The Outcast (Summoner #4)(44)
“What do you mean, if all goes well?” Zacharias groaned.
Edmund bit his lip. Prince Harold answered for him.
“If my father is not there, she’ll have to search Corcillum until we find him … or one of our parents … or a general,” he said.
Arcturus looked at his feet, wondering what it would be like to have a parent, someone who would do anything to protect him. He felt the sudden urge to summon Sacharissa. She was the closest thing he had to family.
“It could take forever to find someone,” Alice whispered.
“Can the rebels get in if the dogs lead them back to it?” Sergeant Caulder asked, wincing slightly as he stood. “Through the secret entrance, I mean?”
Edmund floated the wyrdlight toward the stone tablet that covered the hole they had come through. There was a strange mechanism built into the rectangular tablet that covered the entrance, all cogs and hinges.
Arcturus peered closer, and saw a word engraved in the side. THORSAGER. A dwarven name …
“My father hired a dwarven smith to build it,” Edmund said. “It will only open if someone presses the right places in the right order—but a few blows with a sledgehammer and they’ll be through. It was designed to be hidden, not to hold back an army.”
“Dwarves?” Zacharias spat, incredulous. “You’ve doomed us all. A dwarf would sell its own mother for a bent penny!”
“Oh, Zacharias, you’re so bad,” Josephine giggled.
Alice shook her head in disgust at her twin sister.
“We should get moving,” she said, summoning her own wyrdlight and sending it down the passageway. “The dogs could bring them back here eventually; let’s not make it easy for them.”
The tunnel yawned ominously as the blue ball of light floated deeper, before disappearing around a winding corner. Arcturus couldn’t help but feel a sense of dread. Somewhere on the other side lay the wild jungles of the orcs.
He set his jaw and forced himself to step deeper into the darkness. He could not show weakness in front of the others—they would abandon him if he slowed them down.
“What do we do with this pair of idiots?” Sergeant Caulder asked, pointing at the two rebels lying unconscious on the floor.
“We should…,” Prince Harold began, but Sergeant Caulder held up a finger.
For a moment he peered at the pair, then picked up the spear that lay on the ground. He prodded the nearest rebel, and was rewarded with a yelp of pain.
“Cheeky bugger.” Rotter grinned, kneeling beside the rebel and tying his hands with a strip of cloth.
“Help! Hel—”
Rotter clamped a hand over the rebel’s mouth, and together with Sergeant Caulder they succeeded in gagging the struggling man. Rotter followed suit with the second rebel, and then the pair were lifted onto the soldiers’ shoulders—one wriggling like an eel, the other a motionless sack of potatoes.
“Right, let’s get out of here,” Rotter growled.
The nobles released a stream of wyrdlights from their fingers, illuminating the passageway in ethereal blue light. The new glow did little to calm Arcturus’s nerves—the gloom still wavered in the moving light, and the stalactites and stalagmites that pierced the air reminded him of the maw of a giant beast. Worse still, the path angled downward, as if they were descending into the bowels of the earth.
He hesitated as the team moved forward, his earlier courage dissipating as quickly as it had arrived, but soon fear of being left alone in the dark stirred his feet, sending him stumbling forward over the uneven ground.
Finding himself shrouded in darkness at the very back of their band, he released his own wyrdlight, and guided it ahead of him. He concentrated on keeping it steady, distracting himself from the walls that seemed to close in on him with each step.
For a moment he was tempted to summon Sacharissa to keep him company, but after his foot slipped and he found himself knee-deep in a pool of water, he thought better of it. Why subject her to the same, for no more than a modicum of comfort?
Moreover, the others might see it as a weakness—the only other summoner who still had their demon out was Elaine. Better to push on ahead, and only summon Sacharissa if he needed to swim. He shuddered at the thought.
“How much farther?” Prince Harold’s voice echoed from up ahead.
“An hour or so, if I remember correctly,” Edmund replied. “In truth, I have never come this far, or seen the exit on the other side. But the dwarves mapped it out for us.”
“Are you serious?” Zacharias moaned. “What if they lied? What if we’re trapped down here?”
“Better than being trapped up there with the rebels,” Alice snapped. Clearly, the blond-haired noble had worn her patience thin.
So they walked. It seemed a never-ending procession of warped walls and undulating ground, coupled with the echoes of their footsteps and the ceaseless trickle and slosh of water. It was a wonder to Arcturus that the entire place didn’t flood, for the drops of water from the porous rock above soon left him bedraggled. As for his boots and trousers, they were soaked through—the group had been forced to wade up to their waists more than once. Every step then had been a moment of terror, as Arcturus imagined plunging into a hidden pool below.
On and on they went, any attempts at conversation forced, and soon cut short by the gut-churning dread of their predicament. It seemed they were now as deep beneath the ground as Vocans was tall, and Arcturus felt as if the ceilings could collapse, swallowing them in a jumble of jagged rock and creeping water.