gleaming eyes. The dark shape of a huge webbed hand interposed itself between the arrow and its target. The high scout drew his bowstring back, groaned at the pain in his cracked ribs, and loosed the shaft.
The arrow tore through the shielding hand with a sound like ripping leather, then crackled into the narrow band of cartilage between the fomorian’s eyes. A deafening screech echoed through the tunnel. Tavis nearly gagged on the rancid odor of the hunter’s death rattle.
The fomorian’s eyes, now dull and glazed with death, continued to move as another hunter tried to work the body out of the cranny.
Tavis retreated to the fork and waded up the tunnel, each step a struggle against the pain in his ribs. This time, there would be no quick cures for his anguish. He had given the last of Simon’s healing potion to Galgadayle, and Brianna had no more mending spells left. The high scout clenched his teeth and reminded himself that his agony was nothing compared to the torture Thatcher and the other front rider had suffered.
Soon, Tavis saw the silvery glow of Brianna’s magical light spilling from a passage ahead. He waded up to the tunnel and found Gryffitt crouching in the entrance. The corridor was scorched and rubble-strewn, with the jagged
