Bottomless Shadow

They didn’t make it back to the surface before the machine serpent exploded. They didn’t even make it back to the entrance chamber. Trick, with his aching body, had only struggled up about half the steps when it finally blew, hurling chunks of ice and pieces of its own body all over the place. The pressure wave picked him up and threw him most of the way to the top of the stairs. It saved him the trip but made it hurt more than it should have.

His slow progress had left him at the back of the party as they rushed upwards and the rest of the group had made it through the barrier at the top of the stairs, which seemed to have blocked most of the blast. Bertran doubled back and threw Trick’s arm over his shoulders. As they got up Trick caught a glimpse of the creature still thrashing down below. A deep, violet rent in its side still glowed and Trick could see the crystalline pillar in the middle of the wound.

It looked almost like it had fused with the snake’s body. Sari had mentioned it was a reservoir in the process of forming and now it looked like it had worked its way into the creature’s own lumi systems and was trying to absorb them. The rip in the creature was growing brighter and brighter but the debris remained stuck in place.

“Keep going,” Trick wheezed. “It’s going to explode again.”

The warden growled. “Unbelievable. It’s already blowing pieces of itself off, if it does anything more than that it’s going to blow itself to bits.”

“I think it’s going to die one way or the other. Let’s just get as far from it as possible before it does.”

They did as he suggested. This time they got out through the entrance and onto the red sands before the blast came. Trick hadn’t expected to hear the serpent explode this time. That proved to be very naive because the machine’s final death throes were far more violent than anything they’d seen yet.

They had limped halfway to the first guide pennant when the ground behind them heaved upwards, split open by a shaft of brilliant purple light. Something whizzed by overhead. When it tumbled down into the sand thirty feet ahead and to the left Trick got a clear enough look at it to realize it was the door. Sand rained down on them for a good ten or fifteen seconds after. With the explosion over Trick let himself relax a bit, starting to favor his aching side more as he struggled along through the sand.

The grit from the explosion wound up caking his clothes and face. Annoyed, he unwrapped his poncho and shook it out then wiped his face off with one corner of it. As he did he tasted a coppery, almost bloody flavor. Confused, Trick gathered a pinch of red sand and touched it to his tongue before quickly brushing it off. As he rewrapped his poncho he glanced at Toff, who was walking beside him. “Can I see your light spear?”

The other man gave him an annoyed look and said, “This isn’t really the time for games, Trick.”

“It will only take a second.”

Toff spent more time thinking about it than it took for him to hand the spearhead over, then for Trick to examine and return it. Once it was back in his hands Toff looked at it once, then said, “Is something wrong with it?”

“Not really,” Trick said, doing his best to talk, walk and keep his breathing even. “I was just wondering what it was made of.”

“It’s ceramic laminate. What else would it be made of?”

He gestured at all the grains of iron sand around them. “Well, steel or iron comes to mind.”

Toff considered him for a moment, then said, “Do people in the tenth sphere make a great deal out of metal?”

“A lot, yeah. In fact, we make most of our bigger buildings out of steel and concrete, our smaller buildings out of wood. I can see that wood isn’t plentiful enough for you to build with, at least not in this part of the sphere.” Trick gestured to the reddish desert all around them. “But you’ve got iron in spades!”

The other man blinked. “What do spades have to do with it?”

“It’s - it just means a lot. You have a lot of iron here.”

Toff nodded. “That’s true, but it’s not very useful iron like this, don’t you think? We’d have to melt it, burn off all the slag and cast it into tools or weapons and that requires an incredible amount of crimson lumi. We just don’t have it to spare.”

“Right. You don’t have wood or coal so you have to use lumi to refine metal, so that would be pretty inefficient.”

The other man frowned. “Koh-all?”

“It’s something that burns at a very hot temperature, if you design things right.” Trick thought about it for a minute. “I guess you could call that one of our crafts.”

“Ah. It’s true, we don’t have anything like that.”

“Keep up, you two!” The warden called. The others had gotten a dozen feet ahead and were in the process of breaking down the first marker flag but he still looked particularly impatient.

“What’s the hurry?” Trick asked. “We’ve got supplies for five days and it’s maybe two hours back to Harbek.”

“It’s not the supplies at issue,” Dart said. “It’s that explosion. They must have seen it all the way in Melchior. It’s only a matter of time before something from the ninth sphere comes to see what it can find.”

“When you put it that way…”

Trick did his best to get the lead out but the reality was he was going about as fast as he could already. The mechanical serpent had really done a number on him. They were all moving slower than they had on the trip out, not surprising given they’d been on the move for nearly six hours already, but Trick did feel he was holding the rest back.

They made it all the way to the edge of the red sands in about half an hour, which was a lot faster than the trip out. During the trip Vara and Bertran kept moving to the group’s flanks and scanning the horizon with their lens. It was on one of those trips that Vara announced, “Shadows moving.”

Norin and Chestin were in the middle of disassembling one of the green pennants when she said it and they immediately dropped the pieces and started moving again. A thrill of urgency ran through the group and they all made for the thin line of scrub grass on the horizon. Trick wasn’t sure what was going on but he wasn’t stupid. This clearly wasn’t the time for questions.

And as things worked out he got answers soon enough when a huge patch of inky black slithered over the ground towards them. At first he thought it was an actual puddle of black liquid. Then, when it got close enough, he realized it was exactly what Vara said - a shadow moving on its own, not cast by anything visible on the ground or in the air.

“Take positions, full ward,” Dart hissed. “Trick, get behind us.”

He scrambled to do as instructed, glancing over his shoulder to see what would happen. The others spread out in an arc, with the three able to create shields in the center, with a lens and a light spear on either side. Trick drew his own weapon but kept his thumb off of the activation position. He wasn’t sure what to expect next.

What he got was a long, insectoid, multijointed leg reaching up out of the shadow. It slammed into the ground hard enough the sand around it jumped with the impact. A single segment of the leg was as long as Dart was tall. Then the rest of the creature began drawing itself up and out of the shadow.