The Titan of Twilight (13 page)

Tavis could hardly bring himself to look away from the wound. If he had not seen the joy in her eyes, he would have assumed that one of their enemies had cut the child from her womb.

Tavis knelt at his wife’s side. “What happened?” he asked. “How badly are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.” Brianna’s voice was as serene as moonlit snow. “And Tavis—I have something to show you.”

The queen opened her cloak. There, suckling at her breast, was the most hideous infant Tavis had ever seen. The baby was the size of a two-year-old, with stubby limbs and pudgy red fingers that pinched at its mother’s flesh like talons. It had dull brown eyes as ravenous as they were vacant, a short pug nose, bloated cheeks, and blood-red lips. Sparse tufts of wiry black hair covered its fat, round head, and the thing resembled a goblin more than a child.

“Well, Tavis?” Brianna asked. “Don’t you think he looks like you?”

The Duoinage Tunnel

The muggy underground air suddenly felt cool and crisp, a sure sign that Tavis and his companions were finally nearing an exit. They were deep down in the mine system, wading through the turbid orange waters of a drainage tunnel as long as it was straight. The walls babbled with the constant echo of dripping water, and the ceiling was so lofty that even the high scout could stand upright. Dozens of side tunnels opened off the main passage, all filled with streams of cloudy, auric water that stank of iron and copper and a dozen other minerals too obscure to name. But it was the heavy smell of brimstone—sharp and acrid and fresh—that concerned Tavis. The queen’s party could not be far from where the fire giants had broken into the mine warrens.

Thatcher, hold up a minute.” Tavis was carrying the queen and her child in his arms, for the tunnel waters were so deep that only he could keep them dry. “Do you feel that cold air?”

The front rider stopped and nodded. “It’s coming from there.” He gestured forward with Tavis’s glowing bow, which had become the party’s only light source when their torch guttered out. “We must be near an exit”

Thanks be to Stronmaus,” whispered Gryffitt. “I was beginning to think we’d never get out of this labyrinth.”

“We haven’t yet,” Tavis cautioned. “Our enemies are sure to be watching the portals.”

“Then let us hope they missed one,” Brianna said. “If we keep stumbling around in the dark, sooner or later we’ll run into Raeyadfourne’s warriors—or something worse.”

The queen was looking much healthier now. After Gryffitt had finished sewing her up, she had used her healing magic to mend both her own wounds and some of those Tavis had suffered. Unfortunately, she had been unable to do anything about her fatigue. She was still so weak she could hardly stand.

Tavis nodded to Thatcher. “Lead on,” he said. “But keep a watchful eye, and you other men hold your weapons ready.”

The other front riders arranged themselves on Thatcher’s flanks, two carrying hand axes and two bearing lances cut short for use inside the mine. The party continued down the tunnel. The foul waters grew deeper, the interval between support timbers shorter. Twice as they passed side passages, Tavis heard the distant rumble of firbolg voices.

The air became cooler. They passed a drift in which the waters sat stagnant, with no sign of any current flowing from the other end. Deep within the passage echoed the sucking sounds of draining water, and Tavis smelled the mordant reek of brimstone hanging heavily about the entrance.

A dozen steps later, the main tunnel intersected another flooded corridor. The two passages joined and angled off together. The cold breeze became a frigid wind. The water was up to Tavis’s navel now, and he could feel the current pressing against the front of his thighs—the opposite direction he had expected.

Thatcher stopped in the intersection. “The wind’s coming from up there.”

He was not pointing down the joined passages, but up the opposite arm of the intersection. This tunnel was even more heavily braced than the one in which the queen’s party stood. It looked as though it had been driven through wood instead of granite.

“And down the main tunnel?” Tavis asked.

Thatcher waded around the angle. He came back a few moments later. “I think it’s the tunnel you blew up with your runearrow,” he reported. “The passage is filled with rocks, and the support timbers have burned away. I saw a boot sticking out of the rubble. It had to be as large as my chest.”

The report did not please Tavis. The main body of the firbolg troop had been hiding just up the canyon from the site of the fire giants’ ambush.

“What are we waiting for?” Brianna asked. “The choice is obvious enough. Let’s walk into the wind.”

Tavis shook his head. “Not without scouting ahead.” He pointed at Thatcher and one other front rider. “You two take a look.”

Thatcher and his companion waded up the opposite fork of the mine, holding Tavis’s bow and their own weapons above the swirling orange currents. Mountain Crusher’s blue glow reflected off the water and danced across the timberlined ceiling, filling the tunnel with a half-moon halo that steadily dwindled away. The darkness grew as smothering as a cave-in, and Kaedlaw began to growl.

“Maybe I should cast my light spell,” Brianna suggested.

“I’d rather you saved it,” Tavis replied.

Thatcher and the other front rider were bait. If there were firbolgs hiding outside, Mountain Crusher’s light would draw them out. The resulting commotion would serve as an alarm, and the queen’s party could slip away during the turmoil.

Kaedlaw’s growl became a fierce, echoing howl.

“Is there any way to keep him quiet?” Tavis asked.

“What do you want me to do, smother him?” Brianna snapped. “If the firbolgs hear him, you’ll just have to kill them.”

Tavis clamped his jaw shut and tried to listen past Kaedlaw’s howling.

“I didn’t mean to snap, Tavis,” Brianna apologized. “But he nearly died the last time I tried to keep him quiet.”

Tavis felt her tug on the cloak he had laid over her legs, then she tucked it around Kaedlaw. The child’s howling quickly abated, leaving the tunnel to the relative silence of dripping water.

“That’s better, isn’t it?” Brianna whispered to the infant. “But when we’re outside, you’ll have to give your father’s cloak back to him.”

Tavis was thankful for the darkness, for it prevented the queen from seeing the grimace that creased his face. How could his wife and the front riders think he had sired the hideous infant—or even call the child by a name suggesting it resembled him? Galgadayle’s prophecy was at least partially correct; the brutish child was not Tavis’s offspring, but that of the Twilight Spirit’s imposter prince.

“Maybe we’ll let the front riders carry me,” Brianna said, still talking as though she were speaking to Kaedlaw. “And your father can wrap you inside his cloak so you both stay warm.”

“He’ll be warmer with his mother,” Tavis said. “And you can keep my cloak to be sure. I’ll be fine.”

Brianna stiffened in his arms. She was silent for a long time, then said, “Lord Scout, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were reluctant to hold your son.”

Tavis’s mouth went dry. “I-I’m holding both you and K-Kaedlaw now.”

That’s not what I mean. You haven’t actually touched him since you found us,” Brianna said. “In fact, you’ve hardly looked at him. What’s wrong?”

Tavis wanted to turn the question back on his wife— to demand how she could possibly think he had sired the hideous thing, to ask whether she was blind or took him for a fool—but he fought back the urge. Despite the baby’s grotesque appearance, Brianna was convinced he had fathered the child. Now was hardly time to tell her otherwise. Besides, it would take more than a half-reliable prophecy to make him betray the oaths he had sworn to the queen.

“Well, Tavis?” Brianna pressed.

“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, well 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 mid-leap 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.